Through an Open Window

Through an Open Window

October 1956
Bentonia, Mississippi

Fall came late to Mississippi that year. Long after the rest of the country had pulled out the sweaters and unplugged the fans, black gnats still swarmed in the humid air and heat lightning split the night sky. Down at the end of Pepper Creek Road, tempers flared, and hope was thin on the ground.

Sheriff Dilbeck had been called to the house before. Today as he drove through the packed, rutted dirt he didn’t push his cruiser over thirty. No churning cloud of red dust followed behind him, looking for cracks in the windows. He was in no danger of hitting those tire-busting potholes at speed. There was no need to hurry; Hutch Dilbeck knew what to expect. Later that night, he would remember how he sang along to the radio on the way. “The Tennessee Waltz.” His wife’s favorite. He would never sing that song again.

The house squatted back off the road in wire grass, like a tick on a long-haired dog. The porch had collapsed on one end, as though God himself had just balled up his fist and punched it, and Hutch had never seen a blade of green grass in the yard.

He stopped the car, rolled down the window, and listened. The air was as still as held breath. He should have known then, but he didn’t. Of course, he didn’t.

Until the day that he died, forty years later, Sheriff Hutch Dilbeck couldn’t remember walking up to the door. All that remained was the baby girl he grabbed off the blood-spattered floor, the one who sat so still and quiet on his lap in the cruiser while the two of them waited for the ambulance to come screaming back down the road.

Everybody had gone by the time the lightning bugs began sprinkling the pine trees with yellow. Nobody saw the little boy when he toddled out of the woods and stood by the ruined porch, looking this way and that way for the family that was now gone for good.

Hutch told Martine they’d have to call the midwife. She was the person who’d know what to do. But Martine said one night wouldn’t hurt anybody. “You’re the sheriff. Nobody will care.” And Hutch let his wife have her way. She looked so right holding that baby.

So, they kept the little girl in their room that night. Hutch took a drawer from out of the old dresser, removed his clean undershirts, and laid them neatly on top of the cedar chest like a stack of little white books. Then he lined the empty drawer with the plaid blanket from their bed.

Martine held the tiny hand till the blue lids closed tight. Hutch said she slept as sound as that beagle puppy had done the night after he’d found him out behind the Blue Front Cafe. “Remember?” he said. She did. Both creatures had had a rough start, Hutch thought, as he turned out the light. With luck, neither one would remember.

He phoned up Carrie Whitlock at ten the next morning and she knocked on their front door at noon. Said, yes, she remembered the birth. Nearly a year ago now. She didn’t know much else about them. No more than he did, anyway. They weren’t from around here, she said. “They came for me late. The smell of drink on that man. The girl so thin and so young, I could hardly believe she was pregnant.” It hadn’t been easy, and in the end, Carrie had to take the girl to the hospital in Jackson. Thirty-eight miles away. Couldn’t get her to quit bleeding, she said.

Carrie had filled in the names the girl had recited. Was pretty sure the certificate had been filed with the county. Relatives could most likely be traced. Yes, she’d let them both know if no one was found. “You’ve gone above and beyond,” she told them.

They handed the baby over to Carrie, Martine holding on to the edge of the blanket a second too long. And they stood on the porch holding hands till the midwife’s old car was barely a speck on the road, both knowing they’d never again lay eyes on that little girl.

Hutch spent the rest of that day wishing the phone on the wall in the kitchen would ring. Wishing that it wasn’t a Sunday. He sat in the porch swing most all afternoon, one toe pushing the thing up and back, till the sky began bruising up over the pines.

He had to go back; he knew it. Just to look, to make sure. To fix it all in his mind. Then, if he could help it, never again. He’d bury it all with those things he’d seen in the war. Without telling Martine, he got up and walked out to the driveway, jangling the car keys in his pants pocket. He’d be back before she called him to supper.

