The Tilted World (16 page)

Her voice. No words to her song, just her voice sliding through notes, her voice high and clear, harmonizing with the stream almost. Sweet Jesus. Ingersoll pressed himself behind the gum tree. But, as if her voice was chucking him under the chin, he darted forward and crouched behind a closer gum.

And there she was, with Junior, lifting him high over her head in time to a sprightly tune:

Is your horse a single footer, Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe,

Is your horse a single footer, Uncle Joe,

Is your horse a single footer, Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe,

Don’t mind the weather when the wind don’t blow.

Hop up, my baby, three in a row!

She repeated the last line twice, tossing Junior gently in the air. He made a happy
eeeeeee
sound, his wispy hair lifting in the breeze, then she caught him and tossed him again. She was wearing a simple brown dress with an apron and looked like a wood sprite. Ingersoll wouldn’t have been half surprised if she turned into a doe and bounded away. Instead what she did was pivot with the baby on her shoulder to point to a yellow butterfly that bobbed past, and she hopped onto a stone with Junior to follow it, then hopped to another.

Dixie Clay and Junior weren’t alone in following the butterfly’s trajectory. The creek had a logjam, and from his crouch Ingersoll could see a river otter pop up from the logs, then, as if in a barbershop quartet, three other sleek heads popped over the top. Dixie Clay laughed and turned to point them out for the baby, all the otters’ long, long noses flicking in unison left then right then left then right to watch the yellow butterfly dip and dance over the water. And then the butterfly lifted away and her glad face turned to watch it waft into the woods and that was when her eyes passed over Ingersoll, Ingersoll stupidly, openly grinning, forgetting that he was no longer crouching. She gave a cry and almost quicker than should be possible her face tightened, the otters leaping sideways as she staggered backward, one foot slipping from her stone with a splash and her free arm flying up to secure the baby.

Ingersoll lifted his palm and called, “Wait. Don’t worry.”

But she half ran, half stumbled to a wall of mossy shelving rocks where her rifle stood and she grabbed it with her free hand and tossed it so it landed in her shooting grip, her other arm still holding the baby.

For the second time in seven days they stood faced off and panting.

“Dixie Clay,” he yelled, “I . . . I just came to check on the baby.”

“With your gun?”

He’d forgotten about the Winchester dangling from his hand.

“No, I . . . Look here,” he cried, and tossed the rifle a few feet off and gave an apologetic shrug.

She kept her gun trained, however. “What are you doing here?”

He said it again, this time with more conviction. “I just came to check on the baby.”

“Why were you spying?”

“I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t mean to. You just looked so happy when you saw the otters—”

“I was happy because I trap otters. Sell their pelts.”

“Oh.” Her face hadn’t softened at all. “Can I see him?”

She paused. “All right,” she said. “But stay on that side of the woodpile.”

He walked to his side of the logjam and felt foolish. He said he’d come to check on the baby, and clearly the baby was fine. Better than fine. She wore him slung on the saddle of her hip, one of his legs in front and one in back, like he’d been riding there all his life.

“Why do you want to check on him?” Dixie Clay wasn’t smiling.

But the baby was. “What do you know. He recognizes old Ingersoll.”

Dixie Clay frowned like she wanted to deny this, but the baby was leaning toward him. Ingersoll skirted the logs to reach for him, but she pivoted her hip. “Well?” She hoisted the baby a little higher. His hair looked fluffy, like she’d just washed it. He was clasping the bib pocket of her apron.

Ingersoll shrugged. He felt his cheeks pinking.

“I know you didn’t come to take him.” She said it as a statement, but when he shook his head, her shoulders softened a little.

“No, I didn’t come to take him.”

“I know. I just said that.”

Ingersoll wasn’t sure how to reply. He wanted to keep her talking. He considered and discarded several observations, and the pause lengthened, and the longer it got, the harder it was to bear.

The baby broke the silence, squealing and then flinging his arm up to Dixie Clay’s face. His index finger hooked her lip. She detached his finger and pushed his hand down, but he flung it back up and hooked her lip again for another round.

