Miss Spitfire (17 page)

F-i-n-g-e-r-s,
I reply.
Girls have fingers. Cows have hooves
.

She sits for another minute, working her fingers like a multitude of hinges. Suddenly she scoots through the straw to Ella's hind legs. After a brief inspection she pulls me to her side. With a jab she indicates the tip of her boot, waves her fingers as if they're dancing over piano keys, then jabs at her boot again.

It's my turn to be puzzled. “Boot fingers?” I ask with a shrug. In reply Helen splays her hand over the
toe of her boot and bobbles her fingers again. A grin tickles my cheeks. “Toes,” I laugh, bouncing the letters into her palm. Taking her by the hand, I guide Helen away before I have to explain udders.

We do a great many things all morning long—string beads, knit and crochet, do gymnastics. When noon comes, we go upstairs for an hour to learn new words. It's a dull practice, digging up what she's learned to see if it's taken root. Both Helen and I would rather be outside, with real things and experiences. Besides, it's much easier to teach her things at odd moments than at set times. But no matter how tedious these classroom drills are, they worked for Laura Bridgman, and I don't dare abandon them.

Before surrendering her to dinnertime, I remind Helen of the words we learned in the barn this morning. Quick as ever, she repeats the words as I identify her head, eyes, fingers, and toes. Curious about her powers of association, I strip off my shoe and present her with my stocking foot and a questioning hand. Without hesitation she confirms my faith in her mind.

T-o-e-s.

I don't know why pride blossoms in my chest. It's not as if her intelligence has anything to do with me. Still, I squeeze her clever fingers in mine, wishing she could sense how pleased I am. “You've a mind as bright and broad as the sky.”

Silence. Her blank eyes gape at nothing.

I sigh and drop her hand. “If only you could touch it.”

In the afternoon Mrs. Keller treats us to a drive into town to see Helen's cousin Leila and her family. The carriage churns tufts of dust from the roads, pecking my eyes with sandy grains. By the time we reach Leila's doorstep, I'm blinking through a layer of dusty sludge, and I'm sure my eyelids have puffed up like mushroom caps.

With a daintily gloved hand Mrs. Keller raps at the door. Once again her impeccable dress and manners leave me awed. Someday I wish someone would regard me the way I admire her. Anchored to Helen, I must look like a rheumy-eyed stray tagging along at her heels.

The door swings open, and Leila greets Mrs. Keller with a wide smile and a ringing voice. “Cousin Kate, come in!” She squats before Helen, presenting her hand for inspection. “And look at you, Helen, in such a pretty hat. I bet you're hungry, aren't you, dear?” she says as Helen sniffs at her like a bloodhound. Opening her arms to me, too, Leila says, “You must be Miss Annie. How nice to meet you at last. Cousin Arthur's told me all about you.”

I nod, trying not to blanch at the thought of what the captain might have said. She pays my ghastly eyes
no mind and pulls me across the threshold. Clinging to Leila's skirts, Helen's baby cousin toddles behind on unsteady legs as her mother whisks us into the parlor. The child grins up at me, and I'm suddenly glad I've come.

Despite the bother of my stinging eyes, I realize an odd sense of relief at seeing new walls and faces. Resourceful as she is hospitable, Leila gives Helen a bowl full of half-shelled pecans to occupy both her hands and her appetite. With Helen so effectively entertained, I feel suddenly free. Muscles I hadn't consciously tightened relax as Mrs. Keller and Miss Leila chat.

In between their conversation the women sprinkle dollops of affection and praise over Leila's little girl. She is perhaps fifteen months old and already understands a great deal. Eager to show her off, Leila tells the baby, “Go to Auntie Kate. Now give her a kiss.” Awkward yet responsive as a marionette, the child obeys. It's perfectly evident that she recognizes a great many words—like “nose,” “mouth,” “eye,” “chin,” “cheek,” and “ear,” which she points out prettily when we ask.

“Give the biscuit to Miss Annie,” Mrs. Keller says, patting the child's round baby behind. Waving a soggy biscuit, she wobbles toward me like a plump, bright-eyed little pigeon. I hold my arms out wide, and she stumbles into them.

“Does she talk yet?” I ask, taking her onto my lap.

