by Abi Maxwell
Otto wouldn’t stop for her. Instead he gave a firm salute and continued walking up the hill. He was still within earshot when he heard her say, “I knows about that child. Don’t go thinking I don’t.”
“One more day,” Sophie pleaded when her husband marched into the house, told her that the baby had to go and there would be no discussion about it, and then marched right back out. The door had already closed after him by the time her words came out.
“You know how to be the person I raised,” Signe said.
“Jennifer,” Sophie said in response. “Someone has to call Jennifer.”
With his father out of the house, Malcolm knew he had to do it. He went to his father’s office and took up a pen and wrote Jennifer’s name in that big, bubbly script she had used. He wrote the number, too—he knew it by heart. Everyone in the family did. For though Jennifer was a Hill—which even Malcolm understood to mean that she was of the poorest class of people in Kettleborough—she had become a part of the Wickholm family. Karl had met her out at summer camp two years ago and the two had been in love ever since. “That girl is smart,” Otto had liked to say, “but not from a good family.” “That’s a hard worker, but not from a good family.” She had been one of the girls who went to summer camp for free, which Malcolm knew because his father had told him as if in answer to his question, which had simply been, “Why is she allowed to sleep at our house?”
But then not four months ago Jennifer had stopped coming over.
Malcolm dialed. Jennifer’s mother answered.
“Karl has died,” Malcolm said quickly. It was that word, died. It had been two weeks. That word was too soon. “My brother,” he went on. “This is Karl Wickholm. Malcolm Wickholm I mean. My brother. Jennifer’s boyfriend.” He stopped and took a deep breath, wiped his arm across his sweating brow. “My mother asked me to call,” he finally admitted.
“I’ll be,” the woman said.
What kind of mother would this woman be, to keep a home that wasn’t good? Malcolm had never thought to ask.
“What is your name?” he said now. It felt adult, that question.
“Valerie. Val, people call me.”
“Do you have a husband?”
“Are you interested?” The woman laughed. Her voice was husky. Malcolm imagined an angular glass of whiskey and ice in her hand. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said after a moment. “A joke. My Jennifer’s gone missing, you know that? I was hoping she was over there in your house, but she’s not. I know your Karl’s dead. Mrs. Randolph called us up.”
Malcolm found his mother in his own bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, the baby between her outstretched legs. In her hands danced ribbons of red and pink, which she’d curled with the edge of scissors. The baby squirmed toward the ribbon and made her wonderful infant noises.
“Jennifer has gone missing. Did you know? Her mother knows Karl is gone. Mrs. Randolph called her up. They’re friends, did you know? She was listening in, Mrs. Randolph, I heard the click of the phone.”
Sophie clapped her hands and gave the baby a wink to tell her it would be all right, which of course it would not. Jennifer gone missing, there was the proof. What lengths would Otto go to, if she ignored his orders and allowed this to go on? She clapped once more and looked about the room. She had always meant to put new wallpaper up in here. Would Karl remember what his room had looked like? No, that is not what she meant. What does a dead person remember. I remember roller-skating on the marvelous cement sidewalk, Sophie thought. There now. If her Karl had lived, that is what she meant. If he had lived would it have been the cold jumps into the lake on the first day of summer? The cookies warm from the oven, his first love?
“We’ve got to do something about this baby,” Sophie scolded her son. “Call Joseph at the fire station. Find out what happens to a baby without a home. Get the Polaroid. Call Joseph and get the Polaroid.”
Malcolm did as he was told. With the camera in his hand he had to wait some time on the line while the men at the fire station bickered. Mrs. Randolph was listening in and it must have been excruciating for her to keep silent, for certainly she knew the answer to the question. Clara and Paul Thorton is what Joseph came back to say. They were the foster parents for Kettleborough.
“Can’t we …,” Malcolm said hopelessly to his mother. He had not begun to piece things together. He simply loved the baby.
