In a diner the painted wooden tables, each place set with a paper napkin, the fork resting on the napkin, to the left a spoon and a knife and an empty water glass. The simple menu is held up by the salt and pepper shakers. Clouds shaped like anteater tongues, like hawk tails, like eraser bloom on a chalkboard, like vomited curds. The ray of the flashlight in the darkness. Wet boulders along a lakeshore.
10
The Lost Baby
MERNELLE HAD ALMOST reached the blueberry swamp, had just come to the first bushes, smelling the sourness of the place, the sun drawing scent from the leathery leaves, from the blue dragonflies and her own mucky footprints, when she heard Jewell’s voice calling, too faint to understand the words which sounded like ‘solo, solo,’ drawn out and mournful.
‘What!’ she shrieked, and listened. Only the faint ‘solo’ floated back, in a long-drawn, hollow tone. It could not be her name. Her name, called from a distance, sounded like ‘burn now, burn now.’ She stepped into the blueberry bushes and picked a few. They were still tinged with purple and sour. She squinted at the sky remembering the dusky brass color it had taken in the eclipse a month ago, though the sun had stayed visible and white. She had been disappointed, had hoped for a black sky with a flaming corona burning a hole in the darkness of midmorning. No such luck. The mournful call came again, and she stripped a handful of berries and leaves, chewed them as she climbed the hill back to the house and only spat them out at the fence.
She could see Jewell in the yard under the pin cherry tree, her white arms go up, hands raised to her mouth, calling, calling. When Mernelle came into her sight line she beckoned her to run.
‘The War is over, President Truman’s been on the radio and a baby is lost. Ronnie Nipple just come by for help. They want us to come help ’em look. It’s his sister Doris’s baby. And wouldn’t you know Mink and Dub is down talking to Claunch about selling off some more of the cows. It makes me mad I can’t drive. There sits the car and we have to walk right past it. Doris is visiting for a week, and this is the first day and look what happens. Seems they was all so tied up with listening to the radio tell about the Japs surrenderin’ and people goin’ hog-crazy wild, they’re dancin’ and screamin’, so that nobody saw the little boy, he’s just a toddler, little Rollo, you remember they brought him over one day last summer before he could walk, nobody saw him go outside. Ronnie, of course, blaming everybody, yelling at his sister, “Why didn’t you keep an eye on him.” They never did get along. So I told him we’d start walkin’ when I got you out of the blueberries and he said if he saw us on his way back from Davis’s he’d pick us up. Davis got a phone.’
‘Hooray, we don’t have to collect fat any more, or tin cans and used clothes to take to church. But they probably won’t need the milkweed pods any more, either.’
‘Guess so. And the gas rationin’ ought to ease off right away, they say.’
‘It didn’t sound like you were calling my name. It sounded like something else.’
‘I hollered “Rollo.” Thought if he’d got this far he could be somewhere in the bushes. But I guess not.’
‘Ma, it’s two miles.’ The strength of it took over the afternoon. Perhaps a baby had to be lost to end the War.
They walked through the August afternoon. The town truck had spread new gravel on the road a few days earlier and the loose stones and pebbles pressed painfully through their thin-soled shoes. Far away they could hear the hoots and blares of sirens, horns, bells, the booms of shotguns fired into the air from the farms along the ridge sounding like planks dropped on lumber piles.
‘One thing they said on the radio was that sewing machines and buckets and scissors will be in the stores pretty quick. Can’t be quick enough for me. I’m sick of using those scissors with the broken blade, twists everything you try to cut.’ Bees mumbled through the goldenrod growing along the fence lines. With a rush of feet and rapid panting the dog caught up with them, trailing his rope.
‘That miserable dog,’ said Jewell, ‘I thought I tied him up good.’ A sense of being too late hung in the dusty goldenrod. The steady grill of crickets burred in the gaping field. Grasses pointed like lances.
