Now, when she looked at the streets around her and all the people, she saw them from a junker’s point of view. She saw them from the alleys where they burned their garbage and from the back porches of their houses, where they left rags — not the front steps, kept so tidy. She knew them not from what they wore or the façade they showed to the world, but from what they tossed out, discarded, thought worthless. She knew them by their scraps, and their scraps told their stories.
The bottles in Gus Newhall’s trash bin told the common secret of his income back in the bootleg days. The Bouchards had a habit of throwing plates when they fought, and were a source of shards that often could be fitted back together with more success, as it happened, than their marriage, which fell apart. Pouty Mannheim threw out both socks when one toe frayed — he never darned them, being a bachelor, and he didn’t keep the widowed sock, for which he earned her respect. Yet his proud and profligate sock habit also told her that he would one day fail in business. As for his mother, candy wrappers told her secret vice. Though she remained slim enough, her teeth dropped out. Step-and-a-Half was not surprised. She found awful things — pet carcasses, ripped-up love letters, bedding soaked with death, blood, illness, waste. She found good things — books and sheet music, which she kept though she did not read, toys that children had accidentally lost, which she cleaned and set on windowsills. She found a prosthetic wooden hand and an eyeball made of glass. A tin filled with weird blue seeds, all of which she planted in a coffee can of dirt, one of which sprouted a fat white flower shaped like a comical soldier’s helmet and smelling of sex and cinnamon. Razors to sharpen, tires that could be mended, engine parts as well as the stacks of clothing the resale of which as rags bought the flour that made her bread, and sometimes grease to butter it. She’d found a gold pocket watch, a radio, a music box that played a few bars of an elusive tune that Eva once told her was composed by Mozart. She’d found a perfectly good pot roast, a box of foil-wrapped chocolates, six bars of brand-new fragrant pink soap. She’d found peppermints and crackers and fancy stuffed pillows that suffered only from a bit of mildew. She found these things in trash heaps and burning barrels and along the river, down the sides of ditches, in the street and here and there. There was no question, however, that her most spectacular find was fished from the hole of Mrs. Shimek’s outhouse.
It was a find that had defined her life, a discovery that had circumscribed her wanderings, given shape to her thoughts, and provided her with an emotion that she never quite recognized but upon which she acted, again and again. Although it had happened more than forty years ago, the drama of it was still with her, and the consequences, which she’d seen played out before her as on a mystery stage.
THAT NIGHT, long ago, was still and deeply cold. The moon was a brilliant and distant polished disk. That October, there had been an early bitterness in the air, but deadly temperatures had never bothered Step-and-a-Half. The walking solved that. She generated her own warmth and knew how to wrap her limbs to conserve heat and repel the wind. She had stayed in Argus long enough then to know its routine. After all the taverns closed, after the doors in the town had banged shut, the fires in the stoves were damped, the curtains drawn, the dogs silenced, she walked. In time, she passed behind the Shimeks’, a place she rarely stopped, as it was merely the source of boiled-out bones and hairballs and stained newspapers. She would have passed by as usual on that night, had she not heard from the shut and weathered outhouse, a single groan. The sound arrested her. It was somehow familiar. She waited. The sound made her terribly uneasy, yet she could not leave. Four more times it sounded, and with an increased and animal intensity that made her certain that the person needed help. She had just made up her mind to violate the shack’s privacy when Mrs. Shimek, at the time a large young bride of a vacant innocence, a harmless bovine type of woman, red-cheeked and incurious, burst from the outhouse door and staggered away like a drunk farmer.
In the shadows of scrub box elders, Step-and-a-Half watched the woman pass into her darkened house, and Step-and-a-Half would have moved on herself, relieved, had she not heard from within the outhouse one more sound — a single, scratchy, outraged squawl. Enough moonlight fell through the door when she opened it for her to see that the seat and floor of the outhouse were slippery with a darkness of blood. That Mrs. Shimek’s husband was a lazy man, and hadn’t dug a deep new winter’s outhouse hole and moved the outhouse according to the autumn custom, was on that night a fortunate thing. For Step-and-a-Half’s arm was just long enough so that by reaching down and straining against the wood of the toilet hole, groping through the unfrozen filth, she was able to grasp the heel of the infant. The baby had dragged its own afterbirth up with it by the umbilical cord, and Step-and-a-Half severed the cord with nothing other than her own sharp teeth. With a finger, she cleaned out the baby’s mouth. She puffed a little air into its face, then opened her coat and pulled up the knitted vest underneath and unbuttoned the three dresses she wore one over the other. She pressed the convulsed thing hard against her flesh and inside her clothing, then she covered it with the dresses and the knitted vest and held it tightly. She had heard its one cry before it sank the incremental inch that covered up its mouth. And it was always, she thought, watching Delphine grow up, exactly the margin by which the girl escaped one dirty fate after the next.
Those thoughts came later, though, and after Step-and-a-Half had time to regret and wonder at the choice of where she left the child. She took the baby with her, of course, to the place she considered her den the way a roaming wolf will put itself up temporarily. For a few weeks only, she’d come to the barn and then the door itself of a bachelor farmer on the edge of Argus. Roy Watzka was shorter than she was by nearly half a foot, but he had fallen in love with Step-and-a-Half anyway. He declared that he would marry her. He made all sorts of plans. He’d buy her a milk cow and a golden ring. A wagon would be hers, and a strong gray horse to draw it. A chicken coop, which he would build, with fine piles of straw for the chicks and hens. He would learn to play the hand organ, to amuse her on winter nights. But she would have to stop wandering, he said. She would have to settle down with him.
Those settling qualities, which he claimed at the time, had fooled her. She had known she would take the baby back there right from the first. As she started to walk, she felt it move, clenched silently at first, and then, dragging somehow a bit of air into its miniature lungs, it gave a shorter, deeper, ragged cry so sad that it seemed to know, as Step-and-a-Half herself knew, it was now doomed to life.