The Story of Beautiful Girl (8 page)

She took the road north.

The Well’s Bottom of 1968 bore a remarkable resemblance to the Well’s Bottom of 1918, when Martha and Earl drove off from the church where they’d just wed to his farm out in the country. Mom-and-pop stores reigned, the local theater bore a grand chandelier, Independence Day was celebrated on the town green, freight trains carried coal and steel, and the number of births
approximated the number of deaths. A few differences did distinguish 1968. There was talk of a new bypass that would siphon trucks away from Main Street. A Chinese family had opened a restaurant. A few people owned color consoles, with wavy green television pictures. But the riots of Detroit and Newark and Los Angeles, and the marches in Washington, were distant news. Change was not screaming in Well’s Bottom. Change was barely a whisper.

Yet when Martha reached town, she imagined she heard that whisper. She pulled into the most inconspicuous place she could find, an old stable in one of the many alleys that paralleled the main streets. It was noon, and except for two stops for feeding and changing, the child’s eyes had been closed. Though as Martha lifted the basket, she felt her own vision open, as she took in what she’d always seen and suddenly found different.

Arm encircling the basket, Martha passed two children as she hurried the block to Eva’s back door. Dressed in yellow raincoats and galoshes, they were laughing at a puppy jumping through puddles, and for the first time in her life, Martha was struck by the ease with which they played right out in the open. Martha looked up to the silver blue sky. Somewhere under that sky was Lynnie, somewhere else the body of the man. Martha had seen none like them playing in puddles. She had never noticed that before.

The back door said,
HANSBERRY PHARMACY—DELIVERIES
. Martha stepped onto the wooden stoop and pressed the bell. She could hear voices on the other side of the door. It felt like the first day of school, as she stood outside her classroom and heard, at the far end of the schoolhouse, children enter the building. Though today there would be no “Good morning, class,” or even “Welcome to fifth grade.” She felt as bereft of vocabulary as Lynnie was.

The door opened.

Eva was pushing her brown hair back toward her ponytail as she
took in the figure at the door. Her round face was as flushed as ever, and for a moment it seemed she was so caught up in her responsibilities, she could not make sense of the face into which she was gazing. Then she caught herself.
“Mrs. Zimmer?”
she asked.

Martha opened her mouth, but nothing emerged.

“What are you…,” Eva began, and then asked, “Is everything all right?”

No
, Martha wanted to say. There was so much that was not all right—so much about which she knew too little—so much
she should have known—
that she just stood, her mouth a stone.

In the silence between them, Eva’s expression darkened with worry. Now her gaze went down, apparently trying to determine the problem that brought her old teacher to the store—a scraped elbow? cut finger? Her gaze lit on the basket. Her eyes widened.

She looked up at her old teacher. “Please,” Eva said. “Come in.”

Eva offered Martha a seat at a Formica table in the stockroom, where Eva’s teenage son, Oliver, often did homework, and where a compact kitchen allowed her to serve dinner without going to the apartment upstairs. She put on a kettle, and Martha, forcing words out, told her about the night before. Eva’s eyes were kind, and when she heard a customer enter the store and disappeared through the swinging door, Martha remembered why Eva had been the confidante of many girls in eighth grade: She had a gentle way about her and listened without judgment.

Martha heard the bells on the front door, and then Eva returned. “I put up the
CLOSED
sign,” she said, and, sensing Martha’s needs, took the baby from her hands. Looking into the tiny face, she explained that Don was delivering a prescription to an elderly couple across town and would return momentarily; did Martha need to hide the baby from him?

“He can know,” Martha said.

“Then may I bathe her?” Eva asked, and Martha, for the first time since the knock on her door last night, started to cry.

Eva did not press for Martha’s grander plan, as she found a bathing basin, placed it in the sink, and filled it with water. She did not ask Martha for a next step as she tenderly washed the last remnants of the birth. She simply described what she was doing and invited Martha’s hands into the water, and the tears receded as the baby grew clean.

