All Aunt Hagar's Children

A POOR GUATEMALAN DREAMS OF A DOWNTOWN IN PERU

For more than forty-seven years, there had been miracle after miracle, each one reaching down and snatching her back from death while forsaking all the souls—loved and unloved by her, known and unknown to her—who happened to be in her little sphere of life at that moment. Leaving one of the University of Maryland’s libraries once, after failing to find an obscure book on the cohesion of solids, she had wandered over to the reference desk, curious at the last minute about a possible book on the meaning of names. The volume the librarian gave her was thin, lacking, and the best it could do for “Arlene” was to first offer a way to pronounce it, a way she wouldn’t have understood if she didn’t already know how to speak her own name. The “A” was upside down, and the “r” and the second “e” were facing the wrong direction. Then the book said of her name: “uncert. orig. and meaning.” She had been young enough that day at twenty-eight—her hair the longest it would ever be in the ponytail, she leaned against a wall in a corner where the sun was uncomfortably generous in that part of the library—to have hoped for what the book bluntly gave the name “Milagro,” which it assumed its readers already knew how to pronounce: Miracle.

Just about everything before that day at the creek was like something from a dream, a dream of some eight years. It had been a happy life, those years before the creek—an industrious father who, with his long workday over, liked to take Arlene’s cheek between his lips and hum until she wiggled away from him; a mother under whose long dress she hid from creatures they pretended were at the door; a loving brother older by five years who preened for girls much too old for him. And a farm that took care of most of their needs, an apple when the heart craved an apple, some cured meat in the middle of the worst of winter evenings, a farm that looked out onto an horizon that made her mother sigh with thanks in spring and summer as she sat on the porch with her sweetened well water. Her grandfather, healthy then, was in her life as well, but he was off to the side, waiting for God to bring him front and center.

At the lovely creek that day, they met her father’s brother and his pregnant wife. The wife had a baby finger with a long nail, and she had been wondering if she should cut the nail before her baby arrived, lest she accidentally mar the child with scratches or poke its eye out. It was Sunday morning, and what family deserved a day of rest more than theirs? Arlene’s uncle had brought half a pig for barbecuing and they all paused but a moment or so in their joking and joy before going down to the bank to cross to where the best picnicking spots were. There was sun everywhere—a little wink-wink from God. With one hand holding the smaller picnic basket, her mother took hold of Arlene’s hand and swung it back and forth as if her child were an old, old girlfriend. The two set off first. It had rained the night before, but it had rained a million nights leading up to that day and no harm had ever come to a single crossing soul. The wooden bridge to the other side was very new, and if a body interested in the chemistry and biology of life had bent down close to any part of it, she could have smelled what the woodsman smelled that moment after he made the first wounds into the trees that would create the bridge.

When they were all still on the bridge and many feet from the other shore, the creek water seemed to rise up and grow violent, with no reason at all except that it wanted to. The water chewed the bridge to splinters and razored the thick rope holding the wood together, and all the people tumbled into the creek, now nearly three times as high as it had been five minutes before. Her aunt went floating away first, the baby inside her only one and a third months old, the two pulled from the group with the ease of a twig and dispatched swiftly down the creek, which wasn’t anyone’s lovely sight anymore. Her father and uncle went next, partly in an effort to retrieve her aunt. They were all silent, amazed, and overwhelmed. The pig carcass slowly sank to the bottom of the creek, as if to hide from it all, while the other picnic fixings—the homemade barbecue sauce, the sodas, the two cakes, the potato salad, the pepper shaker on its side and the top of its head nudging the upright salt shaker—drifted away nonchalantly. Her brother followed her father and uncle, knocked down until he was flat on his back, kicking all the while, trying to swim or to right himself, his hair even now still as perfect as the jar of My Knight pomade had promised on the label, hair still looking like all of the forty-five youthful minutes he had spent on it that morning. Her mother was next, and maybe she knew that she was about to be parted from her child until that day somewhere in eternity when God decided otherwise, for she tried pushing Arlene away, toward the shore. Then she too was forced down and away, still silent, still moving her arms to try to give her child one more push into life.

The Israelites who found safe passage through the parted Red Sea could testify as to what it was like next. A shallow path of easy water presented itself and Arlene was pushed quite peacefully to the other side, her stomach heavy with a quart or more of creek water. She was exhausted once she hit the shore and did not move once there, her body expelling the water a spoonful at a time. She was eight years and two weeks, and this was the first miracle.

Even silent death can have a loudness that calls out for witnesses, and so a white man, arm in arm with his sweetheart, a short, plump Cherokee woman, happened upon them. He pulled Arlene completely out of the water in time to see everyone but her mother disappear around the bend folks called No Name Preacher. The white man, seeing Arlene’s mother reach out and grab a hickory branch standing straight up like a flagpole in the rushing water, began to jump up and down, as if to cheer her on. Arlene’s mother held on to the branch with both hands, and such a hopeful sight compelled the man, bony with almost transparent skin, to take off the new shoes his sweetheart had bought him.

He jumped in. He was only a few feet from the mother when the branch wobbled, uprooted itself and pulled her away. The water took the man as well, like some kind of punishment for interfering. His sweetheart, bending down over Arlene, now stood and called out to him. “Mitchell…Mitchell.” It was at first a soft call, as if she wanted her lover merely to come away from doing some boyish mischief. “I say, Mitchell…” Arlene stood as well and began calling out to her mother. She and the woman were holding hands. “Mama!” Arlene was shivering with the emotion of it all. The woman was now screaming the man’s name, even as the water began to calm and went back to what it had been all the days before that one. The Indian woman felt the shaking of the child and knelt down and pulled Arlene to her and began calling for her own mother, who had not been alive for thirty-five years, since before the Indian woman had turned three years old. She did not call the dead woman “Mother,” but shouted to the water using her first and middle names, the ones her mother had been christened with.

Arlene Baxter went to live with her paternal grandparents.

