by Amy Greene
We cried together as I rested with my head on Granny’s knees, her hand tangled up in my hair. She seemed afraid to let go. When she finally released me, I raised my face and smiled at her through my tears. She opened her mouth, maybe to ask questions, but she must have decided against it. She wiped her cheeks with one shaky hand and said, “You’re plumb wore out. Let me put you in the bed and we’ll talk about it later.”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. But even as I dragged myself to my feet, I knew it wasn’t true. I could sleep, but only if she sat in the rocker for a while watching over me.
Granny pulled herself to her feet with a groan but then she stopped short, eyes growing wide. She was looking at the pocket of my jeans. I followed her stare and saw it, too, a stiff patch of dried maroon. She asked sharply, “What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” I said, still looking down at my pocket. Somehow I had managed to forget what I’d stuffed inside. I reached in and pulled out John’s finger. I offered it to her in the palm of my hand, the usual shine of Granddaddy’s ring dulled by John’s dark blood. We looked at it together. “They laws,” Granny said softly. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. That’s when the reality of what I had done crashed down on me. “I ran off in a hurry. If he’s not, Granny, he’ll come up here after me.”
“Well.” She looked toward the bedroom. “I’ve got your granddaddy’s shotgun.”
“Oh no,” I whispered. “Look what I’ve got us into.”
She took hold of my chin. “Don’t you talk like that. I’m just praising the Lord to have you back. Don’t matter to me what it took to get you here.” She glanced down at the finger. “We’ve got to get rid of that thing.”
“No,” I said.
Her eyes flew open wide again. “You can’t keep that, and him might be dead. That’s evidence, girl! Why in the devil would you want to anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, crying again. “I can’t throw it away. Not right now.”
“All right.” She reached out to caress my cheek. “Don’t get wrought up. We’ll worry about getting shed of it later. But you can’t hold it like that.” She grimaced and it was the first time I’d ever seen Granny recoil from blood. It had always been natural to us here on the mountain, slaughtering hogs and killing chickens and birthing babies and treating Granddaddy’s various gashes and wounds. But this, I saw, was too much for her.
“Where’s the box?” I asked. “The one Granddaddy made me?”
“Myra—” she began, but something she saw in me, maybe the madness I could barely suppress, caused her to give up. “Come on,” she said, and I followed her to the back room. She knelt in front of her bed and pulled out the box. We stood in the growing sun as she opened it for me to lay the finger inside, still pushed through Granddaddy’s wedding ring. I put both ring and finger into the box and we looked at each other for a long moment across it. Her wrinkled face was blank. It was hard to guess what she was thinking. Then she clapped the lid back on the box and knelt, old joints popping, and replaced it in the cottony grave of the mattress hole. She took me by the arm and led me to the bed. “Get out of them dirty britches,” she said. “I’ll bring you a nightgown.”
“What if he comes?”
“I’ll set up with you.”
I undressed and climbed into bed. I was already half asleep before she returned with the gown. It smelled like her and my home. I slept for what seemed like days, having nightmares that John had come and hurt Granny and one where he ripped the child I was carrying out of my womb and ran away with it. I roused up and saw Granny sitting in the rocking chair watching over me, Granddaddy’s gun across her knees.
“Granny,” I said.
She turned to me, startled. “What, honey?”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
She stopped rocking. “Have you been to the doctor?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I just do.”
She looked at me, thinking. Then she nodded. “I’ll make you an appointment with Dr. Weems. He’s old as the hills but he’s got a sound mind. He’ll take good care of you.”
“I’m not going to any doctor,” I said, a little too loud. “I want you to take care of me. You used to help Grandmaw Ruth with babies. You know as much as Dr. Weems.”
“They laws, girl, it’s been sixty-odd years since I seen a baby born.”
“But you still know how to do it.”
Granny came to sit on the edge of the bed. “Quit talking crazy, Myra.”
“I’m not talking crazy. I know what I’m saying. Nobody but you and I will ever lay their hands on this baby. Nobody else will ever even know it’s alive.”
