part one (continued 3)

“It’s a boy then?” She was fearful.

“Sure is. Clate’s pleased with his little brother.” Luke gave the boy a drink of water from a tin cup and then handed him a piece of corn pone. Clate crumbled the food in a moist hand and threw it on the floor, shouting. Luke was sheepish. “Can you take him, Ellie? I’ve got to get to work.” He hurried from the house, his whistling ebbing.

Ellen wiped Clate’s hands. “Wish things would hold still while I study to understand.”

Little by little, she was taking upon herself the care of Clate. She would bring him to the shed and sit him in a pile of hay while she milked. “Swap ends, Tiny,” she turned the goat about, “let’s give some supper down for Farmer Clate.” The child crowed in glee, kissed her with his wet soft mouth, pulling at her braids. In the house he crawled from under the table to trail her. She had to tread carefully, watching out for him.

But Anse, the newborn one, she avoided. Penny would lay the naked red body on the bed to change and dress it while it clamored thinly in an indifferent way, fists clutching in protest. “Why doesn’t he hush, that ugly brat?” she whispered to herself.

Clate she took to see the garden coming up, sang to, confided in. “When I tell the song, I see the picture of what happens. Like ‘Red River Valley,’ that’s where the river’s muddy with red clay and always there’s summertide.” Clate was gripping Ellen’s apron; he staggered beside her. “Hold on to me, now. You should have seen me once in Chicago, when all the fine gentlemen and ladies listened to me sing.”

She came to feel her safety here, gradually putting aside the old terror. She packed the figure of the Virgin into her valise when she made order once in the attic. Waiting the months out, she left it there.

She witnessed the ways of birth around her. When Anse was born, Luke brought home a White Rock rooster as a present from Mr. Webster. It strutted like a lord before the flock of hens, scratched after fake food to bring them scurrying. Its sickle-shaped tail feathers were silken and the crimson comb trembled and folded over with its weight. Ellen picked him up to stroke the long wattles that dangled below his handsome head; he breathed coarsely through open beak. When she put him down he made staccato noises and scuttled after a hen, fanning his wing until it squatted and submitted to the embrace.

In the crab apple tree a pair of robins had fashioned a nest. Each day she held Clate up while he peered in at the four miniature blue-green eggs. The time came when he shouted to see bare nestlings just hatched, all gaping beaks. “Don’t touch them, or the mother’ll smell you and not come back to feed them.”

In the barn the does dropped their kids. Ellen ministered, impersonal, put them to the teats to nurse the first thick yellow milk. It would alter in a few days to become the familiar white fluid. Then she would milk a share out for the family.

The white cat ran from her one day and she saw a strange tom in a tree branch nearby. That night she heard them shrieking in the yard. The next morning the white cat lay sly in the haymow, licked a scratch on her paw, cleaned herself and purred.

She witnessed the ways of procreation and birth, the willing and unwilling, the casual and violent. “It’s ugly. All those ways are ugly.”

At night she lay unwieldly, turning restless to find an easy way to lie now that her body was so increased. The child rolled within and she sighed, “I’d as lief you came before your course and perished. I’m too weary to fret about it any more.”

Penny was asking her to watch Anse while he slept. “I want to put in a row of those flat white bean seeds, Ellie. They say Good Friday’s the day to put in beans and it’s way past.” When Penny returned, the baby was wailing in his basket hoarsely, small face wet with sweat and crying. Ellen was at the kitchen table, her head on her arms, Clate playing at her feet. Penny comforted the infant, cleaned him and laid him against her shoulder where he moistly hiccuped. She came in the kitchen to sit in a chair and put him to her breast. She asked mildly, “What’s wrong, Ellie?”

“I can’t seem to touch him, Penny. I looked and it seemed I wanted him to cry.”

The woman said sharply, “You’re not the first girl with a trouble, Ellie. Nor the last. You’ve got to take hold and plan. You’re not a child any more and you’ve got to act past your years, and study on the ways of your turning.”

From her quilt that night, Ellen was listening to Luke and Penny. “Shh, is Ellie asleep?” The sharp notes of love fell in the room below. When Anse whimpered they brought him to their bed. Their gentle voices came and went. “Poor thing. And it all ahead, Luke. That father, strict and always preaching the Old Testament. I got no use for him. He’ll like to kill her if she goes home.” Luke’s voice rasped faintly and Penny said, “No. Her mother that should be standing by is like a child herself. No marvel Ellie got taken in by some straying man.” Their voices made Ellen weep.

* * *

In June they were whitewashing the narrow house. Penny was climbing the ladder, Clate upset a bucket on himself, and Ellen, moving heavily, misshapen, was painting low spots. Anse was asleep in a blanket under the crab apple tree. When he cried, Penny would put him to a hard-filled breast while from the other, milk wet her dress as it flowed. “Let it go. There’s plenty more I reckon.”

Luke came home for supper and shouted out, “Say, look at that there rich man’s house. Who’s the master of this house?”

A pink June rose was crawling heavy-blossomed over the door where it had been trained. Bright flowers were flocking by the path, and the yard grass was green. The scene was framed and they stood about to admire it.

Then a shower was washing the whiteness into gray streaks and soon the house boards were drab as before. But Penny was satisfied. “It was a sight if only for a week. I’ll remember it clear till next spring, Luke.”

In the first of July, Luke was saying, “Webster’s in a hustle to get the buckwheat in. Says Fourth of July, wet or dry.”

“Why doesn’t he wait till the light of the moon when it starts waning?” Penny was dressed in her best, the babies were clean, their pinafores starched. One of Luke’s fellow employees was driving by in his car to take the little family to the stock farm near Hidden Creek. Penny looked forward to the outing. “Hey, Farmer Clate, come set on your potty before we go.” She turned to Ellen, anxious, “You going to be all right? How do you feel?”

