Shadow Baby (6 page)

“Bye,” I said.

He didn’t say good-bye. I knew he wouldn’t. He was in his dark lantern world. I shut the door tight behind me so the snow wouldn’t drift inside and make a tiny pile by his door, like sawdust. Tamar drove up on the dot, eating a miniature ice cream sandwich from the front freezer case at Jewell’s. Even in the dead of winter she loves them. They’re only a quarter each.

I
used to wonder why my chickens turned mean. Lack of sunshine, maybe. The corner of the broken-down barn where Tamar built the pen was dark. No windows. It was a big pen but nothing in it was interesting, not even my old doll-house, the rusty one that the younger Miller boys wrecked years ago when they held their Final Battle of the G.I. Joes.

One day the January after I got the chickens, I went in with the feed and water. It was hard to see at first because the snow was so bright outside, the barn so dark inside. The CJ Wilson chicken was sitting in the dollhouse. Right in the living room where the winning G.I. Joe busted through the floor. He stared at me. He didn’t blink his nasty beady eyes.

See, he was saying to me. This is my house. There are my women.

I looked in the corner and saw the other cock lying dead. Pecked to death by the CJ Wilson chicken. I took the barn shovel and scooped up the carcass, carried it out to the pasture and flung it into the weeds. Then I went back into the house, washed my hands, scraped the bottoms of my boots, and got on the bus when Tiny pulled up to the driveway.

That was the first day that I knew I was in for a long haul with my chickens. Next to the chicken problem, the real CJ Wilson momentarily faded in importance. When he got on the bus there must have been a look on my face because he said not a word, just pointed out the window as Tiny pulled away from his trailer.

“You see that car?” said CJ to the North Sterns boys. “You see it?”

An old white Camaro with rust spots was parked in a snowdrift in CJ’s unplowed driveway.

“Yeah,” said one of the boys.

“That’s mine,” said CJ. “My dad, he’s saving that for me. For when I get my license. He’s going to fix it up and give it to me on my sixteenth birthday.”

The boys nodded.

“It’s a Camaro. He’s saving it for me. Hey, Wipe! Your chicken shit mother got a car for you?”

I said nothing. I never said anything to CJ.

“Didn’t think so,” CJ said.

Occasionally I used to think about writing a fake book report about a boy named, for example, CJ Wilson. In the morning, when the chickens squawked and pecked, when I brought them their food and water in two buckets, with the snow packing down into my boots, I thought about CJ. I thought about the fake book report I could write about CJ, disguising his name to protect the innocent although he isn’t innocent.

But I’ve never written a word.

“My dad used to be a professional wrestler,” CJ said on the bus one day. “His name was Chucky Luck. He had his own show on TV.”

CJ screwed his mouth up and squinted his eyes, punching his arms straight ahead of him like pistons. Grunting like a pig.

“Yeah right!” said one of the boys. “How come I never heard of it?”

“Before you were born, asshole,” said CJ. “He doesn’t do it anymore.”

“Well if it was before I was born Tiny must have seen it. Tiny, you seen it?” asked the boy.

Tiny shoved down another handful of M&Ms and laughed the way he does, which sounds like a cough.

“See?” said CJ. “Tiny’s heard of Chucky Luck.”

All those boys live out on the border of North Sterns. Some times they used to yell to me.

“Come sit by your boyfriend, Clara,” they yelled. “Come sit on CJ’s lap.”

The first time they did that I didn’t get off at my stop. Tiny went right on by when I didn’t come lurching up the aisle to wait by the door. I sank down in my seat and peered over the bottom of the window, watching the boys get off. Each one at his own trailer. The bus dropped off its last passenger, Bonita Rae Farwell, and turned around in Ray Farwell’s rutted pasture-track. Tiny squinted in his rearview mirror. He reached into his M&M bag and tossed down another handful.

“What in the H you doing back there, Clara Winter?”

“I’m sorry, Tiny. I forgot to get off.”

“Well what were you thinking, Clara?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was reading and I missed the stop.”

“Now I gotta go back all the way to North Sterns to let you off. We all know you got a brain in that head of yours, little girl, you use it now.”

