The Bean Trees (18 page)

“Excuse me,” I said, and went to the bathroom.

But Mrs. Parsons was in there with the broom. “A bird is in the house,” she repeated. “A song sparrow. It came down the chimney.”

I took the broom out of her hands and chased the bird off its perch above the medicine cabinet. It swooped through the doorway into the kitchen, where it knocked against the window above the sink with an alarming crack, and fell back on the counter.

“It’s dead!” Virgie cried, but it wasn’t. It stood up, hopped to a sheltered place between a mixing bowl and Lou Ann’s recipe file, and stood blinking. In the living room they were asking about medical records. I heard Lou Ann spelling out Dr. Pelinowsky’s name.

Virgie moved toward the bird slowly, crooning, with her hand stretched out in front of her. But it took off again full tilt before she could reach it. I batted it gently with the broom, heading it off from the living room full of policemen and anatomically accurate dolls, and it veered down the hallway toward the back porch. Snowboots, at least, didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

“Open the screen door,” I commanded Virgie. “It’s locked, you have to flip that little latch. Now hold it open.”

Slowly I moved in on the terrified bird, which was clinging sideways to the screen. You could see its little heart beating through the feathers. I had heard of birds having heart attacks from fright.

“Easy does it,” I said. “Easy, we’re not going to hurt you, we just want to set you free.”

The sparrow darted off the screen, made a loop back toward the hallway, then flew through the open screen door into the terrible night.

The medical examiner said that there was no evidence Turtle had been molested. She was shaken up, and there were finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder, and that was all.

“All!” I said, over and over. “She’s just been scared practically back into the womb is all.” Turtle hadn’t spoken once in the days since the incident, and was back to her old ways. Now I knew a word for this condition: catatonic.

“She’ll snap out of it,” Lou Ann said.

“Why should she?” I wanted to know. “Would you? I’ve just spent about the last eight or nine months trying to convince her that nobody would hurt her again. Why should she believe me now?”

“You can’t promise a kid that. All you can promise is that you’ll take care of them the best you can, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, and you just hope for the best. And things work out, Taylor, they do. We all muddle through some way.”

This from Lou Ann, who viewed most of life’s activities as potential drownings, blindings, or asphyxiation; who believed in dream angels that predicted her son would die in the year 2000. Lou Ann who had once said to me: “There’s so many germs in the world it’s a wonder we’re not all dead already.”

I didn’t want to talk to her about it. And she was
furious with me, anyway, saying that I had practically abandoned Turtle since that night. “Why didn’t you go to her and pick her up? Why did you just leave her there, with the police and all, chasing that dumb bird around for heaven’s sake? Chasing that bird like it was public enemy number one?”

“She was already good and attached to Edna,” I said.

“That’s the biggest bunch of baloney and you know it. She would have turned loose of Edna for you. The poor kid was looking around the whole time, trying to see where you’d gone.”

“I don’t know what for. What makes anybody think I can do anything for her?”

I couldn’t sleep nights. I went to work early and left late, even when Mattie kept telling me to go home. Lou Ann took off a week from Red Hot Mama’s, putting her new promotion at risk, just to stay home with Turtle. The three of them—she, Edna, and Virgie—would sit together on the front porch with the kids, making sure we all understood it was nobody’s fault.

And she stalked the neighborhood like a TV detective. “We’re going to catch this jerk,” she kept saying, and went knocking on every door that faced onto the park, insisting to skeptical housewives and elderly, hard-of-hearing ladies that they must have seen something or somebody suspicious. She called the police at least twice to try and get them to come take fingerprints off Edna’s cane, on the off-chance that she’d whacked him on the hand.

“I know it was probably some pervert that hangs
out at that sick place by Mattie’s,” Lou Ann told me, meaning Fanny Heaven of course. “Those disgusting little movies they have, some of them with kids. Did you know that? Little girls! A guy at work told me. It had to have been somebody that saw those movies, don’t you think? Why else would it even pop into a person’s head?”

I told her I didn’t know.

“If you ask me,” Lou Ann said more than once, “that’s like showing a baby how to put beans in its ears. I’m asking you, where else would somebody get the idea to hurt a child?”

I couldn’t say. I sat on my bed for hours looking up words. Pedophilia. Perpetrator. Deviant. Maleficent. I checked books out of the library but there weren’t any answers in there either, just more words. At night I lay listening to noises outside, listening to Turtle breathe, thinking: she could have been killed. So easily she could be dead now.

