Julie C. Day
Raising Babies
Even though it was spring, God’s time for new life and rebirth, beneath three feet of hard-packed dirt, the baby wouldn’t stop crying. Unlike back in Asheville, real flowers were hard to come by at Grandma Charko’s house. But they were necessary. Two weeks ago Sylvia had grabbed a handful of zinnias from the neighbor’s garden. Last week she’d lifted roses from the top of a shiny gravestone. Yesterday she’d even sacrificed the carnation Grandma received at church, pressing it down into the dry, unyielding ground. “See, baby? See what a seed can do?” But still the baby kept crying. Momma’s garden sat in a corner of the backyard, not far from the chain-link fence and the looming shadow of the neighbor’s sagging porch. Sylvia could hear a dog bark followed by the frantic scrabble of large paws against an unknown door. The garden was a lonely place for newborn things. “It’s okay, baby.” Sylvia crouched down and patted the hard earth. “It’s all right.” When Sylvia was little, Momma used to sing those nursery songs with the hand gestures. Maybe that was why the baby cried all the time—it couldn’t move its arms. “The itsy bitsy spider,” Sylvia began, her spider fingers laddering upward, “climbed up the water spout….” The dog had finally quieted; Sylvia could hear the whoosh of cars speeding along 3rd Street and out of town toward the East Fork White River. One block in the other direction stood Columbus’s historic district. Grandma’s church, St.