Shadow Baby (18 page)

Why did you take Glass Factory instead of Route 12?

My hermit grandfather couldn’t hear me. He was too intent on working the deerskin for my moccasins, softening the stiff leather so that the moccasins he was making as a gift for me would fit my feet like flesh and never, never hurt me.

T
he night of the fire, it snowed. It was the kind of snow that falls straight down, each flake thick and furry. Silent snow that silences everything it touches. Snow that makes the entire world quiet.

The old man and I were going to make gingersnaps that night. We were moving on, past sugar cookies and into gingersnaps. A true gingersnap is thin and crisp, a dry, light cookie. The opposite of the kind of snow that was falling that night.

“A gingersnap should break cleanly,” the old man said. “It should snap.”

Hence the name. A name reflecting the purpose, the very sound of the cookie when broken. When Tamar dropped me off at the entrance to Nine Mile Trailer Park, I stood by the sign for a minute and tried to catch snowflakes on my tongue. It’s not easy to do. You would think, in a snow falling so thick and straight and heavy, that you would be able to have a mouthful of snow in just a minute or two. Just lean your head back, open your mouth, and let the cold whiteness enter.

It doesn’t work that way. I stood with my head back and my tongue out until I saw the lights go on in the church across Nine Mile Creek. Stained glass, throwing stained shadows on the white ground. You could barely see them, through the falling snow.

Across the creek Tamar was practicing with the choir she’s never sung in, and in his trailer I imagined the old man laying out the measuring cup, the measuring spoons, the flour and salt and sugar and ginger, everything necessary for making gingersnaps. Former olive oil cans were hanging by the window, waiting for their destiny to be fulfilled.

I can still see them in my mind. I can see the way they swung in the breeze in the summer, when the old man opened all the windows. I can hear the sound the cookie cutters made then, like ice when it freezes on Deeper Lake up in the Adirondacks, pushing against the shore with a sound like broken glass tinkling. I can still see myself on that night, standing at the entrance to Nine Mile Trailer Park, halfway between my mother across the creek and the old man in his kitchen.

W
hen I stopped trying to catch snowflakes on my tongue, I walked up the lane to the old man’s trailer. At first I didn’t understand the light in his window. It was an odd light, orange. An irregular light. The light from a lamp is not irregular. Then I saw the lady two trailers down fling open her door. A sound in the air around me grew high and loud. Then I knew that the orange dancing light was a fire in the old man’s trailer, and the sound all around me was me, screaming. “Did you see him come out?” I screamed to the lady two
trailers down. She leaned out her door. She had socks on her feet and she kept stepping on one foot, then the other. Her feet will freeze, I heard myself thinking at the same time as I was yelling at her.

“Did you see him come out?”

My voice kept screaming out of my throat. I could hear my throat getting raw just in the sound of my words. The lady hopped to her other foot.

“Did you see him come out?”

She frowned. I could see her trying to figure out what I was saying. Then she figured it out and shook her head. Back and forth. She mouthed some words at me.
No. No. I didn’t see him
.

She hopped onto her other foot, then she went back inside her trailer. The door was still open. I stood in the old man’s yard. I listened for sirens: none.

“Call the fire department!” I screamed.

I wanted to hear those sirens. I wanted the Floyd Volunteer Fire Department to be on their way. I looked across Nine Mile Creek. The church windows were lit up. They were still singing. Did no one see the flames? Did none of them stop their singing and look out the window and see that the old man’s trailer was on fire?

My feet were numb. My sneakers were no good in the snow. What I had intended was to get out of the car and walk only on the trailer park road, and then only on the path that the old man shoveled to his steps. That’s what I had intended to do.

“Put your boots on,” Tamar had said before we got in the car.

“They’re wet.”

She gave me a look.

“Soaked,” I said. “I would catch my death of pneumonia, should someone force me to wear those boots.”

I could see her thoughts chase themselves around on her face.
And why are they soaked?
she wanted to ask.
Can this be my daughter, Miss Prepared For All Snow Emergencies, refusing to wear winter boots on a cold winter night?

And whose fault is that?
she would’ve said, if I had told her why my boots were wet. There was no good reason. It was a reasonless situation. I got off the bus, and I saw the drift, and for once my feet just wanted to jump into it.

The church windows were still lit. You could hardly see them because the flames from the old man’s trailer had grown so much brighter. The lady came back out on her trailer steps. She had put her boots on and she was carrying a broom. She ran through the snow to where I was standing.

“Did you see him come out?”

She shook her head again. She looked angry.

Then she started beating at tiny flames with the broom, the tiny flames floating from the window. Black and white wisps with a glow of orange coal, drifting down to the snow.

What good would that do?

Then I remembered my roll of green adding-machine paper. I could picture it, lying in its special drawer on the curved wall at the end of the old man’s kitchen that was burning up.

Black dots were crawling through the snow when I looked over to the church again. The windows were still bright through the woods, but black dots were crawling in the snow. The biggest dot, the one in front, ran right through the creek and up the bank toward me. It got bigger and bigger. It turned
into Tamar, running so fast that she looked like someone I didn’t know.

“Did you see him come out?” I screamed at her. “Did you see him come out?”

She came running up to me and grabbed me. She had no jacket or boots. No gloves or hat.

