“I can’t do it, Mama,” I sobbed. “I can’t do this.” It was hard to breathe through the sheer panic coursing through my veins.
“Oh, Nattie.” My mother rubbed my back in great, sweeping circles. “Of course you can.”
“How do you know?” I wailed.
“I know you can,” she said softly, “because you have to.”
She kept rubbing my back, whistling a cheery hymn about His love and glory while I shuddered and sobbed in her lap. When that song was over, she sang another. She moved through a whole church service’s worth of music while my body slowly went still.
Right as I was about to drift into unsettled sleep, Clementine began to cry. My mother leaned over and whispered into my ear, “Get up.”
13
Get up, Natalie,my mother whispers into my ear.Come on, now. It’s time to wake up.
I can’t do it, Mama. I can’t do this.
Of course you can.
How do you know?
I know you can because you have to. Now get up.
Get up, Natalie.
NATALIE,GETUP.
I startle awake. Clementine is sitting at the foot of the bed, looking at me.
No, not Clementine. Mary. Frowning at me with interest. Between her tightly pulled braids and her navy buttoned dress, she looks in every way like the sternest candy striper on the planet. “It’s time to get up,” she says again.
“No.” The word shapes itself like a sob.
“Yes,” she says firmly. “You’ve been in bed for long enough. Your fever has broken, and it’ll be good for you to move around.”
The more I blink awake, the more aware I am of my leg. My God, it hurts. I close my eyes, desperate to fall asleep and wake up somewhere else.
“Come on.” She shakes my good leg, and I moan pitifully. “Youhave to get up. I can’t keep neglecting all the other work I need to do in order to tend to your violent moods.”
I open my eyes and look at her incredulously. “Is that what you would call what happened to me? Aviolent mood?”
She rolls her eyes, smooths the wrinkles off her lap, and stands up.
“You people are criminals,” I hiss wildly. “You’ll rot in jail for what you’ve done to me.”
For a moment, I think she’s going to walk out the door without answering me. But then she points a finger at me and snaps, “If you’re not up in five minutes, I will come back here and saw your foot off myself.”
She stomps out of the room before I can respond.
I feel like I’m living in the aftermath of a failed punch line.
As I slowly sit up, wincing at the throbbing in my leg, a distant memory surfaces: Mary, leaning over me, her voice a distant echo, her face a rippling reflection:She’s lucky she didn’t snap the bone clean in two.
And then Old Caleb, amending angrily from across the room:It’s not luck, it’s science. That trap is meant to catch ferrets and squirrels and marmots, it doesn’t have the force necessary to crush a human bone!
And the babies, all those babies—what a strange, terrible dream. It seemed to last forever. A whole lifetime, caught up in a single nightmare, with the doctor and the midwife and my husband standing over me—
My husband.
