Beloved Mother

by Laura Hunter

  Before dressing, Anna drew a pan of hot water from the stove reservoir. She took a new bar of lye soap and scrubbed her body so hard it stung when her clothing touched her skin. She opened all four windows and attacked the room. She did not stop until she had wiped every surface clean. On her knees, she wiped the floor, edging herself further into the dim light under the bed, until she lay prostrate on the floor. Assured the room was cleansed, she rested on the floor. She cradled her head in the crook of her arm. Exhausted, she slept.

  At the sound of the truck bus gearing up Turtleback, Anna slid from under her bed and stepped outside to greet her daughter. Overhead, a blue, blue sky, a blue deeper than Anna’s burnt robe, hung empty over the mountain.

  Time had welded Winston Rafe’s iron will to Anna’s heart. Each time he appeared at Boone Station and tapped on the door, she admitted him. Each time more resentment grew within her. He told her she was his only love and his life would be empty without her, and she accepted his words as honest.

  She chastised herself for questioning Winston. He was, after all, educated. He was handsome. He had money. She had none of these advantages. She should count herself lucky to have him notice her once, and certainly to have him return time after time. After his visits, she might question what evidence he offered to prove himself true, but she hadn’t always been a person who required signs.

  Had she not accepted what her mother said about the pagan church rattlers? Had she questioned her sister when Ruth confronted Clint about his courting her? Had she asked the granny or Lily about what they did day after day in the woods? The only real evidence she had been handed was the body of Clint lying askew on the porch floor before dawn after the night she refused to obey Winston. The one question she had denied Winston was the order he gave her to see the granny or leave. Requiring proof, she decided, could lead to catastrophe.

  Chapter 20

  The October Lily turned ten, one word sent Anna back to Flatland. Lily came in from school quiet. She withdrew to the loft. If Anna called to her to come down, Lily made empty excuses. Dusk came in and settled on the little house. Once Anna had left Lily to her own thoughts, she climbed down the loft ladder and sat on the rock hearth. She watched her mother’s back as Anna scrubbed clothes in a tub set on the table. The swish, swish of water soothed Lily, and she was able to speak.

  “What’s a bastard?” Lily asked as Anna wrung water from Lily’s nightgown.

  Anna didn’t turn, nor did she answer.

  “Mama, what’s a bastard?” Lily said, louder this time.

  Anna faced her daughter. “Where did you hear that word?” She bit her lower lip, pinching so hard she drew blood. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and swallowed.

  Lily stared at her mother’s blood. “Eli O’Mary shouted it at a boy I don’t know. The word was so bad all the boys came running, and they chased the boy inside. He cried.” She looked at her mother and stood up. “Your mouth, Mama. It’s bleeding. What did that?”

  The blood on Anna’s tongue tasted like rusted iron. Anna had inflicted this pain on herself with the hearing. She realized her pain would be insignificant compared to the pain that might one day send Lily running to hide in shame. Anna had battled with herself on what was right and what was wrong since Winston returned, and now she was pregnant again. Having never known true righteousness, Anna failed to notice this new despair until it settled on her shoulders. Her daughter had unknowingly validated Anna’s decision.

  The next day opened with the kind of morning Lily loved—fog so thick that Lily would have been dancing in the mist. But Lily was not here. Once more, Anna was alone. She had trodden this road before. Anna had been completely happy the weeks with Winston after he returned from his government service, but she vanquished that joy when she set out the second time to see the granny.

  Again, she walked with fear at her back. She grasped her left hand in an attempt to twist her wedding band before she realized she had left it on the mantle next to the stag. She longed for the strength she had lost when Winston returned and the courage it would give her to stoke up her soul.

  Anna longed for a heart like her daughter’s, brave and open. Lily ran fiercely over mountain trails. The child drew sustenance from some unclassified cell memory from eons before when the mountain had flourished, uninhabited by the white man. Lily could not live with regret. Anna needed that kind of power to force her up the hill to Granny Slocomb’s. Soon it would be time to harvest her corn crop. She could not allow herself to take to bed again.