‘He can help look for the baby. Like a bloodhound. I’ll hold onto his rope.’ She thought about Rollo lost in the goldenrod, pushing at the stalks with weak baby hands, the air around him laced with bees, or deep in the gloomy woods the little face wet with hopeless tears, imagined the dog nosing along the leaf mold, then straining forward as he did when he picked up rabbit scent, pulling her after him, heroically finding the baby. She would carry him back to his mother through the snowstorm, the dog leaping up at her side to lick the baby’s feet, and she would say ‘Well, you’re lucky. Another hour and he’d be gone. The temperature’s going down to zero,’ and Doris crying gratefully and Mrs. Nipple rummaging in her nest egg money and handing Mernelle ten dollars, saying, ‘My grandson’s worth a million to me.’
‘I can’t believe we are walking on these rocks when there is a perfectly good car sitting in our yard and I can’t drive it. My lord it’s hot. You better learn to drive a car Mernelle soon’s you can so you don’t get stuck on a farm. I wanted to learn years ago but your father said no, still won’t have it, no, doesn’t like the idea of his wife drivin’ around. Besides, then we had that Ford that started with the crank, he said it was enough to break your arm to wind the starter up.’
The lane to the Nipples’ place was smooth and hard with a strip of thin grass up the middle. The maples threw a breathless shade. Old Toot Nipple had tapped the trees each March, but Ronnie didn’t make syrup and said he’d cut them all down for firewood one of these days. In the winter when the ice storms broke big limbs down into the lane he swore he’d do it the next good day. And never did.
‘Ma, say the counting thing, the way your grandfather used to count.’
‘Oh, that old thing. That was his way of counting sheep, the old, old style of counting. He used to count the sheep out. See if I can remember it. Yan. Tyan. Tethera. Methera. Pimp. Sethera. Lethera. Hovera. Dovera. Dick. Yan-a-dick. Tyan-a-dick. Tethera-dick. Methera-dick. Bumfit. Yan-a-bumfit. Tyan-a-bumfit. Tethera-bumfit. Methera-bumfit. Giggot. There! That’s as much as I ever knew. Up to twenty.’
‘Bumfit!’ said Mernelle. ‘Bumfit.’ She started to laugh, as she always did. ‘Oh, bumfit!’ She screamed with laughter.
‘Wait,’ said Jewell, laughing herself, ‘wait. He said for ewes after the first shearing – “gimmer!” He called the runts “pallies.” He said—’
‘Gimmer! Bumfit!’
‘And granny, that was his wife, mouth straight across like a nail, somebody give her a box of grapefruits once. She didn’t know what they were. Never seen a grapefruit before. You know what she did with them?’
‘Gave bumfit of ’em to the gimmers?’
‘If you’re going to be so smart, why, I won’t say.’
‘Ma! Say it! What did she do with them?’
‘She boiled ’em. Boiled ’em an hour, then brought them to the table on a platter, big pat of melted butter on top of each one. And don’t you know they ate them grapefruit right up, all hot and buttery. Grandpa said, “They’ll never put the ’taties out of business.”’
The orchard and then the barn with its swaybacked and tilting front came in sight. Jewell panted on the rise. Out of the trees the road dust like flour, puffing up at each step. She stopped to catch her breath, looking up at the Nipples’ fields. The chokecherries white with dust. The asters. ‘Look how the juniper’s come into that pasture,’ she said. ‘In only a couple of years. When I think how hard Loyal worked to keep it out of ours I just shudder. I suppose it’ll move right in as fast as it can. Course now that the War’s over, maybe we can find some help. Though it seems like the boys coming back don’t want to work for another man. I guess they got enough of bossin’ around. They all seem to want their own place. And I keep thinkin’ Loyal won’t take to it out west. I expect he’ll come back pretty soon. Make t
he farm hum.’
‘I can hardly remember what he looks like. Tall. “Use Wildroot Cream Oil Charlie” on his hair. Curly hair. He gave me piggyback rides when I was little. Remember when he gave me the blue doll dishes for my birthday?’
‘Them doll dishes was from him and Dub both.’
The west wall of Nipples’ barn was dotted with thousands of flies and thousands more spun in circles and dipped down to the manure pile. The house stood to the southeast where it caught the winter sun in morning and stood in the barn’s shadow in summer afternoons. As they came up the steps they could see through the screening Mrs. Nipple standing on the porch, rocking on her heels and crying into a dish towel. Her geranium collection, in empty lard tins and rusted-through enamel kettles, lined the edge of the porch. The radio, smashed on the ground, trailed its traitorous cord.
