Rose & Poe

by Jack Todd

  “Y’know, Rose,” Rafe told her as he drove, “I could get to like you a lot, but my folks and all. They expect me to be a doctor. It wouldn’t do.”

  “I know it wouldn’t do, Rafe. A boy like you with a girl like me. I know it wouldn’t do, you don’t got to tell me. You’re smart and rich and I’m dumb and poor. It don’t bother me; that’s how things are.”

  “Thanks, Rose. I knew you’d understand. But you aren’t dumb, not at all. You’re smarter than people think. You might not have money or do good in school, but you’re smart — smart enough to make something of yourself someday. Far as I’m concerned, you’re the prettiest girl in school, too. I’d marry you if I could, I really would, but it wouldn’t do. It’s a damned shame in some ways, but it wouldn’t do.”

  Rose understood. She knew how it was. Rafe had to go because it was Halloween. The boys would be out pulling one of their pranks, like tossing toilet paper all over Mrs. Bunker’s mansion or turning livestock loose in the high school.

  Rose tiptoed into the house, ignoring Huguette when the old woman screeched at her, wanting to know where she had been so long. She crawled into her narrow bed with the sweet smell of hay and spunk still in her nostrils and lay there with her hand between her legs, remembering.

  When her belly began to swell, Rose knew Rafe was the daddy. She knew how it worked from the livestock. She had watched cattle breed, and horses, and pigs, and goats, how the females took the seed from the male, gave it a place to grow.

  Because she was a big girl, Rose was six months along before anyone noticed. She hid it from Huguette, but a teacher at the high school noticed her condition and sent her to the principal, who sent her to the doctor. Doc Boudreau said she was due in a couple of months and that she was healthy as a horse, although she could stand to lose some weight. The high school principal informed Huguette, who threw a fit when Rose got home, hissing and screeching and throwing things. Huguette wanted to know the name of the father. Rose refused to say a word. She had another meeting with the principal, who informed her that because she was in the family way, she was no longer allowed near the school, where she might corrupt other girls. Once the child was born, she could give it up for adoption. Then she would be allowed to return to school, though she would be banned from all activities, like cheerleading and the chess club.

  “I don’t play chess and I don’t want to be no cheerleader.”

  “Then I guess you won’t miss those things.”

  “No, I won’t. But I ain’t givin my baby to nobody.”

  “I don’t think you have a choice, Rose. You’re fifteen years old.”

  “Don’t matter. Ain’t nobody takin my child.”

  “We’ll see about that later. If you don’t give it up, you can’t come back to school. That’s all there is to it. We’re crystal clear on the rule.”

  “Then I won’t be back, mister. Ain’t nobody snatchin my child.”

  When she passed Rafe in the hallway, Rose nodded to him. That was the signal for him to pick her up behind the school in the afternoon. He drove to the place where they had talked the first time he gave her a lift home. He parked the car, and she turned to him and said what she had to say.

  “I’m carryin your child, Rafe. Have been for a while.”

  Rafe turned pale and dropped his head onto the steering wheel. “Oh, my God. That’s awful.”

  “No, it ain’t. I aim to have this baby.”

  “You can’t do that! My parents would be horrified. I can arrange something, pay to get it fixed. My dad is a doctor. He can take care of things. There’s no reason you have to have it.”

  “Maybe there isn’t. But I’m having this baby.”

  “You can’t force me to marry you, Rose. I’ll bet there have been other guys. You’re pretty easy, you know.”

  Rose flushed with anger. “I’m easy for you, maybe. Nobody else. Never. I never done a thing with anybody before you, Rafe Skilling. Not even a kiss. You ought to know that much. Anyhow, you don’t have to worry. I’ll never tell nobody who the father is, but I’m havin this child.”

  Rafe stared out the window. “Maybe I can help you a little, pass you some cash from time to time.”

  “I don’t want your damned money. Only reason I wanted to talk is that I thought you should know. Now I’m sorry I did. You go your way, and I’ll go mine. Don’t you worry, I won’t never ask you for a thing.”

