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The first time Ernetta Ducksworth visited Washington, D.C., she drove up in the truck with Arvin and marched in a crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue, carrying a sign that read "America Whore of Babylon When Will You Stop Your Infant Sacrifice?" Ernetta's wrists ached for two years after carrying that heavy sign. Arvin said it was a blessing to imagine how the Lord felt carrying the cross, but Dr. Spears said "Don't you never, ever do that again, Ernetta. You were not made for that kind of activity. What if you got a blood clot in your leg—with your arteriosclerosis you could go like that." He snapped his fingers.

"But Arvin says if you don't march, you don't really believe what you preach."

"Let Arvin go to the marches, then, but you've got doctor's orders to stay home next time."

This time Ernetta walked into the city alone, with no plans to protest anything and no heavy sign to carry. She'd left the old truck broken down a good way back. It sat in the parking lot of a brand new Burger King, parked between a dumpster and a stack of leftover lumber, with its taillights shining like two red sores. The body was so rusted, you couldn't tell it had ever been blue—a flat, deep blue somebody had once been proud of. Alabama sunlight had cracked the dashboard long ago and now stuffing hung down in the lap of the passenger seat, like the insides of a burst boiled egg.

The breakdown came as no surprise: just this morning, Ernetta had stopped to get a tire patched at a Texaco in the Carolinas, and a red–faced fellow lifted up the hood.

"Gawmighty, you engine belt's cracked."

"What's the engine belt do?"

"Do everything. That belt breaks, you be setting on the side of the road."

"Can you change it for me? How much you charge to fix it?"

He looked her up and down. "Forty–five. That's a good price."

"I ain't got 45 dollars. I still need a tank of gas to get me to Washington."

"You ain't going that far. Other front tire's bad too."

"I'll take this old truck's far as I can," she told him. "Then I'll walk."

She'd pushed on, riding that bad belt and bad tire right up the middle of Virginia, cutting through hills and plains like a surgical knife. The afternoon sun burned her left arm; the warm wind made a hole in her grey–brown hair just above her ear. Through the lower half of the state she listened to a country preacher:

"Dear Beloved, oh my precious ones, our Lord has need of us today. He wants us to go and take the Gospel to the nations. Nations of poor, precious, dying souls. Little children who know Him not. And He calls us, weeping, 'Won't you follow me? Won't you take my Word, my Gospel to the nations? Won't you feed my little ones?' But we do not hear his urgent plea. And souls are dying because we do not hear … "

Past Culpepper, though, all she could find on AM radio was tinny music and a baseball game. Then a sharp–voiced Yankee woman shouting advice at some poor little whimpering pregnant thing:

"Are you listening? My dear, are you listening? Would you close your big mouth for one lousy second of your life and listen to me? The simple answer is to grow up, stop calling radio personalities for advice, and do what you already know is right."

Ernetta gritted her teeth and felt the lingering pain of her oldest, deepest wound. She thought of Arvin out there somewhere in the woods or the city or the backroads or maybe in Mexico planning some kind of something. She knew that she loved Arvin not in the way that a wife usually loves her husband but in the way that a soldier loves his country even though he hates the war. She did not love what he did, but she understood him and she would be true to him. She tightened her grip on the steering wheel of the car and looked from side to side, out each window, as if watching for the enemy. But all she saw was freshly ploughed fields and muddy creeks flying by under faded grey bridges—sometimes a cow standing in the shade of one tree, resting from the sun. The sky overhead was a great, burning blue. It was early April, and already hot.

Around noon, Ernetta stopped at a rest station to drink a ginger ale and buy a sandwich from a vending machine. Pimento looked safer than chicken salad. She unwrapped the sandwich from its wax paper, sniffed it suspiciously, and studied the bits of red pepper in the spread, thinking about her new–planted bell peppers back home in LeCrane. She imagined them ripening and then drying upon the vine, turning from great red suns to wrinkled, weeping knots of purple and black before she ever got near the Alabama–Florida line again. Food for the beetles. She didn't have it in her to grieve, not really, about a few vegetables come to naught (she wasn't a farmer, after all, just a backyard gardener), and yet it did seem a shame that any living thing should come to fruit and then die while still on the vine. And, too, she longed for good food after all this road eating: a sweet tomato, a Vidalia onion, a juicy ear of Silver Queen. Maybe she'd reach home before summer. In the meantime, she'd eat her sandwich and get started again.

