On the courtroom steps, the girl pressed her face into her mother’s dress. She wrapped her arms around one of the trunks of her mother’s legs and peeked out. Lawyers and their clients passed them on each side. Men with leather briefcases and polished shoes. Men with angry faces, sad faces, sorry faces, not sorry faces. They dashed up the stone steps and past the courthouse doors. They dashed down the steps and into the street, darting around parked Packards and Studebakers and one old horse pulling an open cart with piles of unorganized hay, three small children, and a man in denim overalls riding inside.
The girl couldn’t see into the future to when she would travel to a new town at fourteen to attend high school since there was no high school where she was. She couldn’t imagine a family with two boys who would take her in and give her a room all her own to sleep in. She had no picture in her mind of the eldest son, white t-shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal his biceps, blue jeans stained with Ford grease. Or the younger, quieter and bookish. Grease-stained also, hair curly like Jerry Lee Lewis, laugh soft and deep like bubbles at the bottom of a lake.
She could see the brown fabric folds of her mother’s dress with delicate white birds on it, each with mouth open and singing to the sky, the real sky birdless and blue beyond. Moments earlier, the judge banged his gavel and said so be it, her mother did not have to live with her father anymore and the girl watched her mother’s shoulders release. She watched her father’s head bow. As for the children, the judge stated, the youngest (male, age eight months) was to remain in custody of the father and the older (girl, age six years) to live full-time with mother. The judge moved a stack of papers from one side of his desk to the other. Next, he said.
One of the lawyers from inside the courtroom came out the door and patted her father on the shoulder before bounding down the steps and into the busy street. Her father pretended a smile, looking over his shoulder and then back to his once wife. The bundle in his arms squirmed. He held it like a bomb wrapped in swaddling cloth. Away from his body.
The girl saw on her father’s face the remains of last night. She knew he’d been awake pacing the place, the dirt floor packed in a path from the window to the door. She’d not been there, but at her mother’s mother’s for the last few weeks. Sleeping in a small bed under the big one. But she knew that path. She’d seen him wear it down before and she saw the telltale weariness in his eyes.
Her mother’s socks were bunched at her ankles. Her mother’s leg was warm, warding off the chilly October air. Louise, said the girl’s father. He was not looking at the girl’s mother. Or the girl. Or the parked cars or the lawyers or the horse. He was looking at the bundle. Give him to me, Albert, said the girl’s mother, glancing quickly to her left and right. She took the bundle from the girl’s father, gathering it to her breast and cradling it there until it melded into her and could barely be distinguished from the cardigan she was wearing over her dress. The girl’s mother put her hand on the girl’s back and pushed her. The girl did not want to release her mother’s leg, but she did not want to make a scene. She reached for her father’s hand and stood still next to his leg instead. He was wearing his work pants with suspenders. They scratched the side of her cheek. She felt his rough hand, blistered from sanding wood furniture and carrying pails of milk. She smelled his earthy pipe smoke in the fabric of his clothes, woven in like wool threads into a cotton garment for extra warmth. She smelled his dirt and his sweat and his pain. A man’s pain smells different than a woman’s, she realized then. A woman’s smells of crickets and streams, early mornings and crushed lavender. A man’s pain smells like oak and fish and motor oil.
In the barn of the house where she would be given a room to sleep in to attend high school in another town eight years in the future, the girl would smell a man again. Not the eldest with the biceps, but the younger with the books. He would smell like an oak tree, too, and she would remember that moment on the courthouse steps. She would see her bundled brother that last time, her mother’s black lace-up shoes walking briskly away, and feel the burn in the tips of her fingers from the cold.