  Rose got out of the car and walked the rest of the way home. If Rafe had offered to do the right thing, to marry her, she would have said yes. She had made up her mind about that before she talked to him. But she knew he was right: it wouldn’t do. A girl like Rose marrying a boy like Rafe, it would be the scandal of Belle Coeur County. Anyhow, she didn’t need Rafe nor anyone else. She knew what she was going to do, and there wasn’t anyone who could stop her.

  ~

  Poe, his birth

  Huguette said that if Rose wasn’t going to school, it was time she earned her keep. Old lady Bunker needed someone to clean her house, and so did the banker Edgar Watson, and the Skilling family. Rose could start with those while Huguette drummed up more customers. She would make five dollars per house, and she was to bring every dime of it home to her grandma.

  Rose didn’t mind cleaning houses for rich folks. Anything was better than staying home under Huguette’s thumb, with the old woman reminding her every hour that she was a sinner who had disgraced the family name. As her belly grew heavier, she spent her days on her hands and knees scrubbing toilets, waxing floors, scouring ovens.

  Three months after she left school, Rose was cleaning Priscilla Bunker’s home when she began to feel a little odd. Priscilla was the wealthiest woman in the county, the last living descendant of Prescott Bunker. The drafty old house was a brute to clean, but Rose found it fascinating. Never in her life had she seen so much stuff. Commodes, pitchers, wardrobes, carvings, oil paintings, knickknacks, books. More books than the town library, as far as she could tell, bookcases in every room.

  Rose was cleaning the old woman’s bedroom when she came across a slender and ancient volume of poetry by a man named Edgar Allan Poe. She sat down to rest on the four-poster bed and the musty old book fell open to a poem called “The Raven.” Rose had puzzled her way as far as the line “. . . In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore” when the first pains hit. At first it felt like dying. Then it let up and she thought she was fine and went back to reading, but it happened again and then again, until her screams sent the ravens flapping away from the house. Then a six-fingered, six-toed baby boy came squalling into the world, blood and afterbirth spilling onto a fine-stitched heirloom quilt that depicted the tale of Paul Revere’s ride, with the famous patriot on a fine black horse, waving his black hat rather gaily as he galloped over the cobbled streets past a church with a tall white steeple.

  The baby wasn’t two minutes old when Mrs. Bunker returned home, stumbled over a bucket of filthy mop-water in the kitchen, and came marching upstairs to find Rose, her pale thighs splayed open, holding aloft a bloody six-fingered child with a bald head the size of a pumpkin.

  Once the fuss over the heirloom quilt had died down and Rose promised to pay to have it cleaned, she cut the cord herself with a paring knife, rinsed the child with cold water at the well out back, wrapped him in a strip of gray cloth torn off her dress, and set off on foot to present her baby to Doc Boudreau.

  The baby was born large and odd. Eighteen pounds, six ounces, on Doc Boudreau’s scale, the largest birth ever recorded in the state. Six fingers on each hand, six toes on each foot. One eye brown and one eye green. There was a hump of gristle on his left shoulder, and from his right cheek, in a widening band down and across his broad neck, there was an immense ruby-red port-wine stain in the shape of the continent of Africa, with Cairo at his right cheekbone and Cape Town over his left nipple.

  To Rose, he was the most beau
tiful, flawless child in the universe. She decided to name him Poe Revere Didelot, in honor of Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Revere. Others failed to perceive Poe’s beauty. “Mark of the devil!” Huguette hissed when she saw the baby in his borrowed bassinet, with the port-wine stain like a blood sign splashed on his face and neck, the hump on his back, and the strange eyes of two different colors. “Spawn of Satan!” The old woman crossed herself three times and spat in the baby’s face. Rose, watching over this miracle of her creation, turned slowly to face her tormentor.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said, and she drew back her thick right arm and shattered Huguette’s nose with a single blow from the heel of her hand.