After dinner one night Lou Ann came into my room while the kids were listening to their “Snow White” record in the living room. I’d skipped dinner; I wasn’t eating much these days. When I was young and growing a lot, and Mama couldn’t feed me enough, she used to say I had a hollow leg. Now I felt like I had a hollow everything. Nothing in the world could have filled that space.

Lou Ann knocked softly at the door and then walked in, balancing a bowl of chicken-noodle soup on a tray.

“You’re going to dry up and blow away, hon,” she said. “You’ve got to eat something.”

I took one look and started crying. The idea that you could remedy such evil with chicken-noodle soup.

“It’s the best I can do,” Lou Ann offered. “I just don’t think you’re going to change anything with your own personal hunger strike.”

I put down my book and accepted her hug. I couldn’t remember when I had felt so hopeless.

“I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down—look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.”

“I thought you were upset about Turtle,” Lou Ann said.

“About Turtle, sure.” I looked out the window. “But it just goes on and on, there’s no end to it.” I didn’t know how to explain the empty despair I felt. “How can I just be upset about Turtle, about a grown man hurting a baby, when the whole way of the world is to pick on people that can’t fight back?”

“You fight back, Taylor. Nobody picks on you and lives to tell the tale.”

I ignored this. “Look at those guys out in the park with no place to go,” I said. “And women, too. I’ve seen whole families out there. While we’re in here trying to keep the dry-cleaner bags out of the kids’ reach, those mothers are using dry-cleaner bags for their children’s
clothes
, for God’s sake. For raincoats.
And feeding them out of the McDonald’s dumpster. You’d think that life alone would be punishment enough for those people, but then the cops come around waking them up mornings, knocking them around with their sticks. You’ve seen it. And everybody else saying hooray, way to go, I got mine, power to the toughest. Clean up the neighborhood and devil take the riffraff.”

Lou Ann just listened.

“What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It’s like it’s become unpatriotic.” I unfolded my wad of handkerchief and blew my nose.

“What’s that supposed to teach people?” I demanded. “It’s no wonder kids get the hurting end of the stick. And she’s so little, so many years ahead of her. I’m just not up to the job, Lou Ann.”

Lou Ann sat with her knees folded under her, braiding and unbraiding the end of a strand of my hair.

“Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” she said. “Nobody is.”

T
urtle turned out to be, as the social worker predicted, resilient. Within a few weeks she was talking again. She never did anything with the anatomical rag dolls except plant them under Cynthia’s desk blotter, but she did talk some about the “bad man” and how Ma Poppy had “popped him one.” I had no idea where Turtle had learned to talk like that, but then Edna and Virgie Mae did have TV. Cynthia was concerned about Turtle’s tendency to bury the dollies, believing that it indicated a fixation with death, but I assured her that Turtle was only trying to grow dolly trees.

Cynthia was the strawberry blonde social worker. We went to see her on Mondays and Thursdays. Of the two of us, Turtle and me, I believe I was the tougher customer.

It was a miserable time. As wonderful as the sum
mer’s first rains had been, they soon wore out their welcome as it rained every day and soaked the air until it felt like a hot, stale dishcloth on your face. No matter how hard I tried to breathe, I felt like I couldn’t get air. At night I’d lie on top of the damp sheets and think: breathe in, breathe out. It closed out every other thought, and it closed out the possibility of sleep, though sometimes I wondered what was the point of working so hard to stay alive, if that’s what I was doing. I remembered my pep talk to Esperanza a few months before, and understood just how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you’ll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Cynthia had spent a lot of time talking with both of us about Turtle’s earlier traumas, the things that had happened before I ever knew her. The story came out of me a little at a time.

But apparently it was no news to a social worker. Cynthia said that, as horrible as it was, this kind of thing happened often, not just on Indian reservations but in the most everyday-looking white frame houses and even places a whole lot fancier than that. She told me that maybe one out of every four little girls is sexually abused by a family member. Maybe more.

Surprisingly, hearing this wasn’t really what upset me the most. Maybe by then I was already numb, or could only begin to think about the misfortunes of one little girl at a time. But also, I reasoned, this meant that Turtle was not all alone. At least she
would have other people to talk to about it when she grew up.

But there was other bad news. During the third week of sessions with Cynthia she informed me that it had recently come to the attention of the Child Protection Services Division of the Department of Economic Security, in the course of the police investigation, that I had no legal claim to Turtle.

“No more legal claim than the city dump has on your garbage,” I said. I think Cynthia found me a little shocking. “I told you how it was,” I insisted. “Her aunt just told me to take her. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been the next person to come down the road with an empty seat in the car. I guarantee you, Turtle’s relatives don’t want her.”

