by Minrose Gwin
Meanwhile, little Charley’s mother, Imogene, who had both sets of fingers immersed in soapy water, nodded sleepily, and the manicurist smiled and nodded too.
Aunt Fan had a bad feeling but she was in the middle of her Silver Satin treatment, which was tricky; she didn’t want to end up purple like poor Minnie McFadden. When she was finished, Alice had not returned with little Charley. It was sprinkling outside, most definitely not baby-walking weather. Aunt Fan threw a scarf over her head and headed up North Church to find out what had happened. The baby carriage was on the McNabb front porch. Aunt Fan marched into the house and called for Alice, then when she didn’t get a response, headed up the stairs. She went from room to room and finally found little Charley sleeping peacefully in what was to have been little Henry’s cradle and Alice standing over him singing snatches of “When at night I go to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep.” Alice had a pretty voice, Fan said, but the song was eerie, especially when Alice got to the part about the two angels whose job it was to guide the baby’s feet to heaven.
Aunt Fan said she didn’t mince words. “That’s Imogene Gillespie’s baby, Alice. You need to give him back.”
Alice cut her a look to kill. “Don’t you go telling me what I have to do, Fan McNabb, you’re not the boss of me.”
About that time Imogene burst through the front door downstairs hollering.
Alice glared at Aunt Fan and snatched little Charley from the bassinet, whereupon he began to cry. Imogene came galloping up the stairs and burst into the room. She hurled herself at Alice, screaming, “What are you doing to my baby? Are you hurting him?”
Then Aunt Fan got into it. She went up to Alice. “Let me change him, dear. Let me have him a minute.”
As if things couldn’t get any worse, Aunt Fan said, little Son burst into the room and stopped short when he saw the baby in his mother’s arms. His face brightened, poor little thing, Aunt Fan said.
“I thought we didn’t get my brother,” he said, clapping his hands. “I thought God flew him away.”
By now Imogene had fire in her eyes. She pulled her Charley from Alice’s arms, in the process knocking Son down.
“Don’t you steal our baby!” he screamed, leaping up and lunging at Imogene’s legs. Imogene pushed out her knee to dislodge him, knocking him to the floor again. He got up and ran to his mother crying, Aunt Fan said, like his heart was broken.
“Where was I?” Jo had asked Aunt Fan.
“Oh my, child, you were right there, tagging along behind your brother like always. You hated to let him out of your sight. And after he’d gotten up off the floor, he snatched you up and grabbed your hand and dragged you over to Imogene and said, “Here, take her and give me back my brother.”
Imogene, meanwhile, quieted her Charley. Then she looked at Alice. “This is my boy,” she said. Aunt Fan said she didn’t say it in a mean way, but as if Alice were a little child with a lesson to learn that she hadn’t quite gotten yet. Then Imogene pointed to Son. “This is your boy, Alice. And soon you’ll have another. But this one is mine.”
Then Imogene gathered Charley’s things and Aunt Fan followed her down the stairs to the porch and told her how mortified she was and how sorry Alice would be when she returned to her right mind.
And that was the end of it, except when Aunt Fan came back upstairs, Son was nowhere in sight and Alice was staring out the front window watching Imogene wheel her boy home in the drizzle.
NOW GLENWOOD would have another resident McNabb. Two days and two nights had passed since the storm. Son would be in a sorry state. But how could they just take him up there and plant him in the ground like an old dog without any family to stand at the grave and sing how, in the sweet by-and-by, everyone would meet on that beautiful shore? (Which Jo sincerely hoped would not be the case.)
Tommy’s diaper was wet and he stank. She took a few steps toward a nurse, who was bent over a cot several yards away. As Jo approached, the nurse looked up and frowned. “You’re going to drop that baby,” she called out. “You shouldn’t be holding him like that with your arm in a cast. Give him here.”
Jo tightened her grip. “He’s my brother.”
