I Live With You (23 page)

Just then the baby starts to cry. He holds still as though afraid to scare me. He even stops stirring the soup. I put the baby to breast. I refuse to look at him. I refuse to smell the soup.

When it’s ready he squats beside me. “Just a sip or two. You’ll feel better.”

But I don’t want to feel better. Why feel better when there’s nothing to look forward to anyway?

It does smell good. He holds out the spoon. I sip. I go on sipping.

He treats me like a child. Says, “Good girl.” I’m surprised he doesn’t pat me on the head. I can see all this as if from over my own shoulder, but I can’t react. I do feel better though.

After the soup he hands me tea. “I’d like to bring you back in the morning. Can you manage it?”

I can’t nod.

He wraps me in blankets, me and the baby together, lies down and pulls me to him so his chest is my pillow. I have no will at all. I let him. He keeps on talking softly and as if it doesn’t matter what he says, and it doesn’t. I’ve done the same for Sisi when she was sick, and even for my donkey.

“You were good to me. You fed me. You held me. You…. And then you…. And then you….” I don’t listen to the words. I sleep.

When I wake, the baby’s gone. I panic. I look to see if I’ve rolled on it or tossed it away in my sleep, but Sebastian has it. He’s sitting nearby, cleaning it up with canteen water. It did need cleaning. He has white cloths to wrap it in. He came prepared for it and for me. He’s talking to it as he talked to me—a lot of nothing. How many other babies has he fathered?

He looks up and smiles.

I don’t smile back.

“I’ll bring you tea in a minute. It’s made.” He wraps the baby in clean cloths and brings it to me. He props me up against blankets, my back against a rock, then brings tea and crackers. He crouches beside me and watches me eat.

After I nurse the baby, we start down. I don’t want to go back but I don’t know what else to do. I keep having the idea I must make decisions. But all I think is:
Think!
and then I don’t do it.

He’s not a big man, but he’s wiry and strong. Sometimes he carries me and the baby—both his pack and me on his back. It’s soothing—to have my arms around his neck and to feel the movement of being carried.

When we stop to rest and eat I say, “I won’t go back.”

“You need rest and care.”

“I can’t go back. Everybody knows.”

“They know this is my boy.”

“Boy?”

He gives me a odd look. And then an even odder one, “What about Sisi?”

Sisi! Ever since I started up to hide and have the baby I’ve forgotten she existed.

“She came with us yesterday to help look for you. Didn’t you hear her calling ‘Ma’?”

Poor Sisi. I
did
hear. That must have been that lost goat sound.

Just in these three days things have changed at the fort. They’re making black banners and hats with a zigzag of red. Like lightening and like blood. They’re making flags that say, THE DEAD. And they do look dead. They could be dead. Why didn’t I see that before? Bloodshot eyes, leathery skin, bony as skeletons…. They paint their faces a jaundiced yellow, though most of them look yellow anyway. They put charcoal around their already sunken eyes. If they’re not really dead, they’ll do for dead.

They’ll advance in three waves. The first wave will pick up the other prisoners and take the pistols from their overseers. The second wave will fan out in a long line and loosen boulders to start the landslide. After the slide that destroys the terraces, the third wave will rush down, to and through headquarters, and hit our army from the back. They’ll count on surprise and higher ground. They’ll count on the fact that they’re the dead.

If they’re already dead they can’t be killed over again …. Can they?

But killing each other—nothing new in that even if three sides instead of two.

I get better. I can talk again. I nod, smile, though it feels like I’m pretending.

Sebastian promises to run away with us as soon as this battle is over—off to some land where nobody knows him. That scares me more than if he hadn’t said it. I know how it works with the last time for things. It means he’s a dead man. If he survives to do as he promised…. I’ll believe it when I see it.

The night before they’re to go into battle he cries. Who would have thought it, a general? I feel all the more that I don’t want him to leave. I say, “Why not go right now? Cross the mountains. You want to. They can do this by themselves. If they really are the dead, they can do it.”

