Ketty woke to a mouth full of ashes and knew she was pregnant. She didn’t tell anyone, not right away. She weighed one breast, then the other.
One of the cows was pregnant too. A couple months before, George Wilson had brought over a big brown bull and turned it loose with them a few hours. It was Maggie he liked. She’d calved June the summer before and still gave good milk, and now her udders were as full as Ketty’s, and like Ketty she vomited and trembled and refused to eat. Maggie’s breath smelled like spoiled fruit. Ketty thought it was just the pregnancy.
But then the men became sick. Juke and Sterling. They spent most of three days in the privy together. She didn’t like that. What might they talk about, for three days? When they were well enough to eat again, she made them grits with milk. Then they were sick all over again. She thought they might die, both of them, together in the privy. Did she want them to die? Ketty thought about it. She hadn’t been able to tolerate milk since her first week of pregnancy, and at nearly four years old, Elma would still drink only Ida’s. It was only the men who’d drunk Maggie’s milk, and it was the north field Maggie had been in when that bull had found her. The thought came to Ketty in the early hours of the morning and wouldn’t let her go back to sleep. After breakfast she went out to the north field and discovered the white snakeroot growing along the fence, innocent as baby’s breath. She thought about going back for the machete and chopping it down. Then Elma came running through the tall grass and asked what was she looking at.
“Don’t touch them flowers. See the little white ones? They’ll poison you, you eat those. Tell me you won’t touch them.”
Elma told her she wouldn’t.
Maggie was a black and white cow, more freckled than spotted, and she was sick. Ketty kept her out of the north field. She kept her milk in the bucket and the bucket in the creek, which was still cold. When the men didn’t die, and could eat again, she gave them Ida’s milk. She even put June on Ida’s tit, and even June liked it.
She waited three months to tell them she was carrying. George first. He told her he’d have the doctor take care of it. She told him no doctor would touch her, and besides, didn’t he know she knew her body, knew the times to keep to her husband’s bed? It was the same thing she told Juke. You sure? they both asked her, George one night, Juke the next. The next night, Sterling lifted her up into his arms, tried to get her back into the bed right there. Men believed what they wanted to believe, and didn’t believe what they didn’t want to. At least, with Sterling, she could plead her sickness. And at least, she told herself, her child would grow up with Jessa’s child. That was something. She weighed her breasts.
She thought Maggie might get better, like the men. She had thought she would let nature take its course. That was what a midwife did: she didn’t interfere with what the body wanted; she helped it along. She said to herself that her body, like Maggie’s, must want a baby.
The two of them had talked of babies, Ketty and Jessa, fussing over their needles in lamplight, over their new husbands’ socks: what their faces would look like, what their names would be. When Jessa died, Ketty darned both men’s socks. And she let out the hem of Jessa’s dresses. Ketty’s hips and shoulders were wider, so she slit them down their spines and sewed panels in them. She had been wearing the green one when Juke had taken her for himself the night three months before, the night she was certain it was him and no one else. Usually he asked, usually he was nice, but that night he had not asked, he was not nice. She would not have been so foolish as to find herself in his bed, knowing she was ripe. “It’s that dress,” he said, accusation and apology. He’d put her on her knees and ripped the panel out of the back. And the next evening she had sewed it back again.
Well, she had wanted to live Jessa’s life, in Jessa’s house, with Jessa’s man, mother to Jessa’s child—this was what she had asked for.
Would she serve the milk cold, in a glass? Would she make buttermilk out of it, and bake it into biscuits?
It hadn’t killed them yet. Would it kill them now? Perhaps if they had enough. But what if they didn’t have enough? Was it Sterling she wanted to kill, for loving her? Or Juke, for taking her for himself, even if some nights she could crawl deep enough inside Jessa’s dress she thought she could see through to loving him? Well, this is what she’d asked for. Maybe it was she who should drink the poisoned milk. Would her child be poisoned too? Was that what she wanted—to do herself what she’d refused the doctor to do?
Maggie grew as Ketty did. She wondered which of them would give birth first. She let nature take its course.
And then Maggie lay down on her side and died. Ketty cut the calf out, but it was too late. June went on suckling from Ida.
Ketty had a funny thought: that cow had been mother to them. All motherless, they had drunk Maggie’s milk. And now Ketty would be a mother. She kicked the milk bucket into the creek and it was a white cloud in the water, and too late Ketty thought of the fish, and then she thought: Yes. It was right, that some creature should die, and that it should be the fish.
* * *
Years later, it was the same ashy taste of death in her mouth, a tin spoon she couldn’t spit out. She might have thought she was pregnant again, but even Juke wouldn’t come near her, so foul was her breath. All the men who had taken her over and over, all the men she had spared, and now she was dying.
She wasn’t alone. She had a daughter. What a daughter was good for was to wash you before you died. “Wash me like it’s Sunday, honey,” she said, and Nan did, in the zinc tub in the shack, evening light coming in the window. She washed and dried her mother’s feet, and under her low-slung breasts, and kneaded almond oil into her hair. When she was clean, Ketty might have put on the green dress, but she asked Nan to bring her her own blue one instead, the one she’d worn the day she met Sterling Smith in church, the one she’d worn in that church on their wedding. Alone she wore the blue dress into the north field, picked a bouquet of the white snakeroot, and ate it. She did not mean to punish herself. (She had done that long ago, when she’d taken her daughter’s tongue. For the fish hadn’t been enough. The cow hadn’t been enough. She’d had to do something else she couldn’t undo.) She was just putting herself to sleep.
“I’m just gone close my eyes,” she told Nan, coming in from the field. Already she could feel death stealing through her body like the milk cloud in the water. She kissed her daughter on the forehead, lay down on her cot, and crossed her hands over her belly. She was not brave, and she was sorry for it.