The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t flinch. “You ain’t spent much time near Catholics, have you?”

      “Can’t say I have.”

      “You know your time of the month, don’t you?”

      “I don’t bleed anymore, not while my milk is in.”

      “Well, you count it. Just before or just after your time is the safest. It’s the time in the middle you worry about.”

      Elma nodded, though she didn’t quite understand.

      “Good thing about my time of the month is that it’s my time, not Jim’s. He might be the one getting caught, come Christmas.”

      Now Elma laughed. She smoothed her apron. “A letter came from Atlanta.” She slipped it out of her pocket. “Some doctor at Emory University wants to study on the babies.”

      “Study on them? What for?” Sara reached for the letter and lowered herself into a chair.

      “He wants to see how come twins can have two daddies, I guess. I ain’t gone let him, though.”

      “Why not?” Sara didn’t look up from the letter.

      Elma sat on her hands. Could doctors really tell if two babies were twins? Could they even tell if they were brother and sister? She said, “I don’t want my babies poked and prodded. I don’t want them in a medical journal. They ain’t specimens!”

      “But he says he’ll pay. Times are hard!”

      “How do I know he’ll pay? How do I know I won’t get there and they’ll take the babies away?”

      Sara snorted. “Elma, Emory University is a respectable institution. They’re not going to take your babies. Tell them your terms.”

      Elma shivered at the word. Her “terms.” Yes, she had set terms before—she had set terms with her father. That was the word for it, wasn’t it?

      “Tell them what you demand in order to cooperate with their study. Atlanta’s all the go! Have you ever been?”

      Elma shook her head.

      “Well, it’s bigger than a bread basket, let me tell you. The men aren’t bad to look at, either. Oh, you’re going to love it! You can take our electric!”

      “I don’t know how to drive. Well, I know a little.”

      “I’ll teach you!”

      “Sara, I can’t. I’m much obliged, but I can’t leave. Daddy would never let me, for one.”

      “He sure keeps you down on the farm, doesn’t he?”

      Elma took another bite. For a moment a dry cake of panic lodged in her throat. What did Sara know about her father? About Nan? Was Elma the last person to know what was happening in her own house?

      “I don’t mean nothing by it,” Sara said.

      Elma could see that she didn’t. She swallowed. The rain was lightening up on the roof. She had a flash of herself, like a remembered dream, flying through Atlanta on a streetcar, holding her hat tight to her head. If her father could leave the farm, if her father could go to the city and be someone else, why couldn’t she? She had told him her terms before. She would set her own terms now.

      She said, “How’d you get your hands on that electric, anyway?”

      Sara smiled around a mouthful. “You can get your hands on just about anything if you’re clever enough.”

      “You stole it?”

      “It’s on loan from my uncle up in Buffalo. He used to like to kiss me with his tongue. I figure he had it coming. First he lost the car, then he lost everything else in the crash.”

      Now the hoecake sat like a stone in Elma’s stomach. To Nan, her father used to call himself that, an uncle, just like she’d called Nan’s father Uncle Sterling. “Come on and hug Uncle Juke’s neck. Come on and give Uncle Juke some sugar.” Then he stopped. Was that when it had started up, with Nan?

      Her mind fell upon something. She closed her eyes and followed the branches of the tree. If her daddy was Wilson’s daddy, then Wilson was not Winna’s brother but her uncle. The only person he was brother to was Elma.

      So if the doctors discovered the babies were kin, well, that was because they were.

      Sara was still talking about the car. “Wasn’t all I took. All that good cloth doesn’t come cheap.”

      Elma sat up. “You stole that too?”

      “Do you know how much the dress factory pays? I prefer to call it ‘souvenir harvesting.’”

      “Harvesting!” Elma swatted Sara’s arm. “Well, lucky for us, we got nothing for you to harvest. Nothing but a handful of cotton.”

      “Just watch out. I might take me a souvenir baby.”

      Elma laughed. Her ears listened for the babies, but all she heard was rain. She knew she should go to them, but she felt frozen in place. Nan was there. Her father wasn’t. Let Nan listen for them. That was what Nan wanted, wasn’t it? Same as Elma. To be mothers to their children. To share them, even! But to be mothers with their whole selves, not to be split into fractions. She allowed herself to imagine it: Nan and Elma living in the big house with Wilson and Winna. Her father gone from the farm. Not gone from the world, like Genus. Just disappeared, like Freddie. Gone! Sara would be there too. In the shack, making dolls for the babies. After doing the doctor’s study in Atlanta, maybe they’d have a little money to live on.

      Then, still laughing, she felt the air go out of her lungs. She looked sideways at Sara, thinking how strange it was that you never really knew anyone, that no matter how much your heart warmed to a stranger, she’d always be a stranger to you. She caught her breath. She was dizzy with fear and envy, certain of some unavoidable loss. It wasn’t just her children she feared losing. Harvest was nearly over. Sara and Jim never stayed anywhere long. Soon they’d be gone, their automobile with them.

      After their meal, when the rain had quieted to a lazy drizzle, Sara and Elma raised the windows and hung their heads outside. The guineas had come out again, honking nervously through the yard, through the coal black ash of the old shack they liked to nest in. High above the sorghum, a purple martin emerged from a gourd. “That’s a funny scarecrow,” Sara said, pointing. “Instead of scaring the birds away, it gives them shelter.”

      “We like those birds,” said Elma. “They catch the skeeters.”

      “I’ll tell you something, Elma. They do no such thing.”

      Elma studied the gourd tree. Someone—her father?—had removed the length of rope, or it had been blown down in the storm. Looking at it with Sara beside her, it was almost just a gourd tree. “Maybe it’s an old wives’ tale.”

      “You Southerners have peculiar ways of keeping some in and others out.”

      A lock of Elma’s hair had fallen. She took a pin from her bun and СКАЧАТЬ