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mind to.”
    â€œNo, Mamma,” I said then. “I like to help you.” And it was true. For I was the best little girl! And I loved nothing more than helping my mamma, her voice was a song in my ears.
    â€œZinnia,” she said that day, straightening up, “now I have some news for you. Come wintertime, we will have a baby in this house.”
    â€œWhere are we going to get it?” I asked, for I did not know. I had heerd that you found them under a cabbage leaf, or that a great owl brung them.
    Mamma smiled real nice and stroked my hair. “God will bring it,” she said, and so I didn’t think nothing of it when she growed so fat and got so tired, not until this neighbor girl come up and tole me after meeting that the baby was in Mamma’s fat stomach, and then I hated the baby, for it had made my sweet mamma grow so big and sick she wouldn’t hardly play with me no more, and she cried all the time.
    I had heerd her crying at night and saying, “No, Claude,” and “They is something the matter,” and such as that. He said, “It is God’s will, Effie,” which is just like him, he bowed always to the will of God.
    And Mamma bowed always to Daddy’s will, which is how the Bible says it should be. In fact the only time I ever recall Mamma acting any way but dutiful was when that baby was in her, and I say it was all due to the nature of the baby.
    For Nonnie had a troublesome nature from a child.
    Things was never the same after the day we were out front canning, so that as I stood on the porch that winter night six months later and heerd Mamma screaming out in the house behind me, I was not surprised to look out and see the world all different, all changed before my eyes, nor to feel the wind blow offen the snow and chill me to the bone.
    Granny Horn would say something, and then Mamma would scream, and then Granny would say something else, and then Mamma would scream again. Out back I heerd Daddy, chop chop chop . I went through the breezeway to see him. “Daddy,” I said. “Daddy.” I couldn’t see nothing out there but his big dark form in the pale blue light. I could see it when he raised the ax, black against the snow. I heerd it when he brung it down. Chop. Chop. Chop .
    â€œDaddy,” I said, but he kept right on. Chop. Chop. Chop . I stood out there wrapped up in a coverlet, hugging myself. Wasn’t nobody else going to hug me, that was for sure! They was all too busy borning the baby to care about me.
    And yet I had done all the work, for Granny Horn had said her old self was wore out, and axed me would I be her extry hands, and like a fool I said yes, so she had set me to fetching and carrying for her, what all she needed—the scissors, the string, the borning quilt, water a-boiling in the big black pot. While I done all this, Mamma just laid up in the bed staring out over her great stomach at me with her dark eyes real big in her thin face.
    â€œNow come here, Zinnia,” she said. This was right before the sun went down. And I went over there, and Mamma smoothed back my hair and touched the mark on my face real gentle, the way she always done, and pulled me down to her, and kissed me.
    â€œNow you be a good girl,” Mamma said, and so I was, and did not cry.
    But it galled me standing out there in the freezing cold in the middle of the night, why I could of froze to death for all they knowed, or cared! I was just a little girl. Too little to see what happened next, which was awful. For Mamma had a britches baby that wouldn’t come out, Granny Horn had to cut it out of her. But it looked so awful I didn’t have no sense that it was a baby. Granny slapped it until it cried. Then she flung it down in the cradle that they had there, my cradle, mind you, that Daddy had made for me, and left it squalling while she worked on Mamma, and this gone on all night, them packing every cloth they could find in