Borrowed Children (7 page)

Helen has just fallen asleep and we re rolling into Manchester. There's the Lyttle house: white, three stories, with a windowed turret. Daddy once said we'd live there when our ship came in.

“When will that be?” David wanted to know.

All Daddy said was, “Don't know as I've ever seen a ship in these mountains.”

At the train station Mama insists that everybody get out.

“We must see Mandy off in style.”

Style is hardly the word for all the bodies spilling from the wagon. David carries my bag and Ben brings the present box. Then Daddy hands me the ticket, Mama straightens my coat, everybody gives me a kiss, and I climb into the train. After the long ride, this part happens too fast. I don't even ask to hold Willie.

When I find my seat I look out the window. There they stand: Daddy behind Mama, his hands on her shoulders; the boys straight and thin, trying not to kick stones; Anna lifting her dress to look at the lace on her petticoat, and Helen's face wet as if she'd stood in the rain. She must have hurt herself, I think. But no, she's waving and searching for me. And then I realize that they all look sad, like a field when the sun has just left it. I try to see if Willie is crying, but Mama has him on her shoulder.

And here I am on board, the seat solid oak and red plush, the windows filmed with dust. Beside me is the supper that Mama has packed—fried chicken and a piece of jam cake; in my lap is a book and handkerchief and money Daddy gave me for the trip. I'm all set for an elegant journey. But a man sits across the aisle, his cheek pouched with tobacco, and every few minutes he spits into a can.

12

The train has a hard time leaving. It jerks and strains and shakes. I feel that way too. If anyone had told me a month ago that I'd be sad to leave home, I would have scorned them like Miss Snavely. But I am sad.

I remember what I told Helen: the nailed-down track is connected—Goose Rock to Memphis—and will bring me back. I'm grateful for that.

I wonder how Mr. Aden felt coming to Goose Rock, leaving behind the paved world he knew. But Mr. Aden is a grownup and a man: why should he worry? Men always know what to do. Turn some kind of labor into money. So he came to teach. And to live. Volunteered to eat fatback and breathe coal dust. I'll never understand it.

Mama let me walk to school Friday afternoon to tell him about my trip.

“What a splendid chance for you!” he said. He always has these silky words like splendid. “What will you do?”

“See my kin, mostly,” I told him.

“But you must see Memphis, too. It's the place to take the pulse of the Mississippi, to follow the Old Souths shadows.”

“Yes sir,” I answered, trying to sound like I knew what he was talking about.

Later I asked Mama. She smiled her Mr. Aden smile. I felt silly.

“Well, Memphis
is
on the river and that's made it important in trade—cotton and lumber—that's probably what he means. Opie can take you to his mill, if that would please you

I nodded, but I knew Mr. Aden didn't mean sawdust. I've seen plenty of that in Goose Rock. Maybe I'll ask Aunt Laura.

After a while I unpack a drumstick but can't eat it. The train makes me woozy. Then I fall asleep and wake up starving. Mama says it's lucky that I like dark meat, since you often have to leave the white pieces for guests. She means the men, though she doesn't say it. I think about this, chewing chicken, watching the lights out the window.

When the news butch comes through, I ask for a cream soda. What catches my eye on his tray, though, is clear glass bottles, shaped like train engines and filled with bits of candy. They're small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

At Chattanooga a woman gets on with a baby smaller than Willie, so swaddled you can't see its face. She takes a seat somewhere behind me, and I hear the baby's gurgle, her low response. They make me feel cold all at once and empty. I wrap up in my coat and try to count the stars.

“Count all the stars,” Daddy says, “and you'll never be forgotten.”

One day I plan to ask him what that means.

Sometime in the night I wake up and eat the jam cake. The heavy sweetness sets me to thinking about the day we picked the berries.

It was late July. Anna and Helen and I went out early, hoping to beat both the bees and the heat. We did for a while; then Anna closed her hand on a berry so plump she didn't see the bee. She shrieked. Mama had made me bring a wet-rag-and-soda poultice. I used that and we went on picking.

I could tell when it neared noon and we ought to be quitting, but Anna's hand was okay and there were two bushes to go.

