The Bean Trees (22 page)

“Do you want to leave your dolly here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Later that night I asked Esperanza and Estevan if they would be willing to do one more thing with me. For me, really. I explained that it was a favor, a very big one, and then I explained what it was.

“You don’t have to say yes,” I said. “I know it involves some risk for you, and if you don’t feel like you can go through with it I’ll understand. Don’t answer now, because I want to be sure you’ve really thought about it. You can tell me in the morning.”

Esperanza and Estevan didn’t want to think about it. They told me, then and there, they wanted to do it.

M
r. Jonas Wilford Armistead was a tall, white-haired man who seemed more comfortable with the notarizing part of his job than with the public. Even though he had been forewarned, when all of us came trooping into his office he seemed overwhelmed and showed a tendency to dither. He moved papers and pens and framed pictures from one side of his desk to the other and wouldn’t sit down until all of us could be seated, which unfortunately didn’t happen for quite a while because there weren’t enough chairs. Mr. Armistead sent his secretary, Mrs. Cleary, next door to borrow a chair from the real-estate office of Mr. Wenn.

Mr. Armistead wore a complicated hearing aid that had ear parts, and black-and-white wires and a little silver box that had to be placed for maximum effectiveness on exactly the right spot on his desk, which he seemed unable to find. If he ever did, I thought I
might suggest to him that he mark this special zone with paint as they do on a basketball court.

The silver box had tiny controls along one side, and Mr. Armistead also fiddled with these almost constantly, apparently without much success. Mrs. Cleary seemed during their working coexistence to have adjusted her volume accordingly. Even when she was talking to us, she practically shouted. It had an intimidating effect, especially on Esperanza.

But we all managed small talk while we waited. Which was all the more admirable when you consider that not one word any of us was saying was true, so far as I know. Estevan was an astonishingly good liar, going into great detail about the Oklahoma town where he and his wife had been living, and the various jobs he’d had. I talked about my plans to move to Arizona to live with my sister and her little boy. I think we were all amazed by the things that were popping out of our heads like corn.

Sister, indeed. I remembered begging my mother for a sister when I was very young. She’d said she was all for it, but that if I got one it would have to be arranged by means of a miracle. At the time I’d had no idea what she meant. Now I knew about celibacy.

Mrs. Cleary returned in due time, rolling a chair on its little wheels, and asked several questions about what forms would need to be typed up. We shuffled around again as we made room for Estevan and the new chair, and Mr. Armistead finally agreed to come down from his great height and roost like a long-legged stork on the chair behind his desk.

“It became necessary to make formal arrange
ments,” Estevan explained, “because our friend is leaving the state.”

Esperanza nodded.

“Mr. and Mrs. Two Two, do you understand that this is a permanent agreement?” He spoke very slowly, the way people often speak to not-very-bright children and foreigners, although I’m positive that Mr. Armistead had no inkling that the Two Two family came from any farther away than the Cherokee Nation.

They nodded again. Esperanza was holding Turtle tightly in her arms and beginning to get tears in her eyes. Already it was clear that, of the three of us, she was first in line for the Oscar nomination.

He went on, “After about six months a new birth certificate will be issued, and the old one destroyed. After that you cannot change your minds for any reason. This is a very serious decision.”

“There wasn’t any birth certificate issued,” Mrs. Cleary shouted. “It was born on tribal lands.”

“She,” I said. “In a Plymouth,” I added.

“We understand,” Estevan said.

“I just want to make absolutely certain.”

“We know Taylor very well,” Estevan replied. “We know she will make a good mother to this child.”

Even though they were practically standing on it, Mr. Armistead and Mrs. Cleary seemed to think of “tribal land” as some distant, vaguely civilized country. This, to them, explained everything including the fact that Hope, Steven, and Turtle had no identification other than a set of black-and-white souvenir pictures taken of the three of them at Lake o’ the Cherokees. It
was enough that I, a proven citizen with a Social Security card, was willing to swear on pain of I-don’t-know-what (and sign documents to that effect) that they were all who they said they were.

