One year later

“Sit down, Hazel, for the love of mercy. You’ve caught half the babies in this valley, and you know a watched pot decides its own finishing time. Sitting won’t slow it and pacing won’t hurry it.”

“I know exactly what it does and doesn’t do.” Hazel went on walking anyway, slow and heavy with one hand at the small of her back, the other resting on the great taut curve of herself. “And I’ve told a hundred women the very thing you’re telling me, and I’ve just this summer learned they were all right to ignore me. Walking helps. Not the baby. Me.”

The house was warm with the long gold light of a late summer evening, the windows thrown open to the prairie, and the sounds of it drifted in on the soft air. he meadowlarks that had come back in their proper season this time, the far-off lowing of the cattle, the endless wind gone gentle and green-smelling instead of cold. It was nearly a year to the season since the fall she had married Will in the frost-bright church. The world had turned all the way round and come to late summer, and now it meant to give her a child of her own.

Sarah sat propped in the good chair with her feet up and her own hands folded over the gentle beginning of a curve she had only lately started to show. Four months along and glowing with it, she had been ordered by Hazel in the sternest of words to rest and be waited on for once in her life. Tom sat on the arm of the chair beside her, close enough that his hand kept finding her shoulder without either of them appearing to arrange it. His weathered face soft with a pride he had given up trying to hide months ago.

“I still say it isn’t right, you up and about,” Sarah said, but gently. “You ought to be lying down with the women fussing over you, not fussing over your own self. Where’s the sense in the best midwife in the county having no one to midwife her?”

“She has someone.”

“She has you barking orders and me useless in a chair, and—” Sarah stopped, and her eyes went to the doorway, and she huffed. “And she has that, which is the part I can’t get used to.”

Will stood in the doorway with his sleeves rolled and a basin in his hands, a look on his face equal parts terror and resolve. Hazel felt herself soften at the sight of him. It was not how these things were done. She knew that better than anyone in this house. A birthing room was the country of women, and a husband’s place was the barn or the porch or the far end of a bottle until it was over. Half the valley would cluck if they heard of it. She had decided she did not care.

“I’ve caught every child born in this valley this past year,” she had told him, weeks back, when the argument first came up. “I’ve views on how it’s to be done when it’s for me. And my view is I want the person I trust most in the room, not a committee of Mrs. Petersons come to watch and report. That’s you. It’s always going to be you. You held my hand through worse than this on a much colder night.”

And he had stopped arguing, as he had learned to stop arguing when she reasoned a thing all the way to the ground. Here he was with his basin, breaking every rule of decency the frontier kept, because she had asked him to.

He set the basin down where she had told him to set it, then picked it up again and moved it two inches. Then, he set it down once more. Hazel watched him do it and loved him so much in that moment that it nearly undid her worse than the pains. A year married, and the man still could not keep his hands still when something frightened him and he had no way to fix it with them. He had rebuilt the whole room twice this week for want of anything else to do but the waiting.

“You can still send me for the Sumner woman,” he offered, not for the first time.

“Constance has a four-month-old at the breast and no business at another woman’s bedside. Besides.” Hazel paused by the window, breathing through a tightening that came and slowly went. “I caught her Silas myself this spring, and a finer, fatter, angrier boy you never heard. If I could bring that one safely into the world after everything that woman had lost, with Constance weeping and laughing at once and Jonathan out in the yard too frightened to come in, then I can manage my own with you beside me. Silas Sumner is the reason I know it can go right. I need no better proof than a live baby I put in his mother’s arms myself.”

Sarah’s eyes had gone bright. “You never told me you cried.”

“I never said I cried.”

“You didn’t have to.” Sarah pressed a hand to her own middle, to the small life four months on its way. Something passed between the two women that needed no saying, the whole long thread of it, the losses, the fears, the animal hope that carried a woman from one to the next. “When my time comes,” Sarah said, “it’s you I want. Nobody else. Barking and all.”

“It’ll be me. I’ll be there, and I’ll bark, and you’ll have a fat cross baby of your own by the first snow.”

The children came through then in a thunder of feet. Becky was in the lead and Danny was at her heels. The two of them grown a hand taller in the year and were thick as thieves together. Pip streaked after them, gone lanky and dignified out of his kittenhood but no wiser. Becky pulled up short at the sight of Hazel bent over the windowsill.

“Is it now?” she demanded. “Is the baby coming now?”

“Soon.” Hazel straightened and cupped the girl’s face, this daughter given to her by a hard winter and a good man. “Not this very minute but soon. And when it does, you’re to mind Sarah and Tom and keep your brother from underfoot, and there’ll be a new one to meet by morning.”

“A brother or a sister?” Danny asked.

“One or the other. They only come the two ways.”

