A sad and lonely sound stirred Lilly’s emotions
—a cow bawling from the lot next to Armina’s, where Mr. Tippen kept his herd. The bawl sent goose bumps parading up Lilly’s arms. It was a sound straight from her farm-girl childhood
—one she hated. It meant the cow was separated from her calf for weaning purposes. Just as, for reasons Lilly couldn’t begin to fathom, Glory’s missing mother had been separated from her baby. Perhaps she was very young
—perhaps she’d hidden the pregnancy from her family out of shame and guilt, and fear of the farm pond, and then, once the baby was born, she put her in a safe place where someone like Armina was sure to find her.
Lilly sipped her tea, now grown cold. The moon was waning. The distant hills played peekaboo through a thick gray mist that swirled around her feet, wetting the hem of her robe. Kip hopped up on the porch and Lilly pulled him close, glad for the solid comfort his little body provided, and wondered what this day would bring. She’d find Chanis and they’d walk up to Anne’s. All together, they’d decide what to do about Glory.
Shade Harmon
staggered under the weight of the paper in his pocket. He’d been lost in misery since early Sunday morning, when he’d broken into the doctor’s office. It had taken the light from only three matches to hit upon the reason the doctor had been working so late on a Saturday night. Match number four had burned to ash as he stared at the picture on the marked page of her medical book. Stared but didn’t comprehend.
He’d taken the folded paper from his pocket twice since, but he hadn’t been able to study it. Single words leaped like rabid dogs from the page, tearing his flesh worse than broken glass ever could:
Idiot. Degenerate. Asylum.
He knocked the back of his head hard against the rough trunk of the tree he was sitting under. Then he hit it again and saw stars. Fingers, stiff with pain and cracked with dried blood, scrabbled in his shirt pocket
—searching for what, he didn’t want to know but had to learn all the same. Smoothing the page against his bent knee, he forced himself to look. Once again the picture of a sweet-faced infant looked back at him. The baby could have been his own Betsy Lane.
Letters swam in and out of focus until his brain corralled them
—forced them into words, lined them up in sentences. He knew what
mongoloid
meant
—that wasn’t bad, was it? Weren’t they fierce warriors? Able to survive the harshest of winters and the bleakest of times?
But it wasn’t for the Mongolians’ fierceness that their name was commandeered, he learned; rather it was for the oddity of eyes that slanted upward and outward. For that little bit of difference, his daughter was set apart.
He turned the paper over and continued. So that small, round head that fit perfectly in the palm of his hand, the tiny flat nose, the odd little low-set ears meant she was in some ways lesser than? Who would have known? Who would have guessed that such a thing could happen
—and happen so much that somebody captured it in the pages of a book?
The words continued, harsh as lye soap.
Public perception,
the article relayed in stark black-and-white,
holds that children born with retardation . . .
Whoa, Nellie. Hold on a minute.
Shade closed his eyes tight. He felt sick
—like he was on the verge of some kind of
lingering illness. He huffed out a ragged breath.
Retarded.
It meant stupid, slow, ignorant. Who had the right to pigeonhole Betsy Lane that way? Didn’t she smile a crooked smile sometimes and make nice bubbling noises when he chucked her gently under the chin? And when he held her in the crook of his arm, didn’t she stare at him with gray-blue eyes that seemed to know his every secret?
He looked out upon a world no longer familiar; even the trees in his backyard seemed unsolid, untrustworthy. Finding his place, he continued to read:
Public perception holds that children born with retardation are a result of the parents’ overall degenerate ways.
Wait. He’d surely missed something. Was this fellow, whoever wrote the book, pretentious knower and relater of all things, saying that what Betsy had was something dirty? Something nasty passed down to offspring from parents? Why did this guy, learned though he might be, get to decide that whatever Betsy had was bad?
Shade tried to muster up a few tears, but he was too dry to spit. His heart would just have to hurt without benefit of release. How long had he been leaning against this tree? And what had possessed him to come back to this haunted place?
The muscles of his legs seized in protest as he stood. He staggered around stiff-legged until the charley horses released their fearsome hold. Clutching the paper to his chest, he stood in front of his house, willing himself to go in. Maybe Sweet Noreen would be standing in the kitchen, ready to berate him for going off without saying a word. Maybe Betsy
Lane would be in the high chair he’d made from hickory wood. Maybe she’d be fat and happy, and maybe her eyes would look just like his.
