Borrowed Children

by George Ella Lyon

  3

  David and Ben started working at the Asher on Sunday. They won t tell what they did, but Ben says it was “too close to housework” for him.

  That makes me mad. It’s easy for them to scorn clothes-washing and floor-scrubbing and chicken-plucking. It’s all done for them—I even make up their bed! And Mama’s silly about them; she always has been: David because he’s her firstborn and Ben because he’s so much like Daddy as a boy. At least that’s what she thinks:

  “I just look at him and catch up on all of Jim Perritt I missed.”

  And Ben doesn’t look any more like Daddy than a frog.

  “It’s his walk,” she says. “It’s how he looks out of his eyes.”

  So I’m glad they’re getting a little taste of dust rags and paste wax. I hope Mr. Asher has them do everything that’s to be done. Puts them in little aprons. Makes them wear maid hats. I’d walk the four miles to town just to see it!

  They’ve got to work all this week, which is the last one before school starts. Then they’ll go in on Saturdays for a while. I wonder if all those fancy lunches were worth it.

  Mama and I are busy getting clothes ready for school. Monday we altered and mended, yesterday we washed, and today were ironing. We’re set up in the kitchen with basket, clothes, the board, and three irons—one to heat up while the other cools from use, and a small one for finishing.

  “No child of mine is going to drag around like a ragamuffin,” she says, as though that’s a fate you have to fight all the time. “You’re lucky, Mandy. You’re the one with new clothes.”

  But new isn’t exactly the word. Mama’s sister, Aunt Laura, sent a box of her discarded clothes from Memphis. That’s where Omie lives too. It’s not that the clothes aren’t nice—they’re too nice is the problem: a black file suit, nipped at the waist; a water-blue taffeta skirt; a slick red dress with hardly a front.

  “How could she wear that?” I ask Mama.

  “Well, Laura’s endowed,” she says.

  “Endowed? You mean with money?”

  Mama smiles.

  “No, I mean her bust is full enough that she fills this out. Of course, it’s still a bit scandalous, but Laura is Laura.”

  Mama’s still smiling, then shrugs the smile away.

  “At any rate, with a little white yoke I can fill it in for you. And the suit just needs to be hemmed.”

  “Oh, Mama, I can’t go to school in clothes like that!”

  “And why not? They’re perfectly decent clothes. Or will be.”

  “But nobody wears clothes like that! And I’m not—I don’t even fill out a slip.”

  Mama pats her stomach, where the dress is stretched like a

  skin.

  “Well, I certainly do.”

  I don’t know what to say to that.

  “And you’ll look better in Lauras clothes than you will in your birthday suit. You’ve grown too much over the summer to wear most of last year’s clothes. Besides, Mandy, by the end of this year you don’t know how you’ll look. You’re getting to an age—” Her voice trails off. She gestures for me to bring her the hot iron from the stove.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, setting the hot weight down, taking back the cool one.

  For a minute Mama just looks at me.

  “You’ll be starting to mature is all,” she says. Then she sprinkles water from a jar onto the iron to test its heat.

  I want to ask more, but her face says the talk is finished. It’s the same with the clothes. No point in arguing. So I go on dipping shirts in starch and rolling them into balls. And I keep an eye on Anna and Helen through the screen door. They’re in the back yard shelling beans.

  School will be all right somehow, though. It always is. Just thinking about it makes my throat tighten. “Pencil fever,” Daddy calls it when I can’t wait to go back to school. “Darnedest thing I ever saw.”

  Daddy finished the eighth grade and Mama went on into high school, so they know what it’s like. Except they didn’t have Mr. Aden for a teacher. If they had, they might have caught pencil fever too.

  Mr. Aden’s from Boston. He came to Goose Rock on a mission, he says, but he and the Almighty got separated on the way down, so he doesn’t work for a church.

  “I work for you,” he tells us, “for the tilling of your minds and the fruit of your ever-growing souls.”

  I told Mama and Daddy that.

  “Bet he gets a check, too,” Daddy said.

