Читать книгу Mulberry - Paulette Boudreaux - Страница 8

MY BABY SISTER WAS to be called Ida Bea, after my daddy’s older sister who died before I was born. “Y’all Aunt Ida Bea was special to y’all’s daddy when he was a little boy,” Momma said. “She helped his mama take care of him.”

Momma sat on the edge of the bed holding ten-day-old Baby Ida Bea so my brothers and I could get our first good look at her. Her tiny face was a smoothly swollen dark moon framed in the billowy whiteness of a baby blanket.

My imagination preened and stretched itself into the future where my baby sister would be big enough to play and be my ally in a household where I was outnumbered by three brothers. She would be the only one I would let climb my mulberry tree.

“Was I ever a baby like that?” Earl asked, staring, incredulous, at the white bundle in Momma’s arms.

“You sure were,” Momma answered.

“I mean little bitty like that,” Earl said, leaning in to point at the baby’s face.

Momma smiled and nodded.

“I never was,” Roy Anthony boasted, puffing out his narrow chest and bouncing up onto his tiptoes in front of Momma.

“Every one of y’all was,” Momma said and laughed. “Even I was once,” she added, grinning at Roy Anthony as he shook his head and rolled his eyes in disbelief. “We all start out babies. Then somebody got to love us and feed us and take care of us till we get big enough to take care of ourselves.”

Momma’s smile flattened and she dropped her gaze to the floor.

Baby Ida Bea yawned at us without opening her eyes and began to squirm in Momma’s arms.

“Now, now,” Momma said, pulling her attention back from wherever it had wandered off to. She rocked slowly from side to side, caressing the tiny cheek. Ida Bea opened her mouth and turned her head toward Momma’s hand. “I think, baby sister needs to eat,” Momma said.

“What you gonna feed her?” Earl wanted to know.

“What a dumb question,” Roy Anthony sang, putting the palm of his hand against his forehead and shaking his head. “Boy oh boy. Baby milk. Momma gonna give her baby milk right out from her body. You so dumb—”

“Roy,” Momma said. The warning in her voice made Roy Anthony rock back on his heels and look down at the floor. “Don’t call your brother names,” she continued. “He younger than you.”

“You ain’t dumb,” Momma said to Earl whose eyes were already glistening with tears. “You seven years old, too young to remember all that. Now y’all go on somewhere and play,” she said, waving us all away.

June Bug pushed himself up from where he had been lying on the bed behind Momma. “Want see,” he said, crawling forward to peer around Momma’s shoulder.

“You can stay,” she said, pulling him around so he leaned against her side as she unbuttoned her blouse to nurse Ida Bea.

Roy Anthony and Earl and I headed outside. I played with abandon, dashing about in the cool, sweet air, playing running games to keep warm. I was glad to be freed from the responsibility to make supper or corral the boys to do homework or get ready for bed.

On her fourteenth day at home, Baby Ida Bea wailed her way through the night. I fell in and out of sleep to the noise of her cries, Daddy’s complaints, and Momma’s futile efforts to quiet her and comfort Daddy. At daybreak, Daddy stomped off to work. Momma’s heavy sighs after he left made it clear that he and Ida Bea had drained a lot out of her in the night.

I got out of bed and dressed for school, thinking Momma would be pleased when she came in at the usual time to wake me and Roy Anthony and Earl for school. I tiptoed into the kitchen and set out the bowls and spoons for our cornflakes. Then I mixed the powdered milk and water in the glass pitcher Momma always used.

“Maddy.”

I went into her room and found her sitting in the big stuffed chair where Daddy always sat. She was breast-feeding Ida Bea.

“Go get Mother Parker,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Tell her to come directly.”

When I ran onto Ma Parker’s porch in the dim morning light, she was standing in the doorway, invisible behind the rusted screen door. “What is it girl?” She sounded angry and impatient.

“Momma wants you. I think it’s to do with the baby.” I said, feeling grown-ups’ emotions like jagged splotches of color in the air around me.

“Come see something,” Momma demanded, as soon as Ma Parker opened the door to our house. I slipped into the room behind her as she went to stand with Momma beside the bed. “What do I do for it?” Momma asked.

I crept forward to peer around the protective wall of their bodies. Ida Bea lay on her back on my parents’ bed, her tiny legs and arms agitating stiffly in the air. She wasn’t wearing a diaper, or the bandage that usually covered the blackening piece of umbilical cord still attached to her belly. Her cotton undershirt was flopped open exposing her tiny torso. A thin line of blood, crimson and moist, ran around the base of her cord, startlingly bright and unnatural against her dark, vulnerable skin.

“Well now.” Ma Parker leaned forward and extended her hand toward Ida Bea. “Well now,” she repeated, her hand still in the air above my sister. “How long has it been doing that?”

“Since last night.”

Momma’s mouth was drawn tight.

