“Is it time for breakfast?” Nannie asked. She was standing beside the bed, twisting the hem of her muslin nightdress across her face.
Christie pulled the dress away and patted her child. “No, hon. Go back to sleep.”
“I want to get in with you. Where’s Papper?”
“He’s outside.” She started to make room for Nannie in the bed, but her belly contracted then and she cried out involuntarily.
“You hurt me,” said Nannie. “You hurt my fingers.”
Christie released her. Alma came over from the stove and steered her back across the soft carpet to her pallet. “Go look for your dreams, child,” she said. “They’ll get away from you.” Turning back to the kitchen, she said to Christie, “I told Mandy to get on down here and carry the chillern up yonder to the house, but where is she?” Alma cupped her ear to listen. “The moon’s shining big as a Sunday communion plate, so I don’t know what she’d be scared of.”
“Hoboes from the train,” said Christie. “And devils behind bushes.”
“She ain’t got the sense God give a tomcat.”
Amanda was Alma’s sister-in-law, married to Alma’s brother, Wad Wheeler. Alma bossed everybody in the household, but she bossed Amanda the most. She believed Amanda thought herself too good for ordinary work.
“I wonder if Mrs. Willy’s back yet,” said Christie.
“Oh, I don’t think she knows a woman’s behind from a jackass, to tell you the truth,” Alma said, scowling till Christie imagined Alma’s loosejawed face drooping all the way down to her apron.
Christie couldn’t help laughing, although it jiggled her stomach uncomfortably. During the winter, she had grown so fat she had to enter the narrow door of the springhouse sideways. Her ankles swelled and her feet ached. She made clumsy padded house-shoes out of double thicknesses of burlap, folded and stitched on top and gathered around and tied with twine at the ankles. She shuffled through the house, skirting the ashy hearth. For several weeks, she thought she must have miscalculated her time. She kept thinking the baby was due any moment. But the storm inside her kept up, at an ever more frantic pace. And now her time had come, the full time since the heat of last June when she and James had lain in the steamy night without cover, their bodies slippery as foaming horses, while the children slept out on the porch. She recalled that the midnight train had gone by then, too, and that she had imagined they were on the train, riding the locomotive, charging wildly into the night.
Christie screamed and grabbed Hattie’s arm. A sharp pain charged through her like the train. Hattie held Christie’s hand throughout the agony, while the thing inside tore loose a little more.
Alma said, “The water’s about to boil and Mandy ain’t here. I’ve a good mind to go up there and give her what-for.”
The hurting passed. Christie sank into her feather bolster and pulled the cover up to her neck. Hattie wiped Christie’s face.
“Bring me that likeness of my mama, please, Hattie,” said Christie.
Hattie handed her the silver-framed photograph from the mantel. In the small portrait, Mama had a large smile, as though she had been caught by surprise.
“She looks right young,” said Hattie.
“Yes, but she’d look old if I was to see her again. It’s been two years since I was home.” Christie touched the bleached-out image, wishing it would come to life under her fingertip. “I never oughter left Dundee,” she said.
“You need your mama,” said Hattie soothingly. “A woman always needs her mama at a time like this. But we’ll do the best we can, Christie.”
On the very day Christie and James married, her Aunt Sophie told her, “It’s nine months from the marriage bed to the deathbed.” At the time, Christie had dismissed the words as the careless remark of an old maid—Aunt Sophie had been to a female seminary and was thoughtlessly outspoken—but lately Christie had dwelt on the thought. She hadn’t mentioned it to James, not wanting to worry him. But she was afraid she would die. No woman could pass a child this big. The commotion inside her felt like a churn dasher, churning up crickets and grasshoppers. Christie had thought she might be carrying twins, but the doctor hadn’t encouraged that idea. Christie never felt sorry for herself, but this pregnancy had been different—hard and spiteful, as if something foreign had entered her body and set up a business of a violent and noisy nature. Almost from the beginning, it seemed she could feel the thing growing oddly inside her. At first, the sensation was only a twinge, like a June bug caught on a screen door. Then it grew into a wiggly worm, then a fluttering bird. Sometimes it was just kittens, then it would be like snakes. It kept changing, until the commotion inside her was almost constant, and terrifying. One day a clerk at the grocery where they traded showed her some jumping beans from Mexico. The beans were somehow electrified, jerking as though taken by fits. She had something like that in her. She imagined there were devils in her, warring over her soul. And even at calm, peaceful moments, she knew something was not right. The baby drained her strength, and now she could barely eat. Even though her breasts had grown huge and firm, she was afraid her milk wouldn’t make.
