Chapter 45 #2
Then she’d dragged Sophia to the shed and locked her in with no water for hours.
Sophia had sat in the corner on the dirt, sweating and swallowing her saliva.
When Ma Deary finally let her out, Sophia’s mouth was dry as cotton, her legs weak from lack of sustenance, and Ma Deary still refused her dinner until she went up to the garden and came back with the crop.
The memory haunted Sophia, but she realized that being denied food, working in the heat, even the strap that Ma Deary hung on a rusted nail in the barn to keep the kids in line, wasn’t her biggest fear.
What Sophia was most afraid of was Ma Deary preventing her return to school.
Sophia’s chest tightened at the thought of being confined to the farm again with no future in sight.
She decided she would hold her identity close until she had a chance to talk it through with Walter.
He had always been her voice of reason and would know what to do next.
The sun looked like an egg, sunny side up, low in the sky, as they turned off the main street and meandered onto the narrow tobacco road.
The tires jolted over grit and gravel as the Rambler moved toward the farmhouse, while the rooster crowed and crowed, welcoming Sophia back home.
Ma Deary pulled up to the front door and killed the engine.
The bald spots in the roof where the shingles were missing still hadn’t been repaired.
Metal bumpers in varying sizes, left over from old vehicles and tractors, were scattered all over the patchy front lawn.
The plastic that covered the front windowpane buckled and blew with the wind.
“How many hands you got working the farm now?” Sophia asked.
“Depends who shows. Today might be two or three.” Ma Deary opened her car door and stretched her legs in front of her. “Go on and change clothes and give your brothers a hand. The twins don’t seem to know their head from a hole in the damn ground without you.”
Karl, Lu, and Walter. Sophia’s heart fluttered at the thought of her brothers. Biological or otherwise.
As she walked along the side of the house, the early-morning chirp of crickets and the jug-a-rum of the bullfrogs relaxed her breathing.
Dead leaves cracked beneath her feet as she rounded the bend.
In the distance, she could hear the horses, cows, and pigs waking, and the smells of fresh dew, earth, and manure unleashed a familiarity inside of her that she hadn’t known she had missed.
Just as she reached for the screen door to the kitchen, she heard “Rusty, that you?”
Sophia turned to see Walter, and her whole body smiled as he barreled toward her, swooped her up in his arms, and gripped her so hard that she was sure if he didn’t let go soon, she would snap in two.
“Whatcha doing here?”
“We’re on break.”
“It’s good to have you home.” He smiled, a piece of straw resting at the side of his lips. He was wearing his Carhartt chore coat over bib overalls, and his hair had grown into a limp Afro.
“Somebody needs a haircut.” She reached up and tousled it.
“You just ain’t been ’round to cut it for me.” He grinned.
“Well, you have an official appointment.”
Walter chuckled as Ma Deary descended the stairs and tsked her teeth.
She said, “Reunion over. Go on and wake the boys and get to your chores. And Rusty, after you pull the eggs, make sure them boys clean up that barn. Smells like hot piss and old cabbage in there.” She let the door slam behind her.
Sophia and Walter exchanged looks and then burst out laughing.
“Welcome home, sis. You’re going to have to tell me all about it.”
“As soon as the boys are off to school and she’s asleep.” Sophia pushed her hair back. “Meet me at our spot near the cornfields.”
Sophia pulled the sherpa blanket tighter over her coat and put her hands over the fire that Walter had built for them.
They were out on the edge of the farm near the garden, in a patch under an ancient elm tree.
Walter had skewered a sausage link on a sharpened stick and held it to the fire.
Sophia watched as he concentrated on rotating the meat so that it wouldn’t burn.
The fire licked and crackled, and the smoky scent made her salivate.
“You let your hair go back to red,” he said, looking up.
“I didn’t have a choice. No dye at school.” She pushed her hair back over her shoulders. She had let it hang loose under her wool skull cap.
“I like you better like that.” He elbowed her.
Sophia tugged on her hat. “Walt… I gotta tell you something.”
“Shoot.” Walter pulled the sausage back from the fire, tucked it in a piece of foil, and then hung a second raw sausage on the stick and thrust it over the flames.
“I don’t know where to start.” She caught his eye.
“The beginning sounds like a good place.”
“I met a boy.”
“Oooh, Rusty has a crush,” he teased.
“It’s not that.” She watched as the heat made the sausage sweat and drip. “There’s a bit more to it.”
She told Walter about the Old South Ball, finding out that Max was adopted from Germany, the shared fire, how the German phrase just came out of her mouth.
“What did you say?”
“Auf Wiedersehen,” she said softly. “Which means ‘goodbye.’ It felt like it bubbled up from some place deep inside of me. A dormant place that I hadn’t known existed.”
Walter turned the sausage while she recounted going home with Willa for Thanksgiving break and meeting the woman in the library.
“Mrs. Porter Wesley was her name, I think. She gave me these articles. Apparently, there were hundreds or thousands of children abandoned in Germany called ‘Brown Babies’ or ‘War Babies.’ They were children of German mothers and the Negro G.I.’s who were stationed there.
” She took a breath. “This woman, Ethel Gathers, adopted a bunch of kids of her own, I think she has like eight, and then helped other American families adopt the half-Negro kids so they wouldn’t be stuck in the orphanage. ”
Walter lifted the meat from the fire as Sophia told him how she had found Mrs. Gathers in the white pages and shown up at her house.
“Why would you do that?” Walter wrapped the sausage in foil and handed it to her.
“There was something inside me that needed to know.” She swallowed. “If I was one of those babies brought here.”
She expected Walter to laugh, but he didn’t. He held her gaze. “And?”
“Turns out I am. I was adopted, Walter. My real name is Katja.”
Walter cast his eyes down to the ground. Sophia knew he would be disappointed that she wasn’t his blood sister. But her brothers were all she knew, and she could never love them any less, bloodline or not.
“I know,” Walter spoke up.
Sophia choked on her sausage. “You what?” He handed her his canteen of water, and she drank. “Walt? What do you mean, you know?”
“I’ve always known. I remember the long plane ride. Walking through the airport with the cameras flashing. Then us riding in the car with Ma Deary and the Old Man.”
“So we came here together? You were the boy Mrs. Gathers mentioned?”
Walter nodded.
“How did I miss that?” She shook her head.
“When we first got here, you and I used to whisper in German, but Ma Deary put a stop to it. She said if she heard us speaking German, she would slap our faces. So we stopped.”
“You knew? And you never told me!”
Walter looked at Sophia with droopy eyes. “I wanted to tell you on the drive to West Oak Forest, but I didn’t want to burden you with too much.”
“Before then, Walter. You could have told me years ago.”
“Honestly, I had started to forget. As cruel as Ma Deary can be, farm life suits me. I’m at peace here, so I just never thought about it.”
Sophia put her sausage back in the foil. If she needed any more proof that she was one of the Brown Babies, Walter had just given it to her.
“What do we do now? What about Karl and Lu?”
“We keep our mouths shut. No sense making a song and dance about nothing. We tell them when they are older.”
“I can’t live like this, not anymore. It feels like I’m just drifting, with nothing to anchor me. I have to find my real mother. I need answers.”
Walter held his hands over the flame. “You sure about that? Ma Deary would blow a gasket if she caught wind of any of this.”
“Mrs. Gathers said she’d help me. I’ve come so far in just a few weeks. I need to see this to the end.” Sophia unwrapped the sausage again and took a bite.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“If you want to see this through, I’ll help you.”