By this point we had run out of small talk. I was over my initial nervousness, but without it I felt drained. Just sitting in that small, crowded office, trying to look the right way and say the right thing, seemed to take a great deal of energy. I couldn’t imagine how we were all going to get through this.

“We love her, but we cannot take care for her,” Esperanza said suddenly. Her accent was complicated by the fact that she was crying, but it didn’t faze Mr. Armistead or Mrs. Cleary. Possibly they thought it was a Cherokee accent.

“We’ve talked it over,” I said. I began to worry a little about what was going on here.

“We love her. Maybe someday we will have more children, but not now. Now is so hard. We move around so much, we have nothing, no home.” Esperanza was sobbing. This was no act. Estevan handed her a handkerchief, and she held it to her face.

“Try, Ma?” Turtle said.

“That’s right, Turtle,” I said quietly. “She’s crying.”

Estevan reached over and lifted Turtle out of her arms. He stood her up, her small blue sneakers set firmly on his knees, and held her gently by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “You must be a good girl. Remember. Good and strong, like your mother.” I wondered which mother he meant, there were so many possibilities. I was touched to think he might mean me.

“Okay,” Turtle said.

He handed her carefully back to Esperanza, who folded her arms around Turtle and held her against her chest, rocking back and forth for a very long time with her eyes squeezed shut. Tears drained down the shallow creases in her cheeks.

The rest of us watched. Mr. Armistead stopped fidgeting and Mrs. Cleary’s hands on her papers went still. Here were a mother and her daughter, nothing less. A mother and child—in a world that could barely be bothered with mothers and children—who were going to be taken apart. Everybody believed it. Possibly Turtle believed it. I did.

Of all the many times when it seemed to be so, that was the only moment in which I really came close to losing Turtle. I couldn’t have taken her from Esperanza. If she had asked, I couldn’t have said no.

When she let go, letting Turtle sit gently back on her lap, Turtle had the sniffles.

Esperanza wiped Turtle’s nose with Estevan’s big handkerchief and kissed her on both cheeks. Then she unclasped the gold medallion of St. Christopher, guardian saint of refugees, and put it around Turtle’s neck. Then she gave Turtle to me.

Esperanza told me, “We will know she is happy and growing with a good heart.”

“Thank you,” I said. There was nothing else I could say.

It took what seemed like an extremely long time to draw up a statement, which Mrs. Cleary shuttled off to type. She came back and was sent off twice more
to make repairs. After several rounds of White-out we had managed to create an official document:

Mrs. Cleary went off once again to Mr. Wenn’s office, this time to borrow his secretary Miss Brindo to be a second witness to the signing. Miss Brindo, who appeared to have at least enough Cherokee in her to claim head rights, had on tight jeans and shiny red high heels, and snapped her gum. She had a complicated haircut that stood straight up on top, and something told me she led a life that was way too boring for her potential. I wished she could have known what she was really witnessing that morning.

In a way, I wish all of them could know, maybe twenty years later or so when it’s long past doing anything about it. Mrs. Cleary’s and Mr. Armistead’s hair would have stood straight up too, to think what astonishing things could be made legal in a modest little office in the state of Oklahoma.

We shook hands all around, I got the rest of the
adoption arrangements straightened out with Mr. Armistead, and we filed out, a strange new combination of friends and family. I could see the relief across Estevan’s back and shoulders. He held Esperanza’s hand. She was still drying tears but her face was changed. It shone like a polished thing, something old made new.

They both wore clean work shirts, light blue with faded elbows. Esperanza had on a worn denim skirt and flat loafers. I had asked them please not to wear their very best for this occasion, not their Immigration-fooling clothes. It had to look like Turtle was going to be better off with me. When they came out that morning dressed as refugees I had wanted to cry out, No! I was wrong. Don’t sacrifice your pride for me. But this is how badly they wanted to make it work.

I
t had crossed my mind that Turtle might actually have recognized the cemetery her mother was buried in, and if so, I wondered whether I ought to take her back there to see it. But my concerns were soon laid to rest. We passed four cemeteries on the way to the Pottawatomie Presbyterian Church of St. Michael and All Angels, future home of Steven and Hope Two Two, and at each one of them Turtle called out, “Mama!”

