Enduring Read Free Page B

she saw a baby or whenever a baby crossed her mind, even when her sisters Barb and Mandy allowed her eventually to hold one of those figures of babies that they had come into possession of, which they called a “dollbaby.” When she asked her sisters where babies come from, they said that this one had belonged to Eunice Whitter and before her to Violet Duckworth, and little Latha said yes but not a dollbaby, one of those babies that really cry and look alive. Barb, the older sister, said that babies come from under a gooseberry bush. There was only one gooseberry bush, out behind the cabin, and Latha explored it thoroughly and watched it for weeks and weeks without ever seeing any sign of a baby. Her sister Mandy agreed with her that that was a pretty dumb notion, and she knew for a fact that you could order babies from Sears Roebuck the same way you could order anything else. Latha waited until the next time a catalogue from Sears Roebuck arrived in the mail (the previous issue had been used up as toilet paper in the outhouse). She hunted and hunted through the pictures in it until finally, way off toward the end, she found two pages covered with babies! She showed it to Mandy but Mandy hadn’t learned to read yet so they had to take it to Barb. Barb read aloud but slowly the words about “double riveted patent joint hip and knees, fine bisque head, pasted wig, comes in three sizes,” and Barb said, “These here aint but dollbabies. There’s not no real baby. As usual, Mandy don’t know what she’s talkin about. Real babies are found under gooseberry bushes.” Latha waited as long as she could stand it, checking that gooseberry bush nearly every day, until finally she asked her mother why their gooseberry bush didn’t have any babies under it. Her mother laughed and said that must be some old wives’ tale.
    “But where did I come from, Momma?” Latha wanted to know. Her mother explained that she had been brought by a granny-woman, not Grandma Bourne, bless her heart, but a woman who lived way back up in the hills and had to be called whenever a baby was expected, and who brought the baby in her tote-sack. Some folks who had no modesty but had money could afford to call in Doc Swain or Doc Plowright, who brought the baby in their doctor bag, but most ordinary folks like us has to make do with the granny-woman, who’s just as good as them doctors anyhow and don’t embarrass the mother.
    “But where did the granny-woman get me?” Latha asked.
    Her mother said, “In the barn, of course.”
    Latha told her sisters what their mother had said. Barb allowed as how the barn might be more private and protected than the gooseberry bush. Mandy said that probably the baby came from Sears Roebuck anyhow but the postman couldn’t stuff it into the mailbox so he left it in the barn. The Bourne’s barn wasn’t much of a structure, just big enough for one cow and enough hay to feed her through the winter. Latha gave it a good looking-over, and found several places where hens had laid their eggs in the straw, and Latha gathered these up and took them to the kitchen. But there was one place where a hen had made a nest, with several eggs in it, which she was sitting on. The hen pecked Latha’s hand when she tried to reach under it to get the eggs, so Latha left those alone. Latha was watching closely on the day when the eggs hatched, and she studied all the baby chicks. She wondered if a woman would have to sit on a big egg in the barn for the baby to be born. Or did the granny-woman just find the baby in the hay and take it to the mother in the house? Latha spent a lot of time in the barn, and by and by their cat, Jasmine, gave birth to a litter of seven kittens, and Latha watched each one of them come out of the cat’s bottom. Latha was taken aback because it looked like Jasmine was doing her business, only making kittens instead of do-do. But it was unmistakable that both chicken babies and cat babies were born in the