I Shall Be Near to You(10)

‘It’d be nice, having you there. But not once the fighting starts,’ Jeremiah says.

‘I promise I’d leave,’ I say.

‘Rosetta,’ he sighs, ‘don’t make it worse than it already is.’

I say, ‘A man should cleave to his wife. I am cleaving to you. You can’t leave me.’

‘You always try to drive such a bargain, Mrs. Stone?’ he whispers, and I nod, my head rubbing against his cheek, my hair catching in the stubble there.

‘That ain’t my name,’ I say.

‘Ought to be. Everything about you is ornery and rock hard. ’Cept for a few places—’ he says, his mouth brushing mine as his fingers circle across my chest. ‘You don’t ever take things easy.’ He smiles, his cheeks apple blossom pink.

‘Easy ain’t always good,’ I say.


THE NEXT MORNING, I visit Mama and Betsy. Mama smiles to see me, saying, ‘I’ve been saving something for you,’ and goes into the kitchen workroom, gathering canning jars from the shelves, still dreaming of me in my own kitchen like she taught me.

‘We don’t need all these, and I know how you like canning,’ she says. ‘This way when it’s the season, you’ll be ready.’

I don’t remind her how it ain’t the canning I like but the being outside picking fruit. Still, I take those jars and say, ‘I’ll make you some preserves in the Fall, when it’s time.’

Mama shoos Betsy off into the kitchen, sending her to check on the stew. Then she says, ‘Rosetta, I never told you some things,’ and turns to straighten the shelves. There is a long pause and then, while her back is still turned, she starts talking.

‘Now you’re a married woman, there’s things you ought to know.’

I don’t say a word. All I want is to be banging out the door and running down the steps. Mama keeps her back turned and sets herself to dusting each jar on that shelf.

‘There’s a time for everything,’ she says. ‘There’s a time for a wife to lie with her husband if she wants a baby, and a time to lie with him if she doesn’t. You understand what I’m saying?’

I’ve been living on a farm my whole life. Of course I know what she is saying, but I just say, ‘Yes,’ and let her keep talking. I get to wondering why she ain’t told me this before I got myself married.

‘The time before and after your courses, that’s when it’s safe if you don’t want to be having a baby quite yet, if you don’t want to be raising your child alone while Jeremiah’s gone.’ Mama turns to me, holding out another empty jar. ‘I’m not saying what you should do,’ she says.

I take the jar and open my mouth to ask her if she ever took her own advice, or if she is still trying for Papa’s son, but then she says she’d better check on supper, even though she sent Betsy to do it already.

When I say I’m going to go visit Papa out in the barn, Betsy follows me back into the workroom. Once the door is closed and I reach for my coat, she looks at me, all serious. ‘You and Jeremiah going to have a baby before he goes?’

I think of Mama lying in bed, the curtains and the door shut tight so I could only get my eyes inside that room a sliver at a time. Or seeing Mama sick and Mrs. Lewis in this kitchen workroom washing the blood out of Mama’s bedclothes and cooking us up one supper and then leaving me and Papa waiting in the parlor while that baby cried. The whole night.

Papa didn’t smile for four days after Mrs. Lewis left and we didn’t name the baby for near to a week. Not ’til we knew it might live and Mama too. Papa didn’t say so, but I knew if Mama didn’t live what the baby’s name would be. When Mama was feeling better, Papa was back to smiling even though she was all mean asking, ‘What’s wrong with you and you don’t give the child a proper name?’

Papa said, ‘Since we done the easy part of having a baby I don’t think we should be the ones to name it, but if you don’t have no ideas I was thinking of Hepzebah.’

She laughed until she cried and when she could breathe again she asked me, ‘What were you thinking, Rosetta?’

I said, ‘Violetta so we could be a bunch of flowers,’ and she laughed and laughed so hard there wasn’t no sound.

Finally she said, ‘Thank the Lord I didn’t up and die, or this poor child! I was thinking Elisabeth Violet.’

Anyone could see she wasn’t thinking about it. It was done and she used both our names and made something better.

‘Rosetta,’ Mama said. ‘You bring Elisabeth Violet here.’

I opened my mouth to say I ain’t never held no baby before and I don’t much want to, but Mama’s face was turned away and Papa was sitting on the bed holding her hand so I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

The oaken crib was pushed along the wall on Mama’s side of the bed. It was the one Papa made for me and I must’ve looked like that in it, so small and flower-petal white, the veins showing through. The baby—Elisabeth—she was all swaddled up. I put my hands around the bundle and I didn’t know how tight I could hold, thinking of pumpkins and overripe tomatoes and what they do when someone drops them. I moved my hands and petted the peach fuzz of her head with its soft spot like a fruit bruise.

I didn’t know Papa was coming until he rested his hand on the back of my neck.