Nonfiction Wax Baby

Wax Baby

Stefanie Fair-King

M tichael 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

tif 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

tattached to the dirt wall where my grandmother grew up, one where she could write her name if she completed a chore, and I bet she never expected to get paid for helping out. I found out about Michael during one of Grandma’s lectures. She set the scene, explaining how she was asleep one night when she woke up coughing, choking. “The sheets had wrapped around my neck,” she said, demonstrating with her hands clasping her throat in a mock strangulation gesture. “I looked over and I seen this baby right under the window.” This baby, she explained, looked like he was made of wax, and when she looked at him, he began to melt. She didn’t say what color he was, but in my mind’s eye he is golden wax with a buttery sheen, casting a yellow glow into the dark bedroom. I imagine his waxy form like a candle dribbling beads of wax in reverse, the droplets pooling upward. She explained how the puddle of wax the baby melted into swooshed right up and out the window. I thought of Grandma’s bedroom with its fluffy brown carpet and flowery bedspread covered in cotton candy pink and blue hydrangeas. The room no longer seemed cozy, but eerie, like the wax baby had left behind a thin layer of paranormal dust that blanketed the room. Grandma explained how she’d had a child that died when he was a baby, and that she believed the wax baby to be that child, a boy named Michael. Grandma had seen Michael in her bedroom four decades prior to her telling me about it that summer when I sat wide-eyed listening to her story, believing every word. I felt sorry for Michael. What was a one-day-old baby doing wandering the afterlife alone? I grew up hearing that if a baby dies, then that little soul just gets back in line to be born into the world. Round two. I was shocked to learn that a baby could be left to his own devices, to go back and haunt his mother as a melting wax baby. Years later, Grandma and Grandpa moved to a large house out in the country and Dad bought their little gray house from them. After they’d taken down their decorations and shelves, perfect outlines of what was removed remained: the wallpaper had yellowed from years of Grandma and Grandpa’s smoking and left crisp impressions of what had once hung on the walls. And that wasn’t the only impression that remained long after Grandma and Grandpa moved out. The window in Grandma’s room still held a psychic outline of Michael beneath it. That eerie room became my brother’s when he chose to move in with our dad. The window under which Michael melted was covered with a gun rack which housed a row of shotguns. The window was no longer visible. Nevertheless, any time I entered the room, I eyed the area with suspicion, on guard against any byline t92 potential wax babies appearing under the window, cautious of Michael coming back to haunt my brother and me, the nephew and niece he never met.