Shadow Baby (4 page)

It’s possible. It’s entirely possible.

“Do you believe that chickens are inherently vicious?”

That’s a question that I want to ask someone. Who can you talk to about insane chickens? Not Tamar.

Those chickens, they started out so cute. I got them last June, when it was warm, a few months after I met the old man. They came in a wooden box, Rhode Island Reds, two roosters
and twenty-three hens. Peeping yellow fuzzy balls. They crowded against each other and sipped up chick feed with their sweet baby beaks. Tamar penned off a corner of the broken-down barn for them. I put in my old dollhouse to amuse them.

“Now don’t go making pets out of those things,” Tamar warned me. “You know you’re going to end up killing and eating some of them.”

“Don’t worry, Ma,” said I. “I’m not even going to name them.”

I read somewhere that if you didn’t name your animals you wouldn’t care about them. That was not a worry anyway. Those chickens grew up mean. The cocks jumped on my back every morning and every night. They dug into my skin through my shirt and pecked my head. Horny yellow beaks pierced my scalp and made my hair streaky with little lines of blood. Tamar did not go out to the broken-down barn. She spent a morning out there fixing up the pen, then she said: “This is your project, Clara. You’re eleven now. These chickens are your first grown-up project, you think of them that way.”

Is an eleven-year-old a grown-up? What would my father have thought of the grown-up project idea?

I do have a father. Everyone has a father. It’s a law of nature. But I couldn’t tell that to Tamar.
He doesn’t exist
, she said.
You don’t have a father
.

Chickens were not my idea. An animal of any kind would not have been my idea of a grown-up project. It’s true that I wanted a grown-up project. It’s true that I had complained to Tamar about not being given credit for no longer being a child. But chickens were not the answer I had envisioned.

“Tell me about my grandfather, and when you’re done, tell me about my father,” I said to Tamar a few months before the chickens arrived.

Hope springs eternal. It was my hope that if I occasionally, without warning, sprang the words—
grandfather, father
—on Tamar, she would be so startled that answers would spring unbidden to her lips.

“Nope and nope.”

That was her response. That was a Tamarian answer.

“I’m an adult now,” I said.

“You’re eleven.”

“In many cultures that would be considered nigh to adulthood.”

“Nigh but no cigar,” Tamar said.

She smiled. She liked the sound of that. I left her in the kitchen with a can of tomato soup and her can opener. I left her neither laughing nor chuckling. It could be said that when I left the kitchen after being told that I was nigh but no cigar, Tamar was
chortling
.

Three months later the chickens appeared.

In the beginning I tried to walk into the barn tall and stern, like I was in command. I carried the feed bucket in my left hand and the water bucket in my right, swinging them from side to side so that the water sloshed. Still, they attacked.

“Get off of me!” I yelled. “Get off of me, you devilchickens!”

Then I tried to look like a man. I made my voice deep. I intoned.

“Get the H away from me.”

Sometimes I even said the word. Get the HELL away. But
it didn’t make any difference. The cocks just looked at me with their beady eyes and didn’t move.

I named the meanest one CJ Wilson.

Why didn’t I tell the old man about the real CJ Wilson either? I could have told him. He would have listened. You might think that I knew all the old man’s secrets and he knew all mine. You would be wrong. Even now I wonder what secrets I never found out about the old man.

The first day of school last September, CJ Wilson corrected the teacher when she said his name at roll call: Charles Junior Wilson.

“It’s CJ,” he said. “Don’t call me Charles Junior.”

Winter comes right after Wilson.

“Clara Winter,” said the teacher.

“It’s Clara
winter
,” I said.

“That’s what I
said
.”

She gave me a look. She was impatient. I could tell. After school CJ grabbed my leg as I walked past him on the school bus.

“Nice skirt,” he said. “Nice skirt, Clara
Wipe.”

Then he flipped my skirt up so that my underwear showed. He hated me because Tamar is the Justice of the Peace of the Town of North Sterns and CJ’s father had to come to her court at our house. Drunk driving.

