Susan Mason Scott

 

 

Mountain Baptism

                                                                      for Caleb

Might be a mountain, she muses, staring at the red map above the bridge of my firstborn’s nose.

Her East Tennessee lilt and stitch bear a heritage not even her beloved could claim. It remains

hers to affirm. A birthright in rows of tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, yellow onions, and red potatoes.

With my baby swathed in her stained apron smelling of fresh game and salt, she explains how

some things grow from seed and others need help from cousins—how a garden abides. Then

she lifts her eyes and my son to the unfolding trails of pine, scarlet oak, coal’s black smoke,

distant wisps measured in crows fly, and a smile so wide it wrinkles her every hard road.

Her face like a bulldog, eyes deep-set divine a cross in motes of filtered light, the intersection

of wood splintered and nails staked like fingers in Appalachian soil.

Her palm, a wizened cup, scoops a handful of peat and manure, holds it to his nose pink and

pinched as a pig’s snout, smears it across his forehead. His newborn blues wide as nickels, my

womb still fat with his impression, she attaches him to my swollen breast to eat the vegetables

she nurtured, and says, lick his forehead, three times a day, as if a prescription for ache.

Last of Colorado’s evening hugging the Front Range my oldest son, twenty-seven, and his dog

sit at my side. He recounts stories of his younger brother, Sam, born to that same mountain in the

South, but gone now. I trace the fading birthmark, hear a familiar accent. Might be, I answer,

notes of dust on my tongue.

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