|
|
From
"Fingers and
Toes"
by
Emily Olson
|
|
Her father was
stricken with sorrow and anger, and blamed the little
baby for his
wife’s death. In the days of Marta’s childhood,
growing up in a small Missouri
town with a large immigrant population from Europe, any
type of deformity
on an infant was deemed to be devil’s work by the
resident community,
and her father and some of his friends and neighbors
insisted for many
months that Marta should be disposed of, left for the
fairies in a basket in the
woods, or drowned like a runt puppy or kitten.
Only her mother’s sister, also Marta’s namesake
was able to convince her papa,
Bruno, that Marta should survive. So the baby was taken
to her aunt Marta’s
house to be raised. She never saw her papa alive again,
only stretched out
in a homemade pine box after he died. Bruno fell to his
death from the roof of the
barn. He was found on the ground below, his arms raised
to the sky in what some
people in the small town described as supplication, his
dead, staring eyes turned
upward in horror and amazement.
Some people told the story of her father’s death
with an added bit of juice. Some
said that when he was found, he was actually kneeling on
the ground in the spot
where he fell, and that the ground around him was burned
in a perfect circle, leaving
nothing but dirt and ash where grass once grew. No one
could explain the event
and people just assumed he had committed suicide. There
was never any reason
to think otherwise.
|
|
|