MITTENS HAD GONE HOME. IT WAS DARK NOW. CHRISTIE HAD SETTLED the babies down, and they were all sleeping. James was taking a hot bath in the kitchen. In case somebody came in, he hid the washtub behind a curtain Amanda had strung up. A bath at the end of the week always put him in a good mood. After his bath, he started teasing Christie, saying he had a surprise. He urged her to comb her hair and get cleaned up for company. Then Dulcie and Jimmie Lou came in the back door. Jimmie Lou had crimped her hair with the curling iron, making fat curls as big as eggs.
“Your head looks like a Easter basket, Jimmie Lou,” said James.
Jimmie Lou ignored James’s teasing and charged through the kitchen toward Christie. “All right, Cousin Christie, get on out of that bed,” she said, tweaking Christie’s toes under the quilt.
“What’s going on?”
“A surprise, Chrissie,” said James, pulling her hand. “Come on. We’re going to carry you outside.”
“What in the world?” she said, her eyes on the babies.
“You’re coming up to the house,” said Dulcie, who had on a good skirt with a shirtwaist and weskit. “Let’s go!”
“The young folks are getting up a blow-out,” said James. “They’re having a play-party! Everybody wants to see the babies.”
“A party! But we can’t carry the babies up yonder.”
“They’ll fit in the clothes basket, and they won’t never know the difference,” James said. “I’ll cover the whole thing with a quilt.”
“Well, what brought this on!” cried Christie. Her feet landed in her house-shoes. Jerking up a little too quickly made her sight dim.
“Wad liked the sound of that wagonload of presents coming,” James explained. “And Thomas brought home some peanuts and peppermint candy for the chillern. Some neighbors are coming—the Stokeses and Pritchards. Wad’s threatening to get his fiddle out.”
Christie laughed. “But I’m too big to carry.”
“We’ll get all the pallbearers in the family to haul you out,” James joked.
“Oh, we’ll get to sing,” she said happily. “I wish I could dance.”
“I’m ready to swing around, I tell you right now,” said Jimmie Lou, skipping across the hearth.
“I’ll dance in my mind,” said Christie, brightening. Her hair was falling down, she saw in the glass Jimmie Lou handed her.
“Aunt Mandy said she wasn’t going to swing around, even if Uncle Wad got out his fiddle,” Dulcie said. “She’s mad at him.”
“She said she’d come down here and take care of the babies if you didn’t want to carry them up there,” said Jimmie Lou, who was rooting under John Wilburn’s dress tail to tickle his toes. He was awake now, and he seemed to be peacefully studying his surroundings.
“They’ll be all right in the basket,” said James. “I want to show them off.”
“Are you able to do this, Christie?” asked Dulcie worriedly.
“If it’s not too cold. I’ve been dying to get out of this bed all week. But you’ll have to go in the north room and bring me something out of the clean-clothes closet.”
“Will the babies cry if there’s singing?”
“No, they like songs. Mandy and Mittens sing to them all the time.”
Christie thought if she could hear some singing, she could get that humming out of her mind. It had gotten stuck there. By now she had supplied words to Mittens’s tune, nonsense phrases—lick the skillet, tear down the tree, chase down the lamb, and don’t catch me.
Excitedly, she got herself washed and ready, while Dulcie prepared clean bottles to carry with them. People would want to see the babies drink from the bottles, Christie thought. As she transferred the babies to the clothes basket, she held each one close, wondering if it was a mistake to take them out so soon. She realized how much she loved them—their tiny features, their wriggling limbs, their unceasing hunger. They were growing, and gurgling like creek water, and she imagined that the flicker of a smile threatened to break out on their little faces.
“A significant thing.” The mayor’s words played like a harp across the humming in her head.
At Wad’s house, James set the babies in a warm corner of the kitchen, near the stove, and Amanda settled Christie in a large, soft chair next to them. Amanda surrounded Christie with pillows and wrapped her in a log-cabin quilt that Christie remembered sleeping under when they lived here. After wrestling with her bolster in bed all week, she was glad to rest her back against comfortable cushions, but the kitchen was so warm she soon pushed away the quilt. The girls flocked to the babies, and Nannie and Clint and Jewell crowded around Christie, excited at first and pulling at her for attention. But when they seemed assured that she was really there, they resumed their squealing and romping through the house. It pleased Christie to see them enjoying themselves. She loved to see a playsome child, set free from daily chores. The children had already filled up on the peppermint candy and peanuts Thomas had brought, and Boone had promised to make Nannie some doll furniture out of the peanut hulls. Her pinafore pockets were full of hulls. She was sucking on a piece of Boone’s cough candy. He kept a supply of horehound sticks for his throat, and he had given Nannie a piece.