Her grandfather had lost his only children in the creek, along with a grandson named for him, two daughters-in-law he cherished, and an unborn grandchild whose future in his pained imagination became limitlessly bright, if only because now there was no future. The loss became his life, and no matter what grand things he might manage to think God still had in store for him, what small pleasures he had once enjoyed and might again savor—combing the rain from his wife’s hair, the taste of the first peach of the season—he could, in one horribly short moment, be back at the first crushing second he had learned of the loss. He had been a man of few words, and now there were fewer still. Arlene suffered the same feelings, compounded by the fact that she had been a witness. She was too young to feel the guilt of a survivor, but not too young to see that the wondrous and bountiful forest that had been her good life had, in less than ten minutes, been cleared down to nearly nothing.

Her grandmother had endured the same loss, but she had God and He told her He had a plan. God held her hand every step of the way.

Then her grandmother died, a woman who had tried to keep everything going for the three of them, the curtains cleaned and ironed, the cow milked and happily sassy, the neighbors over for supper at least once a week to let Arlene and her grandfather know that they were still in life and life was still in them. With her death, that all went away. The cow mooed all day waiting to be milked and would sashay on up to the house in the early evening and poke her head in the side window; and when neighbors, country people all, came to offer a hand to do anything, the grandfather said they needed nothing and asked that they go away. He woke early one morning before dawn, three months after his wife’s death, his beard filthy and stiffly matted and falling almost a foot down his chin until it turned and formed an “L” with the base pointing to his heart. He found Arlene at the kitchen table in half-darkness eating a breakfast of food burned black. With a doting mother and grandmother who nevertheless should have known better, a spoiled farm girl can be left to concentrate on things other than how long to fry an egg. The child was close to nine years old. “That food ain’t good for you, sweetie,” her grandfather managed to say. “I’s so hungry, Paw Paw,” Arlene said.

He understood enough about himself and the wreckage that was his life to know that wherever he was headed, this one innocent thing he was charged with caring for should not have to suffer the same road. He did a rough shave late that morning, got the beard down to a short “I,” and became enough of himself to telegraph a distant cousin of Arlene’s mother who ran a preparatory school for well-off Negro girls some forty-nine miles away in Nashville. The headmistress did not remember Arlene’s mother, but she did remember quite well the mother’s aunt, and that was sufficient for her to connect a line from her blood to Arlene’s blood. “Will be there with next train,” the headmistress, an economist and mathematician, telegraphed back.

The headmistress and the grandfather at first considered that Arlene go with her back to the preparatory school, but he was well enough to know that that would crush him once and for all. Instead, the headmistress wrote to a teacher, one of her former students, who lived and taught in a nearby place called Alamo. The headmistress asked that she come out regularly and tutor Arlene “before she descends into savagery.” The teacher, Miss Waterford, had found several gems among her colored students in Alamo, and she was confident that she might find another in Arlene. She arrived with her fiancé in his car, a day after the headmistress returned to Nashville, and her spirits sank in those first minutes with Arlene: English so bad it sounded like a foreign language. And the child knew the sum of one and one only because she used her fingers. Miss Waterford returned to Alamo and immediately wrote to the headmistress, “Why have you asked still another burden of me, Dr. Hines? Am I always to be tethered?” Two and a half decades after that letter, Miss Waterford, then the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, would be rewarded, once again, when Arlene dedicated her second book, The Relationship of Solids to Ethereal Matter, to “Miss Waterford, Who Called Me Back from the Wilderness.” After she received the letter following Miss Waterford’s initial meeting with Arlene, the Nashville headmistress promptly wrote back to her former student, “Would I place this burden on your shoulders if I did not know that my blood, the blood of your teacher, flows through Arlene’s veins?”

Arlene’s grandfather sold the farms of his two sons and banked the money for Arlene’s future, with the headmistress being given fiduciary responsibility. He then sold off parts of his own farm and used the proceeds to better his and Arlene’s lives, including paying for Miss Waterford’s teaching and for neighbors to come in to clean and cook. He kept enough land to make a buffer, so that he would not have to see from his window or his porch other men, strangers or friends, toiling land that had tried to break him and his father and his father’s father.

The grandfather’s mind slowly returned to that of a man who had no more than an hour before lost so many loved ones to the creek. There were some days with Arlene when he would manage to raise his head above the pain to enjoy a meal with her or a wagon ride into town for her favorite ice cream. Horseshoes out in the backyard. But more and more of the time with him were silent hours they spent sitting side by side on the porch. The sun came up to the right. He would sometimes try to step through the silence and take her hand in his and offer some memory of one of the dead, but before he could finish, he would turn quiet and take his hand from hers and place it back in what passed for his lap. The sun went down to the left, and throughout the day it dangled out there before them, not offering much that was good, and not offering much that was the other way either. When she knew he was not coming back with the rest of any memory, she would take from the crowded porch table beside her one of the many books Miss Waterford had purchased for her. The moon was out there, too, but when it was at its brightest, at its strangest, the grandfather was usually asleep, and Arlene was reading in her bed.

Miss Waterford, afraid that a child with Arlene’s mind would pass too quickly into adulthood, had made playing with the neighbor children a part of Arlene’s everyday regime when she was not there. But Arlene, who began to live only to read, was forever neglecting to go down the hill to the right to the Mason children or up the hill to the left to the Daileys, and so when her teacher returned and questioned her about playing, she would lie, and not very well, “another sign,” Miss Waterford wrote Dr. Hines, the Nashville headmistress, that “she may be becoming old before her time.” And so despite all Miss Waterford’s efforts, she became a child who could “live peacefully unto myself.” That was what she wrote in her essay when she applied to the College of the Holy Cross at sixteen. An aging Jesuit—who had discovered too late in his life that while God walked with him, he did not enjoy walking with God—read the essay. He was a chemistry and biology professor at Holy Cross who had volunteered to read the essays of the college’s science applicants as one small way to ease his growing despair. He loved the phrase “live peacefully unto myself,” and he knew even before he had finished her essay that the school on the hill might not be such a bad place if it gave a home to a young woman who knew at least that one thing about herself.

