CHAPTER 22
Ginny jammed a stick of wood into the steadying fire. Her angular shoulders drooped above the long sag of her body. She closed the firebox, letting it clang. Her exhaustion mired her; she could not recover from the too-long night preparing Charles’s and Hammond’s ruined bodies. There had followed, without respite, the equally long day of wretched burials. Most nights since, she had slept in heavy unrest, waking more tired than when she lay down. She was steeped in death. To rouse herself, Ginny hummed, low and soft at first. Her voice swelled as she straightened to roll out the biscuits. Her humming and the rolling melded. The rhythm was comfort.
“Gin?” Rosa Claire stood in the doorway, a stuffed rag doll hanging at her side, feet bare, her nightgown askew.
“How you get out here to this kitchen all by yourself?” Ginny said.
No answer.
Ginny lay down the rolling pin and knelt, her aching arms outstretched. Glum, Rosa Claire twisted her feet.
“Come on, honey. Ginny got you.”
Rosa Claire rose on tiptoe. The still-baby face brightened as she flew across the floor.
“Where your mama, child?”
No answer. Rosa Claire nestled her head on Ginny’s shoulder. She tucked her doll tight under her arm and sucked her thumb. Ginny snuggled the little girl in one elbow while she stamped out rounds of biscuit.
“You all right, baby. Ginny got you now.”
With her free hand, Ginny laid the raw biscuits one after another in orderly rows on a buttered baking sheet. She folded the scraps of dough, patted them, rolled them again. Rocking the child on her hip, Ginny stamped out three more biscuits and added them to the pan. She offered a pinch of raw dough to Rosa Claire. The little girl shook her head. Ginny popped the fragment of dough into her own mouth, sucking at its savory-sweet flavor.
“Ginny gone put you down now, baby. Got to slide these biscuits in. You stand way out behind me now so you don’t get burnt. That’s a good girl.”
Adeline appeared and scooped up the child. Observing the breakfast progress, she laid her hand on Ginny’s shoulder.
“Emily hasn’t moved,” Adeline said, and left the room.
Breakfast done, Ginny sat by the kitchen fire, gathering herself for the task ahead. After a while she stood and made her way into the house.
The hinges creaked as Ginny opened the bedroom door. The press of the room assailed her: stale air, disheveled bedding, lank strands of matted hair across the coarse ticking of the pillow. The pillowcase, with its incongruous flowered embroidery, lay wadded on the floor. Ginny hardly responded to the tug on her skirts, then twisted and knelt, shielding Rosa Claire from seeing her mother. Ginny wrapped her arms around the girl, nuzzled her cheek, and whispered, “You go on out to the porch now, honey. And don’t make no noise doing it. Mama’s asleep.”
Ginny smoothed the collar of Rosa Claire’s jacket. She stood and propelled the child toward the porch, monitoring her faltering steps. Rosa Claire turned back, a silent plea on her little face, but Ginny shooed her on. “Go on now, child. You go rock your baby doll in the sunshine. That baby need some sunshine.”
Though it was now December, the front door stood ajar. The warmth of the winter day was unremarkable so deep in the South, though recent extremes of weather had created a certain desperation among the farmers. Today, however, was balmy, and the child collapsed in a folded knot on the porch floor, the doll akimbo under her elbow, thumb in her mouth. Ginny slipped back into the room where Emily lay.
“Miss Emily,” she said. There was no response. “Miss Emily,” firmer now, “you got to get up. You got a baby needs you out there. And another one gone need you soon enough. If you gone live, and I expects you is, then living’s what you got to do. And this ain’t no kind of living.” Still no shift, no response at all.
Ginny propped up the window sash, tied back the muslin curtain, untied and retied it. Something in arranging the curtain pulled aside a barrier in herself. She sat down on the side of the bed, her narrow back upright. She adjusted her hips, took a deep breath, and spoke into the thin air.
“I’m gone talk to you, Miss Emily. I got something to say. You can listen or not.” She raised her chin, leaned a bit straighter. “You got to give up this bed, honey. You can’t do this no more, not to that baby out there on that porch, sucking her thumb, and not to me.” Had she said that? “What happened to you ought not happen to nobody on earth and that’s the Lord’s truth. But you ain’t by yourself. Not by a heap. This slavery, this war—well, never mind about that right now. That’s too much for either one of us. I’m gone talk about me. What happened to me ought not happen to nobody neither.”
Emily did not move. Nor give any sign of hearing.
