by Jan Watson
“I meant, was they good?”
“They fried up tasty. Thank ye. Now I got work to do.”
Turnip took his leave, and Armina and Mrs. Blair scuffled lightly over the mop. Armina won and began to clean the floor once again. She was back to her force-of-nature self, physically anyway.
“Come by tomorrow, Timmy, so that I can listen to your chest and take another look at your arm,” Lilly said.
“Good, this here sling is slowing me down.”
“Oh, Doc Still,” Timmy’s mother replied, “maybe you’d best just leave it on.”
“Nobody even noticed my hair,” Mazy said later, fiddling with her tight blonde curls.
“You look quite modern,” Lilly said.
“I guess I’ll have to wear hats for a while.” Mazy turned her head this way and that at Lilly’s dresser. “Can I borrow yours?”
“They’re in the closet. We’ll get the boxes down tomorrow. But listen, Mazy; I need a favor.”
Mazy’s shoulders slumped. “I’ve got a feeling this means more work.”
“Not more, just different. Armina dismissed Hannah today, but I’m not comfortable leaving her alone yet. Would you . . . ?”
“Watch out for Armina? Yes, I will. I’m not ready to show my face at the office.” Leaving the bench seat, she gave Lilly a kiss on the cheek. “I’m going to pray that God will restore my hair, but I don’t think that will work. I think maybe He wants me to learn a lesson like Timmy did.” She dabbed at the corner of one eye with a fancy hankie. “Oh, Sister, life is so hard.”
Lilly slept fitfully. She had never found a private minute to look at the charts, and now they beckoned, interrupting her rest like a dripping faucet. Kip didn’t stir as she padded from the room. The coal-oil lamp that Chanis’s sister had used to heat the curling irons was still on the kitchen table. Dreading the harsh glare of the electric light, Lilly lit the lamp instead, put the teakettle on the stove to heat, and opened the first chart.
Nothing in the pages but progress notes on elderly Mrs. Clark’s battle with scrofula. The last inscription noted that the mix of sulfur, cream of tartar, licorice, and one-quarter part nitrite all mushed in honey, taken in a regimen of three days on and three days off, was helping. The next time she came in, Lilly would need to lower the dose, else the poor thing’s bowels would get too loose. Scrofula was a nasty, multiform disease. No wonder the old-timers called it the king’s evil.
The kettle whistled. She spooned black oolong leaves into a tea ball and selected a mug. Three charts later, her cup was nearly empty, and she had discovered nothing.
Weary, Lilly crossed her arms and rested her chin on her stacked wrists. She’d been so sure she’d find a clue to the break-in in the charts. Why else had they been disturbed? With the clarity of afterthought, she doubted her instincts. It made no sense that someone would be interested in another person’s medical history. Like a blind coonhound, she was barking up the wrong tree.
Idly she pulled the textbooks closer. On Saturday night, she’d begun to research the malady that plagued baby Glory. The unfortunate infant was beset with three distinct medical issues—two of which, mongolism and heart murmur, often went hand in hand. Cleft palate, while not unusual, was not a marker. Because of the mongolism, the baby would certainly be slowed in her intellectual and physical development. But because of the heart condition, she mightn’t live long enough for that to matter. The cleft palate was simply a complicating factor.
She flipped through the pages of the first book. The thumb card she was sure she’d left to mark her place was gone . . . and so was the page.
Startled, Lilly jarred the teacup with her elbow. The remaining tea sloshed over the side and dripped to the floor. She jumped up to grab a dish towel. With one hand, she wiped tea from the table as with the other, she turned pages in the textbook. One page—just one—had been ripped from the spine, leaving jagged margins but no script. A smear of red stained the page next in turn, creating a marker of another sort.
An eerie feeling inched up her spine, one bony knob at a time. This was too, too strange. The only page missing was the one she’d studied Saturday night, the one with images of mongoloid children and text clarifying their unique condition.
Lilly took a deep, steadying breath, but still her hands shook with nerves as she poured more tea into her cup. The room was closing in. Carrying her teacup, Lilly inched open the kitchen door and gingerly pushed against the screen. Despite her precaution, it screeched its screen door warning, alerting Kip that something was amiss. She heard him thump from the bed to the floor. He followed her outside and took off lickety-split for the lilac bush.
