Shadow Baby

by Alison McGhee

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell her it was her fault?”

  “Yes.”

  We sat there for a while. It was cold.

  “On my next birthday I’ll be thirteen,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you ever come out here before?”

  “I did, once, a few months after it happened.”

  “And?”

  “And I saw Tamar out by the barn splitting wood. You were in the house bawling. I saw that I hadn’t split enough wood for half a winter’s worth, and she was out there chopping away, and you were screaming, and I thought of what happened to Daphne, and I turned around and left.”

  “And that’s when you went up north to live in the primeval forest?”

  He looked at me. “What?”

  “Tamar told me you lived in a tipi in a small primeval forest up near the Vermont border.”

  “She did?”

  Then I remembered that Tamar hadn’t told me that. I had made that up. It was a figment of my imagination.

  “No, she didn’t,” I said. “I made it up. It all started with Tales from the Cave: Story of an Adirondacks Hermit.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” C. Winter said. “Anyway. I went back to Utica. I left Tamar chopping and you screaming. And now I’m back and Tamar’s at choir practice and you’re twelve. And that’s the end of the story.”

  The old man taught me how to see the possibility of beauty. He taught me how to make objects that are useful as well as beautiful. I keep my eyes open. At any moment something may shine out at me. There may be something sparkling in the ditch. It may be half-buried beneath fallen maple leaves. Last fall I went walking down Williams Road, the colors of autumn flaming in the trees. Someone was burning leaves even though it’s not allowed anymore.

  I smelled those burning leaves and thought, I will never leave. I will never leave the Sterns Valley in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where burning leaves smell this way in the fall.

  I lay down in the middle of Williams Road, which is a dirt road where almost no cars ever come, and looked up at the sky. A September blue sky, is what Tamar would have said. Her words scroll across the bottom of my mind like all words scroll. I’ll never not be able to read. I’ll be a prisoner of letters the rest of my life. Every time I sign my name I’ll remember the way the old man signed his name, the way he made a slash instead of a dot above the “i,” the way he underlined his last name as if someone might not take it the way he intended.

  The morning after the CJ Wilson chicken died I woke up and I knew that Georg Kominsky, American Immigrant, was truly gone. I could picture him, sitting on his chair at the cigarette-burned kitchen table where we used to drink our coffee and our hot chocolate. But the table was gone and the kitchen was gone and the forge was gone and the trailer was gone and the old man was gone and so was my roll of green adding-machine paper.

  That roll of adding-machine paper contained all my notes for my future true book about Georg Kominsky, American Immigrant. There were words on that spool of paper that were the first words I ever heard the old man speak, and there were words on there that were among his last. Bits of the old man were caught on that paper. I had planned to keep it for the rest of my life, so that I could take it out and unroll it whenever I wanted, and remember the old man.

  Will there be more spools of paper in the reject bin at Jewell’s? There are no guarantees. It’s a reject bin. It’s a bin filled with items that others don’t want, that don’t sell, that have flaws, that are in some way peculiar.

  “It takes a certain kind of person to want a roll of green adding-machine paper,” Mr. Jewell said when I bought it. “And you, Clara Winter, are that sort of person.”

  Just before it was lost in the fire, I came to the end of the roll. The notes for Georg Kominsky: American Immigrant were finished. All the raw material, the heart and soul of the old man, was there. It’s amazing to reach the end of an entire spool of adding-machine paper. When I first bought it, when I had just chosen it from its peers in the bin at Jewell’s Grocery, I thought it would last forever. It was a pristine spool of paper. Untouched by human hands. When I wrote my first word on the first inch of narrow, curling green paper, I never stopped to think that one day the spool would be filled. But words turn into sentences turn into paragraphs turn into curl after curl of writing, bouncing on the floor.