There would come a time when she would just wave at the sight of passing gravestones and quietly say, “Bye bye.”

Finding the church turned out to be a chase around Robin Hood’s bam. Mattie’s directions were to the old church. The congregation had since moved its home of worship plus its pastor and presumably its refugees into a new set of buildings several miles down the
road. I was beginning to form the opinion that Oklahomans were as transient a bunch as the people back home who slept on grass-flecked bedrolls in Roosevelt Park.

The church was a cheery-looking place, freshly painted white with a purple front door and purple gutters. When Mattie used to talk about the Underground Railroad, by which she meant these churches and the people who carried refugees between them, it had always sounded like the dark of night. I’d never pictured old white Lincolns with soda pop spilled on the seats, and certainly not white clapboard churches with purple gutters.

Reverend and Mrs. Stone seemed greatly relieved to see us, since they had apparently expected us a day or two earlier, but no one made an issue of it. They helped carry things up a sidewalk bordered with a purple fringe of ageratums into the small house behind the parsonage. Meanwhile Estevan and I worked on getting possessions sorted out. Things had gotten greatly jumbled during the trip, and Turtle’s stuff was everywhere. She was like a pack rat, taking possession of any item that struck her fancy (like Esperanza’s hairbrush) and tucking another one into its place (like a nibbled cracker). Turtle herself was exhausted with the events of the day, or days, and was in the back seat sleeping the sleep of the dead, as Lou Ann would put it. Esperanza and Estevan had already said goodbye to her in a very real way back in Mr. Armistead’s office, and didn’t think there was any need to wake her up again. But I stood firm.

“It’s happened too many times that people she
loved were whisked away from her without any explanation. I want her to see you, and see this place, so she’ll know we’re leaving you here.”

She woke reluctantly, and groggily accepted my explanation of what was happening. “Bye bye,” she said, standing up on the seat and waving through the open back window.

I think we all felt the same exhaustion. There are times when it just isn’t possible to say goodbye. I hugged Esperanza and shook hands with Reverend and Mrs. Stone in a kind of daze. The day seemed too bright, too full of white clapboard and cheerful purple flowers, for me to be losing two good friends forever.

I was left with Estevan, who was checking under the back seat for the last time. I checked the trunk. “You ought to take some of this food,” I said. “Turtle and I will never eat it all; it will just go to waste. At least the things there are whole jars of, like mustard and pickles.” I bent over the cooler, stacking and unstacking the things that were swimming in melted ice in the bottom.

Estevan put his hand on my arm. “Taylor.”

I straightened up. “What’s going to happen to you here? What will you do?”

“Survive. That has always been our intention.”

“But what kind of work will you find around here? I can’t imagine they have Chinese restaurants, which is probably a good thing. Oh God,” I put my knuckle in my mouth. “Shut me up.”

Estevan smiled. “I would never pray for that.”

“I’m just afraid for you. And for Esperanza. I’m sorry for saying this, it’s probably a very nice place,
but I can’t stand to think of you stuck here forever.”

“Don’t think of us here forever. Think of us back in Guatemala with our families. Having another baby. When the world is different from now.”

“When will that ever be,” I said. “Never.”

“Don’t say that.” He touched my cheek. I was afraid I was going to cry, or worse. That I would throw my arms around his ankles like some lady in a ridiculous old movie and refuse to let him go.

When tears did come to me it was a relief. That it was only tears. “Estevan, I know it doesn’t do any good to say things like this, but I don’t want to lose you. I’ve never lost anybody I loved, and I don’t think I know how to.” I looked away, down the flat, paved street. “I’ve never known anybody like you.”

He took both my hands in his. “Nor I you, Taylor.”

“Can you write? Would it be safe, I mean? You could use a fake return address or something.”

“We can send word by way of Mattie. So you will know where we are and what happens to us.”

“I wish that didn’t have to be all.”

“I know.” His black pupils moved back and forth between my eyes.

