Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  “Oh my,” she said.

  “You see what I mean? Mr. Barre fixed it up right. It would’ve cost me a pretty penny to have the manufacturer send a repairman, and I probably would’ve lost everything before he got here.”

  Mr. Crockett led them to the meat counter. “Look here, Mr. Barre, I got some fine pork chops this morning. Just look at that!” He lifted one of the chops on a square of butcher paper. “Make y’all a fine supper tonight.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Mrs. Pittman.

  “Very well!” he exclaimed. “One apiece for the ladies and two for Mr. Barre. Are y’all headed home? Should I hold them?”

  “Hold them, if you don’t mind,” said Thomas. “I’m taking my mother-in-law to the café for lunch.”

  “Yes sir. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  Thomas was surprised the ground did not open up right then and there and swallow him whole for showing off. He could almost hear Cargie say, “You vain thing!”

  When they were walking to the café, Mrs. Pittman said, “I underestimated you, Thomas Barre.”

  “Uh-huh,” Thomas said.

  She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and Thomas stopped too.

  “Why did you marry Cargie?”

  “Cargie’s different from other women,” he said.

  “Yes sir, she is. That’s the very reason I’s asking.”

  “I love Cargie, Mrs. Pittman. She’s my friend.”

  “Your friend?“

  “Yes’m.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mrs. Pittman said, and she began walking again.

  On their way home, laden with free groceries—”Your money’s no good here,” Mr. Crockett had said—Thomas led Mrs. Pittman past a two-story house on a large corner lot. Its tall white columns looked particularly majestic in the modest neighborhood.

  “You say it’s all colored around here?” Mrs. Pittman asked.

  “Yes’m.”

  “I ain’t ever knowed any black folk to live in such a house.”

  “Plenty of black folks around here have big houses, even mansions.”

  “I declare.”

  “Yes’m.”

  On the deep front porch, an ample young woman lounged in a rocking chair, a glass of iced lemonade in one hand and a cigar in the other. She braced herself against a white column with one foot. Her bare legs sprawled, and the hem of her cotton dress was tucked carelessly between them. She was barefoot and great with child.

  “That’s the new Mrs. Murphy—Lydie,” Thomas whispered. “I’ll give you the lowdown later.”

  “Afternoon!” Lydie called. “It’s hot as hell up in there.” She waived the cigar toward the house behind her. “Y’all want some lemonade?”

  Thomas touched the brim of his hat. “Afternoon, Mrs. Murphy. No, thank you, ma’am. We have groceries to get home. How are you feeling today?”

  “Got the sweats. Can’t sleep. Fart like a mule. Feel like I’m gonna blow a gasket. But other than that, I’m fine and dandy.” She tapped the cigar’s ashes onto the porch. “How about you, Mr. Barre? How you doin’?”

  “Mighty fine. This is my mother-in-law, Mrs. Pittman.”

  “Oh God. Mother-in-laws are the worst!” Lydie pulled on the stogy until the end flared, then took it out of her mouth, threw her head back, and launched a vertical plume of white smoke that rivaled the columns on the house.

  “For heaven’s sake!” cried Mrs. Pittman.

  A guffaw honked out of Thomas before he could stop it.

  “We best get along.” Thomas said. “You have yourself a good day now, Mrs. Murphy, hear?”

  Lydie smiled. “I’ll do the best I can.”

  When they were out of Lydie’s earshot, Thomas said, “Mr. Murphy’s rich. You can see that. He owns three buildings on the Avenue—that’s Texas Avenue—and he has an office in the Calanthean Temple. The Temple has music and dancing on the roof every weekend. Lydie was working in one of the buildings, and she started going to the dances. Next thing you know, Old Man Murphy’s married to her, and she’s getting big with his baby.” Thomas paused. “Or somebody’s baby—who knows? Lydie’s been parked in this house for months, and Murphy stays in an apartment in one of his buildings. It’s a mess.”

  “Well, I never. . . .”

  “Oh, well, I don’t reckon it’s proper for me to tell you such things.”

  “No sir. It ought not be spoken about, but it’s right out here for all the world to see, ain’t it? That girl! Sprawled across that front porch like a hound dog full of puppies!”

