Sallie Reynolds

Word Count 1367

About a month after my husband shot himself, my mother-in-law came to my house, talking about “the water.” My baby was almost two and hadn’t been baptized. He had to have the water. “He has to be given to God by name,” she said. “That way, if he dies, he’ll be with his father in heaven.” 

My baby might die? And he had a name. And didn’t suicides go to hell?I didn’t believe in much, but I believed in hell. With his one shot, my husband had almost taken me and the baby with him. Nothing had a shape anymore. Pieces of our life fell all around us, shards, sticks, bricks, rocks. 

Friends, neighbors, strangers advised and urged. The insurance guy asked was I claiming George didn’t kill himself? The Medical Examiner said if George had only shot himself in the heart, he might’ve made a case for accidental death. But you can’t accidentally shoot yourself in the mouth. 

George should’ve shot himself in such a way that the baby and I could have money? Oh, I thought, what am I going to do? 

Somehow I found a job as a lab tech at a big hospital and my old angel Azariah appeared at my father’s back door, with a little cardboard suitcase. She was coming with me, she said, to look after the baby the way she’d looked after me. Her own son died a few years before, shot in Korea. She said, “Looks like you and me got to walk this midnight road together.”

I rented a little apartment for us near my job. After work, I’d fall exhausted into bed, like a ditch-digger. My son would crawl in with me – we slept all tangled up, Az said, like puppies. 

Except for the baby and Az and the people at my job, I went for days without looking at anyone or speaking. 

This was the moment George’s mother came and started in about “the water.” The baby had to be baptized. She said it over and over. 

She brought food, cooked it, fussed over dust bunnies, ordered Az around. The first day, she cut off the baby’s curls, he was two now. “A little man.” She had the barber give him a haircut with a little part, all slicked down with goo. I didn’t recognize him. She bought him a little blue suit, short pants and a jacket and a miniature tie, and took him to church. And talked about the water. 

The minute she went back to the mountains, I folded up the clothes, and put my boy back in soft easy things he could toddle around in and get dirty. I actually cut up the little tie. I told Az I was afraid he’d choke himself, but mostly I just hated it. What had the manly conventions done for us so far? George had a fresh haircut and a four-in-hand neatly tied when he took his rifle, unlaced his boot, and curled his toe around the trigger.

The next month, on a weekend, I headed up to the mountains with the baby, as I’d promised. Didn’t take the fancy clothes. My mother-in-law would have to buy more of the little suits “for there.” Didn’t tell her I’d cut up the tie. 

The minute I got in the door, here she went again, about the “water.” My own aunts, my father’s sisters, lived nearby, and they chimed in – they’re all Southern Scotch-Irish Methodists, superstitious to the bottom of their white-washed hearts. They wanted to make sure the baby would meet his father in heaven. Somebody said, “Doesn’t he look just like George!”

Most of that weekend, my mind was a fog. Odd stuff jolted me: going to George’s grandmother’s house, looking at the barbed-wire fence and asking why on earth you’d put that anywhere near people and animals, we all have such thin skins. In the cemetery, I found a little stone with George’s initials, GHM, and dates. Suicides aren’t supposed to be buried in a churchyard, even when they’ve been properly baptized. His mother was County Treasurer. She managed it.

Oh, those sin-fighting ladies. In a pack, they carted the baby off to all-day church on Sunday while I stayed at my mother-in-law’s house and slept. When they got back, they kept on – he had to have the water. He had to be saved. What god, I asked, is going to send a child to the flames for not having water on his head? No, I didn’t say that. I said George hadn’t wanted baptism for his son.

If I’d been brave, I’d have defied them openly. But my brave self was worn pretty thin. What’s a self, anyway, and how do you get a missing part back? Inside me, even the simplest little thing had to be wrestled, argued, contested. What did I want? Nothing. What could I do? Nothing. Mostly I said and did whatever, and made up reasons later. But that one thing I was adamant on. 

I’ll say this for the ladies: They didn’t hold out a bribe. Didn’t offer to find me a good job up near them. Or a little house on somebody’s farm, or help with the baby, not even a little extra money. Just a constant drip drip drip. 

I thought, you can’t do worse to me than what’s been done already. But they had. I couldn’t get away from that vision of my baby dead, drops of water on his face. The ladies repeating, If he dies, he’ll go straight to hell. I bit my tongue to keep from telling them they ought to be tested for witchcraft, like in the old days. Thrown in the river, to see if they floated. I had the brains not to say it.

One time, though, I said I’d seen something in the Bible about the god Moloch eating children. I felt they were eating my baby and me alive. 

The next day, one of my aunts – not the missionary, the one everybody called “Silly” – she wasn’t deliberately unkind, it came to her naturally as breath. She said I should expect to hear from lawyers. Then she smacked her hand over her mouth, like a kid. 

But it wasn’t lawyers. I got a phone call from my uncle. He was Dean of Divinity at some big church school. He never much liked me. I was weak and at the same time “free-thinking,” not a winning ticket. He told me my mother-in-law and my aunts, his own sisters, had applied to him, he used those words, applied to me, to sponsor their attempt to legally remove the child from your custody, for lack of religious training. 

I stood there, holding the phone, mouth open like a fish. All the oxygen sucked right out. 

He agreed with the “ladies,” he said. Baptism was in the child’s best interests, and I should consider it. However, what they were contemplating, removing from his natural mother a child who was healthy and growing normally, was a sin. He couldn’t condone a sin.

I hung up the phone and cried. It was the first time since George died that I actually cried, tears spurting out. 

I knew I wasn’t a good mother. I was a bad mother. A good mother would keep up attention. Not drop into nothingness – left to me, in one of my dropouts, my boy could have toddled in the street and been hit by a car. A good mother would baptize her baby, just to be on the safe side. And surely she wouldn’t be so scared of love. Scared it would burn her up. The good mother was anybody but me . . . the good mother was Azariah.

But then I saw that my uncle had just given me a gift – the opportunity – the chance – to be that bad mother! 

I asked Az, “Do you think the ladies will go through with the custody thing on their own?” She said, “Honey, that kind needs a man behind ’em.” She said, “You got time.”

Time. Time on a plate. Time with a ribbon. Time to maybe find the old human core of myself. 

And my baby. My child. My Kevin. 

Sallie is 85, lives back of beyond in Northern California with her painter-writer-mechanic husband, a grand dog, and two hawks (she’s a licensed falconer.) She had to live this long in order to become a decent human being. Her stories are here and there, her two novels are on Amazon.