Stephanie Dickinson

†

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken this baby. Mister God you tell me. Because I already explained to you that nobody wanted her. Thrown out like fish guts. That’s right. 

 I took something that no one wanted, something left to die, a baby girl. But now that I had the baby the world might want her back. That’s how the world worked.

           The convenience store cashier applied a smear of blush to each cheek, checking her face in the silver of the Slurpie machine. Her boyfriend was hanging out by the coffee island, pots burning down to tar, juggling the hazelnut creamers. I was pretty sure they were looking at baby and me out of their side eyes.  A cashier job meant you were one step from being a bottom feeder like a goobie or brittlestar.

            Mister God they shouldn’t be turning their noses up at me.  That’s right, only here for Pampers, the baby and me had interrupted them. They were in the middle of licking each other, like their mouths were slashes dribbling ice cream. I carried the baby in a sling like a papoose. I liked her against me: the fat of her little feet, her talcum smell, the strawberry curls that tickled my nose. The cashier scowled, watching us decide which size. There were premmies and diapers in increments of three months. I kissed the baby’s soft spot, letting the fine hairs tickle my breath. Then I chose the six to nine month and set the Pampers on the counter. 

†

           I’m not stupid, Mister God. I had high school.  I figured this whole thing out.

These two bozos had no idea the baby and I were on a mission, that stowed away in the glove compartment of the Mercury was the Louisiana Office of Vital Statistics Request for Copy of Birth Certificate. You could mail it in with your notarized signature. I needed a name, date, place of birth and mother’s maiden name.

           “That all?” the girl asked, squinting at the baby, but not doing what everyone else did, breaking into a smile, cooing. Her bow-shaped mouth puckered and I could smell her strawberry lip gloss and mistrust. She wanted baby and me out of here; we were fish guts, the tiny blue lung sacs that kept trying to breathe even cut open.  Then her forehead creased. Was there something about the baby?  “Lady, I said is that all?” Like wiping your fish knife off on your pant leg.

           “Yes, that’s it,” I answered in a perky voice.  

           Then she gave me a direct stare eyes into eyes. What did that cashier mean to find out? She should see a baby with blue eyes, deep blue like they’d already seen things. And the baby’s mother, Memory Hebert, a girl not much older than the cashier. Nineteen, twenty at most with big brown peepers. Right now they were probably a skittish brown like the dark in the bayou water between trees. Where you can drop a line in the water and come up with sunfish. The one color they never turned was blue green. My recently shorn hair was starting to grow in, but the car ride had blown it in every direction like feathers. I could feel my bangs standing straight up. I’d pulled on my boyfriend Bluejay’s wife beater just to cover myself, and now the baby's spit up and handprints decorated the ribbed undershirt. My nipples topping breasts like milk trucks and there for all to see.  In jean cutoffs and undershirt, did I look enough like the baby to be its mother?

           The cashier rolled her eyes. Hit sale total and waited. “Five dollars.”

           While I dug in my back pocket the baby fussed, “Ra…ra…ra,” a rubber duckie sticky with spit clutched in her fist. “Ra...ra...ra,” in a higher pitch. I hushed her.   Four ones and now I started to really root around in my side pocket until I found two quarters and four dimes. Shit.

†

Mister God I’m trying to be better than I am.  Trying my best to take after you. I’m a rescuer.  Could you just help me out here.

She took the money and said, “That’s good enough.”

           Then we turned to go and I saw the posters plastered to the door and window glass. The word MISSING. Like X-rays where you could see the blue bones sticking through the meat of the hand. I hugged baby to me. We had to go through the posters to get out. The Mercury’s chrome gave off the glitter of forks and knives. It floated like a cloud in a faraway part of the sky.

           “Hey, lady” she snickered, “you forgot your Pampers.” That voice she probably used to tell her guy friends their zippers were down in.

           “Ra…ra,” the baby gurgled, reaching for my chin.

           There were green spots in the cashier’s blue bow that hovered like a dragonfly, its wingspan the width of her head. I took the sack, said nothing. No worries, nothing to hide. Just a young mother.

