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.
Pregnancy 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