“I’m sorry, Tiny.”

Tiny revved the engine so I could feel it throb under my feet. I watched Tiny’s hand go back and forth from the bag to his mouth. When I got off he smiled at me. Little pointy black teeth.

Y
ou would not have known it to look at him, but the old man was a hero. In his life, he was a savior of babies, treed cats, and victims of natural disaster. In large and small ways and always for the better, the old man changed the lives of those who encountered him. I used to sit across from the old man at his cigarette-burned kitchen table and picture him as a young man, doing his heroic deeds.

The old man, as a young man, once saved a baby from drowning. Back where the old man came from, in his country that doesn’t exist anymore, natural disasters were not a rarity. Spring floods, winter storms, summer tornadoes: these were the realities of the old-man-as-a-young-man’s life.

Once, when the old man was only eleven, a spring flood came that was worse than the village had ever known. Flood legends that went back hundreds of years in the life of the village did not begin to match the enormity of what the old man and the villagers were seeing. The dikes, which were constructed of flower-patterned flour sacks stuffed with sand, gave way. Angry gray water foaming with yellow spume and filled with debris and broken dishes spewed over the top of the banks and exploded through the streets of the town.

“Georg! Climb to the roof!”

That was Georg’s mother calling to him, frantic that her son be safe in the face of the water that threatened to overtake
him. Georg, heeding his mother’s cry, swiftly climbed the wooden peg ladder that leaned against the loft of the hut in which he lived with his parents.

“Where is Papa?” he shouted to his mother as he climbed.

“Still in the forge!” his mother called back.

Clutching her apron filled with the family’s most treasured possessions—a Bible, three silver forks, the white baby dress that Georg, and later his brother Eli had been christened in—Georg’s mother climbed after him. Together they huddled on the thatched roof of their cottage, holding hands and silently praying.

Remember, the old man was only eleven.

The roar of the water drowned out almost all other sound. For hours Georg and his mother crouched on the thatch, made slippery by the rain that accompanied the flood. The sky was dark and heavy with water. All around them the people of the village, neighbors they had known all their lives, huddled on their own roofs. On one, an old woman had managed to shove her pig through a hole in the thatch. She tethered him to the chimney with a rope and knelt next to him as he squealed and tried to push away the leash with his snout.

“Where, is, Papa?” Georg called again. Even though his mother was next to him, holding his hand, he had to yell because the noise of the thunder and rain and racing water drowned out sound.

His mother looked at him and said nothing. She shook her head.

“Pray,” she said.

Then Georg’s sharp ears heard a cry that was not of the wind or water. So faintly that he could not be sure he’d actually heard it, the cry of a newborn came drifting past. Borne
on the wind of the storm, the cry was gone almost before it came. In the next moment it came again, and then again.

There’s a baby out there
, Georg thought.

He looked at his mother, her eyes closed tight against the driving rain and the tears that were blinding her. Across the street now filled by raging floodwaters, the old woman had put her arms around her pig and was holding it as if it were a child. The infant’s cry came again, and young Georg felt his heart contract. He crouched and scanned the surrounding huts.
Where was the child?
The cry came again, and it was then that he saw her. Wrapped in a yellow blanket, placed in the forked limb of a black locust tree, as if someone in great haste had tried to do the one thing she could think of to save her child. Georg knew that it was up to him and him alone to bring the child to safety. Who else was there? Who else had heard the child’s cry?

His mother had buried her head in her hands by then. Unseeing, unhearing, she was lost in a chanted prayer for Georg’s father, still at the forge.

Quickly, before he lost his courage, Georg scrambled back into the loft and then down the peg ladder into the kitchen. Water had reached the halfway mark of the wall, and Georg lost his footing. Before he was swept under and out the door, he managed to take off his boots and soaked tunic. Then he was in the water, and part of the flood.

Getting across the street, which had become a torrent of water and debris, took many minutes. Every time he was swept under the surface of the frantic water, Georg held his breath and struggled to find his footing, struggled to the top again, gasped in a great lungful of air and shook the water from his eyes.