           We walked toward the posters. Like paper airplanes. Spit balls. I stopped, glanced at the same baby repeated over and over. I made myself reach out to one of the scrawny papers and the photo blurred into it, a dark Xerox. It wasn’t my baby, was it?  A snapshot held underwater. With my free hand I peeled the poster from the glass and stuffed it into my pocket.

                The air smelled hot and green. It was free, mine to drink, what they took away from girls in prison was the freedom to breathe. I opened the back door of the Mercury. “Into the car seat, baby. Mommy knows you don’t like the car seat.”  What she had been strapped into when they abandoned her. She shrieked, her face flushing, she kicked, her foot knocking my shoulder. Then I heard the suck of the convenience store door. The cashier in her orange and white checked shirt came out, lit a cigarette, a green flame shooting from a pink lighter. Her boyfriend behind her, one of the empty creamer cups stuck to the end of his nose.  They were looking at baby and me in that way I don’t care for.   

           What were they gawking at? The license tags?  Something about the baby gave us away. Her skin hadn’t totally healed from the fever blisters she’d been covered in. Her scalp was still scabbed with bites and scratches like everything and anything has been dropped on her. NEGLECT written in huge letters all over her body. And the head lice, three hours combing the baby hair free of nits. They had already set this child aside before they abandoned her like trash folks in New Orleans do dogs, leaving their poodles on dirt roads and tearing off.

†

Mister God, you’ve been taking care of me. When my own people didn’t you did.  I had a mother and then she went on and took off and dumped me on Lolie.  

I belted myself into the Mercury, inhaled the leather interior that smelled of my boyfriend and safety, shifted into reverse and backed out of the lot. Memory Hebert and this baby who had no name, who I’d found in a tent on Chef Menteur Pass. In a fishing tent that wind had dragged, one of its upright poles pulled from the ground and a side of the canvas sagging. A guy line gusted, jingling its pin and ring. There was crying coming from inside it, like a puppy whimpering. Maybe it was a cocker spaniel. Inside a baby burning with fever, her nose crusted with snot and sand. One pierced ear with a scab on the lobe. Like someone did one and then lost her train of thought. The dirtiest baby I’d ever seen, hundreds of ant bites on her little body. The bottoms of her feet black. A baby left to die, because there wasn’t a milk bottle anywhere. 

†

Mister God would you have done any different?  And didn’t I go looking?  Hello hello!  And the baby so hurt and so soft.  

I knuckled the wheel, raising my eyes into the rearview to glance at my baby. Her strawberry blond hair had sprouted from her head, tufts of it soft and ticklish as pinfeathers. “I thought Bluejay would be your daddy my love. That he’d wrap his strong arms around us both. We don’t need him. We’ve got each other.”  Last night I’d told him I loved him. He called me his mourning dove. He promised he’d be with me and midget dove all the way. But then we’d fought hard and he turned the TV on up high so he couldn’t hear me crying.

                Airline Highway was giving way to Jefferson Parish and soon we’d be heading for the bayou country cemeteries. I lifted a bottle of spring water and took a long swallow. This wasn’t what Bluejay and I had been raised on in New Orleans—we’d guzzled cancer alley stuff. Water in the Big Easy was like drinking murder. Dreamy and diseased like everything in that Mardi Gras town where the high curbs reeked of vomit and hot dogs, and away from The Quarter you ran into the overgrown okra and magnolia and hangovers. Last night I’d told Bluejay about my plan. “I read about how a spy who needed a new identity visited a cemetery and took a dead man’s name. Maybe it was Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I don’t remember. We’ll find a name on a tombstone of a baby. We’ll send in for a birth certificate.”  I stared into his face. “Mourning dove,” Bluejay said, “that’s ghoulish. You don’t want to be a grave robber.” Then in the morning I got up and he was gone. Not all of him.

 †

He’d left a note.

                For fucks sake u can’t keep this baby. They’ll track us and stick u & me

                in jail for 90 yrs. Bluejay Guy’s not going to Angola.

                Take the Merc. u know where to find me if u lose the kid. 

 “Midget dove,” I said, reaching out to the baby with my voice, “we’re in this together. All the way.”  We were in the open. Moses Baptist Church. Families close to the poverty line lived and worshiped on the numbered streets between here and the river. In the middle of the block was another bus stop. The shelter was plastered with yellow posters.  Color of missing children flyers. Then past the storefront of the True Love Full Gospel Ministries. The showground of the Super Dome rose up, the sunken cemetery with its bones. Behind us a police siren came out of nowhere, spilling a red sound like fire from a skillet. I watched the patrol car gain on us, the cherry top revolving. My heart beat in my temples and wrists, a hundred places. But the police siren went bleeding past. They didn’t want us.

