Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  Luke came to see Cargie the very next day. He was no bigger than a minute and just as quick. His eyes twinkled when he talked, and Cargie felt as if she had known him all her life. The afternoon was warm enough for them to sit on the front porch, away from the horde that still occupied the house. Luke settled on the porch swing and Cargie took a rocker.

  “Brought you somethin’,” Luke said. He reached into his deep jacket pocket and handed her a tattered book. “Jacob taught me to read from that book. The very one. I wasn’t much for learnin’, but he got me through. It was no small job, I tell you.” He laughed. “Anyway, I thought you ought to have it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tatum. This means more than I can say.”

  “Luke. Call me Luke.”

  “Luke,” said Cargie. “Thank you.”

  Becca stuck her head out the door. “Just checking, Mama. Can I get y’all something to drink? We put on a fresh pot of coffee.”

  “No’m. Nothin’ for me,” said Luke. “Reckon I’ll head over to the cemetery in a little bit. Got some flowers in the truck.”

  “Nothing for me either, honey,” Cargie said, and Becca went back inside.

  “Did your husband ever tell you how he came to be on our farm?” Luke asked.

  Cargie smiled. “Eventually.”

  “I reckon that was quite a story,” Luke said, but he didn’t ask to hear it. He reached into his pocket again and took out a ragged, folded paper and handed it to Cargie.

  Cargie opened it carefully. Its four quarters barely hung together. She laid the paper in her lap. “Missing,” she read. “David Walker.” She tried to make out what details she could from the faded image of the boy her husband had been before it all happened. “Was this the handbill your folks had?”

  “No’m. They had one?”

  “Yes sir. It was at the church house. Your mama figured it out right away.”

  “Mercy me. How ‘bout that?”

  “Where’d you get this one?”

  “At the cotton gin in Baldwin. First harvest Jacob was with us, me and Zach run around the side of the building and saw this paper on the gin’s board. We knew right away who the picture was of, and we took it down so’s nobody else would see it. We liked Jacob real well by then, and we didn’t want anybody takin’ him away.”

  “Lord, Lord,” said Cargie.

  “We hid this paper under Mama’s sideboard and never breathed a word to nobody. We was afraid they’d send Jacob away. We was mostly afraid of what Sherman would do. He carried a grudge back then.”

  “I don’t think Sherman ever knew, but your parents did. They knew he was running, and they took him in. They probably saved his life.”

  “Reckon ever’body was pullin’ the wool over ever’body else’s eyes.” Luke smiled and his eyes twinkled. “But the Lord was a workin’. He works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.”

  “Yes he does,” said Cargie. “He most assuredly does.”

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Victoria telephoned Mae to tell her Sissy had died. Mae wouldn’t have known if her sister hadn’t kept up with the Whitesboro crowd through the years. “Come to Fort Worth,” Victoria said. “And we’ll go to Whitesboro together for the funeral.”

  “Oh, gosh, Vic. Yes. Yes, of course. When is it?”

  “Saturday afternoon. We have plenty of time.

  “I’ll come in the morning. I need to tear myself away from the television anyway. I’ve been on pins and needles ever since that baby went down that well. How can it take it so long to get her out?”

  “I don’t know. I had to turn it off. I can’t take it twenty-four seven.”

  “Can’t wait to see you, sweetie.”

  “I’ve got something else on my mind too, Maypearl. If you get a wild hair and decide to drive over tonight, come on. I’m here.”

  The choice between watching the rescuers in Texas toil through another night, seemingly in vain, and an evening road trip was an easy decision. Mae pulled a plastic dress bag over some hang-up clothes and packed everything else in an overnight bag. By seven o’clock, she was westbound on Interstate 20, driving toward a pink and azure sky.

  The next morning, Vic treated her to breakfast at a neighborhood diner. The television in the diner carried the forty-eight-hour-old rescue efforts, reporting that the child had been heard singing nursery rhymes. “My goodness,” said Mae.

