Della

Della

She feels the first pain when she bends over the potato hill. She straightens, then moves down the row, leaving mounds of russets behind her. It is a good crop with no scab or mildew. Along with parsnips, onions, and squash, the potatoes will keep in the cellar well into spring. The next pain drops her to her knees. Then she knows and goes in the house. Jars of freshly canned apples cover the table, their packed quarters swathed in a sugary syrup with specks of cinnamon that shine through the glass.

The seventh child, a girl, born on her forty-second birthday, and this baby does not cry, blessed from the beginning with an accommodating disposition, the doctor says. When her neighbor hands the child to her, wrapped in a light cotton blanket, she notices how smooth her face is, almost unscathed by the trauma. Only when the doctor gently folds back the blanket edge and shows her a swelling, like a translucent sac, at the base of the tiny head, does she understand something is wrong, something she could never imagine. She does not recoil from it or the strained look in the doctor's light blue eyes.

"You'll have to take her to the specialist in Spokane. I'll make an appointment for you. I just don't know. We can't treat these things out here, Della." He pats her shoulder, and she nods at him, then at George, her husband, knowing there is no money, knowing also that after rantings and denials, somehow he will get them there. She takes the little hand and names her daughter Mary Elizabeth for all the trouble that lies ahead.

At six months the doctors drain the sac, now big as a lemon, for the last time. When Mary Elizabeth's brothers and sisters chase each other around the kitchen, she laughs and rolls in her crib. Sometimes Unis, the eldest, picks her up and dances into the dining room where the colored glass panel in the window sends fractured light onto peeling beige wallpaper. Then she moves her fists up and down against her big sister's shoulders in excitement and makes her small pink mouth form an "Oooo."

Every morning her eyes follow her father as he puts on his work boots, eats fried potatoes and eggs, then dips his pipe in the Prince Albert tobacco can. He cannot resist looking back at her. In spite of himself, he smiles and waves his hand over the crib in acknowledgment as he heads out for morning chores. She has captured him, too. Della smiles but covers her mouth with her hand, so he can show his affection without gruff denial, so he can savor the gentlest of loves.

One morning when he rises, Mary Elizabeth's eyes remain closed. He reaches across her bed for the overalls hung on a nail, then touches the cool baby flesh. He turns away hard and leaves the room.

"Della."

She hears her name as the back door slams, hears it as she has heard it only once before with the rawness of a knife scraping bone.

It is not as if she did not know the day would come. It is not as if her prayers were to somehow escape from the pain, old and new at the same time. It is just the finality-separation. She picks her child up, looks into her still face, and feels her merge with another little girl, a child with smoky eyes and a large bow in her hair. Ten years old, but George carries his daughter into the photographer's studio in Lewiston, for she no longer has the strength to climb stairs. Sepia tones make the solemn face still graver, and no degree of beauty shields the viewer from thin white-stockinged legs beneath the dark pleats of her low-waist dress, from the sunken cheeks. Their first child-Lydia.

Born nine months after the marriage, Lydia watches her father with the same curious brown eyes that Mary Elizabeth brings to him twenty-five years later. Like Mary Elizabeth, she entrances him with a smile so free and ingenuous, he forgets his detachments and worships her with unguarded love.

Almost two years later, there is another girl child and then another though Della knows George needs a boy to help with farmwork. He grumbles about the cost of a hired man because he has no sons, but Della catches him standing beside the lilac bush, mesmerized by his three girls at play after Sabbath services, the prairie wind lifting their starched white dresses as they race through the orchard. Often she hears him tease them as they try chasing the hens off their nests to collect eggs. The youngest, still in diapers, calls out, "Wait for me, Daddy, wait," until he sets her on his shoulders. When Lydia grows weaker and weaker, her heart unable to survive the ravages of rheumatic fever, something shuts off in him, something the sons who come later never replace.

Today this is her only comfort-that Lydia was not afraid, that she somehow knew she would not live and told her mother, as if she were the parent, God would send someone stronger, filled with vigor, to take her place. And he did, a first son, never sick, and then two more, the last a towhead with thick curls covering his forehead.

Now there is this little one who almost never cried-"the best little baby in the world," Unis always said when she took her baby sister in her arms and made up songs for her-gone, too.