Water baby

 Anna Bea and Tam had been secretly teaching each other to read and write since the little girl could sit up and hold a crayon. Tam never learned and was reluctant to subject herself to scorn, so she made do as many unlettered adults did.

Each morning when chores were done, Tam would take off her apron and smack her broad palms together and say to Bea, “Time for school!” something she had no firsthand experience with. The two-year-old laboriously stacked three county phone books on the kitchen chair, climbed to her perch and waited with her grubby little fists clutching air while Tam got out the pad of lined newsprint and the cigar box full of pencils and crayons. Tam warned her, “Now don’t be letting other people know about our business here,” as the two of them drew copies of the bold letters from the front page of yesterday’s newspaper.

The truth was that Bea had figured out reading and writing on her own while she sat on an apple box in a booth at the airport bar with Murph, who was often waiting on a guy. He brought her along with him for breakfast when there was time to kill and to give Tam a break from the child’s incessant energy.

She knew that the marks on the paper packed some kind of charm because Murph looked at them with a fierceness, and he often spoke out loud words that were obviously not his own. The marks changed every day and today it was MOBSTER SLAIN! The print filled the top half of the page, and below it was a black-and-white photo of a man lying in the gutter, his head oddly misshapen and his juices flowing away from him on the pavement like the oil that leaked out of Murphy’s old Ford pickup. He studied the grainy photo and pronounced, “Sumbitch probably needed killing.” And moved on to more important pages.

Bea still had the view of that picture on the front page while Murph was deep into the box scores and race results. You couldn’t see the man’s face, but his left arm was thrown up in a gesture that seemed to say “Surprise!”. It looked like fun times. She stood on the seat and leaned across the table, tapped on the paper and said “Zat?”, one of her three words, the others being “No” and “Why”.

Bea was an easy child if you weren’t expecting much and Tam and Murph had no expectations at all when her grandmother dropped her into their lives part-time after her parents died. Nell said that Bea didn’t talk because of Hera’s habit of sniffing gasoline when she was pregnant. Murph privately wondered if they dropped her on her head once or twice. None of this mattered. Bea was his niece.

He peeled off the front page and laid it out on the table like a placemat. He spelled the letters out to Bea, took a pencil stub from behind his ear and gave it to her. This would be good for a quiet hour while she scribbled an endless string of gibberish all over any white space on the page. The marks weren’t quite letters or numbers yet, but she was creeping up on it, her nose two inches away from her fist as the markings danced and unfurled along the avenues between print and picture.

Goldy appeared with their food and stood holding a tray and watching Bea scribble. She reached out and flicked the back of the newspaper to get Murph’s attention.

“What?” He looked at her over the tops of his little round reading glasses. “

“You take this baby to church?”

Murph looked at her like she was crazy. “What the hell for?

“Cause she writing in tongues is what for. The priest needs to see this. She could be taking messages from Jesus.”

He looked across the table at Bea. “Bullshit, woman. More likely she’s taking longhand from the Devil himself.”

He laughed, and she crossed herself and scowled at him as she clattered their dishes onto the table, covering the photo of the dead man with Bea’s plate of scrambled eggs.

Bea’s nose was chasing her fist, and she didn’t stop to pick up her fork. She must have been hot on the trail of some mystery because she broke the pencil point and started squawking.

“Don’t get excited,” said Murph. “Give it here.” She gave him the pencil and started eating eggs with her left hand, her right opening and closing anxiously as Murph used a pocketknife to bring a clean section out of lead out of the greasy, flat carpenter’s pencil. She stood on the edge of the seat and hopped from one foot to the other until Murph handed the pencil back to her and said, “Now sit down before you fall on your ass again. Goldy, where’s them damned scrambled eggs?”

Bea put the new point of the pencil down in the exact place where it had broken and resumed her transcription from beyond, but when she got to the right edge of the white space she stopped, turned the paper and began reproducing the bold headline in the last unfilled margin, copying the shapes of the letters precisely, but smaller, to fit the space that was left.

Goldy came back to the table with a pot of coffee and a stack of toast spread with grape jam. “Put that up now, Missy, and finish your breakfast.” She lifted the page of newsprint like she was holding a rat by the tail and lowered it down in front of Murph’s face. “See what she’s up to now?”

