Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins (read any book .TXT) 📕

after they had been washed. Subtle sounds like fingernails scraping against windows or sharp winds on the inside persisted. But ever since Iris’s premonition about that woman Laila, the outside presences became more apparent: the holes in the ceiling grew larger, the wallpaper chipped and crusted no matter how many times it was patched over, and the aroma in certain rooms was stale and dead even if perfumed oil in glass decanters was used to diffuse the smell.

She didn’t want to believe it. The brownstone had been lived in for decades. Wear and tear was natural. But Maman was getting older. She’d had to move from her master bedroom down to the office on the first floor because her legs were no match for the stairs in her old age. Though the caul protected her body, it did not protect the mind in the same way. She had always been perceptive—paranoid even—which is why she took Iris’s words to heart. But now she wondered if heeding the premonition about Laila’s unborn child wasn’t enough.

The Melancon family were accustomed to precarious living situations. Before migrating, they lived along the Cane River in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Each family owned a home on heirs’ property from the river to the back swamp. The ranch in which Maman resided was on land between the river and an artificial levee, the living room itself right along the central waterway, a risk whenever there were high tides and hurricanes. Cochon de lait characterized many weekends—nightlong carrying on and feasting on roast suckling pig—before Sunday Mass at St. Augustine. When caulbearers lived peacefully, they distilled oil from their camphor trees and sold them as medicine and perfume as a side hustle to everyone from the neighbors to the priests. Ever since Hallow was born, Maman had been reminiscing about simpler days spent raising chickens and hogs, or watching the sun touch the valley’s horizon through the sand hills. She felt secure; her family was secure, their legacy intact. Hallow regenerated caul more quickly than anyone Maman had ever seen. She was the future, the successor! For the first years of Hallow’s life, Maman fantasized without worry. She would sink deep into her mattress and recall the smell of the sycamore or azalea—how, as a child, unlike her relatives, she was endowed with a sixth sense and felt a change that was sure to come to her congenial space where the land and water met..

Moving to Harlem had brought its challenges. The camellia red beans, White Lily flour, Creole seasoning, and Louisiana hot sauce did not cook so richly here. In the summertime, the scent of fried chicken wafted through the air. Then in the colder months, the air smelled of nothing but rain. They substituted their gardens for flowerpots, lawns for stoops, camphor oil for their bodies. But at least they owned their brownstone outright. She and her husband, Alexandre, had pooled their resources together—what she made selling her caul and what he made as a blacksmith—to move up north and start anew.

Of course, the city lights had been too much temptation for him. “Just like a man,” Maman often told herself when she caught herself missing him. He had no interest in being a blacksmith anymore or hearing about how Maman was progressing with the caulbearing business. Whatever earnings they cultivated, he squandered on drinking and gambling, until finally Maman caught him laid up with a cabaret singer. She kicked him and his belongings out on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and he left without so much as a request for reconciliation, let alone an apology. The only thing she had to remember him by was a small, wrinkled photo of him that she kept on her desk and had never thought to remove after all these years. Since Alexandre left her with two small children, Maman poured everything she could back into their home, devoting painstaking effort to making sure every corner was dusted and every surface polished. The home, like her business and her children, was her world. And she was hell-bent on preserving her world, bound within these four walls.

A crack here or there wasn’t going to change that. At least that was what she told herself. But the cracks, alongside the creaking floorboards and the shoddy lighting, had made her feel like a visitor in her own home for years. Maman stared at the cracks and wondered if or when they would part this place in half. Her fear was now mitigated by the fact that Hallow was here. She was growing wonderfully year after year. A successor was now in place; Maman could pass on if she wanted. She was already in her late seventies and she had seen and heard enough. But she still didn’t feel as confident as she wanted to in Josephine.

Maman should’ve known from birth that Josephine would never leave her side—sometimes to a fault. In the womb, Josephine relentlessly kicked Maman in the ribs whenever she ran errands, as if Maman could pull away from her. When Josephine was a toddler, after she had been weaned, Maman would fall asleep often and find that Josephine had unbuttoned her blouse and was sucking from her breast. What startled Maman most was that Josephine did not cry or unlatch when she knew that she was being watched. She sucked more vigorously until Maman pulled her away, massaging her red, chafed nipple and then banishing Josephine to her own room. But Josephine never gave her any other trouble besides not being able to produce a caulbearing child. She was always eager to please—sycophantically and annoyingly so. But as Josephine got older, Maman noticed a strength inside of her too. Maman would never admit it to her daughter, but she was worried and damn near convinced that Josephine was going to walk out that front door years ago. When Hallow was born and Josephine became a mother, there was a ferocity to her disposition that Maman had never seen before, and she liked