Feather Crowns Read online

“Stop that,” said Alma, slapping Jewell. “This ain’t no time for such foolishness. Get on out of here.”

  “Wait,” said Christie. “Come here and give me a kiss.”

  She hugged each one of her children till they squirmed. Then, as Amanda whirled them away, the pain came again—a wave like the long, growling thunder that sometimes rolled through a summer sky from end to end. She was washed with pain, but she didn’t feel how deep it went because she was seeing her children’s faces go out the back door, one by one.

  2

  IT HAD BEEN A HARD WINTER, THE COLDEST IN CHRISTIE’S MEMORY. It was too cold for the roosters to crow. Alma beat icicles off the bushes, and the children collected the large ones for the springhouse. When the men stripped tobacco out in the barn, their hands were nearly frost-bitten. The winter wheat was frosted like lace, and the ponds and the creek were frozen solid. Some of the children went sliding across the pond on chairs. Christie couldn’t see their fun from the house, but she recalled chair-sliding when she and James were courting back in Dundee and her father’s pond froze over. James pushed her hard and fast, and she flew freely across to the other side, laughing loud and wild. That was the only time in her life the pond had frozen solid enough to slide on, but this winter James reported that six cows were standing on Wad’s pond.

  Amanda had told everybody it would be a hard winter. The persimmons said so, she believed. She broke open persimmon seeds for the children. Inside each one was a little white thing, the germ of the seed. Amanda said, “Look at that little tiny fork. That means a hard, hard winter’s a-coming! If it was drawn like a spoon, it would be a sign of mild weather; and if it was a knife, it would mean a lot of frost, but not too thick for the knife to cut. But the fork is the worst.”

  When James and the boys stripped tobacco, Alma had to wash their smoke-saturated clothes. Christie gazed outside helplessly at the bare black trees, the occasional birds huddling inside their fluffed feathers, and the cows chomping hay beside Wad’s barn, making a picture of color against the dusting of snow that had come overnight. Wad’s mercury had gone down to naught on ten different nights that January and February. A snow in early January, after the ice storm, lasted till the end of the month. None of the farmers around had ever seen such weather—but then they always said that, Christie noticed. They’d never seen it so warm, or so cold, or so changeable, or so much rain to follow a cold spell. This year, everybody said the cold winter had something to do with the earthquake that had been predicted for New Year’s.

  Livestock froze: a cow who freshened too early; then her calf, stranded across the creek; then another cow who was old and stayed out in the storm. Wad and James worked to repair the barn so they could keep the cows in at night. They spread hay for insulation, piling bales in front of some of the largest cracks in the walls. The breath of the cows warmed the barn like woodstoves. Christie felt like a cow inside her tent dress and under the layers of cover on the bed. Her bulk heated up the bed so much that many nights James thrashed himself awake. They couldn’t let the fireplace go cold—the children needed its warmth—but Christie felt as if she were carrying a bucket of hot coals inside her. In the past, she had been comfortable with pregnancy because of the privacy of it. It was her secret even after everyone knew. They didn’t really know the feeling—a delicious, private, tingly joy. The changes inside her body were hers alone. But this time the sloshing, the twinges, the sensation of blood rushing, the bloating, the veins in her legs popping out—all were so intense it was as if her body were turning into someone else’s. Walking from the stove to the dishpan—barely four steps—was a labored journey, her legs heavy like fence posts.

  As she grew larger, she felt as though she were trying to hide a barrel of molasses under her dress. She was used to sleeping on her back, but when she gained weight, lying like that seemed to exert enough pressure to cut off the flow of blood to the baby. When she sat, she couldn’t cross her legs. Her hip joint seemed loose, and it was painful to bend or stoop or turn her foot a certain way. The right leg seemed longer, and she walked in a side-to-side motion. She learned to minimize the painful motion, and her right leg grew stiff.