“I have a halo,” Helen declared.

“That's good,” I told her. “You're the world's first blackberry angel.”

“You can feel it.”

“Yep,” I said, my purple hand grazing her hair.

“Blackberries can see it,” she insisted. “That's why they're winking.”

And she tumbled, halo first, into the bush.

Before she'd come to rest, I knew what had happened: sunstroke. Stupid, stupid, my heart thumped with every step I took up the meadow, Helen on my shoulder, Anna carrying the buckets.

Once inside, I could see Helens red scalp. Mama cooled her down while Anna and I rinsed berries. She came to right away.

“Mandy said I was a blackberry angel.”

“Well,” Mama cautioned, “don't fly away just yet.”

She gave me a look, steep as any scolding.

“I'm sorry. I should have realized.”

“Yes, you should. Heatstroke is dangerous, especially for a little child.”

“I said I'm sorry.”

“Ten more minutes might have made you a good deal sor-

rier.

The truth of that settled in through the afternoon. Helen rested. We made jam and a big cobbler.

“Pie supper tonight,” Mama announced.

Pie suppers are how we celebrate birthdays in summer—thick berry juice laced with strips of crust. Daddy can't eat the seeds, so Mama strains out the berries. This one was for David, who turned sixteen that week.

Ben teased him. “I guess you'll run off and marry Polly now.”

David didn't even blush. “Mandy's almost twelve. I'll leave the courting to her.”

“You will not!” My cheeks felt as red as Helen's scalp.

“Just wait till next year. Some tall fellow will show up and put your heart in his pocket.”

Ben added, “If he can get her notice over the rim of a book.”

Daddy saw me steaming.

“That's enough, boys.”

Little did we know I'd get a baby long before a sweetheart.

Or eat those berries rocked in the cradle of a train.

13

A night's train ride and the world has changed: flat red earth, big fields, patches of pine trees. I look out the window and consider the people I'm going to meet.

Mama says mountain people are different from southerners and Delta people are different even from that. Then Daddy says, “Are you sure it's not just your people who are different?” She has kin over in the Delta.

But I'm not going to the Delta. I'm headed for Memphis, with its big white sorrowful houses and voices soft as flour. “Sorrowful houses” is my grand mother Omie's description. One of my favorite things about her is how she says things that sound like a book. I remember what she wrote when she heard about Willie, and Mama's sickness after his birth: “That child, that child. A cup of sunshine in a tub of rain.” And of course she was right.

Omie knows all about babies. She had three by her first husband, Mama's daddy, Mr. Grace. After he died, she married Opie and had four more. Mama was her oldest girl—like me. You know, I never thought of that. She probably had to help Omie a lot, too. There was her little sister Edith, who died, and then a half brother and three half sisters. One of those is my Aunt Laura, who sent me her clothes.

Omie says Laura is her hothouse flower, “though how she took root in a coffee-ground garden I don't know.”

Don't let that fool you. Omie's garden is perfect; her flowers come up bouquets. It's true she mixes coffee grounds in her flowerbed, but that's for a purpose. Mama does it too.

“It lightens the soil,” say Omie and Mama.

Daddy claims they have the only daylilies open to the moon.

“They've got the big eye,” he says.

But Aunt Laura is different. She doesn't push your hair back and say you've grown. She doesn't cook. She's married, to Uncle Cresswell, but she doesn't have any children.

“Imagine a baby spitting up on my shantung dress!” she said one summer when we were visiting.

“If you had babies you wouldn't be wearing silk dresses,” Mama told her.

“That's what I know,” said Aunt Laura.

And she doesn't keep house. She doesn't even always live in one. For a while she and Uncle Cresswell stayed in the Hotel Emory, so they could “be near the center of things,” they said. Could walk to the theater, the symphony, the ballet.

“My stars and time,” said Omie. “The center of things is the kitchen and the cradle, and I don't know how I raised a girl who doesn't know that.”

“Different people have different centers,” said Aunt Laura.

That's so true I'd like to print it in the paper.