  “Tough little girl,” Vic said.

  When they left the diner, Vic drove to a quiet neighborhood with old houses and older trees, much like Alexander Avenue. She stopped the car in front of a two-story duplex, a fixer-upper, with a For Sale or Rent sign in the yard. It was a few blocks from the Texas Christian University campus. “C’mon, let’s have a look,” Vic said and got out of the car.

  “What are you up to, little sister?”

  “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Don’t be a Wisenheimer. I was thinking that since Hollister up and left you and Dewey up and left me, we’re kinda in the same pickle. Neither one of us has anybody to grow old with.”

  “We are old,” Mae said, even though she could hardly believe it.

  “To get older with, then. What do you think of this duplex? Dewey Jr. took a look at it for me. He says it’s solid. We can get it for next to nothing, and he’ll gut it and redo the plumbing and wiring. He can change the interior layouts to whatever we want. Heck, I’ll even give you first dibs on picking a side.”

  “How can I refuse an offer like that?” Mae said.

  Vic slipped her arm through her sister’s. “C’mon. Let’s walk.” They strolled down the deeply shaded sidewalk. “This neighborhood’s landlocked between the country club and the university. There’s a really old Baptist church a couple of blocks that way. It’s beautiful. We could walk to Sunday service on pretty days, like when we were kids.”

  “I don’t have a letter anymore,” Mae said.

  “A letter? Do they still do that?”

  “I don’t know, but I refuse to be baptized again.”

  “Then we’ll be visitors. At the end of the day that’s all we ever were anyway.”

  That evening, the rescuers freed Baby Jessica alive and in one piece, and the entire country breathed a sigh of relief. Mae was surprised when the agitation she’d felt for two days remained after the news coverage had evaporated.

  “I don’t have a very good history in Whitesboro,” Mae told Vic during the drive north to the funeral.

  “Hmm.” Vic glanced at her sister. “Well, at least it’s ancient.”

  Mae saw Buster as soon as she walked into the church. He didn’t look anything like she remembered, but somehow, she knew it was him. He recognized her too. He came over immediately and hugged her tightly. “Mae Pearl Compton! You are a sight for sore eyes.”

  “How are you, Buster?”

  “Thin up top and thick in the middle, but still kicking. Come on, and I’ll introduce you to my bride. I robbed a cradle up by Ardmore, Oklahoma.”

  Buster’s bride of fifty years was not shy about telling Mae how they had met. “I was sixteen and wet behind the ears when this fella showed up on Daddy’s farm askin’ about drillin’ rights. I tell ya, I’d been to three goat ropes and a county fair, but I hadn’t ever seen a man as comely as this one. I set to work on him. Didn’t much know what I was about, but I musta done somethin’ right because the next thing I knew he was askin’ Daddy for my hand.”

  Buster put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and grinned. “Every word is true, and she’s been my little Okie ever since.”

  Like Baby Jessica, Buster had survived his ordeal.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  2012

  Cargie kept Thomas waiting a good while longer than she intended, but she didn’t think he minded. Thomas knew better than anyone that Cargie liked to take her time to finish a thing.

  There was a spot on the second-floor gallery of her granddaughter’s house, just outside Cargie’s bedroom
, that she liked particularly well. From it, she had a broad view of the pine forest south of Natchitoches and of the twisting river, flat and red. It was a view worth hanging around for.

  Cargie heard her great-grandson talking on the phone before she saw him. These days, everyone communicated without pause. Even Cargie felt as if she’d missed something important if she spent an entire day off-line. Joshua stepped out onto the gallery in his dress whites, carrying his phone and a paper sack. “Mama C!” he exclaimed and spread his arms for a hug.

  “Look at you, all spiffed up!”

  “Whatcha think?” He spun around so Cargie could admire a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of his snow-white naval officer regalia.

  “You’re as handsome as they come.”

