Ma died having one,
the Lindberghs said good night to one and lost it,
and somebody
last Saturday
decided to
give one away.
Reverend Bingham says
that Harley Madden
was sweeping the dust out of church,
shining things up for Sunday service,
when he swept himself up to a package
on the north front steps.
He knelt,
studying the parcel,
and called to Reverend Bingham,
who came right by and opened the package up.
It held a living baby.
Reverend Bingham took it to Doc Rice.
Doc checked it, said it was fine,
only small,
less than a five-pound sack of sugar,
spending time on the north front steps,
but Mrs. Bingham
and the reverend
warmed that baby with
blankets and sugar water,
and tender talk,
and the whole of Joyce City came forward with gifts.
I asked my father if we could adopt it,
but he said
we stood about as much chance
of getting that baby
as the wheat stood of growing,
since we couldn’t give the baby anything
not even a ma.
Then he looked at me
sorry as dust.
And to make up for it,
he pulled out a box with the rest of the clothes
Ma had made for our new baby
and told me to drop them by the church if I wanted.
I found the dimes Ma’d been saving,
my earnings from the piano,
inside an envelope,
in the box of baby Franklin’s nighties.
She had kept those dimes to send me
to Panhandle A and M.
To study music.
No point now.
I sat at her piano a long time after I
got back from the church,
imagining
a song for my little brother,
buried in Ma’s arms on a knoll overlooking the
banks of the Beaver,
imagining a song for the Lindbergh baby
stiff in the woods,
imagining a song for this new baby
who
would not be my father’s son.
May 1935