Shadow Baby (25 page)

“I’m sure.”

“Because they look like book reports to me,” Tamar said. “Grade-A book reports, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That is correct.”

“Read me one,” Tamar said.

Read me one. That was something I had never before heard from Tamar, eater of artichoke hearts.

“Read
you one?”

“Read me one.”

I closed my eyes and dug my hand into the box.

“The Winter Without End
, by Lathrop E. Douglas,” I said. “New York: Crabtree Publishers, Inc. 1958.”

“Sounds good,” Tamar said. “Carry on.”

I carried on.

Tamar ate the last artichoke heart.

“Well?” she said. “How does it turn out?”

“Read the book and find out.”

“It’s hard to read a nonexistent book,” Tamar said. “You run out of words fast.”

How Tamaresque, to have known all along that Clara winter was the author of dozens of nonexistent books. How like Tamar never to have said a word.

“So you tell me,” she said. “
Does
Sarah Martin bear the responsibility for her baby brother’s death?
Does
everyone forget Sarah Martin’s baby brother?
Does
Sarah Martin miss him her whole life long?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” I said. “Yes, she bears the responsibility. Yes, everyone else forgets him. And yes, she misses him her whole life long.”

“You’re wrong,” Tamar said.

I watched her pick up her miniature artichoke-eating fork and wipe its tiny tines with her napkin.

“You’re wrong on all three counts,” Tamar said. “One, it wasn’t Sarah Martin’s responsibility that her brother died. It just happened. Two, Sarah Martin’s mother will not ever forget her child. Every minute of every day of her life, she will be remembering the baby she lost.”

Tamar pressed the tines of the miniature fork into the back of her hand and studied the marks they left.

“And that’s not all,” she said. “Sarah Martin’s mother will have to watch Sarah Martin be sad. She will not know how to help her child. Worse yet, Sarah Martin’s mother will be
unable ever to talk about what happened, and that will only make Sarah Martin feel more alone.”

Tamar took the empty jar of marinated artichoke hearts to the sink and rinsed it. She came back to the table.

“And you’re wrong about something else, too,” she said. “Sarah Martin will miss her brother her whole life long, but Sarah Martin will also be happy. She will grow up strong. She will be an amazing adult.”

“How?” I said.

“How takes care of itself.”

“I’m going to burn these up,” I said.

“You’ll write more.”

“I won’t.”

“You will,” she said. “You can’t not.”

Winter Without End
fell back into the box. Tamar got up from the table, went over to the kitchen drawer, and brought back a clean dishcloth. She wiped my face.

I carried the crate out to the burn barrel.

They went quietly to their deaths. They puffed into the air, black words curling into gray ash, spiraling away into the sky. I did not allow myself to think of all that I had imagined, all the families I had put together or torn apart, all the children I had sent on perilous journeys, all the people who never found out what happened.

T
he old man would have gone north with me, through the Adirondacks, up near the border of Vermont. He would have made the trip with me. I was going to ask him to do that with me, and his reply would have been yes. The old man would have known that I wanted to find a small patch of primeval
forest, near the Vermont border. He would have known that all I wanted to do was sit there for one day, sit in the patch of primeval forest. The sun would have shone down on us and slowly made its way across the sky. The old man would have sat with me on the soft moss. He would not have talked unless I asked him an answer-demanding question. He would have sat perfectly still with me, hardly breathing, so that eventually the primeval animals would have thought we were part of the landscape. They would have come forth from the woods, dipping and raising their heads, and gazed upon us with their soft eyes. They would have been curious about these new animals that sat as still as dawn.

Primeval animals have never seen human beings. They don’t know yet that humans are to be feared, that they carry guns and traps, that the soft fur of animals is something to be sought and taken.

My hermit grandfather would have scared these animals away. Animals living within a few miles’ radius of my hermit grandfather would have known fear, and they would have learned that fear from my hermit grandfather. They would have learned distrust of humans, how to step around their traps, how to melt into the underbrush in the fall and barely breathe as the hermit hunter-trapper glided past, his gun at the ready.

Those primeval animals would have passed that distrust and fear on to their young, and their young would not have been primeval animals. They would have been a new breed of animal, one with human added to their list of enemies.

After the old man died in the fire, my hermit grandfather disappeared. My hermit grandfather, who lived in that patch of primeval forest and traded pelts in the village for bare
essentials on his twice-yearly trading trips, no longer lives there. No one knows where he went. He took his tipi, his stored pelts, and his flint with him. His gun and his traps he loaded onto the travois and dragged it away behind him. He found a new life.

After he was gone, the primeval patch of forest grew over the spot where he had lived for those years. Moss crept back over the circle of flattened earth where his tipi had been pitched. Birds eventually grew bold and built their nests in the tops of the towering pines that had shaded his summer camp. Once-primeval animals who still knew the fear of a human being watched and waited until the day came when they knew that my hermit grandfather would not be back, and then one by one they entered his patch of forest. Charred remains of his campfire were covered in one summer by new leaves and grass, and in the winter pine needles lay scattered on the whiteness of the snow in the small clearing. Deer came to nibble on the new growth of the baby apple trees that grew at the edge of the primeval forest, apple trees that had grown from seeds dropped from my hermit grandfather’s apple core.

In the village where he had gone twice a year to trade his pelts, the storekeeper thought of him just once, in the spring.

“Where’s that old trapper?” he asked his clerk assistant.

“The one with the beaver pelts?”

“Yeah. Isn’t this about his time?”

They kept a lookout for my hermit grandfather for a week or so, expecting to see his deerskin jacket appear, his bowed head, the fringe on his pants dirtied by the spring mud. They listened for his voice, unused to words, his yes and his no, his lack of language. What they watched for, what they listened for, did not come.

