Shadow Baby

by Alison McGhee

  “A new colander is only a few bucks at the hardware store,” you can imagine someone saying to them. “Get rid of this old thing.”

  I looked at the old man. He nodded. That’s how I knew I was learning, learning to see with the old man’s eyes.

  The colander owner did not have the old man’s eyes. The colander owner could not see the art of possibility, the possibility of beauty. They did not have the hands and the tools to repair the snapped-off legs of the colander and make it whole again, make it new again, so that it would stand upright and fulfill its potential.

  Sometimes we stopped at Crystal’s Diner. I had a milkshake. He had a cup of coffee.

  He left things at the diner. The money for the milkshake and coffee, plus a quarter. Always that. But he left other things too, things that he made, things that we made together. Sugar cookies wrapped in a tinfoil swan for Crystal. Once a bracelet made of curled-up soda pop tops strung on a piece of red string. The kind of thing that Crystal’s nephew Johnny is crazy for. Shinies, and small red things, that’s what Johnny loves.

  On our way out once, as we passed Johnny’s booth, I saw the old man’s hand go into his pocket and come out again. The candelier cookie cutter lay shining up from Johnny’s table. Johnny wasn’t there, but it waited for him. Next week when we went back to the diner, there was Johnny, waving the candelier in the air under the light, so that it threw sparkles onto the chrome sugar shaker.

  The old man knew things about people.

  On our first trip under cover of darkness, with me as his apprentice, we walked by Mrs. J’Alexander’s house. Her son was sitting in the window. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. That happened in the Vietnam War.

  “Her son almost died,” I told him. “His name’s Joe. His legs were blown off in the war.”

  Everyone knows that. It’s common knowledge.

  “He’s deaf dumb and blind,” I said.

  “He is not,” the old man said.

  “It’s common knowledge,” I said.

  “Knowledge is not common.”

  “He can’t hear, he can’t talk, and he can’t see,” I said. “That makes you deaf dumb and blind.”

  “He can see and he can hear.”

  I looked in the window, lit up by a lamp. Joe was sitting in his wheelchair.

  “What can he see? What can he hear?”

  “Everything you can.”

  If that’s true, how did the old man know it?

  “Are you psychic?” I said.

  He shook his head. It could be that the old man didn’t know that word, or it could be that he was truly not psychic. Then I remembered that I was an apprentice and I stopped talking. I made a vow to continue to observe the old man and learn his ways.

  I didn’t know then that our time was almost up.

  I am still the old man’s apprentice in all things. Paul Revere started that way. Back in those days there was a system for apprentices and journeymen and masters. You followed in their footsteps. That’s how Paul Revere learned to mold silver and create useful objects of great beauty. I’ve seen the Revere-ware factory in Rome. It’s only fifteen miles away. I’ve been past it at night, when the red neon horse gallops against the dark sky. I think about that horse sometimes. I think about the young Paul Revere, apprentice to a master craftsman.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Once, when I was still eleven and the old man was still alive although I had not yet met him, I asked Tamar a sraightforward, answer-demanding question.

  “Ma, did you want kids?”

  Tamar looked at me. I looked back at her. I raised my eyebrows and held them up there.

  “Yes.”

  That was it. That was her answer. No quibbling, no equivocating, no hemming or hawing. It took me by surprise.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  That gave me something to chew on. As my hermit grandfather chewed on deerskin through the long winter to make it soft and pliable and ready for the needle, so did I chew on Tamar’s answer. She was busy with her lumberjacket. How she loves her lumberjacket. Her mother bought it at the store in Speculator. I used to think eighteen was old enough so that your mother could die, but now I’m not sure.

  Tamar was working the new zipper on her lumberjacket, trying to get the teeth to fit together smoothly and not snaggle halfway up. She had replaced the zipper herself when it gave out. Tamar is not a seamstress, however. Neither a needler nor a threader shall she be. Already the zipper had come apart at the bottom. Tamar was using duct tape to keep it together. When the duct tape made its appearance, I asked another answer-demanding question.

  “Did you fall in love with him?” I said to Tamar.

  She didn’t look up. She was wrapping the duct tape around the bottom of the broken zipper.

  “Were you in love with my father?” I said. “Even for just that one time?”

  Duct tape doesn’t tear. You have to cut it. She cut it with the kitchen shears, as opposed to the tiny sharp scissors on her Swiss army knife, which would have gummed up had she tried to use them on duct tape. Tamar can’t stand her Swiss army scissors to be gummed.

  “Even for a few minutes? I’m just trying to understand.”

  “No,” Tamar said. “I did not love your father.”

  “At all?”

  “At all.”

  “Then why did you do that with him?”

  “Well, that will have to remain a mystery,” Tamar said.

  She finished wrapping the zipper and smoothed down the duct tape seam. Then she slipped her feet into her worn-out moccasins and wiggled her toes. I watched her face for a silent wince. That happens sometimes, when her toes are remembering being frozen. There was nothing.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Things don’t have to remain mysteries.”

