Willa shot her husband a look. “Why not Mary, isn’t that a pretty name?”
“Or Sue. How about Sweet Sue?”
“She’s Lily,” the child repeated, embracing the doll as though she’d just recognized it. “
“Look at your other presents,” Acy said quickly, wedging a sparkling box between her and the doll.
She unwrapped a painting set, a tin mechanical jumping dog, a little Limoges tea set, a new frock, a bright yellow child’s umbrella, a musical top embedded with red and green stones. She looked at each gift calmly, smiled at the jumping dog, though she was not strong enough to wind it up. The last of the gifts was a tin piano with two connected minstrel figures. When Acy wound the key, a tin woman jittered before the piano and a tin man in blackface wiggled as though playing his banjo, while the music box inside played “Camptown Races.” Acy sat on the floor. “You like this, Madeline? See, the little niggers move in time to the music.”
The child looked at him appraisingly. “They’re not playing, silly. It’s a trick.”
Acy scowled. “Well, I think it’s damned funny.”
The girl began singing the lyrics, all of them.
Acy stood up and handed Willa a box, which she quickly opened. Inside was a ring bearing a rectangular-cut diamond. She smiled and slipped the ring on next to last year’s gift. “I love it, Ace. The shape is so different. I bet it’s the only one in town.”
She gave him a watch, an expensive Hamilton pocket model, and he set it and slid it into his jacket pocket.
Down next to the tree, the girl was singing, almost under her breath, “Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day…”
THROUGHOUT JANUARY, Sam worked at the bank with the empty shell corroding in his gun’s cylinder. If there was another gunfight, he’d show the spent casing and be done with it. He told Linda that he didn’t know if he could kill a criminal. He wasn’t sure why not, though he thought about it a great deal. The robbery returned to him in dreams, and upon waking, he would imagine all the bad things that could have happened. He became nervous on the job once he understood that any day, another group of pistol-wielding men could appear in the bank’s broad doorway.
On an icy day in early February, Mr. Almeda was on one side of the entrance and the ghostly Aren on the other when Nestor Cabrio walked in. Every policeman and security guard knew him as a thug’s thug who specialized in robbing jewelry stores and didn’t worry about who he had to shoot down to escape. He’d do a job, then disappear for a year. But a few months after his picture appeared in the
As soon as he walked in, Cabrio drew a big break-action Smith & Wesson revolver from his pocket and turned toward Mr. Almeda, who was chatting with a customer. Aren knew who he was at once, stepped out from behind the door, and shot him in the back before Cabrio’s gun arm could straighten out. He twisted and fell, yelling with pain and ripping off shots at random. Aren stood over him and shot him in both shoulders, the left side of his stomach, and twice in the gun arm, placing the shots carefully as though Cabrio were a skiff and he was trying to sink it.
Sam was filling out his duty log for the week when the first shot went off. He stood up and watched the old albino looming over a man and firing at point-blank range. When Aren ran out of bullets, Mr. Almeda crab-walked closer, stepped on Cabrio’s bloody arm, and took the pistol away. Sam ran over to a phone and called the closest precinct, then the nearest hospital. The robber was hollering something in a foreign language, arching his back and rolling in his own blood. Sam didn’t want to study the gory mess at the door, so he drew his gun and sidled past the scene to check the street for an accomplice. Outside, the air was crisp and breezy, the sky blue. It was a nice day, and he decided to stay out in it forever. Somebody had to do this job, he decided, but not him. It took forty minutes for the mud-spattered ambulance to arrive, and when the attendants got to him, Nestor Cabrio began to curse them in Spanish with great gusto and creativity while Mr. Almeda translated for the other three guards, who laughed and put up their weapons.
WHEN HE SAW Linda waiting right inside the door of their house, he blurted out, “I quit the job.”
“That’s nice.” She pushed him backwards onto the porch.
“I’m sorry.”
“Right. That’s nice.” She pushed him again toward the steps, harder.
“Linda, I’m real, real sorry.” His voice began to rise in pitch, and for a moment he thought she wanted to push him across the street and out of her life altogether.
“Yeah. Let’s go now.”
“Go?”
“My water’s broke.”
For a moment he glanced at the house, wondering if she meant a pipe had burst. Then he knew. He put her in the ratty Dodge, noting that she’d loaded her bag in already. It took five minutes to start the engine, but eventually they got to the hospital. At eleven o’clock that night she delivered a boy, and by twelve they were in a ward curtained off from other women in the room. They named the child Christopher, and Sam took him, looked at his features, and saw a chin that was his, eyes that were Linda’s, and a nose he didn’t recognize. The nose would probably change over time, but it was prominent for a newborn’s, almost like his uncle Claude’s. With a thrill he understood that part of this baby would be his father and mother. For much of the child’s life, he would wonder where his ears, cheekbones, feet, angers, inclinations, and talents originated, whether from the killed folks in Troumal or from hundreds of years back in Nova Scotia. The baby writhed in his arms, a wailing package of history.
THOUGH HER MOTHER and aunts were clopping around the house all day, and everybody related to her plus the neighbors came by to see this new Christopher, Sam stayed home in the chaos and helped Linda with the baby. In the nights, after feeding him, she would hand the boy over and go back to bed. Rocking the snorting infant against his belly in the dark, he would feel how warm he was, like a soft little engine slowly burning up the milk.
One night, very late, at the beginning of April, Sam got up with Linda, and while she fed, went to stand on the back steps. He looked up at a rare clear sky graveled with stars and thought about going to work on the railroad, about buying paint for the hallway, about discovering that Christopher was another part of his own body. He couldn’t imagine being without him. He wasn’t feeling mushy-hearted; it was just a fact that if anyone took him away, it would be like losing a part of himself. As improbable as it seemed, he now missed his first boy even more. He closed his eyes and saw the ghosting of galaxies on his retinas, and a frightening patch of paleness drifting in his imagination among the real lights. He knew what the cloudy image was-though amorphous and faded, he knew. Going into the house, he took his son to rock and tried to forget what he’d just remembered. But that night he couldn’t sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING at the breakfast table, taking his time, haltingly, he told his wife the truth. She was furious.
“Sam, how the hell could you do that?” She sat back hard in her chair and banged her hands on the table.
“Like I said, these people were so well off-”