Granny frowned. “Myra Jean, no baby can live like that, and neither can you.”
“It’s the only way my baby can live. If John’s dead, I’m in a world of trouble. It’s a matter of time before they come after me. If you see anybody driving up the hill, you let me know and I’ll slip out the back and take this baby somewhere it’ll never be found.”
“Lord, Myra,” she said. “You know I couldn’t stand for you to leave me again.”
“Maybe it won’t come to that. If he’s alive, I figure he’ll be after me once he’s up and around again. I don’t know what I’ll do then. But no matter what happens, John or his family can’t know about my baby. I’d kill it before I’d let them have it.”
Granny took hold of my shoulders. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever.” Then she drew me close. “Ain’t nothing going to happen to this baby. I knowed the minute you opened them eyes miraculous things was going to come out of you.” She rocked me back and forth, like she used to when I was a little girl. “I can feel it all over myself.”
Granny’s faith made me stronger. Days and weeks passed and neither John nor the police came for me. I didn’t understand, but I was thankful for those months with Granny. At first, I didn’t want anyone to know I was home, but it was impossible to keep secrets from Mr. Barnett. He checked on Granny at least twice a week and brought her groceries on Saturdays. There was no use trying to hide from him. I opened the door when he knocked and he looked stunned. Then his eyes lit up. “It’s about time you got away from there,” he said. When my pregnancy began to show, Mr. Barnett eyed my belly but never acknowledged its roundness. I’m sure Granny told him about the baby, but he didn’t mention it to me. Soon the Cotters knew, too. Before Bill died, he stopped by to see about Granny because she hadn’t been at church. I wanted to hide then but Granny swore it would be all right. She trusted our neighbors, and I trusted her.
It was like being a child again but even better, at least when I could forget about John. Time stood still as the baby grew. Granny and I cooked together, washed clothes, read the newspaper and the Bible to each other. On my eighteenth birthday she made a cake and we ate it sitting on a quilt under the trees, looking into the woods as the summer wind blew over us. In the mornings we fed the chickens, brought in the eggs, and made breakfast. At dusk we picked green beans and weeded the flower beds. When fall came, we made apple butter outside over an open fire, taking turns stirring the kettle. All those months, Granny took good care of me, just as I had known she would. It came back to her fast, all that Grandmaw Ruth had taught her. She went up the mountain hunting roots and brewed special teas. She listened for the baby’s heart with her ear pressed to my belly. She examined me so gently I never felt a thing. One day she looked at me as I rolled out dough for a pie crust. “You’re getting awful big, not to be any further along than you are,” she said. “There might be two of them in there.” I put my hands on my swollen stomach. There was a kick, like an affirmation. I imagined two babies curled together inside me. It was comforting to think they weren’t alone in the dark of my womb.
Sometimes I thought of Ford’s soft eyes and gentle hands. I thought how he would love my babies if they belonged to him and maybe if they didn’t. I thought he might even love me,
too. But those thoughts fled when I sat on the mattress with a scrap of John rotting inside. I could never be touched and kissed like that again and stay hidden. Sometimes I daydreamed about showing myself to Ford anyway, my growing belly draped in a sundress. I imagined how he might slide the straps down and kiss each shoulder and then the top of each heavy breast, take them in his hands to lighten my load, curl his long body around the babies in my womb and keep them safe with me through the night. Even now I look off the mountain and wish I could see where he is. I wish we could build a fire and sleep in the long field beside of his trailer and fry eggs in an iron skillet when we wake up in the morning. We could live with the twins among piles of books and matted dogs with ticks fattening behind their ears. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to grow up on a farm instead of high on a mountain. That’s one life I could have given my babies. It would have been easier there, better hidden from the Odoms, and I know I would have loved Ford. Part of me still does. But it was not the right life for my twins and me. This mountain is their birthright. It’s what I have to give.