The baby cried, and cried again. Led by the thin wail of the baby’s fear and sorrow, Georg found himself at the scarred trunk of the black locust, fighting to stay upright. Above him the faded yellow of the blanket hung suspended in the crotch of the tree. A tattered corner dangled in front of his reaching fingertips. The baby’s cry was the cry of all babies, lost and alone and bereft.
If I could just reach that baby, if I could just—

Do you see how it happens? Can you feel it growing inside your own heart? An old man tilts his shoulder in a certain way, or rubs his eye, and then it all comes over you. The yellow blanket, the raging floodwaters, a boy’s mother crouched on a thatched roof crying for her lost husband. It all comes tumbling out.

T
he real story of my birth is that there was no midwife.

Angelica Rose Beaudoin, American Midwife, never lived or breathed. She never delivered two twin girls in a truck in the ditch in the middle of winter. She never stayed with my grandfather and Tamar, sharing her chocolate bars and telling jokes and stories, making sure Tamar was resting and recovering and not bleeding to death, until the Glass Factory Road snowplow came through. It never happened.

There was only Tamar and my grandfather and me: me crying, Tamar half-passed-out and bleeding, my grandfather not knowing what to do with my baby sister who lay wrapped in a scrap of blanket on the seat between them.

That’s what I see when I think of the story of my birth. That’s why I prefer to think about Angelica Rose Beaudoin, the brave young midwife.

Had there been an Angelica Rose Beaudoin, she would have seen immediately what the problem was. A trained midwife would have known what to do. She would have breathed life into my sister, rubbed her tiny chest, warmed her until she was a living being. The midwife would have stripped off the space blanket her husband had packed for her in the recycled coffee can emergency road kit, wrapped my sister up in it and handed her to my grandfather, who would have cradled her and rocked her.

Then I would have been born. I would have been strong and healthy, screaming from the first.
A healthy baby girl
, the midwife would have said to Tamar.
Two healthy baby girls
. A story with a happy ending, the kind of sixth-grade fake book report that my teachers would give me an A on.

It was the dead of winter, a February blizzard. Tamar couldn’t get to the hospital, that was the whole problem. Her father was driving her in his truck. This was in the days before four-wheel drive. That’s what Tamar said the one time I heard her talking to the choir director about it on the phone. She said, “Now there’s four-wheel drive. That would have made all the difference.” She had me and my twin sister in a ditch halfway to the hospital in Utica. Tamar couldn’t hold us in. When babies want to be born they will be born. Nothing can stop them.

“We were born before four-wheel drive,” I said.

The old man nodded.

“The problem is that they never should have taken Glass Factory,” I said. “In a blizzard you never take Glass Factory. You take Route 12. You get to the hospital sooner. You don’t wait until the last minute. You don’t take Glass Factory hoping
to save half a mile, hoping that some midwife will just happen to be passing by in the middle of a blizzard.”

I had a twin sister. I think about her all the time.

If she were alive, people would talk about us in a different way. It would be “Tamar and her girls,” “Miss Winter and the twins,” “Tamar Winter and her daughters.” Tamar refused to name my sister when she was born dead. Bad luck, she said. But what I believe to be true is that all babies should have a name. When I think about my sister, there is no name attached to my thoughts. She is nameless. All I see in my mind is ________, which I have changed to Baby Girl.

Tamar never told me about my sister. If it had not been for the choir director, I would still be living my life knowing that something was missing but not knowing that something was my twin sister.

“Your mother has a beautiful voice,” the choir director said to me when I was nine years old, before I met the old man, when I used to have to sit in the sanctuary listening to the choir practice.

“Do you have a beautiful voice, too?” she asked me.

“Mediocre,” I said, which is true.

“Imagine if you had a beautiful voice and your poor dead twin had had a beautiful voice,” the choir director said. “The Twin Churches would have soared with the angelic voices of the three Winter women.”

That’s how the choir director talks.

“That poor baby,” the choir director said. “She never had a chance, did she?”

I shook my head. I said nothing. I waited for more, but none was forthcoming. Even though I was only nine at the
time and Tamar had never mentioned a word, I knew that what the choir director said was true. I had a twin. I could feel it in my bones.