“Do you think you’ll be able to love my baby anyway?” I asked him.
“Ninah,” he said, “we need to be focusing on the word of God,” and then he started up again.
“But wait, Grandpa,” I stopped him. “Remember how when Mary had Baby Jesus, nobody believed he was really the child of God at first? Remember?”
He raised up his hand like he would strike me, but then he put it down. “I don’t ever want to hear you say something like that again. Do you understand me?” he yelled. “Your baby is not like Jesus. And I just pray to God that the rapture won’t come until you get yourself straight with your maker, because if it does, you’ll be left behind on this pitiful planet, left to have your limbs cut from your body by Satan’s own army, but you won’t die. I don’t know how we failed you, but you’ve got to get your vision directed back on that cross. Because those soldiers will cut off your fingers and toes, one by one, and toss them into a great vat of boiling grease, and you’ll hear them sizzle as they land there, but you won’t die. They’ll cut off your legs and your arms, and you won’t be able to move, but you won’t die. And the scorpions will stick their giant tails into your body, will rape you with their stingers, and you’ll wish you could die, but you won’t.
“But Ninah, my child, if you’ll just repent. If you’ll just admit that you sinned and that James sinned, and that the awful burden of that sinfulness caused him to leave this life, then you can go to Heaven with us all. It won’t be long, Ninah, before Christ returns for his bride. For the Bible says that he’ll come in the blinking of an eye, and if your heart’s not ready, they’ll be no hope for your soul, no salvation when the moon meets the sun.”
“No,” I said quietly.
“What?” he demanded, and I looked at him only long enough to see his bushy red eyebrows bump into one another. Then I looked back into my big, big lap.
“No, sir,” I said.
He left the room ranting about hardheaded women and the workings of the Devil.
Nobody came for a long time except Nanna, who still rubbed my sore muscles and felt my belly but didn’t smile.
“Tell me a story,” I’d beg her.
“I can’t, child.”
“Please?”
“No, Ninah. I don’t have no stories today.”
“You didn’t have any yesterday either,” I cried. “Or the day before. What’s wrong?”
“I have to leave you now,” she said.
And when Daddy came in, he wouldn’t look at me. He’d talk just like normal, about the weather and the new kind of chickens he’d heard about that grew feathers that fluffed out like rabbits. But he wouldn’t look at me.
“What’s gonna happen to me, Daddy?”
“Nothing, Baby.”
“I mean after it comes. Are they gonna throw me out of Fire and Brimstone? Because I don’t have any money.”
“Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you. You’re gonna move right back home with us,” he said to his trousers.
“What about the baby?”
“Honey, I can’t talk about it. I just don’t know.”
There was nobody for me to talk to but Jesus, and I got tired of talking to him all the time. So I talked to the baby.
“I won’t let them hurt you,” I said. “I’ll stay with you forever, and if you ever sin, you can just say you’re sorry and that will be enough. And you won’t have no nettles in your crib either because if anybody puts nettles in your little bed, I’ll brush them off. I’ll check your crib every day.”
I wondered if Daddy had made me a crib the way he’d made one for David and Laura. I thought maybe they’d give that crib to me, even though it was made short and I was taller than most. I didn’t figure it would matter much.
I prayed that I’d known enough of Jesus’ pain already to be able to handle giving birth.
Nanna looked at me strangely when I asked for some pieces of barbed wire and told me that she wouldn’t bring it. I tried to convince her that I wanted to use it in a rug, but she called me a liar and said, “Why would anybody walk on a rug with barbed wire in it?”
She had a point.
But Grandpa Herman was delighted to bring me the wire.
“Now you make sure you don’t hurt yourself,” he said to me. “Cause you can do your penance when the baby’s delivered. You be careful where you put it.”
I knew he wouldn’t mind if I wrapped it around that baby though. All he wanted was to think that I was trying to get close to God again. He didn’t care if I got hurt.