He took the page from her and examined it closely, and then looked across the table at Bea. She had a piece of toast in each hand and grape jam all over her face; cheeks full like a chipmunk, her hair sticking out all over her head in ornery curls. Her eyes were as round and gray as quarters today.

“Nice work, kiddo,” he said. Bea grinned, stuck out her tongue at Goldy, and went back to the business of seeing just how much toast she could put in her mouth before she choked. “This time next week, we’ll have her copying five-dollar bills. What say, Queen of the Amazons, wanna be a counterfeiter?” He slapped the tabletop with a broad palm, making the cutlery and Goldy jump at the same time. Bea nodded and laughed, spewing chunks of toast over the table. If Murph was laughing, it had to be a good thing.

It was Tam who first suspected the child’s other gift when the little girl was still crawling. Bea was only four months old, and Tam had no experience mothering, but Nell had no patience for small children anymore, so Bea went back and forth between their houses. Tam and Murph treated her more like a pet monkey than a baby. Bea was into everything and Tam found that the only way to get her work done was to dress the child for the weather, take her outside with her and tie a length of clothesline around her waist and anchor the other end to a good sized rock or the cloths pole depending on what chores Tam was doing. Blessed be, the baby almost never cried since they got feeding her figured out.

Tam was weeding in the kitchen garden when she felt and heard Bea’s shrieking, but from inside her thinking. Face scrunched against the racket, she stood up, turning her head from side to side to see if her ears were broken, but she could hear a small plane flying low over the house and the sound of the sprinkler at the other end of the garden. The wild birds were in full riot, but over top of all these sounds, was Bea’s screeching inside her head, and she hurried back the length of the garden to see what was what.

She found the baby sitting in the shade of the flapping laundry with the rope twisted around the pole to where there was only a yard of play. Her mouth was closed and her faced screwed into a pitiful scowl and she held her left hand out for Tam’s inspection. The racket inside Tam’s head cut off when the baby saw her and opened her mouth to let the screeching take air.

A wasp had stung her in the palm of her left hand, and it was already swollen like a boiled sausage. Tam untied her and took her into the house. She set her on the sideboard and said, “Hush now, and Tam can fix you up. Gimme hands.”

Bea put out both her hands, breath hitching, and Tam put a cookie in her right hand and an ice cube in her left and wrapped the dishrag around it. There was instant relief and silence for both of them, except Tam had a headache, and she knew who caused it. She stood with her hand at the baby’s back, gave her a second cookie and said,” Now what kinda voodoo bullshit we got going on here, I wonder?”

Murph brought Anna Bea back to her grandmother’s just before dinner, dropped her off at the curb, and watched as she climbed the concrete stairs on all fours, her chubby arms and legs churning like a chimp’s. She was filthy and smelled of beer and cigarettes and he didn’t want to stick around and take any crap about it from Nell, but soon the toddler would be floating on her back in the tub like a dead pink and brown frog; her tanned nose, mouth and fat thighs held afloat by a belly full of beer gas, which probably saved her from drowning. He would not get any credit for this from Nell.

Bea held her breath and sank herself under the surface of the hot water, slimy with lavender bath salts. It crept into her ear-holes and blocked out all sounds except the beating of her own heart, like a dragon snoring in a cave. The sloped back of the claw-foot tub made her think of the slide at the playground so she clambered up to the back edge of the tub and slid down, splashing, heaving up the tides, and she tried to imagine the ocean in Florida that Murph always talked about while holding court at the bar.

On her third try, her feet slipped, and she went down, cracking the back of her head on the rolled cast iron rim with a muffled ring that she never heard. Minutes later, Nell came through the door carrying a stack of towels. “Time to get the hell out of there before you prune.” The stillness in the humid bathroom flashed through the old woman like a jolt of electricity and she dropped towels, spun on her heel, bent and snatched her unconscious granddaughter out of the now tepid water with a shriek.

The child was soap slimy on her arm, and Nell used her free arm to whip a towel around her body for a better grip and squeezed the limp child against her chest as much to keep from dropping her as to pump her out. Bea burped and farted at the same time as Nell fell back onto the wicker hamper, her legs giving way. She smacked her ass a wicked shot and was rewarded with a wail. “You will be the death of me yet, little girl,” she said.

