Getting Near to Baby (5 page)

“That's when children take naps,” Aunt Patty said. “That's when grown women watch the soap operas and do their ironing. What is that smell?”

“Turpentine,” Mom said, although she knew Aunt Patty knew what that smell was. “I've been painting.”

“You've been painting,” Aunt Patty said. It's when Aunt Patty starts to repeat words back to you that you're in the most trouble. Aunt Patty has very particular ideas about how things ought to be done.

“I want you girls to get out of those pajamas,” she said. “Get some clothes on.”

Little Sister and I scrambled right out of bed. We didn't even think to ask Aunt Patty where she had come from so suddenly. How she happened to come halfway across the state without calling to ask, would we be home when she got here. Not any one of us, not even Mom.

We certainly never thought of telling Aunt Patty to butt out. Aunt Patty was her big sister and Mom was used to listening to her. It was only one short step to doing whatever Aunt Patty told her to do.

What bothered me, Mom would never tell Aunt Patty how things were. She never said we were short of money. She never told Aunt Patty how tired we all were. Especially Mom. Sometimes she was so tired her paintbrush shook.

We were no sooner dressed than Aunt Patty told us to go outside and play. “What you girls need is some air,” she said. “What this whole place needs is air.” She began to throw the windows open all over the house.

Aunt Patty is just a force when an idea takes her this way. The best thing to do is get out of her way. Little Sister and I went out but we sat down on the steps where we could hear every word Mom and Aunt Patty said.

“I can't believe the state you have let yourself get into,” Aunt Patty said. “You are skinny as a rail. Will you look at your hair? Have you combed it in a week? Have you bathed, Noreen? Even your children have lost flesh; they can't be eating properly.”

There were spaces in between where Mom could have said something back if she would. But she didn't.

“This house looks like a hurricane has swept through here. It will take a month of Sundays to put it right. How would you like Social Services to come in here and take those children from you? Because they will. You don't have to be on welfare to be at the mercy of Social Services. I know. Hob has a horror story of some poor woman down on her luck for every year he has taught school.”

“Oh, Patty, you don't understand,” Mom said, and I was plain relieved to hear her say anything. I didn't even mind hearing her voice sound so small.

“I do,” Aunt Patty said, her voice softening. “Now go on in and clean yourself up. Get all that blue paint out from under your nails. I'm going to take those girls into town and do some food shopping and when we come back, you and I are going to cook them a proper meal.”

We followed Aunt Patty's instructions. It did not take a month of Sundays to put things to right—to dust and to mop and to wash every dish we owned. But when we finished at the end of the day, we were all bone tired, and even Aunt Patty could not complain when Little Sister and I fell into bed with Mom. Aunt Patty slept in my bed.

She didn't cart us off right away. Mom fell ill after the housecleaning we did the first day. The next morning she stayed in bed and slept. Then she cried. Even when she lay still and didn't make a sound, tears would leak from her eyes and trail down to her ears. She stayed in bed for a week.

When Mom was on her feet again, Aunt Patty spent two days looking for a secondhand car for Mom to get around in. Mom tried to refuse. Aunt Patty wouldn't let her. “I'm only sorry we didn't do it before this,” she said in a firm voice.

Even when Aunt Patty wasn't out “kicking tires,” she was weeding the garden, and fixing the drip in the shower fixture, and changing the lightbulbs that had burned out, and getting some fellow in to split wood for the winter, which she said was not all that far off.

“Firewood needs to dry out,” she said when Mom said it was too early to think about firewood.

“I'll never be able to pay you back for all this, Patty” Mom said more than once.

“I hope you don't think you need to try,” Aunt Patty would answer, and go on as if Mom hadn't said anything at all.

Aunt Patty put us back on regular hours, which meant Little Sister and I were in bed before it reached full dark. I would lie awake and listen to Aunt Patty and Mom talk in the night.

“I should have known,” Mom said over and over. “I should have gotten to the doctor right off.”