“Hush,” she said. She held the baby in her arms and had Malcolm snap a picture. Then she took one with her son holding the child. Finally she took a picture in which Malcolm held the baby forward, so that only her own little body dangled there in the frame.
“Hide these upstairs,” she said. Again he agreed, because he had not seen his mother behave in such a rushed manner before. When he came back she instructed him to put his father’s large coat on and drape the edge of it over the child. “Don’t need Mrs. Randolph seeing us, now do we?” she said.
They walked down the hill and into town. Malcolm kept his nose pressed against the fuzzy head of the child. That smell, he could inhale it for a lifetime. The Thortons lived just across the street from the library, in a little red carriage house with a stone wall to line the front. Sophie and Malcolm took their time walking up the drive. They stood on the granite step and breathed that wood smoke and fallen leaf smell and it was Malcolm who finally raised his arm and knocked.
“We have found a baby,” he said.
Clara said she couldn’t just take a baby like this. “There will have to be an investigation,” she said.
Sophie shuddered then. A small, faint shudder that Malcolm imagined was just the noise of a wild animal, like a bear or a deer, when it has a few breaths to go but knows that after that its lifetime of breath will be used up.
Malcolm straightened his back and handed the baby Clara’s way, then ironed his coat with his hands. “The police have very recently delivered heartbreaking news to our home,” he said in a steady voice. “My mother does not wish to deal with the police. You will understand.”
“Yes,” is all Clara said. Her husband came to the door and Malcolm shook his hand.
“We can’t just take a baby like this,” Paul said to Malcolm.
But they took her anyway. Alice, she would soon be called, and in another couple of weeks news would come that the Thortons had decided to adopt her as their own. Now, on the way up the hill, Malcolm assured his mother that they were good, quiet people and that they would care well for that baby.
Some days Sophie played slow piano songs that contained a glimmer not of hope or of happiness but of something akin to both. These chords rose out of a place like old age, wherein the player could see or smell the tip of a memory, but she could not grasp on to the image enough to say what it was she remembered and anyway if it belonged to her. These songs were Malcolm’s favorites.
Other days Sophie played the songs from just after the war ended. Back then she dressed in shorter skirts than she had ever worn before, and how she danced, and the parties! For an entire summer they would be booked up one Saturday after another. “Bring someone home with you for dinner,” she would tell her husband. Now there was no one, not even Signe, for the two of them had had their first fight. It was over a deed to a small plot of land and a run-down cabin out on the island they had both come from—Signe believed that in the least, the girl ought to have that one day. Sophie didn’t disagree, not entirely, but to Signe she had heard herself say, “We best make a clean break of it.” It was an awful, shameful thing to say, and now she felt sure that it wasn’t what had been in her heart. But Signe had left straightaway, and when she called later that day it was only to say that she had given the deed and all the necessary paperwork to Clara Thorton, who had been instructed to see that it was passed on to the girl when she came of age. Now nearly a week had passed and Signe had not reappeared.
But the hymns, these would keep Sophie going. She thought she knew at least two hundred of them. Hear a song one time, and she could play it straight t
hrough. It was a gift and in the days after the baby Sophie sat at her piano and wondered what it might mean to leave this life for another. A musician in the city, a real, independent woman—she could become that; she believed she could. But instead she stayed at home and felt like the most horrible mother ever to be put upon this earth and she kept her suffering to herself, for that is the way it was done. Each time the mailman came to the front step and dropped a letter addressed to Malcolm from Jennifer in Oregon through the slot, Sophie would watch it as though it could at any moment move of its own volition. She would watch the dust in the air gleam in the sunlight and she would lift one of her aunt Signe’s glass paperweights from the mantel and hold it to the sun, trying, with no success, to make the beams of light refract, and she would know that her son was down the hill visiting the baby at Clara and Paul’s, and she would finally, when the letter did not move, stand up and say, “Make something of this blessed life,” and she would take that letter and hide it in the pile at the back of her top dresser drawer, where those pictures were, too, and she would return to the piano.