But before Holy Cross, and before she went off to the headmistress’s preparatory school in Nashville, there were three more miracles. The first and second saw the deaths of four human beings and two cows and three chickens; that second miracle, which took the lives of two humans and two chickens, occurred on a weekend trip with Miss Waterford to Alamo. (“When the roll of the dead is called,” Arlene at eighteen wrote whimsically in her diary while at Holy Cross, “why should dead cows and dogs and chickens be excluded?”) After those two miracles, a sad, tiny lot of the Tennessee dispossessed began calling Arlene “the blessed one.” And some of them, from all around the state, traveled to the farm and knocked gently on the door and asked before it was opened if they might have a word with the good Miss Arlene: Parents with children crippled from birth with gnarled limbs. Men who had gambled away their pittances and vanished while their families were reduced to begging. Women going into madness because one of the first lessons they had learned in life was to bed down with any man who told them sweet but empty words. Arlene, who never came out to them, was never afraid, just curious as she watched from the parlor windows as neighbors shooed them away. (“Why did not anyone,” she wrote in her diary at thirty in Washington, D.C., “seek to burn me at the stake?”) In the end, after a week of people coming by, the headmistress and the teacher, backed by the grandfather in an especially lucid moment, had to hire three armed men—one Negro on a horse, one Negro on a twenty-five-year-old motorcycle, and one white man in his father’s noisy pickup truck—to keep people from coming onto the property. A few souls still came to stand across the road in the pasture a half a mile from the house. They sat and stood in all kinds of weather, and they, never more than ten at a time, were out there for nearly seven months, thinking only one thing—“If I have already been through a part of the doom, maybe this child can deliver me and mine.”

It was only after the third miracle before going to Nashville that she began to see herself as special, but it gave her no optimism about her place in the world. (“If,” she wrote in the diary her second week at Holy Cross, “you live your life and all about you they are dying, what kind of life can you ever have?”) After the dispossessed stopped coming and watching from across the road, Miss Waterford told Arlene to go out and play again with the neighbor children. The teacher, having seen through her earlier lies about playtime, began requiring Arlene to write compositions of at least five hundred words about playtime episodes. And so not five weeks before going to the Nashville Beginning School for Negro Women, not two months after turning twelve, Arlene was playing school with the Dailey children who lived midway up the hill to the left. It was her turn to be in the role of teacher as the brand-new green Chevrolet with its brand-new driver topped the hill at a selfish speed and came down the road going past the Dailey property. Her hands behind her back, Arlene had shifted the pebble from her right to her left hand and presented her closed fists to the youngest Dailey girl, seven-year-old Petunia, who was on the bottom step there at the edge of the Dailey home. Picking the hand with the pebble would have sent Petunia from the kindergarten to the first grade, the second step. Her siblings had all passed and were on various steps and Petunia alone was on the kindergarten step, mumbling that she was being left behind and that it was not fair. The child, her knees almost up to her chin, raised one end of the Band-Aid on her right knee, peeked at her new cut, blew it a kiss, and then tapped the end of the bandage back down. As that hand prepared to touch Arlene’s left hand, the car, which had swiftly left the road with its horn honking all the way, came speeding into the clean, flowered yard, into the children on the porch in their many grades. Arlene’s closed hands, palms down, were still outstretched, and when she looked up from them as the wind and violence of it all blew her plaits and her dress, she could see the empty space the car had made, could see through the fence a half a mile away, all the way over to the mountains. It was, to be sure, a new view, and her mind took longer than it should have, given her history, to tell her why.

She was still in bed when Miss Waterford arrived late the next morning, Sunday. It was the morning after the night Miss Waterford had decided that marriage was not what she needed at that time in her life. The books were all closed when she opened the door to Arlene’s bedroom. The grandfather was in a bright corner of the room in a chair with a cup of cold coffee in both his hands. He had been there all night, and he, like the teacher, had already decided about his life.

“I can’t write a composition, Miss Waterford,” Arlene said as the teacher took off her hat and stuck the hatpin down through the top of it. The man Miss Waterford would have married had a heart not of this world, and he had lent her his car to come to Arlene even though she had told him she would not marry him.

“I know,” Miss Waterford said, “I know.” She acknowledged the grandfather and then sat on the side of the child’s bed. “Perhaps I have long asked too much of my students.” She placed her hat at the foot of the bed. She took Arlene’s hand. The journey to Arlene should have taken her by the Dailey place, but Miss Waterford had chosen the long way around. “Perhaps the sun and the moon are too much to ask of my students. Perhaps the moon is enough.” It was something the headmistress, Dr. Hines, would have said. And Miss Waterford thought, I have become what I said I would not become.

A neighbor stayed with Arlene while the grandfather and Miss Waterford attended the funerals of the five Dailey children. The three surviving Dailey children had been away in town the day their siblings were killed, at the funeral of an aunt who died giving birth to triplets. The brand-new driver of the green Chevrolet had died as well, but his funeral was held on another day, just before dawn in a part of Tennessee he and his people had never seen.

As the grandfather had suggested, Miss Waterford took Arlene with her to Alamo. When they returned more than two weeks later, again in her former fiancé’s car, the grandfather was nowhere about, and no one could tell them what had happened to him. Miss Waterford stayed with Arlene for almost a week as the authorities made a show of trying to find the man, but the grandfather was never seen again. “She is an orphan again,” Miss Waterford, who would follow Arlene to the Nashville school, said to the headmistress on the telephone. “I’m an orphan again,” Arlene said, thinking of the children in the work of Charles Dickens as she and Miss Waterford packed her things. “But you know more than you did before,” her teacher said. “I don’t think so,” Arlene said.

