Chapter 21

Tuesday afternoon, Lily bounded in with an invitation to stay the weekend with her classmate Julie Hudson in Covington. Lily was ten. She should be allowed to go. Anna decided dropping the baby had been the right decision. Chosen by God, perhaps.

Friday morning, Anna warmed spring water and mixed in the leaves. After they had steeped, she swallowed it in gulps for fear she would change her mind or take too little and the miscarriage would not work. She did not eat. Instead, she spent the day pacing the worn, broad planks, counting the number that made up the room’s floor. Twenty-four. Each time she counted the boards, the total came to twenty-four. She counted the logs that sat above the limestone wainscot. Fifteen. Fifteen on this wall. And this wall. Fifteen on each wall. For a time, she laid on the bed, her eyes closed. The ceiling slats were too irregular and too narrow for her level of concentration so she could not count. She needed to rest for her walk up Turtleback.

That evening, long after the truck bus had passed over the mountain to Breakline without Lily on it, Anna climbed the road to Flatland. In the distance, she spotted the cross, nailed to the apex of the shake roof. Time and weather had loosened the nail’s grip and the cross, outlined by the setting sun, now slanted hard west, daring even the strongest wind to blow it off. Three large Canadian hemlocks had formed a dark green barrier behind the church since Anna walked this road more than ten years before. She passed the lean-to room, almost hidden in shade. She appeared on the church’s rock step as dusk began to settle into darkness. At one tap, Granny Slocomb opened the door.

Anna stepped into the room, its walls lined with shelves of dried flowers and herbs. The nose-burning smell of alcohol stung Anna’s nose. A kerosene lamp cast a harsh, yellowish glow from where it sat on a heavy plank table against the wall under the eastern window. On the far side was a drop-down cot attached to the wall. Its cotton mattress lay flat and thin. Anna wondered if here was where she would drop Winston’s child.

 

“Are you going to let this happen?” asks Brother Moon.

“Shhhh,” replies Great Spirit.

“Sister Sun will boil over this one,” says Brother Moon.

“Be quiet, I say,” says Great Spirit.

 

A faint light entered the one western window. In the dimness, Anna could see the granny standing by a crazy quilt next to wooden hooks where her dresses hung. Granny stood on what had once been the altar platform. Her broad-brimmed hat hid her eyes. “In here,” Granny Slocomb said as she pulled back the quilt. “You drunk the brew?”

Anna nodded.

“Take off your clothes and sit in that old chair. I got to heat up some water.” Granny Slocomb dropped the quilt in Anna’s face.

Anna grabbed the quilt and called back “Granny?”

“It’ll start soon as it’s ready.”

“Can I have some light?” Anna’s hands trembled. She looked back at the granny. “Oh my God. You got a snake on your head,” she said.

“Go on now.” The granny turned her shoulder away.

Anna, now quivering, found herself on a plank landing. She waited, her ear tuned to the closed-off sanctuary, waiting for a voice to tell her to save this child. A faint light from the room she left told her she had seven steps to go. Uncertainty forced her to move slowly. Anna felt her way down using a primitive wooden handrail and to the middle of the room. She stubbed her foot on a platform and grunted. “Oh, God.” Taking a deep breath, she coughed out the odor of old dust.

She removed her clothes and, standing naked, rubbed her hands over intricate carving across the back panels of what had once been an Edwardian rocking chair. The rockers had been removed, probably by somebody’s handsaw. She stroked the milled dowels and the thin metal piece that supported each smooth arm. A narrow rim of boards served as a make-shift seat. In its center was a misshapen hole and under that a splotched enamel bowl.

Shivering, she rubbed her hands over her engorged belly. For an instant, she felt the slightest movement. As if burned, she jerked her hands back and folded her arms over her stretched breasts. Her teeth chattered as she sat and waited. When a draft of cold wind hit Anna’s bare butt, she realized that she was a woman fragile at the core: more easily broken than she had imagined.

As dusk waned, the granny sat on the other side of the quilt and listened to Anna’s moans. Near midnight, the groans grew louder. Granny came inside, her hat pulled down over her face. Anna rose to meet her, but Granny pushed her back into the chair and tied Anna’s hands and feet to the rocker with hemp rope. Using the hem of her dress, Granny wiped blood from where Anna had bitten her lower lip against the pain.

“Why are you wearing that snake?” Anna asked between her teeth.

With a child as fully developed as this one, Granny knew she should give Anna belladonna or poppy opium to relieve the pain. But Anna had disrupted her harmony when she lay with this man. She had impacted more than her own life. She had risked altering Lily’s. Back inside the church sanctuary, instead of gathering her mortar to prepare the painkiller, Granny took up a cover and moved to the porch. There she drew Tall Corn’s old blanket around her shoulders and rocked in the cold.

A darkness of an unknown sort had been settling over the granny since Tall Corn’s mother cast her out. With each abortion, the darkness pushed her deeper into the conviction that this service was her mission. But she had not expected to meet her baby sister there in the shadows, asking her to drop the Granny’s only nephew. Anna’s primal wails now chased her to the bottom of a black pit. She found there the answer she had battled back and forth over the years. There Anna’s groans struggled with Lily’s twinkling laughter. The laughter won. Yes. Salvation was her calling. The undeveloped self inside Anna held the power to drag both down. Lily’s soul in progress should float higher than a new one held within.

Two Tears was compelled to believe she was different in order to justify her place among women. Without her sense of being Beloved Mother, she was no more or no less open to obeying the laws of morality than anyone else. To say she was reinventing herself would seem as fantastic a confession as admitting she grew two horns with each new moon. She had set herself outside man’s law and had continued doing so until she no longer knew the truth. She gradually lost herself in a maze of fantasy and falsehood. She had no idea that her world differed from any other.

Granny’s empty blue eyes glared into the dark as she closed out Anna’s screams. In the distance, Tall Corn’s mist rose over a dusky mountain and called out to her, “The woman of my village, my birth mother, the one who called herself ‘Beloved Mother.’ She stole her name from a phantom north wind.” Two Tears put her hands over her ears. The wind rose higher, and Tall Corn spoke louder. “Listen, Two Tears. My birth mother, who called herself ‘Beloved Mother,’ stole her name from a phantom north wind.” Granny refused to hear. In the distance, a sound echoed off Turtleback. Perhaps it was Tall Corn’s words. Perhaps it was the night wind. Or Sister Sun could have announced the coming of morning.

As the sun topped Turtleback, Granny cast her hat aside. She found Anna unconscious and wet from sweat in the birthing chair. Beneath her, blood still dripped into the speckled blue enamel pan and spattered off what had, last night, been Winston Rafe’s baby boy.

 

“Great Spirit, come see,” calls Sister Sun. “See what she has done in your name.”

Brother Moon slips behind Turtleback to avoid knowing the bloodshed. Great Spirit shakes his massive head and orders a thunderstorm to wait for Anna to get back to Boone Station before it splashes across Turtleback. The universe swirls and hums its own sad song round and round each disappearing star.

“Did you know, Great Spirit?” asks Sister Sun. “Did you know?”