by Martha Ellen

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I don’t know her name. I call her Oma. I love her.

She had found a bit of woven, checkered cloth and fashioned it into a diaper for her newborn son; she scrounged some lengths of cloth and thread from wherever she could and embroidered a cap for him. She stitched a cotton gown with flowers; with tenderness she dressed him before she swaddled him in a worn woolen blanket to keep away the chill of the cool morning air. She held him close, kissed his cheek one last time before she carefully laid him down on Brabant Street, in Ghent, in the early morning of May 26, 1815.

Cecile and Rosalie were returning to the common house near the port after a long night’s work, as they did every morning, holding hands as European women do when they are friends; and as kindred spirits do when seeking the comfort of others who often endured a night of brutality some men were inclined to heap upon those they thought unworthy of any tenderness or care but only to be used and discarded. Cecile lifted the swaddled baby from the street and held him close, her maternal feelings intact, inaccessible to any cruelty that visited her in her harsh life.  

Oma, hiding in some nearby doorway to make sure no stray beast found him first, wept as the women walked away with her baby. They all knew this scene; this was not a new play. Each knew the role they were compelled to perform in a world that did not value the likes of them as though they were incapable of giving love and unworthy of receiving it. They were no lowly Public Ledgers then; they were simply women, sisters helping each other and sharing a silent affection only they understood.

Oma loved her baby, too. She told herself someday she would find him and identify him by the clothing she had made especially for him and they would be together henceforth, though she never did. She couldn’t. She lived a different life.

Cecile and Rosalie took the baby to the police station. I have a copy of the entry into the police ledger on that day written in the stunted, fact-based style that persists to this day. The officer on duty made the determination: “a male child of the age about ten days”. He carefully described the infant’s garments. Cecile marked her “X” to swear to the truth before the court as she had done before for other mothers with impossible lives. The court took him from Cecile and Rosalie and gave him to the Nuns at the orphanage who would keep him and rear him just as Oma knew they would when she could not. Jan-Baptiste Brabant, the rescued baby, the beloved son of my dearest great, great, great grandmother.

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Martha Ellen (she/her) lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Relocated from Chicago in 1972. Old hippie. Returned social worker. History of social justice activism. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums, including North Coast Squid and Words Have Wings. She writes to process her wild life.

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