We took Red Ball Road that was part dust and the other part mud. Thirty minutes later we had arrived. I rolled the window down and let the dust and heat of the Marthasville Cemetery seep in. “Your Grandma Lolie is buried here. I want you to meet her.”  And I knew to find the graves of the babies you looked for marble lambs, those resting in the grass or on the headstones with their hooves tucked under.

 †

 Mister God you wouldn’t have let me take her if it wasn’t right.  You would have tripped me.  Thrown me down in the sand, wrapped that tie line around my neck and squeezed.  Then it’s right if there’s any right.

I got baby out of the car seat, and her blue eyes locked onto mine. Like they were older and knew everything. Like they knew I was her momma. Then I fed her a bottle in the grass, and she sucked until she was milk-drunk and when the sun flitted over her body, her hands reached up like she not only wanted to touch the light but smear it over her face. “Ra..ra…ra,” she babbled, hurling her sponge ducky into the grass. Everything was becoming reachable, every red berry, feather and pine needle. “Eeeh eeech.” The sun grabbed back, wanting to steal her hair. A strawberry red. She kept making that “Eeech eeech.”  Like the milk hadn’t filled her up. I studied her.  My eyes felt like they were eating warm bread. Just so much sweetness in seeing. My little fish with a soft baby face, her guppy mouth, with red lips breathing and guppying, drinking and burping.  Silvery bells of burps.   I think I had a little guppy mouth like that when I was a baby. I loved insects. I still love their buzz and hum and remember when they were my best pals. When Lolie took me crabbing she would tie me to a tree so I wouldn’t run off into the water and drown. That was so much fun watching the shrimp grass for mosquitoes and dragonflies.  The grass flies, Lolie, I’d say later.  Sometimes Mawmaw Versie, Lolie’s sister, would come crabbing with us.  Then Lolie didn’t tie me to the tree.

                I let the baby play in the grass while I made my fingers unfold the Missing Poster. My mind swallowed the word first. Dowsha. A girl named Dowsha was missing, a child not an infant, three feet and one inch in height. Her brown eyes were shining like listening to a mockingbird. Age three. I let out a long breath. Not mine. No one was looking for mine.

                I picked her up, and then we waded deeper into the grass and from trees the crows watched us with their yellow eyes. They cawed in the heat that felt different here because you couldn’t sunbathe in a cemetery, the sun felt cold no matter how it burned.

                “Your mama is a Hebert. That’s an old French surname pronounced ‘a bear.’  Hebert’s are as common as flies in Louisiana,” I said, my spit tasting oily. Black flies buzzed in her face and she laughed. “Your grandma is buried here. Lolie raised your momma all by herself.”

                The grass shone, too green, almost black. And the sun coming down through the pines left an oily sheen on my skin. These trees had seen everything, and now protected the fresh graves decorated with pinwheels. “These are your people,” I said, stopping in front of a granite headstone with HEBERT blocked on it. Lolie Boniface Hebert. Lolie, who weighted ninety pounds, whose brown hair never went white. She could be mean but mostly she wasn’t.  She smelled of grass, wet grass, not what had been sat on. I threw dry weeds over Festus Hebert, Lolie’s husband. I covered his name with my foot.

                “Grandma Lolie, it’s Memory.” I could see the red lip of the earth still showing on her grave, the grass had not yet sewed itself shut.

                “Memory Hebert,” I heard a cackle.

                I whirled around. Grandma Lolie’s sister Mawmaw Versie was hurrying toward us lugging a lawn chair. I stood frozen watching. Her hair rose high on the top and on the sides the buttermilk-colored stuff hung in ringlets like a moss tree. It had to be a wig. On her bottom half, a pair of cut offs showed off her once pretty legs, now streaked orange with bottle tanner.  A spot of rouge on each cheek.

                “Memory Hebert,” she called out again.

                I wanted to run. How would I explain the baby? Mawmaw saw me and Bluejay a month ago.

