by Lee Smith
* * *
MISTY WAS BORN on December 15, 1960, not long after our first anniversary. We were trimming the tree when my water broke. I didn’t know what was happening, but Helen did. She told Travis, who happened to be home at the time, which was lucky, to start his truck. She told Minnie to get some blankets and then go in our bedroom and get my suitcase, which she had had packed for two weeks. She told Vonda Louise to hush and lay down, a good thing, as Vonda Louise had gotten so excited that she was crying and laughing by turns. First she started crying because my water breaking had messed up one of her presents, and then she started laughing that high-pitched “hee hee hee,” which meant she was simply nervous. She was so nervous in fact that Minnie stayed home with her to calm her down, while Helen rode with Travis and me to the hospital.
Travis drove the fastest I ever knew him to drive, but we need not have rushed so, as it turned out, because my real labor was just coming on. The old doctor looked at me and said that it would be a while, but we might as well stay at the hospital since we were already there. So we all went upstairs to a room, where I put on a hospital gown. My pains started coming then, and they were awful, but as they were still far apart, Travis took this opportunity to go all around the hospital visiting the sick and their families. The nurse shaved and prepped me while Helen knitted. Travis was still gone when the nurse announced that I was dilated ten centimeters and they were going to take me to the delivery room.
“Travis,” I said, “I want Travis,” but they were wheeling me down the hall by then, and all I could see was the big round bright lights in the ceiling zooming overhead one by one, and all I could feel was the pain. The pain was terrible. I maintain that if a woman could remember how much it hurts to have a baby, she would never have another one. But we can’t remember, of course. Our bodies make us forget.
I was in labor for twenty hours. About the last thing I really remember is the doctor saying, “Now, Mrs. Word, you are going to feel better after this shot,” which they gave me in defiance of Travis’s wishes, as he did not believe in medicine. But he gave in, the pain was so horrible. Poor Travis. I learned later that he was down on his knees in the waiting room praying the whole time.
Misty was a breech birth—what people call a britches baby—and it took all the prayer and medicine available to get her born, and to get me to stop bleeding. If we had not come to the hospital, we both might have died, is what the doctor said, and later Helen would be glad to relay this news to those who had thought the Words were uppity to use the hospital in Greeneville instead of relying on Mrs. Terrell’s services. But it was more like an operation than a birth, finally. By the time I woke up and saw my baby, they had cleaned her up and put a little pink bow in her blond hair. She was the cutest thing I had ever seen! I took her and counted her tiny fingers and toes, and examined her all over. “She’s perfect,” I said to Travis, and she was. He leaned over the bed and held my hand and thanked the Lord for giving her to us, a prayer I joined in with all my heart.
“What is the name of the baby?” asked an older nurse with a clipboard, and Travis and I looked at each other. We had been planning to name it Travis Junior, assuming it to be a boy, as this is what Travis had wanted and what all the old ladies had told us we would have, including the expert Mrs. Terrell. “If you can’t tell she’s pregnant from the back, it’s a boy for sure,” Mrs. Terrell had announced. “A girl baby will wrap all around you and show on the side.” Since everybody had agreed you couldn’t tell I was pregnant from the back, we didn’t have any girl names picked out.
But right away Travis started flipping through his Bible to come up with some.
“What about Mary?” he suggested. “Or Ruth? How about Mary Ruth?”
“Mary Ruth is real pretty,” Helen said.
“Misty,” I said.
They both stared at me.
“Now, honey,” Travis said.
“That sounds cheap,” Helen said.
“Misty Celeste Word.” It hit me like a revelation. Later I realized I must have gotten the Misty from Misty of Chincoteague, but I never did know where the Celeste came from.
Travis swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple peeking above his shirt collar. “I think that’s a real pretty name,” he said.
“Travis!” Helen hissed, but it was too late.
“How do you spell ‘Celeste’?” the nurse asked, and I told her. It was done.
“That is a mighty big name for such a tiny little girl,” Travis said, touching her hair and smiling.
