Chapter Nineteen
In the days after Katie was born, I lay in bed, aching and hollowed out, my breasts tender and heavy, my stomach a spongy
pouch marked with silvery striae like tiny rivers on a map. I wore a cotton binder around my middle, which Phoebe insisted
would help my organs return to their proper places.
“By harvest time, you’ll be your old self again,” she said.
My old self—the girl who had spent hours reading by the window in the parlor, who wandered the woods alone with her thoughts—seemed
a stranger now. In her place was this new creature, attuned to the slightest whimper from the cradle, functioning on fragments
of sleep, her body no longer her own.
Eng and Chang had built Katie’s cradle from oak harvested from our land, sanding the rails with patient hands, lining it with
a cornhusk mattress covered in ticking. A small patchwork quilt I’d made from scraps of old dresses lay over the top. It was
close enough to my bed that I could reach out to feel her breath warm and light against my fingers.
Phoebe slept in a small bedroom down the hall. She slipped into my room at odd hours, her tread silent as a cat’s. She checked
the fire, adjusted the pillows behind my back, lifted Katie from the cradle, and carried her away to nurse. An hour later
she’d return, the baby milk-drunk and drowsy, her lips slick, her eyelids heavy.
From the start, my love for Katie was full and fierce, but pitted with doubt.
The shadow of the child I’d lost, carried in secrecy and shame, never quite left me.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was living a borrowed life, playing a role I hadn’t earned.
The happiness I’d found seemed precarious, easily undone.
I cradled Katie closer, breathing in her powdery scent, hoping no one noticed the tremor in my hands.
“In my mama’s time, they used moss for the littlest ones,” Grace told me as she demonstrated how to fold a square of flannel
into a diaper, pinning it with a brass pin imported from England. “Spanish moss, dried in the sun. Softer than burlap, and
you just throw it away after.” She sprinkled cornstarch on Katie’s skin to prevent heat rash. “Mama used pine ash, but it
stains something terrible.” She knew the tricks to make a baby drowsy—laying Katie across her lap and rocking her thighs back
and forth, or rubbing the bridge of her nose until her eyelids fluttered closed.
“You’ll know her better than anyone soon,” Phoebe said. “Babies tell you what they need. You have to learn to listen.”
How many generations of women had passed down these small, practical secrets of infant care? I felt like an apprentice in
a craft I’d assumed would be easy to master.
Eng and Chang came and went, bringing parcels of calico for baby gowns and newspapers that sat unopened on the side table
in the foyer. The outside world seemed very far away—President Tyler’s campaign for reelection, the mounting tensions with
Mexico over Texas, even local concerns about this year’s tobacco crop and the rising price of cotton goods. I read the headlines,
but they felt as irrelevant to me as news from the moon.
Adelaide was the one who’d yearned for all this—a husband, a home brimming with children—but I was the first to hold a newborn in my arms. When, six days after Katie’s birth, Addie delivered a healthy girl, Josephine, it felt like the world righting itself. Like my sister and I could both exhale.
One morning, a week or so after Josie was born, I sat in the window seat, knees drawn, watching Addie fold tiny garments into
neat stacks.
“Shall we wake them to feed?” I glanced at the cradle where the babies lay side by side, their dark heads nearly touching—one
with Eng’s steady, serious gaze, the other with Chang’s full lips. Watching their small bodies rise and fall with each breath,
I saw how closely they were aligned, as Addie and I had been through the months of our pregnancies. A connection forged not
only by blood but by the intimacy of shared experience.
Addie set a small gown atop her pile. “Let them sleep. We’ll have precious little peace once they’re up.”
Grace came in with a pitcher of water beaded with condensation and set it on the table. “Tell Phoebe we’ll need her in about
an hour,” I said. “The girls will want nursing.”
As Grace left, I saw a funny expression on Addie’s face.
“What is it?”
Pouring water into two glasses, she said, “It’s what’s done, having a wet nurse. But . . . I tried, you know. That first night.”
I blinked in surprise. In the haze of those early weeks, I’d been only vaguely aware of my sister’s experience. “I didn’t
know. How was it?”
