“Well I—” Connie stood. A short pause with her fingers fluttered before her. Then said, “Gabbing like old geese. There’s work waiting.” Shot her eyes at Leah: sympathy and outrage, the hurt of a child cut free of a game. Then went into the entryway mudroom and deployed herself with deadly silence, getting into boots and winter wraps and went out, letting in a waft of chill air. Marthe seemed to wait for the chill to lose itself into the warmth of the house and then scraped back her chair, staying down in it but pushing out from the table. She said, “Stand, you.”

Leah raised herself using both hands on the arms of her chair. Upright she faced the old woman: gray greased hair worn loose onto her shoulders, her face lined and charred to a texture of dried root, her nose a small smudge of lumped flesh set beneath great black eyes. Her mouth drooped and chapped to a rough red flake. Leah saw that as a young woman she had not been pretty but beautiful. Did not wonder what had caused her to join life with the half-wild man in the half-wild outward reach of the small gore. Anymore than she would explain herself and Norman. Marthe studied her midsection and then raised a hand, extended it open to its full reach before closing it upon itself and drawing it back toward her. As if bringing something in. She said, “Step close.”

Leah stepped to stand over her, breathing the aroma no different from the tang of fresh-turned soil or the ammoniac of manure or the bronzed bolt of Norman’s armpits the end of a summer day, smells all rending of her childhood and carried forward as if the movement of life itself, and Marthe reached and unbuttoned her dress from below her weighted breasts to her pubic arch, the belly moving outward easily as the fabric slid back against the protrusion, the navel distended. Marthe placed her hands on the abdomen and ran them over it slowly, moving from the center out to the sides and then back in again, a gentle round motion that touched deeper than it felt. Leah stood looking down at the grimed hands seeming to feel and draw something from beneath her own skin. Kneading as if the oldest most fragile loaf in the world. Wordless, worldless. Just hands and the belly under them. Going back once to where there was a slight movement, her hand again not probing but reaching somehow deep under the skin. Just a whisper she said, “Right foot.” Then reached up and opened the top of the dress so the swollen breasts were freed and took each in a hand and held them, weighing them or just letting their weight fall into her hands. Then ran her hands down buttoning the dress and only then did she look up at Leah.

“This baby, she fine. She gon’ be just fine. You fine. Beautiful, you.”

“She?”