The Cape Ann (27 page)

“Yes, yes,” he was groaning happily.

“More, more,” he said, but she said, “No, it’s time,” and they began bouncing up and down on the bed like children. If I bounced on the bed that hard. Mama would come and make me stop. Any minute I expected to hear the bed fall down with a crash. That had happened when I and two of my cousins jumped up and down on the bed at Grandma Browning’s.

Before long, the man cried out, as if the Witch had stabbed him, then he whimpered like a balloon losing air and fell silent. My heart stopped. Had she killed him? Moments later, in a different room, light appeared at the window. Water ran from a faucet. The toilet flushed. The lighted window went black, and presently someone—it could only be the Witch—was whispering behind the drawn bedroom shade.

Her whispers were at first calm, almost indifferent, but as she persisted speaking over the dead body, the Witch gathered passion, and the final phrases of her incantation were frenzied, even hysterical.

From the bed, the mumbling of someone returning from the dead answered the Witch’s conjury. She had brought him back to life. And I had heard the whole thing. Too weak to hold my head up, I slumped in a boneless heap on the couch.

How long I lay in that trancelike condition I don’t know, but I was shot from it by screams exploding from Aunt Betty’s room. I threw my arms over my head. Never had I heard such screams, not even on “Suspense.” Clapping hands over my ears, I turned my back to the sound and stared out the window into the purple-gray antedawn, where trees switched in nervous anticipation of the light.

The porch screen opened at the Witch’s house. With hurried stealth, a white-shirted, dark-trousered figure emerged onto the sidewalk. Making his way across the grass, he seemed buffeted by the screams from our house, as though a storm lashed him, driving
him backward. Putting his head down and leaning into the squall, he pushed on, up the step, across the porch, and into the living room. I kept my back turned, although I doubt he noticed me as he rushed headlong through the green drape.

When Aunt Betty’s cries momentarily subsided, Mama asked Uncle Stan coldly, “Where have you been?”

“Sleeping in the car,” he lied. “Is the baby coming?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Dressing quickly, I padded to the kitchen, through the back hall, and out the back door, huddling on the step to wait and watch. How long would it be before I’d see the stork? How had Mama found out that he was on his way?

At a quarter to five, I went in and buttered a piece of bread. Mama was sending Uncle Stan to fetch Maria Zelena and then to call the doctor in Mankato.

“Do the Zelenas have a phone I can use?” he asked.

“How should I know? I called from next door,” she told him. “Don’t go
there
. That woman is a witch. Use the Zelenas, if they have one. Wait.” From the sideboard in the dining room, Mama carried her handbag to the living room and rummaged in the coin purse while Stan, his face the color of unbleached muslin, waited, shifting feet and looking helpless and distraught. “Here. This is what it costs. Call person-to-person. Doctor Neumann. I don’t have the number.”

When Uncle Stan had gone, Mama filled the coffee pot and put it on the stove. “How long have you been up?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Since you told Uncle Stan the baby was coming. I’ve been out back, watching for the stork.”

Mama turned from the stove and gave me a sharp, inquiring look, then she burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

She put a hand over her mouth, but her eyes were still laughing.

“What’s so funny, Mama?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired. Sometimes people laugh at nothing when they’re tired.” Her face in the watery kitchen light was blue around the edges and under the eyes. Her lips looked bloodless. “Are you hungry?”

“I’ve got a piece of bread.”

Mama took half a ring of bologna from the icebox and set it on the table. “Let’s make you a sandwich,” she said, fishing a butcher
knife out of the drawer. When she’d cut several slices and laid them on my bread, she asked, “Onion?”

“Yes, please.”

It was as though everything was all right. Then Aunt Betty screamed again. It was not the kind of sound you expected to hear from a human being, and I sat down on a kitchen chair as if someone had shoved me there.

Mama ran into the bedroom as a second wail broke over us. I heard her speaking calm, businesslike words, as if she were reading a set of instructions off the back of a box. I slipped from the chair and backed out of the house.

Outside, I lay down on the cellar door, which was wet, and put my hands over my ears. I couldn’t exactly
hear
Aunt Betty, but every so often a pressure bore down on me, like someone laying a heavy featherbed over me, and I knew that she was screaming.

