Dogland | Page 3

one night when I was four or five, soon after we moved to Florida. I asked, "Ma? D'you 'member the hairy man an' the tree lady at Mardi Gras?"
She shook her head and set aside the copy of Reader's Digest that she'd been looking through. "There were an awful lot of people dressed up that day, and I wasn't really paying much attention to any of them." She smiled.
"The tree lady that helped you."
"The nice Negro woman?" Ma smiled and glanced toward our TV set. We always had second-hand televisions that never delivered clear pictures or sound; one was usually playing in the background of any family conversation. "Oh, yes. But I don't remember anything about her and a tree." I thought Ma wouldn't continue, but then she said, "It's funny how you were all born under such odd circumstances."
"We were?" No one else was in the living room. Digger and Little Bit had to go to bed half an hour before I did, and Pa was out in the yard working on the station wagon again.
"Well, not very funny," Ma said. "But having Digger in the middle of the Mardi Gras parade is pretty funny." She smiled and blushed at the same time, and so did I.
"Yeah." I laughed. "Pretty funny."
"And on the day Little Bit was born, an entire flock of quail landed outside my room. You hardly ever see quail in northern Minnesota. Several of them settled on my window sill and started whistling away. Doctor Jim said you could've hunted your dinner with a shopping bag. One of the nurses went to shoo them away, and they just flew around her, a-singing and a-singing. But as soon as Doctor Jim walked toward them, they flew off."
I knew the punch line to that one: "Figure he forgot his shopping bag?"
Ma set her hand on my head and ran her fingers over the bristles of my crewcut. "I suppose so."
"And what about me, Ma?"
"What about you?" Ma winced the tiniest bit, then smiled. "Oh, that. It's nothing, really."
"It's funny?"
"Well, there was a drunk man in the waiting room, saying you were his boy. I was afraid Luke would hit him, but the orderlies took the man outside."
I could see a drunken cowboy staggering into a hospital room wearing chaps and six-guns. "What kind of man?"
"Just some man. There are some very strange people in this world, Chris. You have to be careful."
"Yes'm."
I couldn't remember the farm in Minnesota or the trip down to New Orleans, but Digger's birth was one of my earliest memories and one of the first stories that I could tell, though it didn't seem like a real story to anyone except me. It wasn't like the things that no one else remembered because they probably weren't important to them, like my earliest memory, of a day in the living room in Louisiana when the TV screen suddenly went dark in the middle of a show. A white dot lingered at its center as if the whole picture had fallen in on itself, and then the dot faded to black. Pa walked across the living room and did something to the back of the set, but that's where that memory ends.
Everyone in the family remembered the day of Digger's birth, even Little Bit and maybe even Digger himself, but everyone remembered it a little differently. He was born in 1958, soon after my family came to New Orleans. Pa had been away selling encyclopedias, and Grandma Letitia hadn't come down to be with Ma yet because the baby wasn't due for three more weeks. Ma had called us in from the yard and said that Little Bit and I would have to come with her in a taxi, and we'd have to be very good and take care of her like she usually took care of us.
I fetched the pink suitcase that Ma had packed a month before, and Little Bit carried Ma's purse. No one said much. A neighbor came out and offered to drive Ma, but just then the taxi arrived. The driver, a red-nosed man who looked like Santa Claus with a flat-top, kept saying, "Don't you worry none; we'll get you to the hospital fine. Wish it weren't Mardi Gras. Traffic's gonna be hellacious. But don't you fret now, ma'm. We'll get you there jus' fine, you'll see."
The taxi could not reach its destination, but a parade of costumed drunks were not enough to stop my brother from reaching his. Ma said, "The baby's coming," and the driver yelled into the crowded street, "He'p me! He'p me! A woman's havin' a child! Somebody he'p me!" Little Bit and I sat very quietly beside Ma, watching her breathe, watching the costumed crowd, watching for a white-haired doctor in a long white coat