  ~

  Rose versus the state

  A week after Poe’s birth, Rose was nursing him when there was a knock at the door. Huguette was out, and Rose answered the door to find a dour man and a sullen woman waiting. They both wore dark suits and looked like funeral directors. The man’s shoulders were a snowstorm of dandruff and the woman’s bloody lipstick made a savage slash across a cruel mouth.

  “We’re from the state.”

  “State of what?”

  “The state. Don’t you know what state you live in, girl? We’ve come for the child. It’s for his own good.”

  “No, it ain’t. Ain’t nobody comin for my Poe.”

  “You have no choice, young lady,” the woman said. “You are a minor. We’re here to look after his welfare.”

  “No, you ain’t. I’m here to look after his welfare. You’re thieves come to snatch my baby in broad daylight. What’s good for Poe is his mama. That’s me. I can look after him better than any state.”

  “You have to understand, miss.”

  “My name’s Rose, and I understand you perfect. But I told you already, ain’t nobody takin this child. I’ll chew your goddamn ear off and swallow it whole before I let you kidnap my sweet baby. I think I been clear on that.”

  “We’ll see you in court,” the woman said.

  “And I’ll see you in hell. But it’s like I told you, you ain’t takin my child, in court nor no place else.”

  Poe’s fate was to be decided in the stately Belle Coeur County Courthouse, where dust motes floated in the odd shaft of light from the world outside, the only hint that there was a world outside. Rose walked the three miles to the courthouse for the hearing and sat nursing Poe while the proceedings rambled on. The judge frowned when she drew out a creamy breast. “Is that really necessary in my courtroom?”

  “Yessir, it sure is. The child is hungry. If I don’t feed him, he’ll wail like a banshee. That ain’t a sound you want to hear. It cuts right to the quick.” She hauled Poe off her nipple and held him aloft. The baby obliged with a howl that rattled the courthouse windows. The judge endured it for thirty seconds, then gave her permission to go ahead and nurse. Rose did so, listening intently while the people from the state had their say. She had money in her shoe and she had a plan. If the judge ruled that she had to hand over her baby, she was going to say that she had to go home first to get his things. She had already packed clothes for herself and Poe in an old backpack from the army surplus. She would hitchhike to California and raise her baby among the orange groves.

  But Judge Bartram saw something in her that the others missed. The child-welfare people insisted that Rose was incapable of caring for her baby because she got poor grades in school, but the judge found that the girl was a good deal sharper than folks believed. She had battled the state bureaucracy to a standstill, so she was no fool when it came to protecting her child. She was strong of body and great of soul, and she loved that huge ungainly baby.

  The judge had seen plenty of hate in his courtroom, where married couples came to claw one another to shreds with the help of unscrupulous lawyers who poured kerosene on the fire, because the madder people got with each other, the more hate there was and the more money the lawyers made. Love was an emotion he saw less often. He saw how tenderly she held her baby, and he believed she could give him something no one else could. Such a child would never be adopted. Without Rose, he would become a ward of the state in perpetuity.

  Judge Bartram banged his gavel: Rose Didelot, aged sixteen, was granted custody of her offspring in perpetuity. When he saw the puzzled look on her face, the judge repeated his judgment in words she could understand: Poe was hers forever more.

  ~

  Mother and child

  The abandoned Pullman car was parked on a rusty spur line of a railroad that had gone bankrupt back in 1932, in a section of forest so dense that you had to know exactly where it was or you would never find it. Apart from a hundred-foot stretch under the car itself, the railroad track had been torn up and sold for scrap long ago, but underbrush and a pine forest hid the Pullman from sight, and when Rose needed a home for herself and her baby boy, it was sitting there waiting, not doing much except providing a home for scuttling woodland creatures and nesting birds. Pullman cars had once been considered the height of luxury, and Rose was determined that this one would be luxurious again. She moved in, evicted the forest creatures as gently as she could, scrubbed every inch of the old Pullman, removed most of the seats, hung frilly pink curtains in the windows, rigged a coal furnace scrounged from the dump, and even put in a sink to give the place all the comforts of home, although she still had to tote water from a well a quarter mile away.