The door stood open as if in welcome. He stepped hesitantly into the kitchen. It looked normal: same chairs at the table, same cookstove in the corner, same red-checked curtains at the window. But on the table, pastry folded over a rolling pin was shrunken and cracked. Blackberries moldered in a Blue Willow bowl. A brown beetle lay upended in a tin pie plate. Leaves, dry as dust, gathered in the corners
—blown in through the open door.
The room smelled faintly of decay and of fires gone cold. Shade opened the door to the cookstove and used the stoker to shake down the ashes. He scooped the discards into the coal bucket with the small fireplace shovel. There was wood cut to length in the wood box beside the stove. That proved he’d been a good provider. Didn’t it?
When the wood caught, he filled a cauldron with water and set it across two burners atop the stove. He put a pot of coffee on another. He’d soak his sore hand, have a bath and a shave, wash his dirty clothes, and start over clean.
Tasks completed, he took his wet garments outside to the clothesline in the side yard. A single dingy cotton diaper lay forlornly on the ground. Shade took it, returned to the pot in the kitchen, and scrubbed it gently with Fels-Naptha. When the wash was hung, he felt well enough to fry some bacon and scramble some eggs. After dishing up the eggs, he picked mold from a piece of bread and fried it in the bacon grease.
Coffee steamed from his cup. He scooped eggs onto his fork. He’d forgotten the pepper. It was right in the cupboard where it should be. Everything felt so normal, like the baby was sleeping in the bedroom and Noreen was
—what? Run off. Sweet Noreen had run off, back to Cincinnati. It was his lucky day.
Scooting the high chair up to the table, he tore tiny bits from his toast and put them on the tray, practicing for when Betsy Lane came home. How old did a baby have to be before she could sit upright in a chair? Could a baby even eat toast? He dipped a crust into his coffee and let it soak before putting it back on the tray. That should work. And egg
—seemed like any age could eat egg. Once she got her teeth, he’d let her try some bacon.
You’d think he’d know these things. He was an only child, but he’d been raised around his cousins. There was always a baby in the family. He still had lots of kin in Missouri, although he hadn’t kept up with them. Sweet Noreen had been one of nine, though he’d never met any of the Ohio Potters. He knew she had a sister named Joy Irene, but Noreen never paid a visit, and he was of no mind to spend time with folks who’d saddle their daughter with a name like Sweet Noreen Potter. No wonder she was nuts. And she was
—nuts. Maybe because of him or maybe because she was always searching for something she could never find.
Before they married, she’d been a hairdresser. Mostly she went to the homes of society matrons, fixing them up for parties, family portraits, and weddings
—that sort of thing.
Putting whitewash on an old fence, she called it. He’d been attracted to her independence and her glamour. She wasn’t a beauty, but she did a lot with what she had.
Noreen was happy when they first came here
—glad to shake the Cincinnati dust from her feet. She dolled up the house
—made the checked curtains herself and helped him lay linoleum in all the rooms. Together they planted a garden and tilled ground for a pear orchard. They’d work side by side until evening, when he’d go out to ply his trade, leaving her alone. It had to be that way. How’d she think he was able to pay cash money for this place? He thought she’d get used to it. A couple more years of the same and, with luck, they’d be set for life. A man did what a man had to do.
The room was so still Shade could hear himself chewing. His throat made a gulping sound when he forced food down with too-hot coffee.
One night he’d come in late
—of course it was late; furtive games called for the cover of darkness. He’d come in late, carrying his shoes in his hand
—Noreen didn’t like to be wakened once she was asleep
—and found her carving big
X
s in the new linoleum with a butcher knife. And once he’d found her in the well house, dangling her feet into the well shaft and it dark as pitch. He never was able to retrieve the water bucket. She’d cut the rope with that same butcher knife just to hear the splash. They went two towns over to buy a new bucket and another length of rope, her sitting beside him in the carriage as if nothing untoward had happened.
Things took a good turn when Noreen was carrying the
baby. He could kind of see why her folks had named her Sweet. She loved all that laying by of stores, stacks of folded diapers, and scores of tiny gowns and little undershirts. She’d take skeins of floss and a small round hoop out to the porch on sunny days and sit embroidering all sorts of baby animals on the gowns and bibs. She grew round and gratified, plump as a watermelon on the vine.
