From the Corner of His Eye

thousand dawns or ten thousand. If a mere nurse had insisted that she eat, Agnes would not have been persuaded, but she couldn't hold out against the insistent importuning of one special seamstress.
        Maria Elena Gonzalez-such an imposing figure in spite of her diminutive stature that even three names seemed insufficient to identify her-was still present. Although the crisis had passed, she wasn't ready to trust that nurses and doctors, by themselves, could provide Agnes with adequate care.
        Sitting on the edge of the bed, Maria lightly salted the runny eggs and spooned them into Agnes's mouth. "Eggs is as chickens does."
        "Eggs are as chickens do," Agnes corrected. Que?"
        Frowning, Agnes said, "No, that doesn't make any sense, either, does it? What were you trying to say, dear?"
        "This woman be to ask me about chickens-"
        "What woman?"
        "Doesn't matter. Silly woman making fan at my English, trying confuse me. She be to ask me whether chicken come around first or first be an egg."
        "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
        "Si! Like that she say."
        "She wasn't making fun of your English, dear. It's just an old riddle." When Maria didn't understand that word, Agnes spelled and defined it. "No one can answer it, good English or not. That's the point." 'Point be to ask question without can have no answer? What sense that make?" She frowned with concern. "You not to be well yet, Mrs.
        Lampion, your-head not clean."
        "Clear.
        "I answer to riddle."
        "And what was your answer?"
        "First chicken to be come with first egg inside already."
        Agnes swallowed a spoonful of Jell-O and smiled. "Well, that is pretty simple, after all."
        "Everything be."
        "Be what?" Agnes asked as she sucked up the last of the apple juice through a straw.
        "Simple. People make things to be complicated when not. All world simple like sewing."
        "Sewing?" Agnes wondered if, indeed, her head was not yet clean.
        "Thread needle. Stitch, stitch, stitch," Maria said earnestly as she removed Agnes's bed tray. "Tie off last stitch. Simple. Only to decide is color of thread and what is type stitch. Then stitch, stitch, stitch."
        Into all this talk of stitchery came a nurse with the news that baby Lampion was out of danger and free of the incubator, and with the simplicity of a ring following the swing of a bell, a second nurse appeared, pushing a wheeled bassinet.
        The first nurse beamed smiles into the bassinet and swept from it a pink treasure swaddled in a simple white receiving blanket.
        Previously too weak to lift a spoon, Agnes now had the strength of Hercules and could have held back two teams of horses pulling in oppo- site directions, let alone support one small baby.
        "His eyes are so beautiful," said the nurse who passed him into his mother's arms.
        The boy was beautiful in every regard, his face smoother than that of most newborns, as if he had come into the world with a sense of peace about the life ahead of him in this turbulent place; and perhaps he had arrived with unusual wisdom, too, because his features were better defined than those of other babies, as though already shaped by knowledge and experience. He had a full head of hair as thick and sable-brown as Joey's.
        His eyes, as Maria told Agnes in the middle of the night and as the nurse just confirmed, were exceptionally beautiful. Unlike most human eyes, which are of a single color with striations in a darker shade, each of Bartholomew's contained two distinct colors-green like his mother's, blue like his father's-and the pattern of striations was formed by the alternation of these two dazzling pigments within each orb.
        Jewels, they were, magnificent and clear and radiant.
        Bartholomew's gaze was mesmerizing, and as Agnes met his warm and constant stare, she was filled with wonder. And with a sense of mystery.
        "My little Barty," she said softly, the affectionate form of his name springing to her lips without contemplation. "You're going to have an exceptional life, I think. Yes, you will, smarty Barty. Mothers can tell. So many things happened to stop you from getting here, but you made it anyway. You are here for some fine purpose."
        The rain that contributed to the death of the boy's father had stopped falling during the night. The morning