Borrowed Children

by George Ella Lyon

  He pauses and Mama goes on.

  “So now that I’m better—”

  “You mean I can go back to school?”

  I blurt this out from excitement and relief.

  “After Christmas, yes,” Mama continues, “but before that we have a present for you.”

  A present? The first thing I think of is the ring Mama ordered. It seems years ago and I’d forgotten all about it. But I don’t want a ring, not with money like it is.

  “You like trains, don’t you?” Daddy says, as if to fill up the silence.

  “Sure.” But they can’t be going to give me a toy train. I don’t know what to do. They’re both looking at me.

  “Omie’s invited you to come to Memphis,” Mama says. “It’s your Christmas present. And we’d like to let you go.”

  I can’t believe it.

  “You mean on the train?”

  Daddy nods.

  “By myself?”

  It’s all I can do to keep from saying: Without Willie?

  “Just you,” Mama confirms. “A week and a half to visit and see the sights.”

  “And describe that baby to your grandmother,” Daddy adds. “She wants an eye-witness.”

  I smile. “Are you sure its all right? I mean…”

  “Well, we wouldn’t be ready to spare you tomorrow,” Mama admits. “But I’m stronger every day, and in another week—”

  “But I’ll be there at Christmas!”

  “That’s right,” Daddy says. “You can ride streetcars hung with holly.”

  “And eat Mama’s plum pudding.”

  And miss yours, I think. And miss Willie looking at the

  tree.

  “I don’t think she wants to go,” Daddy says to Mama.

  “Yes I do! I just can’t believe it, that’s all.”

  “Well, it’s settled. You go on to bed, and we’ll talk tomorrow.

  “I don’t think I can sleep.”

  “Want a spoon of Willie’s potion?” Daddy offers.

  “Jim!” Mama’s shock is half real. “Sit still then, Mandy. I’ll make you some cocoa.”

  And that’s the strangest thing of all: sitting at the table while Mama waits on me, a huge gift where I’d expected a slap in the face.

  11

  Before Helen was born, we used to go to Memphis once a year. “Come summer, I have to go home,” Mama would say, and pack a trunk and a hamper. I only remember the last two visits: red waxy flowers in Omie s back yard, Aunt Laura pretty as a catalogue cover, Opie peeling apples with his pocket knife. One trip the boys disappeared the moment the train pulled out and Mama told me to quit looking out the window and watch Anna till she found them.

  But it wont be like that this time. I’ll be on my own. I close my eyes and see myself sitting on the red plush seat, brave and lonely.

  Maybe I’ll feel I belong in Memphis. It’s a real city, even if it’s not Boston. Things happen there—interesting things to interesting people. I’ve seen that in Aunt Lauras eyes.

  Mama said I can go a week from Sunday. That’s tomorrow. Ben and David took no notice, even when she told David he might go down next summer to work for Opie.

  “If I’m going to saw logs, I might as well saw them here,” was all he said. He doesn’t want to leave Polly.

  Mama told the girls, too. Anna was mad.

  “Mandy gets to do everything! Stay out of school to take care of Willie! Go see Omie and Opie! Its not fair.”

  But Helen got tearful.

  “What if you forget how to come back?”

  I explained about the railroad, the track being nailed down and going both ways. And about a roundtrip ticket.

  “But if it’s round, you don’t come back like you went. That’s straight.”

  “Helen—” I always forget she sees each word-picture. You have to tell her it’s not real.

  “Round trip just means the ticket will bring you back.”

  I told Willie I’m going. He smiled with his lips tucked in. That’s his new trick. He practices all the time. Last week he worked on his tongue. Not sticking it out, but smiling with it laid from his lip to his chin. He’s never idle. If he’s not asleep, he’s nursing, working, or crying. I admire him. He knows he’s got a lot to do and he doesn’t waste a minute.

  I wonder if he’ll know I’m gone. Will he forget me? Mama says he won’t but the idea makes me sad. In two weeks he’ll be a different baby. Mama’s baby.