Brother. Until now, the word had never entered her mind without bared teeth. Now, though, with Son dead as a doornail, dead as anybody could possibly be, the peckish creature called brother that gnawed at her from time to time had disappeared into thin air. She had come to the conclusion that Son’s death had nothing to do with her; the storm had done it, which meant it was God’s own doing, she was merely His instrument. Moreover, why trouble her parents, if by some miracle they were ever returned to her, with the peculiar circumstances of Son’s death when none of it mattered, not one whit? When, as her father was fond of saying, it was a moot point? Jo smiled a little at her own cleverness, then stopped herself. Here she was, making wordplay out of her own brother’s death; some might call it something else if they didn’t know about that strange gust from the tornado that blew her forward into his shocked arms, almost as if they were long-lost lovers. She looked down at the baby. At least there was little Tommy, whom she herself had saved, literally singlehandedly. Now the word brother had returned to her mouth tasting like cinnamon, reminding her of the toast the aunts sometimes made for her when she came in from school.
The nurse’s name, Jo saw on her lapel, was Sue.
“Brother or not,” Nurse Sue said. “You’ve got only one good arm.” She reached for the baby. “Let me have him now, please do.” She smiled at Jo.
Jo found the smile insincere, something about Nurse Sue’s eyes, which were red with fatigue. Nurse Sue wasn’t from around Tupelo either, Jo could tell by the crispness of her consonants. Jo backed up and shifted her grip, startling the baby, who exploded into a blood-curdling scream that caused heads to turn. “I’ve got hold of him just fine. I found him half dead in a bush and I’ve been taking care of him ever since and if I hadn’t found him he would have died in that bush. The reason he’s crying now is that nobody around here has seen fit to give him a bottle. So, if you want to be so all-fired helpful, go get me a bottle. Somebody needs to feed this baby.” She had never spoken to an adult in that tone. If her father could have heard her, he’d have had a fit. But her father, of course, was missing in action, and her mother lost to her, so there was no one at present to say you go or you stay or you wear your hat just so and behave.
Then, to Jo’s surprise, Nurse Sue’s eyes filled and a tear rolled down her nose and hung on the tip. Then she wiped it off and smiled a real smile. “Whoa, hon. I’ll get him a bottle. You’re quite the gal, now aren’t you, for taking such good care of him. Now let’s you sit with him.” She put one hand under the baby and the other on Jo’s good shoulder, guiding her, then pushing her back down. “It’s going to be all right now. You’re going to be all right, sweetheart.”
“My mother. Can you find out what happened to her?”
As Jo spoke, the baby slipped a little in her grip and then began to slide down her thigh. Quick as lightning, Nurse Sue snatched him up and Jo let her because something inside had broken open when she spoke of her mother, and she worried that what the nurse had said was true, that it was quite possible she might yet make a terrible mistake, she might just drop her baby brother no matter how careful she tried to be (and nobody could say she hadn’t been extra careful) and therefore manage to kill not one but two brothers in the space of less than three days. Then there’d be nobody left but her, not the father she’d counted on her whole life without a shadow of a worry because she knew, come hell or high water, he would have come back to save them if he’d been able, which meant that something terrible had happened. Probably he’d fallen into one of those bottomless water holes made by the root balls from the giant oaks pushed over by the storm, or maybe he had run into a burning house to save a girl like herself and had perished in the attempt. He would have a beautiful monument at Glenwood detailing his valor. Hero, Father: He Did the Best He Could. She enjoyed thinking
of her father as a hero; before the storm she’d considered him rather dull.
Nurse Sue took the baby and started to walk away. Jo got up to follow her.
“You take a little rest, honey,” the nurse said. “And don’t you worry. I’m going to feed him and change him and bring him right back here to you.” She stood beside the cot and waited until Jo lay back. Then she reached down and stroked her hair, which Jo knew was a terrible mess. Still, she inclined her head toward the nurse’s touch. She couldn’t help herself. The McNabbs were not ones to display affection, and the nurse’s touch felt like something Jo had been waiting for her whole life. Nurse Sue had blond hair held up in a twist under her cap; her uniform was starched and tidy. Maybe Jo would become a nurse. She fell asleep, her mouth half open, with the nurse’s hand on her hair.
Now, though, Snowball was flying around town like a huge bird of prey, Jo’s sweet little cat grown monstrous, swooping down on small birds and chipmunks and squirrels lying helpless on the ground and carrying them off in her claws, then landing on the branch of a tree, now bare from the tornado, to eat them. Snowball, stop, Jo called up to her. You don’t have to do that. But the cat just stared at her, wide-eyed as an owl.
