It Happened in Silence

by Jay, Karla M

  I leave the room and come up alongside the boys.

  “Where are you taking our baby sister?” The oldest boy jumps to his feet, his face knitted into an angry scowl.

  I stop and smile. “Your mother asked me to take her to a nice home where she can get lots of food.”

  “But she’s coming back, right?” The younger one is on his feet.

  What to tell them? The hard truth can’t be easier to hear than a little white lie. “Yes. Your mother can go get her as soon as she feels strong enough.” I descend the steps and they follow me, as if staying near their sister may prevent her from leaving. “Now you boys go on back to the house and take good care of your mother.”

  “You can’t keep her.” The younger boy reaches for the blanket and starts to pull her from my arm. Tears cut pink trails down his dusty face.

  I use my big stomach to block his grasp, then open the car door and set the basket in the footwell.

  My Oliver is startled at my quick movements. “Mommy?” His voice is strained.

  With my free hand, I grab the dirigible and hand it to the younger boy, then take the whistle from Oliver’s grip and give it to the older. I plop the baby in Oliver’s lap. “Hold onto her, Oliver.”

  I close the door and face the children. “Your mother has food inside for you so skedaddle.”

  They slowly back away and soon turn and run to the house. I needed to be firm. They were acting like rabid dogs moving in for an attack.

  The car starts on the first try, and I make a circle around their house as I’m not keen on backing up. That’s how I bent the fender the last time. We crunch our way back down the road as I shoot glances at the baby. Her eyes are open and she’s looking at Oliver. “Her name is Anna.”

  “Are we keeping her?” Oliver pulls the blanket away from the baby’s mouth, inspecting her whole face.

  “We’re taking her to a place that’s like a hospital.”

  The baby is making cooing noises and I smile. Who doesn’t like a baby? They only have eyes for the person holding them. That complete devotion fills my heart. So sweet.

  The baby’s hand pops free and is swinging in the air, trying to locate Oliver’s face. “She has spots all over her. Good thing she’s going to the hospital,” he says.

  Spots? I slow the car and lean over the infant. “Hell’s bells!” There are red sores around the baby’s mouth and on her hand. Some of the sores have burst and developed honey-colored crusts. It’s impetigo. “Don’t touch her! Wrap that blanket back up around her hand.”

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” Oliver’s face puckers and his arms shake. I swear this child is more thin-skinned than a rotten tomato. He doesn’t move, so I reach to rewrap the infant.

  “It’s fine.” I take in a big breath. “I don’t want you to catch those spots. They can make you really itchy, and you remember poison ivy from last summer.”

  Oliver’s lip quivers but he freezes, still as a statue.

  This is a fine howdy-do. Fiona must have seen Anna’s skin disease. I’m out here doing charitable work, and now I’m stuck with a hard decision. Impetigo spreads so quickly. New Hope Charity Home will know what to do to treat Anna and keep her away from the other babies, but what will they think of me? Bringing them such a poor-quality child? It makes me wonder if Roy’s mental condition has passed down to this sickly child.

  I turn north on the Dixie Highway toward Cartersville. The turn to New Hope Charity Home comes up in five miles. The Beck Infantorium comes to mind. It’s not much past the turn to New Hope.

  The Beck sisters will never remember me. I was there all of three nights, and they never ask names if a gal isn’t forthcoming. Which I wasn’t.

  I weigh the decision. In either place, the baby will get a cradle and someone to feed her. Both places offer adoption, and with her being white, she has a really good chance. We’ve often joked at the Daisy Ladies’ Society that every baby that expects to be adopted ought to be born with blue eyes. The dark-eyed girl or boy might be just as pretty, but it was hard to make the discerning family believe so. I’ve heard that an attractive infant sells from fifteen to a hundred dollars. Usually paid in installments since not many of the adoptive parents have the larger sum just lying around. The newspapers run the slogan that it’s cheaper and easier to buy a baby for a hundred dollars than to make one of your own.

  Isn’t that the truth.

  When I don’t slow for the road to New Hope Charity Home, I realize I’ve made up my mind. It’s the paper that Fiona showed me. The Beck Infantorium’s advertisement indicated they are seeking a new baby that matches Anna’s description. The bonus is they won’t have to pay for this one—she comes with money. Fiona won’t know or care. She’s relieved her daughter won’t suffer the sadness and hardship that’s in front of her and the two boys.

