Shadow Baby (20 page)

“And the next thing we knew, there you were. Lying in a snowbank,” the choir director said. “We let go. Tamar got to you first.”

And the next thing we knew, and the next thing we knew, and the next thing we knew
. The choir director kept saying that, as if every one of her memories was a surprise to her.

The old man must have crawled through the trailer on his hands and knees until he bumped into me. He would have known it was me by my foot hitting him on his lowered head, or the feel of my hand under his crawling hand, or maybe the smell of burnt hair. That’s a smell you can’t not know. He must have picked me up, stood up, and pushed me out of the window.

Did he try to crawl out after me? Did he make it up onto his bed and then be overcome with smoke? Or did he just crumple back onto the floor once I was out the window?

The choir director had her arms out like she was directing the choir. While her eyes were still shut I took the green rubber frog and threw it under the bed.

Did the old man hear Tamar screaming my name? Did he know that I was still alive, and that they would revive me? Did he know that even then the Floyd Volunteer Fire Department was nearly there, and that the men would jump out and put the oxygen mask on me and take my pulse and make sure I wasn’t dead, and that then the ambulance would come and take me to Utica Memorial, and that Tamar would stay in a chair next to my bed the whole first three days?

That’s what the nurse with the brown hair that was shorter on one side than the other said.

“Your mother sat right in that chair for three whole days and nights,” the nurse said. “She wouldn’t even hardly leave the room to pee.”

What I want to know is when they got the old man out. Did the firefighters go in there and try to save him? Did anyone think of the old man?

Mr. Jewell came to see me a few days after I was home.

“I was walking home,” he told me. “George’s place was on the way so we walked back together. He waited for me to close up, that’s why he was a little later than usual. You must’ve thought he was inside, because we both saw you run on in there.”

Mr. Jewell put a paper bag that said “Jewell’s Groceries” on the bed next to me. I opened it. A can of ginger, a can of tuna, a bag of egg noodles, a small spiral notebook.

“When George saw you run in there, he started running too,” Mr. Jewell said. “He dropped his bag and they all spilled out.”

A spiral notebook? I took it out and turned it over. Red, flimsy, flip-top. Fifty miniature lined pages.

“I wanted to give them to you,” Mr. Jewell said. “I know he was your friend.”

“Thank you,” I said.

After he left I picked up the little spiral notebook again. Why did the old man buy it? What did he plan to do with it?

I will never know.

I
thought of things that weren’t going to happen anymore because the old man was gone, such as biscuit baking. I had told the old man my pioneer recipe for biscuits. Pioneers carried their recipes in their heads. I know this because I once wrote a report on pioneer cooking. It was a true report, I researched pioneer recipes in the Utica Library. It’s hard to
find pioneer recipes; they were passed down mother to daughter. Daughters learned by observing and practicing. They were apprentices to the art of cooking.

Take some flour and cornmeal and rising and some good fresh lard if you have it. Rub it between your fingers till it’s crumbly. Add some salt. Cut into rounds. Bake, covered
.

“‘Rising’?” the old man said. “Baking powder, that must be.”

“Must be,” I said.

“And lard. We used to use that. That was all we used to use. That, and butter.”

He sifted even though I told him not to.

“Did the pioneers sift?” I said. “They did not. They had to pare down to bare essentials before they headed out west. Was there room in a covered wagon for a sifter?”

He said nothing.

“There was not,” I said. “A sifter is not a bare essential. You shouldn’t be using one.”

The old man got a stick of butter from his miniature refrigerator.

“Halt!” I said. “Did the pioneers have butter?”

The old man started cutting butter with two knives.

“Nay sir, I think not!” I said. “Where’s the good fresh lard?”

He smiled at me. That was rare from the old man. Smiles were not his forte. The old man finished rolling out the dough, then he took one of his three water glasses and pressed it into the dough. Each round he placed on a pan that he had already greased. They didn’t take long to bake. They would have been much harder to bake over an outdoor fire. You wouldn’t be able to regulate the temperature. You’d have
to use a regular frying pan with the lid on it. They’d be burned on the bottom and maybe underdone on the top. That would be an authentic pioneer biscuit, I thought. Not a perfect round biscuit.