  “Look here.” He set the paper sack on a table between two rockers, unfolded the top, and took out a bottle of Orange Crush. “For you. Nice and cold, like you like it.” He twisted off the cap and handed it to her.

  “Thank you, baby.”

  He lifted out a tall, thin can of Red Bull. “For me,” he said and set it down. “And, for us.” He took out a small white sack soaked with oil. Cargie saw the red skins of the peanuts through the translucent paper. Joshua pulled a wad of paper napkins from the sack, then flattened it and shook the peanuts onto it. They sat in the rockers on either side of the table.

  “Mmm. Good stuff,” Cargie said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “So, how’s the flight training coming along?”

  Joshua wiped his hands and handed his cellphone to Cargie. “I tweeted this yesterday morning, ‘First carrier landing in a jet! #rockandroll #flytheball #Goshawk.’”

  “Go on now. Tell me everything. What’s fly the ball? What’s Goshawk?”

  “Goshawk is the airplane I’m flying. Here, I’ll show you a picture.” Cargie handed the phone back to him, and a few seconds later, he held it up and showed her a fierce, red-tailed jet. “And this,” He tapped the phone. “This is the ball. We call it the Optical Landing System.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  For the next half-hour, while Cargie chewed peanuts and sipped Orange Crush, Joshua told her every technical detail about flying the ball. Then he told her what still lay ahead in his training. “There’s something else too,” he said at the end.

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “I met a girl. She’s in the class behind me.”

  “Go on now.”

  “She’s smart, and she likes to laugh. We have a good time together.” He rocked for a while, and Cargie waited. Then he stopped rocking and said, “I might be in love with her, Mama C, but I’m not sure, you know? I’m not even sure if I can be sure.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Gabrielle. I haven’t told anybody else about her.”

  “It’s yours to tell, honey. Or not.”

  “How did you know? I mean, how did you and great-grandad know?”

  “I don’t suppose we did. Love is a growing thing. After Thomas and I had been together many, many years, sometimes I’d look back and wonder if what we had at first was love or something else. I don’t know what it was way back then, but it became love. I have no doubts about that. I’d have to say we grew into love. We did not fall into it.”

  Joshua resumed his rocking. “I wish I could’ve met him.”

  “You will. Someday you will. Wait here. I want to show you something.” Cargie went into her bedroom and took a wooden box from the top of the closet. The box held her most precious memories, including Private William Cole’s diary. She carried the diary to Joshua.

  “Whose is this?” he asked.

  “Bill Cole. He passed years ago, but he was my dearest friend, aside from Thomas. I thought you might enjoy reading this.” Cargie turned the brittle pages to the entry about a young noblewoman and her Sopwith Camel. Adele, for whom Joshua’s grandmother was named.

  Joshua read the passage. Then he read it a second time. He closed the diary and said, “I am in love.”

  “Go on now.”

  “Yes ma’am.” He pointed to the diary. “With her.”

  A bunch of the cousins were getting together that evening to kick off summer, and they planned to binge watch all the Star Wars episodes. Joshua invited Cargie to join them. “We’ll start around four,” he said. “What kind of pizza do you like?”

  “Every kind,” Cargie said.

  A little before four, she made her way downstairs to the media room, which held a passel of her great-grandchildren and their friends. “Mama C!“ they shouted in unison when she appeared in the doorway. Cargie thought that was Joshua’s doing to make her feel welcome. The youngsters parted to give her the best seat on the sectional sofa. She received fist bumps and a paper plate loaded with pizza.

  Joshua’s younger brother Caleb, who had just finished his sophomore year of high school, said, “Mama C rocking Star Wars! Wanna try a Red Bull? Here, just try it.”

  Cargie took a sip. As far as she was concerned, the drink tasted like chilled cleaning solvent. She must’ve made a face because Joshua took the can away and fetched her a Coke.

  They began watching Episode IV—Cargie’s favorite—in the wee hours of the morning. When the first Star Wars movie had come out in seventy-seven, she and Thomas watched it at the Strand Theater, and they sat in the third row. Like everyone else, they marveled at the special effects. No one had ever seen anything like it.

