1936—SARAH
DADDY GAVE HER to me that night. After I dropped the wood. After the rattle of it falling to the floor quieted and the room was silent, he stretched out his two hands, the baby girl cradled there, and handed her to me. Then he told me to get on. Get on out to the other room. Get on out.
He wrapped Juna in the tarps he spread every spring over the tobacco beds, dragged her up and over the rise behind the house, kept on as far as he could, covered her over with rocks, and said he’d bury her in the spring. No other choice. The ground was froze solid. We both knew she wouldn’t be there come spring. Something would take her, but we couldn’t, neither of us, say that.
We burned the mattress, the dry ticking bursting into a flame that let me get my first good look at that baby’s face. The fire warmed us, crackled, sparkled, showed me her dark eyes. She was fair-haired, at least for the time being, and as big as any baby should be. She wasn’t Joseph Carl’s. I knew she wasn’t; even when the women worried the baby was coming too early, I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was another man’s child, a man who had come before Joseph Carl.
Daddy shoveled dirt over the last of the flame, dousing the embers. He sent us inside and left us. When he came back, he had milk, most likely from the Brashears, most likely from a goat. We didn’t know, neither of us, what to give a child. I used one of the bottles Mrs. Ripberger had left along with all the tiny clothes. I had boiled them because that’s what the ladies told me to do. I touched the rubbery tip to the baby’s mouth, and she took to it. Just that much made me smile. Never thought so little could make me smile so big.
Daddy said we could never tell. Sure as he saw Joseph Carl hang, those Baines would see me hang. Out of spite, they’d do it, Daddy said. They’d come back, every one of those Baine brothers, to see me hang. Joseph Carl didn’t have no business dying, and neither did I. This made me wonder how long Daddy had known Joseph Carl should have never been hanged. Probably he’d known all along, and that’s why he would die before that ground ever thawed.
Two days later, Daddy went to Abraham Pace and told him Juna was gone. Told him she gave birth to that baby of Joseph Carl’s and walked right out the door. Next, Daddy went for John Holleran. I don’t know what Daddy told John or what he promised him or what he confessed to him, but John came. He never asked after Juna. Never asked where she’d gone or why she’d gone. That’s the thing that makes me wonder if John has always known.
We were married two weeks later. Same as John, folks didn’t ask much after Juna. The fellows slapped John on the back, told him it was high time he strapped himself in. The ladies stood at arm’s length from me and tipped forward to get a closer look at the baby. If she was sleeping, they’d ask me straight out. Does she have those black eyes? Dark brown, I told them. As dark as brown can be. Annie is as sweet as a baby can be.
John and I lived with Daddy those early days. We slept in the room Juna and I once shared. For the first three months, John slept on the floor. Cold as that floor was, he slept there. I never wore the slip I’d been wearing that night with Ellis Baine, never mentioned the thing John had seen. I wanted him to know I’d never been with a man, not Ellis, not any other. I wanted John to know he’d be my first and he’d be my last. I wanted him to know his mama had been right about our future together. But I couldn’t say those things without bringing to mind the thing John most likely saw every time he closed his eyes.
It was nearly spring and we had buried Daddy when John finally came to our bed. I didn’t have to tell him he was the first, and I would say it brought him some peace to find it out for himself.
“That’s a cold hard floor,” he said when it was done.