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Wax Baby
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Stefanie Fair-King
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ichael Henry left this world the day after he came into it. His tombstone is etched with the dates Nov. 9 - Nov. 10, 1956. In bold letters carved at the top of his marker, the word “Baby” is announced. If he had lived, Michael would have been my uncle, my dad’s older brother. I never met him, but I remember him. The story of Michael was the first ghost story I ever heard. Michael’s mother, or Grandma as I called her, lived in Kansas, a state that when viewed from above appears to be a giant’s quilt, an endless patchwork of wheat and sunflower fields. My parents divorced when I was young, and every summer my brother and I would fly from Texas, where we lived with our mom, to Kansas where our dad and his side of the family lived. After the divorce, Dad moved back in with his parents into a small gray house outfitted with plush living room furniture draped with knitted blankets, side tables covered with dollies, and shelves lined with knickknacks—tiny anthropomorphic creatures carved from wood or assembled from seashells with googly eyes behind wire glasses. The kitchen housed olive green appliances, and the refrigerator hummed and ticked in a comforting rhythm. In the evening the kitchen filled with the aroma of meats and vegetables battered in flour or cornmeal and drowned in sizzling grease. I helped Grandma make the most scrumptious chocolate cupcakes. She taught me to seal the moisture in each mini cake by filling all the nooks and crannies of the paper wrapper with the homemade icing. Grandma oozed sweetness. She was a petite woman with short hair which she colored auburn with a box of Clairol hair dye. Smoker’s lines framed her thin lips. Her signature phrase, “Aww, heck,” was accompanied with a smile that made little crinkles at the corners of her eyes. She also said, “I seen” instead of “I saw,” but I knew better than to correct her grammar. She considered it her duty to educate us kids on the hardships her generation had endured. Fresh out of school for the summer and ready to play, my brother and I would have to be pried away from the TV or backyard and coaxed into the dining room for another lesson in Grandma’s personal history. I ached to get back to the rope swing in the backyard, and sensing my frustration she’d say, “This is important.” She told us about how she grew up in some kind of underground house called a dugout, which to my mind was akin to the kind of dwelling cave people had lived in. As a baby, she didn’t have the luxury of a crib—her bed was the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers. Back then, as soon as kids could walk, they were expected help out, unlike my brother and I who were paid if we did optional chores at Grandma’s. We recorded any cleaning we completed on a little notepad attached to the wall. I doubt there was a notepad
