Pammie

Mom was pregnant again. I watched her through my bedroom window as she walked across the yard. I sat on the floor—a cobbled surface of remnant pieces of plyboard arranged like a scrap patchwork quilt—enjoying the cool of it against the back of my thighs and the bottom of my bare feet and watched her. She walked down the small incline with a basket full of dry clothes she had taken off the line, the white plastic, rectangular laundry basket perched on her slender hip. That’s the moment I knew. Months before she told us. Likely weeks before she told my dad. I dog-eared my page in the book I had been reading, placed it face down on the floor beside me, wrapped my arms around my knees and watched her. I couldn’t really make out her stomach in her loose-fitting, cotton button-up shirt, but still, I knew. Maybe it was the way she moved—how her steps were almost imperceptibly shorter, or the very slight shift of the basket so that her petite arms could reach the side to hold on to it.

This image of my momma has gently stepped through my mind many times in the past thirty or so years. In it, she is beautifully forty, long, wavy black hair piled on top of her head in a bun, the tanned skin of her face, neck and arms—the color of dried garden dirt—against the worn white fabric of the flowered top. I smell the earthiness of the firm purple-green dandelion stalks and weeds growing outside the window. It is early in the day and not yet summer, but there is an expectant, warm moisture in the air. Watching her adjust the basket on her hip and glance towards the house, I could sense but didn’t understand her desire for silence and secrets that morning.

While I don’t remember the rest of this day in time, I remember the weeks and months that followed. June and July and all their smothery days of crying cicadas, my siblings and I working in the garden and picking fat, ripe blackberries from the briars up on the top of the mountain made flat by strip mining. August and the promise of my sixth-grade year, pouring over the JC Penney sales paper planning what outfits I would choose if we could afford new school clothes. If. I liked to cut out the pieces from the junior miss section and imagine what I would wear. I’d spread the tiny paper pictures out on my floor and move them around to create different outfits.

School began that Fall, and we were arranged in the “areas” using our last name. I sat in classes with other kids in my grade, last names ending in A through D, and spent more time worrying about hairstyles and makeup than I did the rules of grammar or pre-algebra. I became enamored with a football player named Moose Decker, started sneaking around and putting on mascara in the back hall bathroom, and spent a lot of time thinking about life growing in my Mom’s stomach.

She didn’t see a doctor for the baby until around six months. It was my turn to go to town with her, and I sat in the lobby of the local health department while she explained to the front desk receptionist that she needed to see the doctor. The receptionist stared at Mom’s stomach, indignantly, and asked if she had been to another doctor for her pregnancy. My mom answered no, with no further explanation. My almost teenage mind took note of how she didn’t allow the lady to get the best of her, and I kept on listening. She signed her name on the clipboard, seeming to ignore the scowl of the receptionist, and walked over to sit down beside me on the hard plastic chair. She held her purse in her lap, and as I looked at the posters and signs on the walls advocating prenatal care, birth control and abstinence, a red flush crept up my neck and chest. I was glad when the three names above Mom’s were scratched off the list and it was her turn. I had only been to the health department for immunizations or our “school shots,” and being there with my pregnant mother made me a little nervous.

Dr. Sanderlin was an obstetrician in a neighboring town who did outreach work for our local health department in our small southeastern Kentucky town three days a week. While we waited, my mom told me how he had delivered all six of us. I whispered and asked if she had come to this same place every time with each of us. I wondered but didn't ask if she always waited so long to go to the doctor. She didn't answer, and I didn’t press her. I remember thinking that Dr. Sanderlin must be pretty old to still be doctoring pregnant women. My oldest brother Rick was 22, Jerry was 20, Mary 18, me almost 12, Dina 10, Jay 4...I was pondering what a very old Dr. Sanderlin must look like when the door opened.