“I know you want your mama,” said Hattie. “Believe me, I know how it is.”
Hattie worked busily, clipping Christie’s hairs and washing her with a clear, sweet-smelling liquid. She laid out the contents of her bag on the small bedside table—shiny scissors, a slender knife, cotton wool, tubing, twine, soap, a device for expelling milk, bandages, small cotton cloths, blue bottles of liniment and alcohol and calomel, a variety of ointments in tiny round tins. As she worked, Hattie repeated a story Christie had heard before, how her husband had had his teeth pulled one day and the next day was kicked in the face by a mule. He said he regretted having paid the dentist to do what the mule would have done for free.
Steps sounded on the back porch, and Alma’s brother Wad entered the kitchen. He never knocked on a door. Behind him was his wife, Amanda, Christie’s only real friend on the place. Amanda was pretty, with soft gray eyes and a warm smile. Even though it was the middle of the night, she had put on a clean dress and had pinned her hair up under her fascinator just as though she were going someplace important.
“Well, fine time you picked,” yelled Wad across the kitchen to Christie.
“Don’t let Wad in here,” Alma said to Amanda. “And shut that door. You’re letting the cold night air in.”
Amanda pushed her husband out and closed the door. Christie could hear him out on the back porch stomping his boots in the cold. He was many years older than Amanda—his second wife.
Amanda crossed the kitchen to Christie’s bedside. She said, “Wad sent Joseph to get Mrs. Willy. That’s how come we didn’t get here so quick.”
Joseph, one of Wad’s grown sons by his first marriage, lived down the road a short piece.
“I thought Mrs. Willy was gone to Maple Grove,” Alma said.
“Joseph said he saw her driving her buggy uptown yesterday evening peddling eggs,” said Amanda, pausing over Nannie, who had gone back to sleep on her pallet. “I’ll gather up the younguns and take ’em up to our house to get them out of the way. Come on, precious.”
Clint and Jewell were awake now, their puzzled faces peering down from the loft. Clint, the older boy, had been suspicious for some time about his mother’s condition, but Christie didn’t want James to tell him where babies came from yet. Clint was still too young, and he should see it in cows and horses first.
“Where are we going?” said Jewell, scrambling sleepily down the stairway.
Christie heard Amanda cooing to the children, saying that their papa had gone to get a surprise for them. “It’s like Christmas and we have to go away and close our eyes for the rest of the night so in the morning we can see the surprise—if we’re real good.” Amanda always took time to talk to the children. She turned even everyday events into stories. She had a way with all the children on the place, maybe because she seemed like such a child herself, although she was three y
ears older than Christie and had two daughters.
Amanda was hurriedly wrapping the children in their coats.
“Get your caps, boys,” she said. “Tie your shoes, Clint.”
“It’s a baby,” said Clint.
“Papper’s gone to get a baby,” said Jewell. He reached out and pulled Nannie’s nightdress, and she jerked it away from him. “You’re a baby,” he said. “Nannie’s a baby.”
“Stop that,” said Alma, slapping Jewell. “This ain’t no time for such foolishness. Get on out of here.”
“Wait,” said Christie. “Come here and give me a kiss.”
She hugged each one of her children till they squirmed. Then, as Amanda whirled them away, the pain came again—a wave like the long, growling thunder that sometimes rolled through a summer sky from end to end. She was washed with pain, but she didn’t feel how deep it went because she was seeing her children’s faces go out the back door, one by one.
