Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [143]
“So,” Taylor says, trying not to look at the silent man under the rubber tree. “What does the voice of wisdom and compassion say?”
“I don’t know. I’m not that voice. Child Welfare Services has the final say. They can give or withhold permission for a child to be adopted out. Assuming we’re sure of jurisdiction here. Once we have all the facts, I’ll make a recommendation to Andy Rainbelt in Child Welfare, and he’ll make the decision.”
“Do I get to talk to him?”
“Sure. He’s planning on meeting you this afternoon. And I’ve agreed not to make any recommendations until I’ve heard what you have to say.”
Taylor is aware of being the white person here. Since her arrival in Oklahoma, she has felt her color as a kind of noticeable heat rising off her skin, something like a light bulb mistakenly left on and burning in a roomful of people who might disapprove. She wonders if Turtle has always felt her skin this way, in a world of lighter people.
“Sir?” Taylor speaks to the man, Mr. Stillwater.
He leans forward a little.
“What was your granddaughter like?”
He crosses an ankle on his knee, looks at his hand. “I couldn’t tell you. She was small. Me and my wife, we looked after her a whole lot when she was a little bit of a thing. I’d say she was a right good baby. Smart as a honeybee. Right quiet.”
“Did she ever talk?”
“Well, she started to. She’d say ‘Mom-mom,’ that’s what she called her granny. Little baby words like that.” His eyes light then, behind his glasses. “One time she said ‘hen apple.’ That’s what I called eggs, to tease her, when we’d play in the kitchen. And one morning I had her with me down in the yard. One of the hens was stealing the nest, and I was looking for it, and she crawled off through the bean patch and into the weeds and here in a minute she hollers, ‘Hen apple!’ Just as clear as you please.” He wipes the corner of his eye. “My wife never would believe me, but it’s true.”
Taylor and Annawake avoid looking at each other.
“Then after her mama died, seem like she quit talking. Of course, I didn’t see a whole lot of her. She was with my other daughter and a young fella over to Tulsa.”
Taylor bites her lip, then asks, “Did she go to her mother’s funeral?”
He stares at her for a long time. “Everybody goes to the funerals. It’s our way. The funeral is at the stomp grounds, and then the burying.”
“Do you have any pictures?”
“What, of the funeral?”
“No. Of the child.”
He folds himself forward like a jackknife and slides a curved brown wallet from his pocket. He flips through it for a moment like a small favorite book, pauses, then pulls out a tiny photograph, unevenly trimmed. Taylor takes it, afraid to look. But it has nothing of Turtle in it. It’s merely a tiny, dark infant, her features screwed with fresh confusion. Her head is turned to the side and her wrinkled fist holds more defiance than Turtle ever mustered in her life. Until last week.
“Here’s her mother, my daughter Alma. First day of school.” He reaches across with another small photo, and she takes it.
Taylor makes a low noise in her throat, a little cry. It’s a girl in saddle shoes and a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar, standing tall on a front porch step, shoulders square. Her eyebrows hang an earnest question mark on her high forehead. The girl is Turtle.
Taylor holds the photograph by its corner and looks away. She feels she might not live through the next few minutes. The photo leaves her fingers, but she doesn’t watch him put it away.
Taylor says, “The girl I’ve been raising came to me when she was about three. She had been hurt badly, before that. The night she came to me she had bruises