  I don’t see how I can feel so many things. I want to go—of course I do. I’m ready as a big red tomato is to get off the vine. Then why does the vine suddenly seem fragile, like it might wither up if I’m gone? No, that’s not right. I’m more afraid the vine doesn’t need me, will grow right over the place where I was. Before Mama got better it felt like I was the vine. Now I don’t know.

  And last week, when the Christmas box came from Omie and Opie, I felt left out because there wasn’t a present for me. Isn’t that silly, when mine is the biggest gift of all?

  What with packing and fretting the week has spun by. It’s a cold Saturday night and we’re loaded in the wagon to go to the train. I can tell David and Ben are sour about being here. They had to get their chores done early. But Mama insisted that the whole family take me.

  It’s a squeeze to get us all in. Anna sits up with Mama. I’m back with the boys, and Helen sleepy in my lap. I was hoping to hold Willie but Mama didn’t offer. Anyway, Helen seems rooted. She’s the only one somber to see me go.

  Daddy coaxes Midge and Welkie and we start rolling, between mountains that stand like a deep part of the dark. The only sound besides the wagon’s rattle is Mama singing:

  O, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing.

  The breeze is sighing, the nightbirds crying.

  Far, O far beneath the stars her brave is sleeping

  While Red Wings weeping her heart away.

  Willie’s wrapped in sleep and song and quilts.

  We come to the wagon bridge. Daddy eases us on it. There’s no rail; he has to have dead aim. He carries a lantern, of course, but its glow doesn’t go far, and there’s not much moonlight. We travel the road by heart.

  A little ways downcreek from the wagon bridge is the footbridge—just two logs, fun to balance across. But there was one time I couldn’t make it. In the rattly silence it comes back to me, that hard day I was coming home.

  I was seven maybe, seven or eight. It was early winter and we’d just moved to Goose Rock. I’d waked up that morning feeling jumbled, like the inside me had come loose from my bones. My back ached and I was hot, but Mama couldn’t feel it, so off I went with David and Ben to school.

  I did all right through the morning, but by lunch my feet rose over my shoes like bread. I told Miss Bledsoe.

  “You’re hot as blazes,” she said. “Get your coat and go straight home.”

  I didn’t think to question, just put books in my satchel and headed out. The wool of my red coat smelled funny. Somehow I thought I could smell that it had grown too red. And my eyes didn’t go where they should.

  But I walked. Like Welkie and Midge in this darkness, I knew the road, and I trusted it to pull me. But as I got heavier, it had to tug harder, and when I topped the hill above Goose Creek I realized I was too big for the footbridge; I’d have to cross like a wagon. Then when I reached the rough lip of that bridge, I couldn’t stand up. My feet had ballooned. I got down on all fours, grateful for knees. The bridge appeared to me a long ladder. I had to haul myself up as well as across. But I made it. And crawled the rest of the snow-crusted way home.

  Anna was the baby then. Mama came to the door with her wrapped in a shawl. She didn’t see me at first, then she screamed. I couldn’t speak for the heat rushing out the door.

  I don’t remember much about the next few days. I know Doc Bailey came, bringing shots and little envelopes of big pills. And Mama’s face kept appearing above me, like the moon tonight. “I see the moon and the moon sees me. …” Did she sing that?


  And why does this come back now? Is it the cold? Is it Anna in my made-over coat? Mama has given it a black velvet collar and pocket. This didn’t impress Anna, but Helen was thrilled.

  “Your pocket has a coat!” she said, over and over. “I want a pocket with a coat.”

  “It will come to you,” Mama promised. “Anna is just one stop on this little coat’s road.”

  “Where is it going?”

  “Probably to a rug.”

  Omie braids rugs out of our old clothes—“anything that’s got body but no spirit left.” The parlor rug is mostly David and Daddy, the dining room, David and Ben and me. So that, too, will be cut and stitched and twisted, the too-red coat that belonged to a pocket, the Mandy-Anna-Helen coat. Willie won’t need it.

  Helen has just fallen asleep and we re rolling into Manchester. There’s the Lyttle house: white, three stories, with a windowed turret. Daddy once said we’d live there when our ship came in.

