The Book of CarolSue

by Lynne Hugo

  “You told him I want to?”

  “He’s been looking for you all along. Didn’t know where you were.”

  “He doesn’t want her?”

  “Oh, they’re crazy about the baby. CarolSue, that’s his aunt, she wants to raise her, y’know, but I told them a little girl needs her mother. He understands.”

  Her baby started to fuss again. Rosalina made a move to pick her up, but the man said, “I better get her,” and he picked her up. He jostled Gracia around and Rosalina’s chest hurt with longing.

  The lawman kept talking. His voice was kind but very loud and she wished she could tell him to talk quietly around the baby, but she had no right to tell him what to do. She couldn’t even hold her own baby. She had no power here, and she never would. It was like being back home. Now he pulled an envelope out of her baby’s bag and showed it to her. Her name was typed on the front. He took it out, unfolded it, awkward because he was holding Gracia.

  “So Gary, here’s the letter he signed. All you have to do is make sure your lawyer gives it to the judge when you go to court. The immigration court. Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “They have to let you take your baby with you. Gary’s family will keep her until then. But you can have her back. We’ll make sure. Okay? You understand? I have to leave it at the front for your lawyer. I’ll do that, but I wanted you to see it.”

  She nodded.

  “Isn’t that worth a smile?”

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled. That was how to be safe.

  When he left, she saw the strings of Gracia’s pink hat trailing out of his pocket. Her baby was in his arms and her hat was in his pocket.

  Chapter 32

  CarolSue

  After Gus brought Gracie back to us, to me, it felt as if we entered a strange limbo, a purgatory of not knowing when I woke up if this one might be my last day with Gracie. I, of course, was furious with Gary, but then I’d see him that day, witness his heartbreak, and soften. The thought of losing her was as devastating to him as to me. Gus was another matter. I could just blame him, and I did. It was all his idea, I knew, about Gary signing that permission letter. Otherwise, I realized I could have gone to court, we could have gone to court to keep Gracie. Now, there was no hope.

  Napping had skidded to a dead halt, so I didn’t have to see Gus much. But it was because he was mad at Louisa, if you can feature that. She sure didn’t. I heard her on the phone defending herself. “No, sir, I did not know she’s Gary’s baby. You think I keep a DNA kit in the house or something? I told him over and over we needed to call you. He said it was a confidential church matter. Well, sue me, but I believed my son. What would you know about dealing with your own child? Last I knew you never had any, or am I wrong about that, too?” Her voice raised steadily, and on that last shot, she hung up. Not gently.

  Have you ever noticed how things can devolve from peaceful and fine to a total mess all around you, when you’d swear you had nothing to do with it? That was the situation I found myself in.

  I took Gracie on long walks, suddenly taken with the shining clarity of the air. It was as if the earth had paused, hanging on to the last living leaves, the last warmth and color, even the last few flowers. We hadn’t had a hard frost yet. Look, look at what you’re going to lose, she seemed to be saying. Take in this astonishing beauty. See how I spread the daylight over the treetops like a gold peach butter before the blue-gray of dusk rises from the ground up? Oh, how you will miss this time soon.

  Gracia hadn’t experienced the woods that Louisa and I used to play in, and now she never would. I asked Gary to bring me one of those backpacks you can put a baby in. He looked at me as if I’d sprouted another couple of heads or was babbling in tongues, but the next day he showed up with a used one from the Thrift Store that worked just fine.

  Louisa took one look at me, standing in the kitchen with it on as I tried to figure out how to put Gracie in it. “Good Lord, Sister. I’m going to enjoy watching you put Gracie in that backpack now. Go to it, bless your heart.”

  Possibly you can imagine how irritating it was to have to admit to her that I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d seen people wearing these things, carting infants all over and they looked darn convenient. My intent was to take Gracie for a walk out in the back woods, and any idiot knew the stroller wouldn’t go there.

  Louisa was just having herself a high old time chortling while I tried to twist myself around in such a way that I could get Gracie in the damn thing. Without dropping her. It didn’t take long before Gracie was pitching a fit. Jessie barked a couple times, and Marvelle left the room in disgust.

