The Lady of LaBelle
Isaw her again the other day: the Lady of LaBelle. LaBelle is the name of my neighborhood in Steubenville, about forty minutes from Pittsburgh. The Lady is the woman who lives just down the block from me.
She is a redheaded Appalachian grandmother who is missing her front teeth. The Lady is constantly surrounded by her grandchildren, who take turns living with her. Besides them, she’s got at least a dozen biological nieces and nephews in the neighborhood, and countless honorary grandchildren as well — my daughter is one.
Helping her neighbors
The Lady is always in the middle of a quest to help a neighbor. She spends the whole summer trying to get together respectable new school clothes for all the children; she frequently cooks extra meals for an unlucky relative whose food stamp benefits got canceled.
She knows where and when all the church giveaways of clothing and toiletries are and she spreads the word so nobody in need will miss one. Sometimes, in the mornings, I’ll get a text message from her, asking me to drive another friend to the doctor or the food pantry, since I have a car and she doesn’t.
On this particular evening, she was walking by the community garden with a freckled girl in a worn pink dress, whose hands were all covered in bright blue sidewalk chalk.
“Hi, Miss Mary!”
“Hello, Grandma!”
“Do you know of anyone with a house for rent? It’s for a homeless woman and two daughters. They got nowhere to go.”
“No, but I promise I’ll keep my eyes open,” I said, and I did.
“Say hello to Miss Mary,” the Lady instructed her granddaughter.
I wanted to greet the grandchild by name, but for a moment I didn’t know which one it was.
Was it the little girl who used to live with an alcoholic uncle? When I heard “she was in the house when her uncle died,” I’d pictured the family standing around the bedside as he received hospice care. I hadn’t pictured him falling and hitting his head on the counter, somebody rushing to close the kitchen door so the children couldn’t see. The Lady of LaBelle took her in after that.
No, that girl isn’t little anymore. She’d be a teenager by now, and I think she lives in Texas with other relatives.
Was it the Little Mite who was in the car accident? I missed the whole thing that weekend. The Lady told me later that her Kindergarten-aged girl “got run over by a SUV.” The driver hadn’t seen the child picking flowers by the side of the road until she went flying.
“They took her to Pixburgh in a ambulance!” said the Lady. “She was out cold. When she woke up she said ‘I saw Pappy a angel, I saw Nanna a angel, and I saw God!’” “I believe it!” I’d said, and I do. No, it wasn’t her either.
The Little Tyke
It was the Little Tyke, the one who tagged along when the Lady
went out to feed the homeless.
There used to be a poor man who slept on an abandoned porch down the block at night, and panhandled at the corner market in the daytime. Every morning, after she got her older children on the bus, the Lady of LaBelle would walk down to visit him, with a paper plate of eggs in one hand and her youngest grandchild in tow.
Everyone called the man “Tink,” but she made the Little Tyke call him “Uncle Tink” because it wasn’t respectful for a child to call a grown man by a name without an honorific. She and the Little Tyke would chat with him while he ate his breakfast.
I think the Little Tyke thought Uncle Tink was really her uncle.
The Lady and the Little Tyke might have been two of the last people to see Tink alive. Walking home with her grandmother the night before the shooting, the Little Tyke waved at him and said “Goodbye, Uncle Tink! I’ll have you for breakfast tomorrow!”
Next evening, after the police finished their investigation and took up the yellow “do-not-cross” tape, the children all stayed home. The grownups went out and decorated the derelict building with flowers and candles.
I had never seen the Lady look upset before, but she was upset then. “She cried all day. She doesn’t understand he’s really dead,” said the Lady of the Little Tyke.
That was years ago. The City eventually cleaned up our makeshift shrine, and removed the “RIP TINK” tag on the wall. The building is for sale now, though I can’t imagine who would buy it.
Marked by chalk
Out by the community garden, I greeted and hugged the Little Tyke.
When she saw that her blue chalky hands had marked my arms and clothing, she smiled and produced a piece of chalk from a pocket, and marked me once more, on purpose this time. It reminded me of a cockle shell on the clothing of a pilgrim, or the tattoos people used to get when they visited Jerusalem.
“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” pleaded the Lady of LaBelle.
“It’s a blessing,” I said, and it was.