Shadow Baby (21 page)

Think about it. You walk around with dead hair hanging off your head. The only thing about hair that’s alive is its roots. The roots push up new hair, but that new hair is already dead. In a way, having your hair burned off in a fire is not a tragedy at all; that hair was not alive.

They hauled the old man’s trailer away. One day it was there, with bent metal strips hanging out of the black windows, with black cement steps leading up to the door that was burned away, with the curved kitchen end burnt into a lump, and then the next day it wasn’t.

“Where’s Georg’s trailer?” I asked Tamar.

I’ve started calling him
Georg
, so that anyone who’s listening will know the way his name was pronounced.

“They hauled it away.”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Who hauled it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know it was hauled?”

“That’s what they do with trailers that are too old, or burnt up, or are otherwise unusable.”

Did anyone go through the old man’s trailer before they hauled it away? Did anyone search through the rubble to see if there was anything worthwhile preserving in the ruins? Were there people with masks and white suits and boots, moving slowly from miniature room to miniature room, sifting through the ashes, looking for remnants of the old man’s life?

“Did they take the forge, too?” I asked Tamar.

“What forge?”

“His forge,” I said. “Don’t you even know about his
forge
?”

“No.”

“He was a metalworker,” I said. “Have you ever heard of a metalworker without a forge?”

“No,” Tamar said. “I guess I haven’t.”

“Have you ever heard of a metalworker without tin snips? Jewelry pliers? A soldering iron? A torch? Pre–cookie cutters?”

“Pre–cookie cutters,” Tamar said. “Pre, cookie, cutters.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Pre–cookie cutters. Don’t ask me to explain. Don’t ask me to show you the relationship between things. Don’t ask me about consistencies, and objects that are beautiful as well as useful.”

Tamar looked at me. Words kept spilling out of me, secret words, words and phrases that were the old man’s and mine. I ran out of the room to stop those precious words from wasting themselves in the blank air between Tamar and me.

I asked Mr. Jewell if he knew what had happened to the forge.

“I don’t know, Miss Clara,” he said. “One day the trailer was there, and the next it wasn’t, and I don’t know what happened to the forge.”

No one knew. I wondered about the forge. Did someone under cover of darkness steal into the ruins and take it while I was in the hospital with burned lungs? Is someone in North Sterns now working with fire at a backyard forge? Or did it tumble into Nine Mile Creek when the fire trucks were putting out the fire? Is it possible that the forge is even now rusting in the dark water of Nine Mile Creek? In the fullness of time the destiny of the old man’s forge may be revealed to me. But I doubt it.

The old man had no family. He had no friends, except silent friends. His silent friends were friends like Crystal Zielinski at Crystal’s Diner, who took the onions that the old man brought her and chopped them into tuna salad. Friends like Harold Jewell, who sometimes used to give the old man a Persian dough nut for free.

“He has the money to pay for that Persian,” I said to Mr. Jewell once.

I wanted Mr. Jewell to know that the old man was not a bag person. He had a home and an onion garden. He had a visitor every Wednesday night. He had enough money to pay for a Persian doughnut without it being given to him for free.

“You don’t have to feel sorry for the old man,” I said to Mr. Jewell.

He gave me a look.

“I don’t feel sorry for Mr. Kominsky, Clara,” Mr. Jewell said. “I give him a Persian doughnut because I consider him my friend.”

I am the last of my line
, the old man had said to me in the beginning of my oral history project. That was one of the first things the old man ever said to me, despite the fact that he was chary with his words.

“Did the fire start because the old man used a can of flammable stuff in the wrong way?” I said. “Is that how it started?”

Tamar looked at me.

“What are you really asking?” she said.

If it had been common knowledge in Sterns that the old man didn’t know how to read, then Tamar would have immediately known what I was trying to ask. What I was trying to ask was: if the old man had known how to read, would the fire not have started? Would the old man still be alive? Would
I still be going down on Wednesday nights while Tamar was at choir practice, eating toast thickly spread with margarine and drinking hot chocolate with extra milk?