* * *
A WOMAN NEVER knows exactly how she will react to having a baby. I have known women that were just dying to have a child, to come home from the hospital and cry for a month. I have known others that hated to nurse and swore their babies bit them. I have known others that could not sleep. As for me, I am glad to say it all came natural. But I was so lucky—with Helen happy to fix meals for Travis and run the house, I could stay on Misty Celeste’s schedule as long as I wanted to, and I did so for the longest time. I did everything she did. When she slept, I slept. When she got up, I got up. I ate when she ate. When spring came, I’d put her out on a blanket in the yard in the sunshine. Me and Misty both got a suntan, and each day seemed to stretch out full and golden, and last forever. I was the happiest I had ever been. That younger ornery me was like somebody I didn’t even know anymore, and I was glad to drop her acquaintance.
Of course I was happy! I was living in a paradise. The sisters did everything. Travis came and went, busy with the Lord’s work. When Misty was six months old, I got pregnant again, and before I knew it, the whole circle had started over, only I was not so sick and I had my Misty to keep me company. The second pregnancy passed in no time.
“Oh no!” the old doctor said when he saw us coming. “I reckon you’re going to turn this whole hospital into a prayer meeting again,” he said severely to Travis, who grinned at him. But this time my labor went like clockwork, and Sandra Annette Word was born in about three hours, and this time I was awake to see it. Birth is a miracle, I had to agree with Travis as he prayed beside the bed while I held the new baby in my arms. She was smaller than Misty and did not seem as well developed, startling easy. But she was just as pretty in the face as her sister. Travis let me name her too. I chose Sandra Annette. Sandra is a name I have always liked, and I got the Annette from Annette Funicello, who I had seen on The Mickey Mouse Club at Mrs. Thoroughgood’s house. Later she was on American Bandstand, where everybody was so happy and had such a good time. I hoped that my Sandra Annette would be as cute and as perky as Annette Funicello, and as happy.
It worked. For the next few years, we were all happy. When you have babies, your whole life revolves around them. It has to. It’s always time for a feeding, or it’s time for a bath, or Misty has a fever, or Annette has colic—and then they start walking and the world gets so dangerous all of a sudden, you have to be right there, you have to snatch them up before they tumble down the Tabernacle steps or touch the eye of the stove, your job is to keep them safe. I took this real seriously too. Even Helen Tate came right out and told everybody that when Travis brought me home, she didn’t know what to make of me, but I had turned out to be a fine little mother after all! I talked Travis into letting me enter the girls in the Little Miss Valleydale contest at the new shopping center when Misty was four and Annette was three, and Travis’s sisters sewed pink princess outfits for them to wear in the contest, with tiny tiaras. They won first place and got their picture on the front page of the Valleydale Record, and though Travis sniffed, he was proud as punch. Misty was outgoing from the first, she had that kind of personality that doesn’t know a stranger. But I had to watch her every minute, as I never knew what she might take it into her head to do next.
Annette was quieter, more like her father. She had huge dark eyes like those starving children in paintings of other countries. Her eyes seemed to soak up the whole world like a
sponge. She didn’t speak for the longest time, so long that we were all getting worried about her, and one woman in the church said we ought to have her tested, which made Minnie furious.
“Tested for what? She’ll talk when she gets ready to talk!” Minnie said. “When she’s got something to say.”
Of course Annette did not really need to talk, with Misty right there to tell everybody what she wanted. “Annie want some Kool-Aid,” she’d say, or “Annie sleepy now.”
Sure enough, Minnie was right, because Annette did finally speak up when Misty had the flu and couldn’t talk for her. Annette asked me to get her a drink of water, please, in a complete sentence. I thought I’d die! But my girls were both real smart.
