Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [23]
“You think it’s true?”
Jinny shrugs. “Listen. You can tell.” The woman explains that she herself didn’t see the man fall down the hole, only Turtle did. For two whole days no one else believed it, but she did, and they kept trying to get help.
“National Enquirer for sure,” Annawake says. “She read it in the grocery store.”
Oprah is talking to the mother now, whose name is something Taylor. “I can see there’s a wonderful bond between you and your daughter. Can’t you see it?” Oprah turns around, her loose rayon jacket swirling and the studio audience says Yes, they can. She asks, “You adopted her when she was how old, two?”
“Probably she was three,” the mother says. “We don’t know for sure. She was abused and hadn’t been growing right before I got her. It was kind of an unusual situation. Somebody just gave her to me.”
“Gave her to you?”
“Left her in my car.”
Oprah makes one of her funny big-eyed faces at the camera. “You all hear that?” she asks in a deeper, down-home voice. “Check your car before you drive out of the parking lot.”
Annawake looks at Jinny with raised eyebrows, and asks the TV set, “Where?”
“I’d just stopped for a cup of coffee,” the mother says, and seems a little surprised when the audience laughs. No way is she making this story up, Jinny thinks. “I was on a trip across the country. I’d just left home and was headed out West. The funny part about it is, all the time I was growing up in Kentucky my main goal was to not get pregnant. All my girlfriends had these babies up to their ears.”
“But that wasn’t going to happen to you,” says Oprah.
“No, ma’am.”
“And your first day out, somebody gives you a baby.”
“Second day out,” she says, and the audience laughs again. With Annawake watching, Jinny feels slightly embarrassed about the low laugh threshold of Oprah’s studio audience.
“You could have walked away. Why did you take her?” Oprah asks in a caring way.
“Seeing as how it’s against the law,” Annawake adds.
“Which law?” Jinny asks, surprised.
“Indian Child Welfare Act. You can’t adopt an Indian kid without tribal permission.”
Franklin Turnbo has come in and hung up his jacket. Annawake motions him over, still concentrating on the black-and-white screen. The three of them watch the mother push her hair out of her eyes, thinking. She seems unaware that she’s on TV—unlike the Cub Scout, who keeps bobbing on the edge of his chair and raising his hand as if he knows the answer.
“I felt like I had to take her,” the mother finally answers. “This woman just plunked her down on the seat of my car and looked at me and said, ‘Take her.’ I said, ‘Where do you want me to take her?’ I thought she needed a ride somewhere.”
Finally the audience is completely quiet.
“Take who?” Franklin Turnbo asks.
“That Cherokee kid,” Annawake says, nodding at the screen. The mother looks down at the little girl and then back at Oprah. “The woman told me Turtle’s mother was dead, and that somebody had been hurting Turtle. She was the dead mother’s sister, and it looked like somebody’d been hurting her too. Then she got in this truck with no lights, and drove off. It was the middle of the night. At the time I felt like there was nothing else in the world I could do but take the baby. I’d been driving forty-eight hours. I guess my judgment was impaired.”
The audience laughs, uneasily. The little girl is staring at Oprah and clutching a fistful of her mother’s skirt. The mother carefully moves the child’s hand into one of hers. “The next summer I went back and legally adopted her.”
“Can’t be,” says Annawake. “Not legally.”
Oprah asks, “Where did all this happen?”
“Oklahoma, Indian country. Turtle’s Cherokee.”
Annawake bangs the desk like a judge, bringing the court to order.
The sky has gone dishwater gray. There could be rain on this west wind, Annawake thinks. But it’s Third Saturday, stomp-dance night, and old people love to tell you that rain always holds back till the dancing is over. They’re mostly right. She parks her truck, gathers up her bouquet of blue and white papers from