Gathering her robe around her, she took a seat on the top porch step.
How was she to interpret the broken window, the missing page? Why wouldn’t the baby’s mother just come to her and ask after her daughter? For surely it was the mother, regardless of Chanis’s supposition of a drifter breaking in.
A sad and lonely sound stirred Lilly’s emotions—a cow bawling from the lot next to Armina’s, where Mr. Tippen kept his herd. The bawl sent goose bumps parading up Lilly’s arms. It was a sound straight from her farm-girl childhood—one she hated. It meant the cow was separated from her calf for weaning purposes. Just as, for reasons Lilly couldn’t begin to fathom, Glory’s missing mother had been separated from her baby. Perhaps she was very young—perhaps she’d hidden the pregnancy from her family out of shame and guilt, and fear of the farm pond, and then, once the baby was born, she put her in a safe place where someone like Armina was sure to find her.
Lilly sipped her tea, now grown cold. The moon was waning. The distant hills played peekaboo through a thick gray mist that swirled around her feet, wetting the hem of her robe. Kip hopped up on the porch and Lilly pulled him close, glad for the solid comfort his little body provided, and wondered what this day would bring. She’d find Chanis and they’d walk up to Anne’s. All together, they’d decide what to do about Glory.
Chapter 18
Shade Harmon staggered under the weight of the paper in his pocket. He’d been lost in misery since early Sunday morning, when he’d broken into the doctor’s office. It had taken the light from only three matches to hit upon the reason the doctor had been working so late on a Saturday night. Match number four had burned to ash as he stared at the picture on the marked page of her medical book. Stared but didn’t comprehend.
He’d taken the folded paper from his pocket twice since, but he hadn’t been able to study it. Single words leaped like rabid dogs from the page, tearing his flesh worse than broken glass ever could: Idiot. Degenerate. Asylum.
He knocked the back of his head hard against the rough trunk of the tree he was sitting under. Then he hit it again and saw stars. Fingers, stiff with pain and cracked with dried blood, scrabbled in his shirt pocket—searching for what, he didn’t want to know but had to learn all the same. Smoothing the page against his bent knee, he forced himself to look. Once again the picture of a sweet-faced infant looked back at him. The baby could have been his own Betsy Lane.
Letters swam in and out of focus until his brain corralled them—forced them into words, lined them up in sentences. He knew what mongoloid meant—that wasn’t bad, was it? Weren’t they fierce warriors? Able to survive the harshest of winters and the bleakest of times?
But it wasn’t for the Mongolians’ fierceness that their name was commandeered, he learned; rather it was for the oddity of eyes that slanted upward and outward. For that little bit of difference, his daughter was set apart.
He turned the paper over and continued. So that small, round head that fit perfectly in the palm of his hand, the tiny flat nose, the odd little low-set ears meant she was in some ways lesser than? Who would have known? Who would have guessed that such a thing could happen—and happen so much that somebody captured it in the pages of a book?
The words continued, harsh as lye soap. Public perception, the article relayed in stark black-and-white, holds that chil
dren born with retardation . . .
Whoa, Nellie. Hold on a minute. Shade closed his eyes tight. He felt sick—like he was on the verge of some kind of lingering illness. He huffed out a ragged breath. Retarded. It meant stupid, slow, ignorant. Who had the right to pigeonhole Betsy Lane that way? Didn’t she smile a crooked smile sometimes and make nice bubbling noises when he chucked her gently under the chin? And when he held her in the crook of his arm, didn’t she stare at him with gray-blue eyes that seemed to know his every secret?
He looked out upon a world no longer familiar; even the trees in his backyard seemed unsolid, untrustworthy. Finding his place, he continued to read: Public perception holds that children born with retardation are a result of the parents’ overall degenerate ways.
Wait. He’d surely missed something. Was this fellow, whoever wrote the book, pretentious knower and relater of all things, saying that what Betsy had was something dirty? Something nasty passed down to offspring from parents? Why did this guy, learned though he might be, get to decide that whatever Betsy had was bad?
