The Accidentals Page 13

  Meantime, Baby Girl, she’s growing like gangbusters, getting bigger and fishier-looking by the minute. Folks would come in all gussied up like they’re going to their own birthday party, the young ladies with fresh hair, the husbands with their pressed shirts and shiny shoes, all happy and excited. They’d grab each other’s hands and tiptoe over to the crib to see their very own baby girl, the one they’d brought the pink blanket and bonnet for. They’d been warned, sure, but nothing prepares the eye. They’d take the first glad look and that would be it. Their eyes would get skittery as mice and out the door they’d head, fast as their two feet could carry them, slowing up just enough to cast their eyes sideways into the other cribs, at the other babies with their sweet faces, nothing wrong with them, and wondering why nobody called about that pretty one to their left. Or that other plain but decent-looking one over there in the corner. Back then, there was buckets of babies for white folks, the girls was having them right and left, people could pick and choose, be particular. Why should they take a child with a mouth like a tunnel when they could have rosebud lips?

  Loud as she was ugly too, carrying on all the time like the world was coming to an end. It was like she knew. Even when she was real little, coming to us from Our Lady down on Napoleon, the white girls from families with full pockets but nobody willing to hold them up in their shame and say you are still mine and what comes from you is mine too. She’d root around in her bed like a little pig going for tit. Then she’d get mad as fire and holler like she was saying, Where’s mine? How come I don’t get none? She’d watch you across the room and when she saw you coming at her, she would cry out like somebody’d stuck a pin in her. She wanted petting and talking to, but nobody but me would give her the time of day. The other girls, they fed her and cleaned her up, their hands busy with her business, their eyes always floating up above her, peaceful and uninterested, never looking her in the face. As she got bigger she got more and more watchful, studying those girls for a spark, somebody to look back, be a mirror, other eyes that would say, Yeah honey, here you be, stuck on this treacherous earth with the rest of us poor dopes. You right here, and us too, we’re all in this mess together, Baby Girl. This good earth is your home sweet home.

  I was the one gave her a name. Nurse said we shouldn’t name the children because then we’d get attached and that road is paved in sorrow. But when nobody took her and she got to be a permanent fixture, she started studying me like she was asking for her name. She got me to thinking about how a name is like gravity, it holds you down, keeps you from coming apart and flying all over the place. After a while, those little eyes of hers would follow me home. I would see them when I looked at my own pretty children, like they were a window she was pressed up against, peeking into, out of the dark sorrowful night. So I came up with Baby Girl and it stuck, being both personal and not personal at the same time. I said it in a certain way, with the emphasis on the Baby part to set it aside as a proper name, not just any baby girl in the place. I would say, “Baby Girl needs a change, I’ll be right back,” and they’d all know who I was talking about.

  THE SHAMEFUL THING was that Baby Girl had a family over in Mississippi. A little town called Opelika. Her mother just a girl herself, whose own mother had passed a few years ago. At first it seemed like everything was going to be just fine. The dead mother had a sister, a teacher lady right here in the City who wanted to adopt the child. The nurse what brought her to me told the story. Teacher Lady had come in to fetch Baby Girl and take her home. The lady had hungry eyes. She brought a yellow blanket she’d knitted herself. “Wool,” the nurse said, “and in this weather.” A skinny woman with big teeth and a line like a train track between her brows. She’d been warned about the lip. The folks at Charity had explained to her how it needed fixing. But when she saw Baby Girl, her brows shot up under her bangs and the train track disappeared. She said there must be a mistake, this could not be her own niece’s child—her niece was an attractive girl—and when they said there was no mistake, Teacher Lady turned around and hightailed it out the door.

  After she left, folks here called the granddaddy down in Opelika, asked him didn’t he want Baby Girl. “A girl?” he said. “Adopt it out. I don’t ever want to hear about it again. I got enough to deal with.” Those were his exact words, folks said.

  So me and Baby Girl, we went along, day to day, month to month. She got to be six months old, then seven going on eight. Her eyes turned from blue eggs to hard little coals. She grew two teeth the size of the nail on my little finger and pointed straight out, like tusks.

