I stared, hoping to see him take a breath, for his color to change, for him to live somewhere else when he could not live with me. But he was waiting.
#
He was there when each of the five children was born, always in the cradle, always dead. I grew older with each year. Freckles appeared, then lines around my eyes, the sag of skin around my jaw, and weight around my hips. Those early years had been difficult, food scarce, the cabin small and drafty. Joe built the big house two years later, when the fields were doing well enough.
He hired a housekeeper for me while I was pregnant the last time, a half-black woman who had been a slave until she was freed by her father when he died. Her name was Suli, and she stayed after the difficult birth, becoming a permanent part of the household.
We went to church in the big carriage, and every Sunday I heard the preacher talk about the resurrection, when all of us would rise from the dead and live with Jesus in the heavens. All our pain would be gone, our bodies perfected, and we would sin no more. No more carnal relations. No more shouting. No more music made from the rhythm of the body. Only the heavenly choirs with their trumps.
And this was the world that my baby would live in, when he was alive with me once more. At first I envied him, but gradually I grew sorrowful.
The other children got into mischief. They tracked mud through the house and wrestled with each other. They broke bones and one of them, Joe Junior, climbed inside the ice box to drink two bottles of cream, and nearly froze there. I didn’t know whether to hide him for being sinful or laugh at his being stupid.
Joe did both, and I listened to him screaming at the pain, until Suli brought him ice to bring down the swelling and she rocked him to sleep in her arms, snuffling only now and again.
I lay in bed that night til I heard Joe snoring. Then I woke up and peeked in each of my children’s doors, listening first for the sound of breathing, then checking to make sure it was real. But a face that is lax in death does not look like one in sleep, whatever the preacher tells you. Their eyes were closed, their mouths slightly open, but the color of life was in their cheeks, and there was something else there. Spirit, maybe the preacher would call it.
Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was sin. But whatever it was, I loved it.
#
Years later, on a warm night, I went downstairs and opened the icebox, smiling at the thought that anyone could fit in there. Joe Junior wasn’t a baby anymore; he was three years old, and a stout, red-cheeked three years old at that. If the ice box was empty, he could have walked in without crouching, but it had been full.
I kept the door open and leaned into it. It felt like heaven to have that cold breathe down my sweaty neck like a lover not so eager or demanding as Joe was. A slow lover, who could make me moan.
It was a sin to think of it, I suppose, sitting there on the floor of my own kitchen, my nearly grown children asleep upstairs, my husband snoring.
When I heard a creaking sound coming from the cellar, I thought of coyotes or maybe thieves, and closed the ice box door. I put an arm across my forehead and lifted up my thin shift up to my knees. I took careful, slow breaths, and was surprised at how I could tiptoe without a sound. Chasing five children around a farm all day gives you muscles, even if they are hidden underneath some girth.
I crept down the steps into the cellar. There was no light, so I had to wait for my eyes to adjust.
That was when I saw the cradle, swinging with the dead baby in it, waiting for me still.
I stared at him a good long while and felt myself shiver with anger. They say anger makes you hot, but for me, it was cold. Not burning, but a slow layer of ice that began in my stomach and grew from there, thicker each year.
I asked Joe once if he grieved for that first baby, but he said it was long done and we had other children to love us now. He said that the first baby had never even been born alive, and there was no more grieving for a bit of flesh that had never taken breath than there was for a tree that was cut down to build our house.
“He’s the past, and I don’t look back,” said Joe.
But I had always looked back.
I thought of the preacher who told us the story of Lot’s wife, who looked back and turned into a pillar of salt. It was meant to be a warning, not to look back, but what woman could do that? Walk away from her home and all she had ever known and not regret it?
Well, I couldn’t. I suppose that’s the sin in me.
I had sung lullabies to the others, but they could hear me. I had put my hand on their backs and patted them while the colic gave them pain. They recognized my touch and quieted.
This ghost child did not know me. We shared nothing but death.
He should have been naughty and learned the sound of my voice raised in anger, and maybe my hand, as well.
He should have learned to snowshoe and he should have sucked fresh, warm milk straight from the cow’s teat. He should have told me he heated me and cracked open his skull and bled.
Instead, he waited.
For what?
For heaven and the woman I would be when I was finished here. What kind of mother was that? What kind of childhood would he have in the world of angels and trumps?
I turned round and started at the sight of Suli behind me.
“He don’t have to wait,” she said.
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
I saw her eyes on the cradle. She saw him!
“My mother, she lost three babies before she had me. I saw them, too, waiting. Until she didn’t want them to wait no more.”
Black magic, I thought. It would be a sin to listen to any more of what she had to say. I should be content with my lot, and learn patience. It was godly trait.
But it wasn’t a child’s trait. A child should not have to wait for the end of time. Children are impatient, and that is what makes them beautiful. They show us what it was like to be eager for life.
“What did she do?” I asked Suli.
She took my hand. Hers was warm where mine was cold as ice.