Of course he thinks it all depends on him.

He’s done for. I think he knows it.

We need more prisoners than usual to help rebuild the terraces. I build a little shed by my doorway almost as big as my donkey shed. I can house four. Several of us go down for more men.

Nothing has changed. Nobody seems to care anymore that my black-haired little boy is one of the enemy’s. I suppose he’s just one more soldier for our side. Nobody says a word about me coming back. They even help me repair my cottage. Sisi helps. I get better though I still have the sense I’m watching everything over my own left shoulder.

I don’t think the dead were really the dead … or they died all over again. Or they were blown to bits. Maybe by their own rusty rifles. They weren’t ghosts. I don’t even wish they had been.

At headquarters we pick out new men. I see one that might be Sebastian—he wears a general’s uniform. But I don’t dare take anyone in as bad shape as this one. They wouldn’t let me, anyway. I give him a drink of water. I wrap the old olive drab sweater around him. Whoever it is won’t last long. It’s a waste of a good sweater. One I especially liked for sentimental reasons.

JOSEPHINE

T
OP OF LIST
…
ALWAYS
at the top of list, rain or shine, day or night: Find Josephine. Nothing can be done until she’s back here at the Old Folks Home where she belongs. Talent night she’s our main attraction. We couldn’t do much without her. She wobbles on her slack wire but she hasn’t fallen yet. The ceiling is so high she can do the slack wire act in there in the living room though she has to watch out for the chandelier. She’s not much higher than four or five feet up. When she sings she tinkles out the music on a toy xylophone. Once she brought her wind chimes down to the living room, put them in front of a fan and sang to that.

We pretend not to see how wobbly she is. Everybody else is worse. She’s the only one with the courage to dance and sing no matter what. Or maybe it’s not courage, just innocence.

Because of Josephine we often have townspeople visiting our performances. We don’t know if they come to admire her or to laugh … at her and at us.

I’m the emcee, stage manager, entertainment committee. I’m less important than those who perform. I suppose I do have some poise, though I’ve been told I rock from foot to foot. Why would the Administrator pick a man like me for finding Josephine? Why pick somebody who has a limp?

No, I
am
the perfect person to send off to find her. Somebody she can have a good laugh at. She’ll trip me and I’ll be looking up from the sidewalk, right into her greenish-tan eyes. There she’ll be, found at last, but she’ll run off somewhere else before I can get up and hobble after her.

We live in a grand, though ancient mansion. It was the summer house of millionaires. They donated it to the town for us old people. The living room and dining room are often closed off—too hard to heat.

The breakfast room is the room everyone loves best and spends the most time in. It has windows on three sides with window seats under them. Five tables—enough for all of us. But I’m hardly ever in this room except to eat, nor is Josephine. Too many card games and too much bingo.

Josephine seldom comes out of her room except to eat and on show-and-tell night. (That’s the only time we open the living room and let the heat come up.) Or she comes out to run away. She’s
always
lost. If not right now, then she would be in another minute.

I wish I wouldn’t have to be the one to find her. For the sake of the doing of a good deed, I do it.

She often says, “If not for
you
finding me, I’d not bother getting lost in the first place.” I know that’s true. When I find her (or should I say, when she lets herself be found) there’s such a look of… well, it’s complicated, disdain, but if that were all I wouldn’t do it. There’s relief, too. You’d think I’d find finding her worth it for that look, and I might if it wasn’t for my arthritis. I’ve been using a cane lately. (Josephine gets lost in any kind of weather. Thank God tonight it’s clear.)

You’d think by now the people in the neighborhood would bring her back when she strays, but they don’t. They’re afraid of her. Her hair is wild, the look in her eyes is wild and she makes nasty comments on their noses. She doesn’t dress like anybody else. So many scarves you can’t tell if she has a dress on under them or not. That must unnerve them. And the dress, which
is
under them, is more like a scarf than a dress. Everything she wears is like that, and it’s always pinkish or pumpkin colored or baby blue. She always wears big dangly glittery earrings.