Then, after producing diapers, flannel infant clothes, and formula, Eva rocked the baby in her arms. “I don’t know what I’d have done in your shoes, Mrs. Zimmer.”

Martha wanted to say she was just doing what seemed right. But the back door opened then, and Don came in. Tall, bearded Don, with his blondish red hair. He gave Eva a confused look, and she asked him to sit, and as Martha listened to Eva tell Don what happened the night before, Martha thought,
I am not alone in this
. Only then, as relief spread, did she realize how tense she’d been.

“Actually,” Don said, leaning forward, “I’ve had some experience with the School.”

Martha started.

“You might remember that I attended seminary. Well”—he shook his head—“right after I finished, I worked at the School as a chaplain.”

“I had no idea.”

“I held services, but the staff rarely brought anyone, so after a while I just went to the cottages to talk to the residents. That was eye-opening… and troubling. Finally, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I told Eva I’d rather take over the store.”

“It wasn’t an easy decision for us,” Eva said. “But it was the right decision.”

“So here’s an educated guess about why Lynnie wants you to hide her baby. Sometimes the state takes kids away from parents
who are doing a bad job raising them, and the kids get placed in the School. They’re treated just like any other resident—which, I’m afraid, is miserably. Lynnie was probably worried about that happening to her child.”

Martha said, “Lynnie would have been there to keep an eye out for her.”

“I doubt it. Babies are isolated from the adults. She might never have seen her again.”

Never see her baby again,
Martha thought. A long silence passed. Martha held the baby close to her chest, cradling her head the way Eva had showed her. She felt the body, so light in her arms, so warm against her sweater. She felt the breath against her chest.

Finally Martha said, “I’m too old to care for a child. Should I go to the School and try to get Lynnie out?”

Eva and Don looked at each other and then down at the table. “They’d never release her to you,” Don said. He looked back up. “You’re not related to her, you’re not an official. You don’t have any connection to her.”

Martha said, “But I obviously can’t leave the baby in the care of anyone around here. Whatever will I do?”

For endless minutes, no one spoke. Then Eva stood up and walked across the kitchen, her arms folded over her chest. Looking out the window, she said, “Do you remember what you used to teach us in arts and crafts? You’d say, ‘Follow your inclination. It will take you to thoughts you’d never known you’d had.’ ”

Martha remembered saying that, year after year, to her classes. It was the opposite of planning. It was the path less traveled.

“I never forgot that,” Eva said, turning around. “Not that it helped me with tests.” She smiled. “But when I was sitting in front of a pile of construction paper and glitter, it reassured me that I’d be able to do something beautiful with it.”

Martha smiled, pressing her cheek to the baby’s soft stomach, inhaling the sweet scent. It was so like milk and honey. So beautiful.

She looked up. “I just wish I knew my first step.”

Eva glanced at her husband and back at Martha. “We can help you with that,” she said.

They set out at dusk. Don was driving the first car—Martha’s Buick. Martha and the baby were next, in the used Dodge that Don had purchased that afternoon. The car dealer had lost his signs in the storm, and along with the road closings, he’d thought he might not get business for days. So he was glad to strike a deal with Don, especially once he found out the car was for a young family fifty miles off. Taking up the rear of the caravan was Eva, in the Hansberrys’ Ford wagon, with teenage Oliver. He’d agreed to help out at Martha’s farm until she returned.

“When will that be?” Oliver had asked, putting on a coat over his football jersey.

“Soon,” Don said.

“A while,” Eva said.

“I have no idea,” Martha said.

And then they all laughed.

While Don was buying the used car, Eva copied down the listings in Martha’s address book. She also gave Martha a crash course in child care. Then she dashed off to the florist; they’d decided they needed four flowers.

The sun was down by the time their chain of cars had reached the borough limits; the moon was high by the time they reached Old Creamery Bridge, which had reopened late in the day. After they crossed the bridge, they turned into the campsite.

