Playing by the Rules: A Novel (13 page)

On the drive to the library, Medford wished he could remember something, anything, about his mother, but he couldn’t. He parked his car in the lot and felt awkward walking into the building because it was Saturday, Louise’s day off. The only time he came through was during the week when he was there to meet Louise after work. As he walked past her office, it reminded him of the way he was feeling inside: empty. He had been putting off this investigation long enough. It took Louise to provide the motivation for facing his lifelong question and give him the courage to receive the overdue answer. When he got into the elevator, he pushed the button for the second floor and headed to the periodical section. When he reached the reference help desk, he ordered the
Lemon City Chronicle
for the years 1929–1930 and began looking at the newspaper, reading everything about his sudden appearance on Clement’s stoop that caught his attention: “Baby Found on Doorstep—Infant Unclaimed.” “Missing Baby’s Mother Still Gone.” “Missing Baby’s Mother Presumed Dead.” “Missing Baby’s Mother Thought to Be an Outsider.” “Unknown Baby Believed to Have
Dropped from the Sky.” “Mystery Baby Thought to Have Materialized from Mountain Drizzle and Fall Rain.” “Unclaimed Baby Adopted by Local Man.”

To avoid overlooking anything of importance, Medford read each article two or three times, but was frustrated because the stories lacked detail and seemed to say the same thing over and over again.
December 5, 1929—Clement Attaway, 18, unmarried, found a male baby in a basket on his doorstep. Attaway has gone public with his story and deciding to adopt the baby. The Ladies of Mt. Zion Baptist Church have promised to provide the citizen with any support, supplies, or baby-sitting he would need. If anyone has any information about this child or the whereabouts of its mother, please contact the
Lemon City Chronicle,
the Lemon City Child Welfare Bureau, or the Lemon City Sheriff’s Office
.

There were no more references made to the mystery baby after the year 1929, and Medford concluded everyone had given up looking for answers and the search for the baby’s identity had ended. There were no more clippings in the newspaper. Case closed.

Medford recalled that at the time of his arrival on Clement’s doorstep, Granddaddy Dunlap was the Lemon City Sheriff. After spending all afternoon looking at microfilm and old newspapers and getting nowhere, Medford decided to check out his father’s friend to see what he could learn.

He found Granddaddy sitting in his rocking chair reading
Jet
magazine, snacking on walnuts.

“Well now. How you doing today?” Granddaddy asked with his legs elevated, throwing the walnut shells into a bowl. “Have some,” he said to Medford.

Medford took a handful of nuts and cracked them one by one, pulling out the meat.

“I came to ask you a question,” said Medford. He felt slightly uncomfortable, not knowing the best way to start the conversation.
So, getting impatient, Granddaddy took the initiative and did it for him.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked, resting his reading material on his lap.

“Granddaddy,” Medford started. “One day I’d like to marry Louise, that is, if it’s alright with you.”

“Is that a fact, now? You don’t seem to be so sure ‘bout it.”

“I’m absolutely positive about that.” Medford cracked a walnut with the nutcracker. “I know I need your permission first,” he continued. “But there’s something I have to do before I can start my own family.”

“You don’t say.”

“I need to find my mother.” Medford sighed. “And that’s an area I know nothing about at all… who she is, where she is, if in fact she’s still alive.”

Granddaddy knew Medford wasn’t finished so he waited, wondering what had taken him so long to bring up the subject.

“Can you please tell me all that you remember about my dad finding me on December 5, 1929?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t asked before now,” said Granddaddy. “I remember the police report as if it were yesterday, because I was the one who took down all the information.