After a while I began to think about my sandwich, lying on the kitchen table, waiting for ketchup. I had had nothing to eat since last night’s dinner, and not much then. My stomach was gurgling. I could smell coffee. Had Mama turned off the stove?

Without removing my hands from my ears, I got up and peered in the open kitchen window. The stove was off. Sunshine, slanting in the dining room windows, spilled through the kitchen doorway, throwing a warm path of gold across the linoleum, right up to the table where the sandwich lay.

Lifting the fingers from one ear, I listened, cautiously prepared to clamp them back on. Quiet. I skittered into the house, poured ketchup on the bologna and turned to escape, sandwich to my mouth. Voices, moving from Aunt Betty’s room to the living room—Mama, Maria, and Uncle Stan.

“There are old towels, clean ones, to use?” Maria was asking.

“I’ll get them,” Mama told her.

“The baby will be here before the doctor,” Maria explained.

“Oh, Christ,” Uncle Stan groaned.

There was no time to be lost. I ran outside, letting the door slam, and dashed across the alleyway to the pasture.

Climbing over the fence, I waited, catching my breath, studying the sky, nibbling bread crust. The cows were gathered beneath a stand of cottonwoods, on the far side of the enclosure.

When I’d swallowed the last crumb of sandwich and licked the last trace of ketchup from my fingers, the sky was still empty of
storks, so I set out walking beside the fence, around the perimeter of the pasture. I would walk as far as where the cows were grazing, and back.

As time drew close, I was increasingly nervous. I tested my legs by sprinting halfway to the south end of the field. I mustn’t practice too much, however, or I’d get tired.

I hadn’t spent much time in the company of cows. Once or twice I’d helped herd them from pasture to barn at the end of the day. My few experiences with herding cows into a barn, and watching while they were milked, did nothing to convince me of their intelligence. I never saw a farmer try to teach a cow tricks.

While I did not imagine them clever enough to conspire, I kept an eye on them, albeit an oblique one, since I must watch at the same time the endless, cloudless expanse of sky. From a distance, the cows were as benign as those in the picture over the dining room buffet at Grandma Browning’s house.

The cows in Grandma’s dining room lolled around a mud hole at the edge of a slowly meandering stream. These lazed about beneath trees, some grazing idly; others, overcome by torpor, reposing like pampered odalisques.

On closer observation, however, did these not seem to be slyly noting me, taking my measure? The one with her back to me, grazing, who turned her head all the way around to heed my approach—what was she thinking?

I edged closer to the fence. Another corner was coming up. I had told myself I would turn back at this point. Instead I decided to circle the meadow, passing the farmhouse and outbuildings on my way back to Aunt Betty’s. Maria seemed to have been wrong about the baby’s arrival. Maybe it wouldn’t come until tomorrow.

Tomorrow was Sunday. Sunday was a good day to be born. I was born on Sunday, although I didn’t remember it. Sometimes, when Mama talked about it, I thought I could remember being afraid, high in the air, rocking in a little flannel blanket, clutched in a stork’s beak.

What would Aunt Betty’s baby remember? If only babies could talk, they could tell us what God was like, before they forgot. If I asked Aunt Betty’s baby easy questions about God, questions you could answer yes or no, maybe she could give me a sign. Maybe God sent babies into the world without words, precisely so they wouldn’t reveal Him while they still remembered.

I was tramping down Aunt Betty’s alley now, and still there was no sign of the stork. Could the stork come from more than one direction? Was there perhaps more than one stork? What direction was heaven?

Maybe the stork had come from the west, and I’d missed him. Maybe the baby had arrived. I began to sprint. Now was the time to ask the baby the questions. Just one or two: Would I like God if I knew Him? Could people recognize each other in heaven without their bodies? Tomorrow when the baby was rested, I would ask her one or two more. How many days would I have before she forgot?

“Mama, is the baby here?” I called, hurling myself into the back hall.

Mama was sitting alone at the table, hands folded, head tipped to one side as though she were asking a question. When I came running in with my own questions, she continued to stare for a moment, then turned slowly, looking at me as though she’d never seen me before. At length she said, “The baby is dead, Lark.”

“Dead? You mean it hasn’t been born yet, the stork hasn’t come?”

“It was born dead,” she said in a voice far too calm and unhurried. She seemed barely aware of me.

The stork had dropped the baby just as I had dreamed.