“It could have happened to any one of, us,” Aunt Patty would say.

And Mom would cry. So would I. I don't know why Aunt Patty kept saying that to her. Why didn't she remind Mom, like Milly did, it probably wouldn't have made a bit of difference. That's what the doctor said.

“I ought to take the girls home with me for a little while,” Aunt Patty said one night.

“Oh, no, Patty, I have to hold on to my girls. I have to hold on to them hard.”

“What? What do you mean?”

In low rapid words, Mom said, “I can't get over this feeling that I must have let go of Baby for just a moment. I must have let myself think of something else when I should have been holding on to her—”

“Noreen, wherever did you get such a notion,” Aunt Patty said. “There isn't one thing you did that I would have done different.”

“Oh, Patty,” Mom said, beginning to cry again. “You would have done everything different.”

On the day Aunt Patty took us away, Little Sister came as close to finding her voice as she has yet done. She held on to Mom, silent, but her lips were stretched over her teeth in a terrible grin. I thought any moment her voice would burst out of her.

“Oh, Patty, this isn't such a good idea,” Mom said, clinging to me and Little Sister.

“It's a fine idea,” Aunt Patty said as she pried Little Sister's fingers away from Mom. “It's the only idea. The truth is, you aren't strong enough to take care of anyone besides yourself just now. You know it. Noreen, you can't let yourself fall to the wayside again. The girls will do fine with me, won't you, Willa Jo?”

I wouldn't answer.

I looked back once as we drove away, but only for a moment. It was too hard to look at Mom standing there in the yard, looking so lost and alone.

L
ittle Sister and I made it our business to go for ice cream the same time the day after we met Liz. Sure enough, we ran into her on the way into town.

“I work part-time down at the pharmacy,” she said when I wondered if she was always here at the same time. “My aunt works the fountain. I wash the glasses for her. You going for ice cream?”

“Not especially,” I said.

“Want to see our excavation?” I had no idea what she was talking about, but I preferred not to parade my ignorance. I was deciding it sounded like something medical, like the scar from a vaccination, when she added, “It isn't far.”

I nodded, and Little Sister fell into step with us.

We followed Liz over what felt like hill and dale in the heat, but she called it a shortcut. After ten minutes of walking I could not have found my way back to Aunt Patty's for love nor money. Mostly this was because Liz kept to the trees. And because she didn't give a person time to get a question in sideways.

“The piney woods hereabout are riddled with holes the boys dug,” she said. “Some of them are covered over with rocks or boards. They hoard things in those holes,” she said. “Rusted trucks with a missing wheel. A bottle of nail polish my momma's sister, Ruby, threw away. A nice enough color on its own, but it's strange to see toenails painted dark blue. Hard to say what the boys'll ever do with it. My brothers, I mean. In one hole there's a dead bird they decided to save so they could see how long it took to get down to bones. Of course, now they've looked once and it wasn't yet, they don't really want to look again.”

We ended up at the back side of the nine bungalows in a row. I realized we were across the street from Aunt Patty's. This solved some of the mystery I was not supposed to stare at. Those bungalows had a door front and back, and it was clear to me now that the Fingers only used the doors on the back side.

In fact, what I took to be the front side was really the back side. There were nice little porches in front of each door on the side that I'd taken to be the back side. Each porch was swept clean as a kitchen; boots and shoes were placed in a tidy row along the wall. Jackets and hats hung on hooks between the door and a window. There was a wooden box on one, like a toy box, and a rocking chair on another.

Little Sister didn't miss a thing. She pointed to whatever interested her, like the toy box, and a pair of yellow rain boots. “I see,” I said to her quietly. I didn't want her to feel like she had to hide seeing anything, but I didn't want to hurt Liz's feelings, either.

Liz took us straight to a hole in the side of a rise of earth. I'm not talking about a woodchuck hole. I'm talking about a dirt hole big enough to ride a bicycle into. It was shored up around the sides with tree trunks. Cut-off tree trunks of skinny trees. And dark inside. I'd never seen anything like it in my entire life. Well, I had, but only in pictures. It looked like some old-timey gold mine, so old-timey it had sort of collapsed back into the hillside.