  “Yes’m. Lydie is Mr. Murphy’s fifth, or maybe sixth, wife. He gets around.”

  “I’s amongst the Canaanites,” said Mrs. Pittman.

  “We try to keep godly,” Thomas said, “best we can.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Cargie’s getting close,” Mrs. Pittman announced at supper about two weeks into her visit.

  Thomas looked at Cargie.

  “She knows,” Cargie said.

  “How close?” Thomas asked.

  “Week or two at the most, I’d say.”

  That night, Thomas was shaken awake from deep sleep. He shot up in bed and cried, “Cargie? Cargie!“

  “What’s going on?” Cargie mumbled, half-asleep.

  Mrs. Pittman was in their bedroom. “The maid from up at the Murphy place is in the kitchen. The Murphy girl’s going, and there ain’t nobody to catch the baby.”

  “Oh,” Thomas said. “Oh. Lemme get some clothes on.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Cargie.

  Thomas patted her. “Just stay here and sleep. It’s barely past one. Will you be okay?”

  “Go on now. I’m fine.”

  Thomas dressed quickly and carried his boots to the kitchen, where Mrs. Pittman and Lydie’s maid waited. Mrs. Pittman had a satchel slung over her shoulder.

  “I’m Thomas,” he said.

  “Mavis.”

  Thomas sat at the table and laced up his boots. He stood. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Thomas heard Lydie Murphy a block away. She was screaming bloody murder and cursing John Murphy in language so colorful it was nearly art. They hustled up the house’s broad front steps and through the two leaded-glass doors, which stood wide open.

  “I’m supposed to go to Mercy Hospital and get the twilight sleep!” Lydie yelled. “Where the hell is that worthless bastard?”

  “I’ll get some water boiling,” Mavis said. “Towels is upstairs.”

  “You wait here,” Mrs. Pittman told Thomas. “I’ll holler for you if I need you.” She flew up the staircase like a squirrel up a tree.

  “You!“ Lydie screamed when Mrs. Pittman opened the bedroom door, “Get the hell out of my house and find somebody to take me to the hospital!”

  Mrs. Pittman said there wasn’t time, and she shut the bedroom door behind her.

  Thomas closed the front doors and sat at the dining room table. He stood again and paced in the foyer. Mavis came through with a big steaming pot, which he carried to the top of the stairs for her. He descended the stairs again and sat on the bottom step.

  He put his head in his hands and listened to Lydie’s labor. Every time a birth pain hit, she screamed as if she were being drawn and quartered. Between the screams, she cursed John Murphy and Mrs. Pittman and Mavis and demanded painkillers. There were clatters and bangs every now and again, as if Lydie had gotten hold of something and thrown it. She was sturdy, but the pains wore her down when they bunched into one another, and the cursing and carrying on slowed down.

  “Breathe!” Mrs. Pittman hollered. “Push, girl!”

  Lydie panted so hard that Thomas heard her downstairs. He thanked God for Cargie, who would sooner die than carry on so.

  A baby cried, and Thomas jumped up and ran to the top of the stairs. The women’s voices were muffled behind the door. The baby hiccupped and mewed, and Thomas laid his palm on the door.

  Mrs. Pittman opened the door, and Thomas gave her a start, standing there with his hand up
. She held the child, bundled in a blanket. “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Pittman said. “It won’t be nothin’ like that with Cargie.”

  “I know. What is it?”

  “It’s a boy. Mr. Murphy gots a son. Wanted to give you a look before I try and get her to nurse him.”

  Thomas looked into the folds of the blanket. The child was as red as a beet from the ordeal. Even worse, he had a jagged purple mark down his forehead from scalp to brow. “What happened?”

  “Nothin’. He’s doin’ fine. He’s big. A ten pounder, I’d say.”

  Thomas pointed to the mark. “There. What happened to him there?”

  “Ain’t you never seen a stork bite?” Mrs. Pittman took her forefinger and thumb and laid them over the baby’s head like a bird’s beak grasping it. “See? Stork bite.”

  “Will it go away?”

  “More’n likely. Lots of babies is born with a mark. Ain’t that right, little fella?” she cooed at the child. “What kinda mean old stork bites a little baby anyway? Hmm? Say.” She petted the baby’s furred scalp with her finger.

