Follow Me to Ground(15)

I went to the back door and called to Father. I told him within half an hour we’d have a startled and panicking Cure. He was digging and didn’t turn around.

I went upstairs and put on a large black shirt that wouldn’t show up stains. It had a wide pocket on its front, and I went down to the bottom of the garden and filled it with sorrel leaves, stuffing it as though it was my own animal pouch.

Sooner than I’d thought, I heard screen-door-slam.

I walked into the house and already the couple was on the stairs. Father turned to me and said their name – Bennett-Kent. In the second spare room Father eased Mrs Bennett-Kent back onto the pillows while her husband removed her feet from their thin-soled shoes. I was pulling on the leaves in my pocket, making them limp, easier to chew. How different Mrs Bennett-Kent was to Olivia. Both large with child, both with dark hair that snaked over the pillows, but different all the same.

–Ada will see to you.

Mr Bennett-Kent was not a well-proportioned man; his hands were too large for his arms and the calluses across his knuckles made them seem larger still. Mrs Bennett-Kent had large black eyes that followed her husband out of the room.

–Are you in pain?

She nodded, her lips pursing, and said

–I’ve a tightness in my stomach, like a spasm.

–I’m going to take a look inside of you. Close your eyes.

She closed up her face so quietly I thought She must have been told good things.

I peeled back the wet slap of her womb. The baby was still in evidence, like the unevenness to grass where some animal has stopped to graze. Its shadow-outline turned away from me and I knew its other half did the same in the bowl downstairs. A sound came from her, the deepening lilt at the end of a song, and I picked up the rhythm of a slow healthy pulse.

The spasm that riddled her had started the night before and was working to spoil her lining, had left the baby with nothing to eat, so I took out the mulchen leaves and placed the new bedding inside of her womb.

The leaves settled around the curve of the baby’s back until the lining was plush and wet again. I sang faster, a jumping tune that picked up the pace of the baby’s heart and put suckle back in its cord. After a time the little body got denser. I didn’t know what had caused the spasm. All of her seemed healthy now, and calm.

First thing she did when I woke her was put a hand to her mouth.

–That taste – it’s like I’ve been sucking on a penny.

I told her what I’d seen and asked her if she’d gotten a fright the day before. I put out my hands for her to take hold of, and as she sat upright watched the flesh of her thighs pool out beneath her.

Her skin, deeply brown, was glowing a little now.

–Well yes, last night … but there was no harm in it.

She told me that the night before she’d been up much later than usual. With her husband lost to some unforeseen task in the fields she’d closed the house up extra tight, and close to midnight she checked, for maybe the fourth time, the lock on the screen door. She rattled the door in its peeling wooden frame the way an intruder might.

–To make sure it wouldn’t give, you see.

She’d leaned on the wall letting the weight of her belly settle.

–…Because my back is so sore these days, so tender –

But then she jumped, because she could see the shape of a person outside, someone standing in the yard and gazing toward her.

In the dark she made out the shape of them, thicker than the rest of the night.

–You could just tell it was a person, alive.

Standing as if waiting to cross the street.

And then she turned off the light, and with the kitchen and garden in equal dark she saw that not only, yes, there was a person, but that somehow, in these few moments, this person was now come very close to the house. Was, in fact, standing on the patio step with only the slim parting of the screen door keeping them out of the house.

–I didn’t scream, exactly, but I tell you Miss Ada I jolted like a horse, and then realised it was only Lorraine! My good friend Lorraine Languid. Well, we stood there laughing for I don’t know how long before I thought to turn on the light.

So much talk for so nonsense a story.

I started tugging the duvet back into place, letting her know it was time to leave. I scolded myself, for getting worked up over the baby, and for letting a Cure take up so much time.

–It’s normal to get a shock seeing someone in your garden that late at night.

–Well yes, Miss Ada, and I said to Lorraine I never mind her coming over but it’s a strange way to announce oneself, standing in the garden – and what would she have done if I hadn’t seen her? And gone to bed and locked her out for the night?

I was tugging her skirt down toward her ankles, bothered by the shuffling sound it made around her knees.

I thought of the Lorraine I’d met as a child. Lorraine and her lambs and her smoking mouth.

–She would have gone home, soon enough.

Mrs Bennett-Kent looked at me, her large breasts pulling at the buttons of her shirt.

There’s more to this fright. Of course there’s more, if it was strong enough to spoil her baby’s bedding.

–Oh no, Miss Ada, you’re thinking of the old granite houses on the right side of town. We live on the left side.

–Yes, that’s right—

–Our gardens don’t all back onto the same little lane.