“But it does, doesn’t it? There’s no way around the hurt, is there? You just have to live with it.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Estevan, do you understand what happened back there in that office, with Esperanza?”

“Yes.”

“I keep thinking it was a kind of, what would you call it?”

“A catharsis.”

“A catharsis,” I said. “And she seems happy, honest to God, as happy as if she’d really found a safe place to leave Ismene behind. But she’s believing in something that isn’t true. Do you understand what I’m saying? It seems wrong, somehow.”

“Mi’ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.” He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me very, very sweetly, and then he turned around and walked into the house.

All four of us had buried someone we loved in Oklahoma.

I called Mama from a pay phone at a Shell station. I dug two handfuls of coins out of my jeans pockets, splayed them out on the metal shelf, and dialed. I was scared to death she would hang up on me. She had every right. I hadn’t said boo to her for almost two months, not even to congratulate her on getting married. She’d written to say they’d had a real nice time at the wedding and that Harland was moving into our house. Up until the wedding he’d always lived in a so-called bachelor apartment, which means a bed plus hot plate plus roach motel in his sock drawer, in back of El-Jay’s Paint and Body.

There was static in the line. “Mama, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m just outside of Oklahoma City so I thought I’d give you a ring. It’s a lot closer than Arizona.”

“Is that you? Bless your heart, it is you! I’ll swan. Now weren’t you sweet to call.” She sounded so far away.

“So how’s it going, Mama? How’s married life treating you?”

She lowered her voice. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Either you’ve got a bad cold or you’ve been crying. Your sound’s all up in your head.”

The tears started coming again, and I asked Mama to hang on just a minute. I had to put down the receiver to blow my nose. The one thing Lou Ann hadn’t thought of was that I should have packed two dozen hankies.

When I got on the line again the operator was asking for more coins, so I dropped them in. Mama and I listened to the weird bonging song and didn’t say anything to each other for a little bit.

“I just lost somebody I was in love with,” I finally told her. “I just told him goodbye, and I’m never going to see him again.”

“Well, what did you turn him loose for?” Mama wanted to know. “I never saw you turn loose of nothing you wanted.”

“This is different, Mama. He wasn’t mine to have.”

She was quiet for a minute. We listened to the static playing up and down. It sounded like music from Mars.

“Mama, I feel like, I don’t know what. Like I’ve died.”

“I know. You feel like you’ll never run into another one that’s worth turning your head around for, but you will. You’ll see.”

“No, it’s worse than that. I don’t even care if I ever run into anybody else. I don’t know if I even want to.”

“Well, Taylor honey, that’s the best way to be, is not on the lookout. That way you don’t have to waste your time. Just let it slip up on you while you’re going about your business.”

“I don’t think it will. I feel like I’m too old.”

“Old my foot! Lordy, child, look at me. I’m so far over the hill I can’t call the hogs to follow, and here I am running around getting married like a teenager. It’s just as well you’re not here, you’d have to tell everybody, Don’t pay no mind that old fool, that’s just my mother done got bit by the love bug at a elderly age.”

I laughed. “You’re not elderly,” I said.

“It won’t be as long as it has been.”

“Mama, shush, don’t even say that.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me, I don’t care if I drop over tomorrow. I’m having me a time.”

“That’s good, Mama. I’m glad, I really am.”

“I’ve done quit cleaning houses. I take in some washing now and again to keep me out of trouble, but I’m getting about ready to join the Women’s Garden Club instead. The only dirt I feel like scratching in nowdays is my own. They meet of a Thursday.”

I couldn’t believe it. Mama retired. “You know what’s funny?” I said. “I just can’t picture you without an iron or a mop or something like that in your hand.”

“Oh, picture it, girl, it’s a pretty sight. You remember Mrs. Wickentot? The one always wore high heels to the grocery and thought she was the cat’s meow?”

“Yeah, I remember. Her kids never would give me the time of day. They called me the Cleaning Lady’s Girl.”