  Sure he does, but that’s not the main thing. Mr. Aden has a greater goal in life than “worshiping the brazen dollar.” That’s why he came to the mountains.

  “People are different here,” he says.

  Daddy says we can’t worship what we haven’t got.

  I expect Mr. Aden just got tired of Boston, the way a full person pushes back his plate. But that wouldn’t happen to me. I’m hungry enough to feast on a city forever: theaters and cobbled streets, museums and libraries and running water! We have to pump our water in Goose Rock, of course, and order books from Sears-Roebuck. That means we don’t get many. A library means free books, all you want, over and over.

  “You’ll have a library here,” Mr. Aden promised us. “The spirit requires books and there will be money for them once people’s bodily needs are met. We must be patient. In the meantime, I’ll make a school library of my collection.”

  And that’s what he did. The first week I brought home Jane Eyre ….

  “Amanda!”

  “Oh—what, Mama?”

  “I’ve been talking to you for five minutes and I don’t believe you’ve heard a word.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I was daydreaming.”

  “Well, those shirts are going to turn to bricks if you don’t hand them over here. And these I’ve finished need to be hung up in the boys’ room.”

  I’ve exchanged the wet rolls of cloth for the billowing shirts when I hear a knock at the door. A steady knock, insistent.

  “My word, who could that be?” Mama says, putting down the iron, smoothing her dress front with her hands.

  “Amanda, you wait here.”

  From the kitchen I watch her heavy journey around the dining room table and into the parlor. I can’t see the front door.

  “May I help you?”

  “Mrs. Perritt?” a husky young voice asks.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Cob Russell, Wilt Russell’s son, from Russell’s Grocery, you know, in Manchester…”

  “Yes?” For some reason, she lets him fumble.

  “And I need to talk to you about business.”

  “Come right in then.”

  “Particular business,” the voice adds, as though that makes the situation clear.

  “Won’t you have a seat?” Mama offers.

  “No.” His voice jerks. “That is, this won’t take but a minute.”

  “Very well.”

  “It’s, it’s this bill: we’ve carried you over for three months and, well, you’ve always been solid customers, but…”

  “I paid that bill,” Mama says, her words separate and firm as stones.

  Paper rattles. Cob Russell seems to be hunting.

  “Yes,” he agrees, “but this check—your bank won’t cover it.”

  “May I see it, please?”

  Making sure the girls are still at their task, I tiptoe into the parlor and across to the corner where I can see him hand her the check.

  She looks at it, nods in recognition, and then, cool as you please, tears it up. Confetti floats through his open hand.

  “You needn’t come out here again,” she tells him. “We will pay what we owe.”

  He just stands there with his jaw dropped.

  Mama starts for the door and he stumbles after her. I duck into the kitchen, busying myself with shirts.

  A minute later, Mama comes back. “Well, young lady,” she says, dusting off her hands, “have you seen enough?”

  4

  I expect Mama to be mad at me for eavesdro
pping, but she’s more concerned with what’s happened.

  “Imagine Mr. Russell sending that boy out here, all puffed up like a fritter! He knows we always pay.”

  “But what was wrong with the check?”

  “I expect I wrote it too soon. You see, your father has a separate account for the mill and has to transfer funds from that account to—well, it’s too complicated for you to worry with. The basic thing is the money was there, it was just in the wrong place.”

  “So Mr. Russell will be paid?”

  “Of course. The money will be in his hands tomorrow. You just forget it and come help me with this.”

  She has a pair of work pants half hauled out of the basket and needs me to untangle it from a knot of other clothes. I study her face. She doesn’t look like she’s lying.

  “When I finish this,” she says, sprinkling the khaki, “we’ll have some lunch. You round up the girls and get them washed.”

  Out I go, obedient as a dog. There are the cane-bottomed chairs, which I set in the yard because the ground wasps are swarming; there are the bean sack, the hulls, and the bowl of dull white beans. But no Anna and Helen. I take off running to the spring, Annas favorite place.

  From the top of the slope, I can see them on the flat rock, one brown head, one blond, bent over something intently. Farther down I catch the glint of a syrup bucket lid passed from one to the other. A tea party. No doubt Stella and Mabel Baby are the propped-up guests.