Ingersoll laughed and the baby turned and again seemed to recognize Ingersoll and lean toward him.

“Hey, sport,” he said. Dixie Clay didn’t move the baby away this time.

“If you were here to check on the baby,” she asked around Junior’s finger, her words slurring, “why not come to the house?”

Ingersoll shrugged. He looked at the sky. “It turned out to be a nice day. I hadn’t seen the sun since I couldn’t tell you when. And when it came out—I was past the cornfields and by your woods, and when it came out—”

“Seeing it made you happy,” she said.

He shrugged. All he could do around this girl was lift and lower his shoulders like a stupid wooden puppet.

She removed the baby’s finger and bent her head to kiss it.

There were things he could say, if he were the kind who could say things. Dixie Clay, seeing
you
made me happy.

She looked up at him over the baby, who was wriggling in Ingersoll’s direction. “Well, since he won’t be denied,” she said, and didn’t give Ingersoll the baby so much as stop fighting him. Then Junior was in his arms, familiar feeling. He laid his face on Ingersoll’s chest like he was hugging him, he just didn’t know to use his arms to do it.

“He likes you,” she said.

“We’re old war buddies.” His voice was muffled in the baby’s neck. He could smell Junior’s breath. “What are you calling him?”

“He’s Willy.”

“Willy Holliver.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s . . . nice.”

She turned and started walking and he turned and walked alongside her, matching her pace.

“I’m glad you came back,” she said, “because I wanted to know—it all happened so fast—I never asked anything. Like how you found him. And where, exactly?”

Ingersoll bounced the baby, and they walked beside the creek and he told her, him and Ham two engineers, riding along, and he described the store and the bodies on the gallery and the dying clerk inside and how he took the baby to the Greenville sheriff’s then the orphanage, but that it wouldn’t do.

Ingersoll was aware she was watching him and he glanced to see her face, curious and considering and maybe relieved, he thought, hearing again that no mother out in the world roamed it searching for her baby.

“But . . . why did you help him?”

They walked past a thicket of blackberries that didn’t want Dixie Clay to pass, but she tugged her brown skirt free. She seemed to be giving him time to find the words. He looked at Junior, who had gotten quiet, his breathing deeper like he was nearing sleep. Then Ingersoll told her, “I know what it’s like, being an orphan. I’m—I was one. I grew up in an orphanage.”

They walked on and, without discussing it, angled off from the creek into the woods. They came to a clearing and stopped. With the thick, tranced sunlight, and the mist giving up a few wisps as it steamed, and a dragonfly that zipped beside them, hovered, then zipped on, Ingersoll had the strange feeling that they were underwater. They stood close, the baby between them, all the world leaning in to hear.

“What are you doing out here, really?” she asked.

“I had to see you.” He had not known this until he said it.

Neither spoke. Slowly she reached her arms out and, her eyes on Ingersoll, lifted the baby out of his hands. She placed Willy on her shoulder and stepped back, still tethered to Ingersoll’s gaze, and took another step back, and then turned and walked rapidly into the woods. Ingersoll couldn’t be sure but he thought, just before she disappeared, her small hand had raised, a white flash like a doe’s tail, but whether in farewell or warning he couldn’t say.

The sting of a blackfly on his neck and the slap he gave it roused him and he turned the way they’d come to retrieve his gun. It was still there, by the logjam. He slung its rawhide lace over his shoulder and decided to find the still quickly before Dixie Clay returned.

He found a barn, well swept and mostly empty, nothing but a milk cow with long green saliva dripping from her cud in a stall beside a swivel-eared mule. A path angled off behind the barn and he followed it and the breeze took on a metallic sweetness, like a spoonful of castor oil. It was easy then, he could just follow the odor. Amazing that he didn’t smell it the first time he was here. He’d provide excuses—the wind blowing from the west, say—but he knew his lapse owed more to a baby fussing in his lap, and a pair of speckled blue eyes coming up the gallery stairs, blue eyes with a rifle barrel between them. Of course, if he had known then that Dixie Clay’s husband was a bootlegger, he never would have left Willy here.

