Granny’s shambling steps inside the cabin took his thoughts back to the girl there. If the child was born on this rising tide, it would more than likely be a boy-child. April would be a good name for him too. April was a lucky month to be born in; it was a lucky name too. If the child came a girl, Katy, the name of April’s mother, would be a good name for it.
The spring air wafted clouds of fragrance from the underwoods bordering the forest. Crab-apple thickets and white haw trees were in full bloom. Yellow jasmine smothered whole tree-tops. Cherokee roses starry with blossoms sprawled over rail fences and rotting stumps, piercing through all other scents with their delicate perfume.
Sandy Island looked just so, smelled just so, on that April night when he came here so many years ago. He thought then that he’d go back some day and fetch Katy here to stay with him. But the years had tricked him, fooled him. They had rolled by so fast he’d lost track of them, and of Katy and her boy, April. Now, he was almost an old man, and Katy was up yonder in Heaven. His own lawful wife and his other boy, his yard son, were up there too. Had Katy told them about April? Or would she stay shut-mouthed for ever and ever?
As he wondered and pondered about the ways of people in Heaven, the river, gorged by a high spring tide, slowly flooded the rice-fields encircling the island. The black water lapped softly as it rippled over the broken dikes and passed through the rotted flood-gates, hiding the new green shoots of the marsh grass and uprooting the tall faded blades, that had stood through the winter on the boggy mud flats.
Frogs chanted. Marsh-hens chattered. Wood ducks piped and splashed. Ganits flew in long lines toward the sunset, squawking hoarsely and flapping the air with blue and white wings. Partridges whistled. Doves mourned. Where were the groans from the bed in the corner? Maybe all was over at last.
Granny stood in the door beckoning him to come. Her harshness was all gone. She hobbled down the steps and came tottering to meet him, then laying a bony hand on his shoulder she whispered that the ax was too sharp. It had cut the pains off altogether. They had ceased too soon and she couldn’t get them started again. She had tried every tea she knew. Every root. Every ointment. Every charm. She was at her row’s end. This moon was all wrong for birthing. A young moon makes things go contrarywise. The child should have waited a week longer to start coming. And two weeks would have been still better.
The girl had dozed off in spite of everything. He must come and try to rouse her up. Girls behave so crazy these days. They do like nobody ever had birthed a child before them. She was fretted half to death the way this girl carried on. He must come and make her behave. If she had been a nice decent girl, all this would never have been.
The girl’s eyes opened and looked up at him, and he leaned low over the bed to hear her whispered words. She spoke with worn-out tired breath, begging him to go and get help from somewhere. She hated to die in sin, and leave him, but she couldn’t hold out much longer. Death already had her feet cold as ice, it was creeping up to her knees. Couldn’t he take the boat and go across the river to Blue Brook? Wasn’t somebody there who could come to help her?
He studied. Certainly there was. Maum Hannah, his own first cousin, had a string of charm beads their old grandmother had brought all the way from Africa when she came on a slave ship. They and the charm words that ruled them were left in Maum Hannah’s hands. Ever since he was a boy, living on Blue Brook, he had heard people say that those beads had never failed to help a woman birth a child safely. No matter how it came, head foremost, foot foremost, or hand foremost, it was all the same when those charm beads got to working.
He’d go fetch Maum Hannah. She’d come. Old as she was, she’d risk the booming river if her beads were needed to help a child come into the world.