The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw Page B

me with increasing concern, an emotion that she mostly offered through her annoyed expression, and when she found me yawning over the churn she curtly suggested that I try going to bed before dawn. I didn't want any further discord in the house and retired that night after finishing the day's mending. Jack, up with a tetchy calf, was more than an hour behind me. When he drew back the curtain to our room and saw me already in bed, my belly making a tent of the bedclothes, he straightened the quilt over me and went back out to sleep in the barn. Since I'd told him about the new baby, we'd probably not spent ten hours together in bed, though Lord knows there was nothing to be afraid of now.
    I slept roughly, hot and troubled. In the daytime I wore patched gingham dresses; it would not do to swan around now, when the ladies of town were themselves just learning how to preen. There was no need for them to know about the finished seams I gave myself, or the single, secret, covered button, or the cream-colored shift with embroidery so fine it seemed part of the delicate cotton lawn I stitched it to. Certainly there was no need for them to know about the money pocket, as long as an envelope, that I attached to my underskirt. Fifty-eight dollars. Sixty-four. Seventy. Seventy-one.
    Later I would tell Jack that I sewed right up to the moment I felt my first pain, but this was not true. I sewed well beyond the first pains, setting in the huge sleeves on six shirtwaists for Mrs. Horne, who had said that having me take her measurements made her feel just like she was in Paris, France. I wanted her to keep thinking that. The sleeves were so big that she would have to enter rooms sideways. By the time I finished, contractions had doubled me over.
    "It came on sudden," I told my mother-in-law. I lay on the floor while she pinned a cotton-batting pad to Jack's and my cornhusk mattress and fed armloads of stalks into the stove. Spasms ripped through me and I felt the floor buck. "This isn't going into town the easy way," I said, feeling strangely conversational. "This is the bumpy way."
    "You're not going anywhere," my mother-in-law snapped.
    "Bump, bump, bump," I said. She didn't say anything after that. Later I would remember her braced against the wall, levering me up from the floor while I tipped helplessly from side to side, hardly able to feel my legs. In the end, she had to grab me at the waist and heave me onto the bed, where I lay calmly convinced that my spine was on fire. I don't know where Lucille was. Every time I opened my eyes, my mother-in-law was beside me. "Jack is in the field," she told me. "I'll get him if there's a need."
    "Not yet," I said.
    I closed my eyes and opened them, closed them and opened them. The baby seemed to be tearing its way out, ripping things inside of me that I didn't imagine could be made whole again. I heard voices—Mama's, Reverend Cooper's—but when I opened my eyes the only person in the room was my mother-in-law, her face gleaming with sweat. "A cradle is a pine box," I told her.
    "Hush," she said.
    By the time the doctor came, a night had passed, and I understood that Jack must have ridden to town. I saw Dr. Johnson and said, "Go away."
    "Don't be afraid," Jack said.
    "She's not afraid," his mother said, entirely correctly.
    The baby clung to me like murder, and for every spasm that pushed her down, I could feel her clambering back up. The doctor cut and cut, giving her all the room she needed, but she didn't want room. Finally he had to clasp the forceps—"big paddles," my mother-in-law told me later, with a shudder—around her head and pull her out. I heard all about it later. "Yanked that baby out like she was a baked potato," my mother-in-law said.
    It was good that Jack had already decided on a name. "Amelia," he said, and I nodded. Left to myself, I might have named her Beelzebub. Seventeen years old, I felt seventy. When my mother-in-law came into the room and lifted the