“Seems like the horns are so pretty though,” Ellen sighed, remembering.
Days were going by. Ellen felt her waistbands tighten. She found it hard to grasp that a living child would come from her, believed it would die. One day she was in the shed where a dozen hens ran loose, their nests known, a few porcelain doorknobs kept in them to lure them back. “Poor things. Giving them a mock egg.” Ellen pitied the innocent fowl and she would turn rocks over for them in the yard so they gathered to peck the crawling life beneath. When she was bending to collect the eggs from a nest under a hay manger she felt the child kick. She arose, leaning against the side of the stall, frightened. She knelt again to take the eggs, walked to the house slowly. In the evening she said, “I felt it move.”
“That’s nothing.” Penny was turning to Luke. “Why don’t you see if you can get a good rooster from Mester Webster for me? I could raise a flock this summer off those old hens.”
“He’s got White Rocks,” Luke said.
“That what I’d like, a blooded rooster of a heavy breed. Then I could trade eggs, too.”
“I was in the shed,” Ellen said, “when it happened.”
“Just wait, Ellie,” Penny was jogging Clate on her lap, serene, “till it starts getting knobby and takes to rolling o’er all the while. Wait till it gets a little bigger.”
“I’ll wait.” Ellen was bitter.
At breakfast Penny asked Luke to buy chicory and soda at the store. “And get me a piece from that bolt of blue-check flannel, Luke, for Clate’s outgrown his nightdress.”
“I don’t get paid till the fifteenth.” Luke put on his straw hat. “Now I doubt the store will credit us any more.”
Ellen got up hastily. “Wait, Luke.” She climbed the ladder to the attic, came back to put nearly twenty dollars on the table. “My uncle gave me this.” She was eager. “You’ll know how to use it. It’s yours.”
Penny picked up the bills and turned them over, her eyes downcast, her lower lip in her teeth. She laughed, “Get shed of that store bill first, Luke. Then buy that length of cloth for Farmer Clate. And if you see some, get pink muslin too. The new one could be a girl.”
“I’ll look if there’s a little share at the store to make a turning-plow,” said Luke, “like I wanted to get for that little ass to pull.”
So they thanked her. For the first time Ellen sang when she milked Penny’s goats.
Mist was rolling heavy in the hollows between hills one morning. March gusts had blown in the night, seeking cracks, but Luke had banked the foundation well with straw and manure so the family was snug within. Ellen came carefully down the ladder. She smelled hidden odors, saw Penny asleep in the bed, and from the crook of her arm came a mewling sound. There was a black-haired child wrapped in flannel, born while Ellen slept. She turned quickly to the kitchen where she heard Luke talking to Clate who babbled in reply. Luke looked over at Ellen as she came in. “That bugger’s going to feel awful silly in pink muslin, Ellie.”
“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.”