Shadow Baby

by Alison McGhee

“My thoughts exactly,” Tamar said. “You took the words right out of my mouth. ‘And the stars glitter thickly in the firmament’ was right on the tip of my tongue.”

  “What did you say to the old man when you went to see him before my oral history project?” I said.

  An ambush sentence, hanging in the air between us. She didn’t miss a beat.

  “I told him that you were my daughter, a child of eleven, and that I would kill anyone who harmed you,” Tamar said. “I told him I would be watching him.”

  No hemming or hawing, no mumbling, no prevaricating. That’s Tamar.

  “And what did he say?”

  “He listened. He nodded. He looked at me and I looked at him. We shook hands. I left.”

  “And what did you say in the letter you wrote to him?”

  “I told him about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “I told him that you were a strange child, that he should expect the unexpected when dealing with you. I told him that you were obsessed with the memory of a baby. I told him about your love of books, your book reports, and your stories.”

  “Stories? What about stories?”

  “I told him that stories are the way you look at the world. That stories are your salvation.”

  Stories are your salvation.

  “And?” I said.

  “And what?”

  And what, I thought. And what about Daphne Winter? What about a fake Adirondack hermit living in a primeval patch of forest? And what about the old man? What about his trailer, and his forge in the backyard, his dark-green sink in the bathroom? What about his refrigerator that held one quart of milk per week, no more no less, and his cupboard with its three orange-rimmed plates? What about his kitchen drawer that contained letters he couldn’t read, the wall lined with hooks that held our cookie cutters? What about the tin paper holder he made for me, and the adding-machine paper that contained his heart and soul?

  “What about his heart and soul?” I said to Tamar.

  “His heart and soul,” she said. “His heart and soul are up to you, Clara. They’re your department.”

  My mother, Tamar, holds contradictions within herself. They coexist, battling each other inside her. She craves and hates her father, C. Winter. She longs for and tries to forget her mother, that slow-dying mysterious woman. There may be no one she loves more than me, but every time she looks at me she sees my sister, Daphne. Warring ghosts fight each other inside my mother’s heart, and the battles have made her stern and strong.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They never sifted through the ashes of the old man’s trailer. I asked the Floyd Volunteer Fire Marshal.

  “Did anyone sift through the ashes?” I said. “Did anyone comb through the rubble, looking for anything salvageable from the old man’s belongings?”

  He shook his head.

  “There was nothing left to look through,” he said. “It burned to the ground.”

  “No half-burnt belongings, even?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m sorry, Clara. I know he was a friend of yours.”

  If someone had looked, they might have found salvageable objects from the old man’s trailer. Things that were scorched, bent from the heat, but still usable. There might have been things that to the untrained eye looked like junk, burnt beyond any conceivable use, but that to the someone in the know would have been useful. The trained eye can see the possibility of beauty and usefulness. The old man, had he not died in the fire at his trailer, had he come across the burnt ruins of another trailer in another time and place, would have sifted through the rubble. The old man would have come away from the ruins of that fire with his hands full of possibility. After a time, the old man would have changed something that was only a possibility into something that existed, something whole, something with a place in the world.

  I think about his hands sometimes. The hands of a metalworker are hands that work with fire. Most people may have looked at the old man’s hands and seen nothing but fingers, tendon, bone, and the skin that covers them all. They would not have known about the knowledge in the old man’s hands, what he knew how to do with his fingers, how he could take something that was a possibility and make it into something real.

  If we had had more time, I might have asked him many questions, questions that I did not have time to think of. There are questions waiting in the future, questions that I will come to, and some will be questions that I want to ask the old man, and the old man will not be there to ask.

  Some people may have thought of the old man as ugly or evil. The possibility exists that in Sterns, there are people who thought of him in that way. I used to think that the lady two trailers down from the old man thought of him as evil. There was something in the way she used to lean out her window and watch. She never said anything. Sometimes she came out of her door, onto her front step, and watched. If I had to pick, I would have picked that lady as someone who thought of the old man as evil.