CHAPTER 2
It had been a hard winter, the coldest in Christie’s memory. It was too cold for the roosters to crow. Alma beat icicles off the bushes, and the children collected the large ones for the springhouse. When the men stripped tobacco out in the barn, their hands were nearly frost-bitten. The winter wheat was frosted like lace, and the ponds and the creek were frozen solid. Some of the children went sliding across the pond on chairs. Christie couldn’t see their fun from the house, but she recalled chair-sliding when she and James were courting back in Dundee and her father’s pond froze over. James pushed her hard and fast, and she flew freely across to the other side, laughing loud and wild. That was the only time in her life the pond had frozen solid enough to slide on, but this winter James reported that six cows were standing on Wad’s pond.
Amanda had told everybody it would be a hard winter. The persimmons said so, she believed. She broke open persimmon seeds for the children. Inside each one was a little white thing, the germ of the seed. Amanda said, “Look at that little tiny fork. That means a hard, hard winter’s a-coming! If it was drawn like a spoon, it would be a sign of mild weather; and if it was a knife, it would mean a lot of frost, but not too thick for the knife to cut. But the fork is the worst.”
When James and the boys stripped tobacco, Alma had to wash their smoke-saturated clothes. Christie gazed outside helplessly at the bare black trees, the occasional birds huddling inside their fluffed feathers, and the cows chomping hay beside Wad’s barn, making a picture of color against the dusting of snow that had come overnight. Wad’s mercury had gone down to naught on ten different nights that January and February. A snow in early January, after the ice storm, lasted till the end of the month. None of the farmers around had ever seen such weather—but then they always said that, Christie noticed. They’d never seen it so warm, or so cold, or so changeable, or so much rain to follow a cold spell. This year, everybody said the cold winter had something to do with the earthquake that had been predicted for New Year’s.
Livestock froze: a cow who freshened too early; then her calf, stranded across the creek; then another cow who was old and stayed out in the storm. Wad and James worked to repair the barn so they could keep the cows in at night. They spread hay for insulation, piling bales in front of some of the largest cracks in the walls. The breath of the cows warmed the barn like woodstoves. Christie felt like a cow inside her tent dress and under the layers of cover on the bed. Her bulk heated up the bed so much that many nights James thrashed himself awake. They couldn’t let the fireplace go cold—the children needed its warmth—but Christie felt as if she were carrying a bucket of hot coals inside her. In the past, she had been comfortable with pregnancy because of the privacy of it. It was her secret even after everyone knew. They didn’t really know the feeling—a delicious, private, tingly joy. The changes inside her body were hers alone. But this time the sloshing, the twinges, the sensation of blood rushing, the bloating, the veins in her legs popping out—all were so intense it was as if her body were turning into someone else’s. Walking from the stove to the dishpan—barely four steps—was a labored journey, her legs heavy like fence posts.
As she grew larger, she felt as though she were trying to hide a barrel of molasses under her dress. She was used to sleeping on her back, but when she gained weight, lying like that seemed to exert enough pressure to cut off the flow of blood to the baby. When she sat, she couldn’t cross her legs. Her hip joint seemed loose, and it was painful to bend or stoop or turn her foot a certain way. The right leg seemed longer, and she walked in a side-to-side motion. She learned to minimize the painful motion, and her right leg grew stiff.
At night, James stroked her belly so sensuously she feared the baby might be born with unwholesome thoughts. As the season wore on and she grew still heavier, she retreated from James and wouldn’t let him see her belly. She didn’t want him to see the deep-wrinkled, blind hollow of her navel turning inside out. It made her think of the apron strings she made by pushing a safety pin through a tunnel of material and reversing it so the seam was inside. He seemed proud and happy about the baby, but she didn’t think he would care to know that the baby was kicking—flutters and jabs inside. Men were afraid of babies. There was so much you didn’t tell a man; it was better to keep things a mystery. One night as she was falling asleep, she felt a sharp jolt, unmistakably a foot jamming the elastic of her womb. The kick was violent, as though the little half-formed being had just discovered it had feet and was trying to kick its way out.
