The Romper children, all except for Charlie, proved quite indifferent to the arrival of baby Ellen.
The eldest, a boy named Keanan, had always behaved unconsciously to the extreme – even for his age. He ignored anything that didn’t have to do with himself, and even things that belonged to him he treated carelessly. He would run about the trailer like a wild horse, rolling his eyes, kicking at the walls. The parents, before they became Christians, used to lock him up in a closet for hours at a time. When he was let outside in springtime, he chased cars like a wild dog or jumped in the creek like a wild goose. It wasn’t like he was independent or capable in the way of animals, though; I had to watch over him aplenty during the time he was alive, and I saw how utterly foolish he was. I regretted that I didn’t give him the eyes to see me; instead, I’d given him a spirit of recklessness, which took him far away from everything meaningful and led him on continuously empty chases.
The mother didn’t know what to do about him, had never known. She blamed herself for giving him lollipops when he was a toddler or for smacking him across the face, neither of which was respectable; but in a much vaster sense, she was not the one to blame. (Mothers always think they’re to blame, but in the end everything is actually my fault.)
When Keanan Romper met the baby, he barely saw her; it was out of the corner of his eye, and he kept snorting and cavorting across the tattered carpet like a pony on a broad plain of shallow nonsensical dreams. No one expected any different.
The second child was a shy little girl with dark eyes. The mother had named her Bonnie, which I thought was sweet, but I would have chosen something like Imogen or Siobhan, something more exotic and shadowy. She had a surreptitious mind, inlaid with a natural emotional sensitivity, the combination of which endowed her with one of the most guilt-provoked hearts I’ve encountered this side of Canada. Even Bonnie’s joy, she enjoyed predominantly because she was guilty of it; her happiness shrouded itself in a sense of iniquitous chagrin. For the better, since she had a terrible mean streak (which she spent much time trying to hide). When she saw the new baby, she sidled by and gave it a good pinch. And felt horribly glad.
The mother failed to notice the transgression because she was hobbling around the kitchen, which was no bigger than one square metre at the end of a double-wide trailer, and all piled with chipped and dirty dishes. She was trying to make sure her stitches didn’t bust as she bent over the countertop, preparing baked macaroni and cheese and ground beef for the little ones and the husband who would soon be home from his job in the gold mine. Her hair hung long, stringy and straight, and she wore a flannel nightgown. She had a grey face, even the eyes and lips.
The mother’s name was Marisol.
Earlier in life, she’d been golden all over, with small pink lips, and her eyes had held a flatness of blue signifying great intelligence. Later on, she would be brilliant again, in a darker and paler way. But at this stage, she was grey. The only colour hidden in her was blood red, where her insides had struggled to hold onto this last little girl. Her belly was a clenched and bloodied fist forced open. She could hardly walk for pain and tiredness; her thighs felt as if they’d been carved from one tree trunk unceremoniously hacked apart.
Marisol missed being pregnant, missed the dark silence of it. Now, she was home and there were four children not three. The one that had been quiet inside her was now crying.
She didn’t know why it cried. At last, when her nipples were cracked and dried out, she gave up trying to nurse that horrified little maw and gave it a bottle of formula. (The husband criticized the spending of good money on powdered baby milk, telling her to dilute it further than the directions called for.) But bottles, too, caused the infant to double up in tears and gum-gnashing. Ellen could not be satisfied; she cried twenty-two hours of the day. It was colic, the mother finally deduced, and gave her gripe water and boiled 7-Up. So then Ellen cried only 18 hours a day, and sometimes through the whole night.
Finally, the mother knelt by the crib in the wee hours of an icy April morning; the trees were still shivering out in the yard, thin and blown sideways. She hovered next to the baby, who cried as if desperately starving. Marisol leaned her head on the wooden bars; she had an urge to reach through them and strangle the little one whose voice was already so powerful. How could this thing – this insignificant thing, another child – hold such command over the family, over the mother’s insides? Though she had attempted to both ignore and soothe it, this baby’s hold on her guts was complete; the hook had been sunk from the first needy howl. Marisol, in her exhaustion, wondered if I would forgive her if she laid her fingers upon the neck of the infant, or a pillow on its face, and made everything quiet, quiet, quiet again?
Of course I would have forgiven her. In fact I almost let her do it right then. It would have been self-serving; I missed Ellen dearly and could hardly stand the notion of letting her stay there, crying. Time passes just as slowly and quickly for me as it does for everyone else. I could have left the choice up to the mother, let her snuff out the misery, and there would be my odd, knowing child safe in my lap again.
But I am bigger than that.
I said, She doesn’t know you love her.