  “When will that be?” David wanted to know.

  All Daddy said was, “Don’t know as I’ve ever seen a ship in these mountains.”

  At the train station Mama insists that everybody get out.

  “We must see Mandy off in style.”

  Style is hardly the word for all the bodies spilling from the wagon. David carries my bag and Ben brings the present box. Then Daddy hands me the ticket, Mama straightens my coat, everybody gives me a kiss, and I climb into the train. After the long ride, this part happens too fast. I don’t even ask to hold Willie.

  When I find my seat I look out the window. There they stand: Daddy behind Mama, his hands on her shoulders; the boys straight and thin, trying not to kick stones; Anna lifting her dress to look at the lace on her petticoat, and Helen’s face wet as if she’d stood in the rain. She must have hurt herself, I think. But no, she’s waving and searching for me. And then I realize that they all look sad, like a field when the sun has just left it. I try to see if Willie is crying, but Mama has him on her shoulder.

  And here I am on board, the seat solid oak and red plush, the windows filmed with dust. Beside me is the supper that Mama has packed—fried chicken and a piece of jam cake; in my lap is a book and handkerchief and money Daddy gave me for the trip. I’m all set for an elegant journey. But a man sits across the aisle, his cheek pouched with tobacco, and every few minutes he spits into a can.

  12

  The train has a hard time leaving. It jerks and strains and shakes. I feel that way too. If anyone had told me a month ago that I’d be sad to leave home, I would have scorned them like Miss Snavely. But I am sad.

  I remember what I told Helen: the nailed-down track is connected—Goose Rock to Memphis—and will bring me back. I’m grateful for that.

  I wonder how Mr. Aden felt coming to Goose Rock, leaving behind the paved world he knew. But Mr. Aden is a grownup and a man: why should he worry? Men always know what to do. Turn some kind of labor into money. So he came to teach. And to live. Volunteered to eat fatback and breathe coal dust. I’ll never understand it.

  Mama let me walk to school Friday afternoon to tell him about my trip.

  “What a splendid chance for you!” he said. He always has these silky words like splendid. “What will you do?”

  “See my kin, mostly,” I told him.

  “But you must see Memphis, too. It’s the place to take the pulse of the Mississippi, to follow the Old Souths shadows.”

  “Yes sir,” I answered, trying to sound like I knew what he was talking about.

  Later I asked Mama. She smiled her Mr. Aden smile. I felt silly.

  “Well, Memphis is on the river and that’s made it important in trade—cotton and lumber—that’s probably what he means. Opie can take you to his mill, if that would please you

  I nodded, but I knew Mr. Aden didn’t mean sawdust. I’ve seen plenty of that in Goose Rock. Maybe I’ll ask Aunt Laura.

  After a while I unpack a drumstick but can’t eat it. The train makes me woozy. Then I fall asleep and wake up starving. Mama says it’s lucky that I like dark meat, since you often have to leave the white pieces for guests. She means the men, though she doesn’t say it. I think about this, chewing chicken, watching the lights out the window.

  When the news butch comes through, I ask for a cream soda. What catches my eye on his tray, though, is clear glass bottles, shaped like train engines and filled with bits of candy. They’re small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

  At Chattanooga a woman gets on with a baby smaller than Willie, so swaddled you can’t see its face. She takes a seat somewhere behind me, and I hear the baby’s gurgle, her low response. They make me feel cold all at once and empty. I wrap up in my coat and try to count the stars.

  “Count all the stars,” Daddy says, “and you’ll never be forgotten.”

  One day I plan to ask him what that means.

  Sometime in the night I wake up and eat the jam cake. The heavy sweetness sets me to thinking about the day we picked the berries.

  It was late July. Anna and Helen and I went out early, hoping to beat both the bees and the heat. We did for a while; then Anna closed her hand on a berry so plump she didn’t see the bee. She shrieked. Mama had made me bring a wet-rag-and-soda poultice. I used that and we went on picking.

  I could tell when it neared noon and we ought to be quitting, but Anna’s hand was okay and there were two bushes to go.

  “I have a halo,” Helen declared.