The headmistress, Dr. Hines, had been taught home economics and not a great deal more as a girl and young woman at Mrs. Wilbur Ross’s Finishing School for the Colored Elite. Years before Dr. Hines decided to establish her own Nashville Beginning School for Negro Women, her first husband, a teacher of English, a writer of many novels about “the highest and brightest” class of Negroes, had left her, her finishing school education, and their two children. She was certainly the best wifely material the finishing school ever turned out. In the home of that marriage, the collars of all her husband’s shirts had been starched to cardboard stiffness, and there were homemade sachets tucked discreetly into the back corners of drawers. But one day, a child on either side of her, the woman who was to become the headmistress Dr. Hines opened the tastefully yellow door to that home and found that what her husband wanted was not in her repertoire. And with that inadequate repertoire after the writer-teacher left her, she, a child on either side of her, had had to go back out into the world and strengthen her credentials, becoming along the way an economist and a mathematician. “Numbers do not lie,” Dr. Hines told Arlene and her entering class their first day of orientation. “If they do, the fault lies with you.”

The Nashville school, with grades six through twelve, usually had about a hundred colored girls of all shades, mostly the daughters of a few enlightened, well-to-do Negroes from throughout the country who had looked at the world and discovered, as Dr. Hines had, that Negro girls, their daughters, should be fortified with as much education as possible. Those hundred students included fifteen or so poor girls, whose educations were paid for by scholarships primarily financed by the wealthier families. “Each One Help One” was the school’s motto. Indeed, the headmistress, still overseeing Arlene’s money, took from Arlene’s bank account money that helped pay for room and board for an Alabama sharecropper’s daughter.

The years there were over before Arlene knew it; in four years she absorbed what it took most girls six years. She had few friends, and Dr. Hines and the other teachers did not push her to go out and make any more than those three or four with whom she was comfortable. They were mostly satisfied that she had found comfort and success in the solidity and certainty of science, primarily biology and chemistry. If, Arlene had discovered happily, you did everything you were supposed to do—from the correct calculations to the right amount of flame under the Bunsen burner—it all came out right in the end. She found comfort in the caves of science where good and innocent people did not die for no other reason than that they were near her.

At twenty-two, she would write in her diary that “the world escaped fairly unscathed” from her time at Nashville and at Holy Cross. She could write that by not counting, for one thing, the fire at the tiny hotel in West Virginia that occurred in her last year at Dr. Hines’s establishment. She had feigned an illness so as not to have to go to West Virginia, but Miss Waterford knew her well by then and made her go anyway. Her class went for a long weekend to a small and beautiful town where John Brown and his men were said to have spent their last night before the Harper’s Ferry raid. One of the owners of the hotel, the husband, was nearly deaf and misheard on the telephone how many were in Arlene’s class, and so one student was required to stay in an alcovelike attachment connected to the main building by a short walkway. Arlene volunteered and spent two and a half nights in a pleasant room big enough for only one. Next to her room was a larger one with a Washington, D.C., family of five. In the diary entry, she would also feel safe in not counting the alcove fire because it was started by the youngest child of the D.C. family and because one human being survived. The fire child died, and so did her mother and two siblings. The father escaped because that night he had gone into the woods where John Brown and his people had slept to be with the other owner of the hotel, the wife. That wife did not believe her husband was almost deaf and went to the woods so he would not hear her making love among the animals and the wind-touched trees and a brook that gurgled loudly even though it was nearly dry. The fire child had awakened in the night, afraid, and once again had found her father, a smoker, gone.

And in the diary Arlene did not count the disastrous boat trip while at Holy Cross, primarily because there were two survivors, one being a young man from Wesleyan University. The boat trip was their second date. Those dates were the first of her life. She was a senior, and he, Scott Catrell, was a junior at Wesleyan. Up from Connecticut to visit friends, he had seen her walking in downtown Worcester. Had followed her that day the two miles or more all the way back up the hill to Holy Cross. After three months of telephone calls and letters she had said yes to a date in late January of her last year, for no other reason than that her mentor, the priest of failing faith, had died a week before. “Scott is awkward in his own body,” she wrote weeks after the boat trip to Miss Waterford, who had become the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, “as if he had been put together by a dozen Dr. Frankensteins. But that is not why I know I could never love him.” She had come to believe that death, with all her miracles, had merely overlooked her somehow, and that to make up for such a stupendous mistake on its part, death was planning something quite spectacular.

After Holy Cross, there was Georgetown and then the University of Maryland as she worked for two doctorates. While earning the second degree, she secured a research position at the National Institutes of Health and was given a nice corner space to work in, alone. Not too much sun and not too much moon; and intercoms and telephones—and later computers—to connect her with two assistants down the hall and around the corner from her space. She could count her friends on her two hands, including those she had in Tennessee. And though she begged him not to, Scott Catrell followed her after Wesleyan to the area and entered Howard University’s medical school. They never lived together, but dated and saw each other sporadically for nearly two decades and a half. He married three times—always to women who first asked him to marry them—and he was divorced three times. No children. Over all those years, he was comforted only by the fact that there were no other men in Arlene’s life beyond those, living and dead, who had cleared paths and brought light to the mysteries of biology and chemistry.

When she was forty-three, and had not seen or talked to Scott for two years, they noticed each other at the 12th Street entrance to Hecht’s—she was coming out, empty-handed, and he was going in. It was a very cold day, cold enough to snap the bones of steel-driving men, a day when five homeless people would die in their sleep. “How am I doing at not ever contacting you?” Scott asked, smiling. Four months later, Arlene became pregnant with his child. “How,” she wrote the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, “could two intelligent people of science be so stupid as to become pregnant?” “People of science?” the Reverend Mrs. Campbell wrote back. “Despite all that has happened to you, you are, in the end, no better than all the rest of us, science or no science, who must fight to stay afloat. We want, we rage, we desire, we fail, we succeed. We stand in that long, long line. Where were you when they taught us that?”

Arlene had been in the family way for a little more than a month when she began weighing the pros and cons of an abortion. “I am trying to think of it as I have been trained to do,” she wrote the headmistress Dr. Hines. “The word ‘zygote’ keeps playing in my head over and over. But lately I have been giving the zygote names. It looks into my eyes sometimes and dares me to blink first. It swims and I call it by name back from the edge of the pool because it has swum too far. Beyond the edge, there are dragons and monsters because that world is not round but flat.”

