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Aggie’s Boy

She tests the skin ice of the warped porch. I see you, she says to her ghost in the window glass, as if some of her is already inside and warm, or a like-featured boy awaiting. Every step toward her door is treachery, and she holds to the rail, pauses, looks to the weed-bleak yard where the one white shift on the sagging line is stiff with the frost, too heavy now to be stirred by wind.

Risty, she says, but her eyes do not tear up in the cold. Risty.

Almost two years since the boy vanished, maybe in the lake, bear woods, slough, maybe as her mama said just whisked up by angels or stolen by the goat gypsies or resurrectionists. Toy horses lie in a dusty chest with his clothes, too little now, they’d be. She had wept and prayed and still could not even recall the first frantic house-to-house search, barn and woodpile, springhouses, cribs and sheds. Those two days were the same haze she wakes in now, at first a madwoman, but slowly simmering down to a private grief. The child’s father with his owly face gone since three springs, her own father too, by stroke, all the smoky voices. She had settled into solitude with God, whom she no longer reckoned a friend.

Over a year of mournful time, galax shriveled, leaves turned, snow drifted, columbine twining, soon all beginning again. And then Ruby showed up with a Gazette piece about a lost boy from Boone, just vanished like Risty, but this one has been found with one “Tull,” a tinker near Linville. A battered shirk of a child, filthy, flinchy, and the mother cautious, as he had a wild demeanor and would not, at first, answer to his name.

The tinker was a strayabout, of course, and had been reported hither and yon, rough to the boy or boys he used for helpers. They tended his horse and carried hefty pokes like little mules. They called him Ugly Papa. He’d send them house to house for morsels and pennies, offers to mend pans and stoves. He claimed them as prentices, but nobody trusted that face. Then he was down to the one.

The husband tells reporters his eyes have changed, this one, but that will happen with a child of four-five led out in the sun, muled, mistreated. He takes on a squint, he grows, learns new ways under the strap and switch. Mr. and Mrs. Delmore Welch are their names, and Brady the boy, a towhead like Risty, all of them from down Watauga way, big house, automobile, land to rent. Standing in the chill she sees an icy pinking in the east that is trying to be the sun. A picture with the article, blurry, but she was right off the shot sure it was Risty, and the weeping madness came over her again. Ruby fed her comfrey tea and offered words meant to soothe, but Aggie would startle up from sleep and say, How many times do I need to lose him?

Hand on the knob’s veined porcelain, and she pushes into the warm room where coal in the grate sparkles black under its little revel of flame. Tomorrow is the day she’s to take the narrow-track train, lurch her way to Boone to see is this child her own—Sheriff Ellis, whose words are worth no more than the buffalo on a nickel, to ride along and Ruby for comfort. Lawyers, Ellis says, are already circling like vultures. The Welches are not poorly set up and have doled out a bounty. Nobody down there wants to see your face, hear your story. We’re on a steep already. They’ve engaged a Baldwin detective. Don’t raise up your hopes, Miss Aggie. They’ve both said it, but her heart is flying on the chance. Ten times a day she scans the tabloid photograph. Shape of his face, shell ears, that stubborn scold in the way he holds his mouth. Those damaged eyes.

Aggie, they say he went straight to his room when they brought him across the big house’s threshold, no hesitation at all, jumped in his red chair and set in to rocking, is known to their dog and has the same choir voice of the Welch child, according to witness, but after all, life’s hope. She was prone to hope, but she could not dismiss the scripture. Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bear. At least those women would never know such loss, never feel an old mine shaft in the center of their lives.

Half a quart of milk sits in its bottle at the table’s edge. On the north window frost gathers even inside the glass. She reaches for the milk, but her hand is too tremblous to trust it. Maybe tonight will come shoals of snow, the tracks blocked. One more night of hope is not enough. She knows the verses about Solomon and the baby, two mothers staking claims. Not likely many Solomons in Boone.

Risty. She shapes the name with her mouth but will not say it, as if holding the sounds back might work a charm. At the window, her face again, the ghost of her now outside, or that other. She can hear the first ticks of freezing rain. No other sound in the world, just ice. Everything maybe depends on a scar under his arm. Face in the glass: I see you.