“I can’t do this, Emma Jean. I can’t.”
Emma Jean nodded. “Of course you can. And you will. It’s already done. I have a beautiful baby girl and that’s the end of it.”
“This ain’t gon’ work. There’s no way.” Henrietta’s strength dissolved like sugar in hot water. She sank onto the edge of the bed.
“Listen,” Emma Jean murmured, grabbing Henrietta’s arm. “Just call her a girl and be done with it! There’s nothin’ to think about, nothin’ to rationalize, nothin’ to justify, nothin’ to pray about, and nothin’ to do except love her the way she is.”
“That’s the whole problem! The way she is ain’t right ’cause she ain’t no she!”
“Of course she is. She’s jes’ a little different from most other little girls, but she’ll never know that if don’t nobody tell her.”
Henrietta stared at Emma Jean, perplexed.
“I knew God wouldn’t let me down. After raisin’ all these boys, He owed me a girl.”
Henrietta stood. “Don’t bring God into this, Emma Jean!”
“What chu mean? God’s the One Who made this possible. And I thank Him for it.”
“You know what?” Henrietta tossed her hands into the air. “Do what you want. But when you go befo’ God on Judgment Day—”
“I’ll meet you there!”
Emma Jean was out of her mind, Henrietta decided, so once again, she turned to leave.
“If you ever tell anybody about this, you’ll be sorry. I promise you that. You and that
daughter
of yours.”
Henrietta seethed with anger.
“Oh, don’t worry.” Emma Jean shrugged. “Don’t nobody know the truth but me. Well, me and the person who told me. But I ain’t gon’ tell. I understand why you did what you did. I really do. A woman does strange thangs sometimes.”
“It ain’t the same thing, Emma Jean, and you know it!”
“Oh, sure it is! Since you didn’t have no children of yo’ own, although you had done delivered everybody else’s, you thought you’d just take one.”
Henrietta swiveled and faced Emma Jean. “That ain’t what happened.”
“No? Sure it is. Louise died anyway, right? Or maybe I’m wrong. But I know enough to know you did somethin’ you didn’t have no business doin’.”
Henrietta slid to the floor and relinquished the fight. “Who told you, Emma Jean?”
“That’s some more o’ my business. It don’t make no difference noway. Just know that you ain’t the only one who know.”
“I was takin’ care o’ my sister. That’s all,” Henrietta said, dazed. “She never wanted no babies, but that preacher husband insisted. After she went into labor, it lasted four days, and she was so exhausted I thought she was gon’ fall out dead. But then the water broke and the baby came. In the middle o’ pushin’ with what little strength she had left, Louise stopped breathin’. I thought she was jes’ so tired she quit pushin’, but after the baby came, I realized somethin’ was wrong ’cause don’t care how tired a mother is, she wanna see her baby when it come out.
“I washed the baby girl and wrapped her real tight in one o’ Louise’s little blankets. Then I stood over Louise and patted her cheeks and arms and everything, but she didn’t respond. Her eyes was wide open like she had done seen a ghost, but her body didn’t have no life. I started cryin’ and askin’ God to bring her back ’cause she didn’t want no babies noway, but she just laid there and never did move. Preacher was in the kitchen, smokin’ his pipe real proud, and when I seen him and thought about what he had done done to my sister, I knew what to do. It was what Louise woulda wanted. She had done told him she couldn’t have no babies”—Henrietta clenched her teeth—“but, no, that wasn’t good enough for him. He needed somebody to carry his name, and it was her duty to provide it. That’s what a wife’s s’pose to do, he told her. I heard him say it. And since Louise didn’t want to be no bad wife, she at least had to try.”
Henrietta stared through the window at the woods in the distance. “One Sunday morning, right as we wuz walkin’ into church, Louise whispered and told me she was late. I asked her if she was pregnant, but she didn’t say nothin’. ’Bout halfway through service, she tiptoed out back, lookin’ real sick. I snuck out there and saw Louise throwin’ up all over the ground. I knowed she was pregnant.
“So when Louise was strugglin’ in childbirth, and Preacher Man was sittin’ up there with his chest stuck out like he had done done somethin’ grand, I knowed I had to fight for Louise ’cause she couldn’t fight for herself.”
