Our house was in town just north of the university and the capitol, close to the places where we worked. Although we loved going to their farm and Marsh was the only child they had, we saw the McNeils infrequently. They weren’t clingers, nor were Marsh’s other aunts and uncles. My family was when given a chance, but they all lived a thousand miles away in Tennessee. For three months we told no one. Our friends didn’t catch on though some of the women looked at me with a speculative eye and later swore they had guessed. We spent a lot of time guessing about each other then.
What did we fear? I was twenty-nine, young enough to carry a child well though I never carried any but the first easily. I had morning sickness followed by periods of immense fatigue and hunger so strong my doctor suggested I suck hard candy to contain it. And the ninth month I retained so much water and was so swollen Marsh had to tie my shoes. The last three weeks my blood pressure, usually low, shot up and worried everyone. This happened every time I got pregnant. It would be all right, I knew, as soon as the baby was born.
Amniocentesis wasn’t a routine test in the early sixties, certainly not for someone my age, and if it had been I probably wouldn’t have taken it because I was so sure it was a boy. That was the one thing we spoke about. The rest of the time, when we were alone, we made only slight references to him as if some nameless but malignant fate might happen to overhear us. When around others, we sometimes glanced at each other and smiled. We’d already named him, Martin Moore McNeil—after my father, my mother’s family and Marshall’s family in that order. He had the burden of all those generations upon him within a month of his conception.
For my thirtieth birthday Marshall bought me a two person hammock, one of the sort I remembered from my childhood in Tennessee—a friend of my mother’s had one at her farm—made of stout rope closely woven at either end. He hung it with strong bolts and chains between two catalpa trees in our backyard. Showy in the spring—hundreds of white blossoms resembling miniature orchids drifted down and scattered across the grass—their large leaves provided deep shade. I had insomnia during that long summer. When there was no comfort to be found, no position which gave me rest in bed, I got up and padded out of the house to the hammock to rock slowly to sleep in ropes’ embrace beneath the catalpas’ floppy leaves.
“Mama’s in the hammock!” Kate woke every time I left the house and shouted from her bed. I wasn’t sure why she had to announce it, maybe just to reassure herself of my whereabouts. Every time she made this discovery she would fall asleep again immediately. For some reason her shout never woke Sally who slept, foot to foot with her sister in the next bed, nor did she wake Marshall who was only a short hall’s length away in our room. Both the girls still woke near dawn and both had their share of bad dreams but they were generally good sleepers.
That was later after everyone knew, had to know. I could hide under loose dresses for three months and not a day longer, not for the third child. We actually announced it to no one. When people noticed and asked, either Marshall or I simply agreed happily.
It was an odd time in our lives. We had two children and were going to have a third, yet we were still in transition, still renting a small twenties-style Spanish colonial house with two bedrooms and one bath in an old part of town when many of our friends were making house and car payments in the suburbs. Both Marsh and I worked at jobs we thought we’d leave, but we wanted to have the baby first.
By the time Martin Moore McNeil came along we’d collected so much equipment we didn’t actually need anything though I did buy some new maternity clothes. I was sick of the ones I’d used before and had already passed them on to friends. We had a cradle that had been my grandmother’s and my mother’s before it was mine, a beautiful old one my grandfather had made of hickory. He’d also carved himself a stout walking cane. These were the only two objects we still had that he’d made, one for his children, the other for himself. My mother hadn’t used it for me; instead she kept magazines in the cradle, a functional use Grandmother detested.