Because what was her son to do with the words from Jennifer? What weight might those words pass on to him? There were two letters now and Sophie had not opened either of them, but she had held them to the light in the window, to no avail.
But thank goodness for the turkeys. First that small family and now they had joined forces. Seven adults and twenty-three children, thirty turkeys in all! Daily they came into the field to sun themselves. “I could not go to the store,” Sophie had heard herself tell Otto one day. It was the first sentence she had spoken to him since they had handed the baby over. “I could not go out, it would disturb the turkeys.” The moment she said it she wished she had kept it to herself. Not to punish Otto; Sophie wasn’t the sort for that. This silence she now existed in had just washed over her. Maybe, she thought now, it was to punish herself. She had done wrong and so she would be silent. She would just go along, care for the turkeys. Do turkeys eat apples? There were four apple trees out there in the field and each year since her marriage Sophie had made enough applesauce to last through winter, but this year look at all those fallen apples. They were rotting out there among the leaves, which Malcolm had not raked because he had decided that he liked the look of it as it was, and Sophie had known just what he meant.
Stand up. Do something with yourself. Sophie went out and placed apple after fallen apple into the wheelbarrow. She dumped them all near the stone wall, at the edge of the trees, an offering for the turkeys. When that was done morning had passed, and she reached up to pick her first apple. She bit in and that was joy, simple and quick. Sophie picked all the apples off the trees that day, and when she brought them inside she smothered the couch with them. Now she would make her applesauce; she would fill the house with that smell that told her sons that this was a place to come in and sit down and be home. Her son, she meant. Just the one.
By the time Sophie had boiled down a batch of apples and cranked it through the food mill, there were footsteps outside and then the clank of the mail slot. Oh heavens, not another. Sophie lifted the pot and walked from the stove to the living room and saw that letter gleaming there on the floor. She released her grip and the pot clanged against the wooden floor and the sauce pooled at her feet. She walked upstairs without picking up the letter, and when Malcolm came home he found a trail of pink, and in that trail a letter from sweet Jennifer.
Malcolm stood in his driveway, watching the lake and dreaming of a life lived out on that wild island. He had never been there. But he could go! He could pack his things and steal that beautiful baby and he could paddle the three miles out to Bear Island and live there, as his ancestors had done. Hunt deer and build a house and use cattails to keep his fishing holes open through winter.
“Malcolm!” he heard. “Malcolm!” It was Mrs. Randolph. She wanted him to come to her porch. He had never been invited there before and though it was not something his father would have allowed, Malcolm marched her way.
“Sit,” Mrs. Randolph ordered.
Oh, it did smell wonderful out here. That cold air and that wood smoke, those gone-by leaves. He could see why she would spend all her time outside. And maybe he could stay with her. For just last week when Malcolm had entered his own home he had heard his mother say to Aunt Signe that when Malcolm was out of the house her Karl was every bit as present as living Malcolm was. So he would stay away. That was a small thing that hurt terribly but still a small thing he could give his mother.
Malcolm kept his hands in his pockets and looked on at Mrs. Randolph, rocking in her chair. She wasn’t old, not from up close. No older than his own mother. She wore jeans and a man’s flannel shirt, a man’s pair of slippers. Her hair was parted bluntly down the middle and her skin was dark and rough. Malcolm sat below her, on the peeling steps, and she said nothing and he said nothing for a long while. Then the floorboards creaked from inside the house, and the screen door slowly opened. It was her youngest son, who held the door open with his foot while he reached to hand a mug of coffee to his mother.
“And I didn’t even ask!” she hollered to him. It wasn’t but another moment before the floorboards creaked once more and her son reappeared. This time he handed a cup of coffee down to Malcolm, and then disappeared inside.