Christie pulled Nannie toward her and kissed her hair. “How’s them sniffles, sweetie?”
Nannie shook her head. “All gone,” she said. “That old taller-rag hurt. It made me red.”
Christie spied down the neck of Nannie’s dress. “It’s better now,” she said. She kissed the place to make it well.
The house was crowded—all the Wheelers, including Wad’s sons, Joseph and Henry, with their wives and small children, and three neighboring families, all of whom had older boys and girls eager for a frolic. Everyone tried to squeeze into the kitchen to see the babies in their basket next to the stove. The babies slept through most of the excitement, and when they woke up the women helped feed them with the bottles. Christie remembered nursing Nannie on their first night with the Wheeler family. When they lived in this house, the family had seemed at war, with everyone at cross-purposes, but now they seemed to belong, like all the daisies in a field standing out against the clover and johnson grass and timothy.
“There’s the proud pappy,” said Mack Pritchard, the neighbor who had brought so much sweet-milk. “Nobody believed you had it in you, James.”
Alma’s voice carried over to the men, who had cornered James, teasing him. She said, “You oughter seen James knocking around the corner of the barn yesterday morning on them tom-walkers he whittled down out of some planks. He liked to scared Nannie to death!”
“He was about eight foot tall,” said Henry, raising his hand above his head. “He was as pleased as a skunk in a churn.”
Joseph joined in. “I told him he don’t need no tom-walkers now,” Joseph said. “He seems tall enough, with what he’s done.”
“They’re talking about you all over town, Christie,” hollered one of the Stokes women from the far side of the room.
“You need you about five titties, Christie,” said Ethel Pritchard, Mack’s wife. She was in the kitchen picking out hickory nuts Wad had cracked.
Christie blushed, and everyone around her laughed. Suddenly the cuckoo bird sprang out of the clock on the wall and cuckooed eight times. The loud-ticking mantel clock said five of eight. She saw the men gathered around the fireplace, teasing James. By their hand movements and loud whoops, she knew what they were saying. James caught her eye. She heard one of the young men say, “Reckon you ever got five birds in one shot, James?” She could see James’s abashed grin. She couldn’t hear all the talk, but she could see his lips saying, “You shut up now, Howard. Don’t let the womenfolks hear that.”
The kitchen was separated from the front sitting room only by the long oak dining table, so that from the kitchen Christie could observe all the goings-on. The children played checkers and soldiers and dolls, while the older folks played rummy. The front room was shadowy, with brown walls and small rag rugs braided of wool strips from old winter clothing. Several upholstered sitting chairs and rockers hugged the walls, and a small table with a coal-oil lantern on it stood between the two windows. Another lantern burned in the center of the dining table, casting a glow on the lace curtains and green paper shades of the tall windows. The double doors to the parlor had been opened up, and Christie could see that the carpet had been rolled and pushed to one side. The men had moved some of the parlor furniture out on the porch. Alma had oiled the wood floor and dampened it to keep the dust down. At a play-party, the young people played singing games so they could dance when musical instruments and dance leaders couldn’t be found in a hurry. Wad Wheeler played the fiddle, but he couldn’t always be persuaded to bring it out.
Boone, his white hair sticking out in all directions, sat on the top step of the stairway, holding on to a post.
“Come on down, Boone,” Christie called to him. “You need to bounce around with the young folks.”
From the kitchen, Christie watched the circle of alternating players, boys and girls and older folks all together. They sang verse after verse of “’Liza Jane,” swinging around in circles and stomping forward and back, lacing hands and parading down the length of the room. They sang their way through “Toddy-O,” “Skip to My Lou,” and “Killie Kranky.” The songs exhilarated Christie. She remembered her wedding day, when she and James danced across the grass right past the preacher. Christie noticed that Jimmie Lou had her eye on Bob Stokes, a blond-haired boy with a cowlick that seemed to run a course parallel to his crooked grin.
