The Tilted World (5 page)

For a second, Dixie Clay didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Three babies,” the woman said. “I done lost three. All three.”

Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn’t be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living. But there wasn’t the least thing acceptable about it, Dixie Clay thought as she bent to grab the corners of a sack of sugar and, with a flip, hoist it over her shoulder. Not the least, and she made her way by memory up the path to the darkened house.

Chapter 3

I
f folks thought it strange to see a mud-coated man with a mud-coated baby sleeping on his shoulder riding past the crowded storefronts of Greenville, they gave no sign. Probably they’d seen lots stranger these past months, and they’d see stranger yet if the levee blew. At the lumberyard, men were listening to the radio tell of record levels on the Tennessee River, Chattanooga flooded, sixteen dead. Ingersoll asked a man pricing a boat kit where he could find the police station. The man removed the nail he was holding in his mouth to point.

Ingersoll hitched his horse at the station and lifted Junior to his shoulder and mounted the steps with dread. On the hour-long ride into Greenville from the crossroads store, he’d realized how strange and suspicious his story sounded. But it turned out that the story—and the bodies—had beaten him to town. A pretty dark-haired receptionist directed him to the officer who took his report: Ingersoll was just a fella who wanted chewing tobacco and had the good luck to arrive at the store after the shooting was over. The officer was only half listening, kept one ear cocked to the loud fellow behind him offering a dramatic story of the shoot-out. There were no tough questions for Ingersoll, just name and place he could be reached. Levee in Hobnob, he answered. I’m an engineer.

The officer yanked the paper out of the typewriter. “You’re done,” he said, and pushed away from his desk.

“How do I find out where the baby’s parents were from? Do they have any kin?” Ingersoll asked the blue back walking away.

“Consult a crystal ball,” the officer threw over his shoulder. “We’re a little busy here.”

The reenactment was still going on behind Ingersoll so he joined the rear of the circle, beside some reporters waggling their pencils along their pocket notebooks. It seemed the dead Scottish clerk hadn’t been alone at the store after all—he’d been out back, helping a deliveryman unload crates of ginger ale. The driver was saying how the clerk had been backing into the storeroom when he surprised the looters, who must have figured they had the place to themselves. So the clerk shot at the looters and they shot back and the driver went to get help.

The driver didn’t mention the baby at all, and Ingersoll figured he probably took off as soon as he heard the shooting. Switching the baby to his other arm, Ingersoll thought how sad that Junior would grow up in a world lousy with cowards and fakes.

A door opened from the rear of the station and a clerk poked his head through. “Coroner says he’s done with the gyp corpses!”

The deliveryman snapped his fingers. “Hot diggity! Let’s go look! Come on, boys.”

The group scrummed away like a many-tentacled creature. Ingersoll could hear them chattering through the door and down the steps. He bet neither the driver nor those others had served. If they had, they’d have seen enough bodies to last a lifetime. Many lifetimes.

When he looked up, he was standing alone in the middle of the room. The dark-haired receptionist was studying him.

“You look lost, big fella,” she said.

“I suppose I am.”

“What’re you looking for?”

“I guess I’m done here”—he glanced around as if expecting to be contradicted—“so now I gotta find some officer to give this baby to.”

“Judson!” she called out, swiveling on her chair, but Judson was punching his arms into his rain slicker. “Mrs. Allen, I’m heading to the coroner’s,” he said, and slipped out the door.

“Hmmph,” she said, swiveling back around. “Well, I guess it just needs to get to the orphanage. It ain’t far. I could take it when I get off. ’Course that’s not till five.”

Ingersoll raised his eyes to the clock, quarter past three. “I can take it there,” he said.

A man walked by and dumped some heavy folders on the receptionist’s desk, and Ingersoll looked to see if the thump had woken the baby. It had but he didn’t cry, just blinked and turned his head.

The receptionist rose from her chair. “Girl or boy?”

“Boy.”

“Can I hold him?”

Ingersoll shrugged. “Sure.” She began walking around her desk, but then he felt a warmth on his thigh, a strange warmth that began cooling and he looked down and saw a dark wet patch on his slightly less wet dungarees.

When he looked up, the receptionist was grinning. “I believe you’ve been baptized.”

“I gave him a fresh diddie,” he said, a touch of defensiveness in his voice.

“Sure you did, sugar.” She lifted the baby from his arms and held him away from her crisp green dress. “But you didn’t pin it on tight enough to keep anything in it. Now, let’s see what we can do.”

