in itself), and walked around to the back porch, conscious that by doing so she was admitting, assuming, a familiarity with our family. John Charles, then eight, answered the door and pushed it aside for her to enter.
“Hello, John,” she said. “Is your mother or father at home?”
“No,” he answered, still holding the door, waiting for her to come in.
“Do they know you are playing with your father’s pocketknife?”
“It’s mine,” he answered.
“Do you know when they will be back?”
“Dad’s at work and he’ll be home in a couple hours.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’ll be back, I think, in a little while.”
“Where’s your sister, John? Is she sick?”
“I don’t know.” John Charles had slowly closed the screen door, reasonably content that Mrs. Candlewine had no intention of coming inside.
“How is school going for you?”
“O.K.”
Andrea Sledge came walking up onto the backyard out of the fog. She was five-and-a-half months pregnant. “Here’s Mom,” said John C. Mrs. Candlewine turned to face her and began talking before she had completed the steps up the porch.
“Hello, Mrs. Sledge. I’m Mrs. Candlewine, Mary’s teacher at school, and Mary hasn’t been to school this last week, so I thought I’d come out and see if there was any trouble and if I could help in any way. I’ve brought some work for her to do here at home so she won’t be so far behind when she comes back. She’s such a lovely girl, Mrs. Sledge.”
Andrea sat down on the upper step and put her hands to her head as though to rub something away. “She’s gone . . . Mary’s gone.”
“Gone?” asked Mrs. Candlewine, wondering not so much about Andrea’s choice of word but of what the word had to do with Mary. John Charles had gone back into some farther room in the house.
“Yes,” Mother answered, staring out away from the house. “Into the City. The City has taken my baby.” And she began to cry. Mrs. Candlewine rested a minute against the side of the house and sat down beside Andrea. She did not know what to say but felt guilty just watching, the way it is funny to see someone fall down on the ice and break a leg — but not funny when they are watching you laughing.
“Mrs. Sledge, you’re mistaken. She’s probably just wandered away — to a friend’s house or something. You know how children are.”
“Not Mary, she’d never do that,” Andrea said, still crying. “She was such a good baby ... I wish I had never come here. I wish I had never left Wisconsin.”
“Now, Mrs. Sledge, be strong. When was the last time you saw Mary?”
“Sunday afternoon. She was out here in the yard. I wasn’t paying too close attention to her — but watching her just the same. She was playing some kind of game, chasing those little yellow butterflies, trying to get near enough to blow on them.... I hate this wretched place.” When she had said this last thing she was not crying.
“Now where might she have gone, Mrs. Sledge? To a friend’s house maybe. Have you checked with her playmates?”
“I’ve been a good mother, Mrs. Candlewine.”
“I know, Mrs. Sledge, but . . .”
“No you don’t. You don’t think that at all. You think it’s my fault that my baby’s gone into the City — that I didn’t whip her, or make her help with the washing, or do her Sunday School lessons. But she was always good . . . never unhappy.” Her eyes were dry now and she pointed down into the fog. “It’s That . . . that.”
Mrs. Candlewine went inside the house and told John Charles to stay with his mother while she went away, and to stop playing with his pocketknife. She drove to the police station, the highway patrol, the homes of the other children in Mary’s class, to the amusement park, and to the zoo. Late in the evening she returned to the Sledges’, where she found Luke and Andrea sitting on the back porch. The afterdark had come.
“Mrs. Candlewine, this is my husband,” said Andrea.
“Hello,” said Mrs. Candlewine.
“Mrs. Candlewine was Mary’s teacher,” Andrea told her husband, who acknowledged the fact by lowering his eyes.
“I’ve checked with Mary’s friends and none of them have seen her. I’m sure that if we have patience and pray, she will turn up. Children have been known to wander off into the woods and be gone for weeks.”
“Mary’s in the City, Mrs. Candlewine. Somehow she walked down there and a monument opened and she went in. It is an insult to tell ourselves lies.”
“No,” said Mrs. Candlewine, her whole body quivering but her voice steady and flat. “She is not in the City. She is not. God protects the innocent. He would never let such a thing happen. Were I to believe that I’d walk in there myself and find her.”
“No you wouldn’t, Mrs. Candlewine — just like you won’t now. Just like I won’t.”
“She’s not in the City,” said Luke, being careful to talk to neither woman in particular. “Even she wasn’t that stupid. But she’ll never come back either — someone has killed her — perhaps by accident, in an automobile, was afraid and sank her in the river . . . or perhaps intentionally; there are such people.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Mrs. Candlewine, “the way you think,” and went home and waited. She waited for a week, then two, and then three. Once she stopped John Charles in the hall and asked if his sister had returned home yet. “No,” he answered and she never asked again. She waited, and continued to wait. She read the names Nellie Sledge, Walter Sledge, waiting — Will Sledge, Paul Sledge. Then she quit waiting and told me once while I fumbled with sticks of colored paraffin to fill up the hollow spaces between the outline of distant characters in my coloring book: “I knew your sister, Mary, before she got on the train that took her away.” I wanted Mrs. Candlewine to help me with the crayons because the colors kept running over the lines and leaving blotches inside the hollow spaces but she said I was doing fine and walked on down the row of desks to watch another colorer, of whose style I was envious.
When John Charles was twenty he was in love with a girl whose name I did not know for a long time because Nellie and Walt and Father had forgotten it. The idea of being in love excited him. That would have been in 1933 when the railroad was only running one train a week through to Chicago and that one didn’t stop. The farmers had weathered the depression well and we had made out by what John C. and Father could steal and what was given to us out of conscience. He was in love with a girl who lived on the western side of Des Moines. They went to Missouri because he had been indirectly offered a job with a stone quarry by Tommy Robinson, a man from St. Louis he had met playing horseshoes. She was excited and a little afraid because John C. had told her St. Louis was a tough town.
He wrote home once, two years later, and Nellie had kept the letter and showed it to me. The paper had turned yellow and was dissolving the ink: “Doing
