Free Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee Page A

me. He reached out and plucked the one can from my head. Then he handed me another Jewell’s bag, plastic this time. He took another one and we went back to the cans lying in the snow. They shone in the light from the one Nine Mile Trailer Park streetlamp. I pretended the streetlamp was the moon, shining down on the cans.
    “I brought dinner,” I said. “It’s a mystery dinner. We will have no idea what we’re eating until we open up the cans.”
    One of the things about the old man was that he didn’t question.
    “All right,” he said.
    In the trailer I was going to make the old man close his eyes. I was going to wrap a dish towel around his head for a blind-fold,then I realized it wouldn’t matter. What was there to read? What was there to give away the secret? Everything was unknown. That was the whole point of the show of solidarity.
    “Pick a can,” I said. “Any can.”
    He picked one, then I picked one. Then he picked another one.
    “Three,” I said. “That should be good enough. With three we should get in at least two of the four basic food groups.”
    The old man got out his can opener.
    “Can #1?” I said.
    “Creamed corn,” he said. “Can #1 is creamed corn.”
    “Can #2?”
    “Corned beef hash, from the looks of it.”
    “#3?”
    “Sauerkraut.”
    We heated up the food and ate it. The old man used a soup spoon to eat everything. No fork. The old man didn’t like to waste utensils. Why use two when one will do? In solidarity, I used only a soup spoon, too. Things taste different when you don’t use a fork.
    “Not bad,” I said.
    The old man didn’t say anything. He didn’t usually say anything when he was eating. What he did was look down at his plate and eat steadily and quietly until all the food was gone. Then he picked up his plate and carried it over to his miniature sink and ran water on it.
    My heart was not in the dinner. It didn’t feel like a show of solidarity to me. Creamed corn, sauerkraut, and corned beef hash. It wasn’t so bad. It was a regular dinner, just that we didn’t know what we would be eating before we ate it. Nothing lost, nothing gained. No pain involved. What was the point?
    • • •
     
    I t didn’t use to be a shameful thing, not knowing how to read. In many countries of the world almost no one knew how to read. Take China. Only the rulers had enough time to learn how to read and write. That’s what a book I read said.
Keep the workers down!
Make a written language so hard to learn that someone with no spare time would never be able to. Never write. Never read. Spend your life cutting stone for the rulers who lay around reading and writing their nearly impossible language.
    That’s what the book said.
    It’s an actual book. I didn’t make it up.
    Think of what the old man lost, not reading: jobs, because he couldn’t read the want ads. Doctor appointments, because he couldn’t read the reminder slip. Electricity and phone and gas and heat, turned off because he didn’t read the bills. Packages sent to him, because he couldn’t understand the post office pickup notice. Friends, because he didn’t write back. Family, because they never heard from him again.
    I thought of the old man as a young man, a boy of eleven, struggling across torrential floodwaters to save a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket, crying in the crook of a black locust tree.
    “Clara?”
    The old man was standing by the sink in his trailer. He held a dishcloth in his hand. He had rinsed and dried the nameless solidarity cans.
    “Clara? Did you hear it?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I did hear it.”
    The old man gave me a look.
    “And what did you hear?” he said.
    “The baby.”
    “What baby?”
    “The baby you saved in the flood,” I said. “The baby in the yellow blanket.”
    The old man folded his dishcloth. He had a precise way of folding his dishcloth, and a precise way of hanging it on his oven door.
    “I saved a baby in a yellow blanket?” he