“Did he use something flammable in the wrong way? Did he not pay attention to the directions?”

She was still looking at me.

“Are you what-iffing?” she said. “Are you retracing? Are you saying if that hadn’t happened then that wouldn’t have happened and that wouldn’t have happened and the old man would still be alive?”

I looked back at her.

“Is that what you’re doing?” she said.

“What I’m doing,” I said, “is asking if the old man neglected to read the fine print.”

“What does it matter, Clara?” Tamar said. “What does it matter now?”

T
amar forgot about my chickens when I was in the hospital. For three weeks in March, a flock of insane chickens were without food or water. Insane chickens paced and pecked the cracked concrete floor of the broken-down barn, while Tamar slept on a cot by the side of my bed at Utica Memorial. The day I got home I put on my boots and headed down there. Tamar was busy patching her moccasins with duct tape.

I walked into the broken-down barn, breathing through my mouth because of the stink of the chicken manure. It was quiet. No peeps, no clucks. No pecking and scratching around in the dirt. I put my sneakers one in front of the other like an Indian guide. I glided up to the pen, stuck my head over the side.

All their necks were broken. I could tell by the weird angles of their heads. My chickens had died not by starvation but by murder. Over in the corner the dollhouse lay tipped on its side, with a chicken lying half-in and half-out of the living room, its wing sticking through the window. Over in the other corner there was a hole burrowed through the broken-down barn siding. Weasel, I thought. I knew about weasels from my research. They kill for fun, just to be mean. They might suck a little blood, but that’s it.

Tamar put on her boots right away when I told her the chickens were all dead.

“Oh Jesus,” she said. “I completely forgot about them.”

“They died not from starvation but from murder,” I said. “A weasel got them while I was in the hospital.”

She wasn’t listening. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “They never once crossed my mind. Clara, I am so sorry.”

But halfway across the pasture Tamar stopped and got a look on her face.

“Clara, what is that smell?”

I tried to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Smell?” I said. “What smell?”

Then I saw the way Tamar was looking at me.

“Oh, that smell,” I said. “I guess I do smell it after all. Dead chickens.”

“That isn’t dead chickens I’m smelling, Clara.”

She started walking fast toward the broken-down door to the broken-down barn.

“Ma,” I called.

The back of her ripped lumberjacket was getting away from me.

“What,” she called back without turning around.

“Ma! I forgot to tell you that those chickens were not normal. They were abnormal chickens. They were …
psychotic
chickens.”

She turned around.

“Yes,” I said. “Psychotic chickens. The rooster tried to kill me.”

I scrabbled around on my scalp where there was still hair, searching for old scabs to show her. Too late, though. She was already into the barn.

“My God,” she said.

I came up behind her. Afraid to touch her plaid shoulder. I looked around the barn with her eyes. Fermenting feed in heaps in the pen, where the water I tossed had landed on the feed I spilled. Piles of chicken manure smeared on the pitted cement floor. Massacred chickens strewn like garbage. A searing smell of sulphur and manure and death. Tamar’s eyes turned on me were full of a look I had never seen from her before.

“You smell that sulphur smell, Clara? On top of the manure smell?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s a pile of eggs somewhere in this pen. Those hens were laying all this time.”

Tamar opened up the gate and walked on in. She waded through the smeary manure piles, kicked a dead hen out of the way. She went over to the pile of hay in the corner and swiped off the top wisps.

“Here they are.”

There they were. A million brown eggs, a mountain of brown eggs. Some crushed against each other, some whole and perfect. I stared at that pile of eggs. There was a little
heave from the heap of dark feathers in the dollhouse. Another little heave. It was the CJ Wilson chicken. I crouched down in front of him. His beady eye stared back. He kicked a yellow claw. I could tell he was not going to live. I didn’t know how he had managed to live as long as he had.

I started to sing to him. “Oh Susannah, oh don’t you cry for me … For I’ve come from Alabama, with my banjo on my knee.”

