“No!” her husband says so vehemently that she almost drops the papers. He stands. She’s seen this kind of anger directed at others, but never at her. “No! That’s what my mother did. Kept me on the property, a prisoner, when all I wanted to do was run, jump, climb. And after my mother died, Thankamma and my brothers did the same. When I look at this I can only see squiggles,” he says, jabbing the papers with a finger. “You know why? She never let me go to the church school because it was across the river. She didn’t even want me to walk next to it. What I know now is there’s always a way to get somewhere, it’s just longer. My brothers and sisters have no problem with water. They went to school. Once, I ran away. My brothers and Thankamma locked me up. Out of love, they claimed! But it was out of fear. Out of ignorance!” His tone softens. “My mother and Thankamma meant well. They wanted to protect me like you wished to with our JoJo. But it made me weak. My brother cheated me because I couldn’t read.” He’s pacing the room. “Believe me, no one had to tell me or JoJo to stay away from water. If we can’t swim, we can do plenty of other things. We walk. We climb. Do you think I don’t mourn my only son? But if I had the chance to do it again, I’d change nothing. JoJo wasn’t on a leash. My son lived like a tiger the few years he had on this earth. He climbed. He ran fast. He made up for the one thing he could not do.” His voice breaks. He gathers himself and goes on. “I didn’t hide it. I assumed you knew. Your uncle certainly knew. I’m sorry if you didn’t. You only had to ask. But I don’t go around with a bell like a leper to announce it. This is a part of me. Like the goldsmith’s wife whose face is scarred by smallpox, or the potter’s son whose foot is turned. This is me. This is who I am.”
She’s forgotten to breathe. He’s said more words of significance in one evening than in their last eight years together. The crowd that is within him—small boy, father, and husband—rage and grieve together.
His expression softens. “You could have married better.”
She reaches for his hand, but he pulls away and leaves the room.
Her mind is in a whirl. Thus far, nothing suggests Baby Mol has any fear of water. Even if Baby Mol doesn’t have the Condition, she’ll be considered tainted, capable of passing on this bad seed.
With a shaking hand she records the year JoJo’s mother died. She draws a new branch arising from her husband’s name. She writes in her name and the date of her marriage, then a branch from their union where she writes “Baby Mol”; she will have Baby Mol baptized before she is six months and then she will enter her proper name and birth date. How many branches will lead down from Baby Mol once she marries? “I’m on the inside now, Lord,” she says. “The Condition is mine as much as it is his. How can I cast blame?”
Under JoJo’s name, she writes the year of his passing. She draws the three wavy lines, easy enough to do with her trembling fingers. How cruel, how viciously unfair that JoJo should die from the one element he worked so hard to avoid. Atop the wavy lines she draws the cross, which looks like a tree on the hill of Calvary, the three points breaking into sub-branches, reminiscent of the Saint Thomas cross, but also looking like tree branches that have been cleaved off, leaving the pointy ends clawing at the sky. She grieves now with JoJo’s mother. I know he was yours, but he was mine too and I had him longer. I loved him so much. Her pen touches the paper, struggling to fit the loopy shapes and tails and comebacks of Malayalam script in the small space: DROWNED IN IRRIGATION DITCH. Her mind swims with images of a much younger JoJo, his smile full of holes—if only she’d kept those baby teeth, then she’d still have something of his! He’d insisted on planting them to grow a tusk, and then he’d forgotten where.
She stares at the parchment when she’s done; the Water Tree, she might call it. Is the Condition a curse? Or a disease? Is there really a difference? She knows of a family in which the children have bones that break easily, and the whites of their eyes have a light-blue tinge. They grow out of it, and as adults, they seem almost normal. But when two first cousins eloped and moved away, their child suffered fractures in its journey out of the womb, and by its second year of life its legs were drawn up like a frog’s, its chest squashed, and its spine twisted. It died before it was three.
She reassembles the papers, ties a ribbon in place of the string. She takes the Water Tree to her room. It’s hers now. She will be the one henceforth to repair and preserve this genealogy, to annotate it and to pass it on.
At dinner, he doesn’t meet her eyes when she serves him. Her mother made an egg curry in a thick red sauce, scoring the hard-boiled eggs with three slashes so the sauce can seep in. Her red-eyed mother never asked about the voices raised in her husband’s bedroom behind the closed door.
That night, mother and daughter pray together. “May the living and the departed together cry out: ‘Blessed is He who has come, and is to come, and will raise the dead.’ ”
After she uncovers her head and snuggles with Baby Mol, feeling the emptiness where JoJo would have been, she feels entitled to speak frankly to God.
“Lord, maybe You don’t want to cure this for reasons I don’t understand. But if You won’t or can’t, then send us someone who can.”
Part Two
CHAPTER 10
A Fish under the Table
1919, Glasgow
On Saturdays, Digby’s mother takes him to the Gaiety, Glasgow’s best. Years later, when he remembers those afternoons his nose will itch, as though he’s inhaling the Jeyes Fluid wafting off the seats. But that pungent cleaner never managed to dampen the smell of stale tobacco exuding from the floors and walls.
Johnny the ticket seller’s eyes are on different floors from his prizefighting days. He no longer remarks that a boy of ten shouldn’t be at a variety show. The dancing girls open the matinee and his mother’s hand stays clamped over Digby’s eyes until the second-spot magician appears. The floaters in Digby’s vision don’t clear till the next act, which is either the sword swallower or the juggler.
The audience is louder and less forgiving after intermission, tanked up on pints of heavy. The roll-your-own haze is thicker than morning fog on the Clyde. The comics come out like gladiators, but brandishing cigarettes instead of maces. Eight minutes is what it takes for the dout to burn their fingers, and that’s how long they have on stage. Most are booed off in under five.
His mother is stone-faced the whole time, her thoughts far away in a manner that always worries Digby. Is she recalling being on stage here herself? She gave up a theatrical career, and fame, perhaps, because she was carrying him. Or is she thinking of the man she met here who ruined it all? Digby studies the performers. He never met his father, but Archie Kilgour was of this tribe, traveling from town to town, haunting the same pubs in each city (in Glasgow it was the Sarry Heid), the publican’s face more familiar to them than their own bairns, and bedding down in the same theatrical digs like Mrs. MacIntyre’s. Digby’s mother once said Archie Kilgour had nailed a kipper to the underside of the dining table when Mrs. MacIntyre denied him credit. Digby asked why under the table. “Gie it a thought, Digs. Yon’s the last place onybuddy wid look fur something rotten. That’s him all over. So low he could slide under a snake’s belly wearing a lum hat.”
Some say Archie sailed for Canada, others that he never left. Archie Kilgour’s real talent was in disappearing. All Digby really knows is that he’s the sort who leaves a fish pinned under the dining table, and he left Digby pinned in his mother’s womb. Digby imagines half-siblings he surely has in the other towns on the circuit: Edinburgh, Stirling, Dundee, Dumfries, Aberdeen . . .
The rousing finale is always “There’s a Girl for Every Soldier,” and it rings in Digby’s ears as they emerge. He feels buoyant, lighter than air, only wishing his maw could feel the same way.
Digby can’t imagine a more exciting time to be alive. The Wright brothers made the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903, but, as every Scottish schoolboy knows, the Barnwell brothers did the same at Causewayhead soon after. He dreams of steering a biplane, of becoming lighter than air! He’ll fly his maw over Glasgow and away. He’ll make her smile. He’ll make her proud.