Wearing a white coat, dress pants, and black lace-up shoes, he stepped out into the lobby and greeted Mom, a broad smile spreading across his face. “Pammie,” he said, looking down at her growing stomach, smiling. “Why have you waited so long to come see me?” Her name was Pam, and I had never heard anyone call her that, so I narrowed my eyes to look at him. He was probably in his sixties at that time, a short little man with a full head of gray hair and a face that looked open and quick to smile. She grinned as she stood to walk across the white tile floor to him. She waited until she got closer to him to speak, so I couldn’t hear her answer to his question. I watched as he gently placed his hand on her forearm, speaking to her in a matching quiet tone, and walked with her towards the “back.”

There were four posters on the walls, and I knew them well by the time she came back. Dr. Sanderlin walked her out and told the receptionist to set Mom up a time to come back in the next month “whenever it suited” Mom’s schedule. He smiled broadly, waved in my direction, and told me he had delivered me, too. I smiled back and quickly glanced down at the frayed laces of my worn tennis shoes. I wanted to leave that place, that room, those posters, this man who had seen me naked.

We walked to the truck in silence. I slid onto the cracked vinyl of the bench seat next to her and waited until she had put her purse down, worked the key into the ignition and we had pulled out of the parking lot, to ask questions. She had scooted the seat of my dad’s truck all the way up to reach the pedals and to be able to grasp the wheel across her growing stomach. Our car had stopped running two months prior, and even though Dad had spent evenings and weekends trying to fix it, he had finally decided it needed a fuel pump we couldn’t afford. “He’ll get to it when he can,” she liked to say...about cars, repairs on anything at home. My dad worked as a carpenter, logger, bricklayer and handyman, but you wouldn’t know the last part by looking at our small frame house. I perhaps resented this later in life, but from my dad’s lack of enthusiasm for doing, I learned the ability to make do with what I had. So many times in my life, I have used this lesson of make-do.

“What did the doctor say?” I asked, looking over at her belly first and then up to her face. It was late September, but the day was warm, and she rode with her window halfway down. I watched as the road wind picked strands of her dark hair from her low ponytail and caused them to brush across her cheek and neck. I wished again I looked like my mom instead of my dad and waited on her answer.

“He said everything was fine,” she said, glancing over at me, her eyes a light green on this day, the color of tulip bulbs just before they open—like they were when she was really happy and wasn’t tired—before looking back at the road.

“When’s it coming?” I asked, curious.

“He should be here in about two and a half months,” she said, not looking at me when she answered, stopping at the stop sign before turning onto the state highway leading out of town towards home.

“It’s a boy?” I asked. I had been hoping for a little girl. I had begun looking at that section of the JC Penney sales papers and imagining.

She smiled and looked over at me, “The doctor didn’t say that. It’s just what I feel.”

“So you are able to feel what it is?” This intrigued me, and I hoped she would answer. No answer. “Did you know I was a girl?” I pressed and waited for her response as she drove along the straight line of Highway 25 in our small, southeastern Kentucky town.

“I hoped,” she said, chuckling. She reached across the seat and held my hand in hers for a few seconds. She placed her hand back on the wheel, looked at the road, and I knew she wanted to be quiet for a minute. My mother found peace in moments of silence.

She hummed a bluegrass song, but otherwise, we drove in silence. I rolled my window down when we turned onto our road, Maple Creek Road. The evening was getting late. Gravel crunched under the roll of the tires. Mature, tall trees and woods surrounded us, and I enjoyed the sound of the frogs talking in the dark dampness of the woods and creek that ran alongside the road.

The next several weeks passed in a blur of staring at Moose Decker and more involved makeup applications until the mornings became frost-covered and cold. My sisters and baby brother, Jay, and I walked down the long driveway to catch the school bus. I remember warm heaters blowing at my feet. Hearts drawn in the cloud made by the steam of my breath against the bus window. I wrote mine + Moose’s initials inside before rubbing it off with the end of my coat sleeve. Several times. I spent a lot of time on that school bus. We were the second stop to get on the bus and the next to last to get off the bus. We lived in a very remote, rural area—our farm was the only one within seven miles. My mamaw and Aunt Faye lived across the farm, and my mom’s oldest brother, James, and his wife, Geraldine, lived about half a mile down the road.