“It was two weeks after the 1929 Annual County Fair when it seemed that fall was coming early. The northwesterly wind had started blowing, followed by the rain. Clement was tossing and turning in the middle of the night, couldn’t sleep due to a pounding hangover that even aspirin couldn’t cure, and the rain that sounded like stones rolling down from the mountain, crashing into his roof. When he finally got some shut-eye, what made him wake up again was the wailing sound of a baby crying. At first he thought he was dreaming, but the disturbance wouldn’t go
away. Stumbling out of bed, he got up to see where the noise was coming from, and it got louder as he got closer to the front door. Opening the door, he looked down at the source of the commotion and there was a little tiny baby, brown as a coffee bean inside a basket, inside a wooden box with some bottles of milk and diapers but no note attached and no explanation about how it got there. Clement sobered up quickly at the sight of the baby. And he brought it inside to get it out of the rain that had now dwindled to a drizzle. He thought about calling one of his lady friends, but decided against it since it was three o’clock in the morning and he couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t slap him in the face or cuss him out calling at that time of night. Clement decided to wait until morning, when his head would be clear and he could do his best thinking. He transferred the bottles of milk from the wooden box into the refrigerator and kept one to warm up in a skillet, because it was the first thing he grabbed when he opened the cabinet. When the bottle was ready, he tested the temperature of the milk on his hand. As he held the bottle, the little baby sucked the milk down quickly. The meal helped it quiet down and fall asleep. By the time morning came, Clement decided not to call any of the women he knew. It was a male child and he thought he would raise the infant by himself, because he noticed it was the first time he’d made an effort to stay sober. He went out to the garage and cut some clean rags into squares to use as bibs and extra diapers and found some masking tape to hold the cloth together. Inspired by his car, Clement decided to name the baby Medford, because he had a 1928 medium-sized Ford Model A open-cabin pickup truck and he liked the sound of combining the words
medium
and
Ford
together.”

Granddaddy pointed his finger at Medford for reinforcement. “Medford, it was you who marked the beginning of Clement giving
up hard liquor, because he had sense enough to know that he had to be in his right mind to take care of a baby.

“The next day, Clement called me to file a Missing Mother Report. He was surprised when I told him to keep the incident quiet, that maybe the real mother would show up and there would be no need for public embarrassment. Clement agreed, but after three months passed he was getting cabin fever and he wanted me— because as you know, I was sheriff at the time—to let the story out. Clement being out of sight and absent from town for three months wasn’t so peculiar. No one even missed him not being about. Everyone just assumed he was drunk and on one of his long-term binges.

“On December fifth, exactly three months later to the day Clement found you, he asked me to put a mention in the
Lemon City Chronicle
and the
Jefferson County Times
. So the announcement in the newspaper became your birth date, and not that rainy day in September when Clement found you. Don’t ask me why he told you you were born in the month of Christmas; maybe it was just more appealing to him that you were a gift and weren’t born around the Annual County Fair or maybe he was just so drunk he couldn’t remember. Anyway, me and the Ladies of Mt. Zion Baptist Church put up posters on telephone poles and bulletin boards, circulated flyers at Sunday-morning service, even blasted the news over the radio airwaves and on local TV. When no one claimed the baby after one year, I told Clement he should keep it. I saw it for myself: you as a baby had turned Clement into a new man. You made him stop drinking, shave every day, keep his hair combed nice and his clothes clean. His teeth changed from yellow to white and he had become an individual that was now well respected by men as well as women.”

“Everyone except my mother, I gather,” said Medford, feeling sorry for himself as he discovered he was actually born on September
fifth and had been lied to all his life, celebrating his birthday three months late, and was probably a Virgo and not a Sagittarius like he’d originally thought. Now he knew why he had never asked the question before. It hurt. It hurt him to know that his mother didn’t want him and that she gave him up and never turned around to look back. He didn’t care much about who is real father was. He already had one of those, even though he wasn’t blood-related. It didn’t matter. Clement was a good father, and Medford felt he couldn’t have dreamed up a better one.

“Sorry I can’t be more helpful,” said Granddaddy. “Sure you don’t want something to eat besides nuts?” Knowing that food sometimes provided comfort, Granddaddy thought that something substantial in the stomach might prevent Medford from being so upset.

“I’ll take a raincheck, Granddaddy. I’m not hungry anyway. Thanks for all your help.” As he reached the gate, he remembered, “Tell Nana I said hello.”