You, you, you.
When she woke up the third time, the place had quieted down and the lights had dimmed. She wondered if it was the middle of the night. There was no way of knowing since there were no windows in the theater. She looked out over the theater and saw colored people lying on pallets on the floor, sandwiched in between the rows of seats.
She peered over into the bassinet. The baby was sleeping on his stomach, his rear end pointing to the ceiling. A little tadpole of a boy. Where was their father? What if she were the only one left to take care of little Tommy? What would happen to them? They would be orphans. Their closest relative, her mother’s only brother, Johnny Trotter, lived out on a piece of land near Pontotoc. Uncle Johnny was a confirmed bachelor and kept rough company. They had visited him once, but the cabin he lived in was filled with spider webs littered with dead flies and wasps, the kitchen counter covered in greasy dishes. There were not enough chairs for all of them to sit down at the same time so she had spent most of her time on the back stoop watching chickens peck the dirt around her feet. What she found odd was how they seemed to enjoy eating gravel. They ate it with relish, as if it were feed.
Now, there would be nothing to do but for Jo to take care of Tommy. She would be Joan of Arc, burned at the stake of necessity. They would rattle around the big four-square house, just the two of them, checking doors and windows at night, sleeping together in a locked room. Everyone would feel bad for her. The colored who worked for her family were good people. Surely they wouldn’t abandon her in her hour of need. Bless her heart, dear dear Essie would surely work for free, cooking and cleaning and watching the baby while Jo was at school and for special occasions like the cotillion dance in the spring, and that little washwoman with the name of a bird would do the laundry every Saturday like before, just out of the goodness of her heart. There was a handsome new preacher at First Presbyterian, and he would be compelled to counsel and advise her. Her teachers would arrange special tutoring sessions to help her with her studies since so much of her time would be taken up with little Tommy. Her friends wouldn’t abandon her either. They would come by in the afternoons after school. She would find their petty little spats and adventures ridiculously puerile (a Word to Keep). She would want to laugh at them and tell them they knew nothing whatsoever of the cold, cruel world. But she wouldn’t because by then she would have become kind and mature and brave and immensely patient. She would have transmogrified. Then one day a special man (a man, not a boy, possibly the preacher himself, who was a bachelor and pretty as a girl) would present himself and there would be a kiss and after that a wedding and little Tommy would then have a new father and Jo and this man, yes, most likely the preacher (who would have overlooked the hideous scar on her forehead), and little Tommy would live happily ever after and she would no longer be alone and afraid.
The baby lifted his head and looked at her sideways. He seemed momentarily puzzled by her, as if he’d opened a door and she was not the one he’d expected to find on the other side. Then his eyelids fluttered and he went back to sleep, his mouth in a half-smile, twitching a little. What a precious angel he was! How could she have thought any different? She chastised herself for not being more charitable about his bouts with colic, his furious rages that drove them all to distraction but that now the storm had seemed to blow away.
Oh, let her never doubt how lucky she was to have him!
Though, if she didn’t, her life would be much easier. He was, after all, something of an encumbrance. Were it only herself orphaned, she would be asked, she felt sure, to join the family of one of her friends, Lois or the Wesson twins, preferably Lois because Lois was an only child and lived in a huge house with gables and window seats. Jo would acquire not only a ready-made sister but also her own room.
She gazed around her, looking out again over the dark sea of the theater, where some people sat and slept, and between which some others lay unconscious or sleeping she couldn’t tell which. She assumed they weren’t dead by the fact that the CCC boys hadn’t come and thrown a sheet over them and carried them off.
There was a woman in the bed next to her who kept moaning. Jo didn’t like the sounds she made; as a matter of fact they were downright irritating, and if she thought for a minute that the woman was, well, aware enough to know just how aggravating she was being to everyone around her, Jo would have been quite angry. But, of course, the woman—the poor woman, who looked at least fifty, half a century, think of it, and looking older, old as the hills, surely one of those millworkers since she’d obviously not taken care of her complexion—had no idea what a horrendous sound she was making. Of course she didn’t, and so Jo felt sorry for her and if she’d been a nurse, which she intended to be soon, she would have done something, offered the unfortunate woman a sip of paregoric perhaps, to shut her up.