I step out on the porch. I admire the night for a few minutes as I always do. I hobble down the front steps. Our mansion has a few acres around it and trees so you can think yourself in the country, but no sooner out the gate and you’re in town.

Sometimes I think Josephine is hiding just around the corner, watching me try to find her right from the start. Probably wondering which direction I’ll look in first. Loving how my shirt tail’s out, my belt unbuckled still. (I came straight from my bed.) Loving, especially, my big sigh.

I smooth at my mustache. I had no time to wax it and it’s getting in my mouth. I can feel it’s as draggled as the rest of me.

First I check the bushes on each side of the stairs to see if she’s crouching there. She can hold as still as a frightened fawn.

I always bow when I find her. I do that because noblesse oblige. I wear my old boater just so I can take it off to Josephine. If ever she can be found smiling (that little I’ve-got-you-now smile) it’s because of me.

I limp off, one helpless person in search of another equally inept.

Poor Josephine, here she is, in town somewhere, but I know yearning to be in a forest instead. She often says so.

Once a young person came knocking on our door asking for Great Aunt Josephine. (Just like Josephine, her eyebrows were so much the same color as her freckles they might as well not have been there.) Our Administrator lied. He said, nobody here by that name. She said she had papers. But he said the papers must be wrong and he could prove it with other papers. I suspect the Administrator is in love with Josephine.

The others here call the Administrator fuddy-duddy and fussbudget behind his back, but they don’t expect that sort of talk from me. I call him Administrator. (I’m sure they call
me
fuddy-duddy and worse behind
my
back.)

Left, right or straight-ahead? It hardly matters. Sometimes she leaves me a sign, a little piece of unraveling rosy fabric from one of her scarves or a plastic flower stolen from the dining room tables, but no sign here now that I can see. I go out the gate, cross the street and down the hill. For no reason. I wish I could see more stars, but then I grew up in town. This is what I’m used to.

I whistle so Josephine can keep track of me.

I think I love her … or I must. At least in some way, else why do this practically every day? Every night? And with only a modicum of complaining? (And that, only to myself.) I think she cares for me, too. She’s used to me, at least, and wants to torment me. That could be love.

Since I can first remember anything at all I’ve been in love. As if love came with consciousness itself. I fall in love all the time—always unrequited. I know there’s something wrong with me, and I know that it shows, though I’ve no idea how people can see it as quickly as they seem to. But lots of people are prissy fuddy-duddies and manage to marry even so, while I’ve hardly even had friends. But I’ve stuck to my principles. I’ve been courageous in the face of misadventures. Even catastrophes. People can count on me. Josephine must have seen that in me from the start.

I suspect the Administrator knows only too well that I’m not the sort of man women fall in love with. I’m the safe one to send after her. Nothing will happen between Josephine and me. She practically told me as much herself. She said I was too polite. “Picky, picky, picky,” she’s said and more than once. I must admit I stick to my dignity as best I can. As usual I’m not watching where I’m going. I’m looking up, wishing I could see more stars, but of course there’s too many streetlights. I’ve so seldom been in a place where you can really see them. Here in town they seem unimportant. Even the moon, were it up, would seem unimportant. That’s what I’m thinking when down I go.

At first it doesn’t hurt, but then I try to get up.

“Josephine. I’ve hurt myself.” I whisper it. How could Josephine help anybody?

I try again to get up. I
will
get up.

I can’t. I have my belt. (I’m shocked to find it still unbuckled and my shirt tail still out. I try to be, if not elegant…. Who can be elegant with no money and with the bathroom down the hall and no lock on the door? People see you in all sorts of déshabille. Even so, I always try to be well-groomed. But I must be more addled than I thought.) I try coiling my belt about my leg. It’s not going to help. I look around for my cane. I wonder if I should use it as a cane or a splint. I take my shirt off, twist it, and use it to tie my leg up tight.