  “Anna!” I holler. Then, coming closer: “What do you mean taking off like that, without even asking?”

  She looks up, her eyes buckeye brown.

  “You and Mama weren’t in the kitchen,” she starts, “and I’d finished the beans, so…”

  “Well, you should have come to find me. I have to know where you are, okay? Otherwise, Mama will skin us all.”

  She nods.

  “Come on now. Sun says it’s time for lunch.”

  I gather up the dolls, toss the leaf-cakes off the bright lid.

  “Mandy?” Helen’s voice is thin as a thread. “Can I take these to Mama?”

  She holds up a clutch of wilted chickory.

  “Sure. She’ll love them.”

  “And when we have our nap, will you tell us a story?”

  “I always tell you a story.”

  “I know, but would you tell the one about finding the baby?”

  I agree to that, too. But I wonder, as we scramble up to the house, what to make of that story. Do I still believe it?

  “Once upon a time,” I begin an hour later, sweating in our darkened room, “there was a baby. A girl. What little hair she had was dark and her eyes were dark also. She had a pink mouth—not like a rosebud—more like a blackberry stain. For she was born in July. But she was born in a city far away.”

  “Where?” Anna interrupts.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Boston. You lie down. Now her parents had a beautiful house, near the theater, with a maid and a silky dog, and a dove-gray motor car. But they couldn’t keep their baby. It isn’t clear why. Perhaps the father had caught a disease from the city and the mother had to take care of him. And they wanted their little girl to grow up far away from hard streets and smoky skies.

  “So they asked a friend of theirs who was making a business trip down south to take the baby and leave her, with a packet of money, in some beautiful spot, near a family with a touch of refinement. And that friend just happened to take the L & N railroad and then, for a lark, the Manchester spur. And from there he took a little buggy—I don’t know. Anyway, he came to a field with goldenrod blooming and blackberries on the vine. There was a house nearby, with a woman hanging wash and two little boys in overalls on the porch.

  “‘There’s a home for this baby,’ he thought to himself. ‘That family looks to be in need of a little girl.’”

  “Was it me?” Helen asks. “Was it me they needed?”

  “Shhhhh!” Anna hisses.

  “And he found a shady spot, not too close to the blackberries because of bees, and there he put the baby basket down. Right near the path to the cow pasture, so they’d find her by evening for sure. And, with a few extra coos for the baby, off he went.

  “Later, one of the little boys saw the basket down the hill. ‘Mamas left the wash in a funny place,’ he thought. And down he ran to check on it. What should he find but a beautiful brown-haired baby, red-faced from sleeping in the sun? (For the sun had shifted since the man left her there.) And David—the boy was called David—bounded up the hill to his mother, who was sitting in the porch swing, breaking beans.

  “‘Mama, Mama! It’s a baby! I’ve found a baby! Come quick!’

  “And the mama folded the beans into the newspaper in her lap and rose and came the short way down the hill, without even a hat. And sure enough, she saw just what David had seen. But she picked the baby up.

  “'Oh, you poor hot thing!’ she crooned. ‘You poor little sugar plum. Who would have left you here?’”

  Helen, eyes closed, hugs Mabel Baby tight.

  “And she carried the baby to the house, with David behind her dragging the basket as best he could.

  “Was there a note in the basket? Yes, there was, to avoid legal troubles. It gave the girl-child to the finder of the basket, provided she or he would give it a good home. It asked for Christian love and forbearance, and for good books and elegant clothes, when possible. And it pointed out that there was a handsome sum of money sewn into a pillow in the basket.

  “But the pillow wasn’t in the basket. Indeed, it was never found. Had the ‘friend’ delivered the child and then made off with his ‘fee’? Had the packet fallen from the basket as it was carried from car to train through stations, to smaller trains, and finally to the buggy and across the field? Was it lost somewhere in the meadow grass? Would it turn up someday? Nobody knew.

