The one she did not give back
She was thirty-five when the first one came, and the thing she felt, holding him, was a thing she had felt a hundred times before and never once like this: she did not have to give him back.
All her life she had held other women's children. She had been the arms the babies were handed to while their mothers rested — her sisters' children, her brothers' children, the whole crop of nieces and nephews a family throws off across twenty years — and she had held every one of them warm against her and felt, each time, the exact moment the mother reached to take the child again, the plain unthinking certainty of a woman reaching for her own; and she had handed the weight over, and stood up, and gone to see about the supper. She had done it so many times the ache of it had stopped being an ache and become a fact of her, the low permanent weather of a woman who is everyone's help and no one's mother. Now she was thirty-five, married a year, and the child in her arms was hers, and no one was going to reach for him, and she could hold him as long as she liked, all night if she liked, and in the morning he would still be hers to hold. It was the strangest and the best thing that had ever happened to her body, that simple permanence: the not-giving-back.
The house began to fill, and it filled fast, because she had come to it late and there was no long slow front of a married life ahead of her the way there is ahead of a girl of eighteen. A woman who marries at thirty-four does the thing quickly if she does it at all, and Mary Jane did it quickly. A first son within the year of the wedding. A second not long after. The years that had crept past her one indistinguishable from the next, all through her twenties and thirties, while she held everyone else's beginnings — those same years came, now, each one freighted with something of her own that had not been there the year before, and the house that had been full her whole life of other people's lives began, for the first time, to fill with hers.
The eldest they wrote down, in the books that would hold him, as W. H., and the name behind the letters was almost certainly her brother's — William Hubbard, the one of the Rorie boys who had gone to the war and come home from it, the uncle left standing when Ezekiah was not. It is the kind of thing a family does without remarking on it, names the first-born for the one who came back, and this book will not make more of it than that; but the letters are there, a Searcy child carrying a Rorie soldier's name onto the old Rorie ground, and it is of a piece with the whole of where these people lived and whom they lived among.
Then the second, and the second is the one the record catches in the very act of the book's argument.
He was born on the sixth of January, in 1870, and they named him Robert Edwin. And three months and nine days after he was born, while he was still a thing in a cradle who had done nothing in the world but arrive, the state of Mississippi cut a new county called Alcorn out of the old body of Tishomingo, and the new line came down across the country and put the cradle in a different county than the one the child had been born in. He had not moved. Nothing about him had moved. He lay in the same house on the same ground his mother had lived on her whole life, and the world reached over the cradle and changed the name of the place while he slept. Mary Jane, who had watched a town come up out of the woods thirteen miles off and take two names before it was finished, and had married in a county that would not exist by the time her son could walk, now had a son who was born in one county and would grow up in another without going anywhere at all — the first of her children born straight into the plain truth her whole life had been teaching her, that the dirt stays and the map moves, and that a person can be handed a whole new county through no act of his own but lying still in the one he was born in.
She did not think it in those words, rocking him. She thought only that he was hers, and that he was well, and that the arm he was heavy in was her own arm and would not have to give him up.
· · ·
The third man with a book
The third man with a book came up the road in the September of 1870, and for once in Mary Jane's life the book was kind to her.
She was thirty-seven that year, or near it, and she had been counted twice before and remembered both. The first man had found her a girl of seventeen at the loom and written her down true. The second had found her a woman of twenty-seven at the wash and written her down at twenty-five, and she had stood thirty feet off and said nothing while the house shaved two years from her to spare her. This third man found her a wife and a mother of two with a third on the way, on her husband's own ground, in a county three months old — and he wrote her down, of all the unlikely things, at very near her right age. Mary, thirty-seven. Not shaved. Not invented. For the second time in her life, and the first since she was a girl, the record asked how old she was and set the true number down, because a married woman of thirty-seven with a farmer husband and children in the house is not a number anybody needs to be careful with; there is no shame in the age of a wife. The years had made her, at last, a woman the record could tell the truth about again.
It still would not give her her name. It gave her Mary — not Mary Jane, not the whole of her, just the one plain name a census taker sets down for a farmer's wife — and she was used to that by now, had been used to it her whole life, and did not expect the book to do more and was not surprised when it did not. But it got her age right, and after the shame of the last counting there was a small grace even in that, the record meeting her halfway on the one day it had ever been easy to.
And the man of the house it wrote down that September was not the man the second book had found. Ten years back, the marshal had put Freeman Searcy in the census at thirty with every column empty beside his name — day-labourer, no land, no property, nothing at all, the poorest grown man on a road of landed families. The marshal of 1870 found a farmer. He found Freeman on his own place with real estate set against his name and a personal estate beside it — better than a thousand dollars, all told, where ten years before there had been a row of blanks. The landless man had made himself, in the one decade that took nearly everyone else in that county down, a man of property: not a rich man, not a Reuben with his mill and his five thousand, but a standing man on standing ground, counted among the people who owned the country they worked. He had built it the way a poor man builds, out of nothing and by inches, on the old Rorie ground where he had married in and stayed. Mary Jane had married a man with empty columns. She was the wife, now, of a man the book gave numbers to. The too-poor man of 1860 was a landholder; the too-old woman of 1860 was the mother of his sons; and the sorting that had set the two of them aside had been wrong about everything except the two years it once shaved off her age.