He spotted the shack over a little ridge and in a hollow, looking more like an elf cottage than a distillery, its slanted roof crosshatched with pine branches and tucked among the pines, the way a clever bird hides her nest.

Ingersoll flicked the safety off his rifle and waited. He heard nothing but a pileated woodpecker’s knock-knock joke and saw nothing but the invisible hand of a breeze smoothing the ridge’s long grasses. The grasses weren’t long by the door, though—feet had beaten a path to what must be the supply shed. Etchings of wheelbarrow tracks filled with water. And another path must go back to the stream, where there’d be a dock. He could imagine Jesse’s whole operation now.

After another moment of waiting, he darted to the door, laid his ear against it, and heard no sound. He brought his eye to a crack in the boards and saw no movement. The door was locked. He thought of his old trench knife with its knuckle guard, left beside the German belt buckle embossed
Gott Mitt Uns
in a motel in Jersey City that he and Ham had had to vacate precipitously. Instead of the trench knife he had a utility knife now with several blades, and one did the trick. He swung the door open with the barrel of his rifle and found what he expected to find, the large drums and kegs connected with pipes, funnels, and coiled tubes.

But he found, too, what he did not expect. Even with only the light from the door, he could see the place was tidy, the dirt floor patterned from the drag of a broom’s bristles, the kegs gleaming where a shaft of sunlight reached them. A shelf where bottles were lined, several varieties in neat rows, slashes of black lightning aligned. Something was off here. There was a map or canvas on the far wall, must be hiding something. He crossed in the gloom and with his rifle lifted the corner of the cloth but nothing was there but more wall. The cloth floated down and then it occurred to him what it was. Curtains. Green-checked curtains. Beside a table that held a stack of books. He picked up the top one:
The Sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
The next:
Best Loved Poems to Memorize and Recite
. Smudge on the wall to show where the kerosene lantern usually sat.

Christ almighty, this was
her
still. It was Dixie Clay, not Jesse, he should be arresting. He reeled toward the door and then saw it. On the thumper keg, one of the nippled baby bottles he’d bought for Junior and left with the girl.

She was running the still with the baby.

He’d done something worse than giving a baby to a bootlegger’s wife. He’d given it to the bootlegger.

He flung the door open and it smacked against the wall and rebounded closed. In the harshest light imaginable he stood and realized he’d have to tell Ham. He gave a snort of bitter laughter, recalling the cupped flame of his precious pride, that he hadn’t abandoned the baby in the Greenville sheriff’s office or the chaotic orphanage. Oh no, not Ingersoll, saint of orphans and outcasts: he’d given the baby to a bootlegger, perhaps a murderer. And now the baby would be orphaned once again, Dixie Clay destined for the prison or the grave.

Chapter 10

D
ixie Clay was torn from her nightmare by the shovel-in-gravel scrape of thunder. She lay stunned by her visions, for they were of a terrible black steam train. Long windowless cars humpbacked over each hill on Seven Hills and chuffed closer, louder, needing no track at all, coming to cart her away, to take her to the lynching tree. The two missing revenuers were leaning out the windows. So she snatched Willy from his baby bed and took off into the woods and up the ridge, and when she turned, she saw the train slow at her drive then take the sharp right, following her yet. She thought,
I’ll lead it to the still, I don’t care, and we’ll make our escape.
So she ran past the still, but the train kept coming, gaining on her. She broke through the woods to the stream and held Willy aloft while fording, passing the bloated carcasses of a doe and fawn caught in a logjam, the train snorting its smoke at her back. That’s when she realized it was coming not for her, or for the still, but for Willy.

She was glad the thunder had woken her, though Lord she hated thunder by now, hated thunderclouds, hated clouds. It stormed so often that storms managed to be both terrifying and tedious. Still, better wake in this storm than sleep in that dream. She lay unmoving in the dark and then heard the shovel-in-gravel again but it was coming not from outside but inside her room. It was coming from Willy.