“Well you can put it to rest now, because I told her off good when I quit. I told her if I had the kind of trash she has in her closets, and the way she lets those boys run wild, what I found under their beds, I just wouldn’t act so high and mighty, is what I told her.”

“You told her that?”

“I did. And then some. All these years, you know, these ladies get to thinking they own you. That you wouldn’t dare breathe a word for fear of getting fired. Now I think they’re all scared to death I’m going to take out an ad in the paper.”

I could just see it, right on the back page under the obituaries and deed-of-trust announcements. Or better yet, on the society page:

“Alice Jean Greer Elleston wishes to announce that Irma Ruebecker has fifty-two pints of molded elderberry jelly in her basement; Mae Richey’s dishes would be carried off by the roaches if she didn’t have hired help; and Minerva Wickentot’s boys read porno magazines.”

I couldn’t stop laughing. “You ought to do it,” I said. “It would be worth the thirty-five cents a word.”

“Well, I probably won’t. But it’s good for a gal to have something like that up her sleeve, don’t you think?” She chuckled. “It makes people respect you.”

“Mama, you’re really something. I don’t know how the good Lord packed so much guts into one little person.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth before I realized this was something she used to say to me. In high school, when I was having a rough time of it, she said it practically every other day.

“How’s that youngun of yours?” Mama wanted to know. She never failed to ask.

“She’s fine. She’s asleep in the car right now or I’d put her on to say hi. Or peas and carrots, more likely. You never know what she’s going to say.”

“Well, she comes by that honest.”

“Don’t say that, Mama. That means it proves a baby’s not a bastard. If it acts like you, it proves it’s legitimate.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

“It’s okay. I guess I’m just sensitive, you know, since she’s not blood kin.”

“I don’t think blood’s the only way kids come by things honest. Not even the main way. It’s what you tell them, Taylor. If a person is bad, say, then it makes them feel better to tell their kids that they’re even worse. And then that’s just exactly what they’ll grow up to be. You remember those Hardbines?”

“Yeah. Newt. I especially remember Newt.”

“That boy never had a chance. He was just doing his best to be what everybody in Pittman said he was.”

“Mama, you were always so good to me. I’ve been meaning to tell you that. You acted like I’d hung up the moon. Sometimes I couldn’t believe you thought I was that good.”

“But most of the time you believed it.”

“Yeah. I guess most of the time I thought you were right.”

The operator came on and asked for more money. My pile of change was thinning out. “We’re just about done,” I told her, but she said this was for the minutes
that we’d already talked. I was out of quarters and had to use a whole slew of nickels.

“Guess what?” I said to Mama after the coins had dropped. “Here’s the big news, Turtle’s my real daughter. I adopted her.”

“Did you? Now aren’t you smart. How’d you do that?”

“Kind of by hook or crook. I’ll tell you about it in a letter, it’s too complicated for long distance. But it’s all legal. I’ve got the papers to prove it.”

“Lord have mercy. Married and a legal grandma all in the same summer. I can’t wait to see her.”

“We’ll get back there one of these days,” I said. “Not this trip, but we will. I promise.”

“You better watch out, one of these days me and old Harland might just up and head for Arizona.”

“I wish you would.”

Neither of us wanted to hang up. We both said, “Bye,” about three times.

“Mama,” I said, “this is the last one. I’m hanging up now, okay? Bye. And say hi to Harland for me too, okay? Tell him I said be good to you or I’ll come whip his butt.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Turtle and I had a whole afternoon to kill in Oklahoma City while we waited for some paperwork on the adoption to clear. After her nap she was raring to go. She talked up a storm, and wanted to play with Esperanza’s medallion. I let her look at it in the side-view mirror.

“You have to keep it on,” I told her. “That’s St.
Christopher, the guardian saint of refugees. I think you’d count. You’re about as tempest-tossed as they come.”

A tempest was a bad storm where things got banged around a lot. “Tempest-tossed” was from the poem on the Statue of Liberty that started out, “Give me your tired, your poor.” Estevan could recite the whole poem. Considering how America had treated his kind, he must have thought this was the biggest joke ever to be carved in giant letters on stone.