Mom’s “expected DOD,” or date of delivery, on the half sheet of paper the receptionist had grudgingly given her at the health department was December 5. However, she went into labor the day before Thanksgiving break that year. This happened while we were at school and my dad was at work. The bus driver let us off the bus that evening. It was cold, and I was hungry, so I hurried my little brother Jay up the driveway, asking him if he wanted to skip with me. Jay was forever talking and taking his time. Back sack bigger than he was, hanging low on his back, he held a craft turkey he had made for Mom in his preschool class that day, using a white paper plate and colored feathers. He was carrying it so as not to ruffle it and refused to let go of it, so I held on to the other hand and dragged him along.

I knew something was wrong when I entered the house. The front room was normally warm since the wood burner sat in the corner of the living room. Jay and I had entered first, and I looked back in worry at my older sister, Mary, as I quickly noted the cold of the house, the absence of smell and sound.

Mary pushed past us into the house and called out for Mom. No answer. “Something is wrong,” she said, casting worried looks back at me, Dina, and Jay. Mary told me to check the stove and keep Dina and Jay in the living room and to not let them take their coats off. I sat them down on the couch and walked over to the stove to check if the fire was still burning. Seeing the red coals still smoldering in the bottom, I grabbed several small pieces of kindling out of the metal bucket and placed them in the fire, using the iron poker to stir the red-orange embers, and the flame picked up after a few minutes. I had just shut the iron door when Mary came back into the room.

“Go,” she said, her expression worried. It looked as if she were going to cry.

“Go where?” I asked. She stood in the doorway separating the living room from the rest of the house, and I tried to look beyond her to get a sense of what was wrong.

“Run to Geraldine’s,” she said, her voice raising, her eyes shiny with tears as she looked at me before looking back at Dina and Jay, still sitting on the couch in their puffy coats, Jay still holding the paper plate turkey, two sets of big brown eyes going back and forth between Mary and me talking. She took a deep breath and spoke to me again as I remained planted to my spot on the linoleum-covered floor.

“You gotta go. Tell Geraldine she has gone into labor sometime in the day.” Mary’s voice was nervous.

“Where is she?” I wanted to know, looking towards the back of the house. I knew she didn’t have a car to drive herself anywhere and that our phone had been disconnected for not paying the bill last month, but I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t try to walk down to Mamaw’s. She seemed fine when we left home that morning.  

“Just go,” Mary pointedly told me. “Go now...and run through the field. Don’t waste time getting on the road.”

I let the screen door slam behind me as I bounded down the front porch steps, dodging the bad side of the board on the bottom step. I hit the hard ground, headed straight through the front yard, ran through the field of dead hay and grass, and kept on running when my shoes hit the mud and sog of the field as I neared the creek. I quickly navigated my way to the narrow part where Dina and I crossed to play with our cousins. Dina was the athlete of our group, not me, and I was out of breath by the time I made it to Geraldine’s screen door, which I opened so I could rap on the front door.

Geraldine came to the door, a puzzled look on her face. She had obviously just gotten home from work, the top of her permed hair disheveled, long on the top, cut very short in the back. She was still wearing her work smock. She worked at the local sewing factory at a time when the majority of local women didn’t work outside the home. She was a full-figured woman, always trying out different diets to lose weight, and wore those Playtex Cross Your Heart bras that made her very large breasts come to an accentuated point, which commanded attention when you looked at her. She was outspoken and opinionated. In short, she was my mother’s opposite.

“What is it?” She asked me, her forehead lined in a frown.

I bent at my waist to catch my breath, gulping in deep draws of air before I could speak.

“Mary said Mom is in labor.” I gulped in deep breaths of air.

“When?” Her eyes darted side to side, seeming to search my face for more information.

“I don’t know. When we came home, the house was cold and Mary had to go find her.”