  But I would have been wrong.

  That lady thought highly of the old man. She told me so. When I went back, after I got out of the hospital, and stood by the entrance to where the old man used to live, she came out of her trailer and walked down to where I was standing.

  “They hauled it away,” she said. “The other day. Put some chains around it, pulled it up onto a flatbed, and then it was gone.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  We stood and looked at where the trailer had been for a while. Then I wanted to go. I had looked enough. There was no rubble to pick through. That had been cleaned up. With what, I don’t know.

  “Well, bye,” I said.

  “He was a good man,” she said. “He shoveled my steps every snowfall.”

  “He did?”

  “He did. Every snowfall, even an inch or two. An inch or two would’ve been easy enough to sweep off with my broom, but he was there first.”

  I turned and started down the dirt road that leads to the entrance. She went back to her trailer.

  “I thought very highly of George,” she called after me. “He used to bring me onions from his garden.”

  The possibility of beauty exists in an enameled pot rusted through at the bottom, lying in the woods just off Sterns Valley Road. There’s a curved handle on the rusted pot, attached to either side. I lifted it up by the handle and swung it back and forth. It squeaked a little, and the handle was rusty, but the possibility was there.

  The old man would have seen it, too.

  I have the old man’s eyes. He trained me to see the possibility of beauty, and that is what I see. I can see it everywhere, in a dented olive oil can, in an old pioneer pot on the Sterns Valley Road.

  Fragments of rusted metal flaked off the worn-out bottom of the pot, and the sides of the pot gave when I pushed on them. It crumpled in my hands, all except for the handle. This pot’s been through a fire, I thought. It could have been left over in the ruins of a long-ago blaze on Sterns Valley Road.

  This pot may have been a pioneer pot, suspended over the glowing coals of a pioneer fire.

  It may have belonged to a pioneer mother on her way west. Every night she used this pot to cook stew for her pioneer husband and children. Every evening her oldest child scrubbed it out with sand by the creek, and every morning the pioneer mother cooked cornmeal mush in it for breakfast. You have to be extremely careful when cooking cornmeal mush. You have to sift the cornmeal into the boiling water in a fine stream between your fingers, stirring constantly all the while, or else the cornmeal mush will be an inedible mess of lumps.

  That’s a true fact. I read it in a pioneer book.

  One morning, as the pioneer family packed up their belongings from camping overnight on what is now the Sterns Valley Road but back then was a nameless trail winding through tall meadow grass, the pioneer mother placed the pot on a pile of quilts near the back of the covered wagon. The quilts were folded neatly after keeping the pioneer family warm thro
ugh the long cool spring night. The pot rested on top of the patchwork quilts, and the pioneer mother thought it was secure.

  “Ready,” she called to her pioneer husband, who was up front sitting on the wagon seat with the oldest pioneer child.

  “All right then,” he called back.

  He may not have said “all right then.” He may have said something else that meant “all right then.” It was a long time ago. It’s hard to know exactly.

  With a sudden lurch, the covered wagon started moving. The pioneer mother was busy tending to her youngest child, who was a baby still in nappies. That’s what they called diapers back then. She did not notice when the cooking pot slipped from its perch atop the patchwork quilts and fell to the ground behind the moving wagon. She did not hear the tiny thump it made as it landed.

  That night, the pioneer mother searched frantically for the cookpot. She did not find it. Fifteen miles back, the cookpot lay in the tall grasses. Already, leaves had started to sift over it. A curious primeval woodchuck or skunk sniffed at it, then lost interest and waddled away.

  It was their only cookpot. The family went hungry that night and had naught to cook their cornmeal mush in the next morning. The baby, still in nappies, wrapped in a yellow blanket, cried piteously. He wailed mournfully through the night.

  What happened to them?

