Shadow Baby (24 page)

“Did his eyes jiggle around back then?” I said.

“I don’t remember his eyes doing that.”

“Did he rock back and forth?”

“I don’t remember him doing that either.”

“Do you know if he told Tamar that certain things were her fault that actually were not her fault?” I said.

“No, I do not,” Crystal said.

“Do you remember if C. Winter loved Tamar?”

“He must have.”

“It’s not a law of nature,” I said. “It’s not written in stone.”

“Her mother loved her. Of that I’m sure.”

“Her mother died,” I said. “So did Georg Kominsky, American Immigrant.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I don’t know C. Winter, and Tamar didn’t know Georg Kominsky,” I said.

“She knew more about Mr. Kominsky than you might think,” Crystal said. “She went to see him. She wrote him a letter about you.”

“She did not.”

“Yes she did. Before you ever met him. When you told her you were going to do your, what was it, oral history project on him.”

A customer came in and sat down on the one of the red stools that twirl around at the counter. Crystal went over to him and took his order. She did not write it down. Crystal has the ability to remember any order given to her, no matter how many people in the group, and she never fails to remember who ordered what. It’s one of her talents. After she brought the man his grilled cheese she started wiping down the other end of the counter. I slid out of the booth and went over to where she was scrubbing at a dried chocolate fudge stain with her red rag. All Crystal’s rags are red, because of Johnny and his craving for it.

“Why?” I said.

Crystal rinsed the rag and resoaped it and started in on the stool tops. It’s not everyone who will scrub the top of every single diner stool every single day.

“Why do you think?” Crystal said. “She was making sure he was all right. She was making sure he was a good person who wouldn’t hurt her daughter. She was being a mother.”

“She didn’t tell me.”

“No, she didn’t. She thought you wouldn’t have wanted her to. Was she right?”

I considered.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, she was right.”

Crystal didn’t know the old man couldn’t read, just as Tamar didn’t know. The old man would have taken the letter and nodded his head. I could see him nodding his head, the way he used to do. He might have laid the letter on his kitchen table and let it sit there a while. Then he may well have put the letter into one of his kitchen drawers, ne’er to be touched by human hands, ne’er to be seen by human eyes.

Tamar picked me up at the diner after choir practice. I was helping Johnny write his name. I put my fingers over his and guided his hand around the piece of newspaper we were practicing on. J, o, h, n, n, y. It’s not easy to guide someone else’s hand in writing. Johnny loved it though. He loved seeing the red crayon letters of his name appear. He laughed and laughed. Tamar ruffled his hair on the way out of the diner.

“Bye, Johnny,” she said.

On the way home I pressed my nose against the cold car window. By cupping my hands around my eyes I blocked out the light from the car and stared out at the dark night sky.

“’Tis a clear night,” I said to Tamar. “And the stars glitter thickly in the firmament.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Tamar said. “You took the words right out of my mouth. ‘And the stars glitter thickly in the firmament’ was right on the tip of my tongue.”

“What did you say to the old man when you went to see him before my oral history project?” I said.

An ambush sentence, hanging in the air between us. She didn’t miss a beat.

“I told him that you were my daughter, a child of eleven, and that I would kill anyone who harmed you,” Tamar said. “I told him I would be watching him.”

No hemming or hawing, no mumbling, no prevaricating. That’s Tamar.

“And what did he say?”

“He listened. He nodded. He looked at me and I looked at him. We shook hands. I left.”

“And what did you say in the letter you wrote to him?”

“I told him about you.”

“What about me?”

“I told him that you were a strange child, that he should expect the unexpected when dealing with you. I told him that you were obsessed with the memory of a baby. I told him about your love of books, your book reports, and your stories.”

“Stories? What about stories?”

“I told him that stories are the way you look at the world. That stories are your salvation.”

Stories are your salvation
.

“And?” I said.

“And what?”

And what
, I thought. And what about Daphne Winter? What about a fake Adirondack hermit living in a primeval patch of forest? And what about the old man? What about his trailer, and his forge in the backyard, his dark-green sink in the bathroom? What about his refrigerator that held one quart of milk per week, no more no less, and his cupboard with its three orange-rimmed plates? What about his kitchen drawer that contained letters he couldn’t read, the wall lined with hooks that held our cookie cutters? What about the tin paper
holder he made for me, and the adding-machine paper that contained his heart and soul?

“What about his heart and soul?” I said to Tamar.

“His heart and soul,” she said. “His heart and soul are up to you, Clara. They’re your department.”

My mother, Tamar, holds contradictions within herself. They coexist, battling each other inside her. She craves and hates her father, C. Winter. She longs for and tries to forget her mother, that slow-dying mysterious woman. There may be no one she loves more than me, but every time she looks at me she sees my sister, Daphne. Warring ghosts fight each other inside my mother’s heart, and the battles have made her stern and strong.

T
hey never sifted through the ashes of the old man’s trailer. I asked the Floyd Volunteer Fire Marshal.

“Did anyone sift through the ashes?” I said. “Did anyone comb through the rubble, looking for anything salvageable from the old man’s belongings?”

He shook his head.

“There was nothing left to look through,” he said. “It burned to the ground.”

“No half-burnt belongings, even?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m sorry, Clara. I know he was a friend of yours.”

If someone had looked, they might have found salvageable objects from the old man’s trailer. Things that were scorched, bent from the heat, but still usable. There might have been things that to the untrained eye looked like junk, burnt beyond any conceivable use, but that to the someone in the know would have been useful. The trained eye can see the possibility of beauty and usefulness. The old man, had he not died in the fire at his trailer, had he come across the burnt ruins of another trailer in another time and place, would have
sifted through the rubble. The old man would have come away from the ruins of that fire with his hands full of possibility. After a time, the old man would have changed something that was only a possibility into something that existed, something whole, something with a place in the world.