Liz stepped in and dropped out of sight. She was gone so fast I wasn't at all sure about following her in. But I didn't like to look afraid in front of Little Sister and I let her take my hand.

We had to sit down almost right away and slide along on our bottoms. Not because we couldn't stand, but because it ran downhill too fast to walk it. I couldn't make myself run into the darkness that way.

It didn't go on that way for long, though. At least not long enough for me to change my mind before we rounded a comer into even deeper darkness.

A light blinked on.

Little Sister and I found ourselves standing up in a dirt-walled room, shaking dust out of our shorts. There were three of those plaid lawn chairs, like Uncle Hob was partial to. One of them small enough for a five-year-old to sit in. A wooden stool made a table for a melted-down stump of candle and the up-ended flashlight.

In the spill of light, I could make out a few bent spoons scattered alongside one wall, a couple of garden trowels, a broken knife and a small red Tonka pickup truck. A short pointy shovel was propped in one comer, along with two dented metal buckets and a smaller plastic bucket with a broken handle. “You dug this out?” I asked.

“Me and my brothers, mostly,” Liz said. “Neat, isn't it?”

Little Sister put out a hand and felt the dirt walls. I followed her after a moment. The walls were not so dusty-dry like the floor. Hard-packed and cold. Colder in the shallow place where they'd dug last.

“This here is my uncle Larry's shovel from the army,” Liz said, picking it up. “He was in 'Nam, where everybody digs holes like this. Like woodchuck burrows, he says, tunnels that lead to room after room. My other uncle, Mike, he helped us to shore it up,” she said as she rubbed her hand over another of those tree trunks. “He's done some mining and he knows about these things.”

I was having a hard time picturing it. It seemed to me a hole this big had to have been there in the first place, like a cave. While she was telling me about it, I was hearing Aunt Patty's voice like an echo in my mind. Mole rats. But then something Liz said caught my attention. “Shore it up?” I said.

“It fell in on us once or twice when we first got started.” She was so matter-of-fact about it. I nodded because it seemed to be the response she was looking for.

“There's a rock here,” Liz said, pointing out one wall with the shovel before she put it down. “We've come across other big ones earlier on. Uncle Mike would set a fire on them. Or under. He kept that fire going till they got red hot, then he hit them with a sledgehammer and they broke into a million pieces. This one's huge. And we're in too deep to start a fire now; there'd be too much smoke. That's why we started over again here.” She ran her hand over a darker hollow on one wall.

There was a sudden rumbling in the earth all around us, like an earthquake. It looked like one, with little puffs of dust in the air like smoke. We squinted our eyes against the dust.

“That's some of 'em coming home,” Liz said. She didn't look worried about a few dust motes.

By all rights, I should have been scared of a cave-in. I should have grabbed Little Sister and yanked her right out of there. But it was all so new to me I didn't even react. I waited to see. “Where've they been?” I said.

“The boys like to go to work with Daddy and Uncle Larry. All except the little one, of course.”

“What kind of work?” I said, feeling like I must sound an awful lot like Aunt Patty. I had to stop asking such questions.

“Oh, they do a lot of things. Fix roofs, tar driveways, build porches. Whatever needs doing. They helped to build your aunt Patty's house.”

“I'm sure she appreciates it,” I said. But I looked around at the walls as I said it.

“The boys are a lot of help. They run back and forth to the truck to get what's needed, and carry drinks of water, and sweep up where it's getting messy,” Liz said. She had no sooner said so than there was a scuffling noise in the tunnel.

Three boys burst in, all of them looking alike and all of them about the age of Little Sister. A younger one ran along behind them, his feet moving fast enough that he didn't have to slide down the steep part like we did. His brothers caught him before he fell over at the bottom. He wore nothing but a diaper, and he dragged a rag doll through the dirt.