As Ruby Rose watched late-afternoon cartoons on TV and worked on her math homework during the commercials, she was thinking about how much she didn’t like that woman Louise who ignored her while talking to her brother. She wasn’t only beginning to think the woman Louise was rude, but she was greedy too, wanting to hog up two boyfriends at one time. She could tell by the way Louise looked at Jeremiah that she liked him. She knew it because a boy in her third-grade class was always sniffing around her like she was a honey bun glazed with sugar and grinning in that same way Louise and Jeremiah were grinning at each other. She’d had to tell the boy that if he wanted something sweet he should go down to the corner candy store and buy himself some chocolate or bubble gum and leave her alone. Ruby Rose had counted on Nana to stop her granddaughter from being pushy as a bulldozer
trying to roll over a road. But when Nana did nothing, she started to get mad at Nana too. She was mad at both Nana and Louise for different reasons, but especially at Nana, who Ruby Rose felt could have done a better job sticking up for her in the kitchen, making sure she got the treatment and respect she deserved. She had bad luck with grown women, especially mamas who were supposed to protect little children. It seemed like she was always getting pushed around by them like a kick can that someone crushed and booted around the street. One of these days she vowed to get back at a grown-up, just like she’d always wanted to snatch the wig off Miss Molly Esther Reynolds’ head and punch her in the face.

Ruby Rose folded her arms across her chest and huffed and swore she saw smoke coming out of her nose the more she thought about Louise. She stared at the TV as if it were the only thing worth paying attention to in the room.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

“I’ll get it.” Ruby Rose jumped up from her seat, as if she had forgotten her attitude. When she opened the door, there stood one of the ladies she had seen at Nana Dunlap’s house on Christmas.

“Is your brother here, young lady?” she asked.

The old lady looked tired, like she wasn’t feeling very well, like the color had left her face and it wasn’t pale just from the cold.

“Jeremiah!” Ruby Rose called. “Jeremiah!” she repeated loudly. “Someone is here to see you.”

Jeremiah came to the door.

“Hello, Jeremiah.” The lady stretched out a cold and bony hand. “We met at the Dunlaps, where I caught a whiff of your snakeroot.”

“Are you familiar with snakeroot?” asked Jeremiah. His forehead wrinkled with curiosity about the old woman. Only healers
were aware of the powers of snakeroot, and not all of them, at that.

“Let’s just say in some ways we’re kindred spirits and I respect your level of healing.” She let go of his hand. “Let me reintroduce myself. My name is Lurleen Johnson.”

Jeremiah asked Ole Miss Johnson to come inside and sit down. When they were seated at the kitchen table, he asked her how he could help. Ruby Rose pulled up a chair at the table as well, curious about what the lady had to say.

“About three months ago, shortly before Thanksgiving, there was a bad storm, like a tornado and a hurricane, all mixed into one. I passed out in my backyard and the next thing I knew I woke up and found myself underneath a branch of a white oak tree, then inside a speeding ambulance on my way to a hospital. I broke my shoulder bone right here.” Ole Miss Johnson put her hand on her left shoulder to illustrate that part of the body. “And cracked a couple of ribs.” She put her hands on either side of her ribs as if Jeremiah needed to be reminded where those bones were. “I was feeling better a couple weeks ago, but now I’m feeling worse.” She frowned as if to allow a sharp pain to pass through her body. “I don’t feel right at’all. My body aches with arthritis, my joints don’t move, and my muscles are sore most of the time. I need to be able to use my hands. I got the Annual County Fair coming up and I have to be able to work in my garden. I can’t tell you how important it is for me to put my hands in the earth and plant my tomatoes. I got the best tomatoes in the whole dern town, maybe even in all of Jefferson County. Everybody’ll tell you that, if they’re telling the truth, and everybody’ll let you know I’ll do whatever it takes to keep it that way. I ain’t got no childrens, no husband, no animals. All I got is my tomatoes.” Ole Miss Johnson thought she might cry when she started to let the loneliness that had engulfed her for most of her life get to her, but she
wouldn’t give in to that unpredictable creature that stalked her more often than death. “‘Sides, I got to beat Ernestine again this year to hold onto my crown. My tomatoes have always been bigger and better than hers and I got to do whatever I can to keep it that way.”

Ruby Rose listened intently and watched Jeremiah. She wondered what he was going to do and how he was planning to help the lady.