I couldn’t remember the rest of the words.

“Clara,” Tamar said.

She came up and knelt by me and the CJ Wilson chicken. She put her arms around me.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me about these chickens.”

“What about them?”

Tamar squeezed my arms and rocked. “Everything about them,” she said.

“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “They’re not normal chickens. They never were. They’re psychotic chickens, especially that CJ Wilson one.”

Tamar’s arms around me were too tight.

“Could you stop?” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

All around us the smell rose, thick and heavy. I felt as if I were choking to death in a broken-down barn full of dead insane chickens. All the months, the months and months I had kept the secret of my vicious chickens came crowding down on me and I couldn’t stand it. Days and weeks and months of not telling anyone about the chickens, their meanness and cruelty, the way they kept after me, pecking and hissing and clawing, came crawling up out of the heaps of dead dark feathers,
snaking around me, invisible and strangling. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.

“You should have told me,” Tamar said. “You should have told me about these chickens.”

“Why?” I said.

“I could have helped.”

“You wouldn’t have helped. You’ve never helped.”

Words, crawling out of me, me not stopping them. Tamar’s arms falling away and a choking sound coming from her. The smell of death rising around us like the locusts that once ate up all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s summer fields, and the CJ Wilson chicken convulsing where he lay. Tamar leaned away from me.

“You never told me about my grandfather, or my father, or Baby Girl,” I said. “No matter how many times I asked, you never told me. That’s the only thing I have ever asked you for help with, and you never helped.”

Tamar reached out to the CJ Wilson chicken but didn’t touch it. She took a deep breath of the rotten air around us.

“You listen to me,” she said. “Listen to me, Clara Winter.”

I held my breath against the stench of the broken-down barn and listened.

“There is nothing I could tell you that would help,” Tamar said.

I kept holding my breath.

“Nothing would help, and everything would hurt,” Tamar said.

I stared at CJ, lying there, heaving up now and then, its black eye dull. You must kill this chicken, I told myself. I said it out loud to give myself strength.
You must put him out of his misery
.

“Don’t worry,” I said to the chicken. I bent down close to where its ear must be. “Don’t you worry. It won’t hurt.”

Quick and clean, I thought. Make it quick and clean.

I picked up a chunk of broken-off cement and I brought it down on CJ Wilson’s head.

T
amar was at the kitchen sink brushing her teeth when C. Winter came to the door. I recognized him immediately. He was the same man who had sat in his apartment on Genesee Street in Utica, unable to meet my gaze. He came up the steps to the kitchen door. Tamar was behind me. One of her many oddities is that she prefers to brush her teeth at the kitchen sink, in front of the window. She likes the morning light, she says. At night, when it’s dark, she brushes in the bathroom.

“Hey,” he said.

What do you say to your grandfather, when you don’t know him?

“Hi.”

Behind me the sound of brushing stopped. I felt Tamar walking across the kitchen. The air she displaced moved before her. She held her toothbrush like a gun.

“Tamar?” my biological grandfather said.

She said nothing. She stood there with toothpaste foaming out of her mouth. When Tamar brushes her teeth she brushes for a long time. She leans against the sink and stares out the
window while she brushes. I timed her once: five minutes, thirty-three seconds.

“Tamar,” he said again.

He took his hat off. It was a Yankees baseball cap, one with the intertwined N and Y. That’s what they used to do in the olden days. A gentlemen, in the presence of a lady, would take his hat off. It was a social given. It would have been an extreme insult not to take your hat off in the presence of a lady. There were other places you had to take your hat off, too. Church, indoors, dinner. That was the social
more
of the time.

Tamar said nothing. She stood there with her toothbrush. She looked at him.

“Hi,” I said again to C. Winter.

“Hi,” he said.

C. Winter still couldn’t look at me. His eyes kept moving around. He stood there with his baseball cap in his hands. The time for hesitation was past. She who hesitates is lost, and much had already been lost. I looked up at C. Winter and asked him a question.