Still, the pioneers would love their biscuits. After a day in the open air, walking behind the wagon in the tracks left by the wheels, or riding one of the ponies off to the side, or leading the cow by its halter, those biscuits would have been delicious. Nothing would taste better than an authentic pioneer biscuit, baked in a frying pan over an open fire. There would have been no leftover biscuits in a true pioneer camp.

The old man was the master and I was his apprentice. That’s the way they did things in the olden days, and that’s the way the old man and I did them. These are my terms, not his. I don’t know if the old man knew the words
master, journeyman
, and
apprentice
. I don’t know if his English was good enough to know those sorts of words.

I observed him. I used to watch his every move.

Under cover of darkness, the old man and I used to go out. We escaped from Nine Mile Trailer Park and headed out for scavenging night. Possibility was there, waiting for me. An old colander with only one of its three little curved metal legs was there. You would think that someone had known I was coming, and left it there, bagless, unboxed, so that I would be sure to see it. It was the kind of colander that they still make, that they have been making for all eternity—a round metal bowl with holes in the shape of stars punched all through it, propped on three little curved metal legs that are screwed into the bottom.

Two of the legs were missing, and the colander was tilted. It was a lame and punch-drunk colander.

I held it up to my face and pushed my nose up against the bottom of the bowl. My face was encased in colander. It smelled cold and clean, like clean metal. Someone must have washed it before they put it out for the trash. Maybe they debated before they put it into the trash. Maybe they thought, there’s got to be more use in this colander. Maybe they tried to make little legs for it to stand on, so that they could continue to use the star-shaped-hole colander. It might have been a going-away gift from the owner’s mother, or a wedding gift from fifty years before. But because the owner of this colander did not understand the art of metalworking, they were unable to fix the colander.

“A new colander is only a few bucks at the hardware store,” you can imagine someone saying to them. “Get rid of this old thing.”

I looked at the old man. He nodded. That’s how I knew I was learning, learning to see with the old man’s eyes.

The colander owner did not have the old man’s eyes. The colander owner could not see the art of possibility, the possibility of beauty. They did not have the hands and the tools to repair the snapped-off legs of the colander and make it whole again, make it new again, so that it would stand upright and fulfill its potential.

Sometimes we stopped at Crystal’s Diner. I had a milkshake. He had a cup of coffee.

He left things at the diner. The money for the milkshake and coffee, plus a quarter. Always that. But he left other things too, things that he made, things that we made together. Sugar cookies wrapped in a tinfoil swan for Crystal. Once a bracelet made of curled-up soda pop tops strung on a piece of
red string. The kind of thing that Crystal’s nephew Johnny is crazy for. Shinies, and small red things, that’s what Johnny loves.

On our way out once, as we passed Johnny’s booth, I saw the old man’s hand go into his pocket and come out again. The candelier cookie cutter lay shining up from Johnny’s table. Johnny wasn’t there, but it waited for him. Next week when we went back to the diner, there was Johnny, waving the candelier in the air under the light, so that it threw sparkles onto the chrome sugar shaker.

The old man knew things about people.

On our first trip under cover of darkness, with me as his apprentice, we walked by Mrs. J’Alexander’s house. Her son was sitting in the window. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. That happened in the Vietnam War.

“Her son almost died,” I told him. “His name’s Joe. His legs were blown off in the war.”

Everyone knows that. It’s common knowledge.

“He’s deaf dumb and blind,” I said.

“He is not,” the old man said.

“It’s common knowledge,” I said.

“Knowledge is not common.”

“He can’t hear, he can’t talk, and he can’t see,” I said. “That makes you deaf dumb and blind.”

“He can see and he can hear.”

I looked in the window, lit up by a lamp. Joe was sitting in his wheelchair.

“What can he see? What can he hear?”

“Everything you can.”

If that’s true, how did the old man know it?

“Are you psychic?” I said.

He shook his head. It could be that the old man didn’t know that word, or it could be that he was truly not psychic. Then I remembered that I was an apprentice and I stopped talking. I made a vow to continue to observe the old man and learn his ways.

