Chapter Six #2
“Hmh. Well, it is, and it isn’t. Humans are complicated beasts.”
I shrugged a little. “I’m not very complicated.”
“Sure you are. Complicated and strange, like most people. Some hide it better than others.”
“You don’t.”
Joan laughed. “I don’t have to.”
Late on a rainy afternoon, several months after I arrived, Joan was outside, milking the goats. I’d offered to help, but she
waved me off. “You need rest,” she said, pulling on her boots and oilskin coat. “And Clover’s in a foul mood today.” I watched
from the window as she trudged into the drizzle, muttering about stubborn creatures getting into the wrong pasture. She swatted
the air with her hat, scolding the goats like unruly children.
With the cabin to myself, I climbed a ladder to sweep cobwebs from a rafter and lost my balance. Turning at the last second
to protect my stomach, I fell hard on the rough-planked floor, my hip striking the edge of the stove. The breath was knocked
out of me, my hand scraped raw. I lay there for several minutes, panting, an ache spreading through my side, staring up at
dust motes drifting in the gray light. Eventually I pushed myself up and staggered to my bed.
Joan returned to find me curled on my side, arms wrapped around my middle. “What happened to you?”
I explained about the fall, embarrassed by my carelessness. She helped me sit up, her fingers gentle as she probed the bruise
spreading across my hip, then helped me into my nightgown.
Several hours later the cramping began, a low, grinding pain in my belly. I clutched the edge of the bed frame, trying to
breathe. I felt like something being wrung out. My nightgown, damp with sweat, stuck to my skin as the pain tightened in bursts.
Biting down hard on the inside of my cheek, I tasted iron.
No. Please no. I wanted to believe this wasn’t happening.
“Joan,” I called, my voice high and thin. She came quickly, taking one look at me before pulling back the covers. Blood had soaked through my gown. She flinched. “You’re losing the baby,” she said. “I’ve seen it before.”
She moved with practiced efficiency, gathering clean cloths, heating water, mixing herbs in a small pot. “This will ease the
pain some,” she said, pressing a cup of bitter-smelling tea into my hands. “Drink it all.”
As the pain worsened, she sat beside me. “Breathe through it,” she said, one hand on my forehead, the other gripping mine.
“Yes, like that.”
“Do I need a doctor?” I gasped.
She shook her head. “Town’s too far. It will be all right. You’re stronger than you know.”
When I cried out, she didn’t flinch or look away. Her hands were steady and certain as she helped me lie back, pressed a cloth
to my forehead, murmured words I couldn’t take in. Blood came in gushes, hot and bright. She deftly changed the linens beneath
me and applied compresses to stop the bleeding.
By the middle of that long night, the baby was gone.
Joan cleaned me up and helped me into a fresh gown. “Get some rest now,” she said.
Lying in the dark after she left my room, I listened to rain pebble the roof. I barely knew what to think. I felt a dull ache,
a void I couldn’t quite comprehend. The proof of my transgression was gone, evaporated, as if it had never existed. And yet—and
yet the child I’d anticipated holding in my arms had become real to me.
I wondered if that brief glimpse of motherhood would be my last.
It’s strange how relief and longing can live side by side in the same heart.
Rising from bed, I pressed my forehead against the cool windowpane, feeling the tap of raindrops on the other side. The sky shedding the tears I was unable to summon.
I convalesced for a week. I was sore in the hips, unsteady on my feet; slowly, the bleeding tapered off. Then it was time
to return home. Joan hitched her chestnut horse, Betty, to an ancient buggy she kept in the barn, wrapped me in a quilt, and
drove the five long hours back to Mulberry Creek.
When we pulled up in front of the house, my parents emerged onto the porch. As I stepped down from the buggy alone, without
a child in my arms, I could see the relief on their faces.
They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t need to.
“Praise the Lord,” Mama whispered.
Joan gave her a wry smile. Then she squeezed my hand. “You’re always welcome back,” she said.
Joan’s words lived inside me now, a whisper, a murmur, a rebuke. A challenge to all the voices insisting that our way of life—our
entitlement to free labor—was the only way, that the beliefs we’d been taught were God’s truth. Though it would take years
to rise to her challenge, something had shifted. The sealed container of the world I lived in had been exposed to air.
It was better that there was not a child. But it was not all right. A cloud of ignominy hung over the family. My prospects
were irrevocably tainted. And even though Addie, at eighteen, was everything a suitor might want—beautiful, vivacious, with
land and a dowry—it became clear soon enough that my sister’s fate was tied to my own.