  “All right,” I conceded. “Louisa. Would you please show me what to do? I mean, if you can stop slapping your thigh with the hilarity of it all.”

  “Ohhh. Listen to you,” she said, amused. Then, I think she read my expression—not equally amused—because she said, “Okay. First. Take it off.”

  “I want to . . .”

  “Take it off,” she said.

  I put Gracie down and took it off.

  Louisa picked up Gracie and in a couple of deft maneuvers put her into the backpack as it sat on its frame. Then she backed up, slid her arms into the shoulder straps and hoisted Gracie up onto her back. My sister looked at me and said, “Okay, let’s get going. Which trail you want? Straight down to Rush Run and stay creek-side, or do you want the big loop? I widened that trail last year.”

  “I was going to . . .”

  “You really think it’s a good idea for you, oh Woman of the Great Outdoors, to be in the woods alone with a baby? What happens if you trip? I rest my case. Besides, I want to be with you and my granddaughter.”

  I could see she meant that last sincerely. I also had to admit she possibly had a point about my survival skills.

  And that’s how it happened that the three of us set out together on the first of what would be daily hikes after Gracie woke from her nap. Gary had started coming before supper, staying for that, and he liked putting her to bed. Louisa and I avoided asking him questions. He’d had to move out of Sister Martha’s, who, he mentioned, we no longer had to refer to as “Sister” (oh, the heartbreak of that, Louisa muttered under her breath) and other than that, he didn’t tell us anything except that we could always reach him on his cell phone. There was space for him to move back into his old room with us, but Louisa wasn’t a fan of that option and waited to see if he’d ask to do that. He never did. She was relieved when he mentioned that he had “a place for now.”

  “We’re just so different,” Louisa said. “Nicole was a saint, you know. Lord, I love that girl. Always did, always will.”

  “What? You’re not a saint? Huh. And here I believed you . . .” I drew the words through Charlie’s Georgia molasses, exactly the way my sister most hates.

  “Well, of course I am, just not the saint variety that has enough patience for Gary. I mean, how much glitter art can your eyes take?”

  She had a point. She definitely had a point.

  But, as Louisa says, I digress. We took to walking. As I said, the autumn sun was enough to warm our faces when we’d skirt the edge of the first cornfield if we headed straight back, or perhaps cut to the right, behind the barn and head out in the open, along the edge of the field Louisa reserved for the deer, with its curvy lines that waved into the high grass that provided cover as they emerged from the forest to forage where she’d planted the root crops to help them through the winter. The light was dappled when we got to the trails in the woods, and the leaves that had fallen were pungent, brown, yellow, and here and there, scarlet. I’d forgotten the lovely peace of the woods, and how our wide creek, Rush Run, sings as it rises over and around the rocks of its bed on its way to join the next bigger river, which will join the Mississippi on its way to the ocean. Life, part of larger life, part of even larger life, moving forth, moving on. As we were, as Gracia would. I tried to think of it that way, that she would always be part of me, and maybe I
of her. Not that she’d remember me, or Louisa, but that the love I’d put in her would stay.

  Louisa, remember, had Gracie on her back. I realized that it wasn’t simply that she knew what she was doing and I didn’t, or that she was physically stronger than I from all her farm work, which she was. She wanted to be the one carrying Gracie because it felt right to her, to carry her granddaughter. Perhaps it was because she knew she was going to lose yet another grandchild. Not the way she’d lost Cody, but nonetheless, she was going to lose Gracia as part of her life before she’d really had her, and this was her way of having what she could now. It wasn’t much, was it?

  We backed into talking about it, trying to come up with a Plan. “So, is there some way we can help the mother come here legally with Gracie? I mean, what if I pay for a lawyer for her?” I said.

  “Didn’t Gary say she has to wait a couple of years?”

  “Oh. Or Gus said it. Yes. But we can look into it, right?”