  IT WAS RIGHT chilly that morning. Somebody said to get the babies washed early because of Cuba and the Russians and the Bomb. I ran Baby’s water a little hotter than usual in the deep sink in the kitchen. I sat her down and she laughed and whapped the water, spattering it up in my face. I soaped her up, trying to stay dry myself. Sometimes when I bathed her, I ended up as wet as her. I was running a little more warm water to keep her from getting cold when one of the white girls hollered at me to do this or that job of work, I can’t even recollect what. Those white girls, they gave me the stuff that was too dirty for their taste.

  In the tub, Baby Girl was playing hard, splashing around, snorting the way she did because of the hole in her face. She hit the water again with her little pig hand and squealed.

  I turned away to do this job of work I was called upon to do. A bad diaper, or some upchuck. How strange it is I can’t remember! It wasn’t going to take long whatever it was. Baby Girl was doing fine in the sink, she was all right, snorting those soft little breaths the way she did when she was having a good time.

  While I was cleaning up whatever mess it was, I got distracted. I got to stewing about my own little Mary. I’d left her with her big brother. My Cleve is named after his daddy, who’d died that past year fighting for his country, holding back the communists over there in the swamps of Vietnam so the dominoes wouldn’t fall across the whole wide world and bury us all. Cleveland had gone and got himself blown up in one of the tunnels those communists booby-trap. His lieutenant sent him in to see about another soldier who hadn’t come out. How crazy is that? If you crawl into a hole and don’t crawl out, isn’t that a hint something’s wrong in there? Is it good sense for me to crawl in after you? He’d written to me about how they always sent him into the tunnels, told him he was good at it. I think he was proud of that, but I figured they sent him into those death holes because he was a Negro, like those white girls in the place making me to clean up baby upchuck, allowing as how I had such a strong stomach, wasn’t I something.

  My boy Cleve was twelve. He carried his father’s sweetness tucked deep inside him the way the oyster carries the pearl. He was good with Mary, who was a handful, making hay with every kind of mischief she could think up every minute of the day and night. She was six, with just the softest head of hair you ever saw, a dandelion cloud around her face. I worked myself to death over that hair of hers. She liked to take out her braids so it was always wild. She got so she ran off whenever we let her out. We lived in a double shotgun in Black Pearl. Neighbors two blocks over would find her sitting on their porch stoops, hair flying every which way, looking to be let in. At dusk, she’d sneak out while I was fixing supper and go peering into folks’ windows like a peeping tom. When they’d open their doors to see about her, she would say she was looking for her daddy, he was hiding from her but she was bound to find him if she kept on looking. They would drag her back home, shaking their heads and muttering about how war widows with pensions should stay home and take care of the preciousness they got left. It’s not my nature to talk back to people, I keep my counsel, but one day I told Billie Jones, who lived in the other side of our double, she could have my pension and my children too if she could stretch the money Uncle Sam sent to take care of them. Did they think I was working twelve-hour shifts on my feet diapering white throwaways for the pure pleasure of it?

  I worked from four in the morning to four in the afternoo
n so I could have some time with my own children after school. That day, though, they’d canceled school. If the Russians was dead set on bombing us, the young ones ought to be home with their mamas and daddies. What a joke! My babies’ daddy blown to smithereens and me pushing a twelve-hour shift. I was worried sick. When I left the house in the dark of that morning, I’d put a note to Cleve on the kitchen table telling him to keep Mary in. I reminded him about getting under the kitchen table if he heard a siren.

  As I did that job of cleaning up those white girls had sent me to do, I was thinking Mary would be popping like a firecracker by now. My Cleve would be ready to wring her neck and mine too by the time I dragged myself home on the bus, hanging on to the strap, staring at the empty seats in the front. He’d be waiting at the door like a caged dog. “’Bout time you got home,” he’d say and push past me. He’d walk out onto the street and not come back until past dark, doing Lord knows what. “Wait for me,” little Mary would holler. “I want to go too.” He’d just keep walking, not looking back. Then she would throw a fit while I tried to get supper on. I had a stone setting square on my heart thinking about it all, with no Cleveland in the world, not even a piece of him to bury so I could say, go in peace, my Cleveland, you were a good man, a good husband.