She pulled me to the floor with her, and we made a circle together, hands binding us together.
“Can you let him go?” Suli asked me, her eyes dark and bright at once.
I could see the cradle swinging just behind her. Let him go. “Do you mean, let him die and never come back?” I did not know if I could do that. It seemed too much to ask. Was the end of pain better than the pain itself?
“Not dead,” said Suli. “Give him to another woman, another mother to raise as her own.”
“And when I die?” I said.
Suli shook her head. “He would be hers, not yours. Ever after,” she said.
I stared at her. Did I believe her words were as real as the preacher’s? Was there an after-life for any of us? Perhaps all she offered me was to take away the haunting.
“Do you love him?” she asked me.
“Of course I do,” I said automatically, bristling. “How dare you—?”
She waited for me, the way he waited, unmoving.
I stopped.
“Do you love him more than you love being his mother? You don’t know nothing about him. Think of that. You’re giving up someone you never seen or heard. And never will. Can you do that?”
I looked down, biting at my lower lip. I thought I loved my children before they were born, but there was something that happened when I saw their faces the first time. And each day after that, the feeling changed. It grew, from fierce, mother-love to the love of one who can be delighted in another’s thoughts and words, to admiration. Becky was twelve, and she had a hand with a needle I had never seen.
Could I give her up?
“Your mother gave up three of them, you said?” I asked.
Suli nodded.
How could she do it?
“It wasn’t til years later,” Suli added. “For the second two. The first she gave up right away, but she couldn’t do it again until I was nearly grown myself
. She told me she expected me to give her grandchildren. But I never did.”
This wasn’t what the preacher would tell me to do. God wanted patience and perfection. God didn’t care about mortal happiness, about the touch of flesh on flesh.
But I did.
I realized then that I had already lost that. I had been holding on to the hope that I would get it back, but it was long gone. The preacher pretended I would get it back, like Job. But when you lose ten children, does it matter if you get twenty children back? They are not the same children. You may love them as much as you can love, and you will still mourn the other ten lost.
“Yes,” I said to Suli. “Yes, I will give him up.”
“You’re sure?” she said.
I nodded, still not looking at the cradle.
“Then I will tell you what you must do,” said Suli.
She handed me a pin from her hair when she was finished. I pricked myself with it and let the blood drip over the cradle.
The baby was still as ever. I was saying goodbye, but he did not know me.
“Now,” said Suli.
I said the words she had made me learn, if they were words at all. They tasted like dust on my tongue.
“The cradle that holds him must be broken, as well,” said Suli.
I went to the other side of the cellar, and took up one of Joe’s axes. It felt heavy and it burned my hands, cold like ice. I almost slipped and dropped it on my foot. I could have sliced it open and bled to death, like old man Tewski had done last fall, in his own barn.
Blood and life, against cold and death.
“Strong and swift,” said Suli.
I lifted the axe and brought it down on the cradle’s wood. I felt the impact reverberate up my arm and into my spine. It was pain at first, and then numbness.
The sound of the cracking wood rung in my ears.
And the baby was gone.
Suli took the axe out of my hands.
“What happens now?” I whispered to her.
“Now he belongs to another,” she said.
#
That fall, three babies were born in our town. Two were boys, one a girl. I attended all three births and brought meals afterwards. I held babies through the night as their mothers slept the sleep of the exhausted.
I asked Suli if one of them was mine.
“Not yours anymore,” she said. “You gave him up.”
“But your mother—did she see hers again? Did she know that another woman had them, and took comfort in that?”
“No comfort for her in another woman having them. Only that they weren’t waiting for her no more,” said Suli.
No reason for me to believe that either of the three babies was my baby boy. How many thousands of babies are born each day on this Earth? How many I will never see nor hear of?
No comfort except that I don’t see him in the cradle anymore, eyes closed, waiting for life to come to him when I am dead.
He has the life now that he should have had, if God had been fair to him. I will pay for the black magic when I am gone. I will pay with pain and burning in hell, but sometimes I think that the preacher’s description of hell is not so very different from the way my life had been with him waiting for me. And now that hell is gone.
TYPHOID MAGIC
Mary Tyson was a young, single woman with a pony tail of hair that fell to her waist. She was on a long road trip and got out of her car at the gas station near the park. She filled the car with gas and considered the prospect of getting back on the road immediately. On the one hand, she would get to her destination more quickly. On the other, she thought that she might possibly make her headache so bad that her eyes would pop out of her head from the pressure.
There was a park across the road, small and with a rusty slide and two swings that looked like they could be pumped high enough to be dangerous. Mary had fond memories of her childhood pumping into the sky on sings and then jumping off. She looked both ways before she crossed the street and then jogged across. She went straight to the first swing, but it was only attached to the chain on one end and the leather seemed to be cracking. She got on the other one, though, and it felt sturdy.