When we moved to Texas, I made few plans for the future, so I’d I left it with Grandmother who stored it in a half-finished room on the second floor of her house, a room that frightened me when I was little. I was used to cluttered attic refuges on rainy days in other houses, but this was a forbidden room next door to my bedroom. Cold air crept out of it after someone opened it during the winter, and in the summer, since the windows were never opened, it was hot enough to melt the wax fruit my grandmother put away there. The few times I peeked through the door I saw narrow strips of wood on walls, a single light bulb hanging over a small collection of dusty trunks and boxes and a raw section of red brick chimney—a brighter unweathered red than it was outside—on is way to the roof. Dim gray light fell though a small dormer window. The cold light and the room’s empty unfinished look was inexplicably scary. It was, I thought later, a place of beginnings—it hadn’t become anything—and endings, feared perhaps because I was in transit then myself, living just for a year during the war in my grandmother’s house. I didn’t have to be warned away from its door. Later, of course, the attic-room lost its mystery. Still even after I was grown, I never liked that room. I don’t think Grandmother liked it either. When she retrieved the cradle from it, she wrote complaining of the cold and the dust in there. I could imagine her, white-headed, arthritic though sturdy still, trudging up the stairs on her errand. She must have shipped it to me believing I would, at last, put it to proper use again. Did she, I wondered, remember the days Grandpa gave to its making? Surely she thought of the three children she’d rocked in it. I liked thinking of my mother, my aunt and my uncle as babies while using it for my own. To remember the others was to return to the pristine stage of their lives—before Aunt Lucy’s raddled nerves kept her at home, before Uncle George’s drunken insistence on driving put him in a wheel chair, where my mother’s short life began—before any of them had faults and fates.
We had a crib too. Designed sometime in the thirties, my mother bought it a few months before I was born. Made of plain white painted wood which framed wire screening, it had none of the usual bars or too cute animal pictures—decals from the same set of patterns I seemed to see in every store. The screening was perfect for this climate for protection against mosquitoes as well as keeping curious dogs and cats away. We had neither at the time but were thinking we should get a puppy. Both Kate and Sally were afraid of the ferocious looking English bulldog who lived up the street from us. A dog of their own, we’d been told by their pediatrician, would ease their fears.
The cradle was much more charming than the crib. On its sides my grandfather had carved small semi-circles of flowers, little tight rosebuds and fully opened daisies; on the headboard a small bird spread its wings. The hickory had aged to a light brown except for the top of the headboard darkened by three generations of women’s hands. Grandmother Moore sent it to me shortly before Kate was born with instructions to send it to Fergus, my only first cousin, when he had a child. She wasn’t deterred by the fact that Fergus had no children and had been divorced for nearly ten years.
“She doesn’t give up easy, does she?” Marshall said. He found Grandmother’s stubborn insistence on governing the future by sheer wish comic. His laughter softened my anger. Grandmother was old; she lived miles away.
Just before I went to the hospital we polished the cradle and put it next to my side of the bed ready for Martin Moore McNeil.
When he was born he was a healthy eight pounds, twelve ounces, and twenty-one inches long. He’d be a tall man one day. Martin was a good baby, easy compared to the girls, the first child born to us who didn’t have colic. Or perhaps by the time the third one arrived, I was an easier mother, and he had plenty of companionship. Kate was particularly fascinated. She’d been jealous of Sally. We’d caught her hanging over her sister in the cradle with a flyswatter in hand. Now she watched his fingers curl around hers and insisted on sitting on the floor in the middle of a quilt to give him bottles of
water. Sally, due to be the jealous one this time, seemed to be more interested in keeping up with her older sister. Supposedly children are born with an instinctive fear of falling. That never kept mine from rolling off beds, nor did they know what might happen if a baby fell. Martin’s helplessness appealed to them. As much as I cautioned, they were too young to understand a baby’s fragility. So I had two pair of helping hands to accommodate—and to watch.
Because I was nursing him, we kept Martin in the cradle by the bed at night. It was easy to lean over and pick him up. During the day he slept in the crib in the same room with his sisters. I had to learn all over again how noisy a baby is at night, even an easy baby. There were little whispers and sighs, rustling, squirming noises, sucking, bubbling sounds. Sometimes he woke up entirely, and I always wanted to pick him up.