  I was in a deep study, thinking as to how it was getting toward Thanksgiving and Christmas, and my children would be running wild in the freezing cold until school started up again in January, if we all lived that long. I had no kin to help me. Both our families had left the City years back and headed for Chicago. My mother would have taken care of Cleve and Mary both if she’d been here. They’d be out playing in the old backyard in Algiers, Daddy pitching the ball, making Cleve believe he was the next Jackie Robinson, Mary playing outfield. But those two, coming back south? Not even in a box, Mother said. She wanted to send us a one-way ticket on the Greyhound to Chicago, but I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving our little double, which was the last place Cleveland and I had lived as man and wife. After I got the children to bed, I’d sit in the dark and think about him like he was one of Mary’s jigsaw puzzles, the pieces all crying out to be put back together. I could feel his spirit all around me. Pieces of him fluttered against my face like moths to the light, wanting to hover and touch. This was our place. When I dreamed him up in my head, his corded arms and stern legs, his playing eyes, his manhood, it was like I was putting him back together again. If I weren’t here, in the place where he was whole, he would fly apart and melt into thin air like he’d never been born.

  So I was studying my options, thinking about maybe sending the children north for the holidays, asking Mother and Daddy to send me some money to put them on the bus, though I couldn’t stand the idea of my two babies on a bus all by themselves in the dead of winter. Chicago! They could get snatched or lost, freeze to death. I was tied in a knot worrying about my own flesh and blood, the children Cleveland had left me to care for. It was the last thing he said to me, “Take care of the children, Ed Mae.” And I’d answered him hard and fast, “They’re my children too, Cleveland.” Wished now I’d said something softer, wished I’d said, You know I will, honey.

  So here I was, barely thirty-five years old, stuck like a fly on flypaper to this treacherous earth, two young ones to take care of, no husband and no luck and barely enough money to scrape by. It was a dark tunnel I was in and no light ahead, not even a flicker. That tunnel was about to cave in, right that very minute, and that was nobody’s fault but mine, all mine.

  WHEN ONE OF those white girls saw Baby Girl’s little hand on the edge of the sink and went over, thinking it was a doll got left behind, I was busy planning Cleveland’s funeral if ever a trace of him turned up. Then there could be an end to it. Mary would stop her wandering, and we could head for Chicago. In my mind I was hearing everybody singing “Deep River.” I was seeing the flag on the coffin, then a triangle in my lap, then tucked away in the bottom drawer of my dresser for Cleve when he got to be a man.

  IT WAS LIKE coming out of a dream. There was a commotion and I looked up, across the long cold room of cribs and tables with stacks of diapers and towels, through the open doorway to the kitchen. When I saw the sink and the little hand, something caught in my throat like a grain of pepper.

  Somebody pulled Baby Girl out, water pouring off her. She was shiny and limp on the kitchen counter. Her little head flopped over to the side. I began to run.

  We turned her on her stomach. The water came out of the tunnel in her face. It poured out. We hung her head over the edge and pushed on her back. More water poured out but she still didn’t stir. I turned her on her back and put my mouth over the bottom part of her face and blew the way we’d been taught, her teeth cutting my lip. I was careful, I had read a piece in a magazine about not blowing too much air into babies, you don’t want to explode their little lungs. The white girls turned their heads away like I was doing something shameful.

  When the ambulance men came in, they took one step back when they saw the lip. Then the Creole man gathered himself and clamped his lips on the hole in her face and worked on her some more.

  But she was gone, her eyes closed, no longer watchful and wanting, her mouth the dynamited tunnel. The other ambulance man stepped forward and rolled her up in the towel I’d left on the counter. He carried her out, not the way you’d carry a baby, but upside down under his arm like this was a fish shop and she was a big old snapper he was taking home for his wife to stew.

