I should be miles away by now, but I still hadn’t solved this problem. I still didn’t know how I could run quietly and hide secretly with a baby who would, at any moment, start screaming.
Just because she’d been deathly quiet and serious since I’d found her didn’t mean she wouldn’t expose me and get me killed.
I cocked my head, studying her closer, hating her pink clean skin and glossy golden curls. Her cheeks were round and eyes bright. She was a mockery to every kid in the barn with sunken faces and withered bodies that looked like trees poisoned by petrol.
She was lucky. She’d been cared for. She’d slept in a bed with blankets and teddy bears and hugs.
My fists curled, reminding me all over again of my one missing finger on my left hand.
Would they miss her?
Would they search for her?
Would they even care?
I’d lived my life with one existence: where parents were cruel and beat their children, branded them with hot cattle irons, and fed them by trough and pail.
Up until a year ago, I’d believed that was how all kids were treated. That we were all vermin only fit to toil—Mrs Mclary’s words every night as we crawled exhausted into our mismatch of cots and pallets.
It wasn’t until the night Mr. Mclary cut off my pinkie for stealing some freshly baked apple pie that I saw a different story.
I’d tempted fate by sneaking back into the farmhouse—which was the very reason I had nine digits and not ten anymore. After passing out and coming to from the pain, I’d exhausted my search for a cleanish rag to replace the blood-soaked undershirt around my severed finger, and decided the farmhouse would have a tea towel I could borrow.
It was that or drip blood everywhere.
Mrs Mclary was screaming like a shot rabbit somewhere upstairs. She’d been as fat as a sow for months and I guessed her time to give birth had finally come. I’d seen enough animals and the grossness of new life to tune her out as I tiptoed toward the kitchen.
Only, in the raucous of babies arriving, someone had left the TV on and I became spellbound by its magic.
Moving pictures and colours and sounds. I’d seen the thing on before but had been chased out with a broom and starved with no dinner for sneaking a peek.
That night, though, I morphed into the shadows, holding my throbbing stump of a finger, and watched a show where the kids laughed and hugged their parents. Where healthy dinners were cooked with smiles and lovingly given to plump children at a table and not thrown in the dirt to be fought over before the pigs could eat our scraps.
Mr. Mclary constantly told us that we were the lucky ones. That the girls he dragged by their ponytails into the farmhouse after Mrs Mclary had gone to bed were the chosen angels bestowed an important job.
I never found out what that job was, but the girls all returned white as milk and shaking like baby lambs on a frosty morning.
In fact, having my finger cut off was my worst and best memory.
Having him grab my hand and snip off my pinkie with his fence cutters as if it was nothing more than a stray piece of wire had made me buckle and vomit in agony. The fever, thirst, and throb while watching that TV show had stolen my wits.
I was beyond stupid to stay inside the home where the devil lived.
But when he’d found me passed out from infection and blood loss in his sitting room the next morning, he’d taken me to the doctor.
On the ride over—in a truck filled with sloshing diesel for his tractor—he’d yelled at me not to die. That I still had a few years of use left and he’d paid too much to let me quit yet.
When we’d arrived at the hospital, he’d stuck his reeking face in mine and hissed at me not to say anything. My role was to be stupid—a mute. If I didn’t, he’d kill me, the doctor, and anyone else who helped me.
I’d obeyed and learned what kindness was that day.
The tale spun to the medical team was my clumsy ass had severed it with a columbine blade while cutting hay. My dirty face and knobby knees were used as Mclary’s evidence that I was a reckless, unruly child, and thanks to his reputation around town for being a good farmer, civil neighbour, and regular churchgoer, no one questioned him.
No one asked me how badly his lies stunk.
The infection was bad, according to the nurse, and after shivering on her table with teeth chattering and stomach heaving, she’d sewn me up, pricked me with an injection, and given me a look that made me want to spill everything.