The Photo That Explained My Son
My son looked like no one in the family until my mother set one photograph on the table
The first thing my mother-in-law said when she saw my son was not a thing you say over a newborn.
I was still flat on the hospital bed, stitched and shaking, the way you shake after, when the whole body hums like a struck fence wire. Eli was eleven hours old. He was wrapped in that thin white blanket with the pink and blue stripes they use at Henline County Memorial, and he had a full head of coal-black hair, so much of it that the nurse had laughed and said he looked like a little old man who had already lived a life.
Glenda came in without knocking. She never knocked. She stood at the foot of the bed in her good church coat even though it was August, and she looked at my baby for a long time without smiling.
Then she said, “Well. He sure didn’t get that from our side.”
I want you to understand how small those words are, and how much weight a small thing can carry when it is set down in the right spot at the right moment. It was not loud. It was not an argument. It was a cold little sentence dropped into the quietest room I had ever been in, and it landed on me and it did not move for four months.
I live outside Harmon, Ohio, on a county road that does not have a name, only a number, Township Road 9, where the corn comes right up to the ditch and the school bus turns around in our gravel in the dark. My husband Wade grew up three miles from here. His mother Glenda grew up two miles the other way. We are the kind of people who have been in the same six square miles since before there were cars, and everybody knows everybody’s face, and a face that does not fit is noticed.
My baby’s face did not fit.
Wade is fair. He has hair the color of dry wheat and skin that burns if he so much as thinks about the sun, and his eyes are a pale washed blue, the blue of a shirt left on the line too long. I am fair too. I freckle. My hair is the color of weak tea. The Pruitts, Wade’s people, are all like that, pale and sandy and pink in the summer, a whole church pew of them looking like they were cut from the same bolt of cloth.
And here was Eli, dark as a chestnut, with that black hair and skin that even in his first week seemed to hold a little gold in it, and dark eyes that went darker instead of lighter the way babies’ eyes are supposed to.