Buried Seeds

by Donna Meredith

  Soon after the quake, Nellie had moved into a room in a boarding house while waiting on her insurance payout, and Val’s father had arranged a loan for him. He would have a real home soon, one whose foundation was already being laid. The tent city was shrinking, day by day, and soon it would be quite lonely. It would be time to head back east.

  After lunch, I grabbed a hammer and went to find Val where I’d left him shoveling a trench behind a row of shanties. “Let’s get your roof on over that tarpaper.”

  He leaned on his shovel. “Tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be silly. There’s hours of daylight left. Those shingles might disappear by morning.”

  “True, but it’s not like I paid for them. Finders, keepers; losers, weepers. If someone else takes them, I’ll scrounge for more.”

  I was practically skipping, already making my way down the row of tents to his shanty. He was two steps behind when I stopped. A plaintive bleating came from within one of the tents. My heart leapt— a baby! The bleat became a wail. I stood still, unable to move on.

  One minute passed. My hand touched the tent flap, but still I didn’t open it. “Hello? Do you need help?”

  No answer.

  “Anything we can do?” Val called out.

  Though it violated unspoken rules of courtesy to enter a tent uninvited, I lift ed the flap, peeked inside, and a strangled cry escaped before I could stifle it. Just beyond the opening a young woman lay sprawled in a puddle of blood, her baby squalling, beating its spindly arms and legs between the mother’s thighs, umbilical cord still attached. I dropped the hammer and rushed inside, Val right behind me. I raised and stroked the baby’s head and made shushy noises of comfort, letting it suckle on a finger, while Val dropped to his knees, trying to find the mother’s pulse.

  I watched, anxious, but he shook his head and gently closed the mother’s eyes. She looked so young, still in her early teens, long, damp strands of dark hair plastered against a sweet heart-shaped face. Had she given birth alone? Had no one heard her cries? Val flew into doctor mode and sent me for water and whiskey and clean towels. Moments later I returned. He rinsed his pocket knife in whiskey and cut the cord. I cleaned the baby girl’s body and swaddled her in a towel.

  Val strode from tent to tent, inquiring if anyone knew the young woman. No one did. One man claimed he had heard moaning but thought it was just another case of digestive problems. They plagued everyone in camp from time to time.

  I took the baby back to my lean-to. Val followed and I handed the child to him. I cut the tip from a glove and filled the finger with sugar water. The baby hushed immediately.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” Val asked.

  “On the farm where I grew up. When we had an orphaned cow or kitten, we made a sugar tit like this. It will only do until I can find a wet nurse or a goat. This child will need nourishment.”

  “I’ll put up notices to find her family. There must be a father, grandparents, someone who will want this wee one.”

  I cradled the tiny body tighter against my breasts, smoothing the dark hair away from her forehead. “No one nearby knew the mother.”

  “Ro.” My ears heard the warning in his voice, but my heart ignored it. “We have to keep looking. She must have family here.”

  “Some family. No one helped her birth the baby.” I tried to beat down the hope from my voice.

  Val closed his eyes. “Ro, you can’t just take someone else’s child.”

  “I know.” But maybe I could. Maybe I had found her for a reason. Maybe she was meant to be mine. Finders, keepers.

  Every day I cared for her. I scrounged for milk, clothes, nappies. I cuddled, bathed, kissed.

  Every day Val reminded me this was temporary, that the baby had family somewhere. He put up flyers and inquired of everyone he could find in the tent city. No one came for the baby. We buried the mother and pounded a wooden cross at the head of her grave.

  We took the baby to visit with Nellie, who agreed she was exceptionally beautiful. “That head of dark fuzzy hair—just adorable!”

  I beamed as if Nellie were praising my own accomplishment. Nellie suggested the baby and I move into her rented room. It would be crowded but safer. Val thought we should stay near the birth mother’s tent in case a relative came for the baby. Another two weeks passed.

  Things might have continued as they were, but a telegram arrived from Timmy that forced my hand: Father’s condition worse. If you don’t come soon, it will be too late. If money needed, will wire immediately.

