Light to the Hills: A Novel (46)
When Frank showed up after working his odd jobs, they’d walk the mile path down to the creek and spread a quilt, eating supper with their fingers while the long stretches of daylight lasted and then lying passionately together under the moon. More than once, Mama pulled leaves from Amanda’s hair while they sat together, piecing quilts or mending.
“There’s perfectly good straw ticking up in the loft,” she’d said. “I don’t see how you’re not eaten up with ticks and chiggers.”
Amanda had only smiled. Frank loved it outside in the open air. Their entertainment was each other and a private concert of the rippling creek and the whippoorwill calls, giving way to the chorus of tree frogs as dusk disappeared into night. It wasn’t long before she felt her stomach sour at breakfast and pushed away the plate of hard-boiled eggs.
“I wouldn’t eat those if I were you,” she’d told Mama. “They smell like they’ve gone off.”
“Nothing in the world a bit wrong with them eggs,” Mama snapped, pushing them right back. “As if I would fix a rotten egg and serve it up on the table. Get married and all of a sudden you’re too big for your britches.” Amanda wrinkled her nose and clamped a hand to her mouth. After a few minutes, she ran out to retch into the privet alongside the cabin, and it became clear what was truly off.
“How long’s it been since you bled?”
“A few weeks, I guess,” she’d said, thinking back. “Maybe more? I haven’t been keeping up.”
Mama’s eyebrows arched so high Amanda thought they might fly right off her forehead. Like the careful latches on her father’s boxes, the pieces fell into place finally, and Amanda drew in a breath, her hands settling on her abdomen. She’d fallen pregnant.
“Oh, hon.” Mama had laid her hand on Amanda’s arm. She was barely seventeen but older than many first-time mamas she’d known. “You’ll make such a good mama.”
Amanda’s mind had raced. What about their plans? The ocean, Hollywood? She tried to picture herself with a belly stretched tight, breasts full of milk, going through labor. Amanda scrunched her eyes shut; that didn’t sound much like the fine young wife Frank admired. Later that same week, Frank declared he’d rented a place in town, and he and Amanda moved off the mountain.
“I’ll come by ever’ chance I get,” Mama told her, but between helping Pa with the church work and keeping their own house and garden, it turned out she couldn’t spare many days away. Frank dove into what he called his and Gripp’s “investments” and claimed not to have time to spare on Sundays to travel to a church meeting. For her part, Amanda didn’t feel comfortable riding a horse that far back into the mountains when she started to feel flutters and kicks. Instead, mother and daughter sent word back and forth through church members who chanced through town.
A whuff of air startled Amanda back to the present. Myrtle blew dust out her nose and turned her big head toward the wobbly calf nursing at her side as if being a mother were nothing to fuss over. Already she’d licked his coat clean and dry until whorls of fluff stuck up here and there. Finn hadn’t moved an inch, and Sass lay burrowed beneath the quilt. Amanda couldn’t sleep. She remembered carrying her own child and how it had changed her, shifted the things she yearned for until they were so shuffled around, she wouldn’t have recognized her old self.
While Amanda scraped together meals and kept her and Frank’s square shanty tidy, the magic of the life within her grew bit by bit, enchanting her heart with its spell. If the baby had been a girl, they would have named her Lynn, in honor of Frank’s musical nickname for Amanda. But she’d known it was a boy, even before the granny women touched her ripening belly in the road on her way to the mine store, studying how she carried and making their predictions. She dreamed of him at night, with Frank spooned up behind her, a little brown-eyed boy to catch frogs and lightning bugs.
She’d read out loud at night after supper, anything she could get her hands on. The days of carefree supper picnics and walks in the woods had faded with the heat of summer. Frank was too busy now, focused on the money. When Amanda read, Frank soon fell asleep, tuckered from a day spent doing whatever it was he’d been out doing with Gripp, but Amanda kept on anyway, knowing the baby heard her words.
It was a Robert Frost poem Amanda took his name from, on a night she couldn’t get comfortable and her tossing and turning made Frank cranky. He’d needed to get some shut-eye, he’d said. He and Gripp had big plans the next day. So she’d slipped out of bed, lit the lantern in the small hours of the morning, and cracked the spine of Frost poems to read silently. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” she read, “but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” She had no idea where Robert Frost was from, but his words reminded Amanda of the Kentucky mountains on a winter evening. She, too, had made promises—promises to the man who lay snoring like a badger in the bed he’d pushed her out of and to the lively rascal who kicked and squirmed in the waters inside her, sending ripples straight to her heart like a stone tossed into a still pond. Why, there was his name right there in the poem: Miles. Amanda had a feeling she and Miles had a ways to travel together. She’d turned the name over in her mind, liking the sound of it as she’d rocked in the quiet until the puny town started to wake and she’d risen to make Frank’s breakfast. “Miles to go before I sleep,” she’d mumbled, heating a dollop of grease in the skillet for the eggs.