  Granny Slocomb sensed that someone had climbed the path to her land. Whoever came approached with hesitation. The blue jay told her so. She stepped out on the porch to wait. She should walk down and tell the bees that someone drew close, but the uncertainty the blue jay revealed told her to wait. She lowered herself into a straight-backed chair and let out a long slow breath. In an earlier time, she would have known who reached for her. Had the weasel not told her she was now a god, she might have doubted her power.

  Anna Goodman stepped around the corner. She said straight out, “I ain’t had my flow in six months.” She shuffled up to the rock step and sat near Granny’s feet, her back to the door. “I’ve come here to you as you said you’re the Beloved Mother.”

  Beloved Mother. The granny repeated the phrase but made no attempt to correct the woman. Mona Parsons, Two Tears. Names she had answered to in earlier times. Times were when Two Tears thought back on her life as a Cherokee wife, as protégé to the Beloved Mother, and she questioned why she later presented herself to the women of Breakline as a Beloved Mother. Her logic came to be that she had never said she was the Beloved Mother, but a Beloved Mother. She argued to herself that she had no opportunity to complete the final test required by the Beloved Mother, for she and Briar had been cast out for what the Beloved Mother saw as blasphemy when she decided to send Briar for a white doctor.

  In retrospect, Two Tears could not say that she would have survived having been buried alive for twelve hours, breathing through a reed in her mouth. Each time she imagined herself trying the test, Great Spirit sent her a vision in which she clawed against the earth, then struggled to shake dirt from her eyes, her nose, her ears, her long ashy hair, as she leapt from her makeshift grave and danced her little rabbit dance to cleanse herself of the very earth she had pledged to cherish.

  “I was told years back,” Anna began, “that you help women like me.” She leaned her head against the tree trunk that supported the improvised porch roof. She closed her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t want the child. I do.” Her voice broke. “I just can’t raise another child on what I have. And Lily’s father…” Anna spun her body around to face the granny. “I got money. Here. In my pocket.”

  Lily. The granny had come to see the child as her own in a spiritual way. It was her responsibility to train the child. Because the child learned so quickly, the granny reasoned that Great Spirit had handed down the child to become a true Beloved Mother. Lily had no Cherokee blood, but neither did Two Tears, and the first Beloved Mother had accepted her, initially, for training.

  “Step over here,” the granny said. She pulled Anna’s cotton dress taut and laid her ear to the swollen belly. “No.” She shook her head. “No. I’ll not help you drop this child.” Looking past Anna to the humpbacked blue mountains, Granny waited for Anna to back away from her decision. When Anna did not respond, Granny said with flatness in her voice that belied Anna’s presence on the porch. “It spoke to me in the voice of a boy.”

  Anna slumped into a squat. “But I got to. It’s Lily’s life we’re talking about. She’ll never understand.” Tears dripped from her chin. “She’s all I have. You know how special she is.” She gulped. “It’s not a choice.” Anna grabbed Granny’s hand. “This baby’s father won’t be back.” She dropped on her knees before Granny. “I can’t hurt Lily.”

  The granny picked up her hat and fingered the snakeskin that bound the crown. She made Anna wait, allowing her time to dig
deeper into her heart to be sure this decision was one she truly wanted to make. Anna spoke with her head bowed. “Please.”

  Granny took her hand from Anna’s belly and stroked her hair. “Tell me when you can have a few days without the girl-child,” she whispered.

  Anna grasped Granny’s hand and kissed her palm. “Thank you, Granny. I have money.”

  “No money. For Lily.” After a moment, she added, “For you. A new life.”

  Her hands braced against the porch floor, Anna tried to lift herself. The granny saw how heavy the unborn child was. Granny offered a hand, but Anna pulled herself up using the porch post. “I thank you, Granny,” she said. “For my little girl.”