  When I showed Val the message, he insisted I should leave the baby with Nellie.

  I cuddled my little one closer and didn’t answer. How could I part with that tiny rosebud mouth, the sweet grasp of precious fingers, even for a day? I had failed to keep Ben safe. I would not fail this baby.

  In the pre-dawn hours the next morning, I knocked on Val’s shanty door and I invited him to walk with us out to the Bay.

  As rays of light filled the sky, I extended my arms outward, a sacred offering of the baby to the sun. “Her name is Solina. It means sunlight.”

  I was meant to be this baby’s mother. I could feel maternal light shining within, warming my every pore.

  San Francisco, 1920

  Solina’s mouth fell wide open. “That baby was me? You just found me—that’s what you’re saying?”

  I pressed my lips together. At the conclusion of this installment of my tale, recited at length in our hotel room’s tiny sitting area, I didn’t expect gratitude exactly—well, maybe I did—but I didn’t expect—well, I don’t know what I expected. I had never quite been able to picture this moment, to anticipate her reaction, and that was one reason I had not shared her origins with her until now. The main reason was that I wasn’t sure what I had done was quite legal. I was terrified someone would emerge from the shadows and try to take her from me.

  “Didn’t you try to find my father? My grandparents?”

  “Yes, but without a name to work from, there was little chance of success.” In truth, I hadn’t tried very hard.

  Her lips quivered. “What about Michael? Did you just find him too?”

  “It’s not as if I go around searching for stray children under bushes. I gave birth to Michael soon after we moved to West Virginia. You were old enough you should remember my pregnancy.”

  Her face crumpled. “He’s yours. You love him more; you let him get by with everything.”

  I rose from my seat and knelt beside her, cradling her beautiful, tear-streaked face in my hands. “Don’t be ridiculous, you silly goose. With you, it was love at first sight. I would have died if someone had stepped forward and claimed you. You must know I love all my children just the same. And you, Solina, are one of the greatest blessings in my life.”

  She threw her arms around me, weeping quietly. I stroked her back and ignored the tears running down my own face. I didn’t know how to make her understand how much I loved her. I was grateful to be alone in our hotel room as Solina learned about her origins rather than at home with the rest of the family or in Nellie’s boarding house. This revelation needed to occur privately. The moment was too fraught with emotion to be shared with anyone else, not even Nellie or Val. It was fitting, too, that it happened in the city of Solina’s birth.

  “What would have happened to me if you hadn’t . . .” Mumbled against my shoulder, her question floundered and dropped off altogether.

  I intuited she was wondering what one did with a foundling. Did you take it to the police, the fireman, the city council, a minister? I had refused to consider the proper procedure, because whatever authority took her, the end result would likely have been some horrible institutional setting.

  “Solina, as God is my witness, I would never have let them take you to an orphanage. You have no idea how terrible the conditions in those places can be. Some children suffer horribly; many are malnourished or abused. Most are barely educated. They certainly don’t have pretty dresses and hair ribbons. Some en
d up like that woman—Jack’s mistress.” I squeezed her tighter. “That was never, ever going to happen to my baby, and you were my baby from the first moment I picked you up and your tiny hand gripped my finger, and you will always be my baby, no matter how old you get.”

  She leaned away from me, wiped away her tears. “I guess I’m lucky then.”

  I nodded, with no small measure of relief. “We both are. I was desperate for a baby to love and you were in desperate need of a mother.”

  Angie

  Clarksburg, West Virginia, 2018

  I finish reading aloud Ro’s declaration of how she loved all her children the same, and close the scrapbook. We sit in silence, MacKenzie on one side of Mom, me on the other. We are alone, the three of us, holding hands at two in the morning.

  So this is why Mom pushed me so hard to read about my ancestors, her special way of telling me one more time that she loves both of us, MacKenzie and me. I’ve known this in my heart all along. I am so glad MacKenzie is here, that she heard the story. Mom may have constructed some scenes straight from Solina’s diary, but her loving heart beats beneath the words, infusing them with her warmth.