But I really was making a rug. I knew nobody’d walk on it, but I wanted to make a rug for James.
I bent the barbed wire back and forth until it broke off into strips the right length. Then I cut the rope he’d tied around his waist and that tree to match. And then I took down my hair, combed it out, ran my fingers along the tops of my ears until they met at the back, and I lifted all that top hair up and got it out of the way.
I put a rubber band at the base of my neck to cord off what was left hanging, and then went to work cutting above the rubber band.
It took a long time because my hair was thick. It was more like sawing than cutting. By the time I’d cut just that bottom part off, I had more hair than most people have on their whole heads laying on the floor. Dark brown and more than two feet long. And when I took my other hair down, you couldn’t hardly tell the difference.
I worked all night on the rug. Tobacco twine and burlap, barbed wire and rope. I used my hair to weave in a big cross, right in the middle, and the barbed wire outlined it. I shredded up my fingers working on it, and the burlap had little blood stains smeared all over. I wove for most of the night, and I cried a little too. When it was nearly day, when the rooster had already crowed, I tied off the ends and lifted up my rug for James that nobody would ever walk on. I climbed aching into bed, threw the rug across my feet, and slept.
I woke up late and cramping just a little, and I knew I had to get out of the house. I didn’t ask anybody if I could leave. I just left. And nobody stopped me. Most of the men had taken jobs outside the community for those cold months, and Grandpa Herman had ridden off to town to take care of some business. But the women were around. Most of them were inside, but I walked right past Nanna, who didn’t say a thing. And Wanda was traipsing back from the henhouse when I passed her on the road. She looked at me funny, said “hey” and “how you feeling?” but nothing else.
I didn’t have a coat big enough to go around me, so I’d taken the blanket off the bed again, wrapped it around me like a shawl, and set off for the woods.
I walked out where the boys set their traps and even checked the traps for them, but they hadn’t caught any foxes that morning. I walked out to the creek, and even though I was heavy and aching, I crossed it and went to the tree stand where James killed his first deer.
I tried to climb up the steps, but I didn’t have the power. So I sat down at the base of the tree and remembered James. So gentle and confused, but so very, very dead.
I thought it might have been better if I’d drowned myself beside him, in that awful pond. Then we could have been like those people from great literature who took their lives for love.
But I just wasn’t that brave. I couldn’t think of anybody I loved enough to die for—except maybe the baby, and I wasn’t even sure about that.
I knew I had some time. Nanna had told me the pains would happen regularly when it was time for the baby, and I had some pains, but they weren’t the kind that took my breath or the kind you could count with a watch. Sometimes I closed my eyes and talked myself out of having to use the bathroom, but I figured I had a good while.
So I stayed there, in the woods, listening to the water in the distance dancing over roots and across little sticks and rocks. Listening to the leaves crunch beneath me as I tried to make myself comfortable. I did a little praying, but mostly for the baby—not for me. I prayed that nobody would trick it, or scare it with horrible stories about Revelations and plagues
on the earth. I prayed that my baby wouldn’t ever have to get up in the night to check the faucet and make sure it still had water.
When it was time to go, I thought about staying. I thought I’d probably be better off alone, just squatting in some pine needles and having my child. And when it was out of me, I’d nurse it with my full breasts, and then I’d carry it over to the pond. We wouldn’t have to swim across. We’d just have to walk around it, through some tangles and vines, and then we’d be on somebody else’s property, maybe a nice Baptist family who wanted a young girl and her baby to bring up proper.
But I left. I walked back to the house, slowly, my back feeling like somebody was pinching it from the inside, squeezing it so hard it made me grit my teeth.
When I came inside, Nanna was waiting for me and she helped me get to my bed.
“It’s coming, ain’t it?” Nanna asked me, not happy a bit, not the way I wanted her.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I think so.”
And when I went to sit down on the edge of the bed, that’s when it started pouring out of me, all the water, pouring steady and hard, slippery down my legs, and for a second, I worried that I was having a fish, not a baby.
