Maudie was eight months pregnant with their second child, her hands raw and wrinkled from scrubbing laundry. Men passed through Oklahoma looking for work, and Maudie knew how to tell a joke, share a bit of laughter. She made them feel human again. It was her smile and her easy way of listening, like they were old friends sipping iced tea on a porch on a warm day the way they used to do before the barren fields made them take to the road. There were no porches in this rural Hooverville where tents served as houses, or living quarters of a kind were scrabbled together from whatever could be found. Maudie’s features reminded them of their mothers, their sisters, their lovers all at once and also not at all. The gentle way she insisted a clean pair of overalls or a fresh shirt was all they needed to forget, for a little while, they were destitute and tired. Most times, the men would scrounge up what they could pay her. Sometimes they simply took their clean clothes and moved on. Sometimes, especially when her belly hadn’t been so big, they asked her to take a walk in the woods. But Maudie always made sure she stayed right out in the open.
The women in the makeshift neighborhood did what they could. They’d send their little boys out to slaughter jackrabbits, if there were some to be found. They’d feed the men the stringy meat, but decline payment so that, bellies full, the men would be inclined to dredge up a few coins for clean clothes from Maudie. No one ever said that was why, but she knew. A few months back, a woman here had carried to term, but the baby was stillborn. And before that, when Maudie had given birth to Helen, the bleeding had gone on so long she thought she might die. So, this time, she managed to save for a doctor.
One cold night, as she shivered under ragged quilts, she woke to the noises of someone in her tent. At first, panic. Then as the sleep left her eyes she recognized her husband’s movements. Gone for weeks, he was now rummaging in the dark.
She sat up. Warren? When did you get home?
Shhh, honey. His words slurred.
What are you doing?
A rattling sound as he shook something.
You’ll wake Helen.
Glass shattered. The kerosene lamp. Squalls filled the tent. She reached to soothe the baby lying beside her, keeping a hand over her own belly as well, as if the one unborn had also awakened. The sounds of his hands sliding over their few possessions continued. Maudie’s heart quickened.
Come to bed.
He was nearer now, his hunched outline visible in the dark. Pots and pans clanged. Normally, she knew how to wait out his rage.
Warren. Stop.
He leaned close to her face. Where is it?
The baby was still crying. Maudie sat straight and still.
His breath was thick and cloying. Don’t you think I know what you’ve been up to? Whore. A blow landed on her left bicep, knocking her sideways. She guessed he’d been aiming for her head. It wouldn’t be the first time he gave her a black eye or boxed her ears. She sucked in air.
This is my family, he snarled. My money. He moved away.
So that was it then. If she let him take her savings, he’d leave her be. Warren had always said he didn’t want his own children growing up like him, the beaten son of a gone papa and a drunk mama. Maudie picked up the screaming baby and rubbed her back. Small, but solid.
What have you been doing all this time? Though by then she knew what he comforted himself with while away.
I’m doing all this for you, goddammit.
She hugged the baby. No, Warren.
He found the money then. The bills rustled as he shoved them in his pocket. A clank as he tossed aside the coffee tin in which she’d hidden it. As he moved to leave, she caught his arm with one hand.
Please.
He didn’t even pretend to hesitate.
Once she settled the baby, Maudie lay on her side, curled around her pregnant belly. The black night enveloped her.
The next morning, she found him passed out in front of their tent, his filthy clothes disheveled, snores protruding from his open mouth. Skin purpling around one eye. He’d been fighting. She knew the money was gone.
To the touch he was ice cold, like the earth he lay on in the predawn light. She shook him, hard, and when he woke he stared at her with bleary bloodshot eyes. Reached up and stroked her black hair. Ran his fingers over her parched lips. She steeled herself against his hands, against the nausea churning in her stomach. Then, she drew all her strength and, putting his arm around her shoulders, helped him inside.
*
A few months later, when the newborn’s cries pierced the air, the Cherokee midwife who’d agreed finally to come announced it was a boy. Exhausted from her long labor, Maudie grasped the woman’s hand, but shut her eyes against the tears: Why couldn’t it have been a girl? Like Helen, just eighteen months old.
Helen. Her firstborn, who had grown somehow from the earth when nothing else would. Maudie had been afraid the baby would not have the chance to be born. Her pregnant belly had ached with hunger.
That was during the first time since they’d been married that Warren had left Maudie alone, when she’d still known for certain he loved her. But their love could not feed them, and so he was gone for weeks upon weeks. No wheat to farm. No cotton. Not enough rain to grow even a black-eyed pea.
Warren rarely talked about his parents. One day he told her his father had been a carpenter for the railroad. Maybe he could find work there too. Maudie was afraid, though she tried not to show it, worried he would be crushed by the trains he hopped on to carry him to the stations.
While he was away, hunger kept her constant company, tormenting her. She felt Helen feather light inside her belly, fading away.
Maudie lay each night under the stars, on the hand-me-down iron bed her mother had given them as a wedding present, the scent of dirt keeping her awake. Like most of her neighbors, she slept outside when it was warm. Because the bed wouldn’t fit inside the canvas tent. And so they’d have somewhere to go during the afternoons, a shelter to escape the sun that baked the earth; and the wind that shook the trees. On the single radio station, she had heard how the gusts reached the western part of the state where there had once been wide-open fields bursting with crops. The saying passed from salesmen to farmers was that rain follows the plow. The radio said now, though, that they had plowed too much. Now there was nothing left but great dust clouds that blacked out the sky worse than a tornado.
