Free One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash Page A

Griffen said Matthew would walk again that made it bearable but just barely.
    What bothered my thoughts was that as much punishment as I’d heaped on myself for what happened, maybe God figured it wasn’t enough. I’d near killed a young one once and I’d not be trusted with another.
    For a while I tried to make myself believe that things would be all right, that Billy was a good man and two people could have a good life without young ones. Yet it hurt each Sunday when me and Billy went to church and all the others of our age had their babies or when we went to Momma and Daddy’s and Ginny’s two young ones filled up the house with a happiness only children can bring. Afterwards when me and Billy went home, our house seemed quiet and empty. Billy felt it too. I knew he blamed himself. If I felt less a woman for having no baby, I knew he felt less a man for not being able to plant his seed in me.
    Billy spoke not a word about what we’d found out from Doctor Wilkins but the knowledge laid over our house like a pall. We couldn’t talk about it. What was the good when words couldn’t change what laid on our hearts. I’d had to talk of it to someone though so one Sunday after noon-dinner when Billy and Daddy was out at the barn I told Momma and Ginny what Doctor Wilkins had said.
    ‘And he claimed there was nothing to be done?’ Momma asked.
    ‘Yes ma’am,’ I said, and saying it out loud made it all the more certain.
    ‘Oh, Amy,’ Momma said.
    She took me in her arms and cried for me.
    ‘Doctors don’t know everything,’ Ginny said, her voice cold as a creek stone. ‘There’s them who has a learning you don’t get out of books, a knowledge no man has the least notion of.’
    ‘What are you talking around, Ginny?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m saying there’s one person with the knowing of how to cure what no town doctor can.’
    ‘Maybe it’s best to just let things be, Amy,’ Momma said, for she knew the what and who Ginny’s talk was sidling toward.
    ‘That old woman knows things,’ Ginny said. ‘She might could help Amy.’
    ‘Don’t you go and see that old woman,’ Momma said. ‘If you and Billy ain’t meant to have young ones it’s the Lord’s will. Why you and Billy got other things for to…’
    Momma didn’t finish for she caught sight of Billy standing on the other side of the screen door.

    ‘It could have been you with the problem,’ Billy said as he drove us back home. ‘If it was I’d have never gone blabbing about it all over the valley. Maybe it is something wrong with you. For all I know that doctor didn’t have no reckoning of what was wrong. He was liable to say near anything to get his five dollars.’
    Billy’s neck vein pronged out like a dousing stick. He gripped the steering wheel like it was something he wanted to choke to death.
    ‘Spread it around just to make sure that everybody knows it’s my failing and not yours.’
    ‘That ain’t what I was doing, Billy,’ I said.
    ‘Damn you to hell for talking of it with others,’ Billy said. He’d never near spoke such a thing to me before. He’d not said it to the hail when it beat down his tobacco or to the cow when it hoofed him and cracked his rib. But he’d said it to me.
    The next Sunday at church it was clear Momma had scattered words to the other women about me and Billy. Billy saw it too and there was fury in his eyes for the women and for me. Each sad-mouthed word or ruthful look unyoked us a little more.
    ‘You poor dear,’ Martha Whitmire said and hugged me to her.
    ‘It’s a stout burden for any woman to carry,’ Sue Burrell added, looking all sorrowful.
    I knew Momma meant well but her telling the others made it harder. What those women meant to be pity seemed to me little more than gloating. That was a hard-hearted way to think about other folks and in the deepest part of me I knew it wasn’t just the other women I’d turned hard-hearted toward. I stood up with the others and mouthed the old