From Here to Paternity

Mel took the rest of the kids back to the cabins and Jane sat in the lobby, waiting for Shelley and Mike to return. As she waited, Lucky passed through with an armload of notebooks and file folders. When he saw her sitting alone, he came and sat down. 'Are you teaching a class?' she asked.

'No, just finished one. The last of the evening.'

'Oh! I'm glad I ran into you,' Jane said. She'd reached into her jacket pocket for a tissue and had felt something else. She pulled out the tooth. 'I've been meaning to give you this. It's HawkHunter's tooth. I found it out by the front door. The snow had melted back there and it appeared. If you think it might help in making a mold or something for a bridge, you can give it to him.'

Lucky took the tooth, glanced at it, and handed it back. 'Sony, but that's not HawkHunter's tooth.'

Jane laughed. 'How many people have lost teeth by the front door?'

'I don't know, but this is someone else's,' Lucky said.

'How do you know?'

'It's easy,' he said. And he showed her.

Chapter 22

 

When they got back to the condo, they found Linda chatting with the girls. 'Hi, Mrs. Jeffry, Mrs. Nowack,' she said, heading for her jacket. 'I stopped in to check that everything was all right here. The sheriff called Tenny and said he couldn't find any of you.'

'What did he want us for?' Jane asked.

'Nothing in particular,' Linda said. 'At least I don't think so. Just wondered where everybody had gone. Don't worry, I'll call him back for you. Unless you want to talk to him?'

'God forbid!' Jane exclaimed. 'Has Willard wrecked anything?'

'Willard?' Linda got a mushy expression. 'He wouldn't do a thing like that. Oh, the Sunday papers were all over the living room and there was an awful lot of dog spit on the sliding glass doors—'

'That cat's been back, I'd guess,' Jane said.

'I took him out for a while and he chased some squirrels,' Linda said. 'That made him happy. I'm going home. It's been a long day. Is there anything else you need before I leave?'

'Nothing. Thanks. Oh — there is one thing,' Jane said.

'What's that?'

'I know you're going to think I've lost the last of my marbles, but — well — as dumb as it sounds, could I look at the back of your teeth?'

Linda burst out laughing. 'Do you think you can fit your head in my mouth to do that?'

Jane was blushing with embarrassment, which made her feel all the sillier. 'No, I just want to stick my compact mirror behind your front teeth.'

Linda nodded. 'Oh, I get it.'

'I don't!' Shelley exclaimed. 'Have you both gone nuts?'

Jane fished her compact out of her purse and slipped the edge of the mirror behind Linda's upper teeth. Linda was grinning around the mirror. 'Shelley, look at the back of Linda's front teeth—'

'Okay,' Shelley said suspiciously.

'Now, get another mirror and look at the back of mine.'

Shelley did as she was told. Her eyes widened and she looked at each of them again. 'Wow!'

Linda removed the mirror. 'Shovel incisors, it's called. Indians' front teeth cup on the back side. I think Orientals' teeth do, too, but Occidentals are much flatter.'

'That's so strange!' Shelley said.

'There are skull differences, too, but I don't know what they are,' Linda said, pulling on her outdoor boots.

'Jane, how did you know about this?' Shelley asked.

'I ran into Lucky and told him I'd found HawkHunter's tooth in the snow. He just glanced at it and said it couldn't be HawkHunter's because of this shovel-incisor thing.'

'How weird,' Shelley said. 'How many people do you think have lost a tooth by the front door lately?'

Jane shrugged. 'I don't know. I guess it might even be an animal's tooth. I didn't ask him that.'

'Well, if you think I'm letting you stick my compact in Willard's mouth—!' Shelley said, horrified.

'I'm sure Willard wouldn't mind,' Linda said. There was a knock on the door. 'That's Thomas come to walk me home. See you ladies later.'

They thanked her effusively for her attentions and Jane stood at the door, waving her off. Thomas Whitewing had an arm around her as they slogged off through the darkness. When Jane came back in, Shelley had poured each of them a glass of white wine.

'You were very quiet on the way back here,' Shelley said. 'Were you thinking about that weird tooth thing?'

'No, actually I was thinking about immigrants. Or, I guess they're emigrants when they move within their own country. You and I were struggling and gasping as we came up the hill through the snow, but think of the thousands of women who literally walked over this mountain without the benefit of fancy waterproof snow boots and down-filled nylon parkas.'

'Funny, I'd thought about that, too, as we were driving back here this afternoon,' Shelley said. 'But I was thinking that many of them either set out pregnant or became pregnant along the way. Some even had babies just before or during the trek.'

Jane got up and prodded at the fire Mel had started before taking the boys back to his place. 'I was talking to Mel about being homesick. I guess that's what started me thinking about it. We can go anywhere in the world now and not be too far from contact with those we left behind. Even if you're a missionary in the Andes, you can still walk down the mountain to a town and send a fax or make a long-distance call. But when all those immigrants came here, they were really leaving behind everything and everybody they knew. If you left some little village along the Rhine to move to St. Louis or some place, you could pretty well count on never seeing the people at home again. Your parents, maybe. Brothers and sisters. You could write — if you knew how — but letters could take months to get back and forth, if they made it at all. You'd leave knowing you wouldn't be able to go to your mother's funeral or ever see your sister's next baby—'

Shelley shook her head. 'Not necessarily. That's one of the things the teacher talked about in that beginner's class I took the other day. It's something called chain migration. A town would sometimes collect the money to send some representatives of a couple of families to America to find a suitable place to move to. Then, once the place was chosen, they would follow along in a chain. The young bachelors first, to buy land and build a few houses, then some young families, and eventually the older generation. Sometimes, the teacher said, virtually the entire town moved itself halfway around the globe.'

Jane smiled. 'That's interesting. And it makes me feel better about it. I'm going to have to call my mother when we get home and see what she knows about our family's history.'

'Aha! You're hooked.'

Jane sipped her wine. 'Well, maybe a little.'

'Let's look at Doris's file.'

Jane went and got it and, removing the papers, put them into tidy piles. The first pile was the census reports, which Shelley enjoyed as much as Jane had. 'Look at the size of the families!' she exclaimed. 'Good Lord! Here's a woman who says she's forty-six years old, and she has a four-year-old child at home as well as a twenty-four- year-old and a dozen in between! Twenty years of steady childbearing.'

Jane was studying another sheet. 'This one's odd. The mother is twenty-seven, but there's a child of fifteen. That doesn't seem likely.'

'It doesn't seem nice, either,' Shelley said. 'No, look. The husband is forty. I'll bet these older ones are his children from a previous marriage. At least I hope so. See, the children are fifteen, thirteen, eleven, and then there's a gap, then a six-year-old and a three-year-old.'

'I wonder who she was looking for on these,' Jane said. 'There isn't any highlighting or notation on the back of any of the reports. Where are they from?'

Shelley shuffled the papers. 'One from a township in New York State. One from Denver — no, two from Denver. And one that looks like a farm community in Colorado someplace.'