“I had a brother died, too,” Mrs. Randolph said as Malcolm took his first sip. His tongue burned and heat spread throughout his chest. He had never had coffee like this before, thick and silty.
“Jesse Hill,” she continued. “Did you know I’m a Hill by birth? Must be some Hills in your class. Nathan? Tammy? Jesse died out in the lake. It ain’t easy all I’m saying.”
“No,” Malcolm said.
“So there it is. Now we knows something about each other.” A cough came out of her from the depths and sent her body into three solid convulsions.
Malcolm said, when she was finished, “Yes.”
“So what you going to do about Karl’s child?”
“Sorry?”
“You heard me.”
Malcolm reached to place the half-finished mug of coffee on the edge of the porch but missed. It dropped to the ground and spilled. He picked it up but misplaced it again, and it fell once more.
“Leave it,” Mrs. Randolph finally said.
He did, and down the hill toward the lake he ran.
Dear Malcolm,
In school they teach you to say Or-e-gone, but out here I learned fast they say Or-e-gen. How are things at home? Do you know how long this country stretches flat? One day you will take a train across and you will see what I mean. I am in the mountains now. I have taken a job on a farm and I have my own apartment. It’s really a room and a loft to sleep in, attached to the landladies’ house. They’re lovers. My place has a small table and two wicker-backed chairs and a woodstove and a stove to cook on. The whole place is old and wooden. It reminds me of your home and your mother. How is your mother?
We take care of goats here. Usually they have their babies in the spring but this year the ladies say something is off, and everything is late. They say they cannot understand it. Anyway, when a mother is ready to have her baby we have to lock her up in her own pen so that the other goats don’t get a chance to hog all her food. The baby goats are so wonderful, Malcolm. I hold my finger out and they grab right on and suck. Their little mouths and their little legs make me feel so happy. We have to take them from their mothers. Did you know that’s how it works? It’s so that we can steal the mother’s milk and drink it ourselves and sell it. The first goat I had to steal was Buttercup, and I cried when I did it. She’s the runt of a litter. I want to take her up to my apartment and raise her myself.
The landladies had me for goat stew last night. I did not want to eat it. My legs shook under the table. In the night I woke up screaming, sure that a large windowpane was breaking upon my head. I will not eat goat again.
Do you remember how I used to go to church with you? Will you please speak to me about re
ligion? I don’t know how to say anything about your brother. I loved him, too, and I hope your family is okay.
Love, Jennifer
“Well, isn’t that something.” It was the sort of thing his father would say. Malcolm tapped the letter against his thigh and then moved to place it in his breast pocket, only to realize that he did not have such a pocket. “Well,” he said again. The telephone rang and he knew his mother would not answer it because daily she moved further and further from this world that Malcolm occupied.
It was his father on the line, wanting Malcolm to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner. Of course there would be no one to invite, not so close to the holiday. No one but Aunt Signe, whom Malcolm really ought to call for help, but did not, for he had been taught to not be a burden.
Dear Malcolm,
The windows of the place where I live look out to a big meadow. That’s what they call it out here, they call a field a meadow. When I first came here the meadow was covered in yellow. Buttercups, those were the flowers. You know them. We have them in Kettleborough, too. When I saw the meadow like that, all yellow, my first thought was that a painter had swept his paintbrush across it. This morning when I woke up I looked out the window to see that it had all gone purple. Like the painter came in the night to repaint the meadow. I asked the landladies about the flowers, but now I can’t remember their name. They say that this year, like everything else, the flowers are so late, but that before the snow falls the meadow will be repainted blue.
It is a high elevation here. The weather is not like other places. The apricot tree outside my window bloomed in pink blossoms that fell down like rain when the wind blew, but now the blossoms are coated with ice. Buttercup, the goat I told you about, would not take to the bottle. Now I have vowed to never drink goat milk. Had we not been so selfish with her mother’s milk, Buttercup would have survived. Last night it froze, and Buttercup’s life ended.