Shade tried to muster up a few tears, but he was too dry to spit. His heart would just have to hurt without benefit of release. How long had he been leaning against this tree? And what had possessed him to come back to this haunted place?
The muscles of his legs seized in protest as he stood. He staggered around stiff-legged until the charley horses released their fearsome hold. Clutching the paper to his chest, he stood in front of his house, willing himself to go in. Maybe Sweet Noreen would be standing in the kitchen, ready to berate him for going off without saying a word. Maybe Betsy Lane would be in the high chair he’d made from hickory wood. Maybe she’d be fat and happy, and maybe her eyes would look just like his.
The door stood open as if in welcome. He stepped hesitantly into the kitchen. It looked normal: same chairs at the table, same cookstove in the corner, same red-checked curtains at the window. But on the table, pastry folded over a rolling pin was shrunken and cracked. Blackberries moldered in a Blue Willow bowl. A brown beetle lay upended in a tin pie plate. Leaves, dry as dust, gathered in the corners—blown in through the open door.
The room smelled faintly of decay and of fires gone cold. Shade opened the door to the cookstove and used the stoker to shake down the ashes. He scooped the discards into the coal bucket with the small fireplace shovel. There was wood cut to length in the wood box beside the stove. That proved he’d been a good provider. Didn’t it?
When the wood caught, he filled a cauldron with water and set it across two burners atop the stove. He put a pot of coffee on another. He’d soak his sore hand, have a bath and a shave, wash his dirty clothes, and start over clean.
Tasks completed, he took his wet garments outside to the clothesline in the side yard. A single dingy cotton diaper lay forlornly on the ground. Shade took it, returned to the pot in the kitchen, and scrubbed it gently with Fels-Naptha. When the wash was hung, he felt well enough to fry some bacon and scramble some eggs. After dishing up the eggs, he picked mold from a piece of bread and fried it in the bacon grease.
Coffee steamed from his cup. He scooped eggs onto his fork. He’d forgotten the pepper. It was right in the cupboard where it should be. Everything felt so normal, like the baby was sleeping in the bedroom and Noreen was—what? Run off. Sweet Noreen had run off, back to Cincinnati. It was his lucky day.
Scooting the high chair up to the table, he tore tiny bits from his toast and put them on the tray, practicing for when Betsy Lane came home. How old did a baby have to be before she could sit upright in a chair? Could a baby even eat toast? He dipped a crust into his coffee and let it soak before putting it back on the tray. That should work. And egg—seemed like any age could eat egg. Once she got her teeth, he’d let her try some bacon.
You’d think he’d know these things. He was an only child, but he’d been raised around his cousins. There was always a baby in the family. He still had lots of kin in Missouri, although he hadn’t kept up with them. Sweet Noreen had been one of nine, though he’d never met any of the Ohio Potters. He knew she had a sister named Joy Irene, but Noreen never paid a visit, and he was of no mind to spend time with folks who’d saddle their daughter with a name like Sweet Noreen Potter. No wonder she was nuts. And she was—nuts. Maybe because of him or maybe because she was always searching for something she could never find.
Before they married, she’d been a hairdresser. Mostly she went to the homes of society matrons, fixing them up for parties, family portraits, and weddings—that sort of thing. Putting whitewash on an old fence, she called it. He’d been attracted to her independence and her glamour. She wasn’t a beauty, but she did a lot with what she had.
Noreen was happy when they first came here—glad to shake the Cincinnati dust from her feet. She dolled up the house—made the checked curtains herself and helped him lay linoleum in all the rooms. Together they planted a garden and tilled ground for a pear orchard. They’d work side by side until evening, when he’d go out to ply his trade, leaving her alone. It had to be that way. How’d she think he was able to pay cash money for this place? He thought she’d get used to it. A couple more years of the same and, with luck, they’d be set for life. A man did what a man had to do.
The room was so still Shade could hear himself chewing. His throat made a gulping sound when he forced food down with too-hot coffee.
