Free Habit of Fear by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

fragments, “Aren’t these pretty?” She explained to Julie that a woman who made jewelry gave a day a week to the mission. “Missy is very good.” As though praising a child.
    And Missy seemed hardly able to bear the praise, turning her head away, the color rising to her slack and wrinkled cheeks. The smell of the woman remind Julie of mushrooms.
    When the nun left them, May Weems said, “This here the lady you seen getting in the trailer. Remember, Missy Glass?”
    Julie stiffened. “Please, May, don’t tell her what she saw. Let her tell us. … Would you please, Miss Glass … Missy? Do you remember? It was a Sunday morning. Very quiet. Did you hear anything unusual before you saw me?”
    May burst in again. “She don’t hear good, but she hear something.”
    “Can’t you be quiet, May?”
    The woman looked surprised or alarmed by their exchange.
    “I just trying to help. Them men don’t mean her no good either, Friend Julie, but she don’t know that. I’s the one makes her stay here and do her glass.”
    Julie said, “May, do you know the men?”
    “Seem like I ought to. I knows a lot of Johns that part of town.”
    Missy Glass was looking at Julie surreptitiously. The large, strange eyes, which made her expression seem one of continual surprise, fled when Julie tried to hold them with her own gaze.
    “Tell her how they whistle at you, Missy. Like you was a dog,” May said.
    The woman puckered her lips and gave a short, rather sweet repetitive whistle.
    “Where were they when they whistled at you?” Julie asked.
    “In the doorway.” Her voice was low, barely audible.
    “Before that,” May coached, “they was in the car and stopped.”
    The woman turned to her and said, as though unsure, “Were those the same men?”
    “You say to me it the same whistle.”
    “They wanted to know what I was looking for. Pieces of glass, I told them, pieces of pretty colored glass.”
    “Had you been to that same place before?” Julie asked.
    “It was one of my best places.”
    “They say to her they got lots of nice glass they wants to show her. Right, Missy?”
    So, Julie reasoned, if they were neighborhood youths, they would have seen her before and they would have scouted the trailers for one that suited their purpose.
    “Lots of lovely glass.” The woman articulated the words carefully. She had good speech, but there was a vagueness to the inflection, as though the words had taken shape in her mind well before she was able to voice them.
    The intimate memory of that scene inside the trailer came back to Julie with shocking immediacy. Anger followed, outrage at the degradation, the inhumanity intended in the assault upon this unfortunate creature. It was an anger she had not been able to summon on her own behalf.
    May Weems kept trying to prime Missy Glass. Julie said, “Please, May, let’s both be quiet and let Missy tell us in her own way everything that happened that Sunday.”
    “But nothing happened,” the woman said.
    And May Weems said, “See. Tell her about the baby, Missy.”
    But Missy, it seemed, was still one step behind. “I explained to them that unless I could collect the glass myself, it wasn’t right for me. It has to weather and refine.” She took up a piece and nested it in the palm of her hand to show Julie: a deep, clear blue. The arthritic fingers were curled like question marks.
    “The baby,” May nudged again.
    “I could hear it crying in the trailer and one of the men came out to me and asked if I knew how to take care of a baby. Babies don’t like me. I said it would cry even more if it saw me, and it did keep on crying. So I moved further away—where there was hardly any glass at all.”
    Enter Julie Hayes, Julie thought, who knows everything about babies. “What did the men look like, Missy? Say the one who came and spoke to you about the baby.” They couldn’t have been wearing masks then, certainly not while one of them was driving the car.
    “I didn’t