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Show Moon - 2 only it was blue and deathly still, so she wrapped it in a towel and put it under the sink. Having seen two infant sons fade into death, she was resigned. Then her husband came home and she, "a little bit upset," told him of this baby. He said, "Show me," and so she unwrapped the towel, and lo, a pink baby shook its fists at them, arched its back and screamed. This was Michael, the surviving son. A year later came Alice, who grew up to become a Born Again Christian. Anne, who would someday be my mother, was the third living child. Her birth was unremarkable. Anne was the Sweet One. Her face was shaped like a narrow heart, with a tiny pointed chin and delicate bones. She hated being sweet. If there were a religion that would heal her of sweetness, she would have converted. As it was, she could not, like Michael, decide to turn pink, arch her body and scream. Instead, she curled up in the swing on their huge veranda, wrapped herself in an afghan because she was always cold, and waited, memorizing the light in the leaves of the elm tree and the way the branches joined each other like bodies twisted in some violent community of love. It is likely that my mother didn't see the tree in just that way, but she could have remembered it like that later. It is also possible that she never thought about trees at all, but I think that even when she was very young she saw things beyond her years, inchoate, through her skin, through eyes that were, as she said to me once, on the bottom of her feet. "Quaking Anne," they called her. She often shivered. Ruth would press her lips tightly together and say, "In God's truth there is no discomfort. Coldness is Error." She slapped at Anne's icy hands with a wooden spoon sometimes, but mostly she was otherwise occupied, a baby on her uneven hip, a dustcloth brandished in her free hand like a heraldic banner. After Anne came |