“In all my years of delivering I don’t think I ever seen this particular ailment in a baby,” Ma Parker answered.

She was the local midwife and root doctor. She spent a good deal of time handing out herbal and root cures to a loyal clientele. And even though the law said she wasn’t supposed to, she still delivered babies when a black woman in the Quarters or anywhere in the nearby rural areas asked her to.

Ma Parker put her hand to her mouth. Her silence seemed false, like there was more she could have said. She had a wild, witchy look about her—her long dark dress nearly dragging the ground, a white apron with bulging pockets tied tight around her thin waist, her silvery gray hair hanging to her shoulders in stiff strands like she had just pulled a big tooth comb through it. She bent over Ida Bea and placed her palm on the upper part of Ida Bea’s tiny chest. The baby’s legs and arms stopped agitating. Ma Parker turned her head as if listening to something. The furrows on her forehead and around the sides of her mouth deepened.

“I don’t want to lose an—”

“Dorothy, I think you ought to wrap her up and take her on back up to that hospital and let the doctors up there tell you what to do,” Ma Parker said, cutting into Momma’s words. “You go on get her ready. I’ll go call you a taxicab,” she added, backing toward the door.

While Ma Parker walked to Watkins’ Store, I hung around my mother and my sister, taking stock of the sadness and resignation that crackled in the air around Momma. She wiped the blood from my sister’s stomach with a damp washrag, then dressed her, swaddling her in layers that made her look normal.

“Sit down over yonder,” Momma said, indicating Daddy’s chair. She placed Ida Bea on my lap and positioned my arms to support her small head in the bend of my elbow. “Hold her like that so she won’t fuss,” she ordered, and backed away to get on with the packing. Her hands trembled as she folded pristine cotton diapers and tiny undershirts and placed them in the ragged little suitcase.

I looked at my sister. She yawned in a meaningless way as I peered into her face. Her eyes were navy blue where they should have been black, and pale blue where they should have been white. Beyond that I could see nothing unusual, nothing that betrayed or explained why her most important commodity was oozing out of her belly.

Finally. I have a baby sister, I thought. When she gets bigger she will wear my cast-off clothes without complaining the way Roy Anthony does when Momma makes him wear pants that she originally made for me. Ida Bea will not mind wearing her big sister’s clothes.

“I got to leave you in charge of the boys again,” Momma said, sitting on the edge of the bed when she had finished packing. “Remember your promise. You gone take care of the boys till I get back?”

“Yes ma’am,” I nodded, though I didn’t want the job. It had taken a lot to keep order in the house when Momma was at the hospital delivering Ida Bea. Even with Daddy’s best efforts, our daily lives went to pieces in small ways—shoes went missing just before we were to leave for school; June Bug cried and fought with me when I tried to dress him in the mornings; Roy Anthony picked on Earl and they got into fights; I forgot to do my homework and got into trouble with my teacher; Roy Anthony went to bed hungry a couple of times because he wouldn’t hide the fact that he didn’t like what Daddy cooked. Daddy simply ordered him away from the table the first time he complained. The second time Daddy smacked him across the face when he didn’t move fast enough. This was a side of Daddy I hadn’t seen before. It seemed that Momma’s absence could bring out the worst in all of us.

“Poor baby sister,” Momma said, looking at Ida Bea in my arms with an expression that made the air in the room shiver.

My brothers huddled around me on the front porch waving good-bye to Momma and Ida Bea as their taxicab disappeared out of the Quarters. As soon as the car was out of sight, Roy Anthony and Earl began flinging questions at me. “Where’s Momma going? Will she be back by supper? Something wrong with the baby? When’s Daddy get home? How come Momma looked like she’s about to cry? What’s the matter with you? How come you look mad?”

Their questions, tainted with curiosity and fear, swarmed around my head like gnats.

“Shut up. It ain’t none of y’all’s business,” I snapped.

“I’m going to tell Momma on you,” said Roy Anthony. “You ain’t got no business to tell us to shut up,” he thrust his chin upward and shook his head. “It ain’t nice. Momma done told you so.”

“Come here and I’ll show you what ain’t nice,” I said, balling up my fist and moving toward him. He and Earl separated, leaping off the porch, one after the other, landing in the dusty yard. Roy Anthony turned and stuck his tongue out at me. Earl laughed and they disappeared around the side of the house. I hated that Momma had asked me to take care of them.

June Bug stood near the edge of the porch, crying and wringing his small hands like an old man. He stared down the road where Momma had gone. He seemed more vulnerable than the rest of us—his tiny bald head, his thin back. But his gaze was on the thing that mattered—our mother who had just vanished.

I went forward and picked him up. He wrapped his arms and legs around me like kudzu and buried his slimy face against my neck. I let the rhythm of my breath match the irregular heaving of his chest. I found small comfort in this embrace as I tried to exhale the fear that had settled in my gut.