She handed me a glass and sat down. “It hurt. More than I expected. And she couldn’t seem to take to it. She pulled away,
and I”—she traced the rim of her glass with a finger—“I gave it up. I told myself it was better for her—better for both of
us—to let Phoebe take over. But then . . .” She shook her head. “When the milk came in—”
“It was awful,” I said. “Even with the compresses.”
She nodded. “Mama would be horrified at the thought I tried to nurse my own baby.”
I laughed. “Mama would be horrified by everything we do these days.”
A cry rose from the cradle—Josie, whose waking sounds were higher-pitched than Katie’s.
“I’m closer, I’ll get her,” I said.
I lifted Josie and studied her face—her olive skin, full lips, the shape of her eyes. She gazed up at me, her tiny fist curling
and uncurling against my sleeve, her mouth opening. “I believe she’s hungry.”
“Always,” Addie said, reaching out to take her.
I handed her over and looked down at Katie in the crib, stirring, eyes open.
“I’ll fetch Phoebe,” Addie said, rising with Josie fussing against her shoulder.
“Wait,” I said. “I think I’m going to try to feed Katie myself. Do you want to try too?”
Addie hesitated. “Are you sure?”
I nodded, shifting Katie to cradle her in my arms.
“Should we . . . take turns? In case it doesn’t work?”
“Whatever you like.” I unfastened the top buttons of my dress and guided Katie to my breast. She whimpered, turning her head
away.
“She’s used to Phoebe,” Addie said. “It might take time.”
But across from me, she was having trouble too. Josie’s cries grew more insistent with each failed attempt. I met my sister’s
eyes over the tops of our daughters’ heads, and something in our shared frustration broke the tension. We began to laugh—two
grown women, utterly confounded by this basic maternal act.
“What would Mama say?” I gasped between fits of laughter.
Shaking her head, she said, “She’d call for the wet nurse and have a lie-down.”
“Ladies? Everything all right?” Phoebe was standing in the doorway, her brow arched at our disheveled state.
We looked at each other, at our crying babies, at our undone dresses.
“We’re experimenting,” Addie said with remarkable composure.
Phoebe closed the door behind her and approached us.
“Here, Miss Sarah,” she said, kneeling beside me. “Try holding her like this.” She guided Katie back to my breast and adjusted
her position. “You’ve got to help her find it.”
Under Phoebe’s patient hands, Katie finally latched. The sensation was unlike anything I’d experienced—a sharp tug followed
by a deep feeling of release. I looked up in wonder.
“There now,” Phoebe said, moving to help Addie. “Miss Adelaide, you too.”
The room quieted as the babies nursed. When they were fed and drowsy, we sat by the fire with our feet tucked under the same
quilt. Katie’s head against my cheek, Josephine nestled in Addie’s arms. Our world reduced to the simple sound of our daughters
breathing.
Phoebe tried again the next morning, kneeling beside me and showing me how to cup my breast and guide the baby’s mouth. She
taught me to rub the soles of Katie’s feet to rouse her when she fell asleep mid-feeding and how to sit propped up in bed
with pillows behind my back, the baby tucked snugly in my arms.
This time, she latched and suckled briefly before pulling away again, her tiny brow furrowed in frustration.
“She’s hungry,” I said, panicked. “Just take her.”
“She’s not going to starve in a minute or two,” Phoebe said calmly. “Let her find you.”
It took nearly a week before Katie nursed well enough for me to feed her through the day. “Try feeding her every two hours, even if she doesn’t cry,” Phoebe advised. “Better she gets full in the daytime, so she sleeps at night.”
Even with Grace and Phoebe’s help, Addie and I fumbled through the days half dressed and bleary-eyed, moving between our beds
and the warm space by the fire in the parlor and the dining room where we rocked and soothed and fed. We carried our infants
tied to our chests with long scraps of muslin. The grandfather clock in the parlor still chimed the quarter hours, but its
mechanical precision had become irrelevant. Time was measured not in hours but in feeding and sleeping, waking and soothing.
Even the rooster’s crow, once a reliable signal to begin the day, was just another sound in the round-the-clock cycle of infant
care.
The changes in our bodies marked the passing of time. The bleeding stopped, and the ache of early milk production eased into
a manageable fullness. We learned to pin a diaper with one hand while restraining a squirming infant with the other. To button
our own clothing while balancing a baby on one hip. To eat standing up, swaying in the perpetual rocking motion that seemed
to calm the girls.
