Thrown-away Child

pressing her. And so I ask, “Tell me about that one Christmas?”
     
    Violet Flagg, standing in this place with her head °und in a woollen scarf and the wind being kind enou gh to blow away her embarrassed tears, looked up at a leaden December sky. Her thought was, Oh La-4 will it ever come easy for me? But she did not dare ask such a thing aloud, for fear of losing heart in front of the children.
    Here, at the railroad tracks—at Elysian Fields, wherei Paris Avenue cuts under the viaduct, right near Henrietta’s Wigs & Weaves and the Popeye’s takeout chicken stand—was where people came by night and dumped their throwaways for as long as Violet Flagg had been in New Orleans. Which now, in 1960, had been almost two decades since saying good-bye and good riddance} to St. Francisville.
    She remembered her first visit to the dump, in the 1940s, and how everybody used to come take a close look at the trash—maybe pick a little some. You never know but that something useful would turn up, which j you could not otherwise afford. But then the times got better in the 1950s—for Negroes, too—and only the tramps would come to pick, white and black alike. The tramps and also trashy women who were not too picky \ about men. Nobody respectable came here anymore.
    Yet here she was on this raw day, Violet Flagg with three children following along after her like ducklings. At home, her husband, Willis, was in the big bed upstairs, swaddled to control his incontinence, slipping in and out of delirium. This was the worst bout of Willis’s long sickness. He had not worked in almost ten months. The people at the clinic had no name for what ailed Willis, and : they assured Violet that even the fancy doctors down on Canal Street probably had no better diagnosis. Nobody said he was dying, but Violet knew he was. And so the black dogs of sickness and poverty were again, in 1960, the central facts of Violet’s existence. Just as they had been in St. Francisville during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But Violet was deter- \ mined to prevent at least one replay of those grim days. Christmas was coming! Money or no, it would not be like it was when she was a girl. She would not wear her own mother’s scared brave face and tell a lie to her young ones, “Christmas is just another day.” No! Her children—her little daughters Janice and Ruby, and Rose’s boy, Perry—would have their presents. Her husband, Willis, too. If it meant picking trash, then so be it.
    Violet stood back from the mounds of refuse. The cans and bottles, the soggy bags full of old clothes and household junk, jagged bits of lumber, broken furniture, rusted car parts. The children circled around her. The girls held fast to their mama’s hands, warmed by an old pair of their daddy’s brown cotton work gloves. Perry clutched at Violet’s skirts, wiping a runny nose on the sleeve of one of Willis’s khaki shirts. Violet let loose of Janice’s hand for a minute. Violet shaded her eyes and surveyed the dump, to make sure it was free of trampy men. Tramps were different now than they were years back, more likely toward violence. Satisfied she had the trash mound all to herself, Violet then moved ahead, towing the children along with her.
    “I’m freezing cold!” Ruby hollered, her breath frosting in the wind. And it was true; her little fingers were ice in Violet’s hand. Violet prayed silently to God for the gift of a child’s mittens somewhere in the mean landscape. Ruby further complained, “Why we come here to this nasty place, Mama?”
    'For a little knobby-kneed skinny thing, you got a awful big mouth,” Violet answered her daughter.
    Violet took off her floppy man’s gloves and gave them to Ruby to wear, then shooed her off along with J anice and Perry to go find whatever they might find, he said to the three of them, “Go ahead, run around, nut don’t be straying far from me, and if you see something move — well, just don’t be stepping on it ...”
     
    Ruby stops her story. The train slows to a crawl, to cross a long trestle bridge spanning a narrow and muddy river. The pines of one mountain riverbank give way to another and the speed resumes.
    “I take it your mother found everybody a Christmas present there by the railroad tracks?” I ask.
    “Yes. We just about froze to death that day, and I kept telling Mama I was ashamed of us being there. But Mama wouldn’t leave that trash heap, not until she had all the presents she