  At night, James stroked her belly so sensuously she feared the baby might be born with unwholesome thoughts. As the season wore on and she grew still heavier, she retreated from James and wouldn’t let him see her belly. She didn’t want him to see the deep-wrinkled, blind hollow of her navel turning inside out. It made her think of the apron strings she made by pushing a safety pin through a tunnel of material and reversing it so the seam was inside. He seemed proud and happy about the baby, but she didn’t think he would care to know that the baby was kicking—flutters and jabs inside. Men were afraid of babies. There was so much you didn’t tell a man; it was better to keep things a mystery. One night as she was falling asleep, she felt a sharp jolt, unmistakably a foot jamming the elastic of her womb. The kick was violent, as though the little half-formed being had just discovered it had feet and was trying to kick its way out.

  Sometimes a small event would soar through her heart on angel wings: the train going by, the frost flowers forming on the window light, flour sifting down onto the biscuit board, a blackbird sailing past the window in a line parallel to the train. For a moment, then, she thought she was the blackbird, or that she had painted the frost flowers herself, or that she was setting out carefree and young aboard the train. One day she heard a flock of geese and went outside bareheaded to watch them tack across the sky. The lead goose would go one way and the others would fall out of pattern, and then he would sway the other way and they would all follow, honking. The stragglers seemed to be the ones yelling the loudest. She felt like one of those stragglers, trying to keep up but finding the wayward directions irresistible. It wasn’t just her condition. She had always felt like that. She was hungry at odd times, and she would fix herself a biscuit—cold, with sorghum and a slice of onion. In the henhouse one day, gathering eggs, she leaned against the door facing, breathing in the deep, warm fumes. She cracked an egg against the door and slid the contents down her throat. Then she laughed, like somebody drunk. Several boys had been drunk and torn up some hitching posts on the main street in town not long ago, she had heard. She wondered what it was like to be drunk. It would probably mean laughing at the wrong times, which she did anyway.

  Back before she took to her bed, James had a spell of sleeplessness that made him drag for several days. A farmer couldn’t afford to lose sleep, and she blamed herself for waking him up when she got up in the night to use the pot. One Saturday just before Christmas, he had hardly slept all night. He made his weekly trip to town as usual, but he didn’t stay long. He came home and slept the rest of the morning. He had never done that in his life, he said, annoyed with himself.

  That was the day Mrs. Willy came visiting. Mrs. Willy, who lived by herself in a little white house, lost her husband in a buggy wreck soon after they married. She raised a daughter alone. Now she helped out women and sewed.

  “Come in, Mrs. Willy,” Christie called. “Clint, get Mrs. Willy a chair. Get her that mule-eared setting chair.” But she was in no frame of mind for company. She had ironing to do.

  Mrs. Willy stepped across the floor as tenderly as if she feared her weight would break a board, although she was slender and pigeonboned. Alma had remarked that Mrs. Willy hung around pregnant women like a starved dog around the kitchen door.

  She settled down in the chair Clint had pulled out from the back porch.

  “Go on out and see if you can help Papper,” Christie said to Clint. The other children were gathering hickory nuts with Amanda. James was in the barn rubbing down horse leather.

  “I’ve got a splinter,” Clint said, holding up his thumb.

  Christie felt her apron bib for a needle she kept there. Holding the boy by the daylight through the window, she picked at the splinter until it shot out. She kissed the dirty little finger.

  “I didn’t cry,” he said proudly.


  “Now go on. Papper needs you.”

  Clint slipped out the back door. Christie had been heating an iron on the stove. She spit on it now to test it. It hissed. She started ironing a shirt.

  “I need to do my arning,” Mrs. Willy said. She leaned toward Christie with hungry eyes. “What’s that baby up to in there today?”

  “Growing.” Christie didn’t want to talk about her pregnancy. She didn’t want to satisfy the woman’s curiosity.

  “And how’s your man holding up?”

  “He don’t sleep good,” said Christie, aiming her iron down a sleeve.

  “Witches might be bothering him.”

  “Witches?”

  “Here’s what you do,” said Mrs. Willy, untying the strings of her splint bonnet. “Make him sleep with a meal sifter over his face. When the witches come along they’ll have to pass back and forth through ever hole in that sifter, and by the time they get done he’ll have had enough sleep.”