“Did you? Did you?”

Tamar couldn’t talk. She was breathing too hard. She bent over in the middle and sucked in air. I hit her on the back. “Did you see him come out?”

How could she? She was practicing with the choir in the church with the lit windows. No one but me knew about the secret patch of clear glass in the stained window in the churchhouse, that if you stood on a chair you could peek through it and see the Nine Mile Trailer Park through the woods. All Tamar could’ve heard was the sound of singing. She couldn’t have heard the snow drifting down. She couldn’t have heard the scrape of a match, whatever match it was that lit the fire that was burning down the old man’s trailer.

There was fire coming out of the bedroom window now. No one in all the people standing around us now would’ve known that was the bedroom window except for me. I was the only one who knew the trailer from the inside. I was the only one who knew that behind that window was where the old man slept. I was the only one who knew that my spool of adding-machine paper, which held the old man’s life in its curls of words, was trapped in its tin paper holder in the special curved kitchen drawer.

I cupped my mittens full of snow and shoved them against my mouth. Then I jerked away from Tamar and ran into the trailer. My head was down when I ran in, and the snow was
white-cold against my mouth and cheeks. Then there was a peculiar feeling on my head. I had never felt that feeling before. I smelled a certain smell and I knew that the feeling was the smell, and that it meant that my hair was on fire. Where was the old man? Where was the special kitchen drawer? Where was Clara winter? I sucked in air through my ball of snow, but there was no more snow. The snow was gone, and fire had taken its place.

I
asked the old man a question once, on how he would choose to die, and no answer was forthcoming. I repeated my question several times, in several different ways, but the old man never answered. Instead, he posed a question to me.

“Am I guilty?” he said.

“That’s not the question,” I said.

“But am I?”

“You’re on death row!” I said. “You have to choose: lethal injection or electric chair. It doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or not.”

“But am I?”

I gave up. I took the advice given to me by Tamar when asked about Baby Girl Winter: “Give up.” No answer to my death row question was to be forthcoming from the old man. He was fixated instead on the question of guilt. Now that the old man is gone, I think about that. I wonder how my question sounded to the old man. I wonder if he thought I was asking him about guilt.

My death row question was the kind of question that
I used to ask during lunch in the Sterns Middle School cafeteria. It was a Clara winter type of question. I once posed a dying question to the entire lunch table, after I found out about the old man leaving his brother, Eli, in the snow. The old man was still alive then.

“Here’s a question,” I said. “How would you rather die? Burning to death in a fire, or freezing to death in a snow-bank?”

They stopped eating to consider.

“That is such a Clara Winter type of question,” Jackie Phillips said.

“Burning,” one of the other girls said. “It’s quicker. Or wait. Maybe freezing.”

“Freezing,” another one said. “Burning’s too painful.”

“Yeah,” somebody else said. “Definitely freezing. I heard that if you freeze to death it’s painless after the first few minutes.”

“You just fall asleep. You stop shivering, and you fall asleep.”

“First your toes go, then your fingers, then your lower legs, then your forearms, then your thighs, then your upper arms, then your crotch, your stomach, your chest, and finally your head.”

“Your head’s the last thing to go.”

“That’s because all the blood goes to your brain, because that’s the most important thing.”

I betrayed the old man when I asked that question. There’s more than one way to betray someone. You can tell a secret about someone. You can let loose something that you know about an old man, something that happened to him, something that the old man did, without ever mentioning him by
name, and then that secret is alive in the world, living and growing and being talked about. At the lunch table five girls sat talking calmly about what happens when you freeze to death, without ever knowing that in our town, in a trailer only half a mile from the school cafeteria, there was an immigrant whose little brother had frozen to death. The girls at the lunch table were talking about how Eli had died, and they didn’t even know it.

But I did. That’s one way you can betray someone.

“Stop talking about freezing to death,” I said.

They looked at me.

“Why?” Jackie Phillips said. “You’re the one who asked the question in the first place, Miss Clara.”

“You haven’t even talked about burning to death,” I said. “Isn’t there anyone who would choose burning to death? That’s the martyr’s way to die.”

They made faces.

“Too painful.”

“Yeah. It’s a horrible way to die.”

“Think of Joan of Arc,” I said. “Think of those poor women in Salem. Think of widows in India committing suttee.”

They looked at each other. Had they ever heard of Indian widows committing suttee? No. They may have heard of the Salem witch hunts, but they would not have known that the Salem women died by drowning or stoning. Maybe one non-witch was killed by burning to death. But that’s something most people don’t know. Mention “Salem witch hunt,” to most people, and all they think of is being tied to a stake and burned to death.

“It’s a fine way to die,” I said. “It’s a martyr’s death. It’s the death of someone who sacrifices her or his life for the sake of principle.”

“Objection,” Jackie Phillips said. “Irrelevant. Freezing’s the way to go.”

They all agreed. End of subject. On to sloppy joes.

W
hen I asked the girls at the lunch table that question—
if you had to, would you rather die by freezing or burning?
—the old man was still alive. It was an idle question then, but I think about that day now. Now that the old man is dead by fire, I think about it. Every one of the girls chose freezing to death. There was no question. No debate. Burning was rejected out of hand.