And I couldn't prove I didn't because nobody believes in a patchy woman over a white man's brother. Not in Ohio, not anywhere. She waited for the disgust, for the doubt, for him to stand up and walk out. Anel didn't stand up. Two breaths, he said.
What? You stood still for two breaths? After 8 years of him using you for a punching bag, he shook his head slowly. Odessa, I'd have stood still a lot longer than that. She stared at him.
Then she put her face in her hands and she did not cry, not out loud. But her shoulders shook for a long, long time. And Anel sat across the fire from her. Close but not too close. Not touching, just there.
Like a mountain is there. The snow came the next week and it did not stop. It piled up to the window sills. It froze the creek. It buried the road.
and it locked the two of them inside that big house on the ridge with nothing but a fire and a stack of firewood and a silence that slowly slowly stopped being awkward. He learned she hated mornings and loved the dark. She learned he could not sleep if a door was left open. He learned she bit her lip when she was reading something sad. She learned he hummed to the cattle badly every single morning.
Do they like it? She asked once. They've never complained. They're cows, Anel. Exactly.
very polite animals and she laughed and he felt it in his chest for an hour after. Then on the 10th of December, in the worst blizzard of the year, somebody pounded on the door like the house was on fire. It was Walt Dunore, a rancher from the far end of the valley. 28 years old, snow up to his waist, his eyes wild. He had crossed the street to avoid Anel for 5 years.
Now he was standing in Anel's doorway, shaking so hard he could barely speak. It's Clara, my wife. The baby's coming. It's been coming since yesterday, and it won't come. And she's she's His voice broke.
Please, please, I'll do anything. Odessa was already reaching for her case. How far? 4 miles in this. Please, Anel, she said.
Get the sleigh. They crossed four miles of white hell in an hour and a half. The horses floundering, the wind screaming. Anel walked in front half the way, breaking trail through drifts higher than the horse's chests, dragging them forward by the bridles. The Dunore cabin was tiny, one room, hot as an oven, and on the bed Clara Dunore was gray as ash, and barely breathing.
Odessa took one look, laid her hands on the belly, felt, pressed, felt again. Her face went still. Breach, she said. The baby's turned wrong. It has to be turned or they'll both die.
Can you do it? Walt whispered. Not alone, she turned. Looked straight up at Anel. I need your hands.
He froze. My hands. She's too weak to bear down. I need someone to hold her up. Hold her steady.
Push from the outside where I tell you. Gently. So gently. Can you do that? His hands.
His huge, ugly, frightening hands. The hands the whole valley whispered about on a laboring woman. On a baby. No. No.
I can't. I'll hurt her. I'll break something. I'll answer. He looked at her.
I need you, she said. And so the devil of Copper Hollow knelt down by the bed. All night long through the blizzard, through the screaming, he did exactly and only what Odessa told him. Hold here. Lift there.
Press slowly. Slower. Stop now again. His huge hands steady as bedrock. His voice low and rumbling in Clara Dunore's ear.
You're all right. You're all right. She knows what she's doing. Hold on. Until near dawn, Odessa said.
It's turned. And then push, Clara. Push. And then the baby came. red, furious, squalling, straight into Anel Branick's cupped palms.
He knelt there, frozen, holding a whole new person in hands that could crush Riverstones. A tiny, slippery, screaming girl, her fist the size of his thumbnail. And as he watched, that tiny fist reached up and closed around one of his enormous fingers and held on. Anel Branick wept openly, silently, tears running down into his beard in front of Walt Dunore, in front of everybody. He did not care.
They named her Ruth. Because Odessa had told Walt Dunore what Anel's mother was called. And Walt Dunore, standing in his own doorway at sunrise with his living wife and his living daughter behind him, had looked up at the giant he'd been afraid of for 5 years and said, "Then she's Ruth. If that's all right with you," Anel could not answer. He only nodded.
By Christmas, the whole valley had heard the story. The baby caught by the devil's hands and something began to crack like ice on a river in March. People came up the mountain afraid, still afraid, but they came. Mrs. Lund brought a pie. Walt Dunore brought half a deer.
And on the 18th of December, which nobody in Copper Hollow knew was Anel's birthday, except Odessa, because she had asked, there was a small lopsided cake on the kitchen table with a single candle stuck in it. 39, she said. How did you? I asked. Nobody asks.
I'm not nobody. He stared at that cake like it was the crown jewels. I can't remember the last time, he said. Then make a wish and make it a good one cuz I am never baking again. That oven is possessed.
He blew out the candle. He did not tell her what he wished, but it had her name in it. It was in January that she started teaching him to read. She did not make a thing of it. That was the genius of it.
She just sat beside him on the settle every evening with one of her two books and read aloud. And she kept the page turned so he could see. And one night without looking up, she put her finger under a word. What's that one? He stared at it.