CHAPTER 42
When the baby came, Rosa Claire was all questions as to her name, a name Emily thought she knew, but could not be sure. Weeks passed and the child was simply called Baby Girl. A quiet, strong infant, she nursed well, kneading at her mother’s breast, pushing away hard with her little hands when she was full. She rarely cried and woke only once in the night to be fed.
“I’m taking the baby on an outing this afternoon,” Emily said one day at dinner. “I may be a while.”
“Where to, Mama?” the boys asked in unison.
“Just out.”
“Can I go with you, Mama? I don’t need a nap and I’ll be safe. The war is over now,” Rosa Claire said, her demeanor straightforward, as if she sensed the coming of something important.
“May I,” Emily corrected. She studied her daughter’s face, the unguarded openness of the very young. “Yes, you will be safe,” she said. “Here, hold the baby while I get your things.”
“All by myself?”
“All by yourself.”
Emily propped the baby in Rosa Claire’s arms while she reached for a shawl, but Ginny was ready with it. She wrapped it around Emily’s shoulders and her arms around Emily. Aimee leaned over and fingered the infant cheeks. Arm in arm the two women stood watching the girls: Aimee beside Rosa Claire, cradling her sister, tucking the soft yellow receiving blanket around her again and again.
Emily retrieved the baby and the three of them went out together. She studied her daughters closely, the one in her arms, the one holding her hand. Moments like these are drops in a sieve, she thought. They will drain away or evaporate. As will sorrow.
Near the cemetery, Emily stopped and adjusted the baby in one arm. She put her other arm around Rosa Claire’s shoulder. When the little girl realized their destination, she raised her clear gray eyes and nodded.
“Would you like to pick some flowers?” Emily asked, and Rosa Claire nodded again, running toward a row of wild forsythia. She returned, arms draped with cascading branches of yellow forsythia. They negotiated their way among the stones and makeshift wooden crosses. There were so many now. The field was crowded with them, for those whose remains had made it home. Emily thought of the war-torn fields filled with young bodies across the land, the dead crowding the dead. She threaded her way through the graves to a plot marked with four wooden crosses, three quite simple, bearing the names of Charles, Hammond, and Thomas, with corresponding dates painted on the plain façades.
“This is your daddy’s grave, Rosa Claire. He was a better man than any of us knew,” Emily said, her hand on the little girl’s head. “Would you like to put some of your flowers on his grave?”
The child nodded and arranged a handful of the blooming twigs on the ground in a small circle.
The fourth cross had been carved from a tree stump and retained the appearance of its origin. The roots remained intact, though clipped so that it sat level, semiburied in the earth. Two intricately carved branches, equally truncated, formed the arms of the cross. Along the back rose a natural, unbroken branch, bearing no leaves. Carvings of ivy wrapped the primary trunk of the cross, on which Adeline’s name appeared. Below the name was a single word: Beloved. And above it the phrase: At Rest. Surely the work of Mason Johnson.
When Rosa Claire looked up, she saw her mother’s cheeks were wet with tears. As Emily lowered herself and patted the ground, Rosa Claire laid the remaining forsythia against the stump and curled against her mother. They sat like that, together, in the quiet, until the baby woke and stirred. Emily pulled back the shawl, freeing the infant, who rubbed her clear eyes and stretched.
“Has she told you her name yet, Mama?” Rosa Claire said.
“Yes, her name is Addie Grace.”