  MacKenzie sighs. “That’s the most beautiful story I ever heard. Rosella’s so much like you, Mom. She was meant to be a mother. She was Angie’s great great grandmother, is that right? And she became a famous potter?”

  “Yes,” Mom agrees. “MacKenzie, you have an important woman in your family tree, too. A great great aunt on my mother’s side, Susan Dew Hoff. She became the first West Virginia woman licensed to be a physician. Happened right here in Harrison County, over in West Milford. They wouldn’t let her go to school to study medicine, so she studied with her father, who was a doctor, and she passed the exam back in 1889. I’ve been working on the scrapbook with your special family story. It will be your birthday gift this year.”

  Leave it to my mother to understand that MacKenzie doesn’t need the surprise on her birthday; she needs to be wrapped in our love right now.

  I want to do something to boost Mac’s spirits, too. I put the scrapbook away and set up my laptop on the kitchen table. “Mac, come over here and teach me what a hashtag is.”

  “Me, too,” Mom says.

  Mac’s enthusiasm glows in her eyes. “Do you have twitter accounts?”

  Mom and I both shake our heads. Mac sets up accounts for both of us and explains how tweeting and retweeting works.

  After a while, Mom says she’s going to bed. “Twitter is for the birds.”

  “Seriously. I don’t get why anyone wants to limit the number of words they can use.”

  “You two are so out of it,” Mac says.

  I can see she is going to be my official tweeter of AFT strike news. After she posts tweets supporting the strike, I check out the teachers’ Facebook page. I am not the only one who can’t sleep tonight. Before I know it, morning creeps near. Time for a shower and lots of coff ee.

  Get ready, Charleston! Big doings ahead.

  Rosella

  San Francisco, 1920

  I promised to show Solina her birth mother’s grave after the exhibition was over.

  The exhibition—I glanced at my watch and had a moment of panic. There was so much work to be done before the big event. We had best get on with it. “Right now we need to get ourselves over to Mindy’s gallery and uncrate the pottery, so pretty yourself up, quickly now.”

  Pushing aside my tea, I hurried to wash my face and choose fresh clothing. I finished long before Solina, who dawdled as teenage girls will, certain that all eyes will be focused on them and them alone, when in truth, others are rarely all that interested in us, being more interested in themselves. We are self-centered creatures, even the best of us. When others praise me for Solina’s adoption, I am quick to point out I received at least as much benefit as she.

  As we boarded a streetcar, Solina whispered darkly, “I hope no one recognizes you from the newspaper stories.”

  “Not likely, my dear.” News photos never were very clear, merely blurred ink dabs. It set me to wondering again who might have told the reporter about our scheduled event on family planning. Such a shame that those policemen had confiscated my brochures. They represented a significant personal financial investment. I didn’t suppose there was the slightest hope of recovering them. Who had set the police on me? I suspected a single culprit lurked behind both stories, the one claiming I was a bigamist and the other on my arrest for intent to disseminate lewd materials. I supposed I was becoming quite famous, though not in the way I’d hoped.

  At the gallery, the story of my arrest wagged every tongue.

  Four copies of the Examiner were on hand for all to see, much to Solina’s dismay—as if the poor girl hadn’t had enough to cope with this morning.

  I took her hand and squeezed, our eyes meeting with what I hoped was mutual understanding. “Everything will be okay.”

  “I know.” Doubt lingered in her words.

  I mouthed I love you to her before turning to greet Alexandra Underwood.

  I can’t say I was pleased by the gossiping tongues any more than Solina. Especially as I was certain I detected a smirk on Alexandra’s smile. Both Alexandra and her daughter wore the shorter dress lengths, black and beaded. I noticed Solina studying their fashions and bobbed hair with obvious admiration. I sighed. She reminded me of myself at that age. I supposed she would be eager to copy the new look, no matter what I said about frivolous pursuits. I might as well save my breath.

