Run.
Around her left wrist, on a leather cord, Bea wore the very loud whistle Aunt Vera used to scare squirrels off the bird feeders. If they weren’t gentle with the infant, she would blow it. Also, she would blow it if they turned out not to be who she thought they were. Bea had relied on Uncle Ira for her information, and Uncle Ira was prone to telling tales. Nevertheless, Bea had chosen to believe him. It happened every year, he said. When the moon was bright enough to see by but not to be easily seen, the air still enough not to carry sound or scent. The pears on the verge of starting to drop. He never heard or saw a thing, but the next morning he would look out his window and down the hill and there, where the day before the pears had packed the branches like sparrows, there would be only leaves and the gray, fleshy stubs from which the pears had grown. Uncle Ira smiled, describing this. They might be giraffes, he mused. Giants! Ira harbored a kind of love for the trespassers who stole his pears. They made him feel benevolent.
But really, he said, Catholics. A poor Irish family who had found a market for pears. And Bea believed him, maybe because she had to. She didn’t know any Catholics. Catholics weren’t Jews, but they were like Jews in that they weren’t Protestants. So there was that. And back home Bea had seen the Irish children walking in packs through the common and envied them, even the poor ones, the company. There looked to be a certain freedom in being one of many: the right to go unnoticed, unattended. Neglect, Bea’s mother would call it, she who had rarely let Bea out of her sight.
Until she had, quite suddenly.
And look at the consequences.
Bea steadied herself against one of the near trees, a tall, straight pine so bare of low branches it entered her consciousness as more human than plant. An idea came to her of sliding down its rough side, lying down on the cushion its needles made beneath her feet, and falling back to sleep with the baby in her arms.
The infant snorted. Bea wouldn’t have guessed that babies snorted but this one snorted all the time, followed by a tremulous sigh. The sigh came. Bea shifted the infant to her shoulder. High above them, a branch creaked and shifted, making way for moonlight. Already its angle had changed. If Bea waited for the people to arrive, she would lose her resolve, or she would keep it and be seen and the people would tell Uncle Ira and he would tell her parents and her mother would make her give the baby to the awful woman who had come last month from the Orphanage for Jewish Children, reeking of camphor and assuring Aunt Vera and Uncle Ira that she did not believe in spoiling, kissing, or otherwise unnecessarily touching babies.