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FEED THE BABY OF LOVE

Orson Scott Card

This story will appear in the anthology OCTOBER'S FRIENDS, ed. by

Martin Harry Greenberg, consisting of stories written in honor of Ray

Bradbury's 50 years of publishing science fiction. For this anthology, Ray

Bradbury authorized the contributors to use characters and settings from his

novels. This may be the only story in the anthology to use Douglas

Spaulding, the main character from the Dandelion Wine stories.

Orson Scott Card. The game "Feed the Baby of Love Many Beans or

All quotations and game features depicted in this story are used by

permission of the gamewright. The lyrics to "The Baby of Love" by

Rainie Pinyon are used with the consent of the copyright holder.

FEED THE BABY OF LOVE

Orson Scott Card

When Rainie Pinyon split this time she didn't go south, even

though it was October and she didn't like the winter cold. Maybe she

thought that this winter she didn't deserve to be warm, or maybe she

wanted to find some unfamiliar territory -- whatever. She got on the

bus in Bremerton and got off it again in Boise. She hitched to Salt

Lake City and took a bus to Omaha. She got herself a waitressing job,

using the name Ida Johnson, as usual. She quit after a week, got

another job in Kansas City, quit after three days, and so on and so on

until she came to a tired-looking cafe in Harmony, Illinois, a small town

up on the bluffs above the Mississippi. She liked Harmony right off,

because it was pretty and sad -- half the storefronts brightly painted

and cheerful, the other half streaked and stained, the windows boarded

up. The kind of town that would be perfectly willing to pick up and

move into a shopping mall only nobody wanted to build one here and

so they'd just have to make do. The help wanted sign in the cafe

window was so old that several generations of spiders had lived and

died on webs between the sign and the glass.

"We're a five-calendar cafe," said the pinched-up overpainted old

lady at the cash register.

Rainie looked around and sure enough, there were five calendars

on the walls.

"Not just because of that Blue Highways book, either, I'll have

you know. We already had these calendars up before he wrote his

book. He never stopped here but he could have."

"Aren't they a little out of date?" asked Rainie.

The old lady looked at her like she was crazy.

"If you already had the calendars up when he wrote the book, I

mean."

"Well, not these calendars," said the old lady. "Here's the thing,

darlin'. A lot of diners and what-not put up calendars after that Blue

Highways book said that was how you could tell a good restaurant.

But those were all fakes. They didn't understand. The calendars have

all got to be local calendars. You know, like the insurance guy gives

you a calendar and the car dealer and the real estate guy and the

funeral home. They give you one every year, and you put them all up

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because they're your friends and your customers and you hope they do

good business."

"You got a car dealer in Harmony?"

"Went out of business thirty years ago. Used to deal in

Studebakers, but he hung on with Buicks until the big dealers up in the

tri-cities underpriced him to death. No, I don't get his calendar

anymore, but we got two funeral homes so maybe that makes up for it."

Rainie almost made a remark about this being the kind of town

where nobody goes anywhere, they just stay home and die, but then

she decided that maybe she liked this old lady and maybe she'd stay

here for a couple of days, so she held her tongue.

The old lady smiled a twisted old smile. "You didn't say it, but I

know you thought it."

"What?" asked Rainie, feeling guilty.

"Some joke about how people don't need cars here, cause they

aren't going anywhere until they die."

"I want the job," said Rainie.

"I like your style," said the old lady. "I'm Minnie Wilcox, and I

can hardly believe that anybody in this day and age named their little

girl Ida, but I had a good friend named Ida when I was a girl and I

hope you don't mind if I forget sometimes and call you Idie like I

always did her."

"Don't mind a bit," said Rainie. "And nobody in this day and age

does name their daughter Ida. I wasn't named in this day and age."

"Oh, right, you're probably just pushing forty and starting to feel

old. Well, I hope I never hear a single word about it from you because

I'm right on the seventy line, which to my mind is about the same as

driving on empty, the engine's still running but you know it'll sputter

soon so what the hell, let's get a few more miles on the old girl before

we junk her. I need you on the morning shift, Idie, I hope that's all the

same with you."

"How early?"

"Six a.m. I'm sad to say, but before you whine about it in your

heart, you remember that I'm up baking biscuits at four-thirty. My Jack

and I used to do that together. In fact he got his heart attack rolling

out the dough, so if you ever come in early and see me spilling a few

tears into the powdermilk, I'm not having a bad day, I'm just

remembering a good man, and that's my privilege. We got to open at

six on account of the hotel across the street. It's sort of the opposite of

a bed and breakfast. They only serve dinner, an all-you-can-eat family-

style home-cooking restaurant that brings 'em in from fifty miles around.