The river still overran its banks. With Oliver holding a flashlight, they went out to the dock, where Don, putting to use his
clerical training for the first time in years, led them in the Twenty-third Psalm, paying respects to a man whose body might never be found.

Martha felt the baby’s heart again beside hers as they all said, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” She understood that for Eva and Don, these words mattered. Yet she could not help but wonder how there could be a God if people treated this man as they had, and Lynnie was forced to live in a place like the School—and this child could be doomed to a life of desolation.

As the prayer settled over the night, Eva produced the four chrysanthemums, and Don, Oliver, Martha, and Eva each tossed one into the water.

They embraced by the cars, then drove out of the camp in single file. Martha felt oddly different and knew it was the whisper of change again: She was not the person she’d thought herself to be only last night.

She clicked on her turn signal, and at the intersection she turned north. The others continued straight ahead, palms lifted, waving good-bye and good luck.

1968

N
umber Forty-two did not know that prayers were uttered on his behalf that November night, when Martha and the baby stood on the dock with the Hansberrys and sanctified his death with a psalm and flowers. But this was not because he couldn’t hear.

It was because of the night before, when he’d embarked on a trail now followed by the chrysanthemums that had just been cast into the water and begun voyaging downstream, twirling like the ladies’ hats he and his big brother Blue had once watched from a pecan tree at a church revival. Ahead of the flowers, the dam waited to catch them in its spin, just like it had caught Number Forty-two, as Martha had surmised. But she couldn’t know that he’d once seen what dams could do, when Blue took him fishing and they saw a raccoon bobbing beneath one, unable to escape. Nor could she know that last night, as the water plunged him down the concrete wall of the dam and he was sucked into a spin, his blood went electric with panic—and purpose. With how fully Beautiful Girl had opened his heart and how perfect Little One had felt in his arms and how frantically he needed to return to them both. He went into a frenzy of kicks and elbows, but he was already spinning a second time, the coat leaving his body, the shirt buttons popping, the sleeves drawing away from him like a departing spirit. Chest screaming in a plea for breath, he looped a
third time, thinking of all he’d survived to get so close to freedom, raging at the cruelty of going down like this. And then he seized hold of the raccoon memory: He and Blue had made a guess at what men would do in similar straits, and he followed the guess. He tucked his chin, drew his knees to his chest, hugged himself—and the water shot him forward like a man from a cannon. He flew along the bed of the river, arms at his sides, legs behind him, heart lifting, until he finally broke the surface—in the same spot where the three remaining flowers now rose from the depths.

He heaved his arms up to swim to the shore. The currents, though, drove relentlessly ahead, herding him on. Past the split-rail fence that marked the edge of the Boy Scout camp. Below Old Creamery Bridge. The river widened and the miles tallied up swiftly, along with barns and trailers. Businesses began appearing—a lumberyard, factories, mills, where a wheel scooped up two of the mums. And then, just as the river opened wide, he spied, in the rushing water beside him, the refuge of a floating door.

Forty-two hoisted himself onto the wood. Winded, weakened, unable to stop the charge forward, he held on, beneath bridges, past flood walls, into the nighttime glow of a city.
Again
, he said to himself, his thoughts coming in the southern drawl he’d spoken before the fever.
I can’t believe it. Running again.

He jumped his mind to better places. Little One sleeping in the old lady’s basket. Beautiful Girl shaking her head no to the first many houses, pressing on until the one that felt right. That first tractor ride, when Forty-two spoke to Beautiful Girl with his signs, and she slowly lifted her hands and tried to copy his. For so many years at the Snare, he’d just been ignored or smirked at or bossed around. The only others who’d signed to him—an official he saw once, and a man stuck there like him—made nonsense signs, and when he showed them how to do it right, their eyes went blank. But that day on the tractor, Beautiful Girl watched
his every gesture, her brow deep in concentration, until her smile opened wide with respect.