Borrowed Children by George Ella Lyon Page A

and Welkie and we start rolling, between mountains that stand like a deep part of the dark. The only sound besides the wagon’s rattle is Mama singing:
    O, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing.
The breeze is sighing, the nightbirds crying.
Far, O far beneath the stars her brave is sleeping
While Red Wings weeping her heart away.
    Willie’s wrapped in sleep and song and quilts.
    We come to the wagon bridge. Daddy eases us on it. There’s no rail; he has to have dead aim. He carries a lantern, of course, but its glow doesn’t go far, and there’s not much moonlight. We travel the road by heart.
    A little ways downcreek from the wagon bridge is the footbridge—just two logs, fun to balance across. But there was one time I couldn’t make it. In the rattly silence it comes back to me, that hard day I was coming home.
    I was seven maybe, seven or eight. It was early winter and we’d just moved to Goose Rock. I’d waked up that morning feeling jumbled, like the inside me had come loose from my bones. My back ached and I was hot, but Mama couldn’t feel it, so off I went with David and Ben to school.
    I did all right through the morning, but by lunch my feet rose over my shoes like bread. I told Miss Bledsoe.
    â€œYou’re hot as blazes,” she said. “Get your coat and go straight home.”
    I didn’t think to question, just put books in my satchel and headed out. The wool of my red coat smelled funny. Somehow I thought I could smell that it had grown too red. And my eyes didn’t go where they should.
    But I walked. Like Welkie and Midge in this darkness, I knew the road, and I trusted it to pull me. But as I got heavier, it had to tug harder, and when I topped the hill above Goose Creek I realized I was too big for the footbridge; I’d have to cross like a wagon. Then when I reached the rough lip of that bridge, I couldn’t stand up. My feet had ballooned. I got down on all fours, grateful for knees. The bridge appeared to me a long ladder. I had to haul myself up as well as across. But I made it. And crawled the rest of the snow-crusted way home.
    Anna was the baby then. Mama came to the door with her wrapped in a shawl. She didn’t see me at first, then she screamed. I couldn’t speak for the heat rushing out the door.
    I don’t remember much about the next few days. I know Doc Bailey came, bringing shots and little envelopes of big pills. And Mama’s face kept appearing above me, like the moon tonight. “I see the moon and the moon sees me. …” Did she sing that?
    And why does this come back now? Is it the cold? Is it Anna in my made-over coat? Mama has given it a black velvet collar and pocket. This didn’t impress Anna, but Helen was thrilled.
    â€œYour pocket has a coat!” she said, over and over. “I want a pocket with a coat.”
    â€œIt will come to you,” Mama promised. “Anna is just one stop on this little coat’s road.”
    â€œWhere is it going?”
    â€œProbably to a rug.”
    Omie braids rugs out of our old clothes—“anything that’s got body but no spirit left.” The parlor rug is mostly David and Daddy, the dining room, David and Ben and me. So that, too, will be cut and stitched and twisted, the too-red coat that belonged to a pocket, the Mandy-Anna-Helen coat. Willie won’t need it.
    Helen has just fallen asleep and we re rolling into Manchester. There’s the Lyttle house: white, three stories, with a windowed turret. Daddy once said we’d live there when our ship came in.
    â€œWhen will that be?” David wanted to know.
    All Daddy said was, “Don’t know as I’ve ever seen a ship in these mountains.”
    At the train station Mama insists that everybody get out.
    â€œWe must see Mandy off in style.”
    Style is hardly the word for all the bodies spilling from the wagon. David carries my bag and Ben brings the present