  Oliver is quiet as a mouse and following my direction not to touch Anna. “I’ll buy you new toys, Oliver. Those boys didn’t have any to play with, and I know you understand helping others.”

  He nods. “Maybe I can have a circus car with animals like Horace.”

  Horace is one of Sheriff Withington’s sons. “That sounds like a nice idea.” I’ll have to ask Nancy where she got it and see if I can write away and ask for one.

  We bump down a back road and to the Beck sisters’ home. They have a large piece of property, although I remember not being allowed out behind the icehouse and food storage. A cemetery shows up first, running off into the woods at the back of the large white house. A tall granite angel towers over a sign for burial lots. I pass that and pull into a circular driveway.

  I carefully scoop the baby out of Oliver’s lap and tell him to hand me the basket. The wide porch has a Baby Box where a person can drop a baby and leave with no questions asked. It’s the humane answer to mothers abandoning them in alleys or drowning them in ponds.

  The doorbell chimes a happy tune, and moments later, a tall, raw-boned woman answers the door. It’s Herta. “Hello,” she says and looks to the driveway and then back to me. “I see you brought us a little one.”

  “Yes. From a family in a pickle.” The woman has barely aged. I know I surely look different than the poor girl from Hickory Nut Hollow who once staggered across their doorstep.

  “Dill or sweet?” She tilts her head to the side.

  “What?” I must have skipped a question.

  “Just a pickle joke.” She smiles and a wolf’s grin comes to mind. “Won’t you come in?”

  “My son is in the car, and we must be getting back to town.” I raise Anna at an angle so she can see her. “The mother has run into hard times, and she’s asked to have her baby adopted out. She paid twelve dollars.”

  “Oh, the poor dear.” She studies Anna and reaches for the bundle. “White parents?”

  I pull back a little so she can’t accept the baby. I need to let her know what she’s taking on. “Yes, both white but the father has a nervous disorder from the war, and this one has been sick quite often. Right now, she has impetigo.” I remember the basket. “And she needs goat’s milk, but there’s some in here.”

  “We take in sick babies as well as the healthy ones.” She reaches for Anna, and I hand her over. “You say the mother paid for relinquishment?”

  I pull out the twelve dollars. “Here it is.” I hear babies crying in the back of the house. I don’t remember that much commotion. It sounds like dozens. “How many infants do you have at one time?”

  “We can take fifteen. We have room just now for three more.” She pulls back the blanket and examines Anna. “This is much better than diphtheria.” She rewraps the baby. “We’ll get her healed and then find a good placement.”

  “Thank you. You’ve solved a big dilemma. And maybe in the future, my women’s organization can make a donation to help wayward mothers.”

  She turns the door handle, pushes the bask
et inside, and then says, “That’s very nice, but we are self-sustaining.” She raises Anna to her shoulder. The door is nearly closed when she says, “It was lovely seeing you again.”

  I feel faint. My feet are glued to the porch boards. This is very bad. What if the sisters tell someone about me? Then I remember she doesn’t know my married name. And my given name of Sissy Belle Strunk from six-plus years ago ceased to exist once I arrived in Atlanta.

  She nods and heads into the house, the swell of wailing sounds closing off behind the door. How many workers does she have now? With fifteen babies, she and her sister must be slaving day and night.

  I feel deep-down tired. It doesn’t take much these days with Baby Katherine about ready to arrive.

  I climb into the car and pull past the house. Another woman with her hair tied into a scarf struggles with a wheelbarrow behind the home. As it tips to the side, it appears to be loaded with small melons. Must be Magda. I never asked if they were ever married or had children of their own. And if they are spinsters, they aren’t all that old.

  Everyone has a different calling in life. They have chosen a hard path, raising other people’s throwaways and covering the men’s chores too.

  Oliver has fallen asleep, and it’s a peaceful drive as I head back to Marietta.

  As for me, I’m satisfied with what I’ve accomplished today to help out poor Fiona, and happy knowing the WKKK’s charity outreach in the state legitimizes us. We have a robed event in a few days. Dressed in our impressive lady’s regalia, we will visit a children’s hospital to hand out gifts. The parade is coming up in another week. Five hundred women strong will walk through Marietta and end with a picnic in the park. A wonderful show of the power of white Protestant women and what we can do when we unite under one banner of purity. The national figures say the WKKK has reached half a million members this year. We will cleanse the United States, one community at a time, and make it a better place for all of us.

