Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

And who was I to say any different?

She was coming and I couldn’t stop her. I wasn’t about to try. I lay in the darkness of our room and didn’t make a sound. The pinch was sharp at my back, my stomach a stone. The air felt restless and no end to it, save it was hushed like the inside of a box. Already I could imagine the curl of her hand in mine, her fingernails that would need trimming, and a thread of hair on her crown. A new little girl, just like that. As if I had done something to deserve her, and I wished I had.

“Charlotte,” I called. She woke on the pillow next to me with those springs of hair in her eyes. When the light shone through the windows, I felt another one, sharper this time, with a twist in my insides. Charlotte took my hand.

We waited until the sun rose higher on the windows, the pains faster and the sheets hot to the touch. In the chair next to me, Charlotte worried herself into silence. By the door, Mrs. Keyes had abandoned the knitting in her lap. “At least it’s a Sunday,” she sighed. “We won’t have those factories blaring at us.” The alley outside was quiet as a church, the house too, the other girls still asleep. If it hadn’t been for babies, I might have thought the three of us the last in the good wide world. If we spoke, something terrible would surely come of it. When the door finally opened, Mrs. Keyes dropped her head. “Thank heaven,” she said and crossed herself. “The woman’s here. We’ll survive the day.”

“Hold on, dearie,” the midwife said as she bustled in. She was a small woman with a graying bun and round cheeks, but her hands were frighteningly quick. She dropped her bag and tapped Mrs. Keyes on the shoulder. “Get two bowls of hot water and a knife. Plenty of towels. And be sure that water’s clean. The knife with it.” Hurrying out, Mrs. Keyes opened her mouth as if she might cry. The woman winked at Charlotte and touched her hands to my stomach. “Nice and low,” she crooned. “You shouldn’t be much time at all.” She washed at the sink and sat at the foot of the bed, pressing open my knees. “You’ll feel my hand.”

I winced.

The woman whistled. “She’s upside down, that’s the trouble. I’ll have to turn her.” She cocked her head. “You’re a young one, aren’t you? But that will be all right. Young ones have strength more than the old mothers. You might just have to bite your tongue a bit.”

I knotted the sheet between my fingers. Charlotte sat with me on the bed, the bed far too narrow now and stiff at my back. When Mrs. Keyes returned, the other girls were awake in the hall, crowding together with their whispers. “You leave her alone, you hear me,” Mrs. Keyes scolded them. “Myrle’s got enough problems without you bumbling about.” She fastened the lock and checked it twice.

“Here we go.” The midwife reached under the sheet. “You try telling her to come out. Think on that.” Charlotte’s face shone. “Go on, Myrle,” she said. “You yell all you want.” But I couldn’t catch my breath. The bed felt higher, the light from the windows streaming, and a pain tore through my insides to the back of my throat. “She’s a mischief,” the midwife swore, shaking her head. I wondered if telling her to come would do any good. What had Mother said? It’s a fine thing to be born, but it’s none too comfortable. Fine things go like that . But what did Mother know of comfort or finer things, when dirt clung to our house and even our gaslights left their smoky stains. I could see them flickering, high on the wall, and a flood of heat rushed between my legs. The midwife stood back. “My goodness,” Mrs. Keyes said. There she was, my little girl. She was blood-thin and purple, a helpless bundle on a sheet. The midwife slapped her stomach and she cried out. “That’s right.” The midwife smiled. “Mrs. Keyes, you take her. We have some doing here.” The woman drew out a needle and thread and a blackened bottle of whisky from her bag.

“Myrle, she’s here,” Charlotte said. “Look who she is.”

“The lungs of an ox, I should say.” Mrs. Keyes held the baby close so I could see her all at once. Her eyes were full, her hair pale as thistles.

“What should we call her?” Charlotte asked. “Helen?”

“Or Ruth,” Mrs. Keyes said.

“What about Rose?” Charlotte asked.

“That’s not a name,” Mrs. Keyes said. “That’s a flower. This one’s a bona fide girl.”

They waited for me, but I couldn’t think. All the names I had imagined before, now they seemed less.

“You’ll feel this one,” the midwife said. A sharp prick and the light from the windows was high and white and flooded the place. I heard a wail, as clear as a bird and rising — the girl was a beauty with her noise. “Greta, that’s a name for her,” I said, letting my eyes close. “After Mother. Even Esther would like that.” “Watch her now. She’s going,” the midwife called. “Myrle?” Charlotte asked. But it was the noise I wanted. It faded off now into the far corner of the room and the room with it — a noise I knew as well as my mother’s voice, and I had always known it. There’s more to you than they think , Mother had said. Just looking at you, I can see it. Ten, twenty years to come. Just you wait .

Twenty years , Mother said. But it took longer than she could have guessed. I remember sleeping on Agnes’ porch with my sisters in the summertime, hours after the house had gone to bed. Through the screens, the cicadas hummed— zikaden , Mother called them. They sang the most when we were milking, at the end of the day and in the early mornings before we started our chores. Once we finished them, Mother would walk us to the river. “Look,” she’d say, plucking a cicada off a leaf. She cupped it in her hand. They were ugly things — bright with circles of green, yellow, and black. Agnes stepped away and Esther made a face, but Mother curled her fingers around the insect as if something precious. “These nest only a few winters,” she said. “But others burrow underground for more than seventeen years. When they come out, they are everywhere underfoot. And the way they sing, you can’t hear your own voice. But after a few months, they are gone again. They leave only their shells.” Mother waved her hand one way and another to show us. “Shells on every tree trunk and fence post.” She blew on the cicada’s back and it drew out its wings. Like glass, those wings — veined and thin, and the cicada didn’t look so ugly then. I asked Mother if I could hold it, and she let it walk into my hand. When I tried the sound zikaden on my tongue, the creature thrummed against my skin. I blew on it the way Mother had done, its wings spreading. “Can you imagine?” Mother said. “After seventeen years, the world would be a very different place.”

Those days, Mother brought us to the river whenever she wanted to tell us the names of things. “Spruce,” she said. Fichte . “Nettles.” Nessel . And Elster . “For the noisy magpie. That’s what we named you for, Esther,” Mother said. “And what a good name it was.” Esther’s cheeks grew dark. The next morning, Mother asked us to remember what she’d taught. Agnes always could, but Esther couldn’t, and I for one didn’t understand how something might have two names at once. Mother wouldn’t give up on us, and soon the whole world and every leaf and twig had at least two names to call it by. Only in the year before the war did Mother stop her lessons. “Quiet,” she’d say. “You keep those words in your mouth.” Later when she took to her bed, we found her looking out her window as if she could see the shadows of every named thing now and forever in the paint peeling from the barn.