When they’d returned from the still around 3
A.M.,
she’d given him his night bottle and he’d coughed then too and she’d thought he’d gobbled too much milk—greedy baby!—and it had choked him. His cough had not been his sweet airball cough, a teacup-sized cough, soft as a match struck to light a lamp. His cough had been a knife scraping a tin plate. Now, shortly before dawn, he gave it again.

She rose and bent over his willow branch baby bed and studied him in the dim light. His color seemed high and fine, pink cheeks and closed eyes. She heaved a breath and made a step back to her bed when he coughed again. She turned and saw his body knock with the force of it, his eyes slitting open and gleaming in the half dark.

Hmmm. Willy has a cold. Naming it made it better: babies got colds, didn’t they, poor things. They got colds and you fretted but then they got better.

She’d had Willy for eleven days now and he’d not suffered so much as a sniffle, but this weather could get the best of anyone. Yesterday in the seam where the chimney met the wall, a line of mushrooms had knobbed forth like hat hooks. It was, as Jesse would say, wetter than an otter’s pocket. Where was Jesse now? She hadn’t seen him since the day Ingersoll had met her at the stream, and that was four days ago.

Well, okay, she wouldn’t go shining this evening, not one drop of rain splashing onto Willy as she ran to the still, no toweling off the baby’s plump legs as he balanced on the thumper keg. It was a pleasant thought to settle into. She’d baby her baby today.

Dixie Clay lifted Willy to her shoulder and walked to the kitchen to warm his milk and her coffee. It was still dark, so she turned on the electric light. At the sink, filling the kettle, she saw Willy’s reflection, the back of his neck looking mottled. She lowered him and found the pink of his cheeks was blotched onto his forehead and neck. She put the back of her hand to his brow and it was warm. Too warm. Fever warm. In fact, she could feel the heat of his body through her nightdress. She carried him to the marble-topped console she’d conscripted for a diaper changer and lined with towels. Usually when she laid him down, he’d ball his legs into his body, sometimes grabbing a foot, but now he lay lankly. He did not cry. The diaper wasn’t wet. She pinned it around him again, frowning.

Back in the kitchen she made his bottle and carried him to the rocker. Usually when she held up the bottle he fastened his eyes on it and opened his mouth and sometimes even flapped his arms. He’d suck, gazing at her, perhaps lifting an erratic arm to swat her nose. But now his mouth wasn’t even closing around the rubber nipple. Dixie Clay squeezed it, but his tongue was slack and the milk dribbled out. He seemed to be panting. She put the bottle down and lifted him onto her shoulder again. His forehead was sweaty on her neck. An aura of heat emanated from his body, and patting his back was like moving her hand toward and away from a fire. His panting grew a furry quality. He coughed again, and it was terrible. Great wings of panic thrashed in her.

Not again, Lord. Not again. You took my firstborn. You leave us now. You leave me this child. You let him be.

Behind the thunderheads, the sky had lightened a notch. She rocked Willy and prayed except it wasn’t prayers so much as threats, promises and threats, lamentations and threats. His chest spasmed with each raspy-aired bark. And Jesse gone with the car. And Jesse gone every time she needed him.

Lord, if this child dies, I will kill Jesse. And it will be your fault.

The rain fell in gusts, which she watched out the kitchen window over the baby’s damp head. Sheets of rain were blown from the left to the right and then passed beyond the window, like panels of rain, like funny papers erased of their pictures and words. She clasped Willy to her and pumped the chair.

That’s right, God: give me a son and then set a match to him.