Ernetta drove another hour, and then right when state route 29 had turned to Lee Highway and everything was so built up that she knew she couldn't be far, she felt the truck losing power. She pressed the gas pedal to the floor and coasted helplessly past a "Help Wanted" sign right into the parking lot of the Burger King. Nothing to be done. She pulled out the emergency brake, rolled down the truck windows to keep things cool, and then locked the doors to prevent theft. Then she started walking.

A couple of hours later, here she was stumbling across the Potomac on her two small, weary feet. The government parts of the city loomed close now, but she didn't care about the government parts. She carried no luggage except for her fat black purse, which looked even fatter than usual on account of the magazine rolled up inside it and marked with several sticky notes. The name of the magazine was Tops, and Ernetta did not subscribe to it herself or even occasionally read it, though she'd seen it often in Dr. Spears's office, along with Sports Illustrated, Time, Working Mother, Southern Living, and the Gideon Bible.

Ernetta wasn't a reader. When she had extra time on her hands (away from the garden), she preferred crochet, needlepoint, and hook–rugging from patterns purchased at Wal–Mart. If she did want to read, she read letters from her mother or sister or her cousin, who lived in North Dakota and had nobody to talk to but sheets of notebook paper.

The one and only reason Ernetta had taken the February 2 issue of Tops from Dr. Spears's waiting room was that a photograph of herself appeared on page 84, over the words, "Singing Without Voice." The picture showed her in black and white, her big bare arms stretching down from the holes of a sleeveless blouse like two pale columns, hands laid flat on the soil with the new leaves of a cucumber plant pushing up between them, as if she'd just squeezed it from the earth. Her mouth looked crushed up under her nose. If she'd smiled at that moment, just four teeth would have showed, tucked back in her cheeks like chicklets with the color sucked off. Usually she wore a denture, but the photographer, Rose Merriman, had gone out for a jog that morning with her camera strapped to her waist (nobody in LeCrane jogged except maybe Dr. Spears's daughter, Lew), and she'd appeared at Ernetta's house just in time to get a "totally natural shot in really good morning light."

"Ain't got my teeth in," Ernetta said.

"I can't tell."

"Yes you can. I look like a squished grape."

"This is just the way I want you."

"Yeah," Ernetta said, "you give me that camera honey and let me take your picture."

"No way," Rose laughed. "Not all sweaty like this."

"Who you going to show that awful picture to, again?"

"It's for a book on the South."

"Oh lord." Ernetta shook her head. She thought the idea was stupid. What did the South have to do with old ladies who hadn't had time to put their teeth in? But she liked having this funny Yankee girl around, popping in to visit every a few days. The girl had appeared one afternoon and started clicking that camera and asking questions like, "What do you eat for breakfast?," "What did your father do for a living?," "What's your religion?," and "How much do you get a month from social security?" For a while, Ernetta had worried that the girl would get around to asking to take dirty pictures, but after the social security question, she'd changed over to fearing that Rose was there to kill her and stuff her body parts into a freezer somewhere and collect the regular government checks. Then one day she'd looked at Rose's collection of photos and she'd stopped worrying. The child had been all over Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, snapping the ugliest people you could imagine doing the most ordinary, everyday things you could think of—cleaning fish, hanging out laundry, frying potatoes, hoeing gardens, spanking bottoms, shopping at Winn Dixie, singing hymns in church. And all in black and white, like she hadn't heard you could buy color film at the CVS.

After Rose left town, Ernetta forgot all about her for a while. Then one day about a year later, recently in fact, Grace Hodge came up smiling up after Sunday School and said, "Ernetta, is that you in that magazine?"

"What magazine?"

"I can't remember where I saw it. Maybe it were in Newsweek. It was one of them news magazines. There's a picture of you."

"Do you have it? Where'd you get a copy?"

"Dr. Spears's office, or I'd bring it to you. It had a dinosaur on the cover. I'm sure that was you, Ernetta. I recognized your hat with the big sunflower on the brim."