  “What the Perritts and their neighbors did know was that there was this sudden baby. She had good digestion and slept well. But since they didn’t understand her story, they decided not to tell it. They decided to raise her as their own ….

  “Anna?” No answer. “Helen?”

  Usually at the end of this story, they’re full of questions: Who was the baby? Was it our David who found her? Where is she now? And I make up different answers with each telling. But today they’re sound asleep, worn out by a sack of beans. And I’m left with my own questions. Did I dream this story? It seems like I’ve always known it, always known, whatever creek we’ve lived on, that I didn’t belong. I’ve wanted something Wish Books didn’t carry—finer than cornbread, higher than any ridge. How could I be like that, born to Mama and Daddy? How did I get here if the story isn’t true?

  5

  Sometimes I think housework comes down to hot water: laundry, canning, chicken scalding. Today we re making jelly and chow-chow, but first we have to fetch the Mason jars.

  Helens too little and scared to go down to the cellar, but Anna does her part.

  “Oooo,” she squeals. “Its creepy down here.”

  “You should be the first one down and have to light the lantern.”

  “It’s like a cave.”

  “It is a cave. A cave with shelves.”

  More than half the shelves are already clean and loaded: fat red tomatoes, gold corn, olive green beans. There are June apples, too, fried or cooked into sauce, and pears and blackberries. With fall will come spiced apples, apple butter, and a jar of brandied cherries. That’s for Christmas. But today it’s jelly.

  The jars rattle as we carry them up the steps. Old spider webs net our hair.

  I feel Anna about to holler.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” I warn. “It’ll get on your tongue, too.

  When we get back to the kitchen, Mama takes the hairbrush to us. Then she sets Anna to washing the jars, Helen the lids and rings. I’m the scalder. We’re all sweat-shiny by the time Mama ladles purple syrup into the clean jars.

  “It’ll jell as it cools,” she promises. “And tomo
rrow you can take some to the Skidmores.”

  I knew that was coming.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady.”

  I meant to close them before they rolled.

  “Maggie Skidmore is a kind Christian soul and it won’t hurt you one bit to take her her due. She gave us the grapes, you know.”

  Oh, but it will hurt me. I hate going to the Skidmores’. Their house is worse than the cellar—dark and smelly and piled with unknown stuff. I’d rather do without jelly than owe it to the Skidmores.

  Mama looks with satisfaction at the filled jars.

  “Like jewels,” she says. “Amethysts or garnets.”

  Then her gaze shifts to me.

  “You won’t scorn the Skidmores when you taste this on hot bread.”

  She’s right about that. And I know Mrs. Skidmore has more than her share of troubles: a mean husband, triplets, and only one arm. The triplets are regular demons, and she can’t catch them enough to teach them different. At least Mama has her babies one at a time.

  “It sure looks good,” I say.

  Really the wobbly jelly turns my stomach. I’d rather buy jelly in a store like city people do. They never have to fool with fruit. And when they want a different kind, they just open a new jar. No neighbors sitting on the edge of every spoon.

  “I’ll finish the jars,” Mama says. “You take the girls and get us some green tomatoes. Don’t pick them all, though. Leave some to come ripe.”

  Taking the slat basket, off we go.

  Afternoon only repeats morning. That’s what gets me about Goose Rock. Except for school, the whole calendar is a hum. We put up chow-chow—that’s corn and green tomato relish (Daddy’s favorite); then the boys trudge in, heads hanging, clothes wilted; then there’s supper—earlier because it’s a week night and Daddy isn’t here—then cleaning up, and sleep.

  But I can’t sleep. Anna wakes me up twice, muttering and thrashing. No words, but I suspect it’s spider webs again. We’re getting too big to sleep in one bed. Not enough room for bodies, much less dreams.

  Footsteps cross the parlor; lamplight wavers. Is that Mama? I get up and tiptoe out to see.

  Sure enough, she’s sitting at her desk, Daddy’s old shirt on over her gown. This is unusual. She always pays bills and writes to Omie Sunday night after Daddy leaves. I wait for her to know I’m there, wait while she writes a whole letter, but she’s too intent to notice. Finally I just walk over.