The hotel sends them over here for breakfast and on top of that we get

a lot of folks in town, for breakfast and for lunch, too. We do good

business. I'm not poor and I'm not rich. I'll pay you decent and you'll

make fair tips, for this part of the country. You still see the nickels by

the coffee cups, but you just give those old coots a wink and a smile,

cause the younger boys make up for them and it's not like it costs that

much for a room around here. Meals free during your shift but not

after, I'm sorry to say."

"Fine with me," said Rainie.

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"Don't go quittin' on me after a week, darlin'."

"Don't plan on it," said Rainie, and to her surprise it was true. It

made her wonder -- was Harmony Illinois what she'd been looking for

when she checked out in Bremerton? It wasn't what usually happened.

Usually she was looking for the street -- the down-and-out half-

hopeless life of people who lived in the shadow of the city. She'd

found the street once in New Orleans, and once in San Francisco, and

another time in Paris, and she found places where the street used to

be, like Beale Street in Memphis, and the Village in New York City, and

Venice in L.A. But the street was such a fragile place, and it kept

disappearing on you even while you were living right in it.

But there was no way that Harmony Illinois was the street, so

what in the world was she looking for if she had found it here?

Funeral homes, she thought. I'm looking for a place where

funeral homes outnumber car dealerships, because my songs are dead

and I need a decent place to bury them.

It wasn't bad working for Minnie Wilcox. She talked a lot but

there were plenty of town people who came by for coffee in the

morning and a sandwich at lunch, so Rainie didn't have to pay

attention to most of the talking unless she wanted to. Minnie found out

that Rainie was a fair hand at making sandwiches, too, and she could

fry an egg, so the work load kind of evened out -- whichever of them

was getting behind, the other one helped. It was busy, but it was

decent work -- nobody yelled at anybody else, and even when the

people who came in were boring, which was always, they were still

decent and even the one old man who leered at her kept his hands

and his comments to himself. There were days when Rainie even

forgot to slip outside in back of the cafe and have a smoke in the wide-

open gravel alleyway next to the dumpster.

"How'd you used to manage before I came along?" she asked

early on. "I mean, judging from that sign, you've been looking for help

for a long time."

"Oh, I got by, Idie, darlin', I got by."

Pretty soon, though, Rainie picked up the truth from comments

the customers made when they thought she was far enough away not

to hear. Old people always thought that because they could barely

hear, everybody else was half-deaf, too. "Oh, she's a live one."

"Knows how to work, this one does." "Not one of those young girls

who only care about one thing." "How long you think she'll last,

Minnie?"

She lasted one week. She lasted two weeks. It was on into

November and getting cold, with all the leaves brown or fallen, and she

was still there. This wasn't like any of the other times she'd dropped

out of sight, and it scared her a little, how easily she'd been caught

here. It made no sense at all. This town just wasn't Rainie Pinyon,

and yet it must be, because here she was.

After a while even getting up at six a.m. wasn't hard because

there was no life in this town at night so she might as well go to bed as

soon as it turned dark and then dawn was a logical time to get up.

There was no TV in the room Rainie took over the garage of a short-

tempered man who told her "No visitors" in a tone of voice that made it

clear he assumed that she was a whore by nature and only by sheer

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force of will could he keep her respectable. Well, she was used to

letting the voice of authority make proclamations about what she could

and couldn't do. Almost made her feel at home. And, of course, she'd

do whatever she wanted. This was 1990 and she was forty-two years

old and there was freedom in Russia now so her landlord, whatever his

name was, could take his no-visitors rule and apply it to his own self.

She saw how he sized up her body and decided she was nice-looking.

A man who sees a nice-looking woman and assumes that she's wicked

to the core is confessing his own desires.

After work Rainie didn't have anywhere much to go. She ate

enough for breakfast and lunch at the cafe that dinner didn't play much

of a part in her plans. Besides, the hotel restaurant was too crowded

and noisy and full of people's children running around dripping thick

globs of gravy off their plates. The chatter of people and clatter of

silverware, with Montovani and Kastelanetz (?) playing in the

background -- it was not a sound Rainie could enjoy for long. And

when she passed the piano in the hotel lobby the one time she went

there, she felt no attraction toward it at all, so she knew she wasn't

ready to surface yet.

One afternoon, chilly as it was, she took off her apron after work

and put on her jacket and walked in the waning light down to the river.