And no one ever saw my hermit grandfather again.

The old man would have sat quietly with me and felt the sun pass overhead. At the end of the day he would have turned to me and said, “Well?” He would have held out his hand to me, and we would have gotten up together. Our muscles would have been cramped from a day of sitting and not moving, a day of pretending to be primeval animals. We would have walked out of the woods together. The old man would have understood that all I wanted was that one day, one day of seeing the place where my hermit grandfather had lived and breathed and thought his thoughts. One day of mourning. I would never have gone back.

I
went back into the house through the garage door. Tamar was in the bathroom, the jar of artichoke hearts emptied and rinsed on the kitchen counter. In my bedroom upstairs I pressed my nose against the cold windowpane and looked out at the freak snow, blue in the darkness, and the light of the moon. Orange light flickered against the blue-white snow and the darkness of the woods. If you were a skier skiing through the foothills of the Adirondacks, on your way north to a patch of primeval forest near Vermont, you would be able to see where you were going by the light of the flames, their fierce heat burning up all the fake book reports I had ever written.

Certain trees need fierce heat to regenerate. Take the lodgepole pine, for example. Lodgepole pines do not grow in the Adirondacks. Even in a patch of primeval Adirondack forest, you would not find a lodgepole pine. They are high-altitude trees. They’re huge. They can grow to be extremely old. But to
reproduce, a lodgepole pine needs intense heat. Only then can a lodgepole pine dislodge its seeds. Baby lodgepole pines grow in the charred earth that is left after a forest fire. In order to have a chance at life, baby lodgepole pines must be born in flame. That’s not the kind of tree that grows in the Adirondacks.

After I found the rusted pioneer pot, I washed it and dried it to prevent more rust, and I stored it with my metalworking tools. The old man had given me a pair of tin snips and a solder iron. He was going to train me in the art of welding, but we ran out of time. We didn’t know that we would run out of time, but we did. I put the rusted metal pioneer pot in the back of my closet, in an old wooden apple crate that Tamar and I found once when we drove up north to Deeper Lake.

My hair is starting to grow in where the burned scalp was. I lift up my fingers sometimes to touch it and feel its featheriness.
It’s dead
, I remind myself, but it feels alive and lovely despite its deadness.

In my twelfth year I learned the importance of usefulness as well as beauty. I began to see consistency among that which is inconsistent. I came to understand the art of possibility. Those were the ways that the old man had saved his life, and they are what he taught me. I was his apprentice, and he was the master.

The first night I ever saw the old man, black shapes moved through the trees, like shadows or bats flying low. I didn’t see the old man at first. He moved behind light. Orange flame flickered in front of him. Something black behind the flame was what I stared at. The black shape bent and leaned, curved and straightened. I knew I was watching a metalworker. I knew that he was lighting lanterns.

The old man would be dead before the next winter was out. I didn’t know that then. That’s part of what being an apprentice means. An apprentice might be set loose at any time. She has to go on alone, remembering what the master taught her. She has to be able to see the world as separate but connected parts, joined not by letters and words but by relationships, and the possibility of beauty.

That first night all I knew was that someone in Nine Mile Woods was joining metal together, lighting up the forest. He was making something useful, something beautiful and full of possibility for the people passing by in the woods, something that I couldn’t yet see or understand. But I was a child then.

1. One of the underlying themes in
Shadow Baby
is art—what it is, the people who make it, the people who appreciate it. (Think about, for example, Clara’s soliloquy on book reports versus actual books.) Clara believes that the old man has taught her the “art of possibility, and the possibility of beauty.” What do you think the book is saying about the process of creating art? What are your own feelings on that subject?

2. In many ways the novel is a study in opposites. For example, Clara lives for words, while the old man is illiterate. In what ways do such contrasts serve to illuminate and deepen Clara’s understanding of life?

3. In what ways do Clara’s fake book reports mirror her world? In what ways do they represent her inner psyche? Why does she burn them all up in the end?

4.
Shadow Baby
opens with this line, “Now that the old man is gone, I think about him much of the time.” Clara is twelve
years old as she narrates the book, looking back on the past year of her life. Because she is still very young, she is not capable of having a long perspective of time, yet the book ends with this line: “But I was a child then.” Think about other fictional child narrators, for example, Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye
and Laura Ingalls in the Little House books, and discuss the events behind their transition into adulthood. Compare and contrast them to Clara.

5. Clara’s mother, Tamar, practices weekly in a church choir. Yet Tamar never attends church, nor do the old man or Clara. Is there nonetheless some religious significance in the book?

6. What is the significance of the title?

7. While it is true that the mother-daughter relationship in the novel is difficult, did you find it believable and real? Why does Tamar refuse to answer Clara’s questions?

8. To Clara, “real life” is often indistinguishable from her fantasy life. What purpose does her wild imagination serve?

9. The story of Clara’s relationship with CJ Wilson is intertwined with the story of her chickens. How do the two stories both reflect and enlarge each other?

10. In the book, one person looks at a dented tin can and sees garbage, another looks at the same can and sees the possibility of beauty in the form of a lantern or cookie cutters. How does the book play with ideas of how individual ways of seeing influence one’s experience of the world?

11. Clara is obsessed with pioneers and their stories of incredible hardship and triumph over adversity. Can the book be viewed as a metaphor (or possibly an anti-metaphor) for the traditional American mythology surrounding its immigrant past?

12. Think about the opening scene of the book in which Clara glimpses the old man hanging lanterns in the woods. Think about the ending scene in which she is burning her fake book reports in the snow. How do these two scenes, which “bookend” the novel, mirror each other? What do they tell us about how Clara has changed in the interim?