The Shoebox My Father Carried In

“I helped carry that basket in,” Doris said quietly. “You had the croup.”

I looked at her. She looked right back.

“He came after her,” Leonard said. “Stood on her mother’s porch and talked through the screen door, calm as a man selling insurance. That was the thing about him. He wasn’t a shouter. He told Ruthanne she could have her divorce and her mother’s house and anything else she wanted. He said he’d never set foot on the place again.”

He stopped. He had to swallow.

“And he said the first time he saw that baby out in the open, anywhere, a store or a street or a ball game, he would pick her up and put her in his truck, and Ruthanne would spend the rest of her life wondering which state.”

One of the women from my office made a small sound.

“She believed him,” Leonard said. “So did I, once I’d met him. He had brothers and cousins strung out from Shawneetown to Cairo. There wasn’t a fair or a fish fry or a tent meeting in the bottom of this state that didn’t have a Tolliver at it. And the sheriff up there was his mother’s brother. That’s how it was then. There wasn’t anybody to tell.”

“So you hid me,” I said.

“Your mother asked me to. The night before we got married she sat me down at her mother’s kitchen table and she said, Leonard, I will marry you on one condition. That girl does not go where there are crowds. Not ever. Not until he is in the ground. And I gave her my word.”

He looked down at his hands on the box.

“I thought it would be a few years. A man like that, I figured he’d drink himself off a bridge by forty.” He shook his head. “He lived to be seventy-one. Mean will keep a man going.”

I could hear the balloons knocking against the fence.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“No, ma’am.”

“I was not a stupid child.”

“You were the smartest child I ever saw. That’s the why of it.” He raised his eyes. “You’d have told one friend at school, Laura. One. Just to have somebody to tell. And it would have been up the river by suppertime. Or you’d have kept it, and then by twelve years old you’d have gone looking for him, because you are your mother’s girl and you never could leave a thing alone. Either way he finds you.”

He was right about the looking. I knew he was right.

“So we told people you were sickly,” he said. “Your mother put it around that you had a weak chest and couldn’t be out in the dust and the night air. And I took Jenny.”

“Why take anybody?” I said. “Why not all of us stay home?”

“Because a man who never shows his face with his family gets talked about, and talk travels. Folks needed to see Leonard Hobbs at the fair with his little girl. One little girl. Folks up the line needed to hear that Ruthanne had settled down and had the one child by her second husband, and the first one was poorly and never left the house and might not have lived, for all anybody knew.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “It needed to be a boring story. I made us as boring as I could.”