The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [75]
“My name is Mrs. Watkins,” the old woman said. She held out her hand, and I shook it for the god of politeness. Then Diana did. “Yes, that’s a good woman’s grip,” Mrs. Watkins muttered, taking another puff from her cigarette. “I’m so pleased you’ve visited me. But you must come into the back yard. You must see the children. These,” she swept her hand in the direction of the animals, “are just for show.”
Then she turned around and walked toward the back of the house. She seemed to know where everything was. We followed her. I wanted to take the whistle out of my pocket and blow it. Diana reached for my hand. She appeared to be having a perfectly good time. The huge air and the horizon weren’t getting on her back and weighing her down in the conventional ways.
I decided to be tactless. “You manage so well,” I said to Mrs. Watkins. “Considering.” Then we saw the back yard.
“You think I’m blind, but I’m not,” Mrs. Watkins said. “I have cataracts and things, but I’m not blind.” As she said this, she stared at my right elbow. “I can see all the colors, and I can see you have many pockets in your jacket. It looks like you’ve been picking mushrooms.”
I wasn’t exactly listening to her at that moment, because I had fixed my attention on her back yard. The children were in front of me, stone children and plaster children, in various postures of disarray.
One boy stood with his hands in the air, appearing to hold a kite string. Another lay on the ground with his head propped in his right hand, gazing blankly off into the distance, but in my direction. Those children had been there forever. Mrs. Watkins walked toward the kite-flying boy and put her hand on his head. “My husband made these,” she said. “He made all these children on weekends.”
I noticed the past tense. Close by me was a girl on her knees with her hands together in prayer and her head tilted upward. She had been outdoors for as long as these mountains had been here. Part of her face was wearing away, probably from rain or from the blind woman’s caresses. Although it’s probably a shame for me to admit it, I’ll say here and now that I don’t think statuary is any form of art. You can put it in a museum, and I’ll walk right past it. I don’t want to look at or touch those things. Rodin, Michelangelo, Degas: just clutter to me.
On the other side of the praying girl was another girl — very white and also plaster, my guess was — bending down and looking for a worm. There was a price tag on one of her fingers. It had smeared in the rain, and I couldn’t tell what her asking price was.
“They’re all of them very sweet,” Mrs. Watkins said. “My husband loved making these children. It was a constant love and occupied his daytime leisure hours, such as they were.” She looked up at me but her gaze missed my face and focused on the gray Michigan sky. Quite possibly she was kind. I had no way of knowing. She reached behind her and put her hand on a boy with an open mouth. He appeared to be singing rather than shouting. “Anything interest you here?”
“It all interests me,” Diana said. And then she put her hand underneath my shirt and reached for me around the waist. I could tell she wanted to kiss me in front of Mrs. Watkins, and I wasn’t going to let it happen. Diana’s hand went up my back and I felt the shivers coming on. Being among all these cement children bothered me. It was too much like being with Kathryn at the Humane Society.
Mrs. Watkins stubbed out her cigarette in an open space between two children and deftly reached in her left pocket for another one. I admired her Zippo. Those things could really light cigarettes, and they closed with a satisfactory metallic smack. “We get all kinds of people here,” she said, exhaling more smoke from her freshly lit cigarette. “Most of the children have been sold, though, as