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Chapter 11
  Dead Babies

Nothing prepares you for the loss of your child.

When you get pregnant out come the doctors and nurses and Lamaze specialists. They show you how to change diapers, how to nurse, how to push and breathe during labor. They tell you what the baby should eat and warn you against the toxicity of eggs and honey and bovine milk, seemingly benign things unless you stuff them into your little baby.

There are stores dedicated to clothing your baby. Entire sections of the local grocery are filled with baby necessities, fluids for when they are sick, bibs for when they drool, plastic seats for when they ride in your car. Friends and neighbors pour into your yard when you release blue or pink balloons into the sky and announce your baby’s gender. People clap and cry and cheer your baby’s arrival.

It is different though when you lose your baby. People grow hushed and cover their mouth and turn away. Sure, they send food for a few days but after that gesture, afterward, after the afterlife where there is no life after, after you find the baby stiff in the crib for no good goddamned reason, after you find him nose-down in the kiddy pool in a few inches of water, after you find her behind the couch with a marble in her throat, after you find him on the dining room floor with a bullet in his head. After the friends and neighbors and family send food and maybe attend the funeral if there is one, because sometimes, if the baby dies in the womb they don’t even do that.

After all that you are a pariah. You are a topic of conversation. These conversations begin with the words, “Have you heard about,” and end with the words, “I can’t imagine.”

All the stuff in-between those two phrases is a garbled mess of disbelieving nods and hand-waving.

There are no classes about how you breathe. There are no doctors or nurses who rush to your side to guide you. There are no shelves in the store dedicated to burial clothes. Hell, there aren’t even greeting cards, maybe one that reads, “So sorry you lost your toddler down Old Man Johnston’s well. Better luck next time!”

People don’t discuss it with you. They discuss it all right but not with you, not anywhere near you. They shun you as if you are diseased, because you are diseased. You are ostracized and condemned and moved to
the other side
, wherever the hell that is, probably near hell because that’s how it feels. You are one of them, one of the others, one of those who lost their kid, so tragic, and have you heard about and I can’t imagine.

God gives you no reprieve. He allowed His son to be mutilated and killed, and so great is God’s love that He gave His only son so that you may be saved. Your son died for no great purpose. He died for no reason at all and yet you are charged to bear God’s deepest grief.

You are not God. No one worships your dead son and let’s not forget God didn’t handle the grieving all that well Himself. After three days, He couldn’t take it anymore and He raised His son back to life.

One afternoon you’re in the kitchen cutting onions to garnish a pot roast. You’re in a high mood because you’re high, just a touch of the white stuff this afternoon, just enough to get you through the rest of the day because you were up all night with your husband having slow sex on the couch and the bedroom. He loads his manhood with chemicals from a blue pill that keeps it hard for hours, hard as an aluminum bat.

Your husband is gone the next morning and that is all right. He is a tomcat and tomcats need to prowl, and you are not a prissy piss-pot who is going to micromanage his life. He leaves money for you on the kitchen table beside a cigar box full of pills and other necessities, not the least of which is a pinch of the white stuff, enough to get you through the day and if you ration it, enough to get you through the week or two he is away doing his tomcat things.

A pot roast is in the oven. It is summer and the house is hot, and you have the window open because when you started the roast, last week’s drippings smoked and blew a metallic-gray cloud out into the kitchen.

As you cut you hear a crack and a thump. The crack is a gunshot, one you know well because you have shot the gun a hundred times. “You need to learn to shoot, baby, I got bad people in my circles,” your husband tells you.

You feel the thump rise up from the floorboards of the house, through the soles of your feet, up the back of your legs and into your spine. Still gripping the knife and with electric steps you run into the dining area.

Your youngest son, the mistake, the goddamned stupid mistake from one night of careless sex that wasn’t even that great is sitting in a chair on his knees, holding the .38 pistol your husband calls
Mad Annie
because it is a woman’s gun with a woman’s one-pound pull on the trigger. The smoke from the shot lingers around the mistake like a gray, smoldering halo.

On the floor beneath the mistake is your oldest son. He is eighteen. He is beautiful. He is a god in a god’s body. He rests on the floor beside the chair the way a puppet might fall if you cut his strings and let him drop, arms flayed with his chest on his knees.

