Kathy Little Bird Read online

We weren’t doing too well in Wisconsin, so Jack got on the phone to Minneapolis, where I’d gone over so big. On the phone Jack was the greatest. To hear him tell it, our passage through Wisconsin was like a prairie fire. The biggest clubs in Chicago were clamoring for me, but there was a chance we could squeeze in a return appearance, being friends and all. They bit.

  Minneapolis–St. Paul. That’s where I’d look for a nice rooming house with nice people, a place I could bring a baby to.

  Jack Sullivan wouldn’t make much of a father. I wished it had been someone like Abram. Someone kind like him, reliable like him. In the past, whenever I had to go through something, Abram had been there. Like Mum’s dying; I never could have gotten through that if not for Abram. And life, I reasoned, was as important as death. In a way they were twin happenings.

  Sometimes I got scared about having a baby and about our future. I will say for Jack that he did try to comfort me, but it was a puffy cotton-candy kind of comfort. It consisted of spinning another tale; the trouble was I had stopped believing in them. I don’t know exactly when that happened, probably it was back in some fleabag rooming house where there was no hot water, or one of those nights we had to skip without paying. Somewhere along the way I couldn’t force myself to it. It was a game I could no longer play.

  A flat-handed pounding on the bathroom door. “How long are you going to hold the can down?”

  That very night was the night I was fired. The owner was actually rather sweet about it; he slipped me an extra twenty. What I hadn’t anticipated was Jack’s reaction. He grew very quiet. I had never seen him quiet. He kept looking at me in a speculative way. I felt I was being evaluated and coming up short. The biblical term occurred to me…weighed and found wanting.

  What did he see? A woman swollen with pregnancy, about to have a baby. A career nipped in the bud, an asset turned liability. Domesticity foisted on a carefree spirit. How unattractive that must all seem.

  I knew in my bones he was figuring the angles. What if he left me? From his point of view that was a fairly good option. Shucking off me and the kid meant his old freedom, and I knew he was considering it. The cold I felt traveled to my heart.

  He slept in mornings, and I house-hunted, taking the car, checking out ads in the paper. The place I liked was a big countrified house on Oakdale Street, and the people were friendly. It was a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mason. The wife was especially nice, offering me lemonade and a slice of pie, homemade lemon meringue like Mum’s. I felt two fat tears on my face and wiped them away fast. But I think she’d seen them. The price she quoted for the large back bedroom where the sun flooded in was quite reasonable. It was just the kind of room to bring a baby to, bright and cheerful, with chintz curtains and a bedspread that matched. If I ever have a home of my own, that’s what I’d have—flowered chintz.

  The windows opened onto a large yard with trees. To a child it would look woodsy. I would tell her about real woods, I would tell her about Alberta. “I love it,” I said.

  Jack had often warned me never to praise anything I was negotiating for, but that slipped out. Mrs. Mason seemed genuinely pleased, and I don’t think she put the price up. In fact, when we were in the kitchen and I was finishing the pie, she looked across at her husband as though asking his approval and then mentioned a lower figure.

  “We could do it for that if you and your husband and the baby were to stay a while.”

  “Oh yes, we’d want to stay.”

  She beamed at that.

  Jack and I moved in. It didn’t take Mrs. Mason long to figure out that he had no job and wasn’t looking for one. In a lot of ways she reminded me of Mum. For one thing she disapproved of Jack sleeping till noon, and about eight-thirty started up the vacuum.

  “Does she have to run that thing at this ungodly hour?” Jack protested to me.

  From then on I intercepted Mrs. Mason, and we had coffee together. She confided that they had always wanted a family. She herself came from a large family, second generation in this country, originally Swedish. “From Uppsala,” she said. “But George and I haven’t been blessed with children. When you don’t have them, it seems like such a privilege.”

  “Ours wasn’t planned,” I said. “It just happened.”

  “What do you want?” she asked. “A boy or a girl?”

  “Oh, it’s a girl. She’s already named—Kathy.”