“I understand that. But the problem is that you have no legitimate claim. A verbal agreement with a relative isn’t good enough. You can’t prove to the police that it happened that way. That you didn’t kidnap her, for instance, or that the relatives weren’t coerced.”

“No, I can’t prove anything. I don’t understand what you’re getting at. If I don’t have a legal claim on Turtle, I don’t see where anybody else does either.”

Cynthia had these tawny gold eyes like some member of the cat family, as certain fair-haired people do. But unlike most people she could look you straight in the eye and stay there. I suppose that is part of a social worker’s training.

“The state of Arizona has a claim,” she said. “If a child has no legal guardian she becomes a ward of the state.”

“You mean, like orphan homes, that kind of thing?”

“That kind of thing, yes. There’s a chance that you could adopt her eventually, depending on how long you’ve been a resident of the state, but you would have to qualify through the state agency. It would depend on a number of factors, including your income and stability.”

Income and stability. I stared at Cynthia’s throat. In this hot weather, when everybody else was trying to wear as little as they could without getting arrested, Cynthia had on a pink-checked blouse with the collar pinned closed. I remembered hearing her say, at some point, that she was cool-blooded by nature.

“How soon would this have to happen?” I asked.

“It will take two or three weeks for the paperwork to get to a place where it’s going to get noticed. After that, someone from Child Protection and Placement will be in touch with you.”

The pin at her throat was an ivory and flesh-colored cameo that looked antique. As Turtle and I were leaving I asked if it was something that had come down through her family.

Cynthia fingered the cameo and laughed. “I found it in the one-dollar bin at the Salvation Army.”

“Figures,” I said.

Lou Ann had a fit. I had never seen her so mad. The veins on her forehead stood out and her face turned pink, all the way up to her scalp.

“Who in the hell do those people think they are? That they have the right to take her out of a perfectly
good home and put her in some creepy orphanage where they probably make them sleep on burlap bags and feed them pig slop!”

“I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” I said.

“I can’t believe you,” she said.

But I was ready to give in. “What else can I do? How can I fight the law?” I asked her. “What am I going to do, get a gun and hold Turtle hostage in here while the cops circle the house?”

“Taylor, don’t. Just don’t. You’re acting like it’s a lost cause, and that I’m telling you to do something stupid. All I’m saying is, there’s got to be some way around them taking her, and you’re not even trying to think of it.”

“Why should I, Lou Ann? Why should I think Turtle’s better off with me than in a state home? At least there they know how to take care of kids. They won’t let anything happen to her.”

“Well, that’s sure a chickenshit thing to say.”

“Maybe it is.”

She stared at me. “I cannot believe you’re just ready to roll over and play dead about this, Taylor. I thought I knew you. I thought we were best friends, but now I don’t hardly know who in the heck you are.”

I told her that I didn’t know either, but that didn’t satisfy Lou Ann in the slightest.

“Do you know,” she told me, “in high school there was this girl, Bonita Jankenhorn, that I thought was the smartest and the gutsiest person that ever walked. In English when we had to work these special crossword puzzles about
Silas Marner
and I don’t know what all, the rest of us would start to try
out different words and then erase everything over and over again, but Bonita worked hers with an
ink pen
. She was that sure of herself, she’d just screw off the cap and start going. The first time it happened, the teacher started to tell her off and Bonita said, ‘Miss Myers, if I turn in a poor assignment then you’ll have every right to punish me, but not until then.’ Can you even imagine? We all thought that girl was made out of gristle.

“But when I met you, that day you first came over here, I thought to myself, ‘Bonita Jankenhorn, roll over. This one is worth half a dozen of you, packed up in a box and gift-wrapped.’”

“I guess you were wrong,” I said.

“I was
not
wrong! You really were like that. Where in the world did it all go to?”

“Same place as your meteor shower,” I said. I hadn’t intended to hurt Lou Ann’s feelings, but I did. She let me be for a while after that.

But only for a while. Then she started up again. Really, I don’t think the argument stopped for weeks, it would just take a breather from time to time. Although it wasn’t an argument, strictly speaking. I couldn’t really disagree with Lou Ann—what Cynthia and the so-called Child Protectors wanted to do was wrong. But I didn’t know what was right. I just kept saying how this world was a terrible place to try and bring up a child in. And Lou Ann kept saying, For God’s sake, what other world have we got?