“I don’t want the baby to be dead,” I said.

“The baby is with God,” Mama told me.

“No, it isn’t,” I said, remembering Sister Mary Clair. “The baby is in limbo, Mama.”

She slapped me. “Don’t you ever say that again.”

“Mama!” I stumbled back against the table.

“Never again!” She loomed over me. “I never want to hear another word about limbo! The baby’s in heaven.” She grabbed my arm roughly. “Betty doesn’t need any smarty-pants Catholic brat telling her the baby’s in limbo. Do you understand?”

She let go of me suddenly, turning her back. She looked lonely, standing in the middle of the kitchen, shoulders hunched, nothing and no one to support her.

I crept toward her. “Mama? Can I see her?” I touched her arm. She was weeping. I threw my arms around her waist. “I won’t ever say anything about limbo, I promise.”

“Aunt Betty’s asleep. Maria gave her tea, and she went to sleep.”

“The baby. Can I see the baby?”

“Will you be quiet and not wake Aunt Betty?”

I nodded.

“The baby’s—” She made a pass at her eyes with the hanky. “I almost said ‘sleeping.’ The baby’s in a basket on the bureau. Come right out again as soon as you see her.” Mama sounded like she was talking to a stranger, some little girl who belonged to someone else. It frightened me. I wanted to say, “You don’t have to be ashamed of having me, just because Aunt Betty’s baby died.” I wanted Mama to hold me and say, “I’m sure glad I’ve got you.”

The shades were drawn in Aunt Betty’s room. It was dark and hot. The medicinal odor of Maria’s tea hung in the closeness. In the big chair, Uncle Stan was asleep, head back, snoring softly.

A wicker laundry basket sat on the bureau. In it a bed pillow with a clean white pillow slip was arranged for a mattress. The baby lay on the pillow, dressed in a tiny white gown, which was nonetheless too big, embroidered with white rosebuds. On her head she wore a little white organdy bonnet, again far too big, decorated with roses made of satin and tied under the chin with satin ribbons.

She didn’t look like a baby girl. She looked like a baby bird, fallen from the nest onto the grass. Where had the stork dropped her? I wondered. I wanted to touch her tiny hand, which seemed no larger than a quarter, but I was afraid her eyes would open and look at me accusingly.

MARIA’S MAGIC WORKED. AUNT
Betty’s fever went down. The sickness cast on her by the Witch ebbed from her body. Maria came each day for a week, preparing her tea, making certain that Aunt Betty drank it.

But while Aunt Betty’s body grew stronger and freer of poison, her mind closed around her loss, and she was remote from everyone. I tried to stay out of her way altogether.

I watered plants. I picked up stray pieces of paper that blew into the yard. I swept the porch and the walk, and wiped off the
dusty windowsills with a damp rag. Indoors I straightened up, polished furniture, and swept the floors. In the living room, I ran the carpet sweeper until Mama told me to stop because it made too much racket. I put it away and began picking lint from the rug on my hands and knees. However hard I worked, it mattered little. The sick, guilty feeling was going to be with me the rest of my life.

During the week following the baby’s death, Maria took me home with her for several hours each day. Mr. Zelena let me feed the chickens, which were kept in a pen behind the shed, and he also let me water the garden and pull weeds. Maria taught me to embroider.

After my embroidery lesson and garden chores, I would take a nap on Maria’s couch. I grew accustomed to the strangeness of the Zelena household: the heavy smell of garlic and herbs, the mystery that breathed silently, behind doors and around corners. And yet, perhaps not entirely accustomed, for I never opened a door or took a step without Maria’s urging, for fear I would stumble on secrets not meant for me.

From a member of her sodality, Maria procured a roll-away bed for Grandma and Grandpa Browning, who had come from Blue Lake. At night the few furnishings in Aunt Betty’s living room were shoved against the walls, and the rollaway was set up.

Sunday, which was Grandma and Grandpa’s first night with us, as she tucked herself and Grandpa into the rollaway, inches from me, Grandma exclaimed, “We’re like peas in a pod, aren’t we?”

In Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan’s room, there was no sound. They lay awake, not whispering. Since the baby’s death, Aunt Betty spoke to no one. When Grandma had tried to talk with her, Aunt Betty had told her, “I don’t want to talk, Mama. Just leave me alone.”