“So you told Preacher Man the baby died?”
“I told him that both of them died. But I took the baby and raised it myself. What was he gon’ do with a little girl all by hisself? What a man know ’bout raisin’ a girl?”
Emma Jean nodded and mumbled, “Right, right. But what happened to your baby? You was pregnant, too. Y’all shoulda delivered ’round ’bout the same time, if I remember right.”
Henrietta ignored the question. “He didn’t deserve no baby, the way he had done treated my sister. And he didn’t want no girl noway. Louise didn’t mean nothin’ to him ’til she got pregnant, and then all he was concerned about was the baby. He had done already named it ’fo she had it. I knowed in my heart he was gon’ throw my sister and that child away if it was a girl, so when it came, I told him that Louise died and the baby girl died, too.”
“And nobody knows that Trish is really Louise’s daughter.” Emma Jean snickered.
Henrietta rose. “Trish is my daughter. I raised her.”
“You right about that! If a woman raise a girl, that’s shonuff her daughter. But how did you get the baby outta the house without Preacher Man knowin’?”
Henrietta’s head dropped as she remembered. “I bundled her up in a sheet and set her outside the window on the ground. She never mumbled a sound. When I left, I went ’round de house and put her in my medicine bag and took her home. I kept what part o’ my sister I could keep.”
“Oh! That’s why you disappeared for a while. You needed folks to believe you had gone off and delivered yo’ own child. I see! Wow. You good, girl, ’cause they believed it. I believed it, too. ’Til I learned better.”
Emma Jean’s assumptions weren’t correct—she was so very wrong!—but Henrietta refused to tell her more than she already knew.
“Trish deserved somebody who wuz gon’ love her.”
“And that somebody wuz you, right?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Of course it was. You knew what you could do and you knew what the child needed. A woman always knows.”
“She was my baby sister, Emma Jean. She was all I had.”
“I understand. That’s why yo’ secret is safe with me. Now, you gotta help me out, too.”
“What you doin’ ain’t nothin’ like what I did, and you know it!”
“What’s the difference?”
Henrietta couldn’t explain the difference, but she felt it in her heart. “It just ain’t the same.”
“So what you did was right?”
“I ain’t sayin’ it was right. I’m just sayin’ I
thought
it was right.”
“Okay. And I think this is right.”
“No you don’t! Ain’t no way you think twistin up dat boy’s mind is right!”
Emma Jean smiled. “What’s right changes from one minute to the next. You ever noticed that?”
Henrietta wanted to disagree, but couldn’t.
“So yo’ job now is to keep yo’ mouth shut about my business. Like I did for you.”
Henrietta reached for the doorknob. “God gon’ make you pay for this, Emma Jean. You mark my word. He gon’ git you sooner or later.”
“Then He gon’ git all of us.”
Stumbling through the screen door, Henrietta leaned against the nearest porch pillar and covered her mouth as if she might vomit. She couldn’t crumble right there, she thought, not in the middle of Emma Jean’s territory. She’d never give her the satisfaction. No, she needed to get home, to be surrounded by things familiar, to examine herself and see how she’d let Emma Jean do this to her. Emma Jean Peace . . . of all people. Black, ugly, insignificant Emma Jean Peace. Who would’ve thought? And who had told her? Who else could’ve known? Henrietta hadn’t told anyone. And of course Emma Jean hadn’t been there, had she? No, she couldn’t’ve been. And since God wasn’t in the habit of telling other people’s business, Henrietta couldn’t figure out how Emma Jean had somehow become Swamp Creek’s omniscient one.
She cleared her throat and extracted from her bag a handkerchief with which she dabbed her sweating forehead. Yes, she needed to get home. Her feet felt like concrete cinder blocks, dragging beneath her as she staggered down the front steps and into the weeded lane. On an ordinary day, she was a relatively pretty woman, tall and slender as bamboo stalks. Her head seemed a bit large in proportion to her body, but her eyes, nose, and mouth sat in perfect proximity, causing people to nod subconsciously when they beheld her. Her shape was unimpressive though. Even when she tried to stick out her
ass, it simply wouldn’t protrude, so she accepted that it would be flat forever. Her once-perky breasts, which never filled a C cup, were now shrunken and limp like deflated, miniature balloons. Standing five foot ten, she towered over her girlfriends and stared awkwardly at men. Her short natural, which she wore long before it became fashionable, sat atop her head like a black crescent moon. Yet, even with these foibles, everyone agreed that she was definitely prettier than her other two sisters. On an ordinary day.