One thing happened that caused her to have the child. And that same thing told her to give the child to Scott to raise. On the better days at the National Institutes of Health, she took her lunch on the grounds under an oak tree as far from people as she could manage. On a day in April, three months pregnant, she smelled the storm before there was a cloud in the sky. She continued eating and did not stop until the rain came, not a bad rain, just one that told her it was best to stand rather than to sit. There was no one about. After she stood, the thunder and lightning followed, which surprised her because the rain had not signaled that kind of storm. She decided to stay under the tree. Then, in seconds, as the storm grew fiercer, she heard two people laughing and talking on the other side of the oak.

She at first thought to walk away, but chose not to. After all, they were the invaders. And so, with the world quaking with the storm, she went around to confront the two. “Leave!” she shouted to them. “Leave this place!” They were a black girl and a white boy, not yet out of high school. It was evident that the boy was losing the war against his pimples. He did not seem to understand what Arlene was saying, but the girl said, “What is your problem, madam?” The newspaper article would come out with the girl’s photograph—a face much lovelier than Arlene would remember, and that was because the black girl was defiant the day of the storm, and that defiance was not lovely. “What is the matter with you, madam?” The white boy said, “Let’s just go, ma chérie,” which was what his grandfather called his grandmother. The article would not have his photograph because he was not killed.

“Let’s just go, ma chérie,” the boy said again, and he began walking away in the storm as an example to the girl, a scholarship student at an awfully expensive prep school not far from NIH. The boy had gone but three yards when Arlene decided simply to go back to her side of the tree. “Suit yourself,” she said before leaving. “Suit yourself,” the girl mocked. The boy was five yards away when the earth quivered and the wind swept through and then the lightning came, down into the tree and down into the girl. After the sound of the lightning hitting them, there was nothing except a slight yelp from the girl and an ancient complaint from the tree and a cry from the boy as he ran toward her. The tree, wounded, began tumbling toward the boy, and whatever sounds he made after that were swallowed up by all the young spring leaves.

Arlene sank to her knees in a fit of crying, shivering as the heat from the lightning began to dissipate. Even after years of it, the incredible wonder of it still had the power to pull her down. She heard people on the other side of the tree rushing toward the couple. Her child came into the world in October, a late baby. A boy she and Scott agreed to call Antonio. Arlene tucked her purse under her arm and stood, now afraid that others would be hurt because the storm had not let up, and she stumbled down along the iron fence of the NIH grounds and eventually found a gate that took her out to Wisconsin Avenue. The baby was born bald, and then, in his ninth month of life, when Arlene gave him to Scott to raise, Antonio’s hair came out, nearly an inch in one week.

She caught a cab some five blocks from NIH, hoping as she got in that the driver would complain about her wet clothes so she could tear him apart. The man said nothing. The picture of the dead girl in the newspaper would be a recent one, and as Arlene read about her, about what a grand future people had predicted for her, Arlene thought what a poorer world it would be without Antoinette Champion. The cabdriver, black and old, delivered her to the front door of her condominium, and he must have known something was the matter because after he helped her out of the taxi, he stood at the door as she tried first one key and then another to open the door.

On the Fourth of July some eleven years after the birth of Arlene’s son, Avis M. Watkins, nine years old, spent most of the morning on the floor of her room in a three-bedroom house on Minnesota Avenue, N.E., sulking and telling all her troubles to three stuffed animals. The girl was the youngest child of Marvella Simms, who, three years after her divorce, had returned to her maiden name. The child was upset that morning because Marvella had told her, for the fifth time, that there would be no fireworks at home, that they were going down to the Washington Monument to watch the display with Francisco Padmore, her mother’s fiancé. Avis liked Francisco, she confessed to the animals that morning, but the girl liked fireworks even more. “We all need some fireworks,” Avis told the black bear as she took the back of its head and shook it twice. They, she and the animals, were under one of the windows, and the sun came down through that window and caught the bear’s blue eye and made it twinkle as he nodded.

“Wouldn’t you like to hold one of them sparklers insteada watchin stuff shootin up in the air?” she asked the bear, who nodded yes. The child, her parents had decided, was recovering quite well from what Avis’s therapist had called “that unfortunate episode,” which had occurred nearly a year ago. “Me too,” she said to the bear. “You and me both.” The night of the “episode,” she had stayed at the Harvard Street, N.W., home of her best friend, and during an hour long before dawn, the friend’s father, estranged from the mother, had broken into the home while everyone was sleeping. “When I get grown I’ma do all I wanna do and nobody will say no.” The father shot to death the mother, his mother-in-law, his wife’s boyfriend, and his own five children. Avis survived with no wounds, covered in her friend’s blood, enough blood for the father to think in the near-darkness that she had been shot. This was her first miracle. “Make me go down to some stupid fireworks show.” The father had only one daughter, Avis’s friend, but for those moments after he shot into the bed with his daughter and Avis, he looked at Avis, who kept her eyes closed and breathed shallowly through it all, and the man, insane because his wife’s love for him had shriveled down to nothing, thought he had two girls and said to himself that two dead daughters were better than one because it would hurt his father-in-law even more.

In the late afternoon of the Fourth of July, they—Avis, her mother, and her two brothers, Marvin and Marcus—drove to Francisco’s house in Anacostia, a house his grandfather had built. They had a late lunch. Francisco was also divorced, a man who worked three floors up from Marvella at the telephone company, and though she had seen him about for three or so years, she had not noticed him until he sang “Ave Maria” at the company Christmas party. (“That dude got pipes!” Marcus said at the party.) He had no children. They drove to the Stadium-Armory Metro station in Francisco’s Cadillac. (“Man,” Marcus said during the ride, “I could live in this thing if it had a bathroom and a TV.”) Of Marvella’s children, Avis was Francisco’s favorite because she was the first to like him, had silently taken his hand three months after she first met him as the five of them strolled out of a movie theater.