She started slow and made sure that the swing was balanced. Then she pumped higher and higher. Her stomach hurt from the effort. She had forgotten how much stomach muscle swinging required. No wonder her waist had been so slim when she was a child. She pumped higher and higher, her hair pulling out of her pony tail. She was high enough to jump, but she realized that she had lost more than her toned stomach muscles from childhood. She had, apparently, also lost her courage muscle tone.
She slowed down her swinging to a more reasonable rate, so that the swing set didn’t jump with each turn. Then she saw a young boy coming toward the park. His mother was far behind, but he ran ahead and reached for the other swing. He was about sit on it when Mary dug her feet heels first into the dirt and stopped short. She got off the swing.
“Take this one,” she said to the boy.
He stared at her. His cheeks were fat as a baby’s, but he spoke with clear, adult enunciation. “Thank you, ma’am.”
It made her laugh, and she leaned toward him.
He pulled back, but not before her hand grazed his little cheek.
There was a small red bite on his cheek.
“What is that?” the woman asked.
The boy put a hand on the mark and looked as if he were in pain. His forehead wrinkled and he did not take a breath for a long moment. Then his hand slid away and the red spot was gone.
“It’s nothing. I’m well enough,” he said.
“I suppose you are,” said Mary, watching as he got onto the swing she had vacated and began to pump furiously.
The boy’s mother came up behind him. “He didn’t bother you, did he, ma’am?” she asked.
“No. He was very well behaved.”
“Well, I do try. But sometimes he can be quite a handful.”
“I understand. But you are doing a marvelous job as a mother. I can tell.”
The mother blushed a little and nodded, then turned back to watch her son. “Don’t go so high,” she cautioned him.
Mary’s headache was gone suddenly and she felt ready to go back on the road. Imagine that. A few moments in the fresh air, remembering her childhood, forgetting the responsibilities of the last few weeks, and she was cured. If only it could be bottled and sold, she would make a fortune.
#
As Mary Tyson drove away, she did not see the boy jump off the swing and run toward the street. His mother chased after him, calling frantically for him to stop. But he only ran faster and faster, his arms stretched out to his sides like the wings of an airplane. He made a whistling sound, or perhaps it was the wind itself curving around him.
He ran into the street and then straight down the middle on the yellow line. There was a car coming toward him. His mother screamed, but he did not seem to hear her. He looked into the car, a red sports car that was going very quickly down such a dusty country road. He ran so quickly that his mother thought that his legs had begun to twitch in some convulsion or seizure. Yet he remained upright and stared directly into the car as if he thought it could stare back at him.
Then at the last moment before the car struck, the boy lifted up and flew, but not high enough to avoid the windshield.
The police told his mother afterward that what she had seen was impossible, and that it must have been the motion of the car itself that had pushed the boy’s body into the air and tossed him at the windshield. They also told her that he had been dead instantly, on the first impact, and that she need not worry about him being frightened or in pain for long. Likely he had not known that he was in any danger at all.
When the mother asked what it was that had made him run into the street in the first place, they looked at her pityingly. The sheriff finally shook his head and sad, “He was six years old, ma’am. Boys of that age are always doing things before they think about the consequ
ences. It wasn’t your fault, though. I promise you that. There is nothing you could have done to save him.”
The mother did not believe this and she wondered how much her guilt made her replay the incident over and over in her mind. But she was sure that her son had been trying to fly when he ran into the street. The yellow line was not unlike the lines of a runway.
He had flown, she thought. Whether or not it was because the car struck him, he had his final wish. And that seemed to her more important than his death. Not every boy lives his dream, but every boy dies.
Mary Tyson drove until it was dark and she stopped at a motel with a diner in the parking lot. She didn’t have any bags to put in her room, and she was as hungry as if she had just run a marathon. Everything on the menu looked delicious to her, even the fried eggplant, which she normally hated because eggplant could be so limp. She ordered three entrees, the steak with a baked potato, the open faced fried chicken sandwich with gravy and green beans, and the eggplant parmesan. The waitress asked if she should set two more places and bring more water.
“No,” said Mary Tyson. “It’s all for me, I’m afraid.”
“Are you sure?” said the waitress, who didn’t really care if the food was wasted, so long as she got a good tip.
“I’m sure.”
In fact, Mary Tyson ate almost everything. She left a third of the eggplant because it was, in fact, a little soggy. But she didn’t stop eating until she was absolutely full.
She asked for two pieces of pie, pecan and chocolate cream with hazelnuts, to take with her back to the motel. The waitress packed the two pieces up in separate boxes and then brought the check.
Mary Tyson stood up and almost bumped into her, but the waitress smoothly moved aside.
She was not impressed with the tip Mary Tyson had left her, and wished for a moment that she had brought the cold eggplant they’d had brought back from one of the other tables instead of going to the trouble of getting a warm one.
Mary Tyson put a hand to her head and wished suddenly that she had not eaten so much. She had given herself a headache. She always did when she ate food in a. Now she wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for twelve hours without interruption.
Saving the Moon Page 7