  After they drove away with her, the nurse came in huffing and puffing. She turned to us all and asked what you’d expect her to ask. And the white girls, each and every one, pointed at me.

  Pure and simple. It was me what forgot Baby Girl.

  They called the police and the police took me in. I told them I had two little children at home, no family to take care of them. They said they’d call welfare and I begged them to let me put them with a friend, not even knowing then who that might be. When they took me by home, I snatched up my Cleve and Mary and took them over to Billie Jones next door, who was the first person I could think of, the only person in the neighborhood whose full name I knew. I begged her pardon and asked her to watch over them for me until I could straighten things out. She put her arm around me and said she would, we couldn’t let them go into the system. She promised me. Then she asked Mary if she liked to color pictures and Mary said yes she did, and then Billie Jones took her by the hand and led her back to the kitchen without even a goodbye for her mother. Cleve hugged me around the waist so hard it took my breath away. I told him I’d be back. I told him not to worry, to be brave and mind Billie Jones.

  IT’S BEEN SIX years nine months since Baby Girl died. One day, one minute, one mistake, and your whole measly, precious life is dust and ashes.

  I was thinking Billie Jones would be a temporary thing, but a week after I was arrested, Mother and Daddy’s apartment up in Chicago went up in smoke and them with it. At the jail, they gave me one phone call and I called Billie. “Honey,” she said, “I’ll keep these babies for you till doomsday if you need me to. They’re good children. Just send me some money so I can keep them in clothes and feed them.”

  “Much obliged,” I said, trying to keep from blubbering all over the phone. I barely knew this woman except that she worked at the Tabasco factory down at the river and always smelled like pepper, plus she kept a pot of begonias on her side of our front porch. But anything was better than the system. “I’ll send you my army check every month,” I said.

  “Course you will, baby,” she said. “These are your precious children. Don’t you worry none. I’ll keep them safe as long as you need me to.”

  Six years nine months is a long time, especially if you spend them in the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. Outside things, they change. Today a man landed on the moon. We watched it on TV. Some of the girls clapped when he planted his stiff little flag in that desert of a place, but I didn’t clap. A starched handkerchief of a flag up against all that cold emp
tiness. And for what?

  Billie Jones says Cleve is smart in school like I used to be, he’s got a scholarship to Xavier next year. Mary isn’t the student he is. She’s still a pistol, it’s all Billie can do to keep that girl out of trouble, away from the boys. For a while, after I got put away, Mary kept up her roaming and started looking for me along with her missing daddy. Then one day she just stopped, Billie wrote, and everybody was grateful those little beady eyes of hers weren’t peeking through the slants in their blinds anymore. I expect she finally got it figured out. It’s four hours up and back on the bus to St. Gabriel, but Billie brings them to visit every now and then. Then Mary presses up against Billie’s side and eyes me like I’m a wreck on the side of the road.

  THE WHITE MEN on that jury didn’t look at me. I felt like Baby Girl, dirtied in a sin that made the eye skitter and pitch.

  I go up for parole in seventeen more years. By then, folks’ll probably be living on another planet altogether. Maybe Mary will go looking for her daddy on the moon.

  As to Baby Girl, there’s not a night I don’t get down on my knees and ask her to forgive me for forgetting her.

  14

  Fred the Ambulance Driver

  MY SIDEKICK JOEY CARRIED THE DROWNED BABY GIRL out. He opened the back of the ambulance. I stopped him. “Put her up front,” I told him. “Don’t seem right, putting her back there all by herself. You go ahead and take the streetcar so you can take off early to eat. I’ll drive her over to the morgue. No point in both of us having to give up our break, especially when the world’s about to get blown to hell in a handbasket down in Cuba.”

  Joey gave me the stink eye. “Dead’s dead,” he said.

  “Christ sakes, Joey, it’s a baby,” I said.

  It had started as just another day, my Earlie still in bed, smelling to high heaven of sour milk, her face turned to the wall. When I got ready to go to work, I’d leaned over and pulled on her shoulder a little, trying to turn her over to kiss her goodbye, but she didn’t budge.