After the fireworks show on the Mall, they went back to the subway at the Federal Triangle stop, hoping to avoid the hordes at both Smithsonian stations. Arlene Baxter and Scott Catrell were there as well; their son, Antonio, was staying the summer with Scott’s people in Philadelphia. “Go out with Daddy,” her son had told Arlene before he left. “Hundreds die after fireworks explode prematurely,” she read in her mind as he spoke. She and Scott had sat across Constitution Avenue from the crowds, practically alone on the lawn of the Commerce Department. She enjoyed the time with Scott and was not thinking as they arrived at the Federal Triangle subway platform a minute or so before Marvin, Marcus and Avis Watkins. The children had pushed ahead of Marvella and Francisco. He told them to wait, but the children were quickly separated from the adults, mainly by a large family from Seat Pleasant. The platform lights began to blink, announcing the approaching train, and one of the Seat Pleasant boys bumped into Marcus because someone was bumping into him. Marcus turned and pushed the boy back. “Yall tryin to squeeze me to death in this damn place!” Marcus shouted to no one in particular.

When he turned back, Arlene and Avis had tumbled over the platform. Scott reached for them but was too late. The people who saw them down, down on the tracks were stunned for a long moment, stunned to see human beings in the no-man’s-land of the subway system where riders had never seen humans before, not even workmen. The blinking went on, and the entire platform cooled with wind pushed ahead by the coming train. People began reaching for the woman and the girl, but the confusion of arms and hands and the pushing and shouting only made things worse, and a man warned everyone that more would be falling to their deaths, and for several crucial seconds the bodies at the platform’s edge leaned as one away from death. Arlene, realizing even in her panic that she herself would be saved, sought to lift the girl, but her arms, bruised and weakened from the fall, failed her. She heard the roar and thought the train was only feet away but when she looked to face it, there was nothing but forever blackness through the tunnel. Blackness and then, suddenly, the lights of the train bearing down like the eyes of a creature not to be denied. The train shook the ground and it shook all the hearts of those who knew the woman and the girl were done for. Seeing that the girl could not get back up to the platform in time, Arlene knelt and grabbed the waist of the girl and Avis, knowing the woman could not get to safety, turned and grabbed Arlene back and they fell down and Arlene rolled with her into the recess under the platform. She pushed Avis as close as she could to the wall and covered the girl with her body. Up on the platform, the blinking went on. Scott bowed his head. Three men six feet from the edge of the platform fainted, but the crowd was so thick they had nowhere to fall. Marvella and Francisco leaned forward but could not get close to the children. Marcus moaned to see his sister disappear, then he cursed, and so did his brother as he gripped Marcus protectively by the shirt collar. The face of the first car emerged from the tunnel and the woman running the train saw the chaos and the people only inches from the edge of the platform and she sounded her horn. The brakes, a screeching mess, were of no use, but still the subway woman tried. As the train came on, Avis, having survived a night that saw the murders of eight human beings, knew somehow that she would not die, and so there arose a need to protect the stranger holding her and she put one arm around Arlene’s shoulder and one hand behind the woman’s head and pulled it into the crook of her own neck. Dust and dirt stirred up by the oncoming train coated them, pushed into their nostrils and their ears. And with wind and noise and debris, the train arrived.

Arlene’s telephone number was unlisted, but Avis begged her mother to help her to reach her and Marvella, the telephone company worker, got it. For some three weeks, the child left the same message: “Lady, would you please call me? I’m the girl at the subway.” They had last seen each other that night at George Washington University Hospital. Avis did not know what she would say if Arlene ever called back; she only knew she wanted to hear the woman’s voice again. After word spread about what had happened, with reporters setting up camp outside her home, wanting to talk to “the Miracle Woman,” Arlene had left her home a day after the incident and had gone to stay with Scott. The reporters spoke to Avis, but two days after seeing his child on television and in the newspapers, Avis’s father called Marvella and told her no more of that. He had despaired to see his daughter in one television interview, tiny and in a pretty blue dress, sitting on her couch between her mother and her brothers. Her responses reduced mostly to the shaking of the head and Yeses and Nos. “This is one reason why I divorced that woman,” the father said to the television screen. “Lady, would you please call me? I was at the subway with you.”

The newspapers said Arlene had saved the child, because that is what Avis told them, but as Arlene sat day after day in the dark at Scott’s place, she became less certain of what she had done. By the second week, she started thinking that the child had actually saved her, which was not how the world worked. She began to long for the girl, for her presence, and had she known the girl had been calling, she would have called her back. Perhaps they had saved each other, she thought.

Near the end of the second week, Scott went to Arlene’s home to collect her mail. He called her and told her the telephone message machine was full. She called her number and retrieved the messages. To hear the child broke her heart. She had heard the voice before, but she had heard it years and years before, and it had belonged to someone who was not alive anymore. Arlene was in her sixth decade of miracles.

They—Marvella and her children—came to Scott’s apartment that first Saturday in August when Scott had gone to Philadelphia to get Antonio. Avis stared at the woman and held back and leaned against the door once Arlene shut it. Marvella said, “You been dyin to see her all this time and now the cat got your tongue.”

Arlene seated them on the couch facing the long window in the living room, but Marcus soon got up to look out the window onto Massachusetts Avenue and down 13th Street. “You live pretty high up,” he said of the tenth-floor apartment, “but my uncle lives even higher in Maryland.” Arlene sat in the love seat catty-corner the couch. She and Avis did not take their eyes off each other. “Oh,” Arlene said to Marcus, who returned to the couch. “He live out in Maryland and they not afraid to put up high places. But in D.C., they pretty scared of bein high.” He looked up at his brother, but Marvin, sitting between his siblings, said nothing.

“Would everyone like something to drink?” Arlene said after several minutes, and when she stood, there was a sharp intake of breath from the girl.

“A nice cold Coke,” Marcus said. “No,” Marvella said, “orange juice for everyone.” “Juice for sissies,” Marcus said.

Avis continued to look at Arlene, who said, “Why not come with me?” But the girl seemed unable to move. “I’ll help you,” Marvin said at last, looking down at his sister. “She shy that way.”

She’s never gonna be the same again, is she?” the boy said, watching Arlene as she looked in the icebox.

