When Andrew comes home, Amanda is still holding a bunch of carrots in the root cellar. Her candle has almost burned to a stub. The cellar is stone, carefully built and mortared so that muck doesn’t seep in during the summer. The fading light jumps and flickers on the smooth walls, so that the hanging chickens and piles of potatoes seem alive and threatening, things with teeth.
“Is that dinner?” he asks, laughing. He puts a hand on her swollen belly and kisses the back of her neck. For the first time in Amanda’s life, she wants him to go away.
“Dinner will be late,” she says. “I took a long nap.”
“That’s fine,” he answers. “On Thursday there’ll be half a rack of mutton ready at Tim’s, all smoked and ready for the cellar. I should have asked for a whole one; his roof will hold for decades. Longer than the rest of the place.” He is covered in sawdust and twigs, and she wonders if he was crawling under a tree.
Amanda can never quite believe she married a man who does the same work as Father. Now the reminder makes her gorge rise, and she tries to force it back down her throat and focus on the conversation.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “A whole rack could go a bit off before we eat it.”
“Not with the appetite you’ve been having,” he says, grinning at her.
“Not me,” Amanda says, touching her belly. Don’t say “her.” “The, the baby.”
“The baby,” Andrew agrees.
“I’m actually not very hungry tonight,” she says.
“Would you like me to go to George’s?” he asks. George is Andrew’s older brother, another roofer and an overall cheerful man. He has two daughters.
“Would you?” says Amanda, forcing a smile that feels like a lie. “It’s just that I’m…so tired.”
“Of course,” he says, taking her hand, and she loosens her fingers from her palm one by one so that he’s holding a hand and not a fist. That night she eats unwashed carrots for dinner, squatting on her haunches in the root cellar, savoring the metallic taste of the dirt as much as the sweetness of the vegetables.
Late that night, she hears sobbing from the house next door. From the pitch of it, she can tell it’s Nancy Joseph, who recently started bleeding and so is facing her summer of fruition. Sighing, Amanda rolls over fretfully, frustrated at her inability to block out the sound. Eventually she dozes off, but the soft weeping clings to her mind and follows her into her dreams. She dreams of a child crying desperately, skinny and hunched over, and Amanda is frozen and unable to say or do anything to comfort her.
Chapter Six
Vanessa
Mother keeps telling Vanessa her turn will come, but she still finds birthings disgusting. She’s seen a lot of them, animal and human, and the actual event itself doesn’t bother her anymore. It’s the thought of her having to do it that is awful. She doesn’t want all that stretching and fluid and odor to ever have anything to do with her. Mother says she’ll feel different when she’s older, and Lenore Gideon told Vanessa she doesn’t have a choice anyway. Vanessa suspects they’re both saying the same thing.
Janet Balthazar is breathing hard, and at every contraction her belly turns to stone. Mother is rubbing Janet’s stomach with oil, and Killian Adam is holding burning herbs under her nose, to dull the pain. The sweet, musty scent of the smoldering plants cuts through the heavy smells of blood and sweat. There’s always at least one wanderer’s wife at a birthing, and despite Vanessa’s protests, Mother drags her along to a few every year. The small wooden birthing building—which holds up to three laboring women at a time, just in case—is crammed full of daughters, brought to learn about their future tribulations. They range in age from Hilda Aaron, who just learned to crawl and has now fallen peacefully asleep on the straw with her rump in the air, to Shelby Joseph, who is having her summer of fruition this year and looks aghast. Birthings are the only time unrelated women past fruition can gather together without men, and Vanessa has seen laboring women completely ignored as a cluster of women talk rapidly, shooing the children away. But Mother never ignores a woman in pain, and the others are taking her cue. She keeps dipping her head toward Shelby, muttering instructions and explanations. Janet screams, the cords in her throat vibrating against her skin.
Vanessa is huddled with the younger girls, a loose aggregation on the straw that is trying to move farther away from Janet Balthazar but is already bumping up against the walls. “This had better not be a defective,” says Nina Joseph to Vanessa, stating the obvious. Nina’s only seven, so Vanessa doesn’t snap at her.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Vanessa says.
“How do you know?” asks Nina, and Vanessa realizes she doesn’t, she’s just parroting Mother.
“Well, if it’s not fine, then…”
“My mother had a defective before she had me and Bradley,” says Nina.
“I don’t think my mother had any defectives,” says Vanessa, although she’s not absolutely sure.
The two girls are positioned where they can see right between Janet’s legs. The candles, placed in bowls of water, gutter and flicker and paint undulating patterns on Janet’s naked skin. There’s a rush of blood and water and a resultant rich smell, and together they get up and move to one side, where all they can see is a straining, trembling thigh. When the birthing is done and the hut empty, the daughters are responsible for cleaning out the soiled straw and spreading fresh bundles to await the next deluge of blood. Vanessa is not looking forward to it. It makes her remember the time, about a year ago, when she found a pile of rags in the kitchen soaked through with blood, maroon and stiff, stinking of copper. Mother was in bed recovering from a headache. When Vanessa asked Mother if she had started taking up butchering, hoping to turn it into a joke, Mother’s face hardened. “In a way,” she said, and Vanessa had been too frightened to ask anything more. For the next few days, Mother dragged around the house, irritable and weak, and Father sat staring into the fire, his eyes shining too brightly. Uncharacteristically, Vanessa was too disturbed to ferret out what was going on.
Inga Balthazar skips over. She is a plump ten-year-old with glowing brown curls who always looks smug and satisfied, like she just ate an entire cake. “Mother says it’s alive, she can feel it kicking,” she announces. “I wonder what they’ll name it? Jill Saul just died, so they might name it Jill.”
“Does that mean it’s not defective? If it’s kicking?” Nina asks Vanessa.
“No, sometimes they’re born alive,” Vanessa says thoughtfully. She heard that last year Wilma Gideon had a baby that looked like a gutted fish.
“There haven’t been any defectives in my family for three generations,” Inga says proudly, obviously reciting something she’s heard. “Our bloodline is spotless.”
“No it’s not, your brother is stupid and ugly,” replies Nina. Inga bunches her small fists, but then Janet squalls, and they turn to look.