It was done — this is as much as I know or want to. Do not know or ask so much as even was she on the potty, the sheeted bed, the floor? Was it dead or living? Did she have a look at it? I would think you would have to look at it see was it a boy, a girl, have a name to call it by, count its fingers, toes. Or maybe this is me. Or maybe I don’t know. But I think I would want something from it — a thumb tip, a twist of cord, we keepers, not to have nothing at all from it, anything small to show.
She turns her palms up. Supple as he is and weak — what harm? And yet she is my sister. And yet she is my sister.
And there is the favored wingback, stout of arm, of wing, of foot.
I pass him to her. “Watch his neck.”
“I know, I know, I know.”
Hickory, gingko, willow, elm.
Sweetpea, wicker, junior mint. Little man, I call him, honcho, buster, sugar boy. Almost never Reno, sometimes kid Reno, buckareno, buckaroo.
She calls him Binny. Heeey, Binny. It’s your Aunt Kathleen.
The bird dog she calls Honey Gal and, before long — because much of the time we call her Snoot, for her snoot my sister calls her Snout. This gets us laughing, George and me, helplessly, until we are falling out of our chairs.
“Nose,” she says, and touches his nose. “Ears. Cheeks. Chin. What’s this?”
She spreads her hand on the crown of his head and gives it a turn to show me. “Look.”
But it is only the scabbing rash he has had, yellowish and common, thriving between where his eyebrows will be. “And this, what’s this?” on the slope of his nose, the puggish end, the hard pale knots of acne. “Uunh.”
She lets his head tip back and fingers his neck and it is in my mouth to stop her but I am thinking I understand it, suppose I do — the hope of finding a flaw in him, some lasting crimson blemish. Even a terrible wrongness, I think, it is not such a stretch to think of it: she is hoping to find her mark on him, evidence of kinship, even if, or especially if, it is the kinship of the maimed.
I stoop over her, look to see what she sees: there is vernix still, I have missed it, gray and ripe and gummy, lumping up in the folds of his skin. My sister draws her finger along a crease and the baby squawks and gags. “That’s enough.”
Too much for me already. I gather him up. Remember to kiss her. I remember the place at the bend in her arm Mother used to rub before Sister slept, to help her sleep, and I touch it. “Love you great big,” I remember. Then make my slow way to bed.
My bed is the bed for winter. I sleep where it is warm.
I wake backed away to the foot of the bed, our boy grunting and snuffling against me. Else I cannot find him — he has pushed off from me in his sleep as I sleep: he has crept into the cold with George.
George sleeps out in the summer-room where we used to sleep before the boy, in the wind and sun, in the trees we like, the sickly elm, the willow, the branches bent to shade the barn we keep our boy’s things in. He runs the fan for quiet. He makes a tent, as boys do, of his blankets to read by flashlight in.
Three long walls are windows. He wakes in the cold and trees.
Nights I wake to find George here should he come to me from the summer-room, the room the late-summer gold of corn the afternoon our planets crossed, the day I made my harvest. The baby is between us, or I have lain him, briefly, near, in the wicker bin beside the bed. I reach in sleep for him: I reach for the baby. I pet his face, his tender belly. He pulls me to him. I feel his penis stirring softly in its patch of hair.
Boy, my boy.
But what years I have slept. He is weathered. He is bony, bearded, grown.
They took him from me, to keep him safe from me, early on, while I drifted.
I came as I drifted to a dazzling sow, a slot chinked in her back for coins. In my back, were names I’d forgotten, welted loops and straightaways I could make out with my hand: PRIM SUE, PEPPER, GLORY: the animals when I was a girl.
I’m a dwirl, I’m a dwirclass="underline" my boy scamps through the house — in a heartbeat, shall, the brief day gone. Sthla, sthla, mbla, he learns, and swings to his feet in the crib.
I had them roll me in my bed against the window: Let me drift. I went willingly, unafraid of the cold, my hospital gown with the stamped-down name lapping against my back. The river whinged and gurgled. I skirted the ice at its weedy bank, a selvage poorly sewn.
The baby kicked in me. He would throw his foot through the cut in me, flail through the ragged mouth.
And then? And then?
Instructions. My father in velveteen robes. Presiding, intent on a girlish descant: How to love and hold your tongue. Above him — no cloud, not a tree for shade I watched my life, a plains bird, circling. Hello down there. Hello.
My boy appeared on the riverbank. A dull kite snapped in the trees.
The sow would make her way out through the thicket, I knew, a pig-pretty face, glistening, and drag up the stairs on her hooves. It was the way of things, the way they come at you, I heard the coins tinkling in her belly. She would come at me with her snout.
We stole the bedsheets, a towel, the hospital gown, anything marked we could carry. The fishnet panties, they gave us, and Q-tips to dab his umbilical with, and the bottle with its hooked spout.
We waited the month and then some and by and by George came to me from the summer-room in his slippers. He lay the baby in the bin beside the bed. I felt him push at me. He was eating his way back into me. The old story. You want to creep back, creep back, feed at the spangled shore. My stomach fisted. Seized, contracted. I breathed, a pant: the huffing the nurses teach you. The body going on. He kept on, the good George, so patient, so brave, I felt his brain beat in my knees. I felt him tire; I held him to me, the baby crowning, folding apart on his tongue.
She came on, the sow, she blapped through the door, rearing. She was tall as a man and grotesquely smooth. Her breasts were a pinkish girl’s.
I lit into her with my umbrella, I beat her about the head. I was blazing, vile, a blinded heat. Still she charged, charged again, rutted at me with her snout.
It took hours of beating to kill her and when I had killed her I hauled her out and threw the bolt on the door.
Still she lived. She clawed at the door and simpered. A cigarette, dear: her last request, her voice a child’s. I softened. I crept the door open. She was swaddled in cellophane and wearing a bridal gown. Her eyes were sockets, sooty, gone — the soupy mass flushed out. Her breasts were lumped and spitting milk. Dear, my dear. She would never die. She would die at my door forever; she would wait me out.
We rock for a time and I lie with my boy and listen to the talk downstairs. The good George. Sister telling of her weekly sweetheart; she has had a belt tooled with his name. And what, George asks, do the two of them like to do?
“Goof around. Eat popcorn. Listen to music,” Sister says.
One day, she says, they will marry. They will have a big house and a horse in the barn and their children will learn to ride early. And dogs, oh they will have lots of dogs, and too many cats to count or name, and geese and such, and heaps of corn, and her children — mercy, let them, fine, she isn’t going to fuss at them if they want to play tag in the garden.
She has brought me two spores of kudzu to force in the windowlight through the trees. “From home,” Sister says, morning then, the coming melt, hooome- a drawl, a dipthong, our lie. A little something, a little green in the house when the cold has come—from the heart of Mississippi.