Now the woman, horrors, sat up in bed and stared at Jo like she was a ghost.
There was a desperation to her stare, as if the poor thing were stranded on an iceberg and searching the horizon for the boat that would rescue her.
“What?” said Jo, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Jenny?” said the woman. “Jenny, dear?”
“No. I’m not Jenny.” Jo said it more firmly than she meant to. The poor woman was obviously in distress.
“Jenny? You’re not my Jenny?” the woman said again. Then her head fell back on her pillow and her neck lay at a perplexing angle as if the two, the head and the neck, weren’t even connected, and then, Jo didn’t know how she knew this but she knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt, the woman was alive one minute and dead the next, and sure enough, when Jo cried out for someone to come, a doctor came over and took the woman’s pulse and then pulled her sheet up over her face.
Jo fingered her own sheet. If she died like that, suddenly and quietly, her own neck at that odd angle, would someone come and pull this very sheet over her face and then take her off, like the CCC boys in white were doing that very minute to the poor mill woman, maybe even to Jo’s poor mother?
There was death all around her in this place. How could she not have seen it? She could kick herself. Why, when the poor woman had called out for her Jenny, whoever she was, hadn’t she, Jo McNabb, answered, Here I am, my dear, your Jenny. I am right here. Here is my hand on yours, darling?
A DOOR at the back of the theater opened now and a figure strode in, looking from right to left and back again, as if he, and Jo thought surely it was a he by the fact that she saw pants, were searching for someone. The person, and yes she could tell now it was most definitely a man, came up the middle aisle, stopping at each row, peering at the people slouched in the seats and those on the floor in various stages of unconsciousness. There was an impatience in the man’s movements, an urgency, as if he were goin
g to punish the person he was looking for when he found him or her, as if he were going to give that sought-after person a good talking-to.
He had a familiar gait and the way he put his hand up to his eyebrows to shield his vision from the bright overhead lights made her think of her father when he fished. Mort McNabb liked to fly-fish, and once he’d taken her up to the river and they’d floated along with their knees up to their chins in a very small rowboat for one long hot day because dawn and dusk are the best times to fly-fish. He showed her how to cast and set the line, then slowly skip it through the water in the most alluring way possible. She didn’t catch anything but she had the most seductive nibbles. Her father insisted that she not jerk the line and set the bait, they were probably turtles; she obeyed him, but reluctantly, envisioning a five-pound trout on the end of her line. She knew that if only she’d had another chance, a second day, the fish were bound to hit and hit hard. They were just getting to know her, they just liked to tease. Her father had worn an old hat made of burlap grown loose and soggy with age and moisture; he had stuck his lures into the fabric and their weight had folded the hat over his ears. She had loved him in that hat.
Now, as the man came closer, she saw that indeed it was Mort McNabb. Where, pray tell, had he been all this time? Why had he not come back for her, and also for her mother and little brother, both of whom, no thanks to anyone but her, had been rescued from the pit of death? (Well, she’d give the old washwoman some credit for sending the CCC boys her way.) Now, when it didn’t matter, here came her on-the-lam father to the rescue, looking resolute and worried and responsible; he looked like the man she’d thought he had been before the storm had proved otherwise.
She watched him come, but she didn’t call out to him. Maybe it was a proprietariness about little Tommy. He was safe and sound because she had saved him and she was prepared to take care of him all by herself if her mother didn’t turn up, or even if she did. If she could ever find a working stove, she would warm his bottle properly and dribble it on her wrist to make sure it wasn’t too hot. She had come to know what his various cries meant and what would comfort him and make him stop crying. She had come to know him like the back of her own hand because he was her own dear brother and she his sister-mother-father all rolled into one. It was as if she had hooked him with an invisible line and drawn him in. She’d caught him so that he might live, not die. She alone had pulled him from that bush. She alone had kept him warm and clean and nourished. She’d made the nostrils flare on his little smushed-in nose and his cheeks turn rosy and his eyes flicker and shine, all in the short time it took for blue eyes to change to copper. Her father had had nothing to do with any of it. Mort McNabb was now, what was the Word to Keep her mother had given her? Redundant.