But the truest thing on that 1870 page was none of the grown people. It was the baby. Down at the bottom of the household, under the parents and the growing boy, the marshal wrote Robert, four-twelfths — Robert Edwin at four months old, his first appearance in any record anywhere, the oldest paper trace of the man he would grow to be. Sixty years of his life would run out from that four-months' line, and nearly the whole of it on the same ground; but on the day it was written he was a number in a column, four months into the world, in a county three months older than himself. Mary Jane, who had spent her whole life watching the record get her wrong, watched it take down her son at the very beginning of him, and there was nothing wrong in it to grieve — only a small new person, correctly counted, at the start of a long life on the family's dirt.
And around the household on that page was everyone. The counting set the Searcys down in the thick of the same cluster the second book had held — Rories and Walkers and Rineharts and Vanderfords, the intermarried families of that road — with Freeman's sister a few doors off in another household and Mary Jane's own brother William Hubbard up the page. It was the neighborhood it had always been, the family and the neighborhood one thing, the way it had been her whole life; only now she was not the waiting daughter at the middle of it but a wife and mother with a place of her own inside the cluster, counted among the households instead of inside her father's. She had not moved an inch to get there. The road was the same road. But her standing on it had changed, at last, in the only direction it had ever had left to go.
· · ·
Three, and none of them given back
The third son came in 1873, when she was forty, and with him the house was full.
They wrote him down, like the others, by his initials — F. N. — a third small Searcy on the old Rorie ground. He was the last; forty is late, and three was what the late marriage gave her, and three was what she kept. She had borne three sons in the six years since she married, from thirty-five to forty, and the house that had counted her whole life only the people it was losing — the grandmother from the corner, the old man up the road, her father, her brother, all the leavings of all the years — now counted, for the first time she could remember, only the people it was gaining. Three boys under one roof, all of them hers, all of them living.
It is worth setting her beside her mother here, because the two counts do not read the way you would think. Mary Polly had borne ten. Ten children off that ground over the years of her marriage, the full house that was the very standard of what a woman of that country was raised to be. Mary Jane bore three. She had come to it too late for more, and three was a thin harvest beside her mother's ten, and by the plain arithmetic of the neighborhood — the same arithmetic that had once counted her too old to start — she had done a fraction of what her mother did. But set the other column beside that one. Of Mary Polly's ten, the ground had taken some back; a woman who bears ten in that century does not keep ten, and Mary Polly had stood over more than one child's grave in her time, and had buried at the last a grown son east of Atlanta besides. Mary Jane bore three, and she kept three. She would keep them — all three, every year still coming, to the far end of her own long life — and that is a thing this book will come to in its own place and will not spend here; but it begins in 1873, with the third boy in the house and not one of the three yet taken from her. The daughter who had done a fraction of what her mother did had done, on the one count that cuts the deepest of all, the thing her mother could not: she had borne her children and given none of them back.
And there is the phrase her whole life had taught her, come round now to mean the opposite of what it always had. Given back. All those years she had held the family's babies and given every one of them back to its mother. She had learned the ache of it in her arm before she had a child of her own to weigh against it. And now she had three of her own and gave none of them back — not to a mother, because she was the mother, and not to the ground, because the ground did not take them. The arms that had handed a hundred warm children over to other women held their own three and kept them.
There is one more thing to say of these years, because it is the years these were, and the earlier chapters have been quietly laying it in. She was, by now, the family's hands for the dead. She had learned the office at twenty-four, over her grandmother's body, and had gone on learning it, because in a family and a neighborhood that size someone is always being made ready for the ground and the readying falls to the women who can do it steadily, and she could. Those hands knew the work of the dead. They had done it, and they would do it again, more times than any one person should be asked to, in the years still ahead of her. But not in these years. In these years — the new decade, the house filling, the three boys underfoot — those same hands did nothing but the work of the living. They washed children who squirmed and hollered instead of children who lay still. They dressed the quick. The woman who would one day lay out very nearly everyone she loved spent the one long full stretch of her life with no one under her roof to lay out at all, only three loud boys to feed and scrub and chase and raise; and the hands that knew the dead so well were given, for once and for a good while together, nothing to do but keep the living going. It was the nearest thing to plain ordinary happiness the record ever lets us catch her in, and it is worth marking as exactly that: a full house, everyone in it breathing, the death-work set down for a season.
The boys would grow, of course, the way boys grow, and go; and the years were already on their way that would thin the house again by the ordinary means, and turn her, at the far end, into an old woman taken into a child's house the way her grandmother had been and her mother would be. But that is the far side of the hill, and it is not yet, and it does not belong here. In 1873 she was forty years old, on the ground she had been born beside, with a husband who had made himself a farmer out of nothing and three sons in the house and every one of them living. The county had set her down, at twenty-seven, among its settled and finished features, a woman nothing further was going to happen to. A great deal had happened to her. It had only taken until she was thirty-four to start, and it had come, when it came, all at once, and on the same dirt she had stood on her whole life — and she held it the way she had learned to hold everything, in the arm, warm against her, except that this, at last, she did not have to give back.