Free All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter Page B

said.
    â€œI guess so, but it don’t seem like he could get ’cross the field that quick. Let’s get on home. Ya’ll daddy be home soon.”
    And they walked on, leaving the hungry boy lost among the weeds.

10
Unveiling
    B ECAUSE Venita was childless she thought she could make herself invisible. She cloaked herself in her sorrow, in her emptiness. Thinking herself unseen, she walked through All-Bright Court watching the children openly. She and Moses had been trying to have a child since they were married, three years.
    At first she thought she might just be stupid, that she simply did not know what she was doing. She did not know how to call a baby, so none would come. As a girl she had been stupid about babies. Up until she was thirteen Venita thought babies came from cabbage patches.
    Even though her parents grew cabbages in their garden and she never saw a baby there, she continued believing that was where they came from. She looked under the tender leaves of the young plants and between the waxy leaves of the older ones. When she was seven she pulled up an entire row of young plants, one after another she pulled them from the loamy soil, liking the sound when she pulled them, the soft ripping as the roots let go of the earth. Secrets were here. Each time she pulled up a plant she looked to see if a baby was there, a tiny head or maybe a tiny hand or foot buried in the warm soil. Her mother did not see her until she had pulled up the whole row, and then her mother ran screaming from the house. Venita did not connect the screaming with herself and what she was doing. She jumped up to see what was wrong, and when her mother got to her, she knocked her to the ground. “Girl, you done lost your mind?”
    Venita was going to answer, but her mother had smacked the air out of her. Her breath flew out of her mouth like a bird. It flew from the garden while she lay on the ground, trying to weather the storm of her mother’s fury.
    When Venita was thirteen she had the chance to find out where babies came from. She was asked to stay home when the time came for her mother to have a baby. The other times, she and the other children had been sent to their Aunt Hattie’s or Aunt Thelma’s. Her mother’s sister Hattie came, and so did a midwife. They had her father take the kitchen table into her parents’ bedroom. From dawn until well into the night the women walked calmly through the house, in and out of the bedroom. Drinking coffee, eating spoon bread and butter beans. Her father was out on the porch, and a group of his friends had gathered. They sat drinking and smoking and playing dominoes. They played even in the darkness, by the light of a kerosene lamp. Sometimes moans came from the bedroom, but her mother did not yell out. Venita was either ignored or in the way. Feeling no sense of purpose, she wandered out into the garden.
    It was late, and the ground was frozen. A blue and cold dampness was in the air. The air clung to her, made her breath appear before her, a series of diminutive clouds drifting off into the night. Venita felt like crying. She was cold and scared, wearing one of her father’s old sweaters. And not only that, there were no cabbages. Where was a baby going to come from? How could a baby push through the petrified earth even if there were a cabbage? She did not even hear her aunt calling her at first.
    â€œVenita. Ve-ni-ta. Come here, you silly gal.”
    She ran into the house and her aunt told her to bring her mother some water. Hattie met her at the bedroom door. Venita could not see much beyond her in the dim light of the bedroom, but she could see her mother was unconscious and sweating on the table. Venita thought she was dead, but then she saw her mother stir, and heard her moan. She noticed the blood, hiding in the folds of sheets. Venita was frozen there. Her feet were cold. She wanted to watch but was grateful when Hattie pushed her aside and shut