She grabbed her coat from the peg by the door and barged past me to go to her car.

“Come on,” she said. “Get in the car.” I opened the passenger door and got in without question.

“I don’t know why she does this,” she said.

“Does what?” I asked, wondering if she, like everyone else, had an opinion about my mom “keeping on having more babies.”

Geraldine did not answer and just drove faster. She hit every possible pothole in the gravel road between their house and ours. She pulled up in our driveway, slammed the car in park, and quickly opened the door. She ran up the stairs onto the porch, and I ran trying to keep up with her. The door slammed behind her, in my face. I opened the door and saw Dina and Jay were still sitting on the couch, the paper turkey still in Jay’s little hand. Geraldine walked directly back to the back of the house, to my parent’s bedroom, and I heard her voice raised as she talked to Mary. I sat down beside Dina and Jay, still trying to make my breathing normal, and waited.

A few minutes later, Mary and Geraldine came through the house with Mom. Mary stood on one side, Geraldine on the other, helping her walk. Each held on to her by either arm, and they moved slowly. Mom’s hair was undone, and she wasn’t wearing shoes. She looked over at us and smiled weakly. Jay jumped up and ran over to give her the paper turkey he had made for her. Geraldine put her hand out to stop him from touching Mom, but Mom stopped in the middle of the living room floor, disentangled her right arm from Geraldine’s, and took the turkey from Jay, rubbing his cheek with the back of her hand and smiling down at him. “I’ll take it with me,” she told him. “I’ve got to go to the doctor for the baby right now.” Geraldine wrapped her arm back around Mom’s urging her on.

“We’ve got to go, Pam.”

Mom looked at us and said, “You all are going to go down to Mamaw’s and see Aunt Faye until your Dad gets home from work.”

“I’ll take them, Mom,” Mary said, still holding on to Mom’s left arm.

Then, the three of them slowly resumed their walk across the floor. I watched the shuffle of her small feet, the way her shoulders slumped forward before being drawn back up by Geraldine and Mary as she struggled to take the next step. I saw moisture and blood on the back of her pants, the red-brown borders of it bleeding onto her thighs and ending near her knees. I held Jay’s hand and tried not to cry as they finally got to the door. Mary closed the door behind them, and I heard Geraldine’s car start a minute later. I waited until I heard the car turn out of our driveway onto our gravel road before going to the door to look for Mary. She was standing on the porch, wiping her face with her hands.                    

“Is she going to be okay?” I asked, searching her face and expression.

“Yeah,” she said. “She’ll be okay.” She took a deep breath, dropped her hands to her side, lifted her chin, straightened her face and shoulders, and said, “Let’s get them and go to Mamaw’s. This house is cold.”

I wondered if she was lying as I turned to go back in the house to get Jay.

*

The baby was born nine minutes after Geraldine rammed the gear shift into park in front of the Corbin Hospital. We lived about forty minutes from the hospital, “normal driving,” my mamaw said. Geraldine called Mamaw about an hour after they had pulled out of our driveway to tell us that the baby was born, and he and Mom were okay. Ten pounds, eleven ounces. “Almost waited too long,” Mamaw said. “Too big for her to be having him.” Mamaw spoke into the phone as we watched quietly from the dinner table. She didn’t say much more, but I wouldn’t have expected her to. Geraldine was known for putting Mamaw in her place. Faye had fixed us dinner. We sat, elbows off the table and mouths shut, while we chewed.

“Are they okay?” Faye asked. She sat next to me, her hand resting on the chair rail behind me, the nearness of her comforting in some way.

“Yeah,” Mamaw said, putting the phone receiver back into the phone base mounted to the skinny wall between the kitchen and dining room. “Hopefully this is the last,” she said, letting out a long show of breath like she did when she was frustrated.

“I’m glad she is okay,” Faye said. She smoothed the tablecloth in front of her.

“When will she be home?” Dina asked.

“Few days,” Faye said. “Finish your plate, and maybe we’ll have time to trim your bangs before your Dad gets home.” She tucked long strands of my hair behind my ear.

