The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (21 page)

“I’m scared of not waking up when they put me out. I don’t like hospitals,” I added.

“I hear you on that one.” She nodded. “It ain’t natural for a thing like that to happen and a body feel nothing a’tall. Your people know you here? Would your momma want you here?”

“No, ma’am. Nobody knows about this but my husband.” I stared straight ahead at the wall of the shed. Her hands were low on my belly, pressing up.

She stopped then, pulled my shirt down over my skirt, and straightened herself to eye level. One quick glance down at my wedding band. “I do not get rid of babies for people. Have you got yourself into trouble with a colored man?”

“No, oh, no,” I stammered. “I’m just scared, that’s all. I’m so scared. And they would make me go to the hospital. I know they would.” She studied my face again. She must have heard the truth of the fear in my voice. She patted my arm.

“Well.” She took a snuff tin out of her dress pocket and put a pinch in her cheek. “I have only brought along a few white babies—only when necessity made it so.”

“I’ve heard of you, Granny Paynes. Pearl tells us you . . .”

She raised a hand to shush me. “They was poor white women. You don’t look rich exactly, but your people could afford to take you to a white doctor, I know. My Rankin has done some work on your farm, years ago before you was living up there. I’ll come to you when your time has come, but, like I told your man, I want twice my normal birthing fee. If anything happens to you or your baby, your people will be after me. You understand?”

“I do, I do,” I told her. I had not considered what a risk she might be taking. “Thank you, Granny Paynes, thank you.”

She inspected me again, her eyes scanning me head to toe, and then smiled so broadly her whole face erupted into fine lines. “By my reckoning you have yourself a Christmas baby, most likely a daughter. Between now and then you eat as well as your purse and land will allow. Take a sip of wine or beer—nothing harder—after supper if you can’t sleep and stewed prunes if you can’t relieve yourself. After December first, don’t eat garlic, chocolate, or tomatoes. And no tobacca. They go into your womb. They’ll spoil your milk and make your baby fussy. The baby needs your milk.”

She walked me toward a side door of the shed. “Now, if you pass blood without any pain, you let me know. When your child is coming, the pain will be like your monthly, only stronger. Your man should come for me when you cannot finish singing through all the verses of ‘Amazing Grace’ twice between the pains.”

I laughed. “ ‘Amazing Grace’?”

She smiled again. “You do that, child. And you come see me one more time beforehand—come the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This is your first, right? Maybe three times through all the verses then. Then Granny Paynes will be happy to come help your baby get here.” She held on to my arm as if she needed help walking, but I could feel her fingers working through my coat sleeve as if she was checking my strength as she returned me to my husband.

Outside again, Granny Paynes and I squinted at the brilliant morning sun. Adam waited, a slab of wrapped ribs in his hands. He had that tentativeness men have around birth, and his eyebrows shot up in a question. For the first time, he seemed wholly a man. A pang of grief for Addie surged through me. Granny Paynes winked at him and handed me off like a bride.

I felt how young we were, how new the world was in that cool autumn light. I rode home in the truck with the warm ribs on my lap, one hand on Adam’s leg and the other on my belly.

P
regnancy changed things between us. Adam became my protector. Not that I was in any danger. But I felt my primal vulnerability. My belly stuck out between me and the world. Any danger coming at me would come through our child. I was an animal then, more than at any other time in my life.

Adam probably felt more like my servant than my protector. In the last month, he took over most of the milking and all of the heavy work while keeping the horses, too. Protector or servant, things were very different from how Addie and I had been. Like so much with A., the new arrangement felt both strange and natural.

He was not squeamish or disgusted as some men are by periods, pregnancy, birthing, or breast-feeding. Of course, for a man, he possessed a unique perspective in these matters. His passion became gentler, sweeter. At night in bed, he knelt before my belly, stroking it, singing to the child until the vibrato of his unique voice made me ache with tenderness. At the sound of his voice, the baby turned inside me, wriggling.

Momma had told me not to let Adam make love to me in the last month. She said it was not good for the baby. But we did. I did not feel very erotic, but I craved the sound and odors of him, his hands on me, and his body surrounding me. When my own pleasure increased, my womb tightened and that satisfied the way a good scratch does an itch. I thought the contraction of sexual climaxes would make my womb stronger.