I let the grass flick between my toes as light broke from the trees. I wanted to take my child and vanish.   

†

Mister God I’m not the girl people go out of their way for.  They’d just as soon throw me on the grill to blacken. And leave the marks on me like whip lashes.  Go out of your way for me.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’m not that old, beb,” she cackled. “I thought I’d be the one who got walked on not Lolie. She was my pischouette. I come out here to visit with my sis.” Then she opened her lawn chair and set it on Lolie’s grave. But she didn’t sit down. “You, Memory, said you’d come visit me and Big Aimee and I don’t see you yet.”

                Mawmaw was spoiling everything by being here, I thought. Why doesn’t she go away, with her orange skin and yellow hair?

                Mawmaw Versie had the Boniface brown eyes like deer had been trapped inside them. “Who is this child? Why she’s just adorable,” she squinted, making sure the deer couldn’t escape.

                “This is Bluejay’s baby.”

                “What?”

                “He had another girlfriend while I was in detention.”

She gave a hoarse laugh, “You can count on the mens to have their fun. Now you’re doing the babysitting. You’re a good girl.”

“We’re going to raise her. The birth mother doesn’t want her.”

Mawmaw Versie took another look.

“Baby this is your great-great aunt Mawmaw Versie,” I said.

Her eyes widened taking the entire baby inside, eyes that could weigh measure.

“She’s just about as cute as Big Aimee was as a baby. Never was a prettier baby. Red hair. My my she doesn’t take after Bluejay, does she?”

“I think she does look like Bluejay.”

Mawmaw Versie leaned over screwing up her rouged nose. “That’s not Bluejay’s big forehead. Why he’s all forehead. This is a nice size.” 

Baby reached for Mawmaw Versie’s hair, grabbing a varnished curl. I tried to open her fist, but she held on and the Tower of Pisa started to tilt. “No, baby, leave Mawmaw’s hair alone.” A smile widened Mawmaw’s narrow face. At one time she had dated Moon Landrie, the former mayor of New Orleans. There were rumors of her sleeping with high roller Maf guys.

“Let go, baby.”

“Who did you say the momma was, beb?” A big smile crossed Mawmaw Versie’s lower face. “She can pull those fake weeds. Nothing hurts Mawmaw Versie. They had to set an iron cross on that grave over there, to keep one of those women from walking the night of the living dead,” she said, reaching up. “Let me hold her. How old is she?”

†

Mister God do I know? 

“She’s almost six months?”

“Six months,” she said, wiping something from the corner of her mouth with her red painted nails. “She’s a little big for six months. I’d say eight or nine months. Come on, come to Mawmaw Versie.”  She held out her arms and baby smiled when I passed her over. I worried that her chicken bone arms might not be able to hold her. “Beb, these are all the ladies your Lolie cooked for as a girl. She went into their kitchens and stood over their stoves,” Mawmaw said, rocking baby and walking. “Mrs. Lucy is right behind you. Her husband’s not there because he married a petite graham cracker of a gal after Mrs. Lucy passed. My sister cut plenty of stale bread and crawfish fat for that one.”

           Mawmaw and all that talk makes my eyes cross.  Where was she when anyone needed her? Now she’s everywhere I take a step.

†

Remember Mister God that time Lolie took me fishing and Festus who’d been drinking was along sleeping in the back seat. He didn’t want me in the car. He said my hair smelled, made him sick to his stomach. I started crying and my crying made him sick up on himself.

She’s still blabbing, “Mrs. Elexa Eugenie, wife of Hawk. It was bisque heads for her. Down there in that dirt is my sis’s crawfish tails cut in tiny pieces. They used to call her Girl. Like her name wasn’t Lolie. I like to come here and spit right on top of their old asses.” Mawmaw grinned down at the baby like she was a hockshop diamond. “She sure is fair skinned to be one of Bluejay’s spawn. For goodness sakes, she doesn’t cry. And look at those eyes. She’s going to be quite a pistol. Why she’s cute as a hardboiled egg.  What’s this little mouche a mielle’s name?”

“Midget dove,” I said.