“You’re going to get enough jars here for a canning, Alma,” said Bob Stokes’s mother, when her husband went out to check his buggy jug, the squat wide-mouthed whiskey jug that fit under the seat of his buggy.
James went out too, with Wad’s sons and some of the neighbors. James rarely took a drink of whiskey, but Christie didn’t mind right now if he did. He was happy and full of laughter. She was the focus of everyone’s admiration. Everybody was talking about the babies and the newspaperman from St. Louis and the men from town. To go from the heaviness and fear of her pregnancy to the shining light of attention was like getting saved at church. Or it was like the rush of anticipation at a box supper when a young man who caught a girl’s eye bid on her cake. James had done that, many years ago when they were sparking. She carried a sunset cake to a box supper, and she was frantic for James to bid on it. More than anything, she wanted to pass the night with him, eating that cake together. Her sisters laughed at her because the cake was her own invention—layers of white, yellow, orange, and pink in descending order, like sunset flames. The cake was held together with pineapple filling and boiled white icing. James did bid the highest, paying a dollar. He told her he had mistaken her cake for angel-food, because he thought an angel must have made it. His serious tone made her laugh so hard that cake crumbs flew out of her mouth into his glass of cider. That feeling she had at that box supper was being in love. She felt the same now.
Thomas Hunt approached Christie with a coconut and a shriveled orange and some headache powders he had left over from samples he had distributed through Mississippi.
“Thank ye kindly, Thomas,” said Christie. “I’m surely glad to get this coconut.”
“Let me open it up for you, so you can have a delicious drink of milk.”
“No, not now. I want to save it till I’m able to make a cake.”
“It’s hard to get oranges now, but a feller traded them to me for some shoelaces. These was from Christmas.”
James came in to get a handful of corn Thomas and Alma’s son Thurman had popped in the fireplace. Thurman’s sisters had bragged on his popping skills, but he couldn’t pop the corn fast enough to suit the crowd. James brought a handful of popped corn for Christie. He said, “Thomas, I thought you were going to bring us some samples of them ladies’ drawers you’re trading in now.”
“Oh, I reserve my samples for only the most promising ladies,” said Thomas, casting a mischievous eye at his wife.
“The very idea,” said Alma with a frown. “Scattering out women’s drawers all over the country.”
“Do you let ’em try ’em on, Thomas?” asked Wad, who had just come in from the porch.
Christie thought she heard a threatening note in Wad’s tone. There was a lull in the singing, as the young people crowded around Thurman and his corn popper. Alma picked up a popped kernel that shot out on the floor.
When Thomas went upstairs to find his jar of whiskey, Wad said, “There goes a feller that acts above his raising—the way he goes out a-bragging his way around the whole country, like he’s something on a stick.” Wad laughed. “Thurman told me he saw some of them samples out in his pap’s buggy. He said Thomas was using one of ’em for a feed-bag for his horses.” Wad slapped his knee as he laughed.
“I ain’t saying a word to that,” Alma said, glaring at her brother. “I’ve made up my bed, and I’ll lay in it.”
“I’m jest humoring you, Alma,” Wad teased. He turned to face the basket of babies. “How’re you gonna tell them younguns apart, Christie?” He laughed, his high-pitched wheeze. “They’ll have you fooled the rest of your born days. You’ll tell one to go hoe some taters, and when you catch him out playing ball and ask him why ain’t he hoeing them taters, he’ll lay it onto another one. He’ll say, ‘I didn’t hear nothing about hoeing no taters! You got me mixed up with somebody else!’”
Wad had a childish habit of jumping up and down—or drumming his feet if he was seated—when he joked and teased. Christie laughed.
“Play me your fiddle, Wad,” she urged him.
“Well, being’s the whole family’s here, from baby up, I’ll do it—for you, Christie. As long as we ain’t got any Baptists here.”
“The young folks is getting tired of singing their way through a bounce-around,” Ethel Pritchard said with a perky smile. “They need a little music to go with it.”
When Wad started fiddling, it was as though he were saying with his bow on the strings what he could not begin to say in words. He played the fiddle like sawing wood, with irregular, screechy sounds. But he had fire. The whole crowd joined in the singing, which smoothed over his defects.
Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man,
Washed his face in a frying pan;
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,
Died with the toothache in his heel.
Run away, all run away, Tucker,
You’re too late to get your supper.
The girls in the circle all ran to the center, and the boys tightened the circle around them. They giggled and gasped as they changed positions and Wad began playing another verse. Watching him, Christie realized what a well-respected man he was, and also how much he could get away with. Amanda hated for him to drink whiskey, and tonight she wouldn’t join the singing games at all, preferring to help out with the children and babies. She was heating milk for the baby bottles.
“Come on and play, Mama,” Lena said as she dashed out of the circle into the kitchen for a moment.
Amanda shook her head no. Lena grabbed some popcorn and rejoined the circle.
“This ain’t like you, Mandy,” Christie said. “You always like to swing.”
“Wad’s been at that whiskey all evening,” Amanda said disgustedly. “He’s mad ’cause Thomas give me one of those sample corsets he brought back.”
“What did Alma say?”
“She don’t know about it.” Amanda tested the milk on the back of her hand and removed the stewer from the stove eye. She said, “It’s a Talk-of-the-Town corset. And it’s a featherbone style.”
Mrs. Stokes got up from the card table and came over to the babies. “You’re looking poorly, Christie,” she said, pinching Christie’s jaw. “Having five of them babies pulling at you is taking your strength.”
“But I feel good,” Christie said. “I’m just weak from laying. And I’m fat! I need one of them featherbone corsets to hold me together.” She started laughing, but Mrs. Stokes wasn’t amused.
“I was glad to hear you wasn’t letting your babies suck from that Smith girl,” Mrs. Stokes said. “I don’t believe a girl such as that ought to be a-fooling with your babies, Christie.”
Alma had always defended Mrs. Stokes’s habit of finding fault, saying she was just being honest, but Christie suspected Alma might be having second thoughts about Mrs. Stokes, now that her son Bob was sweet on Jimmie Lou. Christie remembered what James had told her so often, how she had to get along with everybody. Now that she was the center of attention, she felt it was easier to forgive Mrs. Stokes. But at the same time she almost felt she could get away with making a disrespectful remark to her now. Her mind was whirling around like a child’s hoop.
Christie’s attention shifted to Thomas, who was joking and laughing with Alma. Amanda had her back to them. Amanda spilled some of the milk she was pouring into a bottle. When the next play began, Thomas dragged Alma out onto the parlor floor. She clomped along in her Sunday boots. She had pulled off her apron and bonnet, and with a ribbon in her hair she looked ten years younger.
Possum up the ’simmon tree,
Raccoon on the ground;
Raccoon says to the possum,
Shake ’em ’simmons down.
Christie was surprised. Alma and Thomas had never seemed like husband and wife, and here they were playing one of the swinging games. The babies seemed to have transformed everything. The singing accentuated Christie’s feeling of limitless possibility. Wad’s fiddle screeched along, making up with good intention what it lacked in skill. But the real music, Christie thought, was the children shrieking as they ran through the halls and up the stairs. Clint and Jewell and Nannie romped up the stairs and across Boone’s loft, leaning down daringly over the railing to wave at her. Then they ran back down the stairs and arrived at her knees, red-faced and breathless.
The dancing circle was singing.
I wouldn’t marry an old maid,
I’ll tell you the reason why.
Her neck’s too long and stringy,
I’m afraid she’ll never die.
When James came near, Christie reached her hand up to touch him. He bent down, and she whispered in his ear, “Remember what I said in the wagon on the way out of Dundee?”
“No, what?”
“That it was the happiest day of my life. But that’s not true anymore. Today’s the day.”
“I remember that,” said James, squeezing her hand.
She watched her husband walk through the room, his bearing so confident, his stride more manly than it had ever been. They were no longer young folks, Christie thought.
“That husband of yours don’t know what hit him,” said Ethel Pritchard, unaware she had stepped in the milk Amanda had spilled.
“How will you ever feed all these younguns?” Mrs. Stokes said. “And where will you put ’em all?”
Christie didn’t reply. She noticed Amanda, sitting in a chair feeding John Wilburn from a bottle, singing to him softly and holding him almost desperately close.
“Mandy,” Christie said.