I didn’t know then that our time was almost up.

I am still the old man’s apprentice in all things. Paul Revere started that way. Back in those days there was a system for apprentices and journeymen and masters. You followed in their footsteps. That’s how Paul Revere learned to mold silver and create useful objects of great beauty. I’ve seen the Revere-ware factory in Rome. It’s only fifteen miles away. I’ve been past it at night, when the red neon horse gallops against the dark sky. I think about that horse sometimes. I think about the young Paul Revere, apprentice to a master craftsman.

O
nce, when I was still eleven and the old man was still alive although I had not yet met him, I asked Tamar a sraightforward, answer-demanding question.

“Ma, did you want kids?”

Tamar looked at me. I looked back at her. I raised my eyebrows and held them up there.

“Yes.”

That was it. That was her answer. No quibbling, no equivocating, no hemming or hawing. It took me by surprise.

“You did?”

“Yes. I did.”

That gave me something to chew on. As my hermit grandfather chewed on deerskin through the long winter to make it soft and pliable and ready for the needle, so did I chew on Tamar’s answer. She was busy with her lumberjacket. How she loves her lumberjacket. Her mother bought it at the store in Speculator. I used to think eighteen was old enough so that your mother could die, but now I’m not sure.

Tamar was working the new zipper on her lumberjacket, trying to get the teeth to fit together smoothly and not
snaggle halfway up. She had replaced the zipper herself when it gave out. Tamar is not a seamstress, however. Neither a needler nor a threader shall she be. Already the zipper had come apart at the bottom. Tamar was using duct tape to keep it together. When the duct tape made its appearance, I asked another answer-demanding question.

“Did you fall in love with him?” I said to Tamar.

She didn’t look up. She was wrapping the duct tape around the bottom of the broken zipper.

“Were you in love with my father?” I said. “Even for just that one time?”

Duct tape doesn’t tear. You have to cut it. She cut it with the kitchen shears, as opposed to the tiny sharp scissors on her Swiss army knife, which would have gummed up had she tried to use them on duct tape. Tamar can’t stand her Swiss army scissors to be gummed.

“Even for a few minutes? I’m just trying to understand.”

“No,” Tamar said. “I did not love your father.”

“At all?”

“At all.”

“Then why did you do that with him?”

“Well, that will have to remain a mystery,” Tamar said.

She finished wrapping the zipper and smoothed down the duct tape seam. Then she slipped her feet into her worn-out moccasins and wiggled her toes. I watched her face for a silent wince. That happens sometimes, when her toes are remembering being frozen. There was nothing.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Things don’t have to remain mysteries.”

“This one does,” Tamar said. “There are some things you are too young to understand.”

That was a rare thing for Tamar to say. Usually she stops after, “This one does,” and that would be the end of it. Tamar is not a qualifier of words. Things are, things are not. That’s the sort of person she is.

“I’m not a child,” I said.

But that was it. She was finished. She stretched her arms in her old lumberjacket carefully, so that the worn-out seams wouldn’t rip any farther, and tested the zipper for snags.

“There’s going to come a point at which you will be forced to buy a new lumberjacket,” I said. “There will come a day when you will get in the car and drive to Speculator, walk into the lumberjacket store, and buy a new one.”

But even now, that day has not yet come. That day in Speculator remains in the future. There’s no way to predict when it will come, no way to know when Tamar will wake, put on the lumberjacket her mother gave her, look down at it and realize that it is no more, that the seams are destroyed and it will not zip. That the cold cannot be kept out. The lumberjacket as it once was will have disappeared. Tamar’s lumberjacket from her mother will have entered a new, nonjacket life, and in her gut Tamar will know it.

W
hen you lose your hair in a fire, you might not recognize it when it grows back in. It doesn’t look like the same hair that grew on your head your whole life long. New hair is soft, and patchy. When new hair grows in over a patch of scalp that was burned in a fire, it grows in tentatively, unsure it should be
there. You look at your hair in the mirror and you wonder whose hair it is, and if it’s always been this way and you just never noticed it before.