But this was no ordinary day. Henrietta wondered, in fact, if she’d even recognize her own reflection in a mirror. She felt her facial features shifting, as if Emma Jean’s proposal sought to distort her very flesh. Tenderly and frightfully, she touched her cheeks, nose, forehead, mouth, just to make sure they were still there, and pressed her way home. Everything stable enough to bear her weight she grabbed along the way—saplings, fence posts, road signs—until she was sure Mother Nature marveled at the strangeness of her behavior. At one point, she wilted against a young maple tree and wailed as though giving birth again. Yet fearful that someone might come along and inquire as to her state, she quickly composed herself, lifted her dress tail, and fumbled the rest of the way home.
The worst part about it, she thought, flinging open her front door and tossing her bag onto the sofa, was that Emma Jean really didn’t know the truth. Not the
full
truth. She certainly knew too much, but she didn’t know everything, and for that Henrietta was grateful. Emma Jean knew that Henrietta and Louise were pregnant at the same time—everyone knew that—but no one knew that Henrietta’s baby was stillborn. No one except her husband and Louise, who helped her deliver. Too devastated to face reality, she asked them not to say anything. Not right away. So they didn’t. She lay in bed for two days, with the dead baby pressed against her bosom, sulking and asking God why, knowing in her heart that, at her age, she’d never conceive again. Then when Louise went into labor on the third day, she rose and helped her deliver a beautiful, healthy baby girl. But there were complications that Henrietta hadn’t expected. When Louise died, Henrietta knew exactly what to do. She laid her own dead daughter next to her dead sister on the cooling board behind Preacher Man’s house and told him that his wife and baby had both died. She had done all she could do. Preacher Man was sad, but he wasn’t devastated, and that’s what confirmed for Henrietta the rightness of her decision. Her strength returned and, overnight, she was back to her old self again. No one knew anything. Or so she thought. Henrietta saw the hand of God
orchestrating things, and she gave thanks. There was a problem, however. Her husband wouldn’t sanction the plan—not at first—so Henrietta convinced him to let her breast-feed the child for a while, just to make sure it survived, then promised to give it back without a fight. Feeling sorry for Henrietta’s loss, her husband reluctantly agreed. Someone needed to care for the child, he thought, and Preacher Man certainly couldn’t do it alone. He didn’t even have a wife anymore! So maybe Henrietta was right. She should keep the baby for a spell, just to make sure the child survived.
I bet Emma Jean don’t know that!
Henrietta smirked.
After two weeks, Tom told Henrietta that enough was enough. The child couldn’t stay any longer. So Henrietta bundled the baby, and together they went to return the child to its rightful home. But Preacher Man wasn’t there. Tom looked in the front window and noticed that everything was gone. Everything. They scoured the community for information as to his whereabouts, but no one knew anything. There were no relatives to approach or to hand the child to, since Preacher Man had migrated from somewhere out West, so Tom and Henrietta took the baby back home and decided to raise her as their own, at least until Preacher Man returned.
And he did return—with a bride—five years later. By then, Tom had died from a heart attack and Henrietta had become far too attached to Trish to let her go. She contemplated telling Preacher Man, having promised Tom she would, but after losing everyone she’d ever loved, she simply couldn’t. Whenever she saw him and Georgia, who returned to Swamp Creek to take care of her mother, Henrietta smiled apologetically. Too much time had transpired to fix things. She simply couldn’t undo what she’d done, so she left things as they were. Once she learned the woman was barren, she fell to her knees and begged God for forgiveness. That was the difference, as she saw it, between herself and Emma Jean. She’d wanted to fix what she’d done, had even gone to Preacher Man’s house to do so, but he’d disappeared. Once he returned, it was too late. That wasn’t her fault, right? She wasn’t evil like Emma Jean. She had saved a life. Emma Jean was destroying one.