  “We’ve got to find out her name, and where she’s going. I mean, where exactly she’ll go in . . . Honduras, he said. Why couldn’t we go see her? I mean, we get passports and . . . couldn’t a travel agent help us?”

  “I don’t know. We can ask.”

  “She must want to be here, or she wouldn’t have . . .”

  “Well, Gary must know more than he’s told.”

  We talked like this as we walked, even when the trail was narrow and we had to go single file. Louisa would be first because she knew exactly where she was all the time. “Watch that vine on your right. Poison ivy,” she’d say, in the middle of a sentence. Or, “Shhhh. Over there. See the white tails? Three. Over there,” as she pointed to a ridge. By then, they’d be taking off and I’d see the last one as it disappeared soundlessly into the thick underbrush, mainly honeysuckle and still green.

  “What’s Gary going to do? I mean, what do you think? That church . . .” I said. “I hope they’ll . . . I mean, he’s poured himself into it. Not my cup of tea, and I know how you feel about it, that Zachariah Barnes and all, but . . .” I gave up. I didn’t want Gary to lose any more than he already had.

  “I know. I know.” She sighed. She’d always figured Barnes for a con man and that Gary had been pulled in by a scam. “All he’s said is that there’s been a meeting and there’ll be another one. I’ve been thinking, though—how did he pay off Barnes?”

  I stopped mid-stride on the path. “I never thought of that.” Gracie looked back at me.

  “Not like nothing else on our minds.”

  I shook my head. “Sister, did you ask him?”

  “Wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I mean, what would I do about it?”

  “I have it. I mean if he . . . maybe he borrowed it?”

  She came close, and Gracie’s face was behind her as Louisa dipped her face and laid her forehead on my shoulder. “Thank you. Let’s wait and see what happens. You know.”

  “It’s okay, honey. Family.”

  The only sound that moment was our breath and that of Rush Run, picking up, up, moving on to the next place.

  Gus

  He’d never been to a church meeting. Well, not since Rhonda had dragged him to Sunday school when he was a kid. She’d intimated that was so he’d avoid the evil of alcohol that had ruined their mother, according to Rhonda. But Gus saw it differently. Liquor was his mother’s escape from his father’s temper, quick and mean; it was his cruelty that had kept her from them. Rhonda, nine years older, had done her best with the little brother who’d come as an unwelcome surprise, something that had apparently been Gus’s and his mother’s fault in his father’s eyes.

  But damn, here he was, in what was likely not Gary’s church anymore, invited—more summoned—by the members to “give input” because of his role in the situation with Gary’s baby, about which Gary had evidently updated them. And because of what Brother Tom had told him: that their building-fund money was missing. They understood, again from Gary, who obviously never heard of avoiding self-incrimination, that he’d used it to pay off Barnes. Well, in Gus’s opinion, that made a steaming pile of cow manure smell attractive by comparison. And he’d had no idea that there could possibly be this many pieces of glitter art in a church, let alone a barn, even if they were supposed to be Jesus. Was Gary trying to make people go blind to test some theory of miraculous cures? Rhonda would slap him upside the head for even thinking that, he reminded himself. But seriously, he argued with her. Have you looked at it? Gus supposed not. Gary would say yes, she definitely had a clear view from heaven, but Gus considered himself a man of science and reason and took into account all the impediments in the way, including trees and the roof of the barn. Nope, he just didn’t buy it, even if he did talk to Rhonda all the time and assume she could hear him clearly.

  He sat waiting, uncomfortable in the folding chair, and uneasy. Was it embezzlement? Likely yes. Could they bring charges? Well, that would involve the prosecutor and maybe the grand jury, but likely yes. Then Gary would confess. Conviction. Mitigating circumstances? A crapshoot.

  How much more could Gary lose? And what about Louisa? Oh God, what about Louisa?

  Do the right thing, Rhonda prodded. Be a good man. If you’re with a woman, you’d better love her, you hear? Tell these people the truth, sure, but you also have resources you can use. It’s Louisa you’ll be helping. Think of it that way. No one has to know.

