It was like being a child again but even better, at least when I could forget about John. Time stood still as the baby grew. Granny and I cooked together, washed clothes, read the newspaper and the Bible to each other. On my eighteenth birthday she made a cake and we ate it sitting on a quilt under the trees, looking into the woods as the summer wind blew over us. In the mornings we fed the chickens, brought in the eggs, and made breakfast. At dusk we picked green beans and weeded the flower beds. When fall came, we made apple butter outside over an open fire, taking turns stirring the kettle. All those months, Granny took good care of me, just as I had known she would. It came back to her fast, all that Grandmaw Ruth had taught her. She went up the mountain hunting roots and brewed special teas. She listened for the baby’s heart with her ear pressed to my belly. She examined me so gently I never felt a thing. One day she looked at me as I rolled out dough for a pie crust. “You’re getting awful big, not to be any further along than you are,” she said. “There might be two of them in there.” I put my hands on my swollen stomach. There was a kick, like an affirmation. I imagined two babies curled together inside me. It was comforting to think they weren’t alone in the dark of my womb.
Sometimes I thought of Ford’s soft eyes and gentle hands. I thought how he would love my babies if they belonged to him and maybe if they didn’t. I thought he might even love me, too. But those thoughts fled when I sat on the mattress with a scrap of John rotting inside. I could never be touched and kissed like that again and stay hidden. Sometimes I daydreamed about showing myself to Ford anyway, my growing belly draped in a sundress. I imagined how he might slide the straps down and kiss each shoulder and then the top of each heavy breast, take them in his hands to lighten my load, curl his long body around the babies in my womb and keep them safe with me through the night. Even now I look off the mountain and wish I could see where he is. I wish we could build a fire and sleep in the long field beside of his trailer and fry eggs in an iron skillet when we wake up in the morning. We could live with the twins among piles of books and matted dogs with ticks fattening behind their ears. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to grow up on a farm instead of high on a mountain. That’s one life I could have given my babies. It would have been easier there, better hidden from the Odoms, and I know I would have loved Ford. Part of me still does. But it was not the right life for my twins and me. This mountain is their birthright. It’s what I have to give.
They were born on the fifth day of November in 1975. I was sitting on the back steps with a jam biscuit, colored leaves skittering out of the woods across the yard. I didn’t have to read the poems from a book anymore. I had come to know them by heart. I was saying the verses out loud to my babies when the pains came. As soon as the first sharp contraction cramped low in my belly, all my fears came flooding back. I jumped up so fast that I almost lost my balance but I didn’t know what to do next. I paced in the brown grass in front of the steps, waiting for another pain. When it came I felt the panic welling up big and dark, threatening to wipe me out. Once the babies were outside of me it would be harder to protect them. Granny opened the door to ask if I was hungry and I stared at her with eyes that strained in their sockets. “Is it time?” she asked. I nodded. She spat her snuff into the dirt beside the steps, still holding the door open. “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? I can head down yonder and get Hacky right now.”
“No!” I shouted, trying to hold back tears.
“Well, okay. Don’t get all worked up. We’ll do just fine by ourselves.”
“What if John comes?”
“If he ain’t come after you by now, he ain’t going to.”
“He’s got brothers, Granny. The one named Hollis is awful. He—”
“Straighten up, Myra. This is a good day and we’re going to have a big time. Now come on in and put your feet up. It’ll be a long wait yet.”
It was a long wait, just as she said. I drank tea and Granny rubbed my feet and sometimes my back and sometimes my shoulders. She told me all the good stories again and read to me from the Bible and tried to teach me how to knit but it was hard to concentrate. Then she checked me once more and said, “I believe they’re ready.”
I was afraid at first, when the worst pains came, grinding in my abdomen. I couldn’t keep still. My fingers dug into the sheet. Everything was more vivid. Colors shouted and sound had the resonance of a bell. I heard my toes crack as I curled them. The mattress creaked under my writhing. Granny told me to push and there was a moment when I was sure the babies would never come out. I would be giving birth forever. I bore down, head thrashing from side to side, hair plastered to my cheeks and neck and forehead. I felt the babies battling to join me in this life. Everything I was, all that I had done right and wrong seemed far and distant. I gave one last shove, determined to have the babies even if the effort split my body in two. Then the first baby cried and Granny was laughing, shouting like she did sometimes in church, running up and down the aisle with her hands held high in the air. I fell back onto my pillow, the headboard knocking against the wall. “A little boy,” she said. “Lordy, he’s got stout lungs.”
I rested while she suctioned his mouth and nose with the same orange bulb syringe she had used on me when I had the croup. Then she wrapped him in a towel and placed him for a moment in a bureau drawer lined with a blanket. She came back to stand at the end of the bed and I gave one more hard push. The other child came and Granny shouted, “Praise Jesus, this’n’s a girl!” Both of us wept from relief and happiness.
Then I must have dozed for a while because the next thing I remember is a baby rooting at each breast, their downy black heads poking out of blankets. Granny sat on the edge of the bed leaning back on the pillow with me, sweat glistening on her face. It had taken almost as much out of her to bring my babies into the world as it had out of me. “What will you call them?” she asked, wiping her face with a clean diaper.
“I’ve always liked Laura,” I said, looking down at the baby girl. Granny had found an old pink shawl to wrap her in, so that we could tell the twins apart.
“That’s good,” Granny said. “Like mountain laurel. What about the boy?”
I looked him over for a long time, his button of a nose pressed against my breast. “Johnny,” I said at last. When I spoke the name out loud, it sounded right to me.
Granny was silent. I could tell she didn’t like it. Finally she asked, “How come?”
“Because I loved him once,” I said, gazing down at my baby boy.
“All right,” Granny murmured. But she still looked troubled.
I never told Granny about Ford, but sometimes I was tempted. I knew it disturbed her to think the twins were John’s babies. Maybe she was worried how they would turn out, but I wasn’t. I knew it didn’t matter who their daddy was. When I held them I didn’t think about their fathers. I just looked at them, pink lips suckling, and thought about God.
In the first weeks of their lives, every sudden movement, every creak, every pine knot exploding in the fire made me tense to run or fight. I couldn’t understand why John hadn’t come for me, and if he was dead, why someone else hadn’t. But Granny and the babies made it a precious time. Mr. Barnett brought a crib that had belonged to his own children, cleaned and smelling of beeswax, and moved it into Granny’s bedroom where we slept. Those first nights when I was so weary I could barely lift my head, Granny got up and brought the babies to me whenever they cried, singing hymns to them under her breath. As I grew stronger, we tended the babies together while the rest of the mountain slept, burping and swaddling by the light of Granny’s oil lamp, the only sounds their grunts and cries and swallows as they drank from my breast. Sometimes as Granny rocked the babies, one in the crook of each arm, I pretended to be asleep and watched her in secret through the fringe of my lashes. When she thought I wasn’t looking, her face always fell into a mask of exhaustion. Her ashen color made me sick with worry. I heard how she lost her breath while she worked in the kitchen and the yard. Sometimes when she spoke I saw the blue of her tongue. For a long time, I knew something was wrong.