Marsh, half awake, reminded me just as he had when Kate and Sally were babies, “Let him get back to sleep. Remember he’s got to be able to do it on his own, Marianne.”
I lay there stretched between the desire to comfort and the almost overpowering need to sleep. After the first two weeks we got so edgy, we put Martin to sleep in the room with his sisters. It looked like a dormitory in there, the crib and a small chest just to the right as we walked in the door, Kate’s and Sally’s twin beds at a right angle under three east windows. Marshall and I had been only children, and we’d both lost our parents when we were young. We felt rich in children. Of course we needed to move, but not with a new baby, we told ourselves.
I didn’t try to go back to my editing job for a month. Then I allowed myself a second month without pay. It was a slow period at the press, and I had to admit, I was tired most of the time. I always wanted more energy than I had. Although both girls were in nursery school in the mornings, there was no time for anything, not a sliver, and at night when the children were all in bed, I was too weary to read. One morning a week I had help, a woman who had promised to come more often, a promise she couldn’t keep when her father was hurt in a wreck and she was needed at home. I didn’t have the energy to search for someone else just then. Without realizing it, I accepted weariness as part of my life.
Marshall, I knew before Martin was born, was bored with his job. He’d thought he loved history enough to endure the tedium although we were both aware he’d taken the job just to have something to do. We’d pooled our inheritances so we could live on interest as well as my salary from a halftime editing job at the university press and Marsh’s at the state archives. When Martin was born, he began coming home a little earlier in the afternoons. He’d call the girls, put the baby in a stroller and go off for a long walk leaving me to get supper ready. In October he began coming home at four-thirty instead of five—hell hour we called it because the children quarreled most easily and my own patience ran lowest then. I needed his help. I told him I was glad for it.
“Anything … anything at all is better than microfilming one more document. I’m beginning to turn blue in that light!” He said.
Actually he was beginning to look gray, not gray-haired; his skin paled, and his eyes hollowed. He had all the classic signs of over-work. Well, so did I. It was a hard time. We’d known it was going to be.
“What are you doing, reading everything you film?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Impossible. Maddening too. You’d like to read some of it, but you can’t. There isn’t time to.”
Kate and Sally were running circles around his legs. Martin, as if sensing he was being left out, began fretting.
“Later. We can talk—” Marsh waved at me from the door.
We would spend weekends looking for a place to start a horse farm, we decided that evening. Marsh had grown up learning a little about training horses from his uncle. He’d put it aside when he went off to school. Now he thought he’d try working with horses again. Even if Uncle Carter was retired, he would help train him, he was sure. Once he’d practiced a while, we could slowly buy our own and begin breeding. Couldn’t I go back to work? Wasn’t I ready? He was ready to do anything that would take him outside once more. He hadn’t known how much he’d miss that—walking outdoors early in the morning and staying there, going in and out of the barn and corrals, working with horses—the mixture of smells—manure, powdery dust raised by hooves, hay, and horse sweat. Without realizing it the first few years, he’d missed the animals themselves, the feel of his hand on hide, the look of muscles rippling, the unspoken communication between horse and rider. When we went to the country to visit his uncle and aunt we always stopped before we got to the house to watch two or three horses running in the green fields.
Sometimes I thought we’d married because of horses. We met that way, not at the university we both went to but in a stable next to a park in Nashville where we rode the wide leafy trails together, boughs of hickory, of maple and elm arcing over us, the horses trotting companionably together.
We spent a third of our inheritances on a down payment for a farm with a house and barn, both needing repairs. We would move at the first of the new year when Martin would be four months old. Until we were established, I’d keep my job. Marsh would quit his in December; he’d give up not only his state salary but retirement and insurance as well. We had both been orphans; we were careful. We didn’t forget the thin line between ordinary life and disaster; we knew everything could be taken away from us in an instant. Cars collide. Planes crash. We’d have to look for the best deal on insurance. Marsh, thirty-two, felt he was young enough to earn his own retirement. We’d have to take some chances, wouldn’t we? Yes, I agreed. And if there weren’t enough people wanting horses trained, if every investment failed, we would live frugally. There were other jobs he could find to hold us together.