‘We come to help you look,’ said Jewell, opening the screen door. The waxed linoleum gleamed like water. ‘Mernelle thought the dog might come in handy.’ The dog looked a fool, clawed at his fleas.
‘Ronnie’s gone up to Davis’s to call up on their phone for some help. Doris is lookin’ in the barn again. First place we looked, but she says he loves the cows so much she thought that’s where he’d be. He couldn’t of got too far on them little legs of his. It was only a few minutes since we see him, and we was listenin’ to the news about the War bein’ over and everybody screamin’ in New York, just standin’ around the radio when Doris says all of a sudden, “Where’s Rollo?” ’(Mrs. Nipple couldn’t help telling it like a story.) ‘Well, her and me starts to lookin’ upstairs, downstairs, in the pantry, down cellar, Ronnie still listenin’ to the radio, then Doris sees the porch door is open and we look out there, then look in the barn. By this time Doris is real upset and she makes Ronnie go up to your place and the Davis’s. It’s been way over a hour now, and not a thread of that baby! I said to Ronnie, “The time we’re losin’ because of not havin’ no telephone. I want that telephone put in.”’
Mrs. Nipple found Rollo’s sweater for the dog to smell. He took it in his mouth and shook it as though it were a game until Mernelle got it away and led him outside, holding the rope and saying ‘Where is he? Find the baby! Where is he? Fetch the baby!’ The dog trotted around the corner of the house and lifted his leg to water down the stones edging Mrs. Nipple’s flower beds.
‘Get going,’ said Mernelle, but the dog sat down and stared at her with stupid eyes. ‘Find that baby or I’ll grind you up,’ she hissed. The dog wagged his tail tentatively and looked in her face. ‘You dumb puke,’ she said and tied him to the porch steps rail. The dog thrust his nose under the steps and snuffled as though at rare perfume. Mernelle went down to the barn.
Doris was up in the hayloft saying, ‘Rollo, Mummie wants you sweetheart,’ though Mernelle didn’t see how any baby could climb the slick, worn rungs of that steep ladder. She looked in all the dim cow stalls, seeing where Doris had scraped at the matted hay, under the table in the milk room, in the old harness room and the cobwebbed horse stalls with the names WAXY and PRINCE carved on the posts. Doris’s footsteps overhead knocked from corners to shallow cupboards to the chute where the hay came down. Her black frenzy filled the barn. Mernelle went outside and looked in the manure pile. Rollo might have fallen into the mire and drowned in cow shit. She’d heard of it. Jewell knew of somebody it had happened to. She braced to see the blue, lolling head, the smeared arms. But there were only hens. From the manure pile she could see her mother and Mrs. Nipple in the uncut orchard, wading through the grass calling, ‘Rollo, Rollo,’ their voices heavy and sad.
When Ronnie’s car, packed with men in work clothes, drove into the yard Doris ran out, crying, to tell them the baby was still lost. The men talked in low voices. After a while they spread out and began walking through the mown hayfield, heading up toward the spring in the woods, the spring just open water, ten feet across, white sand at the bottom bubbling with the icy water that pulsed up from underground. Doris, knowing suddenly about the water, ran after them.
Jewell and Mrs. Nipple came up from the trampled orchard, and Mernelle followed them into the summer kitchen with its screened windows and kerosene stove off the end of the porch. Their arms were streaked with welts from the saw-edged grass. Mrs. Nipple pumped them each a glass of water. A few drops fell in the iron sink, rubbed to a gloss with a few drops of kerosene on Mrs. Nipple’s cleaning rag.
‘I dunno,’ she said, looking out the window at Doris running behind the men, tripping and going down on her knee, scrabbling up on her feet again and floundering on. And Ronnie, turning to point angrily at her, shouting at her to keep away. As if knowledge was more dreadful. ‘How could he get that far away in just a few minutes?’ A thin keening sound came from the water pump.
‘Sometimes the little ones can surprise you,’ said Jewell. ‘I can recall Dub gettin’ down to the road while I was gathering eggs and he wasn’t old enough to even walk. Crawled all the way, a whole mile. He’s kept it up, too.’ The pump wailed with an eerie shriek.
