The Sacrifice Read Free Page A

who could afford to live there.) Then, she’d move her family out of squalid East Ventor.
    Six years she’d been hoping and she hadn’t given up yet.
    “God! Don’t let it be no baby .”
    (Well—it wouldn’t be the first time a baby had been abandoned in this run-down neighborhood by the river. Dead-end streets, shut-up warehouses and factories, trash spilling out of Dumpsters. Some weeks there wasn’t any garbage pickup. A heavy rain, there came flooding from the river, filthy smelly water in cellars, rushing along the gutters and in the streets. Walking to the Camden Street bus Ada would see rats boldly rooting in trash just a few feet away from her ankles. [She had a particular fear of rats biting her ankles and she’d get rabies.] Nasty things fearless of Ada as they were indifferent to human beings generally except for boys who pelted them with rocks, chased and killed them if they could. And what the rats might be dragging around, squeaking and eating and their hairless prehensile tails uplifted in some perky way like a dog, you didn’t want to know. For sure, Ada didn’t want to know. Terrible story she’d heard as a girl, rats devouring some poor little baby left in some alley to die. And nobody would reveal whose baby it was though some folks must’ve known. Or who left the baby in such a place. And the white cops for sure didn’t give a damn or even Family Services and for years Ada had liked to make herself sick and scared in weak moods thinkingof rats devouring a baby and so, whenever she saw rats quickly she turned her eyes away.)
    Ada was uneasy remembering Ednetta Frye from the previous morning. She’d seen the distraught woman first crossing Camden Avenue scarcely aware of traffic, then in the Korean grocery, then approaching people in Hicks Square who stared at her as you’d stare at a crazy person. Ednetta had seemed so distracted and disoriented and frightened, nothing like her usual self you could talk and laugh with—it was Ednetta who did most of the talking and the laughing at such times. There’d been occasions when Ednetta had a bruised face and a swollen lip but she’d laugh saying she’d walked into some damn door. You guessed it had to be Anis Schutt shoving the woman around but it wasn’t anything extreme, the way Ednetta laughed about it.
    Ada was at least ten years younger than Ednetta Frye. She’d substitute-taught at the middle school when Ednetta’s daughter Sybilla had been a student there, a year or two ago; she knew the Fryes from the neighborhood, though not well.
    They were neighbors, you could say. East Ventor crossed Crater and if you took the alley back of Crater to Third Street, somewhere right around there Ednetta was living in one of the row houses with that man and her children—how many children, Ada had no idea.
    With her education degree and New Jersey teacher’s certificate Ada Furst liked to think that there was something like a pane of glass between herself and people like the Fryes—it might be transparent, but it was substantial.
    But the day before, Ednetta hadn’t been in a laughing or careless mood. She’d been anxious and frightened. She’d showed Ada photos of Sybilla as if Ada didn’t know what Sybilla looked like—Ada had had to protest, “Ednetta, I know what Sybilla looks like! Why’re you showing me these?”
    Ednetta hadn’t known how to answer this. Stared at Ada with blank slow-blinking eyes as if she hadn’t recognized Ada Furst the schoolteacher.
    “She’s probably with some friends, Ednetta. You know how girls are at that age, they just don’t think .”
    Ednetta said, “S’b’lla know better. She been brought up better. If Anis get disgusted with her, he goin to discipline her—serious. S’b’lla know that.”
    Ada said another time that Sybilla was probably with some friends. Ednetta shouldn’t be worried, just yet.
    “I don’t know how long you’d be wantin me to wait, to be ‘worried,’” Ednetta said