  “Like you?’

  “Yes, and my Mum. It’s a tradition in our family.” And I told her about Mrs. Mike. “That’s why the girls are always Kathy.”

  “I’ve a great respect for tradition. It links the generations.” She got up to fill our mugs. When she came back she told me that her husband owned his own business. “It’s small, a bicycle shop. But it’s ours. He buys, trades, repairs, and sells them. Both the used and the brand new. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask. What is it your husband does?” She refrained from finishing the sentence with “when he works.”

  “Jack? Oh, he’s my manager. You see, I’m a singer.”

  It was plain that Mrs. Mason had never expected that a singer and her manager would be boarders in her back bedroom, so I gave her time to digest this information.

  “Where do you sing?” she asked.

  “That’s Jack’s department. He does my bookings.”

  “I was wondering, because my husband is a Moose, and the lodge has a monthly get-together…”

  That night, lying in bed beside Jack, I mentioned the Moose and the Shriners as a possibility for additional bookings. But a series of prickings across my abdomen stopped me, letting me know the baby was preparing its move. I panicked. I needed to talk to Mum. I needed someone who had been through it to tell me what it was like, to say I’d do well and have a fine, healthy little girl.

  I needed it, but I didn’t have it. All I had was Jack, and he had gone to sleep without answering me. Would he ever be there when I needed him? Suppose when I went to the hospital Jack simply decamped? What would I do? I hadn’t worked in three weeks and our savings were running low. Even my secret hoard would not stretch much further.

  I reached out my hand to Jack, an inert lump on the far side of the bed. “Do you love me, Jack?”

  “Sure, honey,” and he turned over.

  The pains started several hours later.

  I shook Jack awake. He inquired drowsily if they were regular.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said, when I admitted they came when they wanted to.

  By morning it was a different story. The pains were strong, and they clocked.

  Now it was Jack who was in a hurry. He bundled me into the car. Mrs. Mason ran out in a robe, her hair in curlers, to give me a hug and a kiss.

  I’d never been in a hospital. How stark it was, how impersonal. It stank of cleanliness. They put me in a short, stiff, white muslin gown, slit up the back, and came in to shave me. They pulled and tugged, and for a while it took my mind from the labor pains.

  Not for long. They grew in intensity. They grew until they enveloped me. I became the pain. And I realized a terrible thing…this child could not get born. It was stuck inside me, battering to get out. But it couldn’t, it would tear me apart trying, but it couldn’t.

  When my insides finally expelled their burden, I felt degutted, as though I’d been turned inside out, and was as weak as water.

  They put the baby in my arms. I smiled. She had red hair.

  I WAS speaking to Jas. He sounded just the same. The same boy I confided in, who was angry at me for not marrying Abram.

  “Jas,” I said, “it’s me, Kathy.”

  “Who?”

  “Kathy, your sister. How many sisters do you have?”

  “Kathy?”

  “I called to tell you, you’re an uncle. You and Morrie. I just had a baby. Her name’s Kathy. And she has red hair. How are things with you, Jas? And how’s Abram?” Abram had moved away.

  You think you’re insulated and then a possibility like this jars you, displacing the comforting pictur
es in your head. The one I liked best was Abram sitting on the steps of his house whittling. I wanted him right there where he’d kissed me and knew he loved me. I was devastated that he had moved.

  “Moved where?” But I didn’t wait for an answer. “He didn’t go and get married, did he?”

  Jas only laughed.

  I WAS wakened by the nurse.

  She put Kathy in my arms.

  My heart pounded. I held her against me, afraid to move.

  The nurse laughed. “No, no, give her the breast. Your milk won’t have come in yet, but sucking encourages lactation and strengthens the baby’s ability to feed.”

  I transferred the precious bundle, held her in the crook of one arm, and with the other hand put her little face against my breast. My nipple sprung hard as her tiny mouth closed over it. What a strange and marvelous sensation to give suckle from your own body, to nourish your child. It wakens such floods of love.