“Wonder what his name will be,” Dina said.

“Something simple,” Mary answered. And she was right.

*

Glen, no middle name, Davis, came home four days later, our little momma in tow, walking a different slow than before she went to the hospital—not the slow caused by the extra weight or heaviness in her middle. This slow was an empty slow, a be careful slow, a hurt slow. Faye told me her hips would be sore for a while. Mary said it was her butt and talked about stitches. Whatever the case, I understood she was sore.

Mom went on, though, and the next day was cooking dinner when we came home from school, Glen in a bassinet Dad had made three kids ago, which she had moved into the kitchen as if nothing had happened. She moved a little slower and didn’t sit square on her bottom but rather bent her right leg and hooked her ankle under the left side of her hip, taking her time getting down into the chair and getting up again. There was no maternity leave, no rest. Only the next day, the next meal, the next baby bottle, the next diaper, the next load of laundry, the next dinner, the next bill, the next runny nose, the next skinned knee. I didn’t understand just how much she put others before herself until I was grown, two days postpartum, slowly moving around my own house like the walking wounded.

Glen didn’t talk or walk early. In fact, most of us had begun to wonder if he would talk and walk. He was a gentle, quiet baby, with big green eyes that looked at you full of longing and laughter, inconsistent with his refusal to cry or speak. He scooted around on his bottom, using one bent leg and hand to propel his tiny chubby body across the floor, lifting little arms high when he wanted to be picked up and held.

“When’s he gonna talk?” I asked Mom.

“When he’s ready,” she said.

“When’s he gonna walk?” I went on.

She chuckled and said, “When he’s ready.” And with that, she bent and kissed him on the top of his blonde head—the only part of him that didn’t look like her—and I remember the way his baby hands reached up to hold both sides of her face. I suppose they did not need words.

But, sure enough, Glen did talk and walk around fifteen months old. He was sitting on the living room floor, playing with one of those multi-colored stacking ring sets that looked like a puffy pyramid, when the yellow ring got away from him and rolled over to the other side of the room. He scooted over to the coffee table, placed his hands on the edge, pulled himself up, and took off walking towards the yellow ring. No wobbly first tries. No falls after a couple of steps. He simply walked slowly and carefully and picked up his yellow ring before plopping down on his bottom, scooting back across the floor.

Two days later, he said “momma” for the first time. Mom laughed out loud and hugged his body, holding him tightly against her. Then it was “daddy” and “sissy.” Pretty soon, he was saying whatever he wanted to say, going wherever he wanted to go, but never straying far from Mom, quietly playing on the floor next to her feet, staring up at her with eyes identical to her own. So many days, for the next four years, this is where we found them when we came home from school or in from outside working in the garden or doing our chores. Not many words between them, her humming, him playing, seeming to only want to be near each other.

Though I never spoke of it, I had believed Mom loved Glen more than the rest of us, and that some new part of her mourned when Glen became old enough to have to go to school. On his first day, she stood at the bus stop with us, something she didn’t normally do, his hand in hers, telling him what a good day he was going to have and how much fun it would be to play at recess. True to form, and just like her, Glen didn’t cry, fuss, or complain. Dina and I helped him up onto the bus. He sat in the seat in his best blue jeans, his new white tennis shoes double knotted but not touching the bus floor, waving at her, his little face, tanned by the summer sun, pressed against the window.

I can still see her standing on the road as the bus pulled away, smiling and waving until he couldn’t see her anymore. Then I looked back over my shoulder, and there she stood—arms crossed in front of her body, hands wrapped around her middle, crying as the bus drove on.

It wasn’t until I had my own children that I understood that she didn’t love Glen more, just differently. Until I was a mother, I couldn’t conceive how much sorrow and worry there is in having to share them with the world.

It was many years before I understood how she felt, standing there on the lonely country road, watching the school bus pull away, hugging herself, letting go yet again, once more trying to soothe away all that sad and empty.