own children.”
Adam leaned across the table toward Otis, but winked at me. “Otis, you and I both know nobody makes a McMurrough woman do something she does not want to do. Especially if she is hurting and feeling mean about it.”
Daddy agreed. “Lily Mae was mean then, too. If she had taken a notion to, I’d have had to let her have her babies in the middle of the railroad tracks.”
“I was not about to get in that old truck and go bumping down the road. It was too late for that,” I cut in.
“Does it really hurt that bad?” Rita asked, looking worried and tearful. That year everything made her giggle or weep. Nothing was neutral. Bertie leaned down the table, eyeing me and Mary skeptically as she listened for my reply.
Momma patted Rita’s hand and shot a look down the table at me and Mary to let us know we were not invited to share our pain. “Look around you. How bad can it be if everybody keeps having babies? And besides, Adam is right. We McMurrough women only do what we want to do.”
“I’ve heard you forget about the pain real fast,” Mary added and rolled her eyes at me.
Later, as we passed the first pie around, Uncle Grady’s sister, Lou, dropped in from down the street. Cole arrived with Eloise, now his wife and herself a few months pregnant. Cole gave Adam a bear hug of congratulations and kissed my cheek. He and Eloise were a sweet, warm contrast to Frank, who appeared soon after them, edgy and brusque as usual, his camera ready. We all crowded around the table, eating our slices of pie from little saucers, smiling for Frank’s snapshots.
Lou stood in the kitchen door, swaying back and forth with Gracie spread over her big bosom, ignoring the streak of spit-up on her blouse. “That’s how my second and third ones got here, just popped out before I could hardly get out of the bed. Getting them out doesn’t have to take much longer than it takes to get them started in there in the first place. I was lucky, I guess. Some have a lot of trouble on both ends of that one. But my last two boys turned out fine without a doctor.”
Silence rippled across the room as we suppressed our laughter and tried not to think of both ends of that one.
Even Frank smiled, his normal brooding stare gone for a moment.
Momma waved a warning at Joe, who gazed intently at the crumbs on his plate, his lips pressed shut. Rita looked puzzled, opened her mouth, but never asked whatever question Lou’s comments had brought to mind.
“Fine Christmas supper as usual, Lily. Fine pie,” Daddy announced, pretending to laugh at the pleasure of mincemeat and pumpkin.
I loved them all. My child was normal and whole. We were a family among family. I was a lucky, lucky woman.
By the time Christmas visits were over, everyone had made their comments and told us their stories of babies being born. Depending on the point of view and the sex of the friend or relation, Adam was foolish and henpecked for not having made me go to a hospital for decent care. Or he was a hero, a man able and unafraid to do what needed to be done. The women in the family liked him better for calmly delivering his own child. That, and the way he cradled her so comfortably in his arms. He got almost as much attention as Gracie. I, on the other hand, became the butt of jokes about my exaggerated meanness and ability to intimidate. I felt sore and I tired quickly, but I would not have missed Christmas dinner in the mill-village for anything. I had just given birth to the world’s most beautiful child. How could I have kept her at home?
Within two days, she appeared completely normal. Beautiful. Her skin as smooth as any baby’s and her genitals, though still puffy, had taken on the normal cleft of a female.
Gracie was a good baby, calm and watchful, always moving but never frantic. To my relief, she walked and talked very early. When Adam came in from the stables or home from a job, she would roll back her head, stretch out her arms, and give a gleeful screech of welcome. He called her “my girl” so often that when she began to speak, she introduced herself as My-Girl-Gracie. We did not spoil her. She, in her