Anyway, now Aunt Laura and Uncle Cress live in a house on Catalpa Street. But that doesn't mean Aunt Laura breaks her nails scrubbing laundry and baseboards. She has servants. And servants are not the same as Help. Mama had Help after Helen was born, a poor girl from up on Big Goose. Stayed with us a month, doing wash and looking hungry, her eyes as dull as a dry creek stone. Help is somebody you know you're helping too. Servants are trained. They don't eat with you.

So I am looking forward to seeing Aunt Laura. Maybe I can tell her how I feel about different centers. And how I don't want babies. How I didn't sprout up in the coffee-ground garden either. Maybe she will take me to the theater. She can drive a motor car herself, you know. Maybe she'll take me for a ride. Maybe she'll even let me sit behind the wheel.

14

As we pull into Union Station, I see Omie and Opie waiting, as much a pair as bookends. Their clothes aren't alike, Opie's gray coat and Omie's rose, but they stand close and their faces look for the same thing.

Me.

All of a sudden, I feel shy, backward. My going-away dress Mama was so proud of looks dull and homely. My hair hangs limp, like someone cut it in the kitchen, which Mama did.

But Omie and Opie don't seem to notice.

“She's grown a mile!” Opie exclaims, giving me a hug.

“She'll outstrip her mother in no time.”

“Let me see your hands, child,” Omie says, putting her gloved hand palm to palm with mine. “Heavens, yes. Your hands are already larger than Rena's. You must take after me.”

Omie is tall, and draws herself up as she says this.

Mama calls her “Tall and handsome.”

Daddy always adds, “Like a sailing ship.”

We ride home in Opie's car—black with curtains and a bud vase. There's a rosebud in it, pink and tight as a baby's fist.

When we get to the house on Poplar, Omie sends me up to bathe while she finishes Sunday dinner.

Like magic, hot water comes out of a pipe into the huge cold tub. I'm used to bathing in a washtub in the kitchen in shared water. I cant believe all this luxury is for me. I take off my clothes and slide in, like a spoon in a big sauce boat, and lie back and close my eyes. There's a wonderful smell of enamel and rosewater soap drifting over the soothing sway of the bath. It's like the train only quiet and sweet smelling. Like the train …

“Dinnertime, Mandy!”

I must have been asleep! The water is cool and I haven't even washed. I do my face and hands and feet and climb out quickly. It wouldn't do to keep them waiting.

Omie's table is not just set, it's arranged. Everything has a special dish and they all match. I set myself down slowly, not wanting to break even the silence.

But of course Omie and Opie want to hear all about home—Omie asking about Mama and the babies, and Opie asking about Daddy and the mill. And the lads, as he calls David and Ben.

“Do they know their wood?” he asks me. “Can they walk a boundary of timber?”

The truth is, I don't know whether they can or not.

“They can wash clothes,” I tell him.

“Wash clothes!” he rumbles.

Opie never thunders, but he lets on like he might. His eyes are gray and what hair he has is white and stands out like lightning. He's just a little taller than Omie, and portly.

“Yes, wash clothes,” answers Omie. I can't answer. My mouth is full. “Rena has been sick you will remember.” Then she says she's proud of how we all managed. “Especially you, Mandy,” she says, reaching for my hand. “Your mama told me you helped with the house and the baby like you'd been doing it all your life.”

Not exactly, I want to say, remembering the time I set Willie's clothes on fire; and the time I served spoiled meat, not recognizing the smell; and the time I tried to make cookies with leftover oatmeal. Not exactly. But I just smile.

“You'll be that much ahead when you're a wife and mother yourself,” Omie goes on. “A baby won't be a jolt to you.”

No indeed, I think, because I won't have one. But I don't say that. I butter the roll I've lifted from Omie's silver basket. It's light as a baby's breath.

After dinner and dishes, we sit at a card table in the living room playing Rummy. There's never time to play cards at home—too many bodies to look after. I'm just about to say this when Opie says, “Remember how Rena loved to play bridge? I never knew a soul better at it. She could beat us all when she'd been playing only two weeks.”

That's a surprise. I've never seen Mama play cards.

“Of course, she played wild,” Opie continues.