Noreen had gone into labor during one of his nightly forays. Shade hadn’t given it a thought; the birth wasn’t supposed to happen for two more weeks. Maybe that was why the whole thing wasn’t so difficult. He’d made it home just in time to deliver the baby himself, cutting the cord with Noreen’s sewing scissors.
They’d been like two kids at Christmas dickering over the same toy. Neither of them could get enough of the tiny new being. For two days they’d argued over the naming. Noreen didn’t catch on why he insisted on naming their daughter Betsy
—he’d told her his first wife’s name was Diane
—but she thought it was too cutesy. She didn’t mind Lane, his mother’s maiden name, but she wanted the baby called after her own mother too. The mother she didn’t ever visit or write. He stood his ground. Maybe that started the whole dark slide. Why hadn’t he left it alone?
But the thing was, the baby looked like a Betsy
—tiny and adorable and helpless as a kitten. He would have carried her around in his pocket if he could have. He stayed home nights, though Noreen had recovered quickly, on her feet just hours after giving birth. And milk
—she had plenty of milk.
It was probably a week before either of them noticed that Betsy wasn’t doing so well. Mostly she slept. That’s what babies were supposed to do
—but they were supposed to eat, too. And that was the difficult part. Betsy took hours to nurse, and her cry, when she mustered up the energy, was not a joyful, lusty newborn cry, but a thin fret that set Noreen’s nerves on edge.
The next day, after they’d tried everything else, they’d set off for the same town where he’d bought the new well bucket. He’d thought the trip would cheer Noreen up. She liked the big overstocked general store there. Maybe she’d buy some new face cream or a bauble for the baby. But when they arrived, she wouldn’t get out of the buggy. When he’d tried to cajole her, she gathered the baby closer and turned her taciturn face away. He hated when she got that way; it made him want to punch a hole in something. Instead he hurried into the store, sure his purchase would solve everything.
If he could take back only one thing he’d ever done in his entire life, it would be what he’d said to Noreen a few days later, the thing that had started that last terrible fight.
The chair scraped against linoleum as Shade stood to stack his dishes and pour another cup of coffee. Once settled, he laid the stolen page on the table, determined to study it like a scholar would, interested, instead of like a loser spoiling for a fight. He read the article probably a dozen times, underlining each word with his index finger, not allowing himself to skip past what might upset him. If you left out the ugly,
condemning words, it described his daughter to a tee: slow to feed, hard to nourish, floppy limbs, weak cry.
His anger didn’t dissipate with knowledge but simmered like a kettle on the stove. He forced the rest of his food down and drank the coffeepot dry. At the very least, he knew Betsy Lane was somewhere alive, not carried off through the open window by some hungry animal or traveling gypsy.
On the peg beside the door hung the peeled sycamore walking stick and the red gallon bucket he’d found after he discovered the baby missing. His wild search had taken him down to Tattler’s Branch, where he came upon the spilled blackberries and the cane. That stick had been a divining rod; finding it had helped him settle on Skip Rock as the place where Betsy had been taken. It was logical that whoever had been helping themselves to the berries from his property had walked from somewhere nearby; the town was the best bet. It was clear as the water in the creek that that person had taken his daughter. What didn’t make sense was why the law hadn’t been nosing around. Maybe the sheriff was too green to put two and two together. Or maybe whoever had taken Betsy didn’t see what he had done. Maybe they just wanted a baby.
Absently he rubbed circles around the healing sores on his chest. Maybe the law had come with a warrant and a set of leg irons. But he didn’t think so. The house was too much like it had been on the night he’d fled, not even bothering to close the door, figuring he’d never be back, figuring his amazing luck would give him one more chance. He’d been halfway to Tennessee when Betsy Lane’s need had called
him back. He’d take his chances with the law, but his heart couldn’t leave his little girl behind. How would he know she got proper care unless he gave it himself?
He’d rented a room at the boardinghouse in the town with the big general store and journeyed from there to Skip Rock. He figured the best place to start was at the doctor’s office. His wounds gave him the perfect excuse to pay a visit. Intuition, a sixth sense honed by years of speculating, served him well that day in the fancy lady’s office. His gut told him he had hit the nail on the head. The paper he was pleating into perfect folds confirmed it.
Outside the open door, a dry, hot wind kicked up. Swirling bits of leaves and twigs danced across the threshold, caught up the errant page, and flung it away. It stuck against the wall as if held by an unseen hand. He should get up and close the door before the kitchen was full of grit, but he sat there too dejected to move.