“Tonight, before you sang, you told the story of how your little boy died. Isn’t it difficult to tell people something so private?”
“It’s hard for me to say why I tell that story,” Ella said. “I didn’t used to talk about it. It used to be that I didn’t want to think about it. But I think about it now. I think about it all the time: his face, how his body felt when I held him, how his breath smelled sweet after he nursed.” Something caught in her throat, and she feared that she might find herself in tears, something that hadn’t happened in a long time.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Kate said. Ella felt Kate’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Ella said, “I don’t mind talking about it. I just hadn’t thought of that sweet breath in a while.” She looked at Claire. “You know what I’m talking about? The way a baby’s breath smells sweet and sugary after it nurses, after it’s fallen asleep with your nipple in its mouth, and you take it off and hold its face up against yours, and you can smell its lips, smell its breath when it breathes?”
“Yes,” Kate said. Her eyes glistened. “I know. I remember it.”
Ella turned away from Kate, looked out into the darkness before her.
“I don’t know if you were raised in the church,” she said, “but I was. I was raised Baptist. We always hopped around from church to church depending on where my daddy was working, but my mother was a fiery believer. My daddy wanted to stay on her good side.” She smiled, allowed herself a small laugh that cut through her sadness; with it came a quick memory of her mother and father’s faces, and then they were gone. “So that meant Daddy was a fiery one too.
“In a church like the ones I was raised in, it was normal for folks to get up and talk about how the Lord had moved in their lives. When you’re holy, when you’re filled up with the spirit, you want people to know you’ve earned it, and you want to tell about it. People want to know that you’ve earned it too. Speaking at these rallies is something like that for me. Being poor, losing my baby, fighting for what I’m fighting for: it’s the same thing as getting up in front of that church and telling those people how the Lord’s moved in your life. You’ve earned that story. I’ve earned mine. I’ve earned this being sad, this loss, this being angry. I want to tell it to people so they’ll know what it means to earn it. Plenty of the women who’ve heard me, probably a good bit of the men too, have lived the same kind of life I’ve lived. They need to know they’re not alone.”
She stopped speaking, considered saying nothing else, but she couldn’t help it. She had to know.
“But you didn’t answer what I asked you,” Ella said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”
Kate dropped her hands into her lap, parted her knees, looked down at her feet. “I was seventeen when I married Richard,” she said. “Not much older than you were when you married your husband. After he finished school we were married in my parents’ church in Hickory, and then we moved to McAdamville so he could start working for his father.” She sighed, laughed quietly just once. “I was young. I didn’t know anything about my body, I certainly didn’t know anything about his. I was probably three months pregnant before I realized it.”
Kate raised her head, folded her arms over her knees.
“Richard was overjoyed. We both were, really. I thought that’s what it meant to be a wife, to support your husband. You saw him off to work in the morning and saw him home in the evening and you gave him a baby as soon as you could.
“Richard took me to the doctor, and the doctor felt around on my belly. Oh, you know how they poke at you. And he put something to my stomach and tried to hear the baby. He said if I was right about how long I’d been pregnant, then the baby should be big enough to hear it inside there. But he didn’t hear anything, and I couldn’t feel anything either, and it made me wonder if I’d been mistaken. I was afraid that I’d made the whole thing up.
“And then my belly got bigger and bigger, and I knew a baby was growing inside me, and I could feel it inside there too. And when I went back to the doctor he felt around and poked at me some more and said the baby was too small. He listened and said the baby’s heart was too small. He said things might not be okay, but I didn’t believe him. At least I didn’t want to. I thought, Here you were thinking you might not be pregnant, but you are. Anything’s possible. Things could turn out fine.
“But they didn’t. When he was born he was so small, Ella.” She cupped her hands before her. “I remember him fitting right in the palm of one of my hands, but I know that can’t be true. Surely he wasn’t that small, but that’s how I remember him. He was beautiful, but he was so little. And he wouldn’t nurse, wouldn’t hardly open his eyes. The doctor said he was sick. He didn’t know what with, but he never got better. And then we lost him a few days later.”
She held her hands to her mouth as if trying to keep the words inside. She sighed, looked over at Ella.
“I’m sorry to come all the way out here and tell you a story like this,” Kate said. “I’ve just never told anyone before. Richard won’t talk about it. I got pregnant with Claire a few years later, and I was scared to death. When she was born it was such a relief. I was so afraid to let go of her, terrified of her not being at my breast where I could see her, see all of her, and make sure she was okay. I wondered if I worried over her so much because I was trying to forget what happened. We never talked about it. We never told Claire, we still haven’t. But now I know that I worried over her because I still worried over our son. I still thought of his face every time I saw hers, still felt his body in my hands each time I lifted her to me. I still think of him every day.”
She put her hands to her eyes and held them there for a moment, and then she wiped at her nose and folded her arms back across her knees. She looked at Ella. Ella saw that her eyes had grown wet again.
“It’s like what you said earlier,” Kate said. “What you said after I told you about my brother. You said it doesn’t get easier when you lose someone you love.”
“It doesn’t,” Ella said. She lifted her right hand and put it on Kate’s shoulder, and then she put her arm all the way around her. Kate scooted closer. Ella felt her lean toward her.
“It’s brave of you to tell your story,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Living through it is the brave part,” Ella said. “You don’t know it when it’s happening, but living through it’s the hardest. After that the telling about it’s easy.”