Free Fields Of Gold by Marie Bostwick

to visit Mama’s cousins in Kansas. I said he couldn’t marry me because he’d been engaged and gotten married before I knew about the baby.
    â€œHe was engaged?” Ruby piped, scandalized and intrigued. “Eva, how could you!”
    â€œWell, I didn’t know it at the time or I’d have never gone out riding with him.”
    Ruby clucked her tongue and sighed a sigh of sympathy and delicious shock. At least if I had to tell her a lie I was glad it was one she could enjoy.
    â€œGosh, that’s so awful—how he took advantage of you.” Ruby sighed again and shook her head as curiosity overcame concern. “Was he handsome, though? What color were his eyes?”
    I made up more stories. I marveled at how easily she believed my lies, much more easily than she’d have believed the truth. For once I was thankful that I’d been made so imperfect and twisted that it would never occur to people that someone as straight and beautiful as Slim could want me.
    â€œI can’t believe it. I still just can’t believe it,” Ruby mused. “You don’t even look fat or anything.”
    â€œI had to put a safety pin in the waistbands of my skirts last week. Guess I’ll be big as a house soon.” I pulled up my blouse to show her how my secret child was pushing, taut and swelling, under the coarse fabric of my skirt.
    Ruby smiled and instinctively, without thinking to ask permission, reached out her hand to lay it on the tiny bulge. Reverently, as though not to wake the baby, she whispered, “What is it, do you think? A boy or girl?”
    â€œI don’t know. I guess there’s no way to tell for sure.”
    â€œMy mama says there’s a way,” Ruby reported solemnly. “You take your wedding ring, put it on a chain, hold it over your stomach, and if it swings in a circle it’s a girl, but it swings in a line it’s a boy. ’Course,” she faltered, “you don’t have a wedding ring, so I guess we’ll just have to wait.”
    â€œI guess so.”
    But, I did know. I was sure of it. I knew I was carrying a son. The same way I’d known Slim when he walked into our house, though we’d never spoken a word, I knew our son. He was inside me, part of me, and when I closed my eyes I could see him, tiny and translucent, curled inside the watery protection I’d instinctively made for him, cushioned and cradled so completely that the blows of the world would seem only a buoyant swell to him. How was it that other women didn’t know who it was they carried inside?
    Lying in bed that night I felt him move for the first time. A ripple, not a push. A silky spool of bubbles unwound inside me, rising and skating along the skin of my stomach. I lay my hand over the bulge of my abdomen and felt him swim, knotting himself under the heat of my hand, the way a cat searches out a sunbeam on a cold winter morning.
    The life in him was pulsing and unmistakable. My strong, beautiful boy—as restless as his father, as faithful as his mother, as helpless as a kitten and too unwise yet to realize it. Our destinies were connected in a way that was entirely new to me, but strong and right. At that moment I realized protecting him and raising him would be the focus of my life. The cold winter would never touch him, capricious life never scar him. Everything I’d ever wanted for myself dimmed to a vague memory, a dream barely remembered upon waking from a dark night.
    I smiled to myself and moved my hand to another spot on my stomach just to feel him flutter and glide as he swam and balled himself under a new fountain of my warmth. I whispered to Slim in the darkness: “Feel our boy, he’s floating already; nothing will weigh him down. He’s the best of us both.”
    But the words bounced back to me, empty in the cold, slicing darkness. Slim was too far off to hear me. As weeks stretched to months he moved just a