There was no point in asking what or how the hell it happened. The child still didn’t speak, and she was pushing three; some figured an idiot in the making. A half hour later, Anna Bea was sitting at her grandmother’s kitchen table, feeding Petey a piece of lettuce through the bars of his cage. He made a squawking fuss of feathers when Nell plopped the box of Saltines next to Bea’s bowl of tomato soup and a little black and white bead of parakeet poop landed and was floating in her bowl. She grimaced for a second, but sank it with her spoon and proceeded to bury the thought with a mountain of mashed-up crackers. She would just not lick the bowl, as usual.

After lunch, Nell found her asleep on the bare painted floor of the sun porch next to the scabby tiger cat, her plaid flannel blanket clutched over her face. She reached down and gingerly felt the bump on the back of the child’s head and left her sleeping. “There will be hell to pay come bedtime,” she thought.

Anna Bea woke up later when the sun sank behind the hill behind the house and the shadows chilled her. She was changed. Later she would say that the furniture in the room of her head had been moved. The room was much larger and the open windows filled with light, as if the sun shone from all points of the compass at once and fresh air breathed through her head like the wind in the willows.

She would finally start talking not long after nearly dying. A week later, Nell dropped dead.

Nell and Bea went to Bingo at the VFW every Wednesday night. Bea brought along a cigar box with things to amuse herself with while she sat under the table at Nell’s feet. She knew that there were other children under the draped tables all over the hall, but she was alone in this one, her castle. She was busy lining up her little herd of plastic horses and knew things were getting tense up top. A few players were closing in on a big round robin. Nell was muttering “O64, come on you bitch, O64,” when suddenly she shrieked “Bingo!”

Anna popped out from under the table on the far side just in time to see Nell slump over her ten cards and sweep all the red plastic markers off the table as she slithered out of her chair to the floor, dead as a doornail according to Dr. Smith.

An aneurysm. “A bubble in her brain popped and her soul just took off like a rocket,” he told Bea later. She got down on the floor and patted Nell’s permed hair, French lilac it was this month, but when she looked into Nell’s open eyes, she knew that no one was home. That’s when she went to live with Tam and Murph full-time.

Time passed, and the empty place Nell left in Bea’s life filled with others, but she would never forget her grandmother’s face or voice.

Bea sat in the bottom of the wooden rowboat, doing her best to be quiet. Murph told her to speak in a low voice so the fish wouldn’t hear her and be scared away from their hooks. She pitched her voice down as far as she could and intoned, “Where do the fish sleep at night, Pop?” That was question twenty-two.

Pop said, “Anna Bea, count them worms for me again, honey. I need to figure out how long we can be out here, drowning the poor bastards with no fish to show for all their misery and suffering due to a certain noisy shipmate.” He fixed her with a grizzled stare.

Bea knew when she was being scolded, even when it was left-handed, but this was the summer after she nearly drowned and finally started talking at the ripe old age of three, and no one could bear to shut her up. God help you if you took her to church. “Can I have another soda, Murph?”

“No, cause there won’t be none come lunchtime, and no, you cannot have beer.” Tam would kill them all if she smelled beer on her again after the incident in the bowling alley. “

I’ll drink the lake later.”

“Have some lake now if you are really thirsty.”

She looked at her hands crusted with worm slime and dirt and decided she could wait for lunch. She wiped her hands on the front of her striped shirt. After a few minutes, she said, “Thirty-eight and a half, Pop.”

“A half?”

“He musta got in a fight cause he’s half a worm with a bloody stump.” “Can’t find the other half?”

“Nope.”

“Cannibals!”

She shrieked and laughed out loud and Murph turned to Pop, who sighed heavily and looked skyward for the help of the saints.After a minute Murph said, “Annabea, you want to have your lunch on the Dragon’s Back?”

She passed from bored and petulant to excited. “Yeah,” she said, scrambling up onto the seat beside him.

“But what’s the deal?” he said, looking at her over the top of his sunglasses

“The deal is never ever, ever tell Tam or Nell cause they would have a shit fit.” Nobody remarked anymore on the fact that Bea continued to mention Nell despite the fact that she had been gone almost a year. It made Pop go misty-eyed and smile at the same time. It was too easy to forget the dead.

“Language, young lady,” said Pop, even though he knew he was pissing in the wind. They all started laughing, concentric rings of mirth spreading out around the leaky rowboat. Murph picked up the paddle and started working them across the reservoir to the tiny island.