I spent the last weeks at home, not even wanting to go to Momma’s. In the evenings, I walked through the house, touching everything and thinking of how my baby would soon be in those rooms seeing the same things I saw. We packed away everything in the parlor—everything but the photographs. I put up new curtains, too. The jars of food Momma and I had canned the previous summer overflowed the basement shelves. The new electric refrigerator hummed in the dining room. Over and over, I sang “Amazing Grace,” as if it would charm our child into the world.

I was ready, past ripe.

The heaviness and the waiting did not sit well with me. On some of the last nights, I tossed and turned around my big belly. In my misery, I kicked Adam out of the bed. He tried to comfort or distract me, singing or reading, sometimes bringing up his beautiful harmonics. But even that worked only for a few hours—until the next time I woke up to pee. I sometimes used a chamber pot again, even though we had indoor plumbing. The bathroom seemed so cold and so far down the hall in the middle of the night.

On the morning of December 22, I woke with a start in the darkness. Adam took a sharp breath behind me, his arm around me, his hand cupping my belly. “This contraction woke you up.” My womb clenched hard as a rock and painful down through my legs.

“Yes. It hurts.”

Softly, he sang “Amazing Grace,” all verses once, then went through them a second time. Silence followed and no more pain. We listened, the two of us in the dark. Another five minutes passed before the next contraction.

All day long, painful, but erratic—twenty, maybe ten, sometimes five minutes apart—the contractions came. I boiled towels, sheets, and a single white shoelace as Granny Paynes had instructed, grateful for the automatic washer and wringer. Before dinner, Adam drove into town to warn her that my time approached. Otherwise, he stayed close by. We went through our normal routines. I ate well. Then, about nine o’clock, the pains came on hard and always right at the end of the second round of the song.

Suddenly, I was afraid to be alone. I didn’t want Adam to leave to fetch Granny Paynes. He dragged in Hobo, who seemed puzzled but stood patiently by the bed, his snout on the pillow next to me. I moaned my way through contractions, clutched handfuls of his hide, and curled up fetal around my own womb.

With each contraction, everything broke into a grainy blueness, then returned to its natural color and density when the pain released me. Then Adam was back with Granny Paynes and Hobo was gone.

Granny Paynes and Adam coaxed me out of bed. “Walk the baby out. You keep moving and it’ll come out easier. Walk it out. Sing it out,” she urged.

Into the kitchen, then into the parlor and back to the bedroom over and over we walked, with her and Adam singing “Amazing Grace.” His strong, soft baritone on one side and her rich, old alto on the other. “Sing through the pain, li’l momma. Sing.”

I tried, but my voice evaporated into a tuneless hiss. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but words were too much. Movement and even breath seemed too much. Pain obliterated everything.

At last, they led me back to the bedroom. Granny Paynes smoothed a clean oilcloth and a layer of towels across the bed. They helped me lie down. The pain grew until it overcame everything. The visual world narrowed to a single crack and everything else disappeared into the pain. I began to disappear, too. There was only pain.

Then, it felt like the hand of God reached inside me and pulled down. Abruptly, the pain changed direction. I was pushing. The pain gathered in the diffuse, overwhelming blueness and shot down to one sharp, blind-white spot between my legs. I screamed high and scared, grabbed Adam by his shirt, and pulled his face up to mine until there was nothing but his brown eyes. I thought I was dying.

Granny Paynes pushed herself between us and took my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Stop that screaming up in your nose. You are working now. Grunt. Low, low down in your throat.” She growled at me and patted my collarbone.

I growled back, low. The next wave of pain began, but I rode it, pushed behind it, not at its mercy, not drowning anymore. Again and again. I pushed and growled and grunted and pushed and growled. Granny Paynes knelt on the bed down between my legs. I felt her rubbing me, massaging my perineum between the pains. Then she held up three fingers. “Three more times,” she said. “Maybe two.”

I took “two” as a challenge and began pushing before the next contraction. After the second one, both she and Adam hunched between my legs, staring. I pushed again. I felt the slither of shoulders, hips, and feet. Then the first newborn bleat.

Silence followed. Everything stopped. Adam and Granny Paynes peered down at the baby. I closed my eyes and saw a featureless face in the mud.