  To keep body and soul together, Rose went back to cleaning houses as soon as she was able, with Poe on an improvised sling on her back or resting in his bassinet. After three years of backbreaking work, she had saved enough to rent a place with running water at the Split Rock Trailer Park. From the start, they were Rose and Poe, Poe and Rose, their names usually run together into a single word: Rose’n’Poe. Mother and child, inseparable. Rose scared off those who threw rocks and bottles and rotten tomatoes at him and called him moron and idiot and freak. She saw her unusual child as a gift from God and maintained her faith in the Good Lord above and her own strong back to provide for him.

  Six years to the day after Poe’s birth, Huguette dropped dead over her ironing board. The hot iron seared a brand into her withered cheek before she was found. Rose stood dry-eyed while the preacher said what he had to say at the old woman’s graveside. She lingered until the gravediggers had finished their task and left, then with Poe keeping watch, she planted one size-twelve boot on either side of the freshly piled dark earth, hiked up the skirts of her best Sunday dress, and peed a thick yellow stream on the old woman’s grave.

  Rose’s life became a little easier after Huguette’s death. She was surprised to learn that the old woman had never gotten around to changing her will, so they were able to leave the Split Rock Trailer Park and the lecherous landlord who wanted her body in lieu of rent and move into the little yellow house. The will left everything to Rose’s father, Guy. But Guy was dead and so was his wife, Sharon, and Rose was their only heir, so she got the house and the land it was on and even the $2,246.87 Huguette had squirreled away in a safety deposit box at the First State Bank. Rose didn’t trust banks, so the first thing she did was withdraw the money and hide it in the metal box where Huguette had kept her other valuables, behind the jars of pickled beets and crabapple jelly in the cellar.

  Rose towed Poe to the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School in Hartbury on a wagon in summer and a sled in winter. He was capable of walking, but he loved to ride, and Rose indulged him. When the afternoon bell rang, Rose was waiting at the gates, her face pressed to the chain-link fence.

  The kindergarten teacher was the first to call Rose in for a chat. Poe wasn’t learning. It was possible he was incapable of learning. The teacher used the word “imbecile.” Poe disrupted the class. He sang odd songs, wordless incantations that sounded like trucks or trains or wind moaning in the trees. The other children were afraid of him because he was so large and odd.

  “Are you saying he can’t go to your sch
ool?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then there’s no reason for this meeting.”

  “He belongs in a special place.”

  “He is in a special place. His home. Are you threatening to send him off someplace else?”

  “I don’t have the authority to do that.”

  Rose glared down at the teacher. “Then teach the child. That’s what you’re paid to do, ain’t it?”

  After that, the teachers simply passed Poe on from grade to grade, even though he never learned to read, write, or do basic arithmetic. Rose explained how it was to anyone who would listen. Poe has his addlements and particularities. That ain’t to say he’s nobody’s fool, only he don’t do no editions nor suttractions, and he can’t read for squat. But he’s a good boy. He does right by his mother, and he does right by other folks. I believe that’s worth more than ciphers.

  In high school, the football coach refused to believe that a boy Poe’s size couldn’t play football. He was six foot eight and over three hundred pounds by his fifteenth birthday and strong as any man. Surely he could learn to play a little game like football. But Poe never grasped that the purpose of the game was to move that ball downfield if you were on offense and to tackle the player who was carrying it if you were on defense. He made it as far as his first game, when his career ended after the first play. When the ball was snapped, he remained rooted to the ground like a marble statue, wondering why a blocker half his size kept hurling himself at his legs. He stood with great fat tears running down his cheeks, looking to Rose for guidance. What’d I do? I didn’t do nothin. Why’s all them guys mad at me? I didn’t do nothin. Why’s they mad at me?