Revival Season - Monica West (10 ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“Before you go to bed, I have a family announcement,” Papa said with the same serious inflection that accompanied his proclamations that Jesus was ready to save your soul. He nodded toward the kitchen, and we trudged through the wide hallway and sat around the cherrywood table, our eyes fixed on Papa, who stood at the head.

“We’re having a baby,” he said, unable to contain his smile. He looked at Caleb as he made the announcement; Ma, Hannah, and I had somehow disappeared. Even though Ma sat next to me, she preferred to study the table’s lacquered grain instead of making eye contact. The last time he’d delivered that news, it had been to tell us that Ma was having Isaiah. Ma had been excited then, had walked around and given each of us a hug. But now she passively accepted the congratulations that spilled from Papa’s and Caleb’s lips, her palms turned upward in submission, her eyes vacant.

Ma had yet to say a word, even though part of me believed that it was her news to share. But she had lost her voice ever since we entered the room.

“What do you think, Ma?” I found the space to ask in the middle of Papa’s praise. I needed to hear her say that she wanted this baby after Isaiah, that she wasn’t just riding the wave of Papa’s happiness. Papa looked down at us from where he was standing—it might have been the first time he’d seen us since he started talking.

“What a blessing,” she finally uttered, with her face turned away from me.

Papa came behind us and placed his hands on her shoulders, his knuckles bulged as he massaged, and she recoiled as though she’d been burned. “It is a blessing, isn’t it?”

Two years ago when Isaiah was born, Mrs. Cade and the other midwives had shoved me from the living room before Ma’s final push. As I stood on the other side of a wall that separated me from Ma—the first time I’d been away from her since labor began—I waited for a baby’s cries but heard silence and shrieking instead. I didn’t move, couldn’t, not even when Papa brushed by us hours later, carrying a lifeless Isaiah on outstretched palms as though he would break. When my legs finally worked again, I followed Papa into the kitchen, my knees shaky. With a tear-streaked face, Caleb was behind me with Hannah on his hip. In the kitchen, Papa laid the blanket on the table and opened the flap. Isaiah looked like a doll, with a round, bluish face and bulbous eyelids that never got a chance to see the sky. We gathered around the table as Papa filled a small glass with water and brought it over.

“In Isaiah 43:1, the Lord says, ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.’ ” Papa’s voice cracked at the end of the Bible verse. He lifted Isaiah’s limp body into the air. “Isaiah Samuel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Papa cupped water into his hand at routine intervals and splashed it onto Isaiah’s forehead when he said “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit.” Then Papa did something that he never did with the baptisms he performed in church: he pressed his lips to Isaiah’s forehead and clutched him to his chest.

Mrs. Cade led Ma into her bedroom, and she didn’t come downstairs for the rest of the day. When I finally got the strength to check on her that evening, she was upstairs at the sewing machine with a tiny piece of terry fabric stretched between her hands. I watched her from the doorway, too scared to take a step inside as she shakily moved the fabric beneath the needle, the glint of sharp silver too close to her hands. Over the coming days, I kept expecting to hear Ma’s wails, but they never came. Instead, she sewed baby blankets and scrubbed bathroom floors. I expected Papa to put a stop to it, to tell her that it was okay to express her grief, but they never seemed to be in the same room.

A week after Isaiah’s death, we were all gathered at the cemetery in East Mansfield—the same cemetery where Papa had officiated hundreds of funerals. The funeral home had donated a tiny coffin that was no bigger than a shoebox, and Papa had dressed Isaiah in a blue sleeper that Ma had made.

The tiny coffin was lowered into the ground—farther down than I expected—until it was barely visible below. It was the first time Ma had been still since his death, and her legs, seemingly nostalgic for the motion of the past few days, twitched as Papa recited prayers. Then there was a sharp, sudden intake of air that startled me after the week of silent activity. I looked next to me to see her mouth frozen into what looked like a yawn. The sound morphed to sobbing as her folded arms pressed against her distended belly, her toes so close to the edge that the slightest movement would have made her fall in. We lined up to drop handfuls of dirt onto the lid of Isaiah’s coffin: first Papa, then Hannah, then me and Caleb. When it was Ma’s turn, she keeled forward, her right leg dangling into the hole, her allotment of dirt gripped in a fist that wouldn’t open.

Papa turned around to leave, not even looking around to see if Ma was following him on his uphill march to the van. I pulled back hard, dislodging her leg from the hole until the full weight of her body collapsed on mine, her shoe coming off in the struggle and falling to the ground beside us.

“I can’t do this again,” she said minutes later as sobs interrupted each word. “I can’t have another baby.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “No one says that you have to.”

“You don’t understand.