  The old man as a boy of seventeen must have tried to find help, someone, anyone, a cottage in the woods, to help him carry his young brother Eli to safety. Why couldn’t there have been a cottage in the woods, smoke coming out of the chimney, paned windows with firelight glowing behind the glass, visible even in the middle of a blizzard? Inside a family sits around a table covered with a red-checked cloth. A gun hangs over the fireplace mantel. The man of the family is a hunter, wise to the ways of the woods. He comes immediately when Georg pounds on the door. They retrace Georg’s steps, fast disappearing in the whiteout conditions, and make their way back to Eli, lying helpless in the snow. Together they make a seat with interlocked hands, the way they taught us to do in gym class at Sterns Elementary, and carry Eli to safety. The wife of the family makes hot broth and spoons it into Eli’s mouth. They wrap him in feather quilts and stoke the fire. Winter rages outside the door, winds howl, but inside all is safe and warm. In a few days Eli has recovered enough to start out on the journey again. The snow has stopped and all is peaceful and calm, a winter wonderland of quiet whiteness.

  “Bon voyage,” the hunter says.

  His wife presses a basket of bread and cheese and dried berries into their hands. They wish them well on their journey to America.

  “Remember us,” the wife says.

  I almost wrote that whole story down on my adding-machine roll of paper. Everything was good. Everything worked out. Eli recovered. He did not lose any fingers or toes. Together Eli and Georg made their way to the dock, together they endured the hard Atlantic crossing. They ate hardtack belowdecks and drank musty barreled water from the same tin ladle. Together they entered America through Ellis Island. They lived together forever, as close as only brothers can be.

  I almost asked the old man about that cottage once.

  “What about the cottage in the woods?” I almost said. “What about the hunter, and the roaring fire, and the feather bed?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The story of my birth is an astounding one. I was born during a February blizzard in a truck tipped sideways into a ditch on Glass Factory Road. My grandfather was trying to get Tamar to Utica Memorial in time for the delivery, but there was no such luck. The most amazing part of the story of my birth is that my mother, Tamar, delivered me herself. There was no one there to help her, including my grandfather, who was trying to slog through a blizzard to reach a house and get help. My mother, Tamar, had to push. She knew that once you have to push there’s no going back.

  Tamar closed her eyes and prayed to God that the urge to push would stop. She felt darkness closing in on her, and the winds of the blizzard howling around her, and she was afraid. Please God, keep my baby safe, she prayed. She did not know that there were two babies.

  Outside, in the depths of the blizzard, my grandfather kept on. Sheer luck kept him from losing his way in the darkness of the night and the whiteness of the snow. He found a house. The people who lived there called the police. But there was nothing that could be done. The blizzard was that bad. Even had it been on Route 12, the police said, there was no way an emergency vehicle could get through in that kind of weather. My grandfather headed back to the truck. He tried to retrace his steps but his steps were gone. By the grace of God he found the truck but it was hours later and hours too late. Tamar was unconscious and Daphne was dead. I was alive, lying on Tamar’s bare stomach, covered with her parka.

  “And that’s the story,” Tamar said.

  “That’s the whole story,” my grandfather said.

  “That’s not the story I
made up,” I said. “My story had a midwife in it, named Angelica Rose Beaudoin.”

  Tamar and my grandfather said nothing. We were sitting on the porch. Piles of wood left over from the winter, neatly stacked, stood silent around us. It was a cloudless night in the Adirondacks. High in the firmament, stars glittered. The air was still and cold and smelled not of spring but of winter, tired old winter whose time was past.

  The day after the judge sentenced CJ’s father was warm and sunny. I could sense the presence of spring. Underneath the last of the snow, bulbs were beginning to push their way toward light.

  “Wipe,” CJ said when I got on the bus. His eyes were filled with his hatred for me.

  “Guess what,” CJ said to the boys. “Me and my dad, we’re leaving here. Getting out of this dump. My dad’s going back on the road again. Going on a Chucky Luck comeback tour and taking me with him.”

  CJ was telling the boys about the hotels he was going to stay at and the cars he was going to drive when Tiny pulled up at CJ’s trailer.

