a crescendo at which they gagged then threw up. Together. On each other. Their mutual mess provided immediate distraction and they grew quiet again. Quite the team.
Before they were two years old, Jennie and Lil learned to pull themselves up the side of their crib, crawl over the top, and slide down the rails to the floor. Soon they began appearing everywhere—in the barn, under the house, in the chicken coop. Like me, they wandered fearlessly as toddlers, but they were doubly bold and agile. Wallace often called to me from the back door, the two bright-haired, squirming girls in his dark arms and an apology on his lips, as if he were to blame for being unable to bear them underfoot in the stable.
One day, Adam spotted them at the end of the driveway. Their bright curly mop tops disappearing as they descended, heading for the railroad tracks. He bolted after them. I found the curtains of their bedroom fluttering out the window and the screen on the ground below. Adam trudged back to the house, the girls struggling, unharmed, in his arms. That evening he and Wallace screwed all the screens into the window frames and began work on fencing. By the end of the week, the front and side of the house were fenced and the driveway gated.
In rebellion against their terrible confinement, Lil and Jennie made their own playhouse. With help from Adam, they built it out of scraps and anything they could successfully filch from the house or the barn. They were good thieves and scavengers. The playhouse held a collection of bottle caps, empty birds’ nests, a stinking fox skull, and a seemingly continuous litter of kittens. A semicircle of little rocks at the entrance forbade anyone else entry. They worked out complex fantasies in their little playhouse. At the supper table, they embellished the stories in dual chattering blasts of an English patois known only to the two of them, a peculiar Southern drawl sprinkled with nasal, Asian intonations.
On our tenth wedding anniversary, Momma took care of the girls while Adam and I went to a restaurant and a movie, a rare night out for us. When we returned, rather than going inside, I waited by the car while Adam checked the stable. Lil and Jennie would be asleep, maybe Rosie, too. But Gracie’s voice carried through the windows, followed by Momma’s reply. A faint breeze crossed the yard. I leaned back over the hood of the car and scanned the thick field of stars vibrating above. A beautiful, clear night. Adam joined me.
I took his hand. “Let’s not go in yet. We haven’t been outside alone at night in years. Let’s take a walk.”
But when we passed the twins’ house, he stooped and pulled me in after him. Some small animal scurried away. We leaned against the trunk of the oak that was a corner support and kissed. We made love there on the dirt floor. The sweet voice of his pleasure echoed against the tin walls. What should have been a safe time of the month was, instead, Sarah, our fifth child.
Her birth was uneventful. I had not even bothered consulting Granny Paynes, who had grown frail in the last few years. The hospital nurses were concerned. But the doctor, after I repeated my lie about being Jehovah’s Witnesses, was nonchalant about our daughter’s oddity and our confident refusal of his services.
The quietest of the girls, Sarah spent her first months content among her cavorting sisters and the daily chaos. Watchful and calm, she reminded me of Addie. She grew in leaps, seeming to develop skills overnight. Standing one day and running the next, babbling incoherently, then suddenly speaking in complete sentences. She learned to hold a crayon one day and covered the walls with smiling faces and stick-figure horses the next. Only in her quest for art supplies did she exhibit Lil and Jennie’s gift for theft and deception. For her, a crayon or pen was incomparable for fixing the boo-boos and injustices of being the youngest of five daughters. Gradually rising smudges, gray fingerprints, and crayon drawings on every wall marked her growth.
With her, we were done. No more children. I felt it in my heart.
By the time Sarah learned to walk, the focus of the farm had shifted from the fields to the stable of horses. Except for a few acres of feed crops and the kitchen garden, the farm was pasture and a riding arena now. We