A Piece of the World(6)

“SHE WAS FINE until the fever,” Mother tells Dr. Heald as I sit on the examining table in his Cushing office. “Now she can barely walk.”

He pokes and prods, draws blood, takes my temperature. “Let’s see here,” he says, grasping my legs. He probes my skin with his fingers, feeling his way down my legs to the bones in my feet. “Yes,” he murmurs, “irregularities. Interesting.” Grasping my ankles, he tells my mother, “It’s hard to say. The feet are deformed. I suspect it’s viral. I recommend braces. No guarantee they’ll work, but probably worth a try.”

My mother presses her lips together. “What’s the alternative?”

Dr. Heald winces in an exaggerated way, as if this is as hard for him to say as it is for us to hear. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think there is one.”

The braces Dr. Heald puts me in clamp my legs like a medieval torture device, tearing my skin into bloody strips and making me howl in pain. After a week of this, Mother takes me back to Dr. Heald and he removes them. She gasps when she sees my legs, covered with red festering wounds. To this day I bear the scars.

For the rest of my life, I will be wary of doctors. When Dr. Heald comes to the house to check on Mamey or Mother’s pregnancy or Papa’s cough, I make myself scarce, hiding in the attic, the barn, the four-hole privy in the shed.



ON THE PINE boards of the kitchen floor I practice walking in a straight line.

“One foot in front of the next, like a tightrope walker,” my mother instructs, “along the seam.”

It’s hard to keep my balance; I can only walk on the outsides of my feet. If this really were a tightrope in the circus, Al points out, I would have fallen to my death a dozen times already.

“Steady, now,” Mother says. “It’s not a race.”

“It is a race,” Al says. On a parallel seam he steps lightly in a precise choreography of small stockinged feet, and within moments is at the end. He throws up his arms. “I win!”

I pretend to stumble, and as I fall I kick his legs out from under him and he lands hard on his tailbone. “Get out of her way, Alvaro,” Mother scolds. Sprawling on the floor, he glowers at me. I glower back. Al is thin and strong, like a strip of steel or the trunk of a sapling. He is naughtier than I am, stealing eggs from the hens and attempting to ride the cows. I feel a pit of something hard and spiky in my stomach. Jealousy. Resentment. And something else: the unexpected pleasure of revenge.

I fall so often that Mother sews cotton pads for my elbows and knees. No matter how much I practice, I can’t get my legs to move the way they should. But eventually they’re strong enough that I can play hide-and-seek in the barn and chase chickens in the yard. Al doesn’t care about my limp. He tugs at me to come with him, climb trees, ride Dandy the old brown mule, scrounge for firewood for a clambake. Mother’s always scolding and shushing him to go away, give me peace, but Mamey is silent. She thinks it’s good for me, I can tell.

I WAKE IN the dark to the sound of rain drumming the roof and a commotion in my parents’ bedroom. Mother groaning, Mamey murmuring. My father’s voice and two others I don’t recognize in the foyer downstairs. I slip out of bed and into my woolen skirt and thick socks and cling to the rail as I half fall, half slide down the stairs. At the bottom my father is standing with a stout red-faced woman wearing a kerchief over her frizzy hair.

“Go back to bed, Christina,” Papa says. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Babies pay no attention to the clock,” the woman sing-songs. She shrugs off her coat and hands it to my father. I cling to the banister while she lumbers like a badger up the narrow stairs.

I creep up after her and push open the door to Mother’s bedroom. Mamey is there, leaning over the bed. I can’t see much on the high mahogany four-poster, but I hear Mother moaning.

Mamey turns. “Oh, child,” she says with dismay. “This is no place for you.”

“It’s all right. A girl needs to learn the ways of the world sooner or later,” the badger says. She jerks her head at me. “Why don’t you make yourself useful? Tell your father to heat water on the stove.”

I look at Mother, thrashing and writhing. “Is she going to be all right?”

The badger scowls. “Your mother is fine and dandy. Did you hear what I said? Boiling water. Baby is on the way.”

I make my way down to the kitchen and tell Papa, who puts a pot of water on the black iron Glenwood range. As we wait in the kitchen he teaches me card games, Blackjack and Crazy Eights, to pass the time. The sound of the wind driving rain against the house is like dry beans in a hollow stick. Before morning is over, we hear the high-pitched cry of a healthy baby.

“His name is Samuel,” Mother says when I climb onto the bed beside her. “Isn’t he perfect?”

“Um-hmm,” I say, though I think the baby looks as crab apple–faced as the badger.

“Maybe he’ll be an explorer like his grandfather Samuel,” Mamey says. “Like all of the seafaring Samuels.”

“God forbid,” Mother says.

“WHO ARE THE seafaring Samuels?” I ask Mamey later, when Mother and the baby are napping and we’re alone in the Shell Room.

“They’re your ancestors. The reason you’re here,” she says.