  “Hey CJ!” one of the boys said. “What happened to your famous car? You decide to start a junkyard instead?”

  The white Camaro was bashed in on the driver’s side. CJ gave the boys the finger. I saw him look over at me.

  “Some drunk smashed it up,” said CJ. “Some drunk totaled it.”

  “Some drunk, huh?” said one of the boys. “Go tell that to Chucky Luck.”

  CJ’s ears turned red below his buzzcut. “I said a drunk smashed it up.”

  “Uh huh,” said the same boy. “Uh huh.”

  She who hesitates is lost. I put my hand in my pocket. I was wearing old white Carter’s that had a rip at the side seam. I felt for the rip through the thin cotton. Then I leaned out of my seat.

  “CJ’s right,” I said. “He’s right. I heard my mother talking about it after court last night. This drunk guy, he just drove right over the yellow line on Glass Factory Road and smashed up CJ’s Camaro.”

  CJ didn’t look at me.

  “See? I told you,” he said to the boys. “That Camaro was rusted-out anyway. It was a mess. I hated it. My dad, he’s going to get me a new one instead. A brand-new one, when he starts making money on the tour.”

  I slid back in my seat and looked out the window at the mountains coming closer. I kept my hand in my pocket, covering up the rip in my Carter’s. That was before the state took CJ away and Tiny stopped pulling up at his trailer.

  • • •

  The old man was a highly prized tinsmith in his former village. Once I asked him about it. You had to space questions few and far between with the old man. He was like Tamar in that way.

  “If you were only seventeen when you left your village,” I asked the old man, “how could you be such a good tinsmith?”

  He didn’t answer right away. I didn’t have a sense of unanswering, though. I waited.

  “It was a different time,” the old man said. “It was a different country. People grew up faster. I had been a metalworker for a long time by the time I was seventeen.”

  That was all he said. There was much that he left out, much I never found out. How had he come to learn the art of metalworking so early? How had he never learned to read? Did his father say: You must go to work, Georg, there are too many mouths to feed and I cannot earn enough myself.

  Maybe his mother put him to work helping her in her work as a laundrywoman. She may have been a charwoman. It’s possible. She may have had a large wicker basket that she took from cottage to cottage in the old man’s village that no longer exists, gathering the weekly wash from each family and taking it down to the river, where she washed it in the cold clear water with brown softsoap she made herself. She may have pounded the clothes on the rocks to get out the stubborn stains, like cabbage-roll-with-tomato stains, ox-plow-dirt stains, muddy-boot stains, dried-sweat stains. She then may have draped the wet clothes over lingonberry bushes by the banks of the river to dry in the sun, while she sat and rested after her work. Her hands may have been large-knuckled and reddened from all the washing and pounding and folding. Georg would have helped her. He would have rinsed the soapy clothes.

  Careful, Georg, she may have said. Get every bit of soap out. If you leave the soap in the clothes will be scratchy. If the clothes are scratchy we will lose our laundry business and then how will we eat? Your father does not earn enough from farming to feed us. The land is poor and the potatoes do not grow as they should. Take good care, Georg, and rinse the clothes till the water runs clear.

  That’s what she may well have said to her son Georg, the little laundry helper. When baby Eli came along six years later she may have laid him in a basket with a cloth draped over it to keep the sun out, letting him sleep by the bank of the river as she and Georg worked. When Georg’s father was done in the potato fields he may have come down to the river to wash himself, to dive into the clear cold water and rinse the grime of the fields from his sweaty skin. Then the whole family—mother, father, Georg, and little Eli—would have walked home, Georg’s father helping his mother with the heavy wicker basket full of freshly washed and folded laundry, Georg singing songs to baby Eli. They would have had boiled potatoes and cabbage soup for dinner. They would have bowed their heads and given thanks for their humble fare—

  The old man’s life still tumbles through my heart and soul. A story starts itself and I watch it unfold. The old man is gone. Who am I to say what may or may not have happened, what the old man’s life as a child may or may not have been like?

