Free JEWEL by BRET LOTT Page A

hands appeared, took hold of mine.
    She squeezed down with some unknown might. l “We sorry, Miss Jewel, ” Nelson said, and now he tugged at her arm. “We going on home now. We don’t mean to burden you.”
    “The Lord smiling down on you this way, ” she said again, and then Cathe ral let go, her hand disappearing into the quilt. She moved out of the light.
    I tried to watch them go, but they were lost to me even before they made it past the repair shed. There was no moon out, not enough stars to do any good. Just God above with some plan for us all.
    I didn’t know what to think, whether to believe her or not, and I tried to imagine how news like this could be of help, and whether that unaccountable piece of God Cathe ral had hold of could be trusted to figure into the stone wedge of Him I knew.
    The light I stood in broke to pieces, shadows falling about me, and I turned, looked up to the doorway. There stood James and Wilman and Burton, the three of them, all my boys, crowded into the doorway.
    Wilman and Burton pushed at each other for room, while James, a boy suddenly taller than I ever imagined he might become, stood still, one hand to the doorjamb. “Momma, ” he said, “what’s going on out here? ” I shrugged, uncertain myself. I only knew I was cold out here, and that somewhere along the road headed away from Purvis walked Nelson and Cathe ral, the dark of no consequence to them. And I knew there was a baby in me. “Nothing, ” I said, and I shrugged again.
    “Jewel, ” Leston called, the word neither question nor demand. Only my name.
    “I’m here, ” I said, and started up the steps.
    CHAPTER 5.
    OUR HEADLIGHTS CUT THROUGH THE BLACK WOODS BEFORE US, THE ROAD into Purvis unfolding like some mystery, a place I’d never been before. The baby’d been trying to make its way out for the last fifteen hours, my mind long past battling with making sense of this world. There was only movement, darkness, light, an old, oiled road, and Leston hunched up over the steering wheel, a cigarette at his lips.
    “Just hold on, Sugar, ” he whispered, and I thought I might have seen the tip of the cigarette bobbing with the words. “Sug, you just hold on.”
    “Sug, ” I managed to get out, and closed my eyes, the work of keeping my lids open too much to bear. “Sug, ” I whispered again, and thought of how I hadn’t heard him call me that in years, not since we were newly married and still in the years when whatever future a future that would account for five children bore in these Mississippi woods seemed somebody else’s life, not our own.
    But then we must have hit a pothole or someplace where rains had dug into the road, because the world sank beneath me, and I fell what felt two feet deep into the seat, my ears filled with the roar of our slamming on through it, and I let out a yelp through no choice of my own, both hands on my belly.
    “Son of a bitch, ” Leston whispered. “Son of a bitch, Sug.”
    The other five had been born at home, all of them so quick that with Wilman there hadn’t been time enough for Cathe ral to make her way over to deliver him. James’d taken the longest with his six hours, Cathe ral’s presence each time as much a comfort to me for her friendship as for her skill at midwifing.
    This time she’d been to my door faster than any time before, showing up not an hour after I’d sent Burton for her, Cathe ral all puffing, the washed-out blue dress that hung on her sweat through, her hair pulled back and knotted. Her eyes were right on mine as she came into the bedroom, Annie sitting in bed beside me.
    “Now you move on out of here, baby-doll, ” she’d said to Anne, though her eyes were still on mine. “Our Lord be blessing you soon enough with another brother or sister, but right now you go play with the ones you got.”
    Annie had looked to me, and I’d turned to her, smiled, though I could feel another wave moving into me. “Go on, ” I said.
    She slid away