There was a park there, a long skinny one that consisted mostly of

parking places, plus a couple of picnic tables, and then a muddy bank

and a river that seemed to be as wide as the San Francisco Bay. Dirty

and cold, that was the Mississippi. It didn't call out for you to swim in

it, but it did keep moving leftward, flowing south, flowing downhill to

New Orleans. I know where this river goes, thought Rainie. I've been

where it ends up, and it ends up pretty low. She remembered Nicky

Villiers sprawled on the levee, his vomit forming one of the Mississippi's

less distinguished tributaries as it trickled on down and disappeared in

the mud. Nicky shot up on heroin one day when she was out and then

forgot he'd done it already and shot up again, or maybe he didn't

forget, but anyway Rainie found him dead in the nasty little apartment

they shared, back in the winter of -- what, sixty-eight? Twenty-two

years ago. Before her first album. Before anybody ever heard of her.

Back when she thought she knew who she was and what she wanted.

If I'd had his baby like he asked me, he'd still be dead and I'd have a

fatherless child old enough to go out drinking without fake i.d.

The sky had clouded up faster than she had thought possible --

sunny but cold when she left the cafe, dark and cloudy and the

temperature dropping about a degree a minute by the time she stood

on the riverbank. Her jacket had been warm enough every other day,

but not today. A blast of wind came into her face from the river, and

there was ice in it. Snowflakes like needles in it. Oh yes, she thought.

This is why I always go south in winter. But this year I'm not even as

smart as a migratory bird, I've gone and got myself a nest in blizzard

country.

She turned around to head back up the bluff to town. For a

moment the wind caught her from behind, catching at her jacket and

making it cling to her back. When she got back to the two-lane

highway and turned north, the wind tried to tear her jacket off her, and

even when she zipped it closed, it cut through. The snow was coming

down for real now, falling steadily and sticking on the grass and on the

gravel at the edges of the road. Her feet were getting wet and cold

right through her shoes as she walked along in the weeds, so she had

to move out onto the asphalt. She walked on the left side of the road

so she could see any oncoming cars, and that made her feel like she

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was a kid in school again, listening to the safety instructions. Wear light

clothing at night and always walk on the left side of the road, facing

traffic. Why? So they can see your white, white face and your bright

terrified eyes just before they run you down.

She reached the intersection where the road to town slanted up

from the Great River Road. There was a car coming, so she waited for

it to pass before crossing the street. She was looking forward to

heading southeast for a while, so the wind wouldn't be right in her

face. It'd be just her luck to catch a cold and get laryngitis. Couldn't

afford laryngitis. Once she got that it could linger for months. Cost her

half a million dollars once, back in '73, five months of laryngitis and a

cancelled tour. Promoter was going to sue her, too, since he figured

he'd lost ten times that much. His lawyer talked sense to him, though,

and the lawsuit and the promoter both went away. Those were the

days, when the whole world trembled if I caught a cold. Now it'd just

be Minnie Wilcox in the Harmony Cafe, and it wouldn't exactly take

her by surprise. The sign was still in the window.

The car didn't pass. Instead it slowed down and stopped. The

driver rolled down his window and leaned his head out. "Ride?"

She shook her head.

"Don't be crazy, Ms. Johnson," he said. So he knew her. A

customer from the cafe. He pulled his head back in and leaned over

and opened the door on the other side.

She walked over, just to be polite, to close the door for him as

she turned him down. "You're very nice," she began, "but --"

"No buts," he said. "Mrs. Wilcox'll kill me if you get a cold and I

could have given you a ride."

Now she knew him. The man who did Minnie's accounting.

Lately he came in for lunch every day, even though he only went over

the cafe books once a week. Rainie wasn't a fool. He was a nice man,

quiet and he never even joked with her, but he was coming in for her,

and she didn't want to encourage him.

"If you're worried about your personal safety, I got my two older

kids as chaperones."

The kids leaned forward from the back seat to get a look at her.

A boy, maybe twelve years old. A girl, looking about the same age,

which meant she was probably younger. "Get in, lady, you're letting all

the heat out of the car," said the girl.

She got in. "This is nice of you, but you didn't need to," she said.

"I can tell you're not from around here," said the boy in the back

seat. "Radio says this is a bad storm coming and you don't walk

around in a blizzard after dark. Sometimes they don't find your body

till spring."

"Dougie," said the man.

That was the man's name, too, she remembered. Douglas. And

his last name ... Spaulding. Like the ball manufacturer.

"This is nice of you, Mr. Spaulding," she said.

"We're just coming back down from the Tri-cities Mall," he said.

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