“I…I went up to Contrition City and I went to the refuge there, the one for pregnant women who want to give up their babies for adoption. Women sometimes come to Rueful just for that reason, you know. I asked for a woman who would have a baby about that same time Maybelle would; Grandpa arranged for a private place for the birthing. Maybelle’s babies were born dead, all scrambled together. We never told her. When she woke up, you were there, and she and your daddy have always thought you were theirs. Nobody knew you weren’t except Grandpa Doc and me and the real mother.”
“And Mama got her tubes tied,” Glory said in a dull voice. “But Aunt Mayleen didn’t.”
“Not right then. She and Billy Ray were dead set against it, but Grandpa did it the year before he died. He told her she had an infection he had to clear up, but what he really cleared up was her having any more babies. He just said it was the infection did it, and that’s what he told Billy Ray.”
“I can’t understand how you kept all this quiet,” said Bamber. “That many conjoined twins would have been on everyone’s tongue.”
I said, “If my husband hadn’t been a very fine doctor, if he hadn’t had a few advanced medical devices that he really shouldn’t have had in Rueful, and if he hadn’t had me to help out, it would have been a circus. But Billy Ray’s farm is away from everyone, and so is Jimmy Joe’s. We never allowed anyone to see the babies until they were apart. Later, when they went to school and played with other children who saw the scars, we had stories to explain what happened. With Til and Jeff, it was an accident in an old barn. With Maybelle and Mayleen, the scars were small anyhow, just at the back of their heads, mostly covered by their hair, and we just told them they were born that way…”
“How did you keep Mayleen quiet?” Glory cried. “When she started having twins, she’d have screamed about it.”
“Not Mayleen. You know what the folks in Rueful would have thought about it and said about it. She didn’t want that. She’d have died before she’d have admitted it, and Billy Ray likewise.”
Everyone was still. I was watching Glory, thinking she’d break out any minute with tears, howls, accusations, but she seemed more…interested, or troubled than outraged.
“I don’t know what this means,” Glory complained. “I feel like I’m lost. Not…not orphaned, exactly. I know that Mama and Daddy love me and that you do, too, Grandma. But I feel like there’s part of me floating free, like a wood chip going down the river, turning around and around, with no idea where it’s going…”
“Which means the umoxen were right,” said Falija. “Glory and Bamber are a different sort. What did the woman look like, the one who gave up Glory?”
I wiped my eyes with the wet hanky. “I never saw her. She sent an old woman to bring Glory to us, a very old woman. Budness or Bodness, she said her name was. She said the mother was too broken up to do it. Well, I understand that. No woman gives up a child unless things are terrible for her. As for Glory, well, even as a baby she had dark, dark hair and brown skin, and when I commented on it, the old woman said the baby’s father was very tall, and very dark. I asked her what had happened to the father, wondering, you know, why the mother was giving up her child, and the old woman said he had disappeared and the mother couldn’t raise her little girl alone.”
“Why didn’t you just tell Mama the babies died?” Glory asked, still in that curious, almost uninvolved voice.
“Because your mama has a heart condition, Glory. You’ve heard us mention it. She almost died when Til and Jeff were born. And she almost died again when she saw them, and again when they were operated on. And she’s fretted herself for years over the fact that they aren’t…equally endowed. Grandpa Doc didn’t realize how serious your mother’s condition until after the Til and Jeff were born, but after that, he just couldn’t let her go through all that again.”
Glory turned to stare at Bamber, her eyes moving from his hair to his eyes to his height. Like hers, all of them. He had an arching nose and a wide mouth, like hers, one that always looked like it had too many teeth in it. Dark, vital, lean, and fit. I felt soft compared to both of them. I could have howled.
“I knew we were alike,” Glory said very softly. “More like family. I never looked like the Mackeys or the Judsons. Do you think we have the same parents?”
He thought about this, troubled, as she was, but not angry. “It’s possible,” he said at last. “I don’t remember what my mother looked like. I don’t remember anybody before we came here to Rueful. It would explain her leaving me with Abe Johnson, because she might have wanted us to grow up near one another…”
I was listening to this with continuing amazement. I had known about Gloriana’s birth mother! Why hadn’t it occurred to me that Bamber might have had the same one?
“What about when Til, and Jeff, and Trish, and all of the rest of Mayleen’s children start having babies?” Glory demanded.
“Grandpa Doc fixed them all, before he died, even Emmaline, when she was just a baby. We had quite a plague of appendicitis among the girls and hernias among the boys, but none of them will have children, not even the nice ones, and that’s another reason why your cousin Ella May joined the Siblinghood. She and Joe Bob were old enough and sensible enough that Grandpa told them the truth. Oh, Glory, it was such a burden for your grandfather. I know he felt