“No, son, she won’t be.” Avis’s father had called Arlene the night before to tell her about the eight murders. She remembered the crime but did not recall that a child had survived. “But in her way, she’ll still be Avis. Her family will see to that.” She turned from the open icebox. She had not expected such a boy. “We will all survive this, son.” She had not felt such confidence until she saw Avis walk into the apartment and cling to her with her eyes. Marvin looked to a series of ten photographs to the left of the refrigerator, five in color on the top row and five in black-and-white on the bottom. “The top one to the far left,” she said, pointing, “that is my son at one year old. Next to it is my son at two years old, and there he is at three years old….” Each photograph was of the child at each of his birthday parties, and he was happy in all of them. “That is my son at six years old. That is my son at seven….”

Marvin wanted to know why there were color pictures only on the top row.

“Those were taken by my son’s father,” Arlene said. “I was not there. I was away. The bottom photographs are mine.”

“Color is better, I think,” Marvin said. He avoided her eyes, afraid that he had offended her.

“That is what they are telling me, but I am too old to change that way.”

Over the next months, there arose between the girl and the woman what Arlene described in her diary as “a love I cannot live without.” She often felt a greater pull toward Avis than toward her own son. The girl and the woman talked every evening on the telephone, and the child spent at least one weekend a month with Arlene. Avis’s father, seeing what Marvella was slow to see, would now and again give up one of his weekends with Avis so the girl could be with Arlene. Then, toward the end of January, Marvella began to see as well, and she allowed Avis to stay some weekday evenings with Arlene. They wrote to each other daily, as if there were ten thousand miles separating them. “One day you will see that Tennessee creek again for the first time,” Arlene wrote her in March. The girl had never been near Tennessee. “And I will see the house again for the first time.” She was speaking of the Harvard Street house of the eight murders, a house she had never seen. A year after the people had been killed there, two wealthy white lawyers bought it, not caring about its history. Indeed, they decorated the front hall with copies of the newspaper articles about the crime, about the girl who had survived but had lost her best friend.

In April Scott asked Arlene to marry him, but she gave him no answer. He asked three days before he mailed a flyer about the Guatemalan woman. The creator of the flyer seemed to expect its readers to know who the woman was, and it gave little information about her, just where she would be speaking in Washington in May. At first Arlene could not understand why Scott thought she would be interested, but an article in the newspaper five days after she got the flyer told her more. There was a color photograph of the woman, Eulogia Rios, spread over a fourth of the top page of the style section. Eulogia, eighteen years old, was standing on a Washington street in simple brown shoes and a dress of brown and red and blue stripes. She was looking so deeply into the eye of the camera that Arlene felt as if she herself had taken the picture. In two separate photographs on either side of Eulogia were her paintings. The headline above her head read, “The Miracle from Guatemala.” One painting was of Arlene’s pregnant aunt, the one who had been pulled away and killed by the angry creek in Tennessee.

Avis’s parents permitted Arlene to take the child to hear Eulogia speak, and the two got seats in the fourth row in an auditorium at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Twelve framed paintings in the same style as those in the newspaper photographs were displayed along the stage. Not long after they sat down, Avis pointed to three of the paintings and whispered to Arlene, “I know those people.” At seven thirty precisely, a nun walked onto the stage from the left, followed by Eulogia in a light blue dress and simple black shoes. There was applause, but after the nun, still walking, raised her hand, people stopped. The nun introduced her and Eulogia stepped to the podium, and in the English she had learned over nine years in the United States, she began speaking.

She talked without tears, in an even voice that a practiced traveler might use to share the stories of her travels. She had been eight years old, she said, sitting in the third row of a classroom of a school that the villagers had just begun building the week before. There were no walls and the children could see out all over the land as their family members and neighbors farmed and worked. “The wind was a good one that day, coming down the mountains and over the valley,” Eulogia said, patting her hand gently to the side of her face. Their teacher, Eulogia said, was a young woman who had been born in the village and had returned to live there, bringing her husband, a doctor born in Peru. If she had told her story before, it was not obvious.

They were newlyweds, the teacher and the doctor, and the schoolchildren, that morning, had managed to get her to talk about their honeymoon in Peru. The soldiers, all of them in civilian clothing, were already in their trucks and jeeps on the outskirts of the village when the teacher, Mrs. Parados, began talking about the smoking and coughing bus that took her and Dr. Parados down a mountain toward the biggest town in the region. Eulogia said Mrs. Parados made every sound the bus made, and she imitated the other bus riders, including the man who held the rooster on his lap and made the bird dance by blowing on the back of its head. The teacher’s story of the bus, which had about seventeen other passengers in addition to the newlyweds, had reached the point where the vehicle had gotten to the bottom of the mountain and was heading toward what passed for a downtown when the soldiers streamed into Eulogia’s village and began killing the people farthest from the school. The village was not a big one and so it did not take them long to reach the school with Mrs. Parados and her twenty-three pupils. “The village was all killed, even down to the littlest chicken,” Eulogia said, “all of them except me. One hundred and fifty-nine people, which does not count the unborn children still in their mothers’ bellies.” She stopped, as if remembering something. “I never heard the end of her honeymoon story,” she said at last. “Mrs. Parados and Dr. Parados have yet to reach that downtown in Peru.”

The paintings along the stage were of some of the dead in the village. Eulogia explained that because she had been alive only eight years at the time, she did not know all of the hearts of all of the people. But she had seen them all at one time or another as she lived her little girl’s life. A painting of someone she knew, Eulogia continued, took some two months to complete, while one of someone whose heart she did not know sometimes took as long as nine months. At that time in her life, the evening at the church, she had completed nineteen paintings. She went to the left of the stage and picked up a painting of a very old man in a straw hat. His bony legs were crossed and he was looking straight at the young woman who painted him. “Señor Efrain Hernandez,” Eulogia shouted. “Seventy-seven. All I know about him is what I learned as I painted him. Though he took eight months, the longest so far, he will not be the hardest to paint. The hard ones are yet to come.” After several minutes, she put down the old man and raised up a boy, barely in his teens. “Fidel Rios,” she shouted, “my brother who sat two rows behind me in class. Two and a half months to paint. He had wanted to be in the fields with my father that day, but my father had made him go to school.” It was Fidel Rios, but it was also the oldest brother of Avis’s best friend.