The mother almost didn’t hear me over Ellen’s crying. But she knew I was talking because she raised her head. The crib bars had left marks on her forehead. She was twenty-three years old.
Marisol cocked her ear.
I whispered even more quietly (because people always listen better then):
She doesn’t know you love her.
Like a robot, the mother stood and picked up Ellen in her arms. She sat down in the rocking chair and folded her arms about the howling baby, who struggled maniacally.
Until now, I had known Ellen was quite feisty; but I honestly didn’t expect her to fight so hard against the process of forgetting me.
Marisol began to rock back and forth; Ellen struggled wildly against the weight of the arms, screaming. Marisol rocked and rocked. I felt the mother growing stronger. She knew she loved Ellen; she just hadn’t been able to hear herself loving. She kept right on rocking until Ellen grew too exhausted to fight anymore and fell limp in the embrace.
They slept together, sitting up.
The father was up around this time each morning, but he didn’t witness the moment. He avoided seeing any of the children if possible, just concentrated on his peanut butter toast before heading out to work underground in the gold mine. He was not like Marisol, who tired as a corpse still felt a sudden electric rush at seeing one of her little humans enter the room; she would drink in the pure scent of her child’s sleepy neck and sweep the damp hair back from the forehead, give a drink, before tucking the little one back into bed.
To the father, such actions were an unsteady afterthought, an unwanted chore. Not once in his life did he notice that each of the children had a smell all its own, Keanan’s like woodruff, Bonnie’s like clean clothes and musk, Charlie’s like butter, Ellen’s like lemon meringue pie.
The father was a big-boned man with a heavy beard and a rather stubborn spirit. He returned from work every afternoon to sleep and concentrate on anything that comforted him: warm socks; cherry yogurt; ground beef; television. He wished Marisol hadn’t forced him into becoming a born-again Christian after Bonnie came along. He missed his chronic marijuana habit, which Jesus had asked him to relinquish.
It’s one thing to have the odd beer or glass of wine; neither Jesus nor I have any problem with that. But it’s another to smoke yourself up till your brain is in a paranoid land of filmy fog and all you can think about is what you’ll get around to the next day or the day after that or never at all. We had to get him to give it up, if only so the kids wouldn’t inhale it. After some months of resistance he did, since he cared what other churchgoers thought; but still, three years later, after work and before bed, he never failed in his craving for the sweet strong inhalation of grass that would make his eyes fuzzy and calm his temper.
Sometimes I thought it would be better just to let him have it, like the Rastafarians who make it part of their religion. The reason I let it go, for them, is that they never fail to think about me the whole time they’re doing it. They stand there toking away and on the clouds they come to me. I smell them coming first; then they’re with me. It will never cease to amaze me how they do it, since everyone else floats away on that stuff. Probably it’s because they hold the Bible in their hands and chant my name within their name, Haile-I Selassie-I, I kingdom-come-I, praise-be-to-I-in-all-I-glory.
Anyway, Georgie, as everyone called the father, he didn’t know anything of that, just lived in a puffball and anytime that puffball was blown on by me or the children or the mother or anyone else, it exploded into a fire of vitriol. I often wondered which was worse for the children: to have a father who was slack and stoned, or to have one so full of violence.
It’s funny – not ha ha funny, but interesting – how some families can so resoundingly fail to welcome a child into their midst. The older children bounce away from the new one by way of glassy eyes, chaotic laughter, sneaky mean surprises and make-believe. It would take the parents to draw them in, carefully. However, the parents remain bogged down in adult layers of strife and habit. They cope with, but never deeply absorb the new addition to the family, and eventually this mere coping levels off into another layer of habit. The process skips the part where the child is wholeheartedly welcomed. This, I know, Ellen resented deeply. She had a great sense of her own splendidness.
It was Charlie Romper who loved the baby first. He was the second youngest, now. Charlie with his golden curls. Charlie with his great shiny eyes of tenderness. I did not make him to understand things deeply, only to love. I put his heart right inside his eyes so it would block out much of his vision. You may say it’s cruel to do that to a person, deliberately. But I happen to know the world needs people who can love like that. They will forgive and forget the most. They’re the ones I use to minister to the downtrodden of the earth; they are my favourite media.
When Charlie saw Ellen, he smiled. He wasn’t much more than a baby himself, only sixteen months old, still snacking on bottles of milk. He went up to the mother’s lap, smiled. He did not expect to be placed thereupon. He saw the baby’s pink, upset face. One of his hands reached out to rest on the mother’s knee and give a gentle pat. With the other hand, Charlie reached out and touched Ellen – his very own sister.