By the time Step-and-a-Half came to the house — boards and tarpaper, but of a solid and thorough construction — the baby was most definitely alive and rooting desperately for a nipple. Roy had a goat, whose mild milk she thought would do. She banged on the door and when he let her in she told him to stoke up the fire and go milk the goat. She’d wakened him, of course, and he stood mystified in his baggy cream-white long johns as she unbuttoned her coat and lifted the vest and rummaged in her three bodices. Her finds interested and sometimes embarrassed him. This one frightened him.
“Holy Jesus!” he cried out, flapping his hands in the air and then wringing them together, “you’ve got a baby there, Minnie.”
Both the baby and the woman who held it eyed him fiercely. The baby was covered with patches of dried and reeking stuff, and it began to tremble and bleat in the cold of the room. The woman Roy had nicknamed Minnie, in a romantic fit, quickly returned the baby to her chest and covered it.
“Quick, it’s in tough shape.”
He threw two logs in the barrel of the stove and jumped into his overalls, shot out the door with the small pail. Surprised the goat, who sleepily butted him at first and then gave up and tiredly let him milk her. When he came back into the house he saw that Minnie was boiling pots of water. In one, she was sterilizing a rag. The other water she was warming to wash the baby. After it was fed with the rag twisted into a teat and dipped in the milk over and over, a tedious process, Minnie wiped the tiny girl clean, pinched a clothespin onto the stub of her navel cord, and swaddled her tightly in a ripped flannel pillowcase.
“Let me hold her,” said Roy. Although he felt a little stupid at first, trying to arrange himself into the proper angles to support the baby against him, it all worked out. He even had a rocking chair, although its joints needed to be reset with glue. As he sat there going back and forth, the rocker creaking high and the floorboards beneath creaking in a lower register, he watched Minnie in the kerosene lamp light as she shed her knitted vest and peeled off two layers of her dresses, and then began to wash within the folds of the dress closest to her skin.
She made a businesslike job of it, soaping and scrubbing and then rinsing. She washed her face, the sides and back of her neck, then she twisted up the rag and washed her ears. She washed the slope of her throat and underneath the collar of the dress. Then she wrung the rag out and resoaped it and pulled the dress off her shoulders a bit, turned to unbutton it and washed each of her breasts, which he’d never seen yet, and never would see, as it turned out. She buttoned up and then, still turned away from him, set one leg on a chair and peeled off her sock. She washed up the inside of that leg and then washed between, lifted the other leg, pulled off its sock and washed along that leg as well. She added the last of the hot water to the basin on the floor and sat in the chair across from him, set her feet inside to soak. She sat there steadily, watching him rock the baby. Her eyes were intent and slanted, unblinking, steady as a hawk’s. He wondered what she was thinking, but he didn’t dare to ask because he was afraid that she was thinking that she had to walk.
And it was true. He didn’t understand — none of them did. She looked on most other people as upon a species different from herself. For certain, she knew, they couldn’t experience what she did inside and live one day, the next and the next, without needing to outwalk their thoughts. If she stopped for very long she might see the trust of the baby, eyes shut, nursing faithfully at the breast of its killed mother. She might see the little boy throw his arms to his face, a toddler who thought the gesture would make him invisible. The gunfire cut him in half. Later on she’d heard that there was one baby who had lived three days, lived through a blizzard, and been rescued although frozen in a sheet of its mother’s blood. It wore a tiny cap beaded with a bright American flag. Who wouldn’t try, for a whole life, to walk off such memories? For that was what it came to and why she did it — walking was the only way to outdistance all that she remembered and did not remember, and the space into which she walked was comfortingly empty of human cruelty. An unfeeling sky, brutal wind, cold, and the indifferent broil of the sun she could accept. The rush of wind in her ears drowned out the sounds of that fizzling and sifting Lakota language, and the other language, her first language, which she spoke with her father. Into her old age she still saw his surprising smile, as they looked into each other’s eyes, where they lay on that snow-hard ground, beneath a roof of bullets. She heard his words, “Go home, gewehn, n’dawnis. Tell them it is over.” The roar of clouds drowned out his silence after that as well as the silence of unspirited bodies sprawling in the slippery gullies, where the wind boomed for days until its voice, too, was gradually choked with snow.
Who wouldn’t walk? Who could ever stay in one place?
Ever since, she had paced the earth. Roy couldn’t expect her not to walk. She knew that eventually she’d leave him with the baby, but she didn’t know that she’d feel compelled to return, again and again, that she’d give him her money to keep the child secure and that, at times, she’d attempt to tend the growing girl in small and clumsy ways. She didn’t yet know that Roy had taken her own picture. She hardly knew what a photograph was. Nor did she understand that she was beautiful, at that time, as she would be again when old and remembering.
NOW, IN THE LITTLE ROOM behind her small shop on an Argus side street, she could seldom muster more than the strength to travel in and out onto the ground before the windows. Only occasionally did she walk the roads, and then the miles that melted away her flesh still temporarily soothed her old torment and put off her reflections. More and more, she rested. Every afternoon she crept upstairs to nap in a bed with blankets quilted out of her best finds of fabrics — thick and figured velvets, heavy satins and fragile silk. Before she fell asleep underneath that crazy quilt of all her pickings and wanderings, scenes assembled. Her brain bothered her back into startling and vivid moments that she’d already lived through and thought she’d finished with in memory.
Again she passed the butcher, Fidelis, whose suitcase she’d imagined entirely empty from the way he tossed it hand to hand as he walked into town, way back then, looking for work. She found out later it held his fancy knives. The suitcase would be filled again, though not with knives or sausages either. The suitcase would go back to Germany. She saw the tender arrangement of boys belonging to Eva, and lived again the surprise and the sorrow of her friend’s death. She saw the boy unsealed from the hill of dirt. The boy who climbed into the clouds, then fell in love with Delphine’s little sister. She saw Roy, and was glad he’d taken those pictures of her to the grave with him, so that there would be nothing left of her to walk upon this earth. She remembered how he’d claimed, early on, that he drank to show her that he couldn’t live without her. To which she answered, “That’s a load of bull crap,” and stepped out the door.
Step-and-a-Half remembered Delphine playing in the dirt that day, swirling it into piles as she passed her, and then the girl, too small to recall this, toddling after her and calling out, just that once, Mama? And Step-and-a-Half remembered breaking her stride at that and kneeling down so that she could look directly into the child’s face, the eyes too beautiful to meet, the cheeks fresh and open, blazing with purity. Step-and-a-Half’s heart squeezed in fear, and then she heard herself saying to the child, “Your mother is dead.” The little face, only beginning to know what dead was, had frozen shut suddenly, then recovered and looked straight at Step-and-a-Half with kindred, bold, shrewd, survivor’s eyes. Delphine then had reached out a swift small fist and rapped Step-and-a-Half on the forehead with her knuckles, as hard as she could. Step-and-a-Half rubbed her head and said, “Good. The tough ones live.”