  “I got a brew, but you got to be here the night of the dropping. I ain’t having none of my women go bad on me.”

  “I can’t leave Lily for the night.”

  “Nobody down in Breakline or Covington?”

  Anna rubbed her eyes as if viewing the few people left in her life. “Maybe Juanita.”

  “Juanita’s a wise woman. She’ll be akin with you. Let Juanita keep her two or three days till you get your wits about you. After it’s gone and done.”

  And so it was agreed. Anna would find a place for Lily for a few days and it would be over.

  Granny Slocomb pulled a piece of notebook paper from under her hatband and the stub of a pencil from her apron pocket. “Here.”

  “What’s this for?” Anna asked.

  “Mark your name. Great Spirit must know.”

  Anna scribbled out Anna Parsons Goodman and handed the paper back to the granny.

  Granny Slocomb stared at the name, took in a deep breath and held it. She clenched her teeth and cringed as if her jaw ached.

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  Granny stuffed the paper in her bosom and from her pocket drew a packet of powdered leaves that smelled of mint. “So that’s the way of it,” she muttered to herself.

  “The way of it?” Anna said. “Tell me.”

  “Great Spirit has spoken,” Granny answered. “We don’t question.”

  “She’s doing it again.” Sister Sun flashes. “He said no such thing!” she shouts. Her radiation sets the Northern Lights spinning from purples chasing blues chasing reds chasing greens and into a sky covered in orange. “Why, you lying old crone. Great Spirit will make you pay.”

  “You sound just like the girl’s mother,” says Brother Moon. “Pay for this. Pay for that. Making decisions about what Great Spirit will and will not do. What do you know?”

  Sister Sun drops further toward the horizon without an answer.

  “On a Friday morning, brew up a tea from these leaves and come by dark to drop the baby.” She pressed the packet into Anna’s palm. “Don’t dally.” That Anna might need another cup of brew or maybe a dose of sedative on the night for dropping a baby this size flickered through the granny’s mind, but she pushed it back. With what she now knew she could choose later. But she would tell Anna this, “Follow the road back. You come up the footpath. Uktena let you pass knowing your need. He ain’t quite sun-warmed yet. Day or two, and he’ll be up and ready.”

  “Uktena?”

  “Rattler. That’s what Lily calls him.”

  “Lily uses that footpath all the time.”

  Anna reminded Granny of a squirrel as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. She watched the veins in Anna’s neck bulge at the idea of her child near an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.

  “Uktena and Lily, they’re kin.” After a moment she added, “We’re all kin before Great Spirit.”

  “Great Spirit, Sister Sun,” Brother Moon calls. “Did you see? Did you hear?”

  Sister Sun is too far into Kentucky to return. She calls back, “Great Spirit’s too busy with the rest of the world to worry about this.”

  “Sister Sun, for once, you were right.”

  She slides further into the distance.

  Chapter 21

  Tuesday afternoon, Lily bounded in with an invitation to stay the weekend with her classmate Julie Hudson in Covington. Lily was ten. She should be allowed to go. Anna decided dropping the baby had been the right decision. Chosen by God, perhaps.

  Friday morning, Anna warmed spring water and mixed in the leaves. After they had steeped, she swallowed it in gulps for fear she would change her mind or take too little and the miscarriage would not work. She did not eat. Instead, she spent the day pacing the worn, broad planks, counting the number that made up the room’s floor. Twenty-four. Each time she counted the boards, the total came to twenty-four. She counted the logs that sat above the limestone wainscot. Fifteen. Fifteen on this wall. And this wall. Fifteen on each wall. For a time, she laid on the bed, her eyes closed. The ceiling slats were too irregular and too narrow for her level of concentration so she could not count. She needed to rest for her walk up Turtleback.

