her. Thought there wasn’t nothing to it, no reason to give up those few precious minutes of sitting in my chair and letting the day roll off me.
’Course then the next day afore I got home, Leta felt the bucket hit something when she was getting water to boil the corn. Pulled up the bucket, and it had a blanket in it.
Leta I THOUGHT SURE WE’D GET SICK. CAN’ T EVEN THINK about it—the poor little thing. But in the drinking water.
I waited ’til Albert came home from work. When I pulled up the blanket with the morning water, I knew Tess had been telling the truth, and we’d all ought to have known that. She’s a good girl. I didn’t let the bucket down again, just sat the blanket on the side of the well. I hurried to the store and bought a new tin bucket, too, thinking I wouldn’t want to be using that one again if the night passed like I thought it would. When the girls and Jack came home from school, I told ’em we’d be having cornbread and milk for lunch. Couldn’t do much else with no water, and I wasn’t touching what I’d already drawn.
“You found it, didn’t you, Mama?” Tess asked. Her voice was hoarse, and she was chewing on her braid. I didn’t get on to her for it.
“Found a blanket. We’ll get it all straightened out when your papa comes home.”
“You believe me now, don’t you?” She seemed concerned, like I might actually still say she was making things up. I knelt down, took the braid from her mouth, and kissed her forehead—dirty already from who knows what.
“I believe you, Tessie. Get washed up for dinner.”
I poured fresh milk over dewberries for dessert. None of them complained.
With the last touches of sun in the sky, backs sore from peering in and eyes tired from squinting, we thought we’d have to find some netting. Then, when we’d lost count of how many times we’d tried, Albert pulled it up with a tiny, pale arm hanging over that tall tin bucket. It was naked, and it was a boy.
My mama died when I was four, and I remember her laying there with the blood soaking the sheets and the sweat not even dried off her face. I saw the baby she’d had die two days later, its face blue and its body shrunk like a dried peach. I’ve seen men carried home from the mines with eyes torn out and arms just about ripped clean off still hanging by pieces of skin. None of it stuck in my head like that little swollen thing that used to be a baby hanging over the side of our water bucket.
Virgie I THOUGHT SHE MADE IT UP AT FIRST. TO FEEL IMPORTANT. Tess was the hatefulest thing when she was little. Mama would leave me watching her, and she’d wander off and I’d have to drag her back just a’screaming. The white fence around the yard had to be built to keep her in. Then she just learned to unlatch the gate. She wouldn’t mind worth a flip. And after Jack came, she didn’t ever get tired of tattling on him. But she never told lies.
She couldn’t sleep that first night, and I didn’t even say a word to her. I thought she was being silly. I lay there mad at her, listening to the sleep sounds coming from the rest of the house. Papa’s snores. Mama’s restless shifting—even in her sleep, she couldn’t be still. Jack murmuring as he rolled over. The train whistle outside. Wind against the glass panes. But no sounds from Tess. She was lying there awake just like I was, and I didn’t even say good night.
The next night, the night the baby had laid on top of our well covered in its still-damp blanket and the sheriff had come and carried it off in a basket, Tess didn’t say a word to me. I watched her for a while, tucked into a little S with her back to me in bed, and I inched over to her, even though the pins for my curls stuck into my head when I moved.
“Tessie,” I whispered. It tickled her ear, and she hitched her shoulder up.
“What?”
“Y’alright?”
She didn’t answer me. I poked her with my big toe, aiming for the sole of her foot.
“Stop.”
I jabbed at her calf next.
“Stop it, Virgie,” she hissed. “You’ll draw blood with that toe.”