I soiled the floor and my clothes and the blankets, and I just stood there looking down at it. I tried to stop it, like pee, but it didn’t work. My legs would not go back together. I couldn’t even slow it down.
“It’s all right,” Nanna said. “It’s expected.”
“Uh-oh,” I kept saying.
“It’s all right,” she reassured.
Nanna left me for a while, and when she came back, she brought me something to drink. I think it was alcohol, though I don’t know where she got it, and I knew that drinking was a sin, but it seemed like I’d sinned so much already that a little more couldn’t hurt.
Then I remembered Ben Harback and the grave, and I said, “Nanna, I don’t want to sleep in a grave. Don’t give me nothing that will get me in trouble.”
But she said, “Hush, child, and drink it.”
So I did. I knew that Grandpa called it Satan’s own sweet piss, but it wasn’t sweet at all. It scalded at my throat and made me feel like if I tried to say something, it’d come out demonic and coughing.
As soon as I finished one cup, she got me another one. But by then, I was having a pain, a real one, worse than barbed wire in my skin, and I said, “Nanna, you gotta tell me a story.”
But she said, “Shhhh,” and gave me a piece of rubber that came off the back of the washing machine to bite down on.
I was sure I was going to bite that thing in two.
Then it let up for a minute, and I could feel the sweat on me, just like I’d been in a tobacco field in the middle of summer except it was winter and different.
“Uh-oh,” I kept saying. “Uh-oh.”
“You’ll make it through this,” Nanna promised. “Most everybody does.”
But I was thinking about James’ mamma, who had died doing just what I was doing. I was thinking about Dot, the horse, who bled everywhere. I knew I couldn’t die because then that baby would be stuck good, and if nobody killed it, it would have to live at Fire and Brimstone forever and wouldn’t have me there to whisper in its little ear that rapture or no rapture, it wouldn’t be left behind.
I wondered if the rapture happened at just that moment, if the pains would stop, and I almost prayed for it.
But then I got another pain. A bigger one that hurt so much I messed myself without even knowing I was doing it.
“Tell me a story, ” I begged.
“I can’t right now,” Nanna said. “I got to clean you up.”
And I was sorry, in a way, embarrassed in a way, but mostly I just didn’t care because I was caught in a wave of hurting that wouldn’t break.
Nanna left with the dirty towels and came back with another drink for me. That time I chugged it just to have something to swallow.
The next time when I cried out, Nanna said, “Bite that rubber,” so I put it back in my mouth. And I didn’t even have to ask for a story because she started telling it on her own.
“When Herman’s pappa died, he inherited a lot of land. More land than one man can handle, I reckon. We were living right here in this house, but not another thing was on this property. It was fields as far as you could see.
“You breathing too fast, Baby. Slow it down. In through your nose and out through your mouth.”
I hoped that I wouldn’t choke on that piece of rubber. Usually I was adult enough not to choke, but it seemed like I’d lost control of most everything.
“Anyhow, Herman worked all the time, sun-up until sun-down. And even though he was right here with me, I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt before. My people was all the way over the swamp, and I didn’t hardly ever see them except for on Sundays and Wednesday nights at church.”
“It’s coming again, Nanna,” I panted. “Stop it.”
“Here, get you a piece of ice,” and she picked up a thick sliver and stuck it in my mouth.
“I had little Ernest already, but having a child ain’t always as much company as you think.”
“Uh-oh,” I muttered through my mouth blocked off with the piece of washing machine and my tongue hanging onto that ice for all it was worth.
“Don’t fight it,” Nanna said. “Fighting it won’t do no good. You might as well dive on in.”
“Uh-oh,” I said again, in a voice so high that it must not have been mine, the whole world fading to purple, slowly, so that I thought I was going to knot up so tight I strangled myself trying to get little enough to fit through the circle of light. But then it let go.
“Have you another drink,” Nanna said, and I did.