‘What in the world is that,’ said Mrs. Nipple, letting water tip out of her glass.
‘Sounds like your pump, some kind of pump trouble.’
‘That pump’s never made such a sound in its life,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘That’s the baby, and he’s down under the summer kitchen. Rollo, ROLLO,’ she bellowed into the pump mouth. And was answered by a gobbling howl. Jewell sent Mernelle to run up and tell Doris and the men that they could hear the baby under the summer kitchen floor near the water pipe, but how should they get at him, tear up the floor? Mrs. Nipple was crouching under the sink calling encouragement and prying at the boards with a kitchen knife. She got up and stepped around to the pump end of the rink where the water pipe rose from below, where the boards under the curling linoleum were as soft as cheese. The pump handle’s dull red curve was stamped LITTLE GIANT.
Jewell, watching Mernelle sprint up the hill toward the spring with a child’s demonic strength, heard a thick crumpling sound and looked around. Mrs. Nipple was half gone, one leg sunk to the hip in the rotten floor, the other bent like a grasshopper’s, the muscles folded tight. She hung onto the edge of the sink with one hand, the other clenching the knife. Frightful shrieks came from below.
‘Pull me up, I’m standin’ on him!’ shouted Mrs. Nipple, but before Jewell could reach her, Mrs. Nipple, the pump and the sink descended on Rollo.
‘The little son of a bitch is bruised up pretty bad but he’ll make it,’ said Dub at the supper table. ‘You’d think he’d of been squashed flat with that load comin’ down on him, but it seems like everything fell slow, settled, instead of fell, and the old lady sort of squatted as she landed, so he come out of it pretty good. The old lady’s worse off than him. She got rusty nails in her like a pincushion. They tried to keep her in the hospital for a day or two, but she wouldn’t have it.’
‘When I think how all that rot was layin’ there under that proud housekeepin’,’ said Jewell. ‘There’s a lesson in it.’ Her glasses, lenses spotted and dull, lay on the table. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose where the flesh-colored rests had pinched two red ovals.
‘How’d he get under there, anyway?’ asked Mernelle, remembering the crying and keening, Mrs. Nipple lying in the back of Ronnie’s car with her bloody knees showing at the window, the baby howling in the front seat in Doris’s lap and Ronnie shouting, ‘Get out of the way’ as he skidded down the lane.
‘Crawled under. They figure he went in under the porch steps, farther in under the porch to a narrow place where he couldn’t get turned around, so, since nobody never learned him to crawl backwards, he had to keep goin’ and the last stop on the line was the water pipe under the summer kitchen. Just remember Mernelle, always learn your babies to crawl backwards.’
‘Don’t talk so smart about babies and crawlin’. I remember when you crawled all the way on down to the road through the mud, over a mile, and too dumb to come back,’ said Jewell.
‘No,’ sa
id Dub. Too dumb to keep goin’.’
11
Tickweed
RONNIE, RED-EYED FROM the funeral, leaned over and put the china dog in the center of the table as in a place of honor. The port-wine mark that stained his chin was deep in color, as though he’d rested it in a dish of crushed blackberries.
‘When she see she was goin’,’ he said to Mernelle, mumbling through swollen lips, ‘she said she wanted you to have this. Said that your dog was on the right track sniffin’ at the porch steps. It might of all turned out different if somebody had paid attention to that dog, she said.’ He pushed the dog again with his forefinger, then turned and went out to his car.
Loyal’s alarm clock on the windowsill clacked. They all looked at the china dog. Its vapid face and impossible pink gloss accused. Mrs. Nipple, silently declaring, if only you had noticed what the dog was trying to show I’d be alive today and not buried in a closed casket because of blood poisoning that turned my face black.
‘I doubt that dog was sniffin’ anything but where some other dog pissed,’ said Mink. He patted Mernelle’s hand twice, the first time she could remember an affectionate gesture from him since the time she was coming down with mumps and was too dizzy and feverish to walk and he carried her up the stairs to her bed. Jewell shoved the dog behind some empty jars in the pantry.