“What? That’s common. You could do better.”  Drool leaked from baby’s mouth who seemed dazzled by the cherry blossom rouge spot on each of Mawmaw Versie’s cheeks. Mawmaw began to sing in a silly vibrato. “Meenoo, Meenoo. Here kitty, here kitty. I don’t know if she even takes after Bluejay. Just who is her mother?”

She wouldn’t just shut up, wouldn’t shut that mouth of hers. Some women can’t stop talking or they will disappear, but the more they talk the more you disappear. The trees moved closer, all the hot green trees filled with black flies. Then a brown Hornet that I’d been watching churn up the road pulled off into the cemetery grass and stopped.

“That will be my honeychile,” Mawmaw Versie said, not looking up. “What’s Big Aimee doing here already?  Fat as she is let’s see if she can move me before I’m ready.”

Baby and I had to get away before Mawmaw’s daughter Big Aimee arrived. Big fat nosy bossy Big Aimee. “Let me have her, Mawmaw.”

“Meenoo, let me show you those graves had to be dug on the hillside so rising water couldn’t float the bodies away. Turtle soup is what Mrs. Lorena LaBorde loved.”

                Baby laughed.  I tried to take my child from Mawmaw Versie, but baby held onto the old woman’s neck and hair. The pungency of Vicks Vapor Rub, menthol cigarettes and turtle meat wafted from her. Rickety people didn’t frighten my child. Neither did their odors.  Mister God I don’t want to tear this child apart like Solomon’s women.  

The door of the Hornet slammed and Big Aimee got out marching like even the grass she stood on had angered her. She hiked up her blue terrycloth shift that could have been sewed from beach towels to cover her girth. Little balls dangled from the hem like those from a mariachi musician’s hat. She didn’t need a Mister God. Never had.

“Mawmaw!” the enormous woman barked causing the little balls to jiggle from her hem. ”Let’s go.”

“We have to go too, Mawmaw,” I said.

“She’s adorable. Why she wants to go home with me. I’ve got a big house. I think I’m just going to steal her from you.”  Then the baby grunted and her cheeks turned red, a look of concentration flushed her face. “She had poppy. Yeh, she did. You better change her before she gets stinko. When I had Big Aimee we didn’t have them nice napkins with the stickums.” Mawmaw Versie couldn’t stop talking. “Turtle soup. They all loved it. Had to get the roux the color of a penny. Mrs. Lorena the worst of the stuck ups floated right out of her grave. Her family’s over there. Two daughters she had. Antoinette, Suzette buried half sitting like they’re in the dentist’s chair. Like the old times in New Orleans when the malaria corpses would wash out of St. Louis Cemetery and end up on Royal Street.”

She’ll be talking when the undertaker does her face.

I held out my hands and this time the baby wanted me. Her eyes lit up and her arms went around my neck and she hung on. I gave Mawmaw Versie’s orange cheek a kiss and waved at Big Aimee. I thought of Big Giant, how baby and I’d stopped earlier to buy the car seat. I worried that cameras followed me through the store, that they were everywhere. My cheeks burned as I veered through the aisles, mirrors glinting. I felt Big Aimee and Mawmaw watching me like that. I threw my shoulders back. They were watching me the momma who looked lost, the momma who examined the tags too long like she didn’t know how old her baby was. A red “A” glowing on her chest like Hestor in The Scarlet Letter. The book I read over and over in detention. Only the “A” stood for abduction rather than adultery.

Scrub pines surrounded Blue Bayou Cemetery. Pain here was still raw not like the pioneer cemeteries where even the mourners left behind had long died. I laid her on the grass, and pulled the Velcro tabs of the Pamper. “Oh baby, stinko is right.” I held her feet and tugged the shitty one out from under her. On her little butt was where you could still see what was left of the rash, a sunburst around her anus of purplish red where she had been left in her excrement. I changed her Pamper and wrapped the dirty one in a newspaper. Afterwards I rolled onto my stomach and looked at her trying to crawl. She was moving slowly forwards. I tickled her and she giggled, and then she moved her right knee forward and then her left. All the trees around us reminded me of the bayou church where Lolie married that old pill Festus because she felt sorry for him. I was real little. Then came that fishing trip when he took up the whole back seat in Lolie’s car. I still couldn’t forget his whiskey voice booming, “Stop, here. Get her out of this car. She smells.”  And I was shivering. “Promise I’ll be quiet. Lolie. I promise I won’t smell.” But Lolie went on and stopped out there in the dark. And that was where Mister God found me. I thought of the posters of Missing Children I’d seen most of my life, staring out from mailboxes and dryers in Laundromats. How their faces always followed mine, chastising me for leaving them stuck to the Plexiglas. The old flyers yellowed like a blizzard of dandelions. Missing kids.  Everything about them scared me. Their weights, the pitiful thirty and sixty pounds, their heights, two feet and four. I always thought I might be one of them. Lolie always said my momma just up and left on me. I didn’t know because I never felt at home.