So the next day, having nothing else to do and being of a curious mind, Ernetta went to Dr. Spears's office. Though she had no appointment, no one noticed her except to say "Hello Ernetta," since she came so often anyway. She looked through all the magazines in the wall rack until she finally found her face—her crushed dentureless mouth and somber, curious eyes staring out at her over an article about that girl's book. She still didn't exactly understand what the book was about: something to do with elderly white widows living an unsung and uncelebrated life in the rural South—women of skill and intelligence existing beyond the borders of feminist politics, and some such. Whatever. "But I'm not a widow," Ernetta thought. "Arvin's out there somewhere, up to no good. I wonder if he'll see this."

Two thoughts struck her on finding that picture. One, of course, was that people from town might read the article and get the idea that Arvin was dead. There could never any good come from a lie. The other thought was that she herself looked so awful with that squished face and too–tight blouse—the buttons busting open so far you could make out the flowers on her brassiere! Ernetta could only hope that Grace Hodge would forget and not tell anybody else.

Thinking these things, and also thinking (sort of contradictorily) that nobody around here would care about this particular magazine anyway, she rolled it up and stuck it in her purse. Stole it. Yes, she'd committed plenty of sins in her day, but this was the first time Ernetta Duckworth had stolen anything. Maybe later she could confess to Dr. Spears and thus clear her conscience.

It was at home that night, lying in her little bed in her trailer in a bedroom crowded with ivy and shamrocks and silk flowers bought from the LeCrane Silk Flower Warehouse, that she flipped through the magazine and came across another article altogether: an opinion piece by a young writer totally unknown to her until that very second.

Mama
by Stan E. Colfax
I've never minded the fact that I'm adopted. Sure, I'm a little curious to know who gave me the weird webbed toes (hey, don't tell anybody about those, O.K.?). But basically, I don't care, and pretending I had a painful childhood gets me lots of sympathy from beautiful women. I talk about it a lot in singles bars. Come on, we know they all want to be mothers, down deep.
No, my genetic origin remains a mystery, which is absolutely fine with me. Oh, yeah, there's something in there that urges me to explore my roots—to track down an old sleeping–pill and soap–opera addict in her trailer in Phoenix and find out she's the tree my apple fell from. But weigh the urge to know against the beauty of ignorance. Well, a little ignorance is a wonderful thing.
I mean, I could be anybody. I could be the love child of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Or Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Or Sir Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye. Maybe my mother was some Hollywood tramp who got boinked by JFK or, hell, even Desi Arnaz (which means all those dreams I had about Little Lucie when I was eleven years old would have been, like, incestuous—cool).
Hey, if I could choose, I'd be Jewish (Ma, Ma, are you living in the Poconos?). Or black (do you think there's a chance?). Or even Latin (yes, girls, I am positively soaked in testosterone). Minority guys are irresistible to women, especially if they also happen to be ugly and neurotic. It's an evolutionary thing: females instinctively want to pass on the genes of a suffering, paranoid male. They laugh pretty hard at his jokes, too. All he has to say is "mazel tov" and women wet their pants.
But let's face it, there's just nothing sexy or even all that funny about well–adjusted middle–class white guys like me. Say Woody Allen had been born "William Smith." You think he'd be doing love scenes today with gorgeous women? Nooooo. I see him teaching high school debate, or maybe selling roof tiles. Say he did go into show business—even made a movie of the week with Valerie Bertinelli's second cousin. I'm hearing dialogue:

Her: What's life about, anyway? You're born, you suffer, you die. And in the middle of it all, where's the meaning? Where's the joy?>
Him: Look, babe, could you keep it down. I'm trying to watch Best of the Monster Truck Expo.

So, yes, I'm just fine with my adoption. I'll never track down my birth parents, the mysterious Duck People of Webville. And if anybody out there knows who they are, DON'T tell me. I'm over here eating borscht, and I don't want to be interrupted.

There in her bed, Ernetta closed the magazine and began to think. She thought for the better part of two hours, struggling and worrying and wishing that sleep might just sneak up on her like a thief in the dark. It was hot in the room, even with the windows open and the fan strung from the ceiling and going on high. When Ernetta did finally close her eyes, she slipped into a dream of wind and fire and billowing black clouds. She woke the next morning with the sense of having just given birth all over again.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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