  A freak snow fell in Sterns, and the ground was newly white in September. You might think that a September snow in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains is an impossibility. You would be wrong. On the night of that snowfall, I got out all my false stories. All my books waiting to be written. Waiting for their endings. Waiting to find out what happened.

  I stalled for a while. There were more fake book reports than I had thought. They were stacked in a wooden crate that I bought at a garage sale in North Sterns. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have had that many ideas for books. If asked I would have said ten, maybe twelve. But there were many more than that. Many, many more, all stacked up. I did not allow myself to go through any of them.

  Tamar watched me carry the box out the door. She was eating a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. She likes to eat them with a miniature fork that she says is actually meant for pulling lobster meat out of lobster shells.

  Tamar raised her eyebrows.

  “Burn barrel,” I said. “Cleaning my room. Trash.”

  It hurt me to say that. It hurt me to call the works of my own imagination trash. I thought of the old man, standing in line on Ellis Island, writing in the air with his nose. I thought of him seeing the official people watching him, talking about him, whispering. I thought of him standing straight and willing them to let him in, him alone, no brother Eli who was supposed to be there, too.

  “Trash?” Tamar said. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because they look like book reports to me,” Tamar said. “Grade-A book reports, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Read me one,” Tamar said.

  Read me one. That was something I had never before heard from Tamar, eater of artichoke hearts.

  “Read you one?”

  “Read me one.”

  I closed my eyes and dug my hand into the box.

  “The Winter Without End, by Lathrop E. Douglas,” I said. “New York: Crabtree Publishers, Inc. 1958.”

  “Sounds good,” Tamar said. “Carry on.”

  I carried on.

  It was the longest winter that Sarah Martin had ever known. Growing up on the Great Plains, she had known many a stark December, many an endless January, and the bitter winds of February were not unfamiliar to her. She was a child of winter. But that winter—the winter of 1879—Sarah knew true cold.

  The potatoes had long since run out, as had the cabbages and carrots buried in sand in the root cellar. The meager fire was kept alive with twists of hay. When the first blizzard came, followed every few days by another, Sarah’s parents had been trapped in town. It was up to Sarah Martin to keep her baby brother alive and warm until the spring thaw, when her parents could return to the homestead.

  The true test of Sarah Martin’s character comes when her baby brother wanders into the cold in the dead of night. Sarah blames herself for this; she was too busy twisting hay sticks in a corner of the cabin to notice that he had slipped from his pallet next to the fire and squeezed his way outside. “He’s only two years old,” thinks Sarah. “How long can a tiny child survive outside in this bitter cold?”

  Will Sarah Martin be able to find her little brother in time? Will she be able to rescue him from a fate so horrible that she cannot bear to think about it?

  Did Sarah Martin have the foresight to dig a snow tunnel from the house to the pole barn where Bessie and Snowball are stabled? Or is there nothing beyond the cabin door for her beloved brother but blowing snow, bitter wind, and a winter without end?

  Will Sarah have to face the responsibility of her brother’s death?

  Will her baby brother be forgotten by everyone but her?

  Will she miss him her whole life long?

  Read the book and find out.

  Tamar ate the last artichoke heart.

  “Well?” she said. “How does it turn out?”

  “Read the book and find out.”

  “It’s hard to read a nonexistent book,” Tamar said. “You run out of words fast.”

  How Tamaresque, to have known all along that Clara winter was the author of dozens of nonexistent books. How like Tamar never to have said a word.

  “So you tell me,” she said. “Does Sarah Martin bear the responsibility for her baby brother’s death? Does everyone forget Sarah Martin’s baby brother? Does Sarah Martin miss him her whole life long?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes,” I said. “Yes, she bears the responsibility. Yes, everyone else forgets him. And yes, she misses him her whole life long.”

  “You’re wrong,” Tamar said.

  I watched her pick up her miniature artichoke-eating fork and wipe its tiny tines with her napkin.