They were my whole life in those years. I didn’t really have any friends. There was one other young wife named DeeDee Burgess who used to bring her own little girls, the same age as mine, over to play while we sat out in the yard and watched them. In one way it was like no time had passed since Travis had brought me home and I had so longed to sit out there and while away the day, and yet in another way I felt like I had been there forever and ever, a thousand years. Life seemed to pass like a big slow river. For the most part, I was content to float along, or paddle in the shallows with my baby girls, looking out across its broad mysterious expanse.
But sometimes, something would happen to make me come up gasping for air.
I remember that summer day when DeeDee and me were sitting out in those chairs watching our little girls play in a plastic pool. Misty shrieked and splashed with DeeDee’s girls, while Annette stood holding the hose, making a hole in the yard with the water. She was just as serious about this as if somebody was paying her to do it.
Then DeeDee said, “I’ll swear, sometimes I wish Johnny would lay off of the sex for just one day. It gets old, you know what I mean? But Johnny, he wants to do everything the same way every day. He has to have meat for supper every night and watch the ten-o’clock news and get his loving and go to sleep. You can’t read a magazine in bed. You can’t watch the eleven-o’clock news. On Saturdays we do it in the morning too, while the girls look at the cartoons on TV. Then he goes hunting or fishing, depending on the season. Then we do it again on Saturday night. He is exactly like his daddy, who is the most boring man on earth. I’ve said to him, ‘Honey, let’s get a baby-sitter and go out sometime,’ or ‘Let’s get your mama to keep the girls and we’ll go over to the lake, just the two of us,’ and he looks at me like I’m crazy. Oh, I don’t know. I get tired of it, you know what I mean? I swear I do. I feel like we’re real old, but we’re not even thirty yet.”
I was dumbstruck. Though I had never talked Travis into going on a picnic again, I had not yet gotten to the point of boredom. DeeDee was just enough older than me so that part of what she was saying was like a preview of things to come. But what really hit me about her outburst was the fact that they did it every day. DeeDee’s husband Johnny was a man’s man kind of guy who drove heavy equipment for the highway department and had a big gut. Now I had to picture him and DeeDee doing it every day—and on Saturdays, twice a day! I just couldn’t get over this, considering my life with Travis Word. For I was still young then, something I had mostly forgotten about, and when you’re young, you relate everything to yourself.
I guess I was staring. DeeDee pulled her red hair up into a ponytail and giggled and said, “Now don’t you tell Travis what I was talking about, you hear?” because of course he was their preacher, and I had to smile as I said, “Don’t worry, I won’t.” The fact was that I couldn’t imagine talking about a thing like that with Travis Word, or discussing my own private life as Travis’s wife with anyone. I was not even tempted to tell DeeDee about it. It was purely not possible. Also, I did not mind my situation that much. I loved my little girls, and I loved my life. From time to time I was still overcome by a feeling that I didn’t deserve any of it, that I was there under false pretenses and might be discovered at any moment and thrown out, though I was unclear about what these false pretenses actually were. For I really was a wife now, and I had had two real babies. I was earning my keep.
The only problem was the one I touched on earlier—the true nature of Travis Word. Now this is a thing which I had not even dared to think of before DeeDee made her comment. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Every day! I kept thinking. Twice on Saturday! I could count on my fingers the number of times Travis and I actually did it in any given month—or to be accurate, the number of times he did it to me. For he did not like me to move much, or say anything, while he was doing it. And when he was through, he would fling himself down on his knees, praying in anguish to be cleansed. I had thought he might ease up on this with time, but he had not. I had to kneel down there and pray too. After a while, I got to where I did not often try to tempt him, as it was not really worth it, if you see what I mean.
For a long time Travis’s attitude toward bodily love did not seem too important, but then there came a time when it did, when I reckon my true nature came out too. For there are ways in which it is easier to live with a plaster saint like Daddy than with a real saint like Travis Word.
* * *
THE SERIOUS TROUBLES began when Misty was in school and I started volunteering there a lot, being the room mother and the candy drive chairperson and what have you. Travis and his sisters were real proud of me at first. Then Misty’s teacher, Mrs. Browning—who had been at that school forever and ever—took me aside one day and said that her teacher’s aide was going to quit because she was pregnant, and asked me if I would like to take her place. All I really had to do was apply for the job, Mrs. Browning said, and she would make sure that I got it. I would make four thousand dollars a year.