Mattie had her own kettle of fish to worry about. She hadn’t been able to work out a way to get
Esperanza and Estevan out of Tucson, much less all the way to a sanctuary church in some other state. Apparently several people had offered, but each time it didn’t work out. Terry the doctor had made plans to drive them to San Francisco, where they would meet up with another group going to Seattle. But because of his new job on the Indian reservation the government liked to keep track of his comings and goings. Mattie always said she trusted her nose. “If I don’t like the smell of something,” she said, “then it’s not worth the risk.”

Even with this on her mind, she spent a lot of time talking with me about Turtle. She told me some things I didn’t know. Obviously Mattie knew what there was to know about loopholes. She was pretty sure that there were ways a person could adopt a child without going through the state.

But I confessed to Mattie that even if I could find a way I wasn’t sure it would be the best thing for Turtle.

“Remember when I first drove up here that day in January?” I asked her one morning. We were sitting in the back in the same two chairs, drinking coffee out of the same two mugs, though this time I had the copulating rabbits. “Tell me the honest truth. Did you think I seemed like any kind of a decent parent?”

“I thought you seemed like a bewildered parent. Which is perfectly ordinary. Usually the bewilderment wears off by the time the kid gets big enough to eat peanut butter and crackers, but knowing what I do now, I can see you were still in the stage most mothers are in when they first bring them home from the hospital.”

I was embarrassed to think of how Mattie must have seen straight through my act. Driving up here like the original tough cookie in jeans and a red sweater, with my noncommittal answers and smart remarks, acting like two flat tires were all in a day’s work and I just happened to have been born with this kid growing out of my hip, that’s how cool I was. I hadn’t felt all that tough on the inside. The difference was, now I felt twice that old, and too tired to put on the show.

“You knew, didn’t you? I didn’t know the first thing about how to take care of her. When you told me that about babies getting dehydrated it scared the living daylights out of me. I realized I had no business just assuming I could take the responsibility for a child’s life.”

“There’s not a decent mother in the world that hasn’t realized that.”

“I’m serious, Mattie.”

She smiled and sipped her coffee. “So am I.”

“So how does a person make a decision that important? Whether or not they’re going to do it?”

“Most people don’t decide. They just don’t have any choice. I’ve heard you say yourself that you think the reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.”

I stared at the coffee grounds that made a ring in the bottom of the white mug. Back in Pittman I’d heard of a fairly well-to-do woman who made her fortune reading tea leaves and chicken bones, which she kept in a bag and would scatter across her kitchen floor like jacks. On the basis of leaves and bones, she
would advise people on what to do with their lives. No wonder she was rich. It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up.

“Taylor, honey, if you don’t mind my saying so I think you’re asking the wrong question.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’re asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm’s way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can’t. But nobody else can either. Not a state home, that’s for sure. For heaven’s sake, the best they can do is turn their heads while the kids learn to pick locks and snort hootch, and then try to keep them out of jail. Nobody can protect a child from the world. That’s why it’s the wrong thing to ask, if you’re really trying to make a decision.”

“So what’s the right thing to ask?”

“Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best effort and maybe, when all’s said and done, end up with a good friend.”

“I don’t think the state of Arizona’s looking at it that way.”

“I guarantee you they’re not.”

It occurred to me to wonder whether Mattie had ever raised kids of her own, but I was afraid to ask. Lately whenever I’d scratched somebody’s surface I’d turned up a ghost story. I made up my mind not to bring it up.

I called for an appointment to meet with Cynthia
alone, without Turtle. In past appointments she had talked about legal claim and state homes and so forth in Turtle’s presence. Granted Turtle had been occupied with the new selection of toys offered by the Department of Economic Security, but in my experience she usually got the drift of what was going on, whether or not she appeared to be paying attention. If either I or the state of Arizona was going to instill in this child a sense of security, discussing her future and ownership as though she were an item of commerce wasn’t the way to do it. The more I thought about this, the madder I got. But that wasn’t what I intended to discuss with Cynthia.

The appointment was on a Friday afternoon. I started to lose my nerve again when I saw her in her office, her eyes made up with pale green shadows and her hair pulled back in a gold barrette. I don’t believe Cynthia was much older than I was, but you put somebody in high-heeled pumps and sit her behind a big desk and age is no longer an issue—she is more important than you are, period.

“Proof of abandonment is very, very difficult,” she was explaining to me. “In this case, probably impossible. But you’re right, there are legal alternatives. The cornerstone of an adoption of this type would have to be the written consent of the child’s natural parents. And you would need to be named in the document.”

“What if there are no natural parents? If they were to be dead, for instance.”

“Then it would have to come from the nearest living relative, the person who would normally have custody, and a death certificate would have to be
presented as well. But the most important thing, as I said, is that the document would name you, specifically, as the new guardian.”