  “This one does,” Tamar said. “There are some things you are too young to understand.”

  That was a rare thing for Tamar to say. Usually she stops after, “This one does,” and that would be the end of it. Tamar is not a qualifier of words. Things are, things are not. That’s the sort of person she is.

  “I’m not a child,” I said.

  But that was it. She was finished. She stretched her arms in her old lumberjacket carefully, so that the worn-out seams wouldn’t rip any farther, and tested the zipper for snags.

  “There’s going to come a point at which you will be forced to buy a new lumberjacket,” I said. “There will come a day when you will get in the car and drive to Speculator, walk into the lumberjacket store, and buy a new one.”

  But even now, that day has not yet come. That day in Speculator remains in the future. There’s no way to predict when it will come, no way to know when Tamar will wake, put on the lumberjacket her mother gave her, look down at it and realize that it is no more, that the seams are destroyed and it will not zip. That the cold cannot be kept out. The lumberjacket as it once was will have disappeared. Tamar’s lumberjacket from her mother will have entered a new, nonjacket life, and in her gut Tamar will know it.

  When you lose your hair in a fire, you might not recognize it when it grows back in. It doesn’t look like the same hair that grew on your head your whole life long. New hair is soft, and patchy. When new hair grows in over a patch of scalp that was burned in a fire, it grows in tentatively, unsure it should be there. You look at your hair in the mirror and you wonder whose hair it is, and if it’s always been this way and you just never noticed it before.

  Think about it. You walk around with dead hair hanging off your head. The only thing about hair that’s alive is its roots. The roots push up new hair, but that new hair is already dead. In a way, having your hair burned off in a fire is not a tragedy at all; that hair was not alive.

  They hauled the old man’s trailer away. One day it was there, with bent metal strips hanging out of the black windows, with black cement steps leading up to the door that was burned away, with the curved kitchen end burnt into a lu
mp, and then the next day it wasn’t.

  “Where’s Georg’s trailer?” I asked Tamar.

  I’ve started calling him Georg, so that anyone who’s listening will know the way his name was pronounced.

  “They hauled it away.”

  “To where?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Who hauled it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know it was hauled?”

  “That’s what they do with trailers that are too old, or burnt up, or are otherwise unusable.”

  Did anyone go through the old man’s trailer before they hauled it away? Did anyone search through the rubble to see if there was anything worthwhile preserving in the ruins? Were there people with masks and white suits and boots, moving slowly from miniature room to miniature room, sifting through the ashes, looking for remnants of the old man’s life?

  “Did they take the forge, too?” I asked Tamar.

  “What forge?”

  “His forge,” I said. “Don’t you even know about his forge?”

  “No.”

  “He was a metalworker,” I said. “Have you ever heard of a metalworker without a forge?”

  “No,” Tamar said. “I guess I haven’t.”

  “Have you ever heard of a metalworker without tin snips? Jewelry pliers? A soldering iron? A torch? Pre–cookie cutters?”

  “Pre–cookie cutters,” Tamar said. “Pre, cookie, cutters.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Pre–cookie cutters. Don’t ask me to explain. Don’t ask me to show you the relationship between things. Don’t ask me about consistencies, and objects that are beautiful as well as useful.”

  Tamar looked at me. Words kept spilling out of me, secret words, words and phrases that were the old man’s and mine. I ran out of the room to stop those precious words from wasting themselves in the blank air between Tamar and me.

  I asked Mr. Jewell if he knew what had happened to the forge.

  “I don’t know, Miss Clara,” he said. “One day the trailer was there, and the next it wasn’t, and I don’t know what happened to the forge.”

  No one knew. I wondered about the forge. Did someone under cover of darkness steal into the ruins and take it while I was in the hospital with burned lungs? Is someone in North Sterns now working with fire at a backyard forge? Or did it tumble into Nine Mile Creek when the fire trucks were putting out the fire? Is it possible that the forge is even now rusting in the dark water of Nine Mile Creek? In the fullness of time the destiny of the old man’s forge may be revealed to me. But I doubt it.

  The old man had no family. He had no friends, except silent friends. His silent friends were friends like Crystal Zielinski at Crystal’s Diner, who took the onions that the old man brought her and chopped them into tuna salad. Friends like Harold Jewell, who sometimes used to give the old man a Persian dough nut for free.

  “He has the money to pay for that Persian,” I said to Mr. Jewell once.

  I wanted Mr. Jewell to know that the old man was not a bag person. He had a home and an onion garden. He had a visitor every Wednesday night. He had enough money to pay for a Persian doughnut without it being given to him for free.

  “You don’t have to feel sorry for the old man,” I said to Mr. Jewell.

  He gave me a look.

  “I don’t feel sorry for Mr. Kominsky, Clara,” Mr. Jewell said. “I give him a Persian doughnut because I consider him my friend.”

  I am the last of my line, the old man had said to me in the beginning of my oral history project. That was one of the first things the old man ever said to me, despite the fact that he was chary with his words.

