The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [79]
Slowly I moved in on the terrified bird, which was clinging sideways to the screen. You could see its little heart beating through the feathers. I had heard of birds having heart attacks from fright.
“Easy does it,” I said. “Easy, we’re not going to hurt you, we just want to set you free.”
The sparrow darted off the screen, made a loop back toward the hallway, then flew through the open screen door into the terrible night.
The medical examiner said that there was no evidence Turtle had been molested. She was shaken up, and there were finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder, and that was all.
“All!” I said, over and over. “She’s just been scared practically back into the womb is all.” Turtle hadn’t spoken once in the days since the incident, and was back to her old ways. Now I knew a word for this condition: catatonic.
“She’ll snap out of it,” Lou Ann said.
“Why should she?” I wanted to know. “Would you? I’ve just spent about the last eight or nine months trying to convince her that nobody would hurt her again. Why should she believe me now?”
“You can’t promise a kid that. All you can promise is that you’ll take care of them the best you can, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, and you just hope for the best. And things work out, Taylor, they do. We all muddle through some way.”
This from Lou Ann, who viewed most of life’s activities as potential drownings, blindings, or asphyxiation; who believed in dream angels that predicted her son would die in the year 2000. Lou Ann who had once said to me: “There’s so many germs in the world it’s a wonder we’re not all dead already.”
I didn’t want to talk to her about it. And she was furious with me, anyway, saying that I had practically abandoned Turtle since that night. “Why didn’t you go to her and pick her up? Why did you just leave her there, with the police and all, chasing that dumb bird around for heaven’s sake? Chasing that bird like it was public enemy number one?”
“She was already good and attached to Edna,” I said.
“That’s the biggest bunch of baloney and you know it. She would have turned loose of Edna for you. The poor kid was looking around the whole time, trying to see where you’d gone.”
“I don’t know what for. What makes anybody think I can do anything for her?”
I couldn’t sleep nights. I went to work early and left late, even when Mattie kept telling me to go home. Lou Ann took off a week from Red Hot Mama’s, putting her new promotion at risk, just to stay home with Turtle. The three of them—she, Edna, and Virgie—would sit together on the front porch with the kids, making sure we all understood it was nobody’s fault.
And she stalked the neighborhood like a TV detective. “We’re going to catch this jerk,” she kept saying, and went knocking on every door that faced onto the park, insisting to skeptical housewives and elderly, hard-of-hearing ladies that they must have seen something or somebody suspicious. She called the police at least twice to try and get them to come take fingerprints off Edna’s cane, on the off-chance that she’d whacked him on the hand.
“I know it was probably some pervert that hangs out at that sick place by Mattie’s,” Lou Ann told me, meaning Fanny Heaven of course. “Those disgusting little movies they have, some of them with kids. Did you know that? Little girls! A guy at work told me. It had to have been somebody that saw those movies, don’t you think? Why else would it even pop into a person’s head?”
I told her I didn’t know.
“If you ask me,” Lou Ann said more than once, “that’s like showing a baby how to put beans in its ears. I’m asking you, where else would somebody get the idea to hurt a child?”
I couldn’t say. I sat on my bed for hours looking up words. Pedophilia. Perpetrator. Deviant. Maleficent. I checked books out of the library but there weren’t any answers in there either, just more words. At night I lay listening to noises outside, listening to Turtle breathe, thinking: she could have been killed. So easily she could be dead now.
After dinner one night Lou Ann came into my room while the kids were listening