Free One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash

their comments but they wasn’t as funny now and I suspicioned they wasn’t meant to be.
    ‘It’s time you started your family,’ they’d say, like as if it was their business to tell me such.
    The younger girls, girls I’d grown up with, would make a show of their young ones whenever I was around.
    ‘Ain’t she a darling,’ they’d say to me or, ‘You want to hold him?’
    They all everyone of them seemed to be saying to me I wasn’t a woman till I had a young one of my own.
    ‘Are you and Billy getting along?’ Momma finally asked one afternoon when she came to visit.
    ‘Yes, Momma,’ I said. ‘We’re getting on fine.’
    But Momma was doubtful of my words. She looked out the window where Billy was drawing water for Sam.
    ‘A marriage ain’t no simple thing to keep sprightly. It takes some tending to.’
    ‘I know that, Momma,’ I said.
    ‘I bought you some things,’ Momma said, and took some lipstick and cheek rouge from her pocket. ‘A man likes his wife to pretty up for him sometimes.’
    ‘I don’t need you to buy me such things, Momma,’ I said, but she pressed them in my hand.
    ‘You make yourself up with that lipstick and cheek rouge,’ Momma said. ‘And put on that blue dress to show off your eyes. You do that tonight, Amy. It’ll make a difference. I’m certain of that.’
    But Momma was wrong. It made no difference at all.
    When it came December me and Billy finally went to Seneca to see Doctor Wilkins. We sat there most forever before the nurse called our names.
    ‘You can go out to the waiting room if you like,’ Doctor Wilkins told Billy after a few minutes.
    ‘No,’ Billy said. ‘I’ll stay.’
    Doctor Wilkins put me in his stirrups. He laid a sheet over my legs and opened me up.
    ‘No tumors or infection,’ Doctor Wilkins said. ‘That’s a good sign.’
    Then he took what looked to be ice tongs and opened me way wider. He put a tube in and blew into that tube while he listened. I gasped for the pain of it.
    I looked over at Billy and his face was studying the far wall. ‘Everything looks to be fine,’ Doctor Wilkins said.
    Doctor Wilkins opened his desk and reached Billy a sheath. ‘I guess you know what I need,’ Doctor Wilkins said. ‘There are some magazines in the back bathroom. When you finish bring it back and I’ll put it under the microscope.’
    Billy got all red and shame-faced but he did what was asked of him. Then Doctor Wilkins looked under the microscope. He stared long and careful and that was sure no good sign.
    He finally took his eyeball off the microscope.
    ‘I can’t find a single live sperm,’ he said.
    Going back home that afternoon was ever a long and silent ride. I looked out the window and the world seemed dead. The mountains was bald-looking and brown, the trees shucked of their leaves, nothing more than skeletons of what they’d been in summer. I looked out on those bare mountains and a memory I’d been trying for months to keep pushed deep in my mind corked up to the surface and wouldn’t go back down.
    It was a memory of me and my brother Matthew and the day I broke his body. We’d been in the barn loft doing the work Daddy had sent us there to do. At least I was doing it. Matthew was being contrary and not doing nothing but sassing. I was twelve and him only eight. It vexed me to have to do it all.
    ‘Get on over there and do your part, Matthew,’ I’d said, and shoved him toward the other bales. He’d tried to keep his balance and tottered back to where the loft window laid open like a trap door. He took that last step backwards and it was like he’d just stepped off the edge of a cliff hang.
    Momma and Daddy hadn’t punished me for what had happened, never spoke a word of blame about it. Yet I’d blamed myself plenty. Those first couple of days when Doctor Griffen wasn’t sure what might happen in the long run I’d wished more than anything in my life it had been me that fell through the window loft. When Doctor