The painting of Arlene’s aunt was not on the stage, but long before Eulogia reached the final painting on the stage, Arlene remembered that her aunt had looked at her long fingernail that beautiful morning and after several moments she had stared without words at Arlene. “The fingernail will have to go,” that look told Arlene now, more than forty-five years after the aunt’s demise. The long fingernail, the look said, was of a time when her man had been courting her and she did not know if she could give herself over to him to the exclusion of all other men. That was a different life, that courting life, and it would not do if something from that life left even the tiniest of scratches on her baby’s cheek. Such is life, the look said to Arlene now. And then the aunt, arm in arm with her husband, had taken her place behind Arlene and her mother as they stepped onto the wooden bridge that was new and that was doomed.

When the evening was done, the people in the auditorium rose as they applauded. Eulogia remained on the stage, looking out over the audience, her hands clasped before her. Arlene took Avis’s hand and they went toward the front. Eulogia saw them and did not take her eyes from them as she came hurriedly to the end of the stage and down the stairs. There was a pool of many people in the aisle, and it took Eulogia some time to reach the woman and the child. Arlene picked up Avis. It was nearly two minutes before anyone spoke. “I have been looking for you from the beginning,” Eulogia said to them both. “I know,” Arlene said, though she had not known that before yesterday morning. “I know,” Avis said, though she would not know the truth of what she was saying for three years, after her third miracle. “I looked,” Eulogia said, “but I could only feel that you were somewhere out in the world looking for me as I was looking.” “I know,” Arlene said. Eulogia took Avis from Arlene and kissed the girl’s cheek and Avis kissed her back. “I will see you all of the day tomorrow,” Eulogia whispered to them and handed Avis back to her. She stepped to leave, then she turned back. “How will they be, if we who were present do not blow life into them and create them?” she asked Arlene. In all the belongings was there even one picture of her aunt? Eulogia said to Arlene, “You must tell me again tomorrow that it is this or it is being in the dark.” “I will,” Arlene said. “I will,” Avis said. The nun came behind Eulogia and said her name, and Eulogia looked at the nun as if she had never seen her before. Eulogia disappeared through a side door, and the nun stayed with Arlene and Avis. Two men were on the stage, and first one and then the other told people that they were more than sorry but that none of the paintings were for sale.

The bus that took the newlyweds Arlene and Scott successfully through the forest one hundred thirty-seven miles southeast of Lima nearly went over a mountain three times, a mountain that their useless guidebook said “had grown up to keep the forest company.” Arlene could see on her husband’s face that he longed for the comparably easy roads of an Aruba or a Jamaica. She squeezed his thigh after the bus escaped going over the third time. The bus had done time on the streets of London for eighteen years and had then been imported to Peru seven years before. It was still red, but not a red any Londoner would know. Scott scooted closer to Arlene and put her hand in both of his. He was not afraid, but he knew her history by then and felt that if he were to be lost to her, he wanted her eyes and body to be the last things he saw and touched. Beyond the mountain, after four more tortuous miles, the bus and its people witnessed the road even out and they were fine for most of the miles into the town of Buena Serra—“Sweet Good-byes” was the translation of their guidebook, which not only offered poor translations but gave some Peruvian towns Italian names. Just outside of Buena Serra a field of purple cacti—all twelve feet or so high and none standing perfectly upright—rose up to greet them, and before long the bus coughed twice and gave out. Everyone had to get off, though the bus driver in his tuxedo promised that it would be repaired in no time, and he clapped his hands twice to the two Americans in case they did not know how quick Peruvian time could be. Arlene had, that morning before leaving their hotel, written her third postcard to her son and the fourth to Avis since arriving in Peru. Their luggage was two towns away, waiting at another hotel, and so it was not a difficult walk into the downtown of the very small Buena Serra. Arlene and Scott were thirsty and hungry and knew that if they were to enjoy more of what was ahead, they would need to fortify themselves. At the corner of a tiny one-story building that Arlene guessed was the town hall, a woman sat before a table with a pitcher of blue liquid and large paper cups. There was a sign in Spanish, but they did not know anything on it except for the word aqua. Scott, fingering his fanny pack, was skeptical, telling Arlene again that he wanted to drink nothing but Cokes and bottled water in foreign lands. I hope that you, my love, might decide to see this place again for the first time when you are old enough, she had written Avis two weeks before on that third Guatemalan postcard. After Tennessee again for the first time, perhaps? Arlene walked up to the woman, who stood and, without a word between them, poured some of the liquid into a paper cup. She handed the cup to Arlene and smiled and did not seem to mind that Scott held back. Arlene looked at her husband and at the woman, who was still smiling, and then, after she drank deeply, she handed the cup to her husband. “Drink,” she said. “It will not kill us. I promise.” “I miss Wesleyan,” Scott said, which was what he often said when he was not quite certain of anything. “I miss Holy Cross,” she said, which was her way of trying to ease his mind. “I miss Holy Cross.” He did as she said, and as he drank, she stepped forward and looked at the road they were on. The road seemed to be shimmering and shuddering as it turned into a huddle of trees only a child’s shout away. There the road quickly left her sight, so abruptly that it gave a small pain to her heart. She looked down at her dusty sandals, at her dusty feet, and then, a few seconds later, she took two steps forward and stopped. She was not a woman to carry a pocketbook everywhere, and so both of her hands were free that day. She made fists of them and rested the knuckles on her hips. She seemed to recognize what she was seeing now. A barely noticeable smile came to the edges of her mouth. The bright road eventually came back again and went on a bit until it dipped swiftly and disappeared once more. Momentarily. She waited and she could see, with some relief, where many people were walking and riding all along it once it reappeared, sloping gently down as it wound a crooked way to what her guidebook had told her was “the Valley of Enormous Science Mysteries and Smallest Happenings.” She could see the eternal road emerge almost miraculously from the valley, still crooked, still shimmering, still full of humanity, and she turned to her new husband to tell him what the path ahead would be like.