  Christie laughed until she had to catch hold of her side.

  “Don’t you believe that?” asked Mrs. Willy. She was unsmiling, her face like a cut cabbage.

  “I can’t see James sleeping with a meal sifter on his face,” Christie said through her laughter. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want witches working in and out of a meal sifter so close to my face while I was sleeping. I’d rather be wide awake.”

  Christie felt her laughter shrink like a spring flower wilting, as Mrs. Willy retied her bonnet strings.

  “You’ve got to get used to waking up through the night,” Mrs. Willy said. “That’s the Lord’s way of getting you used to being up with the baby in the night.”

  “Does the Lord carry a meal sifter?” Christie asked.

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “Oh, sometimes I can’t tell witches from devils,” Christie said. “Reckon it was witches that made our mule go crazy last summer? And what about that swarm of bees that got after Wad one spring?” Christie paused to tighten a hairpin. She cast a glance at the ceiling. “And that he-cow that busted out of his stall last week? Witches?”

  “Christianna Wheeler!” said Mrs. Willy disapprovingly, realizing she was being mocked. “If you act ill towards people, that baby will have a ill disposition.”

  “I can handle any witches that get in my house,” said Christie, pushing her iron forcibly up the back of the shirt.

  “Well, Christie, when you went to camp meeting down yonder at Reelfoot, Alma said you got enough religion to get you through to your time. I hope so.”

  Christie didn’t want to think about Reelfoot. There was a lull, while the fire in their voices died down into embarrassment. Christie finished the shirt and lifted a sheet from the wash basket.

  Mrs. Willy said, “You need some new domestic. That sheet’s plumb full of holes.”

  “This sheet’s old. I’m aiming to tear it up into diapers.”

  Christie was glad when the woman left. She made Christie nervous, watching her iron and waiting for a crumb of personal detail. Christie wouldn’t tell Mrs. Willy about the particular sensations—the way the blood flowed, the way all those creatures turned somersets in her stomach, the way she jolted awake. One night she had awakened after dreaming that her little sister Susan was alive again. In the dream, Nannie had been tugging on her nipple, but Nannie was Susan. The rhythm of the sucking had words, like words to a song. One of Susan’s first words was moo-moo, her word for milk. Awake, Christie remembered the time her mother made a pinafore for Susan, starching the ruffles and working the fine lace. But the dogs tore it off of Susan, chewing it to tatters. Mama had worked on that pinafore for most of one winter.

  A few days after Mrs. Willy’s visit, James came in unexpectedly from the barn, slamming the kitchen door. He said, “I heard you was nasty to Mrs. Willy.”

  Christie was standing at the stove, stirring cream corn. “Mrs. Willy?” She turned away from James and reached for a bowl on the shelf. Her heart pounded.

  James said, “Her sister’s telling how you laughed at her and hurt her feelings.”

  Christie set the bowl on the table and dumped the corn in it. She said, “Some people like to talk.”

  For a second James’s face looked as hard as clay dirt baked in the sun. “We have to live with all kinds,” he said. “You can’t just laugh to a person’s face, Chrissie.”

  Christie bent her head down. She was conscious of her swollen breasts, her own, not his or anyone else’s. James had never talked to her like this.

  “When we moved here, we promised we was going to get along with everybody,” he said. “You remember that.”

  Christie nodded. She was tired. She put her hands on her stomach, and she felt it move. James rarely got upset with her. He usually turned everything into a joke, he was so easy.

  “Since you and Mandy went down to Reelfoot, it’s like you come back a different woman,” James said. “I don’t know what’s got into you, Christie. You’re making my heart ache.”

  She turned, and her skirt tugged against her middle.

  James’s face softened a little then. “That baby’s coming sooner than we thought,” he said, touching her stomach. He seemed shocked to realize her girth.

  In bed that night, Christie couldn’t get comfortable. She felt monstrously heavy, as if with the weight of opinion. When she got up to relieve herself, she took the pot into the kitchen and tried to hit the side to muffle the sound. Afterward, she reached inside the warming box of the stove for a chicken wing. She gnawed the chicken, then searched for a piece of liver, the grease congealed with the crust. In the dark, she nibbled like a mouse, as quietly as possible, chewing breathlessly. She felt better. She heard Nannie stir on the pallet.