Leila nods, her curls bobbing with pride. “‘Mama,' ‘Papa,' ‘Nana.' And she calls herself Baby.”

“Bee-bee!” the child echoes, smashing the biscuit between her fat hands.

“But she can't say ‘eye' or ‘ear,' or ‘biscuit'?”

“No, not yet,” Leila answers. “She babbles for hours on end, so it won't be long. Will it, Baby?”

“Bee-bee!”

Laughing, I hug her to me. “Kiss?” I ask. She lunges at me like a lecher, mashing her lips against my cheek. Warmth ripples down to my toes.

Woozy with pleasure, I slide her from my lap and send her toddling to her mother before my gratitude bends her delicate bones.

Night finds me in the rocker once again, humming to the Perkins doll as I mull over the day. I've given up weaning myself from the doll. By day she's Helen's plaything, victim to her indifference. At night she's my darling. I can't resist her when I settle into the rocking chair. Part of me curls with embarrassment at such childishness, but I pay no mind. It's a harmless pleasure, and I have so few. Since Mildred, and now Leila's little girl, have dipped into the wells of my affection, I can't bear sealing myself off again.

These days rolling one after the other with nothing happening are unbearable. I can feel myself shifting inside my skin, aching to move. Forward, backward, anything but this festering restlessness. It's been nearly a month since I arrived in Alabama, and what have I managed to accomplish?

And yet watching Leila's daughter today gave me some small hope. It's clear that language has found its way into her head, but her mouth isn't quite capable of giving it a way out. For a child like that it's only a matter of time until her muscles catch up with her brain. With Helen it's just the opposite. Her hand hasn't connected with her mind. She's like a baby babbling, intrigued by the shapes she can make, the way infants are fascinated by the first meaningless chirrups of their own voices. But she never makes the words unless I prompt her. I can only drop them into her hand like pebbles into a puddle, praying one day their meaning will spill across the rim of her mind.

This constant, thankless labor drains me. Receiving nothing in return weakens me like dry rot, yet keeping my warmth locked inside leaves me every bit as hollow. I don't know how much longer I can give of myself with no way to replenish what I've lost.

My head droops, weary with discouragement. I look down at the doll in my arms. Her flawless china face beams back at me. What would it be like to love a normal child, a child as perfect as this? In all my life I've never had a love that lasted. My mother, gone before I lost my milk teeth. My baby brothers and sisters, all stricken with one malady or another. Dear, dear Jimmie. And now Helen.

She's the same age Jimmie was when he died, Helen is. And just his size. Looking at her, I can't help
remembering how tightly Jimmie and I held on to each other at Tewksbury. It was such a comfort, having someone familiar to cling to. “Oh, Jimmie,” I whisper, trying to recall the soothing words I read so long ago at Perkins: “I would not wish any companion in the world but you; nor can I imagine a shape, besides your own, to love.” I wonder if I'll ever know such closeness again.

Closing my eyes, I try to imagine away the doll's brittle hands and face, her slight cotton body. I dream of her as a child, my child-perfect in body and mind as Helen is not, and I never was. A child I could nourish, love, and teach with nothing but my own heart and hands.

A child who loves me back.

Next morning I turn up my nose at the table by the window and steer Helen into the garden for her lesson. She seems puzzled by the breach in routine. While I fasten her hat strings under her chin, I recite, by way of explanation:

As we work, the breezes wash us with the scent of honeysuckle and similax. Everything is growing and blooming and glowing. I suppose I hope Helen's mind will blossom outdoors too.

To encourage her interest, I scatter our familiar objects throughout a small section of the flower beds and hedges in front of the little house, letting her search for them. Like a foraging bear, Helen snuffles and roots through the brush, identifying her discoveries for me in exchange for a nibble of cake. Then I add a new set of objects: knife, fork, spoon, and saucer. When she dashes from place to place, I follow her, spelling
r-u-n
into her palm. Before the day is out, she's learned to spell eight new words.

The next day I turn the game about. Once she's located everything, I scatter the things back through the garden. I spell a word to Helen, then send her off in search of it, a mixture of hide-and-seek and fetch.

It doesn't work nearly as well; with nothing tangible in reach, Helen doesn't know what to do with the words. In the end I trail her from place to place, dropping the words into her hands just before she reaches an object.