“I didn’t mean it,” your mistake says.

There are no preparatory classes for how you react in that moment. With one gentle pull of the finger a hammer falls. It slams into a firing pin which jabs the primer and ignites a touch of gunpowder. The exploding gas launches a small piece of lead into your older son’s head and lobotomizes him as surely as any doctor’s knife ever did.

You don’t hover over your oldest son lying prone on the floor. He is dead and you know it because you have seen enough dead things to know one from the other. You chase the mistake out of the house, screaming after him, waving the knife in front of you as if you can cut through time and space and distance and trade one son for the other, if you can only catch the little shit.

Chapter 12
  Peaches

The sun rose out of Beaumont and began its descent onto Houston.

Marty moved the toddler chair to the west side attic window and kept carving on the piece of Bois D’Arc wood. He alternated between the rough grit sandpaper, the smooth grit, and the Old Timer carving blade. He decided after he smoothed it and formed the finger grips that he should carve something into the handle.

His first thought was a snake. He could make Jim Bowie his snake-hunting knife, but then he decided that even though the blade was every bit of a foot that still wasn’t enough to make it a snake-hunting knife. He would need at least a machete to hunt snakes, and so Marty ruled out snakes on the handle.

After that he thought spiders but his father already laid claim to that image, and Marty didn’t like spiders anyway.

He finally settled on either an owl or a lizard. The owl ate snakes and the lizard ate spiders.
Why not both?
He rolled the handle in his hand and began carving first the owl. Owls are easy. So are lizards and it didn’t take him long to carve a good likeness of each of them.

When Marty looked up and wiped the sweat from his eyes, he peeked at the neighbor girl’s window. She had not been there a few minutes before, hadn’t been there an hour ago but she was there now, moderately obstructed through the limbs of the oak tree, but not so much that Marty could not see she was holding a sign with letters and an arrow on it.

She waved when she saw Marty and pointed at the sign.

Marty squinted and made out the word
Peaches?
The arrow pointed toward her back yard, where they had a couple of peach trees and the requisite squirrels that chittered about them. Marty pointed to her peach trees and realized he was pointing with the Bois D’Arc handle.

Sadie nodded.

Marty said, “Um, okay,” even though she couldn’t hear him.

She held up her fingers and signaled
okay.

•

Sweat covered Marty’s chest and back. He was shirtless. On top of the sweat was a layer of attic dust mixed with fine-powdered Bois D’Arc grains from his sandpaper work. His forearms were the worst and the back of his hands. He didn’t think much of it until he was walking across the back yard toward the fence where Sadie had somehow managed to arrive before him. He felt out-of-place, the way a church mouse might feel after shitting beneath the pulpit.

Sadie wore shorts and a white shirt with ruffles at the neck and arms and was barefoot because there was no reason for her to wear shoes. Her stickly legs were pulled up close to her chest where she sat resting her chin on her kneecaps. Some of the metal parts of her wheelchair had been painted pink, obviously after-market because Marty could see splattered areas at the corners where some of the spray paint had misted the nylon seating. Flowered stickers stuck to the back of the wheelchair and along the arms and legs.

Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and Marty realized he had never really looked at Sadie up close. She was the neighbor and he sometimes saw her mom pushing her down the road. He also knew her from school when she wheeled by going to real-class a couple of times a week, and from two years ago when she had her legs and still went to school full-time, but they never spoke. When she came to school he parted with the rest of them so poor Sadie Marsh could wheel down the hall with her head down, seemingly focused on her footing where feet no longer walked.

Her eyes were greenish-brown and big and until you got close, golden.

“Hi,” Sadie said.

“Hi,” Marty said. He waved the piece of Bois D’Arc wood at her. The Bowie knife was in his belt with the busted handle sticking out like a pirate’s sword. He didn’t want to leave anything in the attic anymore, not after last night.

“What are you doing today?” Sadie asked.

Marty shrugged. “Carving.”

“Wood?”

“Yeah.” Only the hurricane fence separated him from Sadie and Marty handed the piece of wood down to her. The top of her head was just about the height of the fence, near Marty’s sternum.

Sadie turned it over in her hand and rubbed Marty’s owl carving then his lizard. It was a green gecko, the kind that scaled the sides of the house.