  But the pregnancy dragged on, like the winter. Her mother couldn’t come from Dundee on account of her bronchitis. And Mama was afraid of the earthquake. Christie had to be helped back to her feet when she sat in her rocking chair. She was afraid of falling. She had to struggle up the steps to the porch. On New Year’s Day, she managed to cook field peas and turnip-greens-with-hog-jaws for good luck, but the cornbread burned. She hated being fat. She remembered an old woman in Dundee who told Christie’s mother, “I had a fat place to come on my leg, just like a tit.” The woman said, “The doctor mashed it up real good and then drawed that fat out through a little hole.”

  Christie fell asleep early at night, curving away from James. She couldn’t sleep comfortably in any position except on her side, with a knee pulled up to support her belly. She curled her body around the baby, holding it as closely as possible—hooked to it from heartbeat to heartbeat, her blood flowing into her child.

  3

  THE CONTRACTIONS WERE MORE FREQUENT. CHRISTIE LOST TRACK of who was there. James still hadn’t come with the doctor. Amanda had returned with an ax, which she had placed under the bed to cut the pain.

  “I had five younguns and didn’t need no ax,” said Alma.

  “We might need it,” said Christie. “To get the devils.” To distract herself from the pain, she was pulling at a sheet tied by one corner to the bedpost.

  “Why, Christie, you do have an imagination,” Hattie said, all smiles. Her wavy, gray hair framed her broad, gentle face.

  “Here, Mandy, take this rag and wash out that bucket,” Alma said to Amanda. “I’m going to scald it.”

  “James oughter be back by now,” Amanda said, holding the rag like a flower.

  “If you ask me, we can do without that doctor,” said Alma. “Doctors just want to get their eyes full.”

  “It’s going to be a mighty big baby, but we’ve got plenty of time,” said Hattie calmly. Her apron was so white it seemed to shout.

  “Chris, you better get up and walk some,” said Alma. “That baby ain’t gonna get out of there with you a-laying like that.”

  The talk went on around Christie, the sounds rising and falling senselessly, like the confusing messages of those preachers at Reelfoot. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t gone
to Reelfoot Lake that day back in the fall. Amanda had talked her into going to the brush-arbor meeting there. Afterward, Amanda had told her not to feel ashamed, to take it easy and let the easiness transfer to the baby. That was the sort of idea Amanda believed in. Amanda wouldn’t let a post or tree come between two people walking along together. She took black cats seriously. She believed every tale she had ever heard about snakes. She had believed intensely in the earthquake that had been predicted, and she still feared it might happen. When she and Christie came home from Reelfoot, Amanda had told her husband that they had been possessed by the spirit. “But in a good way,” she said. “It wasn’t the Devil—more like the Holy Ghost.”

  “What do you know about the Holy Ghost?” Wad had asked suspiciously.

  “I know he’s welcome in our house,” said Amanda. “That’s enough for me to know.”

  “You better leave the Holy Ghost where he belongs—at church,” said Wad.

  Now, opening her eyes a crack, Christie glimpsed Amanda’s vacant stare. Wispy hair stuck out in little feathers all around Amanda’s face.

  Christie pushed down on the bed with her elbows, trying to rise, but she was too heavy and she fell back against the bolster. She heard the pot of water boiling. She felt warm, wet rags between her legs. The clock pendulum swung insistently, loudly. She felt as though the rhythms inside her were trying to catch up to the clock’s. She saw a lantern light through the front window. James appeared, conferring with the women in low voices Christie couldn’t hear. Then he was standing over her, touching her steaming forehead. Was this the same man she had bounced around with long ago at a play-party in Dundee? The man who proposed marriage to her at another play-party, a year later?

  “The doctor’s on his way,” he said. His palm was sweaty.

  “I don’t want him to touch me again,” said Christie, pulling her hand out of James’s.

  “He can give you something to stop it from hurting so much.”