  I looked into the little face. She was all eyes. Big, dark, beautiful eyes, and that fringe of red hair. “Oh you blessed thing,” I crooned at her. “You blessed thing.”

  She resumed her effort at nursing, and I began to speak to her seriously. I realized that in this first meeting with my daughter we should get to know each other. “To begin with I’ll tell you what’s important in this world. I wish you could do the same. Before you started getting born, did you see the plan of all possibilities laid out? Did you pick me? By the way you look at me I know you’re trying to tell me. But by the time you can talk, you won’t remember. And I suppose that’s the way it’s meant to be.

  “Since you can’t tell me about your world, I’ll tell you about mine, this one you’ve come into.”

  I touched her little cheek with my finger, it was so soft. “The most important thing is that you’re Kathy. Like me and my Mum, right back to Katherine Mary Flannigan. You see, the namer and the named are bound together by closest ties. That is why I am so lucky to be both mother and namer to you, Kathy.”

  Closing my eyes and travelling inward, I called. The Grandmothers came, and my own mother, and Oh Be Joyful and Mrs. Mike—“Know this new Kathy,” I begged, “be with her, watch over her steps and her heart.”

  The nurse came back. She reached to take Kathy.

  “Oh no, let me have her a moment more. We’re just getting acquainted.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time for that.” She gave me my night medication in the forrm of a pill to swallow. “This will give you a good night’s sleep. You need to get your strength back, you know.”

  She lifted Kathy from my arms. I tried to explain I still had important things to tell her, especially about Mum. “Oh, Kathy, how she would have adored you. It doesn’t seem right that you won’t know each other, that you’ll never know her except what I can think of to tell you.

  “She was a woman of two worlds. I don’t think she was at home in either. She was Cree. She looked Cree, and she married a First Nation person. I think that was one side of it. The other, she was adopted by Katherine Mary, the first Kathy, and raised white. She graduated from nursing school at the top of her class and went to war, a white man’s war. And she married a second time—white.

  “All that is buried somewhere deep inside me and you. It’s called DNA, and it makes you up, part of you, like fingernails. Kathy, the thing I want to tell you about that other Kathy—she lived. I want you to live. She loved—and I want you to love. Because she never held back, but gave herself completely, she became Oh Be Joyful’s Daughter. That was her Indian name and that was her heritage. All her life she brought others joy and finally…finally…”

  I was being shaken awake. I thought Jack was part of the dream. He wasn’t. He had my clothes laid out on top of me.

  “We’re blowing this place.”

  “What?” I asked, still groggy, still asleep.

  “Come on, baby, we’re getting you out of here.”

  I nodded. That was okay with me.

  “Let me help you into these,” and he started to dress me.

  “Does anyone know? The doctors? The nurses?”

  “That we’re getting you out? Of course not.”

  Jack cranked the bed up until I was sitting leaning against it, dressed except for my shoes, which he was fitting to my feet.

  “Where’s the baby?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you about that in the car…. Oh, she’s all right,” he hastened to add. “She’s fine.”

  “But where is she?”

  “Now, lean on me and we’ll get you down the hall.”

  “I can’t stand up, Jack. I feel as if my insides will spill on the floor.”

  He captured a wheelchair from the hall and helped me into it. I was dizzy and felt strange sitting up straight. I may have fainted. I’m not sure.

  In the car I asked, “Where’s Kathy?”

  “Don’t you worry about Kathy. She’s better off than we are.”

  “I want my baby!”

  “Of course you do. But just for now Mrs. Mason will look after her.”

  “No.”

  “Just till you get your strength back, and we get on our feet. Believe me, it’s best for the baby.”

  “But, but—”

  He quelled my fears, stopped my questions with sensible answers.

  We put up at a motel, and I was so glad to be helped into bed that I let everything slide until morning.

  It took two or three days for my strength to return. I used the breast pump Jack foresightedly provided. I had plenty of milk, but no baby.