The more I looked into the baby’s face, the more it resembled my own. I lifted her sweetness back into the sling and this time she didn’t object, and so drowsy she fell asleep.

 †

Mister God there it was the day about a month ago.  I had the baby in my arms and walked from that tent and down the beach. I was calling out, “Hello. Hello.”  I saw a fire and guys and chickies playing around. And a blond girl wearing almost nothing but whatever she wore was red. “What’s wrong with you?  Can’t you see I’m beautiful?” a girl shouted.  She was running after a guy in waders with a fishing pole.  “Mister Fucking Fisherman, don’t you fucking walk away.”

The wind was up and so her voice got caught and tossed back in her face and that made her mad.

“Go see to your baby, okay. I’m going fishing,” he said.

“I don’t care about that fucking baby.  I only care about fucking you,” she screamed.

“I’d rather go fishing,” he yelled, wading straight out in the water.

And she tried to get as many of the f-words into her sentences as she could and then the f-word was the only sentence she could make, piling one on top the other.

And then she just stood there screaming.  Her slip-dress was smeared to her like the blood of a white trout. She whirled around and around the bonfire, her arms in the air. Fire seemed to pass through her into the sand. I came closer, staring, holding the baby. Her bones poked through her skin, and the only fat on her body--her lips, pillows greasy with wine.

Mister God I knew that she was this baby’s mother and that if I gave the child back to her it would be the same as throwing her on the fire.

There they were, the stone lambs in the grass. I began to search. I was the spy coming in from the cold. A row of Hebert’s; the youngest Melissa Ann Inez Hebert born in 1967. See that, Hebert’s were common as flies. Two rows of them. Tiny praying hands, mica bits glinting from the marble. The sun shone green on Alma Nephi Clark, born in the spring of 1983 and died in the heat of August, greener on Baby Deville Cloud, a January baby, spent the almost month of its life inside that month. Some wild gene must run in the Cloud and Clark families that hexed their offspring. Infant Cornett Clark had the year 1989 to suckle. Sherel Lee Cloud reached her fifth birthday, the oldest of the very young. These babes must have whimpered, cried out like shivers of a quail, poor bob whoit, trying to hold onto life, most of these hadn’t survived the trip. Baby hiccupped. Before us two rows, two aisles of infants, bones on satin, skin-sweated gardenias. My eyes sank into the names and dates. Asalean Cloud died at age three in 1992. Too still. Not a fly disturbed the quiet. We had reached more stones. Pleasant Edward Clark and Nancy Kim Fontenot Cloud, “Little Nan.”  Both infants of the late eighties. A few feet away three pinwheels whirred in the breeze. I walked over to the grave at the end of the row. Another aisle of sadness lay before us. Unity Hebert. b. 6 April 1995 – d. 2 October 1995, Infant daughter of Neveda Cloud and Larry Wayne Hebert.  A calm filled me. It felt almost religious. Mister God I know you brought me.  There she was.

†

Mister God this is baby my baby, my Unity Cloud.

Then her little hand reached out and tightened around my index finger.

Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Texas, Iowa, Louisiana, and now New York. Her work appears in Cream City Review, Mudfish, Green Mountains Review, Chelsea, Nimrod, PMS, Storyquarterly, Feminist Studies,  Inkwell, Ontario Review, Water Stone, Columbia Journal, and the McGuffin, among others  Along with Rob Cook, she publishes and edits the literary journal Skidrow Penthouse. Her Half Girl won the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) for best unpublished novel of 2002.  It will be published this year by Spuyten Duyvil. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” appears in BEST AMERICAN 2005 NONREQUIRED READING edited by Dave Eggers.  She is a 2006 fellow in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.