Not more than two hundred feet long and thirty wide, the Dragon’s Back was an arched strip of island with an ancient stone wall snaking down its center. A forest of pine, maple and oak trees struggled up through the thin dirt flanking the wall, itself covered in creeping bittersweet and thick moss on the north side.

It was once the highest point in the Browne’s back pasture before the valley was flooded for the dam in 1911. The town and all the surrounding farms drowned, and all that was left was the Dragon’s Back. For many years, the top ten feet of the steeple of the Methodist church in town stuck out of the water, but it was gone now, too.

The miles of stone walls in the area were built by the earliest New England settlers. If you wanted to farm in this part of the country, you spent half your life harvesting chunks of granite and piling them up along the agreed on property lines. This wall was very old.

It was six feet and more wide at the base, with enormous boulders that must have been aligned by teams of oxen or mules. Smaller stones strung the largest together in a more or less haphazard fashion, but in a straight line that followed the ridge. After a day of hauling rocks, most farmers didn’t have the energy for getting fancy, but someone had, most probably one of the many Italian stonemasons recruited from Ellis Island for the project that eventually caused the flooding, the Kensico Dam.

For a stretch of thirty feet at the southern tip of the island, some long-dead artisan puzzled and fitted stones as small as a grapefruit to form a tight span that was table flat and four feet wide with clean edges that dropped off into the stunted growth below. From the water, it looked like a dock, but there was no safe approach. The finished wall tumbled off into a jumble of jagged, slime-covered rocks sticking up out of the water; treacherous for boaters and swimmers alike.

They approached the island from the sunny side where a huge tree had keeled over into the water years ago and formed a perfect bridge to the stone wall. Bea took her Orange Crush from the tin ice chest and put it in her black lunch pail and stood impatiently behind Murph as he bulled the stern of the boat onto the submerged log.

“OK, kiddo. Here you go. Now, what are the rules?”

“No swimming, no snakes, and don’t tell!”

“You got it. We’ll be back for you after a couple hours. When the sun hits the top of those trees. I’ll be able to hear you holler, and we won’t be far out of sight.” He whispered, “Pop will be less grumpy after he catches some fish and gets a nap.”

“What’s that?” Pop said.

“Nothing, you old buzzard. Hang on. We’re shoving off.” Bea hugged Murph around the neck and stepped over the stern onto the log. She put the lunchbox down and helped push the boat away, nearly falling into the water. She waved to them and then squatted on the log, washing her wormy hands in the clear water and wiping them on her dirty shirt.

This was her secret kingdom. She grabbed the lunch pail and scampered up the log to the rock wall. This was the third time that Murph let her off on the island by herself, and she set about checking out her domain. She declared to no one in particular that she, Anna Bea Catalano, was Sovereign Queen of this island while she was in residence, of course. The rest of the time, it was a refuge for the wild things and the Caretaker. No one knew about him except Bea.

Her first order of business would be to check on her supplies and eat most of them. She sat on a sun-warmed granite boulder right in the center of the landing. There was a pie sized gouge in the flat rock that would hold water after it rained or if she filled it from the reservoir, but dry, it fit her butt perfectly.

She opened the lunch box and took out the bottle of soda and her church key with layers of colored rubber bands around the flat of it giving it a good grip. There was an orange with the leaves still on it that Murph brought up from Florida last week. Tam made a baloney and mustard sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and put a handful of sugar wafers in a smaller waxed paper sack.

The cookies were gone first. She watched as Murph and Pop circled out of her view, waved to them, and then opened the soda with an expert flick of the wrist. Crammed into the domed lid of the lunch box was a legal pad bowed in half and a fistful of sharpened pencils wrapped in another rubber band, all of them scored with teeth marks up and down their barrels. When she was deep in the magic trick of writing, she held a pencil in each fist and bit down on a third, switching them out as the leads lost their sharpness.

She would write her report after she scouted the island and met with the Caretaker. She set aside the orange and half the sandwich, knowing he was watching her from the trees.

Don’t do that, he said inside her head. It’s not polite. If you want to know something about me, just ask me. 

“Well, how can I ask you stuff if you won’t show yourself?” Bea said in a loud voice. The trees rustled behind her, and she forced herself to be still and not look behind her. That would be rude, too.