  That evening, long after the truck bus had passed over the mountain to Breakline without Lily on it, Anna climbed the road to Flatland. In the distance, she spotted the cross, nailed to the apex of the shake roof. Time and weather had loosened the nail’s grip and the cross, outlined by the setting sun, now slanted hard west, daring even the strongest wind to blow it off. Three large Canadian hemlocks had formed a dark green barrier behind the church since Anna walked this road more than ten years before. She passed the lean-to room, almost hidden in shade. She appeared on the church’s rock step as dusk began to settle into darkness. At one tap, Granny Slocomb opened the door.

  Anna stepped into the room, its walls lined with shelves of dried flowers and herbs. The nose-burning smell of alcohol stung Anna’s nose. A kerosene lamp cast a harsh, yellowish glow from where it sat on a heavy plank table against the wall under the eastern window. On the far side was a drop-down cot attached to the wall. Its cotton mattress lay flat and thin. Anna wondered if here was where she would drop Winston’s child.

  “Are you going to let this happen?” asks Brother Moon.

  “Shhhh,” replies Great Spirit.

  “Sister Sun will boil over this one,” says Brother Moon.

  “Be quiet, I say,” says Great Spirit.

  A faint light entered the one western window. In the dimness, Anna could see the granny standing by a crazy quilt next to wooden hooks where her dresses hung. Granny stood on what had once been the altar platform. Her broad-brimmed hat hid her eyes. “In here,” Granny Slocomb said as she pulled back the quilt. “You drunk the brew?”

  Anna nodded.

  “Take off your clothes and sit in that old chair. I got to heat up some water.” Granny Slocomb dropped the quilt in Anna’s face.

  Anna grabbed the quilt and called back “Granny?”

  “It’ll start soon as it’s ready.”

  “Can I have some light?” Anna’s hands trembled. She looked back at the granny. “Oh my God. You got a snake on your head,” she said.

  “Go on now.” The granny turned her shoulder away.

  Anna, now quivering, found herself on a plank landing. She waited, her ear tuned to the closed-off sanctuary, waiting for a voice to tell her to save this child. A faint light from the room she left told her she had seven steps to go. Uncertainty forced her to move slowly. Anna felt her way down using a primitive wooden handrail and to the middle of the room. She stubbed her foot on a platform and grunted. “Oh, God.” Taking a deep breath, she coughed out the odor of old dust.

  She removed her clothes and, standing naked, rubbed her hands over intricate carving across the back panels of what had once been an Edwardian rocking chair. The rockers had been removed, probably by somebody’s handsaw. She stroked the milled dowels and the thin metal piece that supported each smooth arm. A narrow rim of boards served as a make-shift seat. In its center was a misshapen hole and under that a splotched enamel bowl.

  Shivering, she rubbed her hands over her engorged belly. For an instant, she felt the slightest movement. As if burned, she jerked her hands back and folded her arms over her stretched breasts. Her teeth c
hattered as she sat and waited. When a draft of cold wind hit Anna’s bare butt, she realized that she was a woman fragile at the core: more easily broken than she had imagined.

  As dusk waned, the granny sat on the other side of the quilt and listened to Anna’s moans. Near midnight, the groans grew louder. Granny came inside, her hat pulled down over her face. Anna rose to meet her, but Granny pushed her back into the chair and tied Anna’s hands and feet to the rocker with hemp rope. Using the hem of her dress, Granny wiped blood from where Anna had bitten her lower lip against the pain.

  “Why are you wearing that snake?” Anna asked between her teeth.

  With a child as fully developed as this one, Granny knew she should give Anna belladonna or poppy opium to relieve the pain. But Anna had disrupted her harmony when she lay with this man. She had impacted more than her own life. She had risked altering Lily’s. Back inside the church sanctuary, instead of gathering her mortar to prepare the painkiller, Granny took up a cover and moved to the porch. There she drew Tall Corn’s old blanket around her shoulders and rocked in the cold.