  Willow Stewart

  Somehow, I’ve been carried to the table after playing dead like a curled-up opossum on the floor. Mrs. Holcombe and Mr. Vissom talk about me as if I lost my hearing along with my mama. They decide I’ll stay at the parsonage for the night, and I don’t even try to lift a pencil to scribble out an argument. Like a yellow thread in a stack of hay, I’m lost.

  Mr. Vissom asks for an ink pen and paper. “Willow, once again, I sure am sorry to hear of your family’s losses. I’ll be on my way to deal with the peddler and all. Give us a quick drawing of his whereabouts, and we’ll take that worry off your head.”

  The peddler’s location and his death feel unrelated to me, like a fantasy story from a book I might’ve read. I draw a shaky map and slide it across the table. Mr. Vissom touches the brim of his hat and thanks Mrs. Holcombe for watching over me. He leaves, another mumbled condolence trailing charcoal gray heaviness behind him.

  Mrs. Holcombe makes a switchboard call to the local doctor to come check me out first light. She insists she cannot let me return home tonight in the sad state I’m in. I believe she’s right.

  I have no idea how to accept this twice-terrible news. I sit in a stunned pool of stagnant despair while the preacher’s wife prepares supper.

  Maybe it was someone else who died and not Mama. Anything could have happened like a fall, or someone choked. I shouldn’t wish another person dead, but God’s plan may have called someone else home.

  My insides hurt, and I know I’m wishing for a rainbow to appear out of a dust storm.

  Mama is dead. She was so alive three days ago, sewing, cooking, getting ready for the baby. A fat, dark cloud feels permanently settled over our sunny mountaintop.

  I barely eat the bread soaked in warm milk and honey Mrs. Holcombe prepares. It goes down hard—the sorrow knotting my gut. Every time the woman sly-eyes my way, I close mine, afraid to witness the sympathy in hers. Earlier, my silent gasping sobs scared her. Time stops for me, pinning me in a place of sorrow with no way out. A gloomy forest with no sunlight. My cheek muscles are in spasm after my one long paralyzing cry, and it hurts to eat.

  When it’s obvious I’m done with the food, Mrs. Holcombe attends to my injured arm. She cleans it, and I barely register the pain. She applies some goo from a blue jar called Vicks VapoRub and wraps a clean bandage on it. My wound burns like a small fire, but I welcome the sting. I should hurt everywhere since Mama’s gone.

  She guides me to the outhouse thirty yards from the back door. Darkness has arrived in its sneaky way, nearly graying out the spaces between the trees. The night air feels cool, and a new pain arrives, as I picture home with its refreshing evening breezes.

  Back in the house, I wash at the kitchen sink, splashing cold water on my swollen face. Mrs. Holcombe settles me in a tiny alcove off the kitchen with a single bed sidled up next to a wooden stand. She explains she’ll be right around the corner, preparing her Sunday lessons for the children’s groups. Probably to take my mind off Mama’s death, or maybe it’s because she doesn’t know what to do with a mute, she has talked non-stop about her and Dean’s obligations overseeing a rural church. Besides pastoral care and preaching, they pay the church’s bills and prepare the budgets.

  “My Dean will take the Lord’s word anywhere need be,” she says, “and no offense, but folks around here only pay in sacks of walnuts or ham hocks. But with God’s grace, we get by. That kind of meager compensation worked out all right when he was single and a circuit preacher down near Savannah, riding all over God’s green acres. But it wore him down something awful. He used to say there’s no such thing as bad weather, just a weak countenance, but that was before he ran up against the hurricane of 1910.”

  I have no response. I’m suffering through an onslaught of bad weather myself.

  She leaves me alone, and I stand at a small window and watch the moon rise, tonight a weaker version of its usual bright self, as transparent as steam. I can relate. Part of me feels as if I’m dissolving, losing myself like soda ash tossed into water.