The sound of crying seemed stitched into the air. No sooner had I laid Katie in her cradle than Josie’s cries would rise from
the other room.
At night, Addie and I paced the floorboards with our infants in our arms, whispering and swaying and shushing until our legs
trembled beneath us. I was grateful for the whale-oil lamp Eng had bought in Wilkesboro, its steady light more reliable than
flickering tallow candles for examining rashes and soothing cries during these long vigils. Sometimes I wondered if Addie
and I might both simply fall asleep on our feet, rocking our babies until dawn.
One morning when I was in the parlor, Addie appeared in the doorway with Josie in a sling.
Her face was pale, her eyes dull with exhaustion.
Her dress was stained with breast milk and something that might have been mashed pears.
Neither of us commented on it. Standards of cleanliness were a casualty of new motherhood.
The linen of my own apron was wrinkled and dirty, and the milk stain I’d scrubbed that morning was already ghosting back into view.
“I found myself in the pantry just now,” Addie said. “I couldn’t remember what I’d gone for.”
I smiled. My capable sister, always certain of her purpose, now as addled as I was. “If it makes you feel any better, yesterday
I forgot to pin up my hair until midday. And this morning I put salt in my tea instead of sugar.”
“Phoebe says it’s the lack of sleep,” she said. “That it affects the mind.”
“It’s more than that. They need so much. All the time.”
Josie stirred against Addie’s shoulder, letting out a sigh.
“Strange, isn’t it,” she said, “making a human being.”
I laughed, but it was true. Katie’s weight in my arms still startled me—how solid she was, how real. Some mornings I woke
sure I’d imagined her, only to find her beside me, warm and breathing.
As the weather warmed, we spent more time on the porch. The babies fell asleep against our shoulders, swaddled in lightweight
muslin to keep mosquitos at bay. We laid them together in a single cradle tucked in a corner, where a cross-breeze offered
some relief.
It was late afternoon—that stretched-out part of the day when the light flattens and everything feels worn.
June heat pressed down on the farm like a heavy hand.
Chickens scratched in the dirt; the mare dozed in the paddock.
Katie was cranky; her cries rose like steam from a kettle.
I paced in tight circles, my voice a low murmur, pleading and coaxing as I held her higher on my hip, her damp cheek pressing against the sweat-sticky skin at the base of my throat.
I didn’t know what was wrong with her; I only knew that something was.
“Lay her down,” Phoebe told me.
“She won’t let me.” I kept pacing, one hand pressed against Katie’s back. My bodice was unbuttoned, my hair slipping loose
from its pins, damp strands against my neck. “Every time I try, she starts screaming again.”
“She’s a baby,” Phoebe said. “She doesn’t know how to ‘let’ you do anything.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do.”
“Just a minute,” Phoebe said.
She returned with a jar of molasses, dipped her finger into the dark syrup, and traced the sticky sweetness across Katie’s
gums. She hummed a low tune, her voice steady and warm.
“Takes the edge off the pain,” Phoebe said. “Her teeth are coming in.”
I nodded. Of course. I should have thought of that.
Katie’s cries settled into hiccupping breaths. I laid her in her cradle, watching her small chest rise and fall in the glow
of the lamp.
From her earliest days, Katie was wide-eyed and observant. Her dark eyes, so like Eng’s, seemed to take in everything—the
pattern of sunlight on the bedroom walls, the blue jay outside the window, the face of her father peering into her cradle.
Sometimes I’d look down and find her staring straight back at me. It startled me every time—not just because she was so still,
but because her gaze felt knowing, familiar, as if she understood more than an infant should.
Eng was besotted with her. I saw it in the unguarded moments when he thought no one was watching: the way he rocked her and hummed melodies from his childhood in Siam, how he studied her fingers as if trying to understand the mechanics of such tiny hands.
Cradling her in the crook of his arm, he’d press his lips to her forehead, his expression so tender it made my chest ache.
Sometimes I let myself imagine a different life. One in which my husband was mine alone, sleeping beside me each night without
another body just inches away. A life that wasn’t a constant negotiation among four. But Katie, with her steady gaze and calm
presence, anchored me to this one.