When I opened my eyes, Adam smiled at me. Tears ran down his face and he nodded. All I could see of the baby was the top of her wrinkled head and her waving arms as Granny Paynes held her between my legs. The skin on her scalp appeared strange.

“Tell me,” I said.

“The Lord have mercy.” Each word out of Granny Paynes’s mouth rang separate.

Suddenly, I felt very cold and dizzy. I held my voice as steady as I could. “Boy or girl?” I pulled myself up against the headboard to see. Adam looked to her and she shook her head.

Granny Paynes cut and tied the cord. They quickly dried the baby, wrapped her, and slipped a knit cap over her head. Adam brought her up to me. He gazed at our child enraptured. Everything still seemed fuzzy in the dim light, but I could see that the baby’s facial features were oddly flat. Still, all the parts were there—ears, nose, mouth, and, when she opened them, clear blue eyes. I counted fingers. Ten. I began singing “Amazing Grace,” but my voice cracked out from under me.

I lifted the blanket and tried, through the fog of exhaustion, to focus. “A girl?” I blinked. She looked like a girl, but in the shadowed lamplight, there seemed to be too much there between her legs.

“More girl than boy, I’d say,” Granny Paynes agreed. “We need to keep her wrapped against the cold.” She pressed on my belly for the afterbirth. “This is not a birthing problem. Nothing could have been done. You gonna have to let a doctor look at her. Maybe they can do something.”

“She’s beautiful. Our Grace.” The certainty and resonance in Adam’s voice calmed me.

My fear subsided as I surrendered to my fatigue. My child was whole and well. I touched his jaw, but he did not take his eyes off our baby. A strong final contraction hit me. The dense, thick odor of blood filled the room.

“A big, healthy afterbirth and all there.” Granny Paynes dropped it into a basin and turned her attention to the baby. She laid the baby on the bed beside me, unwrapped the blankets, and took a long look. “I have to tell you, I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” she said.

She lifted Grace up by her little fists, then turned her and looked at her back, her neck, and skull. Grace’s arms shot out when Granny Paynes laid her back down and she began a full-throated wail, her face flushing dark pink. Granny Paynes worked the baby’s arms and legs, looked in her mouth, and then announced, over Grace’s diminishing cries, “She might not be quite right when it comes to learning—only time will tell you that. But everything else seems to be working fine. Specially her lungs. She’s not at all early and she’s strong. Born so close to Christ’s day, she’ll be a good one.”

She diapered and swaddled Grace then pressed her against my breast. “We need to see how she sucks,” she said.

Grace latched on immediately. A visceral, sharp tenderness radiated up my body into my breasts. The three of us watched as she sucked and grunted, her fists working under her chin. I was happy. She looked better than I had feared, but I wanted to see more. I motioned for Adam to turn on the overhead light.

I fought an impulse to flinch and cover my eyes as the harsh yellow light flooded the room. Her slightly jaundiced skin did not have the rough swirled texture of her father’s when I first pulled him from the clay. Rather she resembled Addie on the second or third day. Every surface of her was oddly dimpled, like fat under the skin on a woman’s thighs. Her neck, face, shoulders. Individually, her features were normal. Tiny reddish brows, puffy newborn eyelids and lips. Bridgeless button nose. Toothless, shallow jaw. But the total effect was off. Was that my imagination? I held her close. Everything was there!

“She’ll be okay, Granny Paynes. I know she will,” I mumbled. Then, to Adam, “And, yes, she is beautiful.”

To him, she may have been pretty. The texture of her skin might have been deeply familiar to him. He now had someone who was truly his own flesh and blood, however much his flesh might now resemble another man’s.

For what seemed like hours, Granny Paynes cleaned me and the bed up—though there was far less mess than I had expected. She sent Adam into the kitchen to make a tea from some herbs she pulled out of her bag.

“It’s got catnip and some other good stuff in it. Good for your blood and the baby’s.” She spooned warm drops of it onto Gracie’s lips.

She announced that she would be at my side until I could relieve myself. The four of us sat in silence, one new life among us and the odor of blood iron in the air. Granny Paynes eyed us as we gazed at the baby. She must have been surprised at our peculiar relief at having had such an ugly, sexually ambiguous child.