  “That’s good,” I told her. “You’re the world’s first blackberry angel.”

  “You can feel it.”

  “Yep,” I said, my purple hand grazing her hair.

  “Blackberries can see it,” she insisted. “That’s why they’re winking.”

  And she tumbled, halo first, into the bush.

  Before she’d come to rest, I knew what had happened: sunstroke. Stupid, stupid, my heart thumped with every step I took up the meadow, Helen on my shoulder, Anna carrying the buckets.

  Once inside, I could see Helens red scalp. Mama cooled her down while Anna and I rinsed berries. She came to right away.

  “Mandy said I was a blackberry angel.”

  “Well,” Mama cautioned, “don’t fly away just yet.”

  She gave me a look, steep as any scolding.

  “I’m sorry. I should have realized.”

  “Yes, you should. Heatstroke is dangerous, especially for a little child.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Ten more minutes might have made you a good deal sor-

  rier.

  The truth of that settled in through the afternoon. Helen rested. We made jam and a big cobbler.

  “Pie supper tonight,” Mama announced.

  Pie suppers are how we celebrate birthdays in summer—thick berry juice laced with strips of crust. Daddy can’t eat the seeds, so Mama strains out the berries. This one was for David, who turned sixteen that week.

  Ben teased him. “I guess you’ll run off and marry Polly now.”

  David didn’t even blush. “Mandy’s almost twelve. I’ll leave the courting to her.”

  “You will not!” My cheeks felt as red as Helen’s scalp.

  “Just wait till next year. Some tall fellow will show up and put your heart in his pocket.”

  Ben added, “If he can get her notice over the rim of a book.”

  Daddy saw me steaming.

  “That’s enough, boys.”

  Little did we know I’d get a baby long before a sweetheart.

  Or eat those berries rocked in the cradle of a train.

  13

  A night’s train ride and the world has changed: flat red earth, big fields, patches of pine trees. I look out the window and consider the people I’m going to meet.

  Mama says mountain people are different from southerners and Delta people are different even from that. Then Daddy says, “Are you sure it’s not just your people who are different?” She has kin over in the Delta.

  But I’m not going to the Delta. I
’m headed for Memphis, with its big white sorrowful houses and voices soft as flour. “Sorrowful houses” is my grand mother Omie’s description. One of my favorite things about her is how she says things that sound like a book. I remember what she wrote when she heard about Willie, and Mama’s sickness after his birth: “That child, that child. A cup of sunshine in a tub of rain.” And of course she was right.

  Omie knows all about babies. She had three by her first husband, Mama’s daddy, Mr. Grace. After he died, she married Opie and had four more. Mama was her oldest girl—like me. You know, I never thought of that. She probably had to help Omie a lot, too. There was her little sister Edith, who died, and then a half brother and three half sisters. One of those is my Aunt Laura, who sent me her clothes.

  Omie says Laura is her hothouse flower, “though how she took root in a coffee-ground garden I don’t know.”

  Don’t let that fool you. Omie’s garden is perfect; her flowers come up bouquets. It’s true she mixes coffee grounds in her flowerbed, but that’s for a purpose. Mama does it too.

  “It lightens the soil,” say Omie and Mama.

  Daddy claims they have the only daylilies open to the moon.

  “They’ve got the big eye,” he says.

  But Aunt Laura is different. She doesn’t push your hair back and say you’ve grown. She doesn’t cook. She’s married, to Uncle Cresswell, but she doesn’t have any children.

  “Imagine a baby spitting up on my shantung dress!” she said one summer when we were visiting.

  “If you had babies you wouldn’t be wearing silk dresses,” Mama told her.

  “That’s what I know,” said Aunt Laura.

  And she doesn’t keep house. She doesn’t even always live in one. For a while she and Uncle Cresswell stayed in the Hotel Emory, so they could “be near the center of things,” they said. Could walk to the theater, the symphony, the ballet.

  “My stars and time,” said Omie. “The center of things is the kitchen and the cradle, and I don’t know how I raised a girl who doesn’t know that.”

  “Different people have different centers,” said Aunt Laura.