“I don’t feel a thing. I might pick some berries for supper if I can haul myself down the lane.”

“Well, don’t tire yourself, hear?” Penny paused. “Maybe I oughtn’t to go, Luke. Ellie might get taken.”

The two turned in protest. “Now, you know yourself it doesn’t happen that quick. Ellie wants you to go. And Clate and me too. Even Anse is saying, Mama show me those little Jerseys that give all cream.” So the woman was persuaded and the party left, waving from the car window, disappearing down the dusty road.

Ellen sighed in the fresh morning that moved on toward the hot noon sun. Partridge repetitively whistled in the woods down the road, “Bob-white. Ah. Bob-white!” A small warm wind stirred and settled, puffs of cloud drifted very slowly, and the sky was vivid blue. Like a fall aster. Wish it was over. She was going down the warm dirt of the lane in the late morning for blackberries. She dropped the first heated ones into the tin pail; they made whining thumps until they covered the bottom. Juice was staining her fingers. When the pail was filled she toiled back up the path. At the pump she washed the dust from the berries and hung them in the well to cool. She threw water on her flushed face and arms, pumping more over her bare feet. Refreshed, she was seated in the open doorway, leaning her head against the frame. The child under the blue apron turned itself. She drew shallow labored breaths, closed her eyes. “I’m nigh to smother. Will I e’er take a full breath again?”

At noon she was restless about the kitchen. She brought fresh water in from the well, ate a square of corn pone, listless, while a bluebottle fly churned at the glass of the window. She walked to the field, carrying a bucket of water to the goats and donkey staked there. The goats drank slowly, raised mournful yellow eyes while their beards dripped. The little ass sucked noisily, slobbering, jerking his overlarge head. He took a button of her dress gently in his teeth. The girl laid her hand on his woolly shoulder and looked away to the languishing farmlands where hot air shimmered.

The flock of guineas had not come in to feed the night before. Ellen knew some of the pairs had been hiding out, setting their clutches of small strong-shelled eggs. “Some of the chicks could have hatched,” she told the donkey, “and are keeping the hens and cocks from feeding. A skunk or snake might get them.” So she took grain in her apron pocket and went past the orchard, seeking in the farthest places, calling, “Wee-wee-wee-wee. Come, wee-wee-weeeee.”

It was by a lone scraggled locust tree in an open field that a great pain smote her. She leaned upon the tree while it was subsiding. She attempted to reach the orchard and stumbling, fell. The onrush of spasms was far past her imaginings. In the intervals of withdrawal she crawled, pulled her racked body through the field. “I will not lie out here.”

A pair of guineas, followed by a stream of peeping spotted keets, flushed from a covert as she neared the orchard. She but dimly gave them heed. She was grunting, face fired red, wet from the sharp throes that came in the scorched air, in the sweet crushed grass and the round-shaped white clover blooms. She cried out hoarsely, biting her lips, detached from her sore body where the child sought its way out of darkness. Her mind was apart in a red torment where she strove unbelieving to endure. When a seizure would lapse she lay a moment supine, freed, while above in the sultry blue, a cluster of twittering goldfinches were bobbing in the Seckel pear branches.

The hand was laid remorseless again upon her. Muffled at first, it was graduating into cruel wrenching. Then she evoked the holy Virgin, swore in agony many bonds, until distracted she knew not of her body as it was arching itself. In time, from her laden womb the child had its way and was brought out upon the meadow grass. Thin wails fell on the stifled afternoon air. And overhead the finches chirruped brightly.

After long, Ellen heard the faint piping and lifted herself to see the limp warm child. She wrapped it in her blue apron and laid it at the base of the old tree. Resting weary on the grass, she waited. When the evening star showed itself hovering above the horizon as the sun began to set, her joy caught in her throat. “I came through. I’m unfettered once more.”

The Doughertys found her as the evening birds were beginning their songs. Ellen’s pallet was brought from the attic to a corner of the room below. She ate milk and berries and bread. In the early part of the night Penny put the child by her. “You got to nurse him, Ellie. He’s hungry.”

Ellen suffered the feeble seeking mouth. “Say, another setting hatched off, Penny. I saw them in the field back of the orchard. You want to go get them in?”

“Now I think you care more for those chicks than your own newborn son.”

In a short while Ellen was about the house again. Penny had Luke bring home a few yards of pink-and-white striped material and Ellen was holding her needle light. “Oh, but I’m a slim one. Look at me,” she demanded.

She told them she must go, trying to say the other thing that was in her mind. “I’ve been studying. I can’t come home dragging it. Pa’d turn me off. Could you-all find it in you to take it for your own? I’d send money for its needs.”

“It’s true what Ellie says, for I know Mester Gaddy.” Penny looked up at her husband.

“It’d be a twin to Anse,” he said.

“We’ll love your baby, Ellie. But you mark me, he’s not our blood. The day’ll come you’ll rue you didn’t make a way to keep your first-born. You can have him then.”

But Ellen was turning away. “Not me. Though I’m beholden.”

She would walk in the morning down to the Weems Crossroads station. While they had breakfast, Clate sat on her lap, kissing her endearingly with his small mouth. “Luke, I reckon it’s the hardest for Ellie to leave our Clate.”

“Oh I love him that much,” Ellen sighed to the brown-haired child.

“We named your boy last night, Ellie,” Luke said. “Simon.”

“And we’ll call him Simon Gaddy,” said Penny. “We’ll tell him you’re his ma. So we decided in the night.”

“I love him that much,” Ellen was saying to the child she held.