Counting Backwards

23

Carrie

April 1970

I feel near certain God won’t forgive those men for what they took from me.

I still can’t figure how it was they thought they were in charge of deciding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to make babies, who was or wasn’t good enough.

Lord knows it was never up to them.

All these years later, I suppose I’ve come to understand much that was unclear to me as a girl.

Folks might say I’ve lived a small life, just being a wife, cleaning house, keeping to myself, and not much else.

I never had an important job, going off to business like the young girls do now.

I didn’t travel hardly anywhere either, born and likely to die in this here state of Virginia.

Yet I’d say I’ve been through more than most.

I never would have got past those days after Vivian died, nor the long years of missing the other children I never had, if not for the way I learned to rely on myself.

Billy, he tried, but he was just the icing on top, not the answer itself.

In the quiet days of my little life, I learned to believe in my own self and my own strength.

I did choose to love my old friend Billy the way a woman loves a man.

But I set him straight right from the start that I was going to be making any decisions for myself all on my own.

I knew by then for sure that I always needed to be true to myself.

I gave Billy a good life, I think, except for the children he never had.

He would have loved getting to watch his own babies grow like weeds in the garden.

They’d have been beanpoles surely, just like him, those same freckles dotting their cheeks.

Even now, on lonely days, I like to imagine boys like that, doting all the time on their father.

A little stream trickles along behind the house here.

When we first settled in, right away Billy set to building me my own special bench out beside it, a place where I could rest myself when I wanted a quiet moment to remember Vivian.

It’s been years now since Billy passed, and here I still sit, remembering Vivian and Billy both.

I try not to let my mind wander away with all the what-ifs.

Even so, one thought keeps creeping back up on me: If only I’d been born some years later.

Surely what happened to me would never happen to a young woman today.

But then I remind myself there’s no use carrying on that I didn’t land up in better times.

All the while, I’m still scribbling in this here book.

Sometimes when everything else falls away, we finally see the clearest.

I didn’t ever give myself enough credit for pushing through the hard times.

I focused so hard on what I’d lost and how it’d been taken from me.

I wish I’d come to understand sooner that I should be grateful for my own two feet, the very same footing that held me up all along.