Your father loves you, Mama told us every night. He loves all us girls. Including herself among us. That didn’t seem strange. Mama felt like a girl, like an older sister who sewed our clothes and milked the goats but still had time to play. She’d take us up Clough Hill for picnics, spread out a cloth on the springy grass, among the wildflowers. We’d make garlands of bluebells and buttercups and wear them like crowns. She’d lead us in dances, our feet falling in the same worn spot where our great-grandmothers might have danced, or girls in the middle ages, or unimaginable years before that. A fairy ring, Mama called it. Then covered her mouth, like she’d said a swear.
We lay flat on that big round hill, watching clouds that looked like animals we only knew from stories: elephants, lions, monkeys with their long tails hooked together, like the ones Papa carved for our Noah’s ark. We’d close our eyes and little suns would stay imprinted on our eyelids. We’d feel the sun warm us like it warmed the grass, feel our bodies growing stronger, longer, reaching for the sun like stalks of corn.
Sometimes we’d look down from the top of the hill, trying to see the ocean, or a town, or smoke from the chimneys of other houses, but there was only green for miles and miles. I’d watch the tall grass wave and pretend it was the ocean.
The world seemed wide and empty with only us in it.
And yet, I knew the world was bigger than what we could see. Papa kept maps on the wall, maps with lines of latitude and longitude, sections marked FEDERAL LAND or UNINCORPORATED, sections with a red X through them, though Papa never said what the X was for. The paper was wavy and pushed-in from where Papa pressed hard with his red pen. Sometimes Papa would go out on patrols with his rifle. His eyebrows met in the middle, looking fierce, like the Big Bad Wolf in Mama’s old storybook, but Mama said he was just worried. A worried man keeps his girls safe, she told us. Safe and secure from all alarm, like the song she’d sing to us at bedtime, but she never said what the alarm could be, fire or windstorm or ravening wolves from over the hills.
I never saw the wolves, but thought I heard them singing far off at night. Some nights I’d lie awake, listening for wolves snarling and growling outside my window. All I heard was Papa’s footsteps, checking every bedroom door. Sometimes I thought he stopped too long at one, but maybe I fell asleep and only dreamed the sounds I heard.
I didn’t know what ravening sounded like, but I imagined it as the harsh croaks of ravens, mixed with the sad cries of wolves.
Spring gave way to summer. We still climbed Clough Hill, still danced in our flower crowns, but our oldest sister danced more slowly now, her growing belly pushing her feet wider apart.
Soon we’ll have a new sister to love, Mama said. A new miracle to welcome.
Mama picked up her sewing, the rag doll she was making for our sister-to-come. She stabbed a needle into the doll’s black button eyes, pulled the thread through. None of us knew why her face was wet with tears.