From her flower beds Mrs. Keller watches us flit from one corner of the lawn to the other, a wistful smile on her face. I've noticed that expression before—when she watches me fastening Helen's napkin round her neck, straightening her pinafore, smoothing her hair. It's as if she's admiring something that flickers
just out of reach. Seeing Mrs. Keller's half-bitten smile makes my chest squeeze. Her mouth looks so much more vulnerable than the rest of her, as if her every sorrow has settled there. Nothing as perceptible as a line stands out round her lips, only a sense of the effort it must take for her to sustain her cheer.

When Helen returns to my side, I spell
m-o-t-h-e-r,
and give her a gentle shove toward Mrs. Keller. With nothing more to guide her, Helen stumbles along at first, crashing through the ivy until her nose recognizes a familiar scent. Blind as a newborn kitten, she finds her way to Mrs. Keller by instinct, it seems. What could it be that pulls Helen toward her mother-the scent of roses, a lingering odor of the kitchen, a whiff of talcum powder?
Perhaps something deeper,
more elemental, I think. Could it be the same something that threaded Jimmie and me so tightly to one another? I watch Helen and Mrs. Keller embrace, my arms flattened to my sides. Will anyone ever feel that way for me again? My throat tightens as if it's filling with sand.

But the gesture buys me some goodwill from Mrs. Keller. After that she invites us to join her when she tends the flower beds. Helen takes to the new arrangement rapidly. She loves to dig and play in the dirt like any other child. With a small trowel and bucket she tunnels through the yard with the vigor of a mole. Working alongside Mrs. Keller suits me as well—I enjoy her company, and she's the most skillful gardener I—ve ever known. Already her sturdy rosebushes and vines
are thick with nubby buds. When I was a child, we had only one smear of color in our drab blur of a house-a geranium that bloomed in the window. The nearest thing to gardening my mother ever did was strip the leaves from the poor thing. I pleaded with her not to do it, for I loved the feel of its furred leaves and the sharp smell they left on my hands, but she told me it was for my eyes. “Wash them,” a neighbor had said, “in geranium water.”

On my knees in the dirt with Mrs. Keller, the unspoken strain of my overtaking her place at Helen's side disappears for hours at a time. I watch our hands, working the soil in silent rhythm. My fingers look more stout and capable than I remember. A month of spelling for Helen has made them strong as dandelion roots. For the first time I prefer my rougher look to Mrs. Keller's grace.

As we gather our tools up before supper one evening, Helen tugs at my sleeve. With her trowel she points to the ground. Nestled between two azalea bushes the small hand of her rag doll reaches out from under a pile of turned earth.

“What in the world?” Mrs. Keller wonders.

Disgusted, I bend to retrieve the doll from her untimely grave, but Helen squats beside me, swatting my hands away. Protective, she lays her palm over the buried doll, then raises it, inch by inch, until she wobbles on tiptoe, reaching as high as my head.

“You cunning little thing,” I laugh. “How did you ever put that together?”

Leaning on the handle of her spade, Mrs. Keller cocks her head. “What is it?”

“She's planted her doll. I think she expects it to grow as tall as I am.” Together we laugh like schoolgirls as the sun ladles its warmth over our shoulders. Mrs. Keller pulls Helen to her side, smudging Helen's cheek with her dirt-stained touch. Trowel in hand, I follow them to the pump to wash up for supper.

“Wah-wah,” Helen calls as the water gushes over her.

“Wah-wah, indeed,” I sigh. “If only her mind could hear that word.”

As they rinse their tools, I hang back, watching the sunlight glide over Helen's chestnut hair. It would feel hot and smooth as melted butter under my hands. Suddenly I understand the feeling that puts the wistful look on Mrs. Keller's face.

Later I try to bolster myself with Helen's lesson. Her success with “saucer,” “knife,” “fork,” and “spoon” makes me wonder again why I can't get her to distinguish between “mug” and “milk.” “Probably because I wasn't foolish enough to teach her ‘food' and ‘eat' at the same time,” I chastise myself, laying out the
cutlery. This time I add a cup to the arrangement. I also cut a handsome slice of cake and set it aside.