The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
say those babies came from two different wombs.”
A week after delivering the cobbler, Mrs. Minrath returned in her starched apron, her leather ledger at her side, saying, “Those tomatoes in your garden aren’t going to can themselves.”
Elma said she wouldn’t be needing any help this year, thank you kindly. “We got our hands full with the babies.”
Mrs. Minrath pursed her flat lips. “Then it would seem you could use all the extra hands you could get. Especially in times like these. And without any womankind around.”
“I got my Nan. She’s a plumb miraculous canner. We been canning since we was tall as the hem on your dress, Mrs. Minrath. Even without a book to write it all down in.”
Mrs. Minrath looked around Elma and into the house, where Nan was holding Wilson. She shook her head. “Poor children,” she said, and turned and walked down the steps.
People came to help, and Elma sent them away. It was true that she lost some tomatoes—her father let her tend the garden, but alone she couldn’t pick them fast enough. She canned what she could, and the peaches and berries too, and pickled the peppers and carrots, sweating over the stove. She ate the cobblers and biscuits and pies, hating every bite, but she was hungry, and so were the babies, and they were delicious, those wicked, wicked pies. She fed the chickens and the guineas and the hogs and the mules, trapping a high-pitched hum in her mouth, and milked the cows, April and June, Anna and Margaret, and separated the cream from their milk, saving the skim for the hogs. “It’s all they want us for, ain’t it, girls,” she said to the cows, tugging the full, furred mounds of their teats. “Milk, milk, and more milk.” When she was held up feeding the babies and couldn’t get out to the barn until dawn, their udders were engorged as globes, veined with rivers of ducts. “Ain’t it the worst, girls,” she said. When she was held up with her chores and forgot to feed the babies, her own milk would mess the front of her dress, and then there was no ignoring it. And then she’d pull the shutters and sit back in the rocker and settle a baby into her lap, or two if she could manage, closing her eyes and letting the ache ease, and then there was nothing in the world but the babies, no visitors, no reporters, only their billy goat mews and the buttermilk smell of their warm heads.
One sunny morning at the height of summer, a truck pulled up in the dirt driveway and a woman with knee-high boots climbed out of it. Her short hair was yellow as a cornfield. Elma stood barefoot on the porch, fiddling with the pins that held up the great pile of her hair, as the woman made her way up the driveway and reached to shake her hand. Elma feared she was from the home demonstration club or the WCTU, on a mission to save her vegetables or her soul. The woman said, “I’m here to see the Gemini twins.”
Elma let her hand fall, loose as a dishrag. “They’re not Gemini,” she said. “They’re just regular.”
She was a dog breeder on her way to Florida, come all the way from Atlanta. Out of the wooden truck bed, where a dozen dogs yapped, she scooped up two Labrador puppies, one the color of butterscotch, the other oily black as a crow. “They’re called Castor and Pollux,” she said. “Every child needs its own dog.”
Her father came in from the field and thanked her and the dogs jumped on him and he laughed. What was there to laugh about? Elma watched their pink tongues lapping at her father’s hands. This was their reward for killing Genus. Dogs.
“We can’t keep them,” Elma said to the woman. “We got enough to look after with the babies.”
“Course we can,” said her father. “Dogs look after theyselves.”
And he made Elma take the woman into her room, where the babies now shared a larger crib that Juke had built. The woman leaned over the sleeping twins but didn’t pray. “Would you look at that,” she said.
“Please don’t touch the babies,” said Elma. “They’re still fragile. They were born small.”
“They look strong,” said the woman. “Especially this boy here. That’s hybrid vigor.”
Elma joined the woman at the crib, pulling the quilt to Wilson’s chin.
“Most people don’t believe a woman can have two babies from two fathers at the same time. They think it’s witchcraft, don’t they? Or just tales from Bible times?”
Elma felt a sudden pressure in her chest, like a blush, or a rush of milk.
“With dogs in the wild, it happens all the time. You take any bitch in heat, they’s as good a chance as not that every mutt in the litter’s gone have a different daddy.”
“That so?” said Elma, head cocked. One of her pins sprung out of her hair and she bent to pick it up, then took it between her lips, chewing it over.
“Your babies will be fine,” the woman said. “Black or white, they’re fixing to be strong.”
Of course, Wilson wasn’t true black. Nor was he red like Isaac’s child Esau, though under his skullcap was a rusty shock of hair, like the bronze wool used to scrub the pans. When he had grown into his skin, he was a warm, loamy brown, the color of the earth tilled for seed—sand and silt and clay mixed together. And when his eyes finally settled, when he could stare back at the faces that loomed over the crib and hold them in focus, they were a pale gray-green. You didn’t have to look twice, some said, to see those eyes were Elma’s.
Winnafred, though—already she was called Winna Jean, or just Winna—took after her father. When her skin cooled from the pink of infancy, she was white as a gourd, with Freddie’s sun-bleached hair, even before she’d seen the sun. It wasn’t until years later, when the twins spent their days running between the house and the fields and the barn, that their freckles came out, like stars appearing in the night sky. If you wanted to believe they weren’t twins—and at some point, everyone did, even the twins themselves, as often as they wanted to believe that they were—their freckles were there, finally, to connect them, Castor and Pollux joined in their immortal constellation.
When they were still babies, Elma dressed them head to toe, even indoors, even in summer. She wanted to protect them, to hide them, to make them more the same. You couldn’t blame her. After all, Juke said to the visitors, she’d been expecting only one. When she was pregnant, singing “All the Pretty Horses” to the baby kicking in her belly, she’d sewn six identical guano sack dresses, stitching them together with hay bale twine. When two babies came instead, she dressed both of them in the sacks. If she could have, she would have stitched the babies together at the waist, like Siamese twins. Sometimes it seemed she wanted to believe Wilson and Winna were one child, or that she needed others to believe it. It didn’t matter how the babies came to be. Babies were babies. Even Juke believed that.
“Course I love them both the same,” Elma told the women from church, the reporters who tracked white clay across the floor. She followed them with a broom. “All children live in the kingdom of God, don’t they?”
And they nodded with certainty, saying “Amen” and “Praise His name.”
But they were thinking of all the things she might have done with that baby, all the doorsteps she might have left him on in the middle of the night. The colored school. The colored church. In a basket on the creek. She could see the scheming in their eyes, the stories they were writing in their heads. Just like they wondered what had happened between Elma and Genus Jackson in the cotton house or creek or cornfield, a cornfield she hadn’t even been in, but they were following her there.
In some of their eyes, doubt. They had seen their share of mulatto babies. The Jesups were as liable as any country family to have some black blood along their line, black blood that decided to rear up and show itself. (The white Youngs who owned the tobacco plantation and the black Youngs who owned the juke joint? “You think they ain’t kin?” a white farmer, drunk enough, might be heard to say to his wife. This was raised as a diversion, because that white farmer might himself have a favorite colored