Amanda looked up, her eyes scared. She looked down at the baby.
“He hungry,” she cooed. Her hair was falling in loose ringlets around her face. She wore a brooch on a ribbon at her throat, with the silhouette of a woman, like a hidden person about to leap out of her.
Boone, in a cheerful mood, descended from his loft then to sit in a corner near Christie. He always wore the same old threadbare britches. Some of the visiting children gathered around to see his picture-card album. Christie had seen it so many times she knew it by heart.
“This is my Museum of Humankind,” he told the children as he opened the small album. He had picture-card portraits of Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, and Jenny Lind, as well as pictures of Pygmies and Bushmen and witch doctors. He had one picture of several women with lips like platters and ears with jam pots hanging from them.
“I’m making an album too,” Dulcie said. “Pa brought me some trading cards.” She pulled them out of her pocket and showed them around. Thomas had brought his daughter several colorful advertising cards for Scott’s Carbolated Salve, Dr. Humphreys’ Witch Hazel Oil, Vegetine Blood Purifier, Dr. Ayer’s Cathartic Pills, Turkish Pile Ointment, and Dr. Koenig’s Hamburg Breast Tea. The cards featured pictures of cherubic children and delicate women.
The babies were fretting from all the warmth, and Dulcie helped Christie remove their bonnets. Little Bunch kept hovering around them, pulling at their bonnet strings. Finally, Dulcie complained to her uncle, and Wad took Little Bunch upstairs and locked her in a bedroom. During a lull in the music, they could hear her kicking and screaming. Amanda, who had been quietly helping with the babies, ran upstairs and stayed with her.
“Little Bunch always causes trouble,” said Dulcie, exasperated. “When I carry her to school, I can’t do a thing with her. We have to tie her to a desk.”
“She just wants to love on the babies,” said Lena, defending her sister. Lena herself seemed afraid of the babies, and she tiptoed around them.
Christie could see that Dulcie was shy and didn’t know how to act at a play-party, while her older sister’s eyes were shining. Jimmie Lou blushed and giggled every time she got near the Stokes boy.
“Why don’t you go join the circle?” Christie said to Dulcie gently. “You’ll have fun.”
“Go with me to see Mammy Dove,” Dulcie begged. “Let’s show her the babies.”
Mammy Dove had been feeble this winter and had taken to her bed.
“All right, if you’ll get James to help us carry them.” Christie reached for Dulcie’s hand. “And if you’ll dance a little when we come back. For me.”
Dulcie nodded. The child had on an oversized apron, and her hair was hanging down in plaits.
Dove was sitting up in bed in her tiny room behind the parlor. Dulcie carried a small lantern and set it on a washstand near her grandmother’s bed. Christie stood at the foot, clutching the spool post.
“Look who’s here, Mammy,” said Dulcie.
The old woman squinted in the lantern light, and Christie sat down in the rocking chair beside her. Dove’s wedding photograph was hanging on the wall beside the bed. In it, Dove looked young and pretty, with fine features and thick hair. Her husband, Lige Wheeler, James’s grandfather, was just a boy in the picture. He was still fairly young, a father of five, when he died in the war—of measles. Whenever she saw the picture, Christie was amused to imagine wrinkled, old Dove meeting her young soldier-boy husband up in Heaven. Brother Jones once said that after Judgment Day, God made adjustments for a situation like that.
“How come you’re out, child? Where’s them babies I hear tell of?” Dove spoke with a rasping in her throat, like a bug buzzing.
“They’re here,” said Christie, smiling. “James is bringing them.”
“You don’t need to be out of bed, child,” scolded the old woman.
James brought the babies in, setting the basket up on the bed, out of the draft. Dulcie set the lantern so Dove could see them. Dove’s face lit up. She had heard all about the babies, and she even knew their names.
Dulcie said, “They’re telling about the babies everywhere, Mammy. Nothing like this ever happened before, and a wagon full of presents is coming from town.”
“Well, I declare,” said Dove, grasping at the edge of her quilt.
The lantern light played on the ridges and brown spots on the old woman’s hands as she ran them across the blankets in the basket. Her hands were so old and spotted, her skin was rough and scaly, and her fingernails splintered and cracked. But the texture of the babies’ tiny faces was as delicate as the tip of James’s privacies.