Paris of the Plains: The place beneath
Eighty years ago desperation led into the woods
Friday, May 14, 2010
The Union Station redcap told police he remembered a wheelchair. He had pushed it from the entrance to the women's waiting room.
In the chair, a young woman, her right leg in a plaster cast. On her lap, a tiny baby in a gray blanket. The baby's left wrist bore a hospital name tag. A middle-age man was with them. It was a Friday afternoon, May 16, 1930.
The redcap said the man asked him to look in on the woman from time to time, then wheel her to a Missouri Pacific train scheduled to depart hours later.
Some time passed. The redcap returned to the waiting room. The young woman was there. No man. No baby. She said she wasn't feeling well, that the man had taken the child to his sister's house outside town. On the next check, the man had returned. Alone. He seemed nervous.
At midnight, said the redcap, the man and woman boarded a train.
* * *
The eastbound train steamed out of the sheds into darkness. At the same time, across Pershing Road from the station, up a gravel road, along a faint path in a tangle of woods below the Liberty Memorial, lay an old, rusting iron tank. Inside the tank, atop a bed of newspapers, wrapped in a gray blanket, lay a two-week-old, blue-eyed baby girl.
* * *
Police found the couple at a house in Jefferson City. She was hiding in a dirt-floor garage out back, lying on a pile of rotting gunnysacks, in pain and barely conscious.
Some of their answers aligned. He was a house painter. She was an unemployed waitress and factory worker. She had broken her leg. He was her father. She lived with him and her mother. There was a baby, born in a Kansas City hospital. There was talk of adoption. The baby had disappeared at Union Station.
Beyond that the stories diverged, details varied. She was married. Or not. The baby's father was an Indian from Oklahoma who had worked on the Bagnell Dam. Or he was the son of a Jefferson City minister. Or a married grocery clerk from St. Louis.
She had a son, 4 years old, dark-skinned, whose father was the Oklahoma man. Or the unknown father was the reason she never named the boy, simply calling him "Sonny."
The broken leg was from a fall down stairs at home. Or she was pushed.
They were poor and couldn't afford a baby. Or they had money, recently inherited. They went to Kansas City to keep his parents from knowing about the baby.
The plan was to have the baby's father take the child from Union Station and do with it as he pleased. Or there was no such plan.
The grandfather returned to the waiting room and found the baby gone. The mother, on painkillers, fell asleep in the waiting room. She woke and found the baby gone.
* * *
Ultimately the grandfather confessed. He led police across Pershing Road, up the gravel road, along the barely seen path within the tangle of woods below the Liberty Memorial, to the rusting iron tank, now empty.
Couldn't afford a baby, he said. And who would adopt a child with no father, no name?
The mother had agreed to leave the child in a random parked car. But the grandfather panicked, thinking someone might see him. He carried the child into the woods, discovering the old tank. A little shelter, he thought.
But when the late-night train left town, temperatures were dropping into the 40s. A cold rain fell that weekend on the leaky iron tank in the woods.
A doctor at General Hospital said it would have been impossible for a newborn to survive such conditions for long.
* * *
It had been two nights and two mornings. From their nearby home a man and his 12-year-old son climbed the overgrown slopes toward Liberty Memorial, gathering firewood. A sound made the boy stop. A sort of high-pitched chirping.
"Just a catbird, son," said his father.
They carried their wood home, but the boy returned. The same sound, a little fainter now. In the underbrush, a rusting tank. Inside, a tiny baby. He ran home, fetched his mother.
The gray blanket and thin gown were wet from rain. The skin was cold, the little voice weak, but the child was alive. On its left wrist, a hospital name tag.
* * *
At General Hospital, where her adventure began, the blue-eyed baby girl was revived to ruddy health. People called the switchboard, wanting to adopt her. Well-dressed women came, asking to see her. A man visited, leaving $10. The Journal-Post received a letter in crude handwriting:
"I want a baby sister. I want one with blue eyes and black hair. Please do it."
The grandfather got five years for child abandonment, reduced from assault with intent to kill. Charges against the mother were dropped. The prosecutor decided her father had forced her cooperation.
Mother and daughter spent two more weeks in the hospital, allowing the broken leg to mend.
* * *
For more than 80 years General Hospital sent patients home through a stone portal carved with a quotation from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice:
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed.
It blesses him that gives and him that takes.
She'd gotten back her factory job, she said. She wanted to go home and take care of her children.
A version of this first appeared May 15, 2009, at parisoftheplains.com.
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