“I ain’t unhappy amongst you. Better here than anywhere else.” Ginny’s voice was hoarse with tension, her tall back supported by her hands on her knees. “I got no complaints. Your daddy always treat me good. Taught me to read and write. You and me had us a talk on that. Your daddy tried to set us free. Didn’t happen. Now he’s gone. You been good to me, too. All you been good to me. Not like where I come from. They’s things that happened there I don’t talk about. Whippings, lashings, all kinds of other things.” She paused. “They took my mama, Miss Emily. Me no more than four or five years old, and not much bigger than your baby child out there.”
Ginny rubbed her hands over her knees; her eyes scanned the room.
“I don’t know nothing ’bout my daddy. Trader took him was all my mama ever say. Might of just been some breeding buck. Don’t have one thing to remember him, not even a name. But I remember my mama. Standing on that block half-naked. Some man snatch me right out of her arms and her reaching for me, screaming, crying. Driver lash her then, but she don’t stop crying. Load her off in a wagon, chained up. Still crying, holding out her arms after me, chains clanking. Won’t never get over her crying. Won’t never get over remembering her. Nor wanting her. Don’t nobody get past wanting their mama. Like you, so little, when I first come here. Like Rosa Claire out there on that porch. Curled up, trying to hold on to herself by a thumb, wanting her mama. Wanting you.”
Ginny shifted her weight, took a deep breath, let it out.
“I know you be wanting them others. Your daddy, maybe your husband. I know you be wanting your mama, too. They ain’t here. They gone. And they ain’t coming back. But, Rosa Claire, she’s here. Out there wanting you, like you wanting them, like me wanting my mama forever. They ain’t no end to such wanting, Miss Emily. You just got to live with the wanting.” She stood and walked away from the bed.
Ginny steadied herself on the doorframe. Down the hall through the open front door, she could see Rosa Claire on the porch, folded in on herself, seeming to sleep. Ginny arched her back and dragged herself to the back porch, her eyes roving the ragged fields beyond. At the churn, she rubbed her palms up and down the cool sides of the blue and gray pottery, took the dasher in her hand, hummed herself into the rhythm of the coming butter.
Emily lay in the dimness of the room. In the air around her, Ginny’s words hovered fine as spider webs, catching bits of light. From somewhere beyond her, the faint sounds of the farm mingled with Ginny’s humming and the steady heartbeat of the churn. Emily surrendered to the sounds of the day. The cadence of the churn hushed. The cooing of a dove caught in the web of Ginny’s words, rending a small tear in the stillness. Emily opened her eyes, rolled her face to the window, where the edge of the muslin wavered in a breath of air. Outside, the bare branches of a low-growing crepe myrtle fractured the light. Emily’s paralysis lifted. Here and there her hollow emptiness absorbed bits of commonplace life: the scrape of Ginny’s stool across the floor, the slosh of the buttermilk into a pail, the low mooing of a cow in the far pasture, the faraway clang of a gate. Under the porch a kitten mewed and its mother answered. Something maternal in the sound propelled Emily to rise.
The slanted sun through the window warmed Emily as she put her foot on the cool floor. Holding the wall for support, she inched along the hallway to the porch toward the crumpled form of her daughter. When Emily neared, Rosa Claire’s little body twitched and she stuck her thumb back in her mouth. Emily lowered herself around the child’s body, cocooning it with the bulge of her abdomen on the hard floorboards. Emily inhaled the milky scent of her daughter, brushed the pale, slightly sour hair back from her face. The unborn infant turned inside Emily, as Rosa Claire stirred in her arms. They lay there, all of them: fatherless, husbandless, together, alone.
* * *
“What’s his name, Mama?” Rosa Claire whispered, leaning over the baby’s wrinkled face. The window was open to the ongoing warmth of December; a breeze ruffled the curtain, still tied as Ginny had left it days ago.
“I don’t know, sweetheart.” Emily tugged at the strands of hair caught on the pillow behind her, pulled on her ear. Rosa Claire laid her hand over the baby’s, which curled around the edge of a worn blanket that had only recently been hers.
“He got to have a name. Don’t he, Mama?”
“Doesn’t he,” Emily corrected. “Of course, and he will when I rightly know what it is. You wouldn’t want Mama to go giving him the wrong name, now would you?”
“I have a name. How you know, Mama?”
“You told it to me.”
“I talk?” Rosa Claire stared up at her mother’s face, letting go of the baby’s hand.
“No, you told me with your heart. Rosa Claire. Like a sweet little coral rose that blooms and blooms. And that’s how I knew who you were.”
Rosa Claire was silent. She looked down at the baby’s ‘old man’ face. “Daddy know his name?”
When Emily did not answer, the child looked up to see if her mama was still with her. Emily caught her breath and spoke.
“No, honey. I don’t think he would. I’d like to think so. But I don’t.”
