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

“Quite frankly, I don’t give a damn what you believe. Your wife does. It’s already started.” Maman swiveled to Hallow and said, “Sweetheart, it’s time for you to practice. Come kneel down right here with me.”

Hallow did not move until Maman placed her arm around the right side of her body and pulled her toward Iris’s legs. They knelt beside each other, and Josephine balanced Hallow’s grip on the butcher knife. Softly, she said, “Remember what I told you. Can you see how the light shines on the caul? You see it?”

Hallow nodded.

“I cannot hear you.”

“Yes.”

Hallow did a double take at Josephine, who nodded. “Go on.” She watched Josephine and Landon, whose faces were just as stricken with apprehension as her own; Officer Evans, whose bottom lip protruded and eyebrows caved into the glabella; and finally, Iris, who remained dormant in spite of everything that went on. Hallow tapped the caul right above Iris’s left ankle and flashed a glance at Iris’s face. Then she thumbed the caul in and around its ridges and noticed that its texture felt different than her own. The caul was much harder and crystalline, unlike hers, which was softer and luminescent. Hers was dew and Iris’s was armor. Because of Iris’s age, the distinction between Iris’s caul and epidermis was more defined than what it would be on a child. Maman wasn’t close to finishing the next part of her instruction before Hallow cut a piece of Iris’s caul in the shape of a boot and became overwhelmed with surprise at the crunch from the incision. She held the severed part of the caul, which had now shrunk in her hand, up toward the chandelier so that she could get a better look at it. Maman coaxed the caul from Hallow’s fingers and patted her on the back. With the caul now dried and browned in both hands, Maman laid her palms out in front of Officer Evans and said, “Take it.” Hallow noticed from the periphery that Iris’s eyeballs seemed to be moving while her lids remained closed and wondered how much time had passed from Josephine striking Iris to her being moved out into the foyer. She should’ve been awake by now if Maman’s estimation was correct. The layer of skin now bare from the incision was smooth and glossy like a newborn’s. Hallow wanted to reach out and touch it, but she refrained. She was not aware of all that she had done, and yet she felt vital to whatever plan Maman was concocting. She was precocious, but her wits had their limits.

“I don’t want it,” Officer Evans replied. His bottom lip dropped lower, toward his chin, giving him the look of a petulant child, and he took one step back with his right foot.

“Come on. This is a gift, and we won’t ever have to speak of this day again. You write me up for disturbing the peace or whatever and we go on about our business. I’ll even wrap it in our signature matte paper with a wax seal.”

Officer Evans took one look at Iris and could not fix his jaw to hold back the floodgates of his emotion for his ailing wife. He snatched the caul and stuffed it in his pocket. “I’m taking this in for our files. I don’t believe in any of this shit.”

“I believe that you do,” Maman said. She escorted Officer Evans to the front door and made sure that it clipped the backs of his feet as he exited. She kept her hand on the door panel and grinned with clenched teeth. “Now that he’s implicated . . .” Maman pivoted and returned to the foyer. “We can all disperse. I, frankly, need a nap.”

“We’re just going to leave her here?” Hallow asked.

“She’ll be fine.”

“But she hasn’t woken up yet.”

Maman rested her right elbow on her left arm and said, “This is true. Strange but true. But she will. Run along now. You’re not needed any longer. Jo—take her.”

“Come on, sweetie.” Josephine pulled Hallow to her feet and gradually inched her toward the staircase with Landon following behind them.

Hallow staggered her steps to keep an eye on Iris through the spaces of the balusters and saw how she rose, shook some shards out of her hair, and walked toward the stairs leading to the basement. The brownstone fell silent as everyone dispersed to different corners. When Hallow returned to her room, she sat on her bed in a stupor over what had just transpired. Josephine and Maman were right: Iris was conscious or had to have been conscious the entire time the police were questioning them and when Hallow was cutting her. But why didn’t she just open her eyes? What game was she playing? Hallow could hear her heartbeat in one ear and an incessant ringing in the other. Hallow never felt more like an interloper than when she witnessed the way everyone continued on with their days almost completely and utterly detached from what they were doing to one another.

Maybe Helena was right: this family was broken.

10

The spirits became more charged and needy since that day of the police visit. For the next five years, they appeared more frequently to Iris after Josephine struck her with that glass pitcher, dislodging her mind’s processing of who said what and when. The accident made Iris seem even more untethered from this world. Her gait was uneven, and her bones cracked as if her ligaments needed oil to keep the machinery of her body from rusting. If one were to look close enough around her hairline, they could see small dents where the shards were once wedged in her head.

Eye contact became a challenge. When in conversation with another relative, she had gone from looking beyond the person’s face to toward the ceiling, as though she was searching for something above her head. Iris’s conversations with the spirits, once relegated to the basement, now happened anywhere and everywhere. Since that day when the