Ida had run off with a singer she met celebrating her 17th birthday, honky-tonking with her friends and she knew it was crazy and probably even bad but he sang the sorrow and love she’d never known how to express and it seemed to her she didn’t really have a choice in the matter. And anyway he’d gotten her virginity so carefully saved all those years and she was afraid to face her father in the morning, so she just didn’t go home at all but traveled with her magic man from deep in Louisiana up along the river toward Chicago.
It was summertime and they’d drive in the nights and then park in a shady spot in the morning and sleep in back of his truck. He’d fixed it up with 2x4s and a tarp to make a kind of covered wagon of it and laid all kinds of blankets and sleeping bags out over the floor of it to make a soft bed.
Afternoons they’d walk along the river where everything was soft and hazy, birds making lazy sounds as they coasted on warm air currents and the fluff from the cottonwoods drifting around them, and evenings he’d find himself a place, a dance hall, or bar, where they’d let him play his guitar and sing for tips. Ida went with him a few times but after a while he asked her to stay at the campsite they’d made. He stayed out later when she stayed home. Some nights he came back broke because the manager would take his tips to pay for the booze he consumed. Some nights he came back bruised because he fought for his tips. And some nights he came back broke and bruised because he fought for his tips and lost.
When she told him she hadn’t gotten her monthly and must be pregnant, he didn’t seem too glad. In fact he cussed her good but he didn’t hit her. He told her he could find someone to give her an abortion but she didn’t believe in that and they argued and she cried every night alone in the truck because he didn’t love the baby in her belly. That’s when she first started praying, hard, to God, someone vague still in her mind. Ida knew the baby was a girl because she dreamed about a girl baby and she decided she’d name her Cardenia to rhyme with the sweetest smelling flowers she knew. It was a rich and gorgeous gift a poor, homeless woman could still bestow, a gift of imagination. But Cardenia slipped away, no more than a clot in a river of blood that almost took Ida herself in the flow.
“I dreamt I was carrying my baby through a crowd and then suddenly the baby was not in my arms and I found Marcus to see if he had taken her but he didn’t have the baby either and I was crying and scared and I told him ‘I’ve lost the baby, I’ve lost the baby’ and when he came back that night I was still whimpering ‘I’ve lost the baby, I’ve lost the baby’ and I was just bleeding and bleeding so I knew I must have miscarried.”
“What a relief” was all he said and she knew it was better this way and that she should thank God for the timely miscarriage but she couldn’t help mourning. That next day as soon as the shops opened he brought her sanitary napkins and clean clothes but he didn’t know enough to take her to a doctor. After 4 days of bleeding and feeling weaker and weaker Ida realized she could be dying and they drove to the nearest emergency room. The nurse told her another day and she could have bled to death as her body worked to rid itself of the last minuscule vestige of the fetus. A doctor cleaned her out, gave her antibiotics and advised no sex for three weeks.
Marcus felt so guilty he nursed her tenderly for the whole time and then, when she was well in body but sick in spirit and wanted another child, he gave her one, a boy this time and the boy survived. For a little while the man, and woman and the baby boy made a little family temporarily sheltered from poverty and despair by love and good intentions. This man could sing and con his way into anything including a regular paying job and so he did until not quite a year after the birth of the second son when he was overcome with wanderlust and boredom, and strong urges he recognized partly with dread and partly with excitement and he simply walked away one night never to return.
As she aged, Ida’s mind churned up the rich soil of her memories and long-ago dreams came back in her sleep. “I’ve lost the baby, I’ve lost the baby,” she was crying in such real grief when Adam ran in. “Wake up mama, wake up, everything will be alright.”
“Abandoned,” she whimpered and reached a hand out to someone. Adam held the hand and whispered back, “Ok, mama, you sleep. I won’t abandon you, I’ll be here when you wake,” and he was, Ida thanked God.