  Next time Tamar went to choir practice I rode into Sterns with her. She dropped me at Crystal’s Diner so I could wait there while she practiced. Crystal brought me a vanilla milkshake. She knows they’re my favorite. Johnny was coloring in his booth.

  “Can I sit with Johnny?” I said to Crystal.

  “Why not?” she said.

  Johnny seemed happy to see me. He had a coloring book and an eight-pack of crayons that were all red. How did that happen? Did Crystal buy eight packs of assorted crayons and then pick out the reds from each one?

  “Here,” Crystal said. She set a tunafish sandwich down in front of me. It came with a pickle and chips.

  “Do you still use real olive oil in your salad dressing?” I said.

  “Indeed I do.”

  Johnny held one of his red crayons up to the lamp and laughed the way he laughs.

  “My grandfather’s name is C. Winter,” I said. “Most people call him Cliff.”

  “I know,” Crystal said. “I remember your grandfather from when Tamar and I were growing up.”

  “Did his eyes jiggle around back then?” I said.

  “I don’t remember his eyes doing that.”

  “Did he rock back and forth?”

  “I don’t remember him doing that either.”

  “Do you know if he told Tamar that certain things were her fault that actually were not her fault?” I said.

  “No, I do not,” Crystal said.

  “Do you remember if C. Winter loved Tamar?”

  “He must have.”

  “It’s not a law of nature,” I said. “It’s not written in stone.”

  “Her mother loved her. Of that I’m sure.”

  “Her mother died,” I said. “So did Georg Kominsky, American Immigrant.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “I don’t know C. Winter, and Tamar didn’t know Georg Kominsky,” I said.

  “She knew more about Mr. Kominsky than you might think,” Crystal said. “She went to see him. She wrote him a letter about you.”

  “She did not.”

  “Yes she did. Before you ever met him. When you told her you were going to do your, what was it, oral history project on him.”

  A customer came in and sat down on the one of the red stools that twirl around at the counter. Crystal went over to him and took his order. She did not write it down. Crystal has the ability to remember any order given to her, no matter how many people in the group, and she never fails to reme
mber who ordered what. It’s one of her talents. After she brought the man his grilled cheese she started wiping down the other end of the counter. I slid out of the booth and went over to where she was scrubbing at a dried chocolate fudge stain with her red rag. All Crystal’s rags are red, because of Johnny and his craving for it.

  “Why?” I said.

  Crystal rinsed the rag and resoaped it and started in on the stool tops. It’s not everyone who will scrub the top of every single diner stool every single day.

  “Why do you think?” Crystal said. “She was making sure he was all right. She was making sure he was a good person who wouldn’t hurt her daughter. She was being a mother.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “No, she didn’t. She thought you wouldn’t have wanted her to. Was she right?”

  I considered.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, she was right.”

  Crystal didn’t know the old man couldn’t read, just as Tamar didn’t know. The old man would have taken the letter and nodded his head. I could see him nodding his head, the way he used to do. He might have laid the letter on his kitchen table and let it sit there a while. Then he may well have put the letter into one of his kitchen drawers, ne’er to be touched by human hands, ne’er to be seen by human eyes.

  Tamar picked me up at the diner after choir practice. I was helping Johnny write his name. I put my fingers over his and guided his hand around the piece of newspaper we were practicing on. J, o, h, n, n, y. It’s not easy to guide someone else’s hand in writing. Johnny loved it though. He loved seeing the red crayon letters of his name appear. He laughed and laughed. Tamar ruffled his hair on the way out of the diner.

  “Bye, Johnny,” she said.

  On the way home I pressed my nose against the cold car window. By cupping my hands around my eyes I blocked out the light from the car and stared out at the dark night sky.

  “’Tis a clear night,” I said to Tamar. “And the stars glitter thickly in the firmament.”