good-natured and cooperative way, spoiled us.
From the time of Gracie’s birth, we were an ordinary family. Like most ordinary families in the 1950s, we were making a living and making babies, not much else. I spent more time in the house and Adam spent more time in the stables. He had made a solid business of training, boarding, rehabilitating, and sweetening horses. We were down to one cow, but even then there was not room for all the horses. Building the new stable was our first major change at the farm, outside of plumbing and wiring for the house. Adam and I owned the farm free and clear by then. Momma had signed the deed over to us on our first wedding anniversary. The stable was our only debt.
Gracie was almost two years old when she had her first cold. Normally an easygoing child, she became demanding and whiny. I’d been up with her the night before and was happy to have Rita come help. Late in the morning, I found them both asleep on Gracie’s narrow bed.
I went looking for Adam. Between family and carpenters working on the new stable and Gracie being sick, the only time Adam and I had alone was at night, when we were both exhausted. We had not made love for days.
For the first time that week, there were no cars or trucks in the driveway. All the workmen were gone. I found Adam in the clean, virgin stable, spreading sawdust and hay in the empty stalls. The odors of fresh wood filled the stable—no scent of sweat, manure, or leather yet. I came up quietly behind him, pulled his shirt out of his pants, and slipped my hands across his bare belly, then down to that flat, smooth spot I loved so much where his legs joined his hips. That was all it took—for either of us. Moments later, I conceived Rosie in the third stall on the left, on a bed of sweet, fresh hay.
We went through the same process, meeting with Granny Paynes at Pearl’s for the preliminary examination. Adam waited outside, holding a slab of wrapped ribs with Gracie perched on his shoulders. He handed Gracie over to Granny Paynes. “See what you started?”
“Don’t go blaming me for this here,” she chuckled and held Gracie up to get a better look at her. “You sure this is the same baby? You didn’t switch her for a pretty one?”
Adam ran his hand through Gracie’s bright red curls. “Where would we have found another one like this?”
Gracie smiled and patted Granny Paynes on the cheek.
Like Gracie, Rosie was big, healthy, and delivered by Granny Paynes. An easy, fast delivery that Adam once again got credit for. She came into the world faster and with more bustle than her sister. Granny Paynes barely got there in time. Gracie woke midway through the delivery. Adam dashed out of the room to get her and returned with her in his arms. “She won’t go back to sleep,” he apologized. Solemn and sleepy, she witnessed her sister’s birth. Rosie emerged with a full head of deep auburn hair and blinking, bright blue eyes.
As ugly and unformed as Gracie had been at birth, Rosie took her first good look at the world and began a scream that lasted for months. Granny Paynes looked at Rosie and then nodded toward Gracie, who had fallen asleep, again, in Adam’s arms as soon as her sister began to wail. “This one’s a girl, too, I reckon, and as ugly as her sister was, only she’s mad about it.”
Adam and I laughed.
She was a cute, normal-looking baby girl within a couple days of birth. Fair-skinned redhead, with blue eyes that shaded toward green after a few weeks.
But Rosie was also colicky. She woke every two hours and suckled as if there was a time limit and a long line of other babies waiting for my breast, then she screamed till sleep took her, then woke again to feed and restart the cycle. In the evenings, I passed her off to Adam. He adapted a blanket into a sling and, with Rosie secured to his chest, he rode Becky the old plow horse around the corral. She plodded slowly along, while he sang in his normal voice, below the lyrics, a low, steady hum. Gradually, Rosie’s crying would stop. Her father’s voice and the motion of the horse were more effective than me in a rocking chair. After Adam brought her in,