Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux
to his knees in front of her.
“Ida Bea needs me.”
“Can’t you bring her home and keep her here? You brought June Bug home. He was a little baby one time.” Earl leaned forward.
“Ida Bea’s got to stay where the doctors can see her. She needs the doctors.”
Roy Anthony moved around the room touching things—Momma’s little round alarm clock, the smooth plastic handles on the chest of drawers, the cold rounded metal of the bed frame, the smooth surface of the mirror above the dresser. He glanced at Daddy periodically. I sat cross-legged on the cold floor away from them all, trying to take it all in.
“Can’t the doctors see ’bout her without you?”
Earl, in his blundering open-hearted way, kept questioning Momma.
“She needs me to see ’bout her too.”
“We need you too,” Earl said.
“You got your daddy and you got your big sister,” Momma said. “Ida Bea’s got nobody but me.”
Momma looked from Daddy to me. When our eyes met, I blanched, trying to swallow whatever emotion might have been on my face. There was a free-floating mishmash of feelings that went with knowing that she and Daddy were hiding the fact of a dead child. There were no pictures of Samuel in our family photo album. There had never been a mention of his name. How could Momma and Daddy act like they always had?
My whole world was shifting. I had been removed from my place in the family. A brother had been born before me, and he had died before me. Daddy had something to do with the dying.
“I’ll be home when she’s all better,” Momma was saying, still looking at me.
Could she read how stunned I felt? I looked at Daddy. What was he thinking about?
Back in the summer Esther and I had been drawn in to keeping a secret with him. I had followed an overgrown path shaded by longleaf pines, towering oaks, and low-lying shrubs that sloped down toward Harvest Quarters creek. Esther was close behind, letting me take the lead for once. We were headed to one of our favorite places. We went there when we wanted to avoid the other kids in the neighborhood. At the creek’s edge, there were flat places where we could wade in the shallow water and catch tadpoles. We built watery corrals and let them flit around inside. Sometimes we just stood still in the water, pretending to fish with string tied on the end of a stick, feeling the cool and squishy mud between our toes and the tickling of minnows brushing against our legs. There were big rocks and moss-covered tree-stumps where we could sit and talk, or do nothing but watch dragonflies dart over the surface of the water.
We had never seen another soul in this particular spot, but that day when we spilled out of the shady path to look at the sunshine rippling on the surface of the water in front of us, there was Daddy sitting on a stump. The toes of his work-boots were submerged in the clear water. In one hand he held a mason jar, and in the other a photograph.
“Daddy?” I blurted.
His eyes were glistening when he looked up.
“Maddy? Baby Girl?”
He put the photograph in the pocket of his khaki shirt and stood. “What you doing here?”
“We kind of lost,” Esther said, and looked at me quickly.
Daddy’s lean dark face looked relieved. He patted his shirt pocket and stooped to retrieve something from the ground—the lid for his mason jar. Slowly, he screwed it on. For a few long moments we all stood in the music of birdsong and flowing water.
“Lost, you say?”
“Yes, sir,” Esther said.
I nodded and looked down at the ground, feeling the heat rise to my face.
“You girls ain’t got no business wandering around in these woods. There’s some dangerous animals out here—foxes, mad raccoons, water moccasins. Maddy, you gone get your hide tanned.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said, though I couldn’t see what was so bad about going to wade in the creek on a hot day. We’d never seen any dangerous animals except snapping turtles sunning themselves on rocks. They always slid into the water and swam away from wherever we were.
“Save your sorry for later. It’s your momma you’ll need to explain yourself to,” Daddy said.
“It ain’t Maddy’s fault, Mr. Culpepper. I’m the one got us lost. We won’t come this way again.”
Esther was stepping from foot-to-foot and fingering the small hairs at the back of her neck.
I wanted to ask Daddy what he was doing here, and whose picture was that? But I knew better. “Bad manners to question adults. When I want you to know something, I’ll tell you,” he had warned before.
“Come on,” Daddy said.
He led us along the creek in the opposite direction of the way we had come. I followed in his shadow, worrying about my punishment. He veered off onto an unfamiliar path among the trees. The ground was worn bare and the shrubbery had been hacked back so nothing reached out to touch my face and arms as I passed. Esther and I had never come across this path. It occurred to me that there must be hundreds of ways to move through these woods. Daddy stomped on ahead, sure-footed with his head bowed. When we came out onto the Quarters road, he stopped.
“I tell you what. I got to go take this back to the people that gave it to me.”
Clear liquid sloshed inside the jar when he held it up. “You momma don’t need to know either one of us was down by the creek today. It’d just worry her for no good reason. So, I’m not going to mention it. This time.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Got that?”
He was asking me to keep a secret from Momma. What would she have a problem with—the jar, the picture, or the fact that he hadn’t come straight home from work?
“Got that, Maddy?”
I nodded.
“So you and your little friend here go on home. I’ll take care of what I need to and I’ll be there directly, like I always am.”
He tapped me under the chin with his fingers the way he used to when I was little. “Later, Baby Girl,” he said, then turned and headed back into the heart of the Quarters.
“Grown-ups always got secrets,” Esther said as we walked toward home in the opposite direction of Daddy.
“Maddy, are you hearing me?” Momma’s voice intruded on my memory. Her face was drawn in lines of aggravation when I looked across the room at her. I nodded. Esther’s voice still echoed in my head, “Grown-ups always got secrets.” “I’m trying to tell you that y’all’s daddy’s gon’ start bringing y’all to visit me and Ida Bea up at the hospital. Ain’t that right, Gene?” Momma moved her gaze back to Daddy.
“Uhnn huh,” he grunted. Nothing on him moved except the lump of his Adam’s apple, which vibrated in his throat like a hard candy he was trying to swallow.
They had both cried about their dead child. Now they were back to holding that secret with stoicism and ease.
“Now don’t y’all go making me feel bad for even coming home for a little bit,” Momma said.
Everybody stiffened, even Daddy, who opened his eyes and sat up straight.
“I want y’all to be good to each other while I’m away. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Y’all hearing me?”
We all nodded, even Daddy.
“Now y’all go on get ready for bed. Junie Boy will sleep with me and Daddy tonight. Maddy?”
She called me back as I was leaving the room and handed me a few pieces of notebook paper. In her precise cursive handwriting she had written out simple