Fifteen

Up in the house, I discovered my own patience and calm in the quieter work away from the fields.  I had always helped my mother churn the cream from our goats to make butter and watched her making bread in the fire at home.  This kitchen was bigger and just as busy.  Momma started with the sun getting breakfast for everyone.  We worked late into the night to cook the meat for the next day’s meals.  She used the best parts of the slaughter for the Master and Mistress.  The children and the fieldhands ate soup made from the bits of meat and bones that were leftover after the Master’s meal. 

There are other young women living here and all of us will have a baby soon.  One woman had her baby last week.  I saw how she took the pain and finally saw for myself what it might be like.  I have been through it before, but because those babies were so small, this will be different.  They say some women take the pains, and suffer through it as if there were no pain at all, silent and withdrawn inside, suffering in silence.  Other women keen and gnash their teeth, rolling over and over on the bed, standing and wailing and pressing up against the wall or anything else they can lean on.  Some women say that the wailers deliver the baby much faster than the rest, for they get that pain outside of their body and by doing this they draw the baby outside into the cooler air.

In between feeding everyone, nursing the babies, and keeping the children occupied, Granny took me up the hill to the vegetable garden. 

“I’m not strong enough for this work anymore, and I won’t be here with you forever,” she told me.

“But Granny,” I said, “who will be the one who watches over the women when they have their children?”

“You will see,” she answered.  “Time will tell.” 

She pointed to the lettuce leaves and the shoots of the root vegetables and showed me which ones needed watering each day.  She taught me their names and showed me how to harvest the plants when they were ready.  We gathered the vegetables ready for harvest and carried them back up to the house in our aprons.  We talked about how Momma would prepare the vegetables in the kitchen.  

Some days before the hot afternoon sun blazed, we walked further up the hill past the bunkhouses into the woods where she showed me which barks and leaves were safe and which ones held poison.  Some of the plants were similar to ones my father used at home, but others were different.  Before we headed back to the house, we picked wild blackberries and gathered the blackberry leaves to bring back for making tea.

Granny never slept.  She was up early in the morning at the big house before the fieldhands were even up with the sunrise.  She was waiting in her rocking chair in the corner for the babies.  The babies slept with their mothers, but granny took care of them all day long. 

“Gets really busy with all the babies,” I said to Granny.

“You shoulda seen when we had the twins,” said Granny.  I didn’t have any idea which twins she was talking about.  Certainly not mine. 

“Those boys’re so bad, they had to string ‘em up and tie ‘em from their ankles to keep ‘em from runnin’ away.  And we had ‘nother twelve kids or so at the time, and none of ‘em could sit still either.”