  That was Rhonda, always one instruction after the other. Like it was just easy-peasy.

  All right, already. He swatted Rhonda away. The members were taking seats, Brother Thomas standing in the front appearing to take charge. They must have decided that someone was going to run this thing, and he’d been chosen. Gus waited to be called on. He answered their questions, added his piece, and ninety minutes later when he left the meeting, Gary’s fate had been decided.

  Chapter 33

  CarolSue

  I couldn’t decide what was the right thing to do. I considered packing Gracie’s and my own things and going on the run with her, but as I’ve told you, I’m the sensible one. I couldn’t access my money without my whereabouts being traced, and even though I’m a relative, I figured it would still be kidnapping, and bam! Up would go an Amber Alert. Even if I could hide, what kind of life would that be for Gracie? Here I was, quick to criticize the life she was headed for in Honduras, the one her poor mother had been desperate to escape, yet thinking I could give her a great one outside the law. It was not a workable Plan.

  It was the kind of glorious day that is like a hand slowly, slowly pulling the light and warmth away from the earth, letting it linger so you will smell it, feel it, grieve for its passing. Oh, how I dreaded the winter. Gracie, of course, knew nothing of what was coming. She was laughing and babbling, as pretty and delightful a baby as ever lived, I was positive. She was thriving, anyone could see that. We’d been feeding her rice cereal and now were adding puréed fruit, cooked carrots. There was nothing she didn’t like. I didn’t see how we could go on without her. I tried not to think of her mother, how she must feel the same thing. Everything now was more poignant each day, beauty and impending loss perfectly balanced.

  Charlie was on my mind. I would never have even left Atlanta if he were alive. Oh, if he could see me now with Gracie, that good-hearted man would say it was worth his death to give me what I’d wanted. The baby was mourning’s bittersweet reward, the bright red berry hidden inside the hard casing that opens in mysterious time. And the season of open yellow hands and red hearts of bittersweet in the woods of our land is glorious, like time suspended in safety, between the heartbeats of beauty and danger. And you might—or I might—be fooled into thinking that this time it might last because time seems to stretch beyond the boundaries of its rightful life. The days with Gracie were like that.

  Louisa, Gracie, and I went for our walk. We hiked down to Rush Run in shafts of gold and light, swishing through the leaves still scarlet on the ground, Louisa watching for her beloved deer, both of us talking to G
racie, not knowing, as I’ve said we never did, if it would be the last time for the three of us. Would this be the afternoon the great hum of the spinning earth would start up again, gunning the earth toward what was to come? Jessie trotted ahead of us, sometimes going on a foray after a squirrel, but generally sticking close.

  When we got home, Gary was sitting in the backyard waiting for us, trying to keep the girls at a distance. “Get away, whatever your name is . . .”

  “Not an ounce of the farm in that boy,” Louisa muttered to me while he still couldn’t hear. “No idea what went wrong.”

  “Shhh. Be nice. He probably just wants to see Gracie.”

  I was wrong.

  Gary stood up, squinting in the brilliant sun. He’d been there a while; his face had already pinked. “Couldn’t get in the house,” he said in his mother’s general direction.

  “Huh,” was all he got back from her. A while ago she’d gotten in the habit of locking the door when she wasn’t there, exactly because she didn’t want Gary going through her bank records once she’d found out he planned to build a church on her land, something she was having no part of. It was going to be a wildlife reserve when she died, a little fact that would be the equivalent of a grenade. She’d already signed the trust, which was like pulling the pin. I both hoped I wouldn’t be home when she threw it and that I would be.

  “Gus called me. He wants to come over. You know, how I told you the church, I mean the members, were having meetings? I guess they had their big one last night and he was there. He has something to tell us. I don’t know why him, but . . .” Gary shrugged. “Mom, do you know anything?”

  “Me? Of course not.” Louisa sounded defensive, but I knew she hadn’t talked with Gus and it sure wasn’t like she hung out with the Daily Prayer Squad callers or the Clean for Jesus Committee that Gary was always talking about.