She’d seen some of it, back at the beginning of the drought, before her mother moved Maudie and her siblings to Oklahoma’s Green Country, hoping for rain and work. But by the time they crossed the state, the rivers were low, the land not so lush as the name implied. That there were no more crops to farm was how Maudie understood then that what the president called the Depression was real. Before, it had seemed to her like they were poor as always.
It was after the move that Maudie met Warren. He was passing through looking for work, and he started overseeing maintenance at a farm they were staying on. His height and wit commanded the respect of the other men, who never knew he was bossing them, though he was younger than most.
She was drawn to his rugged, round-cheeked face and pouty lips, his eyes sharp and sparkling; the way she felt when he touched her. He liked to wrap his hands around her waist, admiring the way his fingers met. She was as tall as him, and this too he liked. Reclining under an elm, they would press their palms together and admire the symmetry of their fingers—his wide and square; hers long and slender, the tips polished her favorite shade of red in spite of the callouses from housework and cotton picking. Piano hands, he said kissing hers, and she thought how she’d like to learn to play one day.
When he asked her to marry him a few weeks later, her mother wanted Maudie out of the house. Like Warren, Maudie was eighteen. Just one more mouth to feed now that her step daddy was gone. Left for a girl Maudie’s age. She’d never known her real father. Rumor was he’d been a married man who’d employed her teenaged Mama. Besides, Dan, at age twelve, was old enough by then to care for the younger ones. At least that’s what mother said. Maudie’s heart broke, leaving them. Mama warned her to keep close to Warren, no matter what. Don’t end up like her: six kids to raise all by herself.
It had been a troubled few years, ever since the earth quit growing things.
*
One night when Maudie had lain beneath the stars, pregnant the first time and willing Helen to life, the scent of the dust finally overwhelmed her. The dirt ignited her senses like fresh bread, plumped and tender from the oven. She knew it wasn’t right. Tried to resist, pressed her face into her straw-filled pillow, but the richness of the earth made her nostrils quiver, overwhelming her sinuses. Maudie ran her tongue over the inside of her cheeks, licking her lips and smacking them together. Her stomach growled. A swirling sensation in her belly: The baby moving, as though she, too, was enticed by the smell.
Finally, Maudie sat up in bed and lowered herself to the ground. Reflecting the moonlight, the dirt glowed pale in the night. She looked around but saw no movement. Only the forms of her neighbors asleep on their beds, the shapes of their shacks and tents, and the dark shadows of brittle pines and sparse elms beyond. On her knees now, she reached underneath the bed, where the floor of earth lay soft and un-trampled. It was powdery against her palm, the fine grains slipping in streams from between the fingers of her piano hands as she brought the cool dirt to her lips. The saliva that filled her anxious mouth mingled with the dirt, forming a satisfying kind of clay. She closed her eyes, moaning with relief as she chewed and swallowed. The aching in her stomach eased. She imagined the clay filling Helen’s outline inside of her, her features emerging as though sculptured. She leaned her face closer to the ground, bringing great handfuls of sand to her mouth.
In this way, each night, Maudie sustained herself and her baby. And while she was pregnant with the second child, she staved off hunger by eating dirt to help with saving the money to pay the doctor. She kept it a secret from her neighbors, in light of their kindnesses, like being around to talk with, but not to ask questions when Warren was home.
Girls, she knew, did what they could for each other.
Boys, though. They grew into men.
*
Yet, when the midwife placed the baby boy on Maudie’s chest and she wept, it was also because his body was tiny and vulnerable in her arms. She knew she couldn’t help loving him. The same way she had loved her little brothers and sisters when she was raising them, while their mother labored in the fields of the farm where they rented a roof.
And so she had no choice. She named the baby William Ray, as she and Warren had agreed; though she never called him anything but Sunny. To remind herself of what she well knew: that children could bring light to the dark. If you loved them well. She vowed that, through her nurturing, her son would come to fit the name. In fact, everyone came to know him as Sunny, so charming and charismatic.
As the babies grew, Maudie noticed, but did not say aloud, that his carefree personality was in stark opposition to Helen.
Helen, who saw everything that went on with her dark, serious eyes. Who, even as a child, took care of things in the little ways she could. And it was she, the baby girl, who caused Maudie to realize she would have to find a way out, and to take her babies with her. Devise a way for them to never be starving again. For despite all Maudie had endured, or perhaps because of it, she felt she had irreparably wronged her daughter. Because it was Helen who, when her father was away and she thought no one was looking, sometimes ate dirt, so her little brother would not hunger.
Lorinda Toledo was born and raised in New Mexico, while Los Angeles has been her home for more than a decade. Her novel-in-progress was named first runner-up for the 2019 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and received an honorable mention in CRAFT's First Chapters Contest. Her fiction has been published in the Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She earned a PhD in Literature with creative dissertation from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2019. While there, her writing and research were supported by multiple awards, including a Black Mountain Institute fellowship. She is a past fiction editor at Witness literary magazine, and teaches writing at Antioch University Los Angeles.
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