  I sink onto the soft bed. Inside my head, I replay the sound and rhythm of Mama’s voice. Like the seasons and the plants and the river, she lived in daily harmony with everything and everyone. I can’t imagine life without her. Will our broken hearts ever seal back up? Or will it be like a busted hand that never heals straight and true? It pains you to close it, but you go on hanging the wash, cradling a baby, or shielding your eyes to watch an eagle soar across the face of the sun, recognizing the hurt every time you move it.

  Memories flash behind my closed eyelids, each recollection to match every beat in my chest. Mama humming as she does her needlework, all of us gathered in the parlor, warm against the cutting wind that scrapes down the mountains, dragging eerie whistles through frozen boughs. Using a foraging knife to cut stinging nettles pushing up through the snow and brown patches of winter leaves. Forcing Poppy to dance a jig on his birthday. Sewing Ruthy’s wedding dress. Making clothes for the new baby out of scraps from our outgrown clothing.

  And just like that, with her last breath, everything stops. Our sign-language conversations.

  Newspaper reading. Reassurance.

  For a long time, I’ve shared my fears with Mama about what might happen to me. Would I ever marry? Have a family? Many days I’m satisfied with the notion I’d stay near our home fires and not be out in the world, hungry for other cultures. Unless books give out, I can do all my exploring from home. I’d help Mama with the folks who come to her with ailments, educate myself in her herb-healing knowledge. She always told me I can do anything my heart desires, even if it means moving off the mountain and into a township.

  But after what I’ve experienced today, I can’t see a safe place for me outside of my hill family.

  Mrs. Holcombe is flipping pages at the kitchen table, her pen scratching on paper. I carefully turn over on the bed, arm aching from the wound. Fresh tears spring free and I have no mind to s
top them. Perhaps the hot salt will wash away my guilt. As I look back on the day, I surely committed a sin. I could have kicked the mushroom soup out of Mr. Coburn’s hands and taken his punishment. He’d still be alive. I’d be defiled but safe in the knowledge my wickedness had not taken Mama’s life. Everyone knows the Devil waits for a sinner to break one of the Ten Commandments and then he gives them the what for.

  And what a walloping he unleashed.

  I want time to stop in that moment before Mama passed. Then I could live the rest of my life there before it changed forever.

  I imagine it all. Pastor Holcombe arrives too late to our homestead tonight to properly funeralize. He spends the night in the parlor on the guest cot that’s seen many a wayward traveler or sick person who needed Mama’s close watching. The neighbor men dig the grave, while the women weave wildflower wreaths and line the coffin with one of Mama’s best quilts. Was it the one we all played Toss the Cat with last fall when the cat skedaddled to the corner that Ruthy held? The cat’s prediction of who would marry next was right—Ruthy got engaged a week later.

  In the morning, Mama and Baby Luther would be laid in the coffin, feet placed toward the east so they can face the rising sun. The morning view of the mountain ridges is splendid and one of Mama’s favorites. The peaks poke like dark islands through a sea of soft fog, changing from gray to apricot as the sun pushes through. If ever a soul heard the voice of God, it would be there in the cool of the early day.

  I long to be there with Poppy rubbing my back, Billy Leo wrapped around Ruthy, the family and neighbors singing “In the Sweet By and By,” Mama’s beloved song. I picture Poppy lost in a forest of sorrow. Can he imagine ever finding his way to a better place?

  Mama is thirty-nine, Poppy going on forty-one. Both came to America in 1898 on separate ships and with different stories. Mama and Aunt Effie never knew dire poverty. Her parents raised the sisters in Invergarry, a village in the Highlands of Scotland. Mama’s voice softened to dusky green whenever she spoke of her childhood, playing in the lush glens surrounded by towering mountains. Her father was a crofter, a working man on a twenty-acre farm, and held a small portion of the land in his own right. After both the cereal and potato harvests failed, he sold everything, wrote to a great uncle in the MacDonell clan in northern Georgia, and bought ship fare for four. Two weeks into the passage, Mama’s parents died when their wet coughs turned to pneumonia. Mama was seventeen, Effie fifteen when their parents were buried at sea. When they reached New York City, the First Presbyterian Church housed them for one night, took up a collection to purchase train tickets for them to travel to Washington, DC, then through the Carolinas with the final destination of Dalton, Georgia. Great Uncle Alistair MacDonell met them there to transport them the last one hundred fifty miles by horse and wagon to MacDonell Mountain.