“He’d come in nights, and I’d already have the baby asleep, and I’d be missing him so bad, wanting him to lay down with me for a while—because sometimes when you’re lonely enough, you feel like there ain’t no way out except having a little bit of another person fill you up—but Herman’d eat and fall right asleep,” she told me.
I was trying to listen. I really was. And I wasn’t hurting just then. But I was tensing up to get ready for the next round.
“Then in the morning, after all my sweet dreams when I’d been imagining things different, at the time of day when I felt full enough already, he’d wake me up feeling lonely, I reckon. I always figured we must be exact opposites. Cause just when I’d be content, he’d have a need.
“Privately, I hoped there’d be another war. So he’d go off again, and I could take Ernest and go back to my people. I ain’t never told nobody that,” she added. “Don’t you repeat it.”
“Uh-oh,” I huffed. “Nanna?”
“Breathe,” she coached. “In through your nose. Deep. That’s good,” and paused. “And out through your mouth.”
“Nanna?” I called.
“It’s okay,” she said, and she rubbed me with oil to help my skin get ready to give.
“Tell me a story, ” I hollered.
“Shhhh,” she begged. “Bite down.”
“So when Herman got the idea for the church, I weren’t that disappointed at all. In fact, I was happy. Course I feel guilty about it now, because I didn’t care nothing about the religion exactly. I just wanted to have people close by.”
It was all I could do not to holler out. The room was reeling and Nanna was veiled by the anguish of it all. I kept imagining what it must feel like to die—on a cross or in a pond either one.
“Not that story! Tell me about your mamma,” I cried, and then coughed, and Nanna gave me another piece of ice.
But then the pain left me. Nanna poured me another drink. We sat there quiet and she rubbed at my stomach and between my legs, and I didn’t even care, cause it was Nanna. She ran out for a minute to wet me a cloth to put on my head and to get more ice. But it took her too long, and when she got back I was halfway through my next pain, feeling like I was being torn wide open and leaving my teeth marks in the side of my arm because I’d d
ropped the piece of rubber and couldn’t lean over to get it.
When Nanna saw me, she rushed over and sat beside me on the bed and wiped at my face, glancing occasionally at the clock on the night table.
“Tell me about your mamma,” I raved.
“She was pretty,” Nanna said quickly. “And she loved being that way. She’d sit in front of her vanity and brush her hair until I was sure it would all come out in her comb.”
“No,” I moaned, swirling off so far I needed to say something just to make sure I still could. “Tell me about Weston Ward.”
“He had hairy arms,” Nanna fell in. “And you can tell how good they’ll be at loving just by the hair on their arms. My pappa didn’t have much, but Weston’s arms were like a bear, so he was that much closer to nature, and that much closer to being able to ...”
“Uh-oh,” I interrupted as it peaked. “Uh-oh, uh-oh.”
“Breathe,” she said, and I imagined her wiping her face though my own eyes were closed by then. “Breathe deep.”
When that one was over, I was crying, more tears than I’d ever had maybe, and I wished James was there so he could see me hurting that way, because I hated him for leaving me to deal with it all alone. But only for a second. Then I wished Jesus could see me too, hurting so much, but he wasn’t there either. Nobody was.
Or so I thought. Then I glanced at the window and saw that it was still daytime, though I thought it had to be the middle of the night. And I saw Pammy’s little red face, her blue eyes big as plums and peeking in.
I started to holler out and tell her to leave, but then Nanna gave me another drink, and I forgot or just didn’t care.
“What was Weston like?” I asked Nanna desperately when I felt the surge begin again.
“He was a sweet man,” Nanna said. “And I believe he loved Pappa almost as much as Mamma, except he loved her in another way. It was Pappa he wanted to please though. Helping him out in the store and all. Mamma just latched onto him because he was around.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” I hollered.
“Mamma?” a voice called from the other room, and I knew it was my own mamma, but I didn’t care.