“Where Daddy? Won’t he never come back?”
“Ever,” Emily corrected. “No, Rosa Claire, he won’t ever come back.”
“Mama, you come back. Auntie Gin bring you back for me.”
Emily brushed the soft curls away from her daughter’s face, away from the innocence of the gray-green eyes with their too-long lashes.
“Yes, I did,” Emily said at last. She remembered the hard boards of the porch floor against her hip and shoulder, the warm curve of her daughter’s body in the morning sunlight. Yes, she thought, she had, incomprehensibly, come back.
The birth had gone easy. Emily, moved beyond her fear, had cared little what might come to her or of her. So much had overcome her now. She let it happen as it would, listless with exhaustion between contractions. It was only the head, in the end, that split her, riveted her into nowhere that was not pain. And then he slithered out, leaving his mother behind him. He dropped into the waiting hands of Adeline and Ginny, both of them crooning, their motion blending, though their voices did not, while Emily reached for the hardly human little body, all blood and mucus, this child that was hers alone.
Emily stilled herself in that memory. And then she spoke to Rosa Claire.
“His name is Alonso, but that’s too old a name for him just now. So, Lonso, meet your sister.” Emily pulled the blanket from his wrinkled face.
“He tell you?” Rosa Claire’s little voice was all awe.
“Yes, baby girl. He told me a secret. About being alone and then I knew his name.”
“No, Mama. He got me! Got you, Mama. Got Gran and Ginny.”
“I know, honey. But no matter how many folks we’ve got, in the truth of it all, we are alone.”
“I not alone, Mama.”
“Not that you know of, baby. Not that you know of yet.”
Satisfied, the child lay her head beside the sleeping bundle in her mother’s lap. Her fingers caressed the soft, frayed edge of the blanket that still felt like hers. She thrust her thumb into her mouth. Her breathing slowed as she comforted herself into sleep.
They were there like that, the three of them joined in their separate slumber, when Adeline came in. Before she eased the door shut again, she stood for a moment, beset by this momentary respite from grief.
“I’m afraid you’ve come for naught,” Adeline said, returning to her parlor, where Michael Lambert stood, curling the brim of his hat. “Emily is still in bed and they are all sleeping. I’ll tell her you came to ask after her.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Lambert seemed not to know where to put his eyes or his feet. “Fact is, I brought something she might need. Then again she might not, having Rosa Claire already. So, you can tell me straight out if it is going to be in the way and I’ll just take it on back home.” He shifted his lanky body from foot to foot, ducked his head and lifted it. “It’s my mama’s rocking chair,” he said. “Been out in the shed a while now. Didn’t Asa or me either need it, two old bachelors getting by with one another, and it didn’t fit either one of us. It was in some disrepair, from the years, you know. But I cleaned it up, glued it, laid a new finish on. I tried it out, and even with my big frame, not a squeak in the joints. But she might not need it. Might just be in the way.”
From the porch, Lambert returned with a spindled lady’s rocker. Adeline’s throat constricted as she walked around it, flooded with memories of rocking her baby boys. The chair tilted back as she ran her fingers over its surface, absorbing the care he had given to its restoration.
“We do have a rocking chair, Mr. Lambert,” Adeline said at last. “But we can use another now that there are two to soothe. Rosa Claire’s hardly more than a baby herself. This will help her not to feel left out.” Adeline’s palm roamed the smooth edge. “You’ve put a lot of work in this. I’m sure Emily will be grateful.”
He nodded and turned for the door.
“Mr. Lambert.” Adeline’s voice wavered.
He pivoted, lowered the hat, clenched it in his hands again.
Adeline took a deep breath and gathered herself. “I understand you took Sheriff Johnson home with you. That you and your brother have been taking care of him.”
“Well, mostly it would be Asa deserves the credit there, I expect. It was Asa dug out the bullet. Stuck in a rib. After that, I guess it was just Mason’s own healing did most of the work.”
“I expect it took a bit more than that. Healing is never so simple.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He cleared his throat.
“Mr. Lambert—” Adeline hesitated. “We are in your debt. Both myself and Emily.” She sucked in a sharp breath. “I am not sure how I would have—”
Lambert bowed his head and stared at the floor.
“And then . . .” Adeline’s voice trailed off. At last she said, “I walked out to the graveyard the other day. I saw the crosses.” He waited. “They are well crafted.”
Lambert raised his dark eyes and cleared his throat again.
Adeline stared through his painful awkwardness and said, “It’s only gratitude, Mr. Lambert.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He clutched and unclutched the brim of his hat, raised it to his head, and reached for the door. Bumping the rocker, he reached out to steady its clumsy, unoccupied tilt.