  “Did the fire start because the old man used a can of flammable stuff in the wrong way?” I said. “Is that how it started?”

  Tamar looked at me.

  “What are you really asking?” she said.

  If it had been common knowledge in Sterns that the old man didn’t know how to read, then Tamar would have immediately known what I was trying to ask. What I was trying to ask was: if the old man had known how to read, would the fire not have started? Would the old man still be alive? Would I still be going down on Wednesday nights while Tamar was at choir practice, eating toast thickly spread with margarine and drinking hot chocolate with extra milk?

  “Did he use something flammable in the wrong way? Did he not pay attention to the directions?”

  She was still looking at me.

  “Are you what-iffing?” she said. “Are you retracing? Are you saying if that hadn’t happened then that wouldn’t have happened and that wouldn’t have happened and the old man would still be alive?”

  I looked back at her.

  “Is that what you’re doing?” she said.

  “What I’m doing,” I said, “is asking if the old man neglected to read the fine print.”

  “What does it matter, Clara?” Tamar said. “What does it matter now?”

  Tamar forgot about my chickens when I was in the hospital. For three weeks in March, a flock of insane chickens were without food or water. Insane chickens paced and pecked the cracked concrete floor of the broken-down barn, while Tamar slept on a cot by the side of my bed at Utica Memorial. The day I got home I put on my boots and headed down there. Tamar was busy patching her moccasins with duct tape.

  I walked into the broken-down barn, breathing through my mouth because of the stink of the chicken manure. It was quiet. No peeps, no clucks. No pecking and scratching around in the dirt. I put my sneakers one in front of the other like an Indian guide. I glided up to the pen, stuck my head over the side.

  All their necks were broken. I could tell by the weird angles of their heads. My chickens had died not by starvation but by murder. Over in the corner the dollhouse lay tipped on its side, with a chicken lying half-in and half-out of the living room, its wing sticking through the window. Over in the other corner there was a hole burrowed through the broken-down barn siding. Weasel, I thought. I knew about weasels from my research. They kill for fun, just to be mean. They might suck a little blood, but that’s it.

  Tamar put on her boots right away when I told her the chickens were all dead.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said. “I completely forgot about them.”

  “They died not from starvation but from murder,” I said. “A weasel got them while I was in the hospital.”

  She wasn’t listening. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “They never once crossed my mind. Clara, I am so sorry.”

  But halfway across the pasture Tamar stopped and got a look on her face.

  “Clara, what is that smell?”

  I tried to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Smell?” I said. “What smell?”

  Then I saw the way Tamar was looking at me.

  “Oh, that smell,” I said. “I guess I do smell it after all. Dead chickens.”

  “That isn’t dead chickens I’m smelling, Clara.”

  She started walking fast toward the broken-down door to the broken-down barn.

  “Ma,” I called.

  The back of her ripped lumberjacket was getting away from me.

  “What,” she called back without turning around.

  “Ma! I forgot to tell you that those chickens were not normal. They were abnormal chickens. They were … psychotic chickens.”

  She turned around.

  “Yes,” I said. “Psychotic chickens. The rooster tried to kill me.”

  I scrabbled around on my scalp where there was still hair, searching for old scabs to show her. Too late, though. She was already into the barn.

  “My God,” she said.

  I came up behind her. Afraid to touch her plaid shoulder. I looked around the barn with her eyes. Fermenting feed in heaps in the pen, where the water I tossed had landed on the feed I spilled. Piles of chicken manure smeared on the pitted cement floor. Massacred chickens strewn like garbage. A searing smell of sulphur and manure and death. Tamar’s eyes turned on m
e were full of a look I had never seen from her before.

  “You smell that sulphur smell, Clara? On top of the manure smell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s a pile of eggs somewhere in this pen. Those hens were laying all this time.”

  Tamar opened up the gate and walked on in. She waded through the smeary manure piles, kicked a dead hen out of the way. She went over to the pile of hay in the corner and swiped off the top wisps.

  “Here they are.”

  There they were. A million brown eggs, a mountain of brown eggs. Some crushed against each other, some whole and perfect. I stared at that pile of eggs. There was a little heave from the heap of dark feathers in the dollhouse. Another little heave. It was the CJ Wilson chicken. I crouched down in front of him. His beady eye stared back. He kicked a yellow claw. I could tell he was not going to live. I didn’t know how he had managed to live as long as he had.

  I started to sing to him. “Oh Susannah, oh don’t you cry for me … For I’ve come from Alabama, with my banjo on my knee.”

  I couldn’t remember the rest of the words.

  “Clara,” Tamar said.

  She came up and knelt by me and the CJ Wilson chicken. She put her arms around me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me about these chickens.”

  “What about them?”

  Tamar squeezed my arms and rocked. “Everything about them,” she said.

  “There’s not much to tell,” I said. “They’re not normal chickens. They never were. They’re psychotic chickens, especially that CJ Wilson one.”