“Gas jockey.” Marsh said. “Cab driver, hired hand.”
The longer his list grew, the more we laughed.
We left the girls with Aunt Sarah when we went to our farm to work. The place we chose wasn’t far from theirs, and the children loved the McNeils. There were often young animals—ducklings, kittens, chicks—to play with. “We like the little ones,” Aunt Sarah said. Raised on a farm herself, she wasn’t sentimental about newborns, nor about any animal for that matter, however she enjoyed having them around to show to Kate and Sally. Uncle Carter was the sentimental one; he kept his favorite horses in the field in front of the house long after they were too old to be useful.
“I like to watch them run,” he said.
When they died, he buried them in his own back pasture.
Martin, too young to leave, went with us to sleep in his car seat we carried into the barn or on a quilt in the back of Uncle Carter’s pick-up. From time to time we put him in a swing Marsh had hung from one of the rafters. The old wooden barn was one of the reasons we’d bought the place. Built sometime in the forties, it had been painted blue instead of the usual red or green and had weathered to a beautiful blue-gray. The minute I saw it I thought of my Great-Uncle Ambrose, who, for reasons known only to him, painted the fence at my grandfather’s farm blue while everyone was in town. Marsh promised me not to change its color. It was sturdy enough but needed stalls. He decided to build these himself. I learned to hammer well enough to help. We hired carpenters and painters for the house; the barn was our project. Actually it was Marsh’s; he’d planned the interior.
“This boy is going to grow up used to a lot of noise,” he said while we were pounding away one Saturday hollering now and then to Uncle Carter who was outside repairing one of the exterior boards. Though cypress lasts well, rats had gnawed holes and damp combined with dirt had riddled some edges.
“Yes,” I shouted back. “He’s gotten used to it, I think.”
Martin, his thumb loose by his mouth, was asleep on an old quilt spread over some clean straw in the back of Uncle Carter’s pickup, which he’d backed into the barn. Later I would carry him with me up to the house to see how the workmen were coming along there. He loved being outside as much as his father did. He watched patterns of li
ght and shadow as breezes blew leaves and branches. It was warm during the day that November as it often is in Texas. All of us were outside a lot on those weekends. We all slept well Sunday nights, even Sally who fought sleep the hardest. She was the one who had to be read to for an hour usually. That night, the last Sunday in November, she fell in bed immediately after supper. Kate followed quickly. Everybody was tucked in by eight-thirty. I looked around at them all sleeping in an L-shaped line around the room; Martin was in his crib on the south wall while the girls each slept on their beds beneath three windows on the east. It was a big room without curtains and a braided oval rug on its wooden floor, a room full of sunlight in the daytime, moonlight shining though trees at night. I’d hate to leave it in a way. In the new house the girls would have a room of their own, and so would Martin. The catalpa trees, stripped of their floppy leaves, cast long-limbed shadows on the lawn. We’d move the hammock when we went. I’d already picked out the trees for it. I looked at all our children sleeping once more. Martin had given up on his thumb again.
Around three in the morning I woke for some reason. I got out of bed and slipped into the children’s room to check on Martin. He slept through the nights now and wasn’t fretting. I still felt the need to look in on him. The earth had traveled so the moon, still bright enough to see by, threw longer shadows. Martin had kicked off his cotton blanket. Automatically I picked it up to pull over him, and when I did I touched his small back. He was cold. I leaned over the crib to lift him out. A chill rippled over my shoulders. He was so cold. I clutched him to me and ran to the phone to call 911. Marsh must have heard me. I heard him running through the moon bright house to me in the kitchen where I sat on the floor cradling the baby. I sat there holding him with Marsh pleading, “Let me … Let me have him, Marianne.” But I couldn’t let go. The EMS medic pulled him from my arms.
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