Pepper Creek Road looked different to him now. Fire ants in the red dirt. Copperheads in the grass. Hutch slowed as he came close to the house, gravel grinding like cornmeal under his tires. He turned off the car, rolled down the windows to let in a breeze. The wind wiped the sweat from his face. The engine crackled, cooling. Hutch stared at the beaten-down house.

He could tell that it wouldn’t be long before kudzu crawled out of the woods to eat what was left of the porch. Time would rip more boards from the roof every season. But he couldn’t know the house would blow off completely the day of the Luckney tornado. He and his family would be long gone by then.

Hutch was never sure why he got out of the car. Why he went back inside. Martine said God crooked his finger. And who knows? Maybe he did.

He steeled himself before going in, didn’t look at the dark stains on the floor. It felt wrong for him to be here. Like walking on top of a newly dug grave.

As if holding a map in his hands he went straight to the room at the back of the house and stopped still. No glass in the windows, no paint on the walls, the tiny boy asleep on a bed with no sheets, his small hands balled up into fists. Mosquito bites were spattered all over his legs, his legs as thin as white straws. Hutch picked him up without thinking. Carried him out of the room still asleep.

The day’s dying light fell through the darkness of those rooms like a straight yellow road leading out the front door. Hutch put one foot ahead of the other until he was back outside in clean air. He tiptoed through the dead grass. He settled the still-sleeping boy beside him in the car, took a towel from the backseat and put it under the boy’s head. Then Hutch turned the cruiser around and drove home.

From a half mile away, he could see her. Standing alone on the porch, one palm held above her eyes to shield out the last of the sun. Watching the road, waiting. She’d always say that she knew they were coming.

They told everyone the boy was her sister’s child. The one who’d had cancer and died. Martine didn’t feel guilt for the lie. She didn’t have a sister, but nobody in Bentonia, Mississippi, knew that.

Two months later, when the job offer came in, Hutch Dilbeck applied without even asking his wife, knowing she’d want to go just as much as he did. A new start for them all, a cloud blown away from over their heads. Someplace where he could give the boy his name outright, without explanations or questions.

And besides, who wouldn’t want to live on the coast?

October 1956
Wesleyan, Georgia

It had been the longest summer Ida Mae Hines could ever remember, and she’d lived here in Wesleyan since before the Great War. She’d never been able to take the humidity like Edith could. It pressed against the windows of the old farmhouse like the devil’s hot hand, trapping her inside. So many long afternoons spent fanning herself with one of those hard paper fans from the funeral home, the ones with the flat wooden handles. The heat paid no heed to the calendar. It was the first week of October and the roses still bloomed. Edith was still picking tomatoes.

But something was different this morning. Ida Mae knew it the minute she woke. Through an open window, she heard the leaves on the pecan trees singing in a wind that, though still warm, was finally crisp on the edges. She lifted her head from the pillow and felt the first breath of fall touch her cheek. She smiled. Just when she’d thought nothing was changing, something came in the night to surprise her. Life was like that, she thought. And Ida Mae was an optimist. She believed in fresh starts.

The quiet house told her that Edith was already out. Opening the back door, walking onto the porch, Ida Mae could see her down in the grove, her pink dress moving through the shade like a light. She was playing catch with the little Elliot boy again. Seeing Ida Mae, Edith threw both arms up over her head and waved back and forth like she was signaling a boat to the shore. And Ida Mae felt like she always did seeing Edith for the first time each morning. Like a flowering vine was growing inside her, straight up from her toes to her heart.

They opened the mail over breakfast, never expecting more than the usual fare. The light bill, Reader’s Digest, McCall’s. Sometimes a letter from one of their friends from Bessie Tift College, though those were much fewer these days. When Edith picked up the official looking white envelope postmarked Mississippi, they stared across the table at each other, and Ida Mae felt an unsettling tingle of fear. She sat her coffee cup back in its saucer, flinching when it made a small clatter. She folded her hands in her lap.