  Although we had our differences, Alexandra and I, she had collected a considerable amount of my work and had loaned it to Mindy for the exhibition. For that, I was grateful. I still didn’t understand why she bought my pottery. Was it to support Mindy’s gallery—since Mindy earned commission on all the pieces sold? Or did she take some secret satisfaction from owning the work made by the wife of the man she’d had an affair with? After Jack had disappeared, Nellie let it slip that Alexandra’s open marriage had been open to the husbands of her friends, including mine. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Jack was a pretty thing, and Alexandra collected pretty things. I wondered if he had transmitted his disease to her—and if so, if she still supported sterilization of people who contracted social diseases.

  I thanked Mindy again for persuading the police to release me.

  “It wouldn’t do for the guest of honor to miss her own show.” Mindy’s smile dimpled her cheeks. Such a shame that the caved-in features resulted in a vessel that missed being as beautiful outside as I found her inside to be. Was that why no young man had claimed my excellent friend as his wife? Or had it truly been Mindy’s decision to eschew marriage? I remembered that long-ago proclamation she’d made that she would never relinquish her freedom to a husband.

  We proceeded to unpack my pottery—Solina, Nellie, and me—unwrapping piece after piece from folds of newspaper, afterward wiping each down with a soft, damp cloth. We left the arrangement of the pieces up to Mindy and Alexandra, as they had already created small placards identifying each piece and distinguishing the work done in California from that done in West Virginia.

  “You made all of these?” Wonderment resonated in Solina’s voice.

  I was pleased for the distraction from the emotional revelations of the past few days. I was feeling overwhelmed myself. It was the first time I’d seen so much of my work gathered in one place. Even I could see it was an impressive array of pottery, the glazes of crushed raspberry, soft olive, butternut, and matte blue predominating. Shapes varied from tall vases with outward sloping sides to squat pots with narrow-lipped openings. What distinguished my work from other artists’ was the slip trail: designs of leaves, flowers, or trees created with slightly raised lines of clay squeezed through a narrow tube, a technique I learned under the direction of the renowned Frederick Hurten Rhead at Arequipa, north of the Bay area. My early pieces were made there from clay dug by boys Arequipa hired. At first, I simply did the decorating, like the other girls, but eventually I was allowed to
shape pots. I created my later pieces in my own shed in West Virginia. I loved the texture of wet clay on my hands, the way it smoothed and soothed as it rotated on the wheel, the way it whispered my mother’s name, reminding me of those first vessels we’d made together. These new pots were my creations from beginning to end. Most were similar in shape to those made at Arequipa, but recently I had begun sculpting the clay into shapes: a flowering dogwood branch, a hen, a spray of roses. Even plates and cups. Fanciful pieces attracted attention; the practical earned my bread and butter. Tableware sets disappeared from shopkeepers’ shelves as fast as I could make them.

  “I wish Papa were here to see this,” Solina said.

  “Yes, that is a shame,” I agreed. “If it weren’t for him, I never would have learned to make pottery. It was he who arranged for my recuperation at Arequipa.”

  “Tell me the story of how he proposed again,” Solina begged. “It’s so romantic!”

  This was a story I knew she had already written in her diary— not because I’d read it but because she told me so. I ignored the lift of Nellie’s right eyebrow, the narrowing of her eyes, the downward tilt of her chin.

  July 1906

  The straw basket felt unsubstantial beneath my feet. I clung to Val’s arm, half afraid I would float away into the pale yellow light of the morning. The balloon lurched a bit as it rose. I gasped, giggled, and looked up to meet Val’s brown eyes smiling down. Odd, how his narrow face became so beautiful when he smiled. Quite possibly more beautiful than any other man I’d ever known. Even Jack. It came from a different source, something inside, rather than an agreeable aggregate of facial features. A couple in a carriage on the outskirts of the city looked up and pointed when they heard the whoosh of the burner. I laughed and waved from the basket of the hot air balloon. I didn’t know what possessed Val to arrange this adventure, but I was glad he had. What would my family think if they could see me now? Soon I would be seeing them again.