  “You’re wrong on all three counts,” Tamar said. “One, it wasn’t Sarah Martin’s responsibility that her brother died. It just happened. Two, Sarah Martin’s mother will not ever forget her child. Every minute of every day of her life, she will be remembering the baby she lost.”

  Tamar pressed the tines of the miniature fork into the back of her hand and studied the marks they left.

  “And that’s not all,” she said. “Sarah Martin’s mother will have to watch Sarah Martin be sad. She will not know how to help her child. Worse yet, Sarah Martin’s mother will be unable ever to talk about what happened, and that will only make Sarah Martin feel more alone.”

  Tamar took the empty jar of marinated artichoke hearts to the sink and rinsed it. She came back to the table.

  “And you’re wrong about something else, too,” she said. “Sarah Martin will miss her brother her whole life long, but Sarah Martin will also be happy. She will grow up strong. She will be an amazing adult.”

  “How?” I said.

  “How takes care of itself.”

  “I’m going to burn these up,” I said.

  “You’ll write more.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will,” she said. “You can’t not.”

  Winter Without End fell back into the box. Tamar got up from the table, went over to the kitchen drawer, and brought back a clean dishcloth. She wiped my face.

  I carried the crate out to the burn barrel.

  They went quietly to their deaths. They puffed into the air, black words curling into gray ash, spiraling away into the sky. I did not allow myself to think of all that I had imagined, all the families I had put together or torn apart, all the children I had sent on perilous journeys, all the people who never found out what happened.

  The old man would have gone north with me, through the Adirondacks, up near the border of Vermont. He would have made the trip with me. I was going to ask him to do that with
me, and his reply would have been yes. The old man would have known that I wanted to find a small patch of primeval forest, near the Vermont border. He would have known that all I wanted to do was sit there for one day, sit in the patch of primeval forest. The sun would have shone down on us and slowly made its way across the sky. The old man would have sat with me on the soft moss. He would not have talked unless I asked him an answer-demanding question. He would have sat perfectly still with me, hardly breathing, so that eventually the primeval animals would have thought we were part of the landscape. They would have come forth from the woods, dipping and raising their heads, and gazed upon us with their soft eyes. They would have been curious about these new animals that sat as still as dawn.

  Primeval animals have never seen human beings. They don’t know yet that humans are to be feared, that they carry guns and traps, that the soft fur of animals is something to be sought and taken.

  My hermit grandfather would have scared these animals away. Animals living within a few miles’ radius of my hermit grandfather would have known fear, and they would have learned that fear from my hermit grandfather. They would have learned distrust of humans, how to step around their traps, how to melt into the underbrush in the fall and barely breathe as the hermit hunter-trapper glided past, his gun at the ready.

  Those primeval animals would have passed that distrust and fear on to their young, and their young would not have been primeval animals. They would have been a new breed of animal, one with human added to their list of enemies.

  After the old man died in the fire, my hermit grandfather disappeared. My hermit grandfather, who lived in that patch of primeval forest and traded pelts in the village for bare essentials on his twice-yearly trading trips, no longer lives there. No one knows where he went. He took his tipi, his stored pelts, and his flint with him. His gun and his traps he loaded onto the travois and dragged it away behind him. He found a new life.

  After he was gone, the primeval patch of forest grew over the spot where he had lived for those years. Moss crept back over the circle of flattened earth where his tipi had been pitched. Birds eventually grew bold and built their nests in the tops of the towering pines that had shaded his summer camp. Once-primeval animals who still knew the fear of a human being watched and waited until the day came when they knew that my hermit grandfather would not be back, and then one by one they entered his patch of forest. Charred remains of his campfire were covered in one summer by new leaves and grass, and in the winter pine needles lay scattered on the whiteness of the snow in the small clearing. Deer came to nibble on the new growth of the baby apple trees that grew at the edge of the primeval forest, apple trees that had grown from seeds dropped from my hermit grandfather’s apple core.