Ingersoll said he’d fetch a diddie from his saddlebag and trotted to get it, and when he came back she was kneeling beside a bench and had the baby naked on a blanket. She took the diddie and cooed to the baby as she lifted his heels in one hand and with the other wound the cloth. Ingersoll tried to memorize the dance of her fingers. When he was a child at St. Mary’s Foundling Home for Boys he’d diapered the occasional baby, but he had since forgotten the ins and outs.

Now Mrs. Allen was nimbly pinning the cloth. “Poor baby,” she said to Junior. “This big silly man didn’t get you
near
secure enough.” She gave Ingersoll a wink and then sat the baby on the blanket. “Now then,” she told Junior, peering into his face, which was dirty. She must have thought so too because she reached into her cleavage and tugged out a little lace hankie and licked a corner and wiped his cheeks.

It occurred to Ingersoll that some of the speckles on the baby were mud, but some were blood, most likely. This poor kid. And about to be dumped at an orphanage.

He’d been deciding something.
If she smiles, she’s the one.

“That feels better, doesn’t it?” she asked the baby. She smiled.

So it was meant to be.

“Ma’am—Mrs. Allen—this baby’s got no family now. This baby needs a mother.”

She turned and then what he was asking dawned on her and she hooted. “A baby? Lord, wouldn’t my Jeffrey love that. We got three already.”

“Three kids?”

“Three babies. Triplets, six months old. Faith, Hope, and Charity. And they got a big sister, who’s three. And Jeffrey’s got two big boys from his first wife, who died when she took the Spanish flu. I’ll never get to the picture show if I keep taking in children, you reckon?”

“Yes, ma’am. I reckon. I reckon so.” He bent to lift Junior onto his shoulder. “Do you—do you know of a family that might feel otherwise? Nice folk?”

“Well . . .” She stepped closer and patted the baby’s fanny. “He is a little lump of sugar. My friend Stacie Andrews got the baby fever all right, can’t hardly stand to walk by a baby without smelling of its head, but she’s gone back to her people in Starkville, ’cause of the flood, you know? So, hm, I’ll have to think on it. Because these are strange times.” She slipped her hankie back into her dress opening and then drew upright. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “You don’t think nothing’s wrong with it, do you? On account of having gyp blood and all? Oh Lord, you might as well carry that child along to the orphanage.”

She looked up at Ingersoll and read something in his face. “Aw, hon, I’m sure someone will come along soon who falls for that little fella. How could they help it, right?” She laid her hand on his elbow, holding the baby. “Right?”

“Right.”

“Especially when they see how good and tight his diddie is?”

She was trying to tease with him. But he couldn’t. “I thank you. Good-bye.”

“Anytime, hon. You come chat with me any old time.”

On the street he got directions from a boy selling toy boats and then he and the baby were aback the roan horse and riding toward the orphanage.

The building was one street over from the levee, visible through the rain-stripped trees. Ingersoll dismounted and, holding Junior in one arm, tied the horse to the wrought-iron fence, which creaked when he opened it. The baby swiveled his head to see where the noise came from, so Ingersoll closed and opened the gate again for the baby’s entertainment. Or maybe, thought Ingersoll, he was stalling.

The three-story brick building, set back from the sidewalk behind a concrete path, must have housed a few hundred kids at least. The orphanage where Ingersoll’d grown up was much smaller, just an extension of the convent where the nuns of St. Mary’s lived. As he walked toward the steps he saw a brass plaque beside the door. “Greenville Home for the Friendless,” he read. He didn’t like “friendless” but supposed it accurate.

He rapped on the door and there was no answer, so he twisted the brass bell and still no answer. He leaned his face to the fan window but couldn’t see through the lace curtains. Where were all the kids? All the shouting? Finally he heard footsteps and a man opened the door with a child-size tuba under one arm.

“You’re here for the icebox?”

On the ride over, Ingersoll had prepared a dignified statement for when he handed the baby to the nuns, but now those words had vanished.

“Isn’t there— Isn’t this—?”

“You’re looking for the orphanage?”

Ingersoll shrugged, the baby on his shoulder lifting with the gesture.

“Oh, right, right, right,” the man said. “Okay then. Wait.” Here he raised himself on his toes to peer over Ingersoll’s shoulder—“Excuse me”—and put two fingers to his lips and whistled, and both Ingersoll and the baby flinched. A Negro in a newsboy cap pushing a hand truck turned up the path.

