True Colors

In loving memory of my sister, Helen,
for instilling in me a love of history and family stories.

For Lisa and Jana,
for letting me “borrow” their grandfather Wallace Gilpin for this story.

And in memory of Beverly Ross, the real three-pound, two-day-old baby who was found stuffed in a mailbox in 1926 and lived to tell the story.

chapter 1
June 1952

On a cold, clear December day in 1941, when I was but two days old, on the very same Sunday the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I was found stuffed into the copper kettle Hannah Spooner grew her marigolds in. Even though I was wrapped in a tattered quilt, my skin was blue, bluer than a robin’s egg, as blue as the tears I imagined in my mother’s eyes when she left me there, with not even a note pinned to my diaper to give a clue as to who I was or where I’d come from.

Hannah carried me inside and warmed my cold, still body in her oven, just as she had newborn lambs, until I was pink again and squalling for my supper.

As news spread through town, folks nearly tripped over each other rushing out to Hannah’s farm to see the Kettle Baby.

“Why, Hannah!” her friends said. “You’re sixty-three
years old! You can’t be raising up a child at your age.” But Hannah had decided to keep me, and I love her like flowers love the sun, but still, bringing creatures home is Hannah’s nature, so I figure I was just one more creature that needed nursing back to health. All these years, I’ve wondered what was wrong with me to cause my real mother to throw me away as if I were nothing more than a banana peel or a day-old newspaper.

So when I saw the cat near Hannah’s barn, wild-eyed and skinny as a rake handle, and Hannah said it’d likely been left behind last year by one of the summer people when they headed back to the city, I felt my heart snag like cloth on a blackberry bramble.

“I know just how you feel,” I told the cat.

I carried a bowl of milk out, but the cat took off across the pasture. I set the bowl down, anyway. She might come back.

Hannah didn’t know it, but I had a secret. All these years, I’ve been waiting and watching for my mama to come back, too.

I looked down the road, as I did every day, but it was empty. She might not come today, or tomorrow, but someday she’ll show up, saying how she made a terrible mistake, that she didn’t know what she was doing when she left me, that she really loves me and wants me back. I’ll kiss Hannah goodbye, climb into my mama’s brand-new 1952 DeSoto, and off we’ll go to see the world.

Every once in a while, Hannah saves out enough of her egg money to take me to the movies (she especially loves Humphrey Bogart), and we share a root beer float at Pierce’s Pharmacy, but my real mama will take me to the movies every day, and she’ll buy me ice cream for breakfast, dinner, and supper if I want.

“Blue?” Hannah’s voice carried out to me and chased the dreams from my head. “Are you feeding that cat out of my good china?”

You heard right. Hannah named me Blue—Blue Sky, to be exact—for my eyes and for being the same color, when she found me, as that clear December sky. Hannah says she thought long and hard about what to name me. I think she should have thought longer and harder, and come up with something better. I know hound dogs and cows with better names than I got, but I guess I’ll have to live with it, at least until my real mama comes to claim me, and then I’ll have a whole new name to go along with my new life.

chapter 2