One night he’d come in late—of course it was late; furtive games called for the cover of darkness. He’d come in late, carrying his shoes in his hand—Noreen didn’t like to be wakened once she was asleep—and found her carving big Xs in the new linoleum with a butcher knife. And once he’d found her in the well house, dangling her feet into the well shaft and it dark as pitch. He never was able to retrieve the water bucket. She’d cut the rope with that same butcher knife just to hear the splash. They went two towns over to buy a new bucket and another length of rope, her sitting beside him in the carriage as if nothing untoward had happened.
Things took a good turn when Noreen was carrying the baby. He could kind of see why her folks had named her Sweet. She loved all that laying by of stores, stacks of folded diapers, and scores of tiny gowns and little undershirts. She’d take skeins of floss and a small round hoop out to the porch on sunny days and sit embroidering all sorts of baby animals on the gowns and bibs. She grew round and gratified, plump as a watermelon on the vine.
Noreen had gone into labor during one of his nightly forays. Shade hadn’t given it a thought; the birth wasn’t supposed to happen for two more weeks. Maybe that was why the whole thing wasn’t so difficult. He’d made it home just in time to deliver the baby himself, cutting the cord with Noreen’s sewing scissors.
They’d been like two kids at Christmas dickering over the same toy. Neither of them could get enough of the tiny new being. For two days they’d argued over the naming. Noreen didn’t catch on why he insisted on naming their daughter Betsy—he’d told her his first wife’s name was Diane—but she thought it was too cutesy. She didn’t mind Lane, his mother’s maiden name, but she wanted the baby called after her own mother too. The mother she didn’t ever visit or write. He stood his ground. Maybe that started the whole dark slide. Why hadn’t he left it alone?
But the thing was, the baby looked like a Betsy—tiny and adorable and helpless as a kitten. He would have carried her around in his pocket if he could have. He stayed home nights, though Noreen had recovered quickly, on her feet just hours after giving birth. And milk—she had plenty of milk.
It was probably a week before either of them noticed that Betsy wasn’t doing so well. Mostly she slept. That’s what babies were supposed to do—but they were supposed to eat, too. And that was the difficult part. Betsy took hours to nurse, and her cry, when she mustered up the energy, was not a joyful, lusty newborn cry, but a thin fret that set Noreen’s nerves on edge.
The next day, after they’d tried everything else, they’d set off for the same town where he’d bought the new well bucke
t. He’d thought the trip would cheer Noreen up. She liked the big overstocked general store there. Maybe she’d buy some new face cream or a bauble for the baby. But when they arrived, she wouldn’t get out of the buggy. When he’d tried to cajole her, she gathered the baby closer and turned her taciturn face away. He hated when she got that way; it made him want to punch a hole in something. Instead he hurried into the store, sure his purchase would solve everything.
If he could take back only one thing he’d ever done in his entire life, it would be what he’d said to Noreen a few days later, the thing that had started that last terrible fight.
The chair scraped against linoleum as Shade stood to stack his dishes and pour another cup of coffee. Once settled, he laid the stolen page on the table, determined to study it like a scholar would, interested, instead of like a loser spoiling for a fight. He read the article probably a dozen times, underlining each word with his index finger, not allowing himself to skip past what might upset him. If you left out the ugly, condemning words, it described his daughter to a tee: slow to feed, hard to nourish, floppy limbs, weak cry.
His anger didn’t dissipate with knowledge but simmered like a kettle on the stove. He forced the rest of his food down and drank the coffeepot dry. At the very least, he knew Betsy Lane was somewhere alive, not carried off through the open window by some hungry animal or traveling gypsy.
On the peg beside the door hung the peeled sycamore walking stick and the red gallon bucket he’d found after he discovered the baby missing. His wild search had taken him down to Tattler’s Branch, where he came upon the spilled blackberries and the cane. That stick had been a divining rod; finding it had helped him settle on Skip Rock as the place where Betsy had been taken. It was logical that whoever had been helping themselves to the berries from his property had walked from somewhere nearby; the town was the best bet. It was clear as the water in the creek that that person had taken his daughter. What didn’t make sense was why the law hadn’t been nosing around. Maybe the sheriff was too green to put two and two together. Or maybe whoever had taken Betsy didn’t see what he had done. Maybe they just wanted a baby.