The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [78]
Edna’s eyes looked more glassy than usual. I noticed, now that I looked at her, that her clothes were a little messed up. Just trances, the red sweater pulled down on one shoulder, a hole in her stocking.
“I heard a peculiar sound,” Edna said. She seemed almost in another world, a hypnotized person speaking out of a trance. “It sounded just like a bag of flour hitting the dirt. Turtle had been talking, or singing I suppose would be more like it, and then she was quiet, just didn’t make a peep, but I heard struggling sounds. I called out, and then I swung my cane. Oh, I swung it high, so I wouldn’t hit the baby. I know how tall she is.” She held her hand just where Turtle’s head would be, if she had been standing on the floor in front of Edna.
“Did you hit anything?”
“Oh, yes, dear. Yes. I don’t know what, but something that had some—I’d say some give to it. Do you understand what I mean? Oh, and I shouted too, some terrible things. The next thing I knew, I felt a great heavy weight on the hem of my skirt, and that was Turtle.”
“It took us twenty minutes to get her to turn loose,” Lou Ann said. Now she was holding on to Edna’s sleeve instead of her hem.
“Oh my dear, I feel terrible. If I had only thought to come in a little sooner.”
“It could have happened to anybody, Edna,” Lou Ann said. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen, I might have done the exact same thing. You saved her, is what you did. Anybody else might have been scared to swing at him.”
Anybody else, I thought, might have seen he had a gun, or a knife.
Someone knocked at the door and we all jumped. It was the police, of course, a small man who showed his detective badge and a woman who said she was a social worker, both of them dressed in ordinary clothes. Edna told what there was of her story again. The social worker was a prim-looking strawberry blonde who was carrying two rag dolls with yarn hair, a boy and a pigtail-girl. She asked if I was the mother. I nodded, a dumb animal, not really a mother, and she took me into the hallway.
“Don’t you think a doctor should look at her?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. If we find evidence that she’s been molested we’ll need to talk with the child about it.”
“She won’t talk,” I said. “Not now. Maybe not ever.”
The social worker put her hand on my arm. “Children do recover from this kind of thing,” she said. “Eventually they want to talk about what’s happened to them.”
“No, you don’t understand. She may not talk again at all. Period.”
“I think you’ll find that your daughter can be a surprisingly resilient little person. But it’s very important that we let her say what she needs to say. Sometimes we use these dolls. They’re anatomically accurate,” she said, and showed me. They were. “A child generally doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about these things, so we encourage her to play with these dolls and show us what has happened.”
“Excuse me,” I said, and went to the bathroom.
But Mrs. Parsons was in there with the broom. “A bird is in the house,” she repeated. “A song sparrow. It came down the chimney.”
I took the broom out of her hands and chased the bird off its perch above the medicine cabinet. It swooped through the doorway into the kitchen, where it knocked against the window above the sink with an alarming crack, and fell back on the counter.
“It’s dead!” Virgie cried, but it wasn’t. It stood up, hopped to a sheltered place between a mixing bowl and Lou Ann’s recipe file, and stood blinking. In the living room they were asking about medical records. I heard Lou Ann spelling out Dr. Pelinowsky’s name.
Virgie moved toward the bird slowly, crooning, with her hand stretched out in front of her. But it took off again full tilt before she could reach it. I batted it gently with the broom, heading it off from the living room full of policemen and anatomically accurate dolls, and it veered down the hallway toward the back porch. Snowboots, at least, didn’t seem to be anywhere around.
“Open the screen door,” I commanded Virgie. “It’s locked, you have to flip that little latch. Now hold it open.