“Good-bye and good riddance,” Tamar said when CJ’s father was gone. She was sitting at the kitchen table, which is her courtroom. Being JP is a part-time job. It takes about five hours a month to be JP of the Town of North Sterns. Tamar holds court wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She doesn’t have a gavel. She says they’re not essential.

“How are those chickens of yours?” she said.

“Fine.”

“You getting any more eggs?”

“No.”

There had only been a few that I could see, a few laid right by the gate so I could reach in quick and grab them.

“Well, look around good for them. That feed isn’t free, you know.”

“I know.”

I couldn’t even get near the pen. I stood four or five feet away, with the CJ Wilson chicken hissing from the dollhouse. I tossed the feed in a sudden jerk, aiming for the trough. The hens fought and gobbled for the bits of corn. While they were scrabbling I scooped up any eggs that I could see. Only one or two each time were close enough for me to grab through the bars. Where any others might be, I didn’t know.

Laura Ingalls Wilder would not have feared my chickens.

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a snow lover. Laura was a true pioneer girl. Laura is the reason I call Tamar Ma to her face, because Ma is what pioneer girls called their mothers. I used to love Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a child. When I started reading about Indians, I had to revise my initial impression of Laura. It was hard to do that. I loved Laura so much. At first I tried to defend her: it was way back then, they didn’t know. Then I had to admit it: the pioneers were awful to the Indians.

“The pioneers were awful to the Indians,” I said to the old man after we had become
compadres
.

“Yes,” the old man said.

We were sitting at his kitchen table that had cigarette burn marks in it from the previous owner. The old man had found
the kitchen table set out for the trash on scavenging night. I made some more toast. I spread it extremely thickly with margarine. I was embarrassed to have the old man see how much margarine I put on toast. I only did it when I was visiting him. He didn’t seem to notice.

Tamar would never allow me to put so much margarine on toast. She has an eagle eye for that sort of thing.

“The problem is that I still love her,” I said. “I love Laura.”

“And what’s the problem?”

“She was mean. She was awful to the Indians.”

“An entire nation was awful to the Indians,” he said. “They invaded their land, they pushed them onto reservations, they tried to kill them off.”

“Yes. That’s right. That’s my point exactly.”

“But still, you love her.”

“Yes. That’s my other point,” I said. “My other exact point.”

“It’s the same point,” he said.

I wrote that down. It had the ring of wisdom, although I didn’t understand it. That used to happen to me when I was with the old man, not understanding something but knowing it was important. Being on the verge. That’s how it felt. I used to write down the things he said. I kept track.

Are young chickens capable of hatred? Is it possible for an eleven-year-old girl to be killed by a flock of young chickens?

I would like to know.

I feel in my gut that the old man would have known what to do about my chickens. I should have told the old man about the chickens. There were things the old man knew that you would not have suspected he knew and chickens may well have been one of those things. After he was gone I researched
chickens in the school library. Researching is one of my talents. There was nothing about a tendency toward violence in poultry. Feed, growth patterns, eggs, fryers versus roasters, and so on.

Violence? Nothing.

When CJ Wilson flipped my skirt up the first day of school he turned to the other boys and laughed. Some were embarrassed, some looked surprised. Some laughed along with CJ.

That’s what happens when you’re eleven. You say good-bye to the kids in your class in June, when school lets out. Maybe you’ll see them a couple of times over the summer, maybe not. But in September, the day after Labor Day, you know you’ll see them again. School will resume. Life will go on. You’ll slide your tray through the cafeteria line: tiny fluted paper cups of applesauce, sloppy joe on hamburger buns. You know that nothing will have changed.

You’re wrong.

You get on the bus the day after Labor Day and you’re wearing new school clothes. New underwear, polka dot. CJ Wilson flips your skirt up and everything’s changed. You never saw it coming.

T
he story of my birth is an astounding one. I was born during a February blizzard in a truck tipped sideways into a ditch on Glass Factory Road. My grandfather was trying to get Tamar to Utica Memorial in time for the delivery, but there was no such luck. Astonishingly, a midwife came walking by the stuck truck just at the critical moment.