Travis and his sisters hit the roof—or his sisters did, to be fair. They called me ungrateful, while Travis just looked sorrowful and said didn’t I have everything in the world I could possibly want? I tried to stand my ground, explaining that since Helen did everything at home, I needed something to do. I gave the example of my friend DeeDee, now getting an associate degree in practical nursing at the community college. DeeDee drove over there for classes every day, so I never got to see her anymore. I was crying before I knew it, as I tried to explain. Vonda Louise started crying too, to keep me company. Minnie pinched her lips together and went to clean the bathroom, which was what she always did when she got mad. But Helen looked at me thoughtfully through her new glasses which made her eyes look as big and blank as plates. Travis began to quote at me from the Bible as was his wont, citing Proverbs, but Helen took his arm before he was done and pulled him outside to help her fix the chicken-wire fence around her vegetable garden. I stood at the window and watched old Helen talking to Travis while he worked, both of them glancing back at the house from time to time. I knew they were talking about me. Meanwhile Minnie splashed water around in the bathroom and Vonda Louise wept on the love seat.
“What’s the matter with Auntie Vonda? What’s the matter?” my girls cried, running into the room. I was short with them, saying, “Nothing,” in a voice that made them cry too.
“Well, shoot!” I said out loud to myself. I gave them a hug and then got Helen’s car keys and took the girls and Vonda Louise out on the interstate for a sundae at the Dairy Bar. Vonda Louise loved sweets and didn’t get out much. Then we went to Kmart. We had a good time. Travis and Helen and Minnie were beside themselves with worry when we got back.
“I couldn’t stand to lose you,” Travis said, very dramatic.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” I told him, but I felt flattered all the same. That night Travis covered me all over in kisses, and I did something to him that had him down on his knees until dawn.
* * *
SO I DID not take the job, to Mrs. Browning’s dismay. But as I was soon pregnant again, it was a good thing I’d said no. A good thing for her, that is. Not for me. I’ve always wondered how things would have turned out if I had
took that job. Different, I’ll bet.
In any case, I lost the baby at eight months. It just died. It had been kicking a lot, and then it quit kicking. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I knew even before the old doctor told me. He was listening to my stomach, and then he put the stethoscope down and took my hand. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Word,” he said. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I was afraid my womb had turned poison and killed it.
“Now, now,” the doctor said. “These things just happen.”
But I had to go through labor anyway, and deliver the dead baby. That was the only way they could do it.
The baby was a boy, stone gray and perfectly formed.
We named him Travis Word Junior and buried him in the graveyard right next to the Tabernacle. He has the tiniest, prettiest stone, with a carved lamb on top and these words cut into the rose marble:
A LITTLE LAMB OF GOD
TRAVIS WORD JUNIOR
SEPTEMBER 10, 1966
BELOVED SON OF TRAVIS AND GRACE WORD
I know people talked about us for spending so much money on a stillborn baby, but Travis insisted. He was brokenhearted. This was the only son he would ever have, since the doctor said I couldn’t have any more children after that. I don’t think Travis ever got over the loss of Travis Junior, in fact, and I didn’t either.
We buried our son on a drizzly afternoon in Indian summer. Little crystal drops of water clung to all the leaves, like jewels. I could not understand how a thing so awful could happen in such a beautiful world, nor could I understand how God could let such a thing happen in the first place. I was weak from loss of blood, and could not quit crying. I hated Him. As we left the graveyard, I kept looking back over my shoulder at that sad little grave with its tiny new stone and its tiny pile of red dirt. I hated to leave my baby there surrounded by old Words and McGlothlins he had never met and never heard of, all of them Travis’s ancestors, going back for a hundred years. The cemetery was full of Travis’s family, in fact it hit me as we were walking out that his family was more dead than alive in general.