On Dixie Clay’s tenth birthday she and Lucius had been playing in the barn’s hayloft and started squabbling over a wooden whirligig and she’d hidden his spectacles. When he gave chase, he misjudged the distance to the loft edge and fell over, breaking an ankle. A miracle, said her father, he could have broken his back. “We’ll tell your mother it was an accident,” he decided. “She’s near her time and doesn’t need to be ruffled.” But Lucius tattled and her mother was indeed ruffled, and three weeks later she was breech-birth dead. Dixie Clay confided in her father that she’d caused them, these deaths her punishment, but her father was emphatic, one hand on each of her cheeks, No, no. It had nothing to do with her. And he made her promise not to think that the world organized itself to spite her or reward her, the world just was, and good could come from praying but not the good she expected when praying for sunny weather for the county fair.

Dixie Clay knew that her father’d been right—she was not so important as to be the focus of God’s machinations—but it was hard not to view Willy’s illness as retribution for two revenuers who wouldn’t be returning to their children.

The day had begun a thousand hours prior, yet the mantel clock read 10
A.M.
She rocked her child, waiting for the fever to break, for the rains to stop, for the slam of Jesse’s car door. Imagine being able to telephone the doctor from this very room. There’d been talk of installing lines out this far, but of course the city had run out of money after lining Main Street and Old Barn and Broad Street. Broad Street, where the mayor lived. She cursed the mayor. She considered going for help but feared taking Willy out in the storm would make him sicker. Then another cough from Willy like butcher paper torn from its roll. She rose with him and walked to the door. Through the shaking, rain-pebbled window, she couldn’t even see the pines beyond the gallery. She turned and went back to the rocker.

Okay,
she told herself,
I’ll give it till noon, and if Willy isn’t improved, we ride for the doctor.
Come hell or high water: she was in both.

The deadline gave her a bitter determination and the rocker clacked like a metronome measuring a song no one wanted to hear. The child’s eyes were slits, glittery slits. His pupils seemed small. He would take no milk. He did not cry. She peeled him from her shoulder with a wet sound and checked his diaper and it was wet only from sweat. He’d left a baby-shaped spot on her dress. She gave him a sponge bath with cool water.

Finally the clock struck noon and she sprang like a mousetrap. She suited up like she was going to war, which in a way she was. She bundled the baby inside her apron and yanked on Jesse’s old wide-brimmed leather hat as a rain break for Willy’s body. Even through her dress the child felt like a branding iron. Dixie Clay cradled the aproned child as she ran splashing to the stable where she tossed the saddle on the back of sleeping Chester, who brayed and danced sideways. As she tightened the straps she spoke to the mule of what they must do. They set off, through watery mud that completely obscured the road. Only the rows of pines and Old Man Marvin’s mailbox told her she hadn’t lost it altogether.

She wasn’t far down Seven Hills, the rain horizontal, straight at her, when they came upon a brown Chrysler turned sideways in the road, its stuttering engine masked by the storm. Beyond the fogged windows she could see three black hats. The driver’s elbow worked to roll down the window.

“Mrs. Holliver!” shouted the driver as she brought Chester closer. “Tell Jesse we come for the delivery but can’t get there.”

The driver’s squashed nose she’d seen before. Where? In the driveway, counting dollars by the light of the Chrysler’s headlamps.

“We’re heading back. Tell Jesse—”

“Take us to town. We need the doctor.”

“What?”

“Baby’s sick. Fever.”

“Baby? You got a baby?”

She pulled down the apron bib. Sweat-slick hairs pressed darkly to Willy’s skull, eyes closed and too deep in his head, raisins pressed into gingerbread.

“Hellfire.” The driver drew his breath. “Get in.”

But when the driver turned back to the other two passengers, something was said. He faced her again where she had slid off the mule but didn’t meet her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Holliver. Can’t take no chances on diphtheria. We’ll send the doctor out.”

“We’ll ride in the back,” she pleaded. But the driver was already rolling up his window. She shouted, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars. Each. A case of whiskey—”

But he had the Chrysler in reverse, its wheels throwing a sheet of water over the mule. “We’ll send Dr. Devaney on out,” he shouted through the window crack. “You go home now, Missus Holliver. The doc will be there directly and your young’un will be fit as a fiddle by teatime.” And with that the car lurched forward and in just a few feet both the sound and sight of it were lost to the everlasting rain.