Sometimes a small event would soar through her heart on angel wings: the train going by, the frost flowers forming on the window light, flour sifting down onto the biscuit board, a blackbird sailing past the window in a line parallel to the train. For a moment, then, she thought she was the blackbird, or that she had painted the frost flowers herself, or that she was setting out carefree and young aboard the train. One day she heard a flock of geese and went outside bareheaded to watch them tack across the sky. The lead goose would go one way and the others would fall out of pattern, and then he would sway the other way and they would all follow, honking. The stragglers seemed to be the ones yelling the loudest. She felt like one of those stragglers, trying to keep up but finding the wayward directions irresistible. It wasn’t just her condition. She had always felt like that. She was hungry at odd times, and she would fix herself a biscuit—cold, with sorghum and a slice of onion. In the henhouse one day, gathering eggs, she leaned against the door facing, breathing in the deep, warm fumes. She cracked an egg against the door and slid the contents down her throat. Then she laughed, like somebody drunk. Several boys had been drunk and torn up some hitching posts on the main street in town not long ago, she had heard. She wondered what it was like to be drunk. It would probably mean laughing at the wrong times, which she did anyway.
Back before she took to her bed, James had a spell of sleeplessness that made him drag for several days. A farmer couldn’t afford to lose sleep, and she blamed herself for waking him up when she got up in the night to use the pot. One Saturday just before Christmas, he had hardly slept all night. He made his weekly trip to town as usual, but he didn’t stay long. He came home and slept the rest of the morning. He had never done that in his life, he said, annoyed with himself.
That was the day Mrs. Willy came visiting. Mrs. Willy, who lived by herself in a little white house, lost her husband in a buggy wreck soon after they married. She raised a daughter alone. Now she helped out women and sewed.
“Come in, Mrs. Willy,” Christie called. “Clint, get Mrs. Willy a chair. Get her that mule-eared setting chair.” But she was in no frame of mind for company. She had ironing to do.
Mrs. Willy stepped across the floor as tenderly as if she feared her weight would break a board, although she was slender and pigeon-boned. Alma had remarked that Mrs. Willy hung around pregnant women like a starved dog around the kitchen door.
She settled down in the chair Clint had pulled out from the back porch.
“Go on out and see if you can help Papper,
” Christie said to Clint. The other children were gathering hickory nuts with Amanda. James was in the barn rubbing down horse leather.
“I’ve got a splinter,” Clint said, holding up his thumb.
Christie felt her apron bib for a needle she kept there. Holding the boy by the daylight through the window, she picked at the splinter until it shot out. She kissed the dirty little finger.
“I didn’t cry,” he said proudly.
“Now go on. Papper needs you.”
Clint slipped out the back door. Christie had been heating an iron on the stove. She spit on it now to test it. It hissed. She started ironing a shirt.
“I need to do my arning,” Mrs. Willy said. She leaned toward Christie with hungry eyes. “What’s that baby up to in there today?”
“Growing.” Christie didn’t want to talk about her pregnancy. She didn’t want to satisfy the woman’s curiosity.
“And how’s your man holding up?”
“He don’t sleep good,” said Christie, aiming her iron down a sleeve.
“Witches might be bothering him.”
“Witches?”
“Here’s what you do,” said Mrs. Willy, untying the strings of her splint bonnet. “Make him sleep with a meal sifter over his face. When the witches come along they’ll have to pass back and forth through ever hole in that sifter, and by the time they get done he’ll have had enough sleep.”
Christie laughed until she had to catch hold of her side.
“Don’t you believe that?” asked Mrs. Willy. She was unsmiling, her face like a cut cabbage.
“I can’t see James sleeping with a meal sifter on his face,” Christie said through her laughter. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want witches working in and out of a meal sifter so close to my face while I was sleeping. I’d rather be wide awake.”
Christie felt her laughter shrink like a spring flower wilting, as Mrs. Willy retied her bonnet strings.
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