The midwife was trying to get to Clearview Heights, the road on the hills above Utica where she lived with her husband and young child. She had to take Glass Factory, because it’s the only road that intersects with Clearview Heights. The midwife, whose name was Angelica Rose Beaudoin, was driving her car and it broke down in the middle of that blizzard. Bravely, Angelica Rose laced her boots up and tied them into double knots. She rummaged in the back seat for the emergency road kit that her husband had put together for her in a recycled coffee can. In it, the young midwife found some chocolate bars, some change for a pay phone, extra mittens, a space blanket, and a pair of earmuffs. She put on the ear-muffs. She wrapped the space blanket around her body,
underneath her parka, for extra insulation. She put the extra pair of mittens on over the mittens she was already wearing.

I love thinking about Angelica Rose Beaudoin, the young midwife. Angelica Rose had not been a midwife for long. She had trained for emergency births but had not actually had to deliver a baby outside of the hospital or a home. Never in a blizzard.

Angelica Rose set off, keeping track of where she was by the telephone poles she could barely see through the driving snow. Up the steep hills and down she went, trudging her way toward Clearview Heights and home. Darkness was all about her, and the snow felt like stinging bees on her face. Her feet made no sound in the powdery snow. Unbeknownst to the snow, or to the frozen ground beneath it, the young midwife was thinking about a baby, her own baby, who had been born without ears. Within his tiny skull, Angelica Rose’s child had the means of hearing, but with no passage to the outside world her son lived in an unknown world. Sound came to him as if from underwater. His mother’s voice floated past his round baby-fuzzed head as if in a bubble. What her baby heard was not what was heard by her. What her baby heard was his own, his own to make sense of, his own to understand. Already, his mother could see a difference in the way her child inclined his head to speech.

Angelica Rose trudged through the snow and thought about things that were missing, things that were broken and could not be fixed.

Then, from the heart of the blizzard, the midwife heard a muffled cry.

Angelica Rose cocked her head and listened again, to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. The cry came again.

Help!

It was my grandfather, calling for help through a hairline crack in the driver’s side window. He didn’t want to leave my mother and search for help, but hoping against hope that someone would pass by, he kept calling out the window into the storm.
Heeeeeeeeelp
, he called, once every couple of minutes, while Tamar twisted in the seat next to him.

“Helloooooo!”

That was the sound of the midwife’s voice, responding to the person in need. My grandfather heard her voice. Disbelieving, he cranked open the window, struggled out into the snow and found the midwife, her head turning this way and that, listening for that lone cry of help.

“Come on! My daughter’s having a baby!”

That was what my grandfather said. Angelica Rose Beaudoin said not another word. She had been trained for this moment. She nodded, started beating her mittened hands together to warm them, and followed my grandfather to the truck in the ditch. As she stumbled after him she summoned all her medical training and ordered her mind as to what needed to be done. They found Tamar in agony on the front seat.

The midwife pushed her way in and cradled Tamar’s head. She spoke soothingly and quietly to Tamar, to calm Tamar’s fears and prepare her for what was to happen.

The old man listened carefully to the story. Already he knew of my fear and loathing of snow and cold. Blizzards especially. I could tell the old man was listening carefully because the more carefully he listened, the more he tilted his head. His head was semihorizontal. That used to happen sometimes, when I was telling a story and the old man was listening.

“And then my twin sister was born, and I was next,” I said. “And that’s the story in a nutshell. That’s all she wrote.”

“You have a twin sister?” the old man said.

“Indeed I do.”

“Does she live with you?”

“She lives with me in a way,” I said. “In a certain manner of speaking, she lives with me.”

“In a certain manner of speaking?”

“In a sense,” I said. “In a sense my twin sister lives with me.”

He looked at me.

“Do you want me to heat some more water for coffee?” I asked.

“All right,” the old man said.

I got up and filled the old man’s teakettle with water and put it on to boil. I looked out the window over the old man’s kitchen sink toward the Twin Churches. An hour had already gone by. Tamar and the choir would be winding down in another forty-five minutes.