“I hope it’s a boy,” Danny confided. “Becky’s alright, but there’s too much girl in this house already.” He said it with the weary air of a much-put-upon man, and Becky shoved him. Hazel sent the pair of them out to the yard with Pip scampering after them. She felt the next pain come harder and closer on the heels of the last, and knew the walking was nearly done.

“Will.”

He was at her side before she had the whole word out.

“It’s time,” she said. “Sarah, you rest, and send the children in for their lunch, and if I want you, I’ll call. Will—” She took his arm, and looked up into that dear anxious face, and let herself lean, just for a moment, on the strength she had spent a year learning she was allowed to lean on. “Come and help me bring our child into the world.”

The birthing room was the small one off the kitchen that she had made ready weeks ago, the linens boiled and folded, the water waiting, everything in its place under her own exacting hand. She had readied it as she had readied a dozen such rooms for other women. It was a strange and wondrous thing to walk into it now as the one it was all for.

What passed there through that long afternoon was hers and Will’s, and belonged to no one else and to no telling. There was pain, and there was labor in the old true sense of the word. There was Will’s hand to grip and Will’s low voice steady in her ear through the worst of it. He told her simple useful things, said he had her, saying it as she had said it to him on a black night a year gone with two lost children in the dark. She had held him up then. He held her now. That was the whole of a marriage, she thought, in the clear, strange spaces between the pains. Two people taking turns being the strong one, so that neither ever had to stand entirely alone.

And then, near the last of the light, when she had spent everything she had and reached down past it for more the way laboring women always somehow do, there came the turning and the crowning and the great final effort, and after it, into the hush, a cry.

Small, furious, and entirely alive.

“A boy,” Will said, and his voice broke clean in two on the word. “Hazel. It’s a boy. He’s — look at him. Look what we’ve done.”

Will put her son into her arms, red and squalling and perfect. The love that came up in her was not a gentle thing at all. It was fierce and total, a tide that swept clean through her and took with it the last cold corner that the losses of her old life had left in her. Dorothy and Mary and the mother and father she had never known, they were still part of her, but now the chain went on. She was a link in it now on the far side, no longer only the one who caught the babies but the one who bore one. She wept without any shame at all while she counted his ten furious fingers and his ten curling toes.

For a while there was no one in the world but the three of them. Will had sent word out that mother and child were well. Then he had closed the door on the waiting house and come back to her. He sat on the edge of the bed with his arm behind her and his son in the crook of it, and neither of them found they had much to say. The baby quieted against her, worn out from the work of arriving. Will looked at the small perfect face, and then at Hazel’s. She watched years of held-back grief and one more of careful hope give way at last to something unguarded and whole.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice quiet.

“For what?”

“For coming down that road. For not letting me talk myself out of you.” He brushed a damp strand of hair off her forehead with a gentleness that didn’t match his rough hand. Then he bent and kissed her, slow and unhurried and sweet, a kiss with no fear anywhere in it. It felt like the first he had ever given her that was not shadowed by something waiting to take it away. When he drew back his eyes were wet, and he did not trouble to hide it. “I didn’t know a man could be given a whole life twice.”

“You’ve a habit of getting more than you reckon you deserve.” She touched his face. “Best make your peace with it. There’s years of it coming.”

The afternoon grew to evening while she slept with the baby drowsing at her side and Will keeping his watch over the both. When she woke, the light had gone long and pale. She took some time to clean, comb, and put herself to rights in a fresh nightgown. Finally, she felt ready to share him. She sent Will to open the door.

The children were in the room before the door had swung halfway, sent for or come on their own, their eyes enormous. Behind them stood Sarah with her hand at her mouth, and Tom with both of his on Sarah’s shoulders, and Pip winding silent and curious through all their feet toward the new small sound in the house.

“Come,” Hazel said, “and meet him. Gently, now. He’s new.”

They came, this family made out of loss and winter and stubborn love, and gathered close around the bed to look at the newest of them. Becky reached a careful finger to the baby’s fist and gasped when it closed on her. Danny declared him satisfactory. Will sat on the edge of the bed and put his arm around all of them, his wife and his son and his daughter and the boy who was his now in every way but the blood. He drew them in against his chest.

Beyond the open windows, the prairie ran wide and endless beneath the last of the light. Along the creek, the cottonwoods stood dark against the evening sky, their leaves still catching what remained of the sun. It was the same vast country that had frightened Hazel on the day the wagon first came down that road, the country she had thought might swallow her whole.

It had not swallowed her. In the end, it had held her. It had given her a home, a family, and more than she had ever thought to ask of it.

She looked at the faces gathered in the lamplight around her son, then out toward the cottonwoods and the open land beyond them and knew she was not afraid of any of it anymore.

“Welcome,” she told the baby, her family, and their good life stretched out ahead. “Welcome home.”

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