“It’s nice,” Sadie said. She drew the handle along her palm the way someone might sharpen a blade against an Arkansas stone, pulling it across her palm rather than moving her palm along the wood. “It’s real smooth. You carved these pictures?”

“Yeah. My uncle taught me how to do it.”

“Mr. Cooper?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that what you did last summer, too, sat in the attic carving?”

“You saw me last summer?” Marty rubbed his jeans to wipe some of the dirt and wood dust off the back of his hands.

“Sure did. I even know how you get up there.” With the length of Bois D’Arc, Sadie pointed at the mimosa tree and outlined Marty’s path up the roof. “I wish I could do that, go up in the attic.”

“Why can’t you?” The words were out before Marty could stop them, and for a few seconds Sadie stared at him and he stared back. “Yeah. I carved some chess pieces with Uncle Cooper last summer before he died. They’re in the house somewhere. I don’t know where. My mom buried them.”

“Why did she bury them?” Sadie’s eyes moved to the back yard.

“Not out here. They’re still in the house, just buried.”

“Under what?”

“I dunno. Stuff. My mom likes to collect stuff. She has a lot of it in the house.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a knife handle,” Marty said, pointing to the Bois D’Arc.

“This?” Sadie wiggled the wood at him.

“Yeah. For this.” He slid the knife out of his belt and showed it to her. “It’s a Jim Bowie knife, like from the Alamo. See how big it is? It’s, like, bigger than my arm. If my mom caught me with this she would beat me senseless. She would slit my throat with it.”

“Can I see it?” Sadie held up a hand. Marty passed it down to her and she held the new handle against the knife, measuring it the way he had done when he first began carving it.

“It’s too long,” she said.

“No it ain’t. I need a piece to hold on to while I work, so I leave a handful at the bottom. I’ll cut it when I split it. I still need to cut it in half lengthwise, carve out a slot for the tang, and then mount it.”

“What’s a tang?”

Marty leaned over the hurricane fence and pointed at the metal shaft leading down the length of the knife’s original fake-ivory handle. “That’s the tang. This is a full-tang knife, means the metal of the blade goes all the way down through the handle, from hilt to the very bottom. Some of the cheap knives, they only have a half-tang where the metal stops halfway down the handle. Those break. This one is a tough knife. That new handle there won’t break, not in forever. That’s horse-apple wood, and the Indians used to make bows and tomahawks from that tree.”

As he spoke Marty heard the screen door slap on the back of his house, and when he glanced back his mother was walking across the yard. Her arms swung and her feet stomped and if she weren’t so small, she might look like a steam-roller about to plow him down.

When he turned back to Sadie, the knife and the wooden handle were gone, disappeared into some secret place Marty couldn’t see. Sadie’s hands rested on her knees and she smiled as if they had been talking about nothing more than peaches.

Marty’s mom clumped up behind him, grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him away from the fence. She wedged between Sadie and Marty and said to Sadie, “Who are you? What are you doing to my son?”

“I’m Sadie. We were just talking.”

“You’re Kathy Pickens’ daughter, ain’t you?” Marty’s mom pointed at Sadie’s house and Sadie nodded.

“Kathy Marsh, yes ma’am. She’s my mom.”

Marty saw the screen door of Sadie’s house open up and realized how similar the houses were laid out. The Marshes had not walled in their carport but left it open, and Sadie’s mom wound around a blue minivan parked under the carport and speed-walked through the back yard. Sadie’s mom was heftier than Marty’s, what someone might call voluptuous, and she held up one of her hands waving to them as if to say,
Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Marty’s mom turned away from Sadie and put her hands on Marty’s shoulders. She twisted him toward the house and pushed him a few steps to get him started.

“Well, we don’t associate with the
Marshes,
” his mom said. She shoved Marty through the yard and spoke as she walked. The words were loud enough for Sadie and her mom to hear, and his mom cocked her chin but not her eyes toward the neighboring yard. “We aren’t allowed to associate with them. They’re too good for us. We’re trash, white devil-worshipping trash.”

“Sadie-love,” Sadie’s mom said. “Come on in, baby, come on, come back in.”

The last thing Marty saw before his mother shoved him under the carport was Sadie’s mom motioning for her to hurry up and turn her chair around as if a tornado might be coming.