  “When we’re able to get her,” I said, “it would be nice to go back to Alberta. Just for a visit. We could stay at Jellet’s, it wouldn’t cost much. And I’d get to see Jas.” I said Jas, but I meant Abram. “Jas is a good kid, you know. I miss him.” I knew who it was I missed. “I miss Morrie too—after all, they’re uncles now and don’t know it.” And I told him about the Canadian geese I’d seen winging their way back.

  “That’s not us, honey. We aren’t going back.” Then he told me if we attempted to reenter Canada we’d be arrested.

  “What!” But I stopped the protest that rose in me and waited to hear what he had done.

  “That’s why we had to find that out-of-the-way border crossing into North Dakota. You remember, we were pretty much on our uppers. I was flat broke. Didn’t have a cent to give you for the shopping.”

  I nodded numbly, waiting for the blow to fall.

  “We had to eat. So I left the market without paying. I figured, they’re a company, they’re insured against loss. It didn’t mean anything to them….”

  “So you shoplifted?”

  “It’s a misdemeanor. Not worth extraditing a person, but they’d pick us up at the border.”

  “You, maybe. I didn’t take anything.”

  “You were with me. You drove the car, ate the food.”

  I didn’t say anything. What was the use? A heavy hopelessness descended. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t take my baby home.

  Jack’s plan for little Kathy left not only my breasts but the rest of me aching.

  Apparently he’d talked the Masons into taking Kathy until I was able to work. This seemed monstrous to me. Jack talked and talked and convinced me it was for the best. But deep inside I knew it was monstrous. I had to have my baby. My breasts called for her, my womb ached, my arms were empty. They laid her against me in the hospital. I felt a little warm being, knew an overwhelming content, felt love. I looked into her face. We communicated.

  Jack said we had to move on. There was the matter of the hospital bill, and we had run out of money. I remembered the suggestion Mrs. Mason had made about the Moose lodge. It was a different lodge; this was in Illinois. Jack also checked out the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I was a hit at their events, and at a Masonic Temple dance.

  Jack made dates with clubs too.

  “Don’t you think we can pick Kathy up pretty soon?” Each time I asked this, Jack stalled. He always had a rea
son why it couldn’t be done—we had a lot of debts, doctors, hospital, anesthesia—until we broke even. Then, when we broke even, it was the moving around. Constantly changing surroundings was unhealthy for a baby, we had to get our feet under us, there was a great opportunity in the next town, a real gig, two solid weeks…

  Finally, reality struck. He never intended that we should raise our daughter. I had to sit down; the blow paralyzed me. I think I’d known. I think I’d known from the first, but I’d cowered in dark corners and pretended on bright stages, unable, utterly unable to face that Kathy was lost to me.

  “It’s better this way, hon,” he said when I charged him with it. “She’s got a stable home. A kid needs that. And she’s got all the love she can handle from two decent God-fearing people.”

  “And a room with chintz curtains and a chintz bedspread.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Often my eyes would fill with tears. I’d go into the bathroom, lock the door, sit on the stool, and cry. I tried to recall what it was like to hold her. She was put in my arms; I held her, talked to her, looked into her little face. We had a conversation. I told her about her name—and naming. She wanted to tell me about the other side, where she came from. I couldn’t lose her.

  I wouldn’t accept that I had lost her, I couldn’t. I wanted my baby, I had to have her.

  If I wanted her, I would have to go get her. The only way to do it was to run out on Jack. I got up while he was still snoring. I thought of taking the car. After all, we paid for it with money I’d earned. But this was something Jack would never forgive. He could do without me, but not without the car.

  So I caught the first bus out of town, telling myself with every turn of the wheels I was closer to my little girl. When the bus finally pulled into the terminal I realized there was another connection to be made. I had missed it and had an hour to wait.

  I sat on a hard bench, my eyes closed, trying to picture it, imagining how it would be. I’d talk to Mrs. Mason first, of course. She’d be upset. She must be very attached to her by now. Attached! What a word. She loved her.

  Well, I loved her too, and she was mine.