They were born on the fifth day of November in 1975. I was sitting on the back steps with a jam biscuit, colored leaves skittering out of the woods across the yard. I didn’t have to read the poems from a book anymore. I had come to know them by heart. I was saying the verses out loud to my babies when the pains came. As soon as the first sharp contraction cramped low in my belly, all my fears came flooding back. I jumped up so fast that I almost lost my balance but I didn’t know what to do next. I paced in the brown grass in front of the steps, waiting for another pain. When it came I felt the panic welling up big and dark, threatening to wipe me out. Once the babies were outside of me it would be harder to protect them. Granny opened the door to ask if I was hungry and I stared at her with eyes that strained in their sockets. “Is it time?” she asked. I nodded. She spat her snuff into the dirt beside the steps, still holding the door open. “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? I can head down yonder and get Hacky right now.”
“No!” I shouted, trying to hold back tears.
“Well, okay. Don’t get all worked up. We’ll do just fine by ourselves.”
“What if John comes?”
“If he ain’t come after you by now, he ain’t going to.”
“He’s got brothers, Granny. The one named Hollis is awful. He—”
“Straighten up, Myra. This is a good day and we’re going to have a big time. Now come on in and put your feet up. It’ll be a long wait yet.”
It was a long wait, just as she said. I drank tea and Granny rubbed my feet and sometimes my back and sometimes my shoulders. She told me all the good stories again and read to me from the Bible and tried to teach me how to knit but it was hard to concentrate. Then she checked me once more and said, “I believe they’re ready.”
I was afraid at first, when the worst pains came, grinding in my abdomen. I couldn’t keep still. My fingers dug into the sheet. Everything was more vivid. Colors shouted and sound had the resonance of a bell. I heard my toes crack as I curled them. The mattress creaked under my writhing. Granny told me to push and there was a moment when I was sure the babies would never come out. I would be giving birth forever. I bore down, head thrashing from side to side, hair plastered to my cheeks and neck and forehead. I felt the babies battling to join me in this life. Everything I was, all that I had done right and wrong seemed far and distant. I gave one last shove, determined to have the babies even if the effort split my body in two. Then the first baby cried and Granny was laughing, shouting like she did sometimes in church, running up and down the aisle with her hands held high in the air. I fell back onto my pillow, the headboard knocking against the wall. “A little boy,” she said. “Lordy, he’s got stout lungs.”
I rested while she suctioned his mouth and nose with the same orange bulb syringe she had used on me when I had the croup. Then she wrapped him in a towel and placed him for a moment in a bureau drawer lined with a blanket. She came back to stand at the end of the bed and I gave one more hard push. The other child came and Granny shouted, “Praise Jesus, this’n’s a girl!” Both of us wept from relief and happiness.
Then I must have dozed for a while because the next thing I remember is a baby rooting at each breast, their downy black heads poking out of blankets. Granny sat on the edge of the bed leaning back on the pillow with me, sweat glistening on her face. It had taken almost as much out of her to bring my babies into the world as it had out of me. “What will you call them?” she asked, wiping her face with a clean diaper.
“I’ve always liked Laura,” I said, looking down at the baby girl. Granny had found an old pink shawl to wrap her in, so that we could tell the twins apart.
“That’s good,” Granny said. “Like mountain laurel. What about the boy?”
I looked him over for a long time, his button of a nose pressed against my breast. “Johnny,” I said at last. When I spoke the name out loud, it sounded right to me.
Granny was silent. I could tell she didn’t like it. Finally she asked, “How come?”
“Because I loved him once,” I said, gazing down at my baby boy.
“All right,” Granny murmured. But she still looked troubled.
I never told Granny about Ford, but sometimes I was tempted. I knew it disturbed her to think the twins were John’s babies. Maybe she was worried how they would turn out, but I wasn’t. I knew it didn’t matter who their daddy was. When I held them I didn’t think about their fathers. I just looked at them, pink lips suckling, and thought about God.