I
t was close to 10
P.M.
, Dixie Clay pacing with the baby held in front of her like a goblet, when there was a banging on her door. She ran to unlock the bolt, already yelling, “Oh, thank God you’re here. Thank God—”

But it wasn’t Dr. Devaney with his black satchel. It was Ingersoll, shucking off his slicker right there on the gallery, tossing his hat aside. He stepped forward and filled the doorway, rain coursing off the saddlebag that he dropped to take the baby before she could even make sense of things.

“Wait,” she said. “No. He’s sick, he’s burning up. I’m waiting for—”

“Doctor’s not coming.” Ingersoll wasn’t looking at her but walking with the baby to the lamp. He rested the child on one palm and with the other turned its chin from side to side. He parted Willy’s eyelids with his thumb and index finger and looked in.

“Not coming? But—”

“Not coming.” He thumbed the baby’s mottled chin down and peered into his throat. “I need alcohol. Not to drink. For the fever. Alcohol, cold water, towel. Now.”

The baby did his cough, one-two-three barks, Dixie Clay with a hand to her mouth while his chest jumped, as if snagged by a fishing line.

“Now!” Ingersoll yelled. And she whirled about and opened the crate by the pantry and lifted a half-pint of whiskey and handed it to him as he strode past into the kitchen. She followed and saw him grab the dish towel off the stove handle, then bite the cork from the bottle and spit it out. At the sink he found a bowl, poured it half full with the whiskey, filled it the rest of the way from the tap.

“Hold him,” he said, and then slid one of the baby’s arms out of its swaddling and dabbed the dish towel in the bowl and then blotted from Willy’s shoulder to his wrist. Then he rolled Willy’s limp arm between his large hands, like dough that you elongate for a pretzel. Ingersoll tucked that arm back in and removed the other and did the same, his movements brisk and confident.

“What you’re doing—how can I—”

“The alcohol evaporates,” he told her, moving to a leg now, “and it cools him, and we rub him down, see, we bring the blood to the surface. We break the fever. It’s cooling him. We’ve gotta break the fever first.”

Ingersoll continued with the other leg, the torso, and then took Willy from Dixie Clay and flipped him to do his back. “You got a croup kettle?”

She shook her head.

“Then get your teakettle going.”

She ran to the stove while Ingersoll crossed her kitchen in three long strides and entered the hall and returned with the baby bed. He flung it before the stove and yelled to Dixie Clay, “Get a sheet, a bedsheet.” She flew to yank one from her bed and when she returned he’d laid Willy in his crib. They kneeled on either side and Ingersoll tented the sheet over their heads, holding one end so the kettle’s spout was under the sheet.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now,” he told her, “now we steam it out.”

“Steam it out? Diphtheria?”

“Baby doesn’t have diphtheria, least I don’t think so. Doesn’t have that layer of skin on the back of his throat, where tonsils grow. Baby has pneumonia, which has led to croup.”

They bent over the crib in the cloud built by that kettle, Ingersoll massaging the baby’s chest or giving him another alcohol rub, Dixie Clay refilling the kettle or tightening the sheet. As the steam grew thicker the baby’s brassy cough worsened, his whole body spasming, snatched by some dreadful fist. Dixie Clay rubbed her palm over the baby’s slick head, felt that hollow where the halves of the skull met, and the depression seemed deeper, sunken like earth over a coal mine. She tried to make the baby take the bottle, but what got inside was flung back at her with a cough. Each breath seemed to cost him something terrible. She wished she could do the breathing, do the coughing, take the sick into her own lungs. “Please God please God please God,” she said silently or maybe aloud. Through the fog of their own making, the man was pressing his ear to the baby’s rattling chest, long locks of his brown hair dripping sweat on the baby. She was herself raining, sweat and tears both plopping on the floor or on the baby as she leaned to tuck the sheet around the kettle but keep it from catching afire.