The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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      The people of Cotton County were distracted from Genus Jackson, and it was the twins who seized their attention. Through August, as the corn grew high in the fields and the next truckload of pickers showed up, people came to see the babies. They came from church and town and neighboring farms, bearing booties and blankets, biscuits and pies. Mary Minrath, the home supervisor who last fall had been sent from town to help with the canning, brought the peach cobbler that had taken honorable mention at the Cotton County fair. Bette Hazelton, the bank manager’s wife, brought a box of secondhand clothes she’d collected from the congregation at Florence Baptist. Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife and the president of the local chapter of the WCTU, brought two golden-edged, pocket-size Bibles. “Every child of God needs his own.” Even the chain gang that made its way down the road left a gift stuffed in the mailbox, a bouquet of blue hound’s tongue picked from the shoulder of the Straight. They came by cart and by foot and by automobile, Hoover wagons and two-wheeled jigs, feigning errands to the crossroads store, delivering news. Some clucked and cooed; some shook their heads. All of them prayed over the cradle. “Haven’t seen you in church, Elma,” said Josie Byrd, whose daddy owned the biggest peanut farm in the county. She was leaving for Emory, for nursing school, and she wore a new pair of leather shoes, white with white laces, so clean they hurt Elma’s eyes. “They got Mary Collier in your place in the choir, and pretty as she is, she sings like a gopher frog.”

      Elma said she’d be back in church when she was ready, when the twins were old enough to travel. And the women left with a knowing nod, sometimes a hand on Elma’s shoulder. “If I didn’t see them with my own eyes,” Josie’s mother whispered to Josie on their way out the door, “I’d say those babies came from two different wombs.”

      A week after delivering the cobbler, Mrs. Minrath returned in her starched apron, her leather ledger at her side, saying, “Those tomatoes in your garden aren’t going to can themselves.”

      Elma said she wouldn’t be needing any help this year, thank you kindly. “We got our hands full with the babies.”

      Mrs. Minrath pursed her flat lips. “Then it would seem you could use all the extra hands you could get. Especially in times like these. And without any womankind around.”

      “I got my Nan. She’s a plumb miraculous canner. We been canning since we was tall as the hem on your dress, Mrs. Minrath. Even without a book to write it all down in.”

      Mrs. Minrath looked around Elma and into the house, where Nan was holding Wilson. She shook her head. “Poor children,” she said, and turned and walked down the steps.

      People came to help, and Elma sent them away. It was true that she lost some tomatoes—her father let her tend the garden, but alone she couldn’t pick them fast enough. She canned what she could, and the peaches and berries too, and pickled the peppers and carrots, sweating over the stove. She ate the cobblers and biscuits and pies, hating every bite, but she was hungry, and so were the babies, and they were delicious, those wicked, wicked pies. She fed the chickens and the guineas and the hogs and the mules, trapping a high-pitched hum in her mouth, and milked the cows, April and June, Anna and Margaret, and separated the cream from their milk, saving the skim for the hogs. “It’s all they want us for, ain’t it, girls,” she said to the cows, tugging the full, furred mounds of their teats. “Milk, milk, and more milk.” When she was held up feeding the babies and couldn’t get out to the barn until dawn, their udders were engorged as globes, veined with rivers of ducts. “Ain’t it the worst, girls,” she said. When she was held up with her chores and forgot to feed the babies, her own milk would mess the front of her dress, and then there was no ignoring it. And then she’d pull the shutters and sit back in the rocker and settle a baby into her lap, or two if she could manage, closing her eyes and letting the ache ease, and then there was nothing in the world but the babies, no visitors, no reporters, only their billy goat mews and the buttermilk smell of their warm heads.

      One sunny morning at the height of summer, a truck pulled up in the dirt driveway and a woman with knee-high boots climbed out of it. Her short hair was yellow as a cornfield. Elma stood barefoot on the porch, fiddling with the pins that held up the great pile of her hair, as the woman made her way up the driveway and reached to shake her hand. Elma feared she was from the home demonstration club or the WCTU, on a mission to save her vegetables or her soul. The woman said, “I’m here to see the Gemini twins.”

      Elma let her hand fall, loose as a dishrag. “They’re not Gemini,” she said. “They’re just regular.”

      She was a dog breeder on her way to Florida, come all the way from Atlanta. Out of the wooden truck bed, where a dozen dogs yapped, she scooped up two Labrador puppies, one the color of butterscotch, the other oily black as a crow. “They’re called Castor and Pollux,” she said. “Every child needs its own dog.”

      Her father came in from the field and thanked her and the dogs jumped on him and he laughed. What was there to laugh about? Elma watched their pink tongues lapping at her СКАЧАТЬ