  After watching the Millennium Falcon jump to hyperspace, Cargie became interested in physics, and she read enough about Mr. Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to put a handle on it. The notion that time and space were a single thing rather than two separate things came as no surprise to Cargie. The Bible spoke of “this present age” and “this present world” as if they were one in the same. While she munched pizza and watched the Falcon jump around in space-time, she thought about her Thomas taking the leap to another realm altogether. For the first time in her life, Cargie wanted to jump in after him.

  “Way to hang with us, Mama C,” Caleb said. “Are you getting sleepy?”

  Cargie patted his hand. “Sleep will come soon enough, honey.”

  The next afternoon, Cargie scooted her ladder-back chair to the desk and jiggled the mouse, bringing her two computer monitors to life. Mr. Benjamin Graham’s investing principles, which had served Cargie for years, had been overwhelmed by amateurs. Modern investors moved en masse as suddenly and unpredictably as schooling fish, and their sheer numbers drove the prices of individual equities and even entire markets up and down without any rhyme or reason. Nevertheless, Cargie still found amusement in dabbling, and she had a soft spot for companies that, like her, continued to put one foot in front of the other on the upward path.

  She opened her favorite investing forum, where months before she had started a string titled, “Nineteen Hundred Reasons to Buy WHR.” Early that morning, a regular named Paradigm451 had posted a question there. To Cargie. “Who are you?!?”

  “Darth Vader,” Cargie typed. She pressed Send, and her hand flew to her mouth.

  “You are SO DOPE!” came the immediate response.

  Cargie frowned. Then she Googled “dope” and discovered the word was now a compliment.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  1926

  By the time David Walker was thirty-one years old, he had worked in the library at Wiley College for nearly a decade. The knowledge he had gained during many Saturday afternoons in the library on Texas Avenue had prepared him to excel at his job. He was a master of the Dewey Decimal System and the acceptable methods for categorizing and cataloguing books. There was not a reference book or textbook or novel that entered Wiley during his tenure that he did not at least skim, and his knowledge of the authors and subjects the library housed bested any faculty member on campus. Professors consulted David, whom they knew as Jacob Tatum, an assumption that made life easier all the way around.

  The university supplied David with room and board and an ho
urly wage. He supplemented these compensations by doing odd jobs for faculty members and their families and friends. There wasn’t anything he could not repair or build. He became the campus pet, and as such, he enjoyed many good meals in the homes of his patrons. It was easy to save money, and David fulfilled his promise to Zachary to pay his tuition, even though David himself never attended a class.

  One particular morning, which happened to be his birthday—David had not celebrated a birthday since he had done so with his parents and Gramps—he was in the stockroom going through a new shipment of books Wiley had received from Columbia University. Since he rarely felt the need to rush, he took his time thumbing through the pages of Harlem Artists: A Mosaic, Studies in African American Heritage, and A Black Perspective on Southern Reconstruction.

  In the bottom of the crate, one last title presented itself. Renaissance Men Volume 32: Caesar Carpentier Antoine. Caesar Carpentier Antoine, or C. C., as David had known him, had been Gramps’s captain during the Freedom War. Afterward, during Louisiana’s brief and glorious Reconstruction period, Gramps had worked with Lieutenant Governor Antoine in New Orleans.

  David picked up the thin book and ran his fingertips over the image in the center of its tooled leather cover. It was the same painting that had hung over the mantel in Captain Antoine’s house on Perrin Street in Shreveport, where C. C. had retired from public life. David had visited there many times with his grandfather. Often after their Saturday errands, Gramps and David enjoyed an early supper at Captain Antoine’s table.

  David opened the book and found a reference to Gramps, as he had hoped he would. Andrew Samuel Dyer, David’s maternal grandfather, had spoken at Captain Antoine’s funeral in 1921, and the eulogy Gramps’s gave was quoted.