  Thomas touched the child’s forehead. He hoped the imperfection faded soon. This boy was going to have a hard enough go of it with Lydie Murphy for a mother. He didn’t need any extra burdens.

  Cargie’s mother carried the birthmarked baby back into the bedroom, and Thomas stood in the open doorway.

  “He’s ready for his breakfast,” Mrs. Pittman said.

  “Gimme,” Lydie said. “Give him to me.” Her voice was as rough as nettles.

  “Go on to your mama, now, Mr. John Murphy, Jr.”

  “Don’t you call him that!” screamed Lydie. “I ain’t namin’ my baby after that son of a bitch!”

  “Miz Murphy! It’s his son!”

  “You just shut the hell up. You don’t know nothin’.” The women and the baby were silent for a moment, and Thomas turned to leave. Before he walked away, he heard Lydie say, “This is Rudy. I’m naming him after my twin brother. He’s kind and good and gentle as a lamb.”

  Thomas first suspected Lydie was kind and good and gentle when little Becca, named Rebecca after Cargie’s mother, arrived to much less fanfare than Rudy. Lydie agreed to nurse Cargie’s baby alongside her own so Cargie could go back to work. “Got two big tits,” she told Mavis and Mrs. Pittman in Thomas’s presence, “No sense wasting one.”

  “I declare, girl,” said Cargie’s mother. “Ain’t you got no shame?”

  Lydie did not reply, but she winked at Thomas.

  Becca and Rudy thrived, even though Lydie nursed them while eating onions and peppers, crawfish and boudin, and pouring Tabasco pepper sauce all over everything. Mavis and Mrs. Pittman tried desperately to steer the nursing mother away from the spicy foods she loved. “For the babies’ sake,” they said.

  “All that mess is gonna gripe them babies’ bellies,” said Mavis. “Done raised enough chil’ren to know about such things.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Cargie’s mother.

  But Rudy and Becca seemed to take to the spices as much as Lydie. Even after they were grown, neither of them met a pepper they did not like.

  The older women contended with Lydie over the babies sleeping with her. Lydie wanted them close by so she could nurse them without getting up.

  “You’ll roll over on top of them,” said Mavis.

  “And wake up with one of them babies as dead as a doornail,” added Mrs. Pittman.

  But Lydie continued doing exactly as she pleased.

  Thomas met Cargie at the Hollywood streetcar stop every evening, and they walked together to Lydie Murphy’s house so Cargie could spend a few hours with her daughter. Becca came home on Sundays and was carried back and forth for feedings. “It feels like Becca belongs to everybody except me,” Cargie lamented.

  When Mrs. Pittman returned to Dallas to care for her white family, Lydie hired Mavis’s granddaughter—barely more than a child herself—to tend the children six days a week so Mavis could go about her housework. Thomas paid the girl’s wage, which earned Becca a place in the Murphy house after she stopped nursing. Thomas would’ve preferred to care for his daughter himself—he liked carting her around town and showing her off—but Becca was fussy if she missed a day with Rudy.

  As far as Thomas knew, John Murphy never saw the son who presumably was his. When Rudy was barely a month old, Mr. Murphy took three loads of buckshot in the chest and face. The husband who shot him was so incensed that he reloaded his single-shot .12 gauge twice. The assailant attempted a defense of temporary insanity, but the jury convicted him on the reloads. The judge sentenced him to twenty years hard labor in the state penitentiary at Angola.

  The funeral was closed casket, and Lydie was the only wife standing graveside when John Murphy went into the ground. She took it all: the mansion, the property on Texas Avenue, and the money. Lydie emptied the bank account and sold everything except the house, as if the lawyer might change his mind. The Widow Murphy—barely twenty years old—settled down to nest in tranquil celibacy. There were no more Saturday nights on the Avenue and no gentlemen callers.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  1930

  “Keep ‘em coming,” Thomas said a little too brightly when Cargie told him she was pregnant again.

  “I’ve got to change my method,” Cargie muttered.

  Thomas and Cargie sat at the kitchen table, and Little Becca hung on her father’s leg, receiving bits of green bean from his fingers. “Look at that baby go after those beans!” he said.

