GARY CADWALLADER lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife Sandy and seven horses. He's working on a book about Magnolia. E-mail Gary at: rmcheal2@aol.com.

                                                          magnolia #3


What sets Maggie apart from the world isn't just her light cocoa skin. No, there's a small wooden box with a tiny lock, probably broken now. The key was lost long ago. The box is red perhaps, or maybe left natural, but certainly there are leather buckles. Tiny leather buckles on a tiny wooden box. Yes! It is left natural, pine, or oak, or maple, or maybe handmade of cottonwood, or hedge apple, not pear. I very much doubt pear or ebony.

Her mother, her mother on paper, brought down the box one day and said, "I want you to know where you came from." And she gives Maggie the box which has stood like a tiny Sphinx on the upper shelf of her papery mother's closet for fifteen years.

Magnolia opens this treasure like a gift from Jesus. She sits on the couch. A flowered couch in a cruddy room with holes in the walls made by violent brothers whose fists, while meant for the mother, were directed at the chalky wallboard instead.

She opens the box in the few moments she has alone in that overfull house. And when she does, she sees a tiny Christening dress, still white and crisp, and a Bible. Catholic. And a note. Handwritten.

She does not show anyone the note. She will paraphrase, if you ask, and tell you of a family devastated by illness and of how a final child was born in a house already full.

When she tells me, I imagine the note on parchment in a monk's Celtic hand, perhaps with a great dropped capital, painted, bejeweled, worked over by candlelight, but I doubt that too. More likely, the note was in ballpoint. Most likely it was typed on an old Smith-Corona by a woman who could only use one hand, while the other hand curled into a ball in her lap. And the woman walked with great difficulty, all stiff and useless throughout the right side.

"Care for my child," the note must read. "For I cannot," it must read as well. "And take these things that are hers and give them as gifts when it is time for her to know."

"My husband and I have so little time. No time to care for her. And so we give her away with heartache and fear and add this tiny dress and all our hopes."

I imagine they write, "with love," but I don't know you see, for Maggie paraphrases or makes up, or lies. Which is her right.

The note has no signature. The adoption papers have no names. She has siblings adrift in the world, but their faces can only be seen in her mirror.

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© 2002 Gary Cadwallader