Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,17

this baby some help. I bundled her up in my jacket, hiked back down the hill, and carried her out of the woods. I took her to the midwives at the convent and begged them to help, but they gasped at the sight of her, muttering that she was the devil’s work. They said she was malformed, near to death, and that there was nothing they could do to help her.”

“But why?” Serafina cried in outrage. “That’s terrible! That’s so mean!” Just because something looked different didn’t mean you just threw it away. She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of world it was out there. The attitude of the midwives almost bothered her more than the idea of a yellow-eyed beast lurking in the night. But she felt a renewed glimmer of admiration for her pa as she imagined his huge, warm hands wrapped around that tiny little baby’s body, giving it heat, keeping it alive.

Her father took a long, deep, troubled breath as he remembered that night, and then he continued his story. “You have to understand the poor little thing had been born with her eyes closed, Sera, and the nuns said that she would never see. She’d been born deaf, and they said she would never hear. And it was plain enough to see that she had four toes on each foot instead of five, but that was the least of it. Her collarbones were malformed, and she had an unnaturally long, curving spine—all twisted-like—and she did not look like she could survive.”

The shock hit her like a blow. She looked up at her father in astonishment. “I’m the baby!” she shouted, leaping to her feet. This wasn’t just a story, this was her story. She’d been born in the forest. That meant her pa had found her and taken her in. She was like a baby fox who’d been raised by a coyote. She stood in front of her pa. “I’m the baby!” she said again.

Her father looked at her, and she saw the truth of it flickering in his eyes, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t say yes and didn’t say no. It was like he couldn’t reconcile his memory of that dark night with the daughter he had now, and he had to tell the story the only way he could: as if it wasn’t her at all.

“The bones of the baby’s back weren’t connected to each other the way they should have been,” he continued. “The nuns were half scared out of their wits at the idea of caring for this child, like it was some sort of demon spawn, but to me she was a little baby, a little chitlan, and you didn’t abandon such a thing. Who cares how many toes she had!”

Serafina kneeled on the floor in front of him, trying to understand it all. She was beginning to see the kind of man her father was and maybe where she got some of her own stick-to-it-iveness. But it was all so confusing. How could she get anything from him if she wasn’t even his?

“I took that baby away, fearin’ them nuns would drown her,” he said.

“I hate them nuns,” she spat. “They’re terrible!”

He shook his head, not in disagreement, but more like the nuns didn’t mean anything at all because they were the least of his problems.

“I didn’t have any proper food,” he said, “so I crept into a farmer’s barn and milked his goat—stole a bottle, too. Felt ashamed doin’ these things, but I needed to get some food into her, and I couldn’t see a better road. That night, I fed the little chitlan her first meal, and as bad off as she was, and with her eyes still closed, she drank it down real good, and I remember praying that somehow it’d help. The more I held her and watched her suck down that milk, the more I wanted her to live.”

“Then what happened?” She slid closer to him. She knew that outside the locked door of the electrical room, somewhere above them, the lawful inhabitants of Biltmore Estate were searching from room to room, but she didn’t care. “Keep goin’, Pa,” she nudged.

“I looked for a woman who could mother the baby proper, but none of them would do it. They was sure she was gonna die. But two weeks later, while I was fixin’ an engine with one hand and bottle-feedin’ the chitlan with the other, somethin’ happened. She opened her eyes