  “See if she’ll take a pea.”

  Thomas picked a purple-hull pea off his plate and placed it inside Becca’s lower lip. The child worked her mouth, fist to lips, salivating profusely. “Looky there,” he said.

  “Give her a bit of cornbread.”

  Thomas pinched the bread.

  “Too big,” Cargie said quickly. “She might choke. About half of that.”

  “Lemme put a little butter on it,” Thomas said. “There, child.” The baby opened her little round mouth for the cornbread and gummed it vigorously.

  “She’s on her way,” Cargie said. “She’ll be eating your fried steak next week.”

  “Did I see you bring in a new book?” Thomas said.

  “Yes sir. Picked it up on my way home.”

  Cargie rose and went into the dining room to retrieve the book from the buffet, where she always set her purse and whatever else she brought in from the workday. She handed the book to her husband, and he examined the creamy cover with a simple sketch of a rabbit.

  “The Velveteen Rabbit. Is it good?”

  “Supposed to be real good, from what the store clerk said.”

  “I don’t reckon Becca would know the difference if you read to her from the Shreveport Journal,” he said.

  “Maybe not, but she wouldn’t be fed.” Cargie lifted her daughter to her hip and smelled her hair. “I’ll just wipe her up tonight. Don’t believe she needs a bath.”

  After Cargie left the room, Thomas called after her, “I best get moving on building your mama a house.”

  “Here we go,” said Cargie.

  Thomas had surprised Cargie by corresponding with her mother after she went back to her white family in Dallas. He addressed Mrs. Pittman as Pretty Mama in his letters. Cargie thought her mother would bristle at his familiarity, but she did not. In fact, she went as far as signing her letters back to him with the pet name.

  Cargie had bought the vacant lot behind their house against the day they needed more room, and Thomas said he wanted to build a small house on it. In each letter to his mother-in-law, Thomas invited her to move to Mooretown, and he promised the house would be hers.

  “I gots responsibilities here,” she wrote back at first. But the day came when Mrs. Pittman wrote, “I’s comin’. Be there before the baby.”

  Mr. Cole told Cargie that his banker friend, Mr. Walter Addington, said that many banks had gone under and many more were hanging on by a thread. Mr. Cole said that Mr. Addington had off
ered to deposit Cargie’s money in First City Bank, where he was president. “First City has the new army airfield business,” Mr. Cole said. “The government won’t let it go under.”

  Cargie was alarmed, to say the least. She took off early that very day and paid a visit to her own banker on Texas Avenue, whom she had never met. Cargie was ushered into his office as soon as she told the teller who she was. Mr. Frank Reynolds—so said the brass nameplate—shut the door behind her and invited Cargie to sit.

  Cargie did not sit. “I’ve come to draw out my money,” she said.

  “Mrs. Barre, please have a seat.”

  Cargie obliged, but she did not remove her coat or her hat.

  Mr. Reynolds sat behind his desk. He was as round as Humpty Dumpty in a pinstriped waistcoat with a gold pocket watch chain draped across one side. “You need not worry about the security of your deposits,” he said. “The bank is doing fine, and I don’t see any reason for that to change in the foreseeable future.”

  “I hear a lot of banks are going under,” Cargie said.

  “That’s a fact.” Mr. Reynolds took a cigarette from a box on his desk and offered her one. When she declined, he asked, “Do you mind?”

  “No sir.”

  “Mrs. Barre, do you know how a bank works?”

  Cargie thought about her education on banking and discovered it was sketchy. “No sir, I do not. Not specifically.”

  He lit the cigarette and leaned back. “When you bring your deposit in here each week, Mrs. Barre, we don’t just drop it in a box with your name on it back there in the safe.”

  “Well, of course not.”

  Mr. Reynolds leaned forward and looked her squarely in the eye. “Or any other version of that notion. The money you bring in is loaned to someone else. Maybe to a fella who wants to build a new house but doesn’t have the cash, so he takes out a mortgage. Or maybe we loan it to a business, like the York Hotel, because they need to get some new kitchen equipment and don’t have the capital on hand. The money that’s actually inside these walls on any given day is a fraction of the amount people have deposited with us.” He stopped talking and dragged on his cigarette.