We drove up to Paradise in late afternoon, just as the sun was dancing around the hilltops behind the house. “This is where you have been living all these years?” Mother asked.
Paradise Ranch warmed my heart every time I came through the peach trees and saw the gray stone house, a cool shady place to rest from the Texas sun. Even after learning that Aunt Eleanor didn’t own the ranch, I still loved it and wanted to call it home. I looked at it through Mother’s eyes, remembered the day Frank had driven me out to the place, and wished that we never had to leave. But wishing comes to no good in the end.
Mother and Eleanor carried their bags up to the porch and into the house.
Bunny and I scrambled out of the blue van. I stretched like a starfish while Bunny put out his front hooves and stretched long, like a dog. The city is okay, we thought, but this is where we belong.
When I walked into the kitchen to get pig chow for Bunny, Eleanor was setting out food. Mother sat at the table, still in a bit of a daze, her newly chopped hair all lopsided. She really had been through so much, what with getting arrested and staying in jail so long until we could get her out, and suddenly being out, buying new clothes and landing in Paradise. Who could blame her for being in a daze?
Eleanor, that’s who.
“Get up, Barbara. You need to wash and chop these vegetables.”
Mother looked down at her hands as if they might do it by themselves. I didn’t remember a single time Mother made anything in the kitchen. My mean grandmother cooked for us and when she died I took it up. I could make grilled cheese and I could fry an egg just fine. Canned soup worked for vegetables and I even learned to make salad with iceberg lettuce and bottled ranch dressing. Who’d a ever thought I’d end up living on a ranch, and by the way I couldn’t see that ranch dressing—white and lumpy—had anything at all to do with a real ranch.
When Mother hesitated, I jumped in and said, “I can do it. I cook all the time.”
Aunt Eleanor lined all the squash and tomatoes up on the counter and said, “I know you cook, Ruby Clyde, and everything else that a mother should do. But I’m going to teach your mother how to behave like a mother. Stand up, Barbara,” she said firmly. And Mother obeyed.
I scooped a jar of piglet chow, and as I headed out I heard Eleanor explaining the importance of properly washing vegetables before you eat them. My mean grandmother had taught me that much. Eleanor must have learned it from her; she was their mother after all. Grandmother must have taught them the same things she taught me. Had Mother known this and forgotten, or had she never known? Was Aunt Eleanor right that Mother had always been babied? I don’t remember my mean grandmother ever asking Mother to do anything, always me. I was more like Aunt Eleanor, if you think about it. I had the strangest thought that I might be the baby that Eleanor gave away … but that’s entirely impossible. Eleanor wouldn’t have left me at home; she gave her baby up for adoption, and besides, he was a boy. And more than all that, Mother loved me too much. I knew that even when I was cross with her.
Once outside on the porch, I poured the pellets into Bunny’s dish and filled the water bowl from the spigot. I noticed that I’d need to get bigger dishes for Bunny. He’d outgrown the little bowls.
From inside I heard Eleanor say, “Do you honestly call this clean? You don’t just run it under the water. Use this scrub brush.”
Bunny pointed his snout up at me as if asking what was happening. I suspect he had been harshly trained to drive that Cadillac back at the IQ Zoo.
“Don’t worry, Bun. You are just fine—a free little pig. I’ll take care of you. All you have to do is eat and sleep and roll around in the sun. That’s your job.”
* * *
After dinner, Eleanor sat us down on the front porch and cut our hair. She evened Mother’s up and gave mine a trim. She swept the hair off the porch while we went upstairs to shower and get ready for bed.
Aunt Eleanor asked if we would like to watch a little television, a nature show. I didn’t know she had a television until she rolled it out of the closet and plugged it in. She adjusted these things on top that she called an antenna until the screen came clear.
It was a show about giraffes. A mother giraffe gave birth on television. It was nerve-racking because her legs were so long. That baby would drop ten feet. The mother giraffe stood there by the fence, her legs planted, and she pushed and pushed, her head bobbing. This big balloon came out of her. You could see some tangled-up shape inside the balloon, and the zookeeper was yelling, “There’s the leg! There’s the nose.” The balloon got stretched bigger and bigger, like a giant teardrop. Then it snapped and fell to the ground.
The baby giraffe tore out of the wet bag and flailed around in the sand. The mother licked the baby, who was trying to stand up on those spindly legs, his knees like basketballs. But he collapsed over and over. After about a minute the little fellow pulled himself up on all four feet, wobbling and weaving, legs splayed.
Here’s the question: how did he know to stand up, soon as he was born? That’s what I wanted to know.
* * *
Eleanor busied herself in a flurry of activities: keeping track of Joe Brewer and the trial, digitizing records for the Library of Congress, and training Mother. The woman gave new meaning to faith, but she was a nun after all, so faith was her business. Bunny was my constant friend, and we pretty much stayed out of her way.
She banged away at her computer, humming to herself. Joe Brewer had asked her to research some legal things. Sentence fragments slipped out of her mouth. Didn’t see that—Oh for crying—just as I—really, some people.
Every day, she’d walk down to Frank’s to use the telephone. A constitutional, she called it, meaning exercise, and she’d force Mother to walk with her. Mother had to learn to take care of her health, she said. She’d walk down the long drive, her habit swirling in the dust. Mother followed, taking two steps for every one of hers.
For a while my mind wouldn’t rest enough to allow me to read Oliver Twist. I warded off the worries by watching television. And like Eleanor Rose, I enjoyed the nature shows. All that nature could engage my whole mind. At least I wasn’t alone in the jungle. Lions were not going to spring out and eat me. That’s something.
One week all they showed was fish, things that live on the ocean bottom: crabs, octopuses, flounders. Did you know flounders are born with eyes on both sides, but since they lie on the sand so long, one eye wanders around to the top so it can be with the other eye?
I’ll tell you something else too. If you go down deep enough in the ocean you will find fish that make their own lights. Live things can get used to all kinds of situations, but it takes time and terrible need. Like the need to get your eyeball out of the sand. Or the need to see through endless dark.
* * *
Joe Brewer visited often. We always knew he was arriving because Bunny would suddenly jump up and run around in circles, chasing his tail like a dog. Bunny knew a good man when he met him.
Joe Brewer’s visits always calmed me because he was hopeful about Mother’s chances in court. He really believed that we had the law on our side. He believed that they needed hard evidence to find Mother guilty of armed robbery. And they didn’t have that. She wasn’t even an accomplice, since she’d had no idea that the Catfish planned to go into the Okay Corral and shoot them up.
But one evening, after sharing a soup that Mother cooked all by herself (Eleanor had even taught her how to make homemade bread to go with the soup), Joe Brewer began to share his growing concern. He’d been filing motions all summer—a motion is what a lawyer does before trial. He’d asked the judge to throw the case out because they didn’t have any evidence. But the prosecutor said she was working on a witness list, and Joe Brewer couldn’t imagine who, besides the filling station owner, would be on the list.
“I can be a witness,” I said. “I can, I was there.”
“No!” they all said in unison.
Joe Brewer saw all that yelling made me uncomfortable, so he reminded me that we had already talked about that. “Thankfully, the prosecutor doesn’t know you were present during the crime, and we’d just as soon keep it that way. We don’t want to give the judge any reason to think your mother is unfit.”
“Why would he think that?” I asked, but I knew. I was a minor child at the scene of a violent crime. Mother’s face had fallen into a deep sadness. I reached for her hand and said, “She loves me.” And I tried to forget that she let the Catfish drag us across the country like that.