Free Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee Page B

said.
    “Yes.”
    I could hear that baby crying still, laid in the crotch of the black locust tree. What had happened to her mother? How could a baby come to be laid in a tree during the worst flood in the village’s history? In my mind the young Georg struggled and fought his way across the raging current, bent on saving the helpless child.
    “I was talking about the owl by Nine Mile Creek,” he said. “You can hear it sometimes on a night like tonight.”
    I looked at him. It was hard to come back from the flood, hard to unimagine him as a boy.
    “And this baby, what about this baby in the yellow blanket?” he said.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    A single thought spun out of air turns into a baby in a yellow blanket, longing for its mother. But there was no baby in a yellow blanket. The old man never struggled through foaming water and tumbling debris to rescue a crying infant perched in the crotch of a black locust tree. That was my story, not the old man’s story. None of it happened, none of it was real. Still, it’s what I believed to be true.
    Again he asked me:
    “What happened to the baby in the yellow blanket?”
    I wanted to say,
You tell me. You were the one who saved that baby’s life
.
    “That baby never existed,” I said. “End of story.”
    The old man turned his hands palms up. That’s something he used to do. He would turn them up and study each palm, tracing the lines. After a while of the old man studying his hands and waiting for me to talk, and me not talking, he went to his bedroom and brought me back a brown paper bag. Inside was a lantern, a regular-size pioneer lantern made of tin.
    “To replace your missing earring,” he said.
    “This is not the sort of lantern I intended,” I said. “You said you’d make me a lantern
earring
. This is a real lantern.”
    He had made it out of my leftover plum tomato cans, the ones I had strung in his weeping willow. You could still see the red tomato labeling on the inside of the lantern. He had punched holes into it in decorative patterns, like the kind of decorative patterns the pioneers used to make. I had seen these patterns in old library books. The old man had cut thin strips of aluminum from the cans and curled them into little curlicues and attached them to the top and bottom of the lantern for decoration. He had put a nail into the bottom of the lantern and spiked a candle on the nail. He had made a carrying handle for the lantern out of twisted wire.
    “This is not an earring,” I said.
    “Lanterns should be useful as well as beautiful,” the old man said.
    I thought of my missing lantern earring, sinking ever deeper into the snow and mud. I imagined floodwaters sweeping it away, helpless in the torrent, down the Nine Mile Creek andinto the Utica floodplain. Swamp gas enveloping my lovely earring in its evil vapors. Swamp worms curving around it, thinking it was some kind of treasure.
    The old man took one of his furnace matches, gigantic long ones, and lit the candle. It was getting dark outside. Across Nine Mile Creek I could see the stained-glass windows of the church where Tamar and the other choir people were practicing. The old man put the lantern on the kitchen table and turned out all the lights. We sat there at his table looking at the lantern. He had punched winter into the lantern: snowflakes, stars, a snowman.
    “I hate winter,” I said. “I hate snow. Winter is what killed Baby Girl.”
    The old man turned the lantern around. On the other side he’d punched in summer: a sun with big rays, a flower, a robin. Across Nine Mile Creek the stained-glass windows went dark. Tamar would be driving up to the trailer park in exactly six minutes. She’s never late.
    “This is a pioneer lantern,” the old man said. “For doing winter chores.”
    “But what I wanted was a new lantern earring for my one remaining lantern.”
    “It never would have been an exact match,” he said. “It never would have been the original.”
    He