“Yeah? Okay, we can take the infant,” he continued, not looking at Ingersoll, and then laid a hand on his arm to move him aside and address the Negro as he passed, “Come on in, it’s out back.” He turned his focus on Ingersoll at last. “But we’ve moved. Had to. Water in the boiler room. Levee breaks, we can’t evacuate 437 kids with just six pneumatic nuns and a mongoloid houseboy, hey? So we upped and moved the whole kit and caboodle”—he gestured with the tuba—“to Leland, got an old hospital there where we’re housing everybody. Kinda nice, actually. Got a swimming pool. I’ll be heading back there this afternoon—”

A crash, like a wardrobe turning over, came from behind him. He yelled over his shoulder—“Clint, use your noggin”—and turned back to Ingersoll. “I can take her with me when I go.”

“It’s a he.”

“I can take
him
then. Just leave me whatever paperwork you got, if you got any, and its belongings, and lay it on a pallet in the music room.”

Ingersoll was already backing down the stairs. “I gotta get the papers and, uh, little dresses and things.”

The man nodded. “Sure, sure, sure. You want to leave it now and come back with the papers?”

Ingersoll was on the walk. “No, thanks.”

“All right. I leave at four. Have that baby here and I’ll take it in the Chrysler.”

Ingersoll turned toward the gate and raised his arm. As they hurried down the path, the baby rested his head on Ingersoll’s shoulder, as if knowing he’d dodged a close one.

J
unior liked riding the horse, which the farmer had said was called Horace. “Horse?” Ingersoll had asked, and the man had repeated the name. He’d come with a Hamley Formfitter saddle and Ingersoll held Junior snug between his stomach and the pommel. Junior found his fingers entwined in wet mane and gave a happy yank. They rode through the mud of Main Street. Ingersoll hadn’t articulated any plan yet, or made any admissions, but when he saw a drugstore on the next corner, he tugged the reins. As he swung off the horse, he accidentally dislodged a brimful of rain from his hat into the baby’s face and wondered if he would cry. There was a moment when Ingersoll thought he wouldn’t. It would be fine. But then Junior opened a quivering, square mouth, drew in his breath, and began to wail. Christ Lord, this baby was loud.

“Shh, now,” he told the baby, jiggling him, patting, begging, “shhhh,” wiping Junior’s wet cheeks with his wet sleeve, which accomplished nothing other than making the child madder. His nose was bubbling snot and when Ingersoll tried to pinch it off, it clung to his fingers until he shook his wrist. The baby was crying harder now, kicking his legs. How could something so small make such a racket?

He somehow hitched the horse and carried the screaming baby, hipping open the door. Inside, all the faces swung toward him, a dozen folks in the aisles and a dozen more at the soda fountain. He froze, dripping muddy water beside the front counter with its patent medicines and sweets, unsure he could do what needed to be done here. The baby was screaming louder, somehow, snot smeared across his face, into his eyebrows even. He was so loud Ingersoll could barely think.
Gotta get some food, some
—he searched for the word—
pabulum into this baby fast,
so he read the signs hanging from the ceiling until he saw
INFANT CARE
and made for the aisle and scanned the complicated packages, the baby red-faced and shaking.

He heard a voice from the row behind: “Who is torturing that poor child?”

He thought,
The hell with it,
and was striding to the door over his own mud puddles, knowing leaving wouldn’t solve anything, when he noticed the tree of ball suckers on the counter. He grabbed one and bit off the cellophane and popped it in the baby’s mouth. Junior quieted instantly, his lips stilling around the red candy, eyes wide.

“That’s better,” Ingersoll said in a low voice. He looked at the tears still on the baby’s cheeks and thumbed them away. Junior gave a little shuddering breath that bubbled his lips around the sucker, and then settled down to the serious business of eating the hell out of it. Ingersoll watched, relieved the screaming had stopped, and thinking maybe he could do it now, could buy the complicated packages.

A tall, aproned man appeared at his elbow. “A penny,” he said.

“For my thoughts?”

“For the sucker,” the man said, and Ingersoll heard a tittering from the ladies at the soda fountain.

He shifted the baby to the other hand and unbuttoned his back pocket and pulled out the damp cream envelope and withdrew a twenty and slapped it wetly on the counter. “Get me everything a baby needs,” he said to the clerk, who was gazing at the Andrew Jackson like he’d never seen one before. “No,” Ingersoll continued, spinning the tree of suckers as the baby watched, then plucking a matching red one for himself, and again biting off the cellophane, “get me”—he popped the sucker in his mouth—“
two
of everything a baby needs. And when you’re done, come find us over here.” He gestured with the lollipop to the only vacant stool. “We’ll be relaxing, enjoying our hors d’oeuvres.” Ingersoll strolled over and sat, crossing his ankle on his knee, resting the baby in the triangle his legs made. He held the sucker to the baby’s mouth, occasionally twisting on the stool for Junior’s diversion, until red syrup had fanged down the baby’s chin and his shirt was lacquered to his chest.