I think about his hands sometimes. The hands of a metalworker are hands that work with fire. Most people may have looked at the old man’s hands and seen nothing but fingers, tendon, bone, and the skin that covers them all. They would not have known about the knowledge in the old man’s hands, what he knew how to do with his fingers, how he could take something that was a possibility and make it into something real.

If we had had more time, I might have asked him many questions, questions that I did not have time to think of. There are questions waiting in the future, questions that I will come to, and some will be questions that I want to ask the old man, and the old man will not be there to ask.

Some people may have thought of the old man as ugly or evil. The possibility exists that in Sterns, there are people who thought of him in that way. I used to think that the lady two trailers down from the old man thought of him as evil. There was something in the way she used to lean out her window and watch. She never said anything. Sometimes she came out of her door, onto her front step, and watched. If I had to pick, I would have picked that lady as someone who thought of the old man as evil.

But I would have been wrong.

That lady thought highly of the old man. She told me so. When I went back, after I got out of the hospital, and stood by the entrance to where the old man used to live, she came out of her trailer and walked down to where I was standing.

“They hauled it away,” she said. “The other day. Put some chains around it, pulled it up onto a flatbed, and then it was gone.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

We stood and looked at where the trailer had been for a while. Then I wanted to go. I had looked enough. There was no rubble to pick through. That had been cleaned up. With what, I don’t know.

“Well, bye,” I said.

“He was a good man,” she said. “He shoveled my steps every snowfall.”

“He did?”

“He did. Every snowfall, even an inch or two. An inch or two would’ve been easy enough to sweep off with my broom, but he was there first.”

I turned and started down the dirt road that leads to the entrance. She went back to her trailer.

“I thought very highly of George,” she called after me. “He used to bring me onions from his garden.”

T
he possibility of beauty exists in an enameled pot rusted through at the bottom, lying in the woods just off Sterns Valley Road. There’s a curved handle on the rusted pot, attached to either side. I lifted it up by the handle and swung it back and forth. It squeaked a little, and the handle was rusty, but the possibility was there.

The old man would have seen it, too.

I have the old man’s eyes. He trained me to see the possibility of beauty, and that is what I see. I can see it everywhere,
in a dented olive oil can, in an old pioneer pot on the Sterns Valley Road.

Fragments of rusted metal flaked off the worn-out bottom of the pot, and the sides of the pot gave when I pushed on them. It crumpled in my hands, all except for the handle. This pot’s been through a fire, I thought. It could have been left over in the ruins of a long-ago blaze on Sterns Valley Road.

This pot may have been a pioneer pot, suspended over the glowing coals of a pioneer fire.

It may have belonged to a pioneer mother on her way west. Every night she used this pot to cook stew for her pioneer husband and children. Every evening her oldest child scrubbed it out with sand by the creek, and every morning the pioneer mother cooked cornmeal mush in it for breakfast. You have to be extremely careful when cooking cornmeal mush. You have to sift the cornmeal into the boiling water in a fine stream between your fingers, stirring constantly all the while, or else the cornmeal mush will be an inedible mess of lumps.

That’s a true fact. I read it in a pioneer book.

One morning, as the pioneer family packed up their belongings from camping overnight on what is now the Sterns Valley Road but back then was a nameless trail winding through tall meadow grass, the pioneer mother placed the pot on a pile of quilts near the back of the covered wagon. The quilts were folded neatly after keeping the pioneer family warm through the long cool spring night. The pot rested on top of the patchwork quilts, and the pioneer mother thought it was secure.

“Ready,” she called to her pioneer husband, who was up front sitting on the wagon seat with the oldest pioneer child.

“All right then,” he called back.

He may not have said “all right then.” He may have said something else that meant “all right then.” It was a long time ago. It’s hard to know exactly.

With a sudden lurch, the covered wagon started moving. The pioneer mother was busy tending to her youngest child, who was a baby still in nappies. That’s what they called diapers back then. She did not notice when the cooking pot slipped from its perch atop the patchwork quilts and fell to the ground behind the moving wagon. She did not hear the tiny thump it made as it landed.

That night, the pioneer mother searched frantically for the cookpot. She did not find it. Fifteen miles back, the cookpot lay in the tall grasses. Already, leaves had started to sift over it. A curious primeval woodchuck or skunk sniffed at it, then lost interest and waddled away.

It was their only cookpot. The family went hungry that night and had naught to cook their cornmeal mush in the next morning. The baby, still in nappies, wrapped in a yellow blanket, cried piteously. He wailed mournfully through the night.

What happened to them?

A
freak snow fell in Sterns, and the ground was newly white in September. You might think that a September snow in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains is an impossibility. You would be wrong. On the night of that snowfall, I got out all my false stories. All my books waiting to be written. Waiting for their endings. Waiting to find out what happened.

I stalled for a while. There were more fake book reports than I had thought. They were stacked in a wooden crate that I bought at a garage sale in North Sterns. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have had that many ideas for books. If asked I would have said ten, maybe twelve. But there were many more than that. Many, many more, all stacked up. I did not allow myself to go through any of them.

Tamar watched me carry the box out the door. She was eating a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. She likes to eat them with a miniature fork that she says is actually meant for pulling lobster meat out of lobster shells.

Tamar raised her eyebrows.

“Burn barrel,” I said. “Cleaning my room. Trash.”

It hurt me to say that. It hurt me to call the works of my own imagination trash. I thought of the old man, standing in line on Ellis Island, writing in the air with his nose. I thought of him seeing the official people watching him, talking about him, whispering. I thought of him standing straight and willing them to let him in, him alone, no brother Eli who was supposed to be there, too.

“Trash?” Tamar said. “Are you sure?”