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The Valley and The Cross

David Bradley

    I didn’t want none of it. I didn’t choose none of it. But you get what you get. That’s what Mama said. You’re cast into the world, you live in the valley, and you die on the cross. There ain’t no sense thinking there was somewhere else for me. I had no choice. I was what I was and I did what I did and there weren’t no other way for me to go.
    Papa was a man. Nothing more and nothing less, Mama said. I can see him if I try, big, on a horse, his hat pushed back to show his black eyes and them chin whiskers. He had a hard hand at night. He was away plenty. He signed on as a hand and he laid rail when they’d have him and I suspect he had another woman.
    One day we were working the beans and Mama just said Papa didn’t come back. She never said she hoped he would. She just said he was gone, and went back to stripping them beans.
    Mama and Papa had come out from Kentucky and stopped when they couldn’t go no further. Like they’d wanted to go someplace and then they just stopped wanting it. There’d been a boy before me but he got a fever and died the winter before I was born when he was just three. Mama talked about that boy like she’d known him her whole life. I heard about that boy every day. There was a little stone for him down by the streambed.
    Then there was me. I was borned and I got a fever too. Mama said there was a night she knew I would die. Papa was away. She said the wolves were howling and the sky was filled with falling stars. Mama could tell a story. I lived and the wolves moved on. Papa left, and there were still stars in the sky. Boy got a fever and died and they put up a stone over him.
    Mama kept trying to have more babies after me. Three times, I guess, she was with before Papa was gone. But she couldn’t hold them long enough. I don’t know much about them. There was a whole flock of little stones down by the streambed.
    Mama was well along with another one when Papa left. She called it his final blessing but I never saw it that way. A blessing that made her sick all that summer long? That kept her off her feet all those final days? That left me to strip beans and boil beans for Mama and me by myself? That ain’t no blessing. That ain’t no good at all.
    I was a child then still, I guess. But I was strong and Mama had taught me. I fed her and washed her and when the baby come I did what Mama told me. How she knew what to do I don’t know. Maybe it comes naturally to a woman, when that moment comes. I don’t know nothing about that. It never happened to me. I hope to never see that again.
    Mama called that baby Maria after herself. That baby was never nothing but trouble. She cried and she cried and she cried until I run from the house screaming into the night. Mama said that’s the way babies was and that I had cried too. I didn’t remember that. I learned to live with the night air biting my skin and I learned to eat my beans cold, but I could not learn to love that baby. Some things just don’t fit.
    Mama loved on that baby like I knew she had loved on me before that baby came. I would watch Mama in the bed with that baby to her breast and I would hear the things she said to that baby. I knew even if I couldn’t remember it that that had once been mine. My job was to feed them and wash them and bring the bucket for Mama until she got her legs back. There was no time for Mama to love on me. That was gone now.
    Some nights I sat on the fence rail and watched for the falling stars and wanted for the wolves to return. But it was just me and Mama and that baby.
    Come spring the stream swelled and the new beans came up. We thought Mama was getting her legs back. But no. It was as if making that baby had cost her part of her own body, and she couldn’t grow it back. The more she tried the worse she was. Her legs withered away and then her mind seem to go with them. She lay in bed with that baby, crazy and blind and talking of Papa and Kentucky for three days and three nights and then in the morning she was dead.
    That baby cried all that day and all that night while I sat outside wondering what to do. It was cloudy and it rained and the wind blew unnatural and so I had no fire. But I wasn’t ready to go into the house. I knew that baby was cold and hungry, just like me. But I stayed outside.
    In the morning I took Mama from the bed. I dragged her out past the pens where we kept the animals when we had animals. I buried her the best I could, near the stream where the ground was soft. I covered her grave with rocks. I didn’t want the wolves to get her. I didn’t want her to come back.
    That baby cried, but different now. I had beans. But nothing for a baby. She cried in the bed and I stayed outside until I wanted to scream. The next night I buried her in the old outhouse pit.

    One time there was a big man set on a dark bey on the hill for hours. He was heavy and set slumped without moving much all that time. I could smell his smoking and that horse. The sun fell behind him and his shadow reached out for me. There was something hanging from his horn that I didn’t like much. Sometimes it seemed like he looked down at me, but I couldn’t see his face none. I watched him from under the pens until he rode on and it got dark. I ain’t never seen him since.

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