In the first weeks of their lives, every sudden movement, every creak, every pine knot exploding in the fire made me tense to run or fight. I couldn’t understand why John hadn’t come for me, and if he was dead, why someone else hadn’t. But Granny and the babies made it a precious time. Mr. Barnett brought a crib that had belonged to his own children, cleaned and smelling of beeswax, and moved it into Granny’s bedroom where we slept. Those first nights when I was so weary I could barely lift my head, Granny got up and brought the babies to me whenever they cried, singing hymns to them under her breath. As I grew stronger, we tended the babies together while the rest of the mountain slept, burping and swaddling by the light of Granny’s oil lamp, the only sounds their grunts and cries and swallows as they drank from my breast. Sometimes as Granny rocked the babies, one in the crook of each arm, I pretended to be asleep and watched her in secret through the fringe of my lashes. When she thought I wasn’t looking, her face always fell into a mask of exhaustion. Her ashen color made me sick with worry. I heard how she lost her breath while she worked in the kitchen and the yard. Sometimes when she spoke I saw the blue of her tongue. For a long time, I knew something was wrong.
Then one night Granny didn’t get up to help me when the babies cried. My heart ached with lonesomeness, but she had seemed so tired all day. I told the babies, “We’ll let Granny sleep.” But when I opened my eyes at dawn and she wasn’t making coffee, I knew. The babies were still resting. I crept by their crib into the front room. The house was cold. She hadn’t stoked up the fire. I stood for a moment in the door of my childhood bedroom looking at her, knowing this time it was for real. Winter light fell through the window across her face. Her mouth was open. Her arm dangled off the bed. I crossed the room and crawled under the quilts to be with her, to rest one last time on her shoulder.
This winter it will have been six years since Granny passed away. Sometimes when I think about her, I have to escape the house where she died and take a walk. That’s how I knew the present I wanted to give the twins. They spent most of their sixth birthday rolling down the hill all the way to the road while their chocolate cake rose, running back up with beggar’s lice on their clothes. I heard them laughing and wondered how I had ever wanted anything or anyone else, how a man could have been so important to me. I watched them pushing together a pile of leaves in the yard and dreamed of hiding with them in their fall-colored mountain. Later I stood on th
e back steps looking into the woods while they ate cake, the smell of woodsmoke drifting down from the Cotter farm. Everything was quiet indoors and out. The boy was solemn-eyed at the table, eating with his hands. The girl sat on her knees licking icing off her fingers. I went and lifted her out of the chair. She looked at me as I wiped the smears from her face with my dress tail, fine wisps of black hair in her eyes. The boy got down on his own, cleaning his mouth on the too-long sleeve of his flannel shirt. He could read me as they did each other and knew we were going somewhere. I knelt and the girl climbed on my back, arms tight under my chin. I knew she could make it because the twins have been all over the mountain, but I liked the weight of her body. When I galloped across the yard she giggled in my ear.
It would take a long time but we had plenty of daylight. The boy traveled his own way alongside us. I watched his black hair passing under the trees and tried to send everything I felt for him between the tall trunks as I had once sent my soul flying out of my body. I tried to tell him that I knew him, whether or not he knew me. I want to believe his spirit was with me, even as his body ranged out of sight. I saw that he’s worn his own paths on the mountain. Maybe he’s already been to the top. I know my twins think their own thoughts and have their own lives. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like inside of them.
The path’s not as treacherous as our elders claimed. For the last half mile the boy came out of the trees and climbed with us. When we passed the springhouse I wouldn’t let him stop for a drink. The waters there are poison now. The girl scrambled onto my back again at the place where Doug Cotter fell. The boy went ahead of us through the fog, surefooted as a mountain goat. After the outcropping, the slope leveled off and we reached the summit. The stories were true. There’s a meadow at the top. I thought John might be waiting there, his shadow face revealed at last, but there was only grass and trees. Doug once told me they called it Cotter Field. I thought it would be grown over, and it’s probably not as open as it once was, but it’s still mostly cleared off. Maybe Mark tends this spot where his ancestors drove their cattle to, or Mr. Barnett, who I think of now as the keeper of Bloodroot Mountain. But it could be Wild Rose who keeps the grasses trampled. I could tell she had been there. I could feel it. I knelt and closed my eyes. She’s part of the mountain now, a spirit in these woods. I know she’s finally free.