But it was also the thing she had come to understand about herself over the weeks of building, which was that she worked through fear by making something. The cabin had been fear made into walls. The garden was fear made productive. The furniture was fear given four legs and a flat surface. She built the table first, a simple frame with a thick slab top, joints pegged rather than nailed the way Henry had taught her.
Then two chairs rougher than she would have liked, the seat slats not perfectly even, but solid, and she was past the point of caring about aesthetics when function was what the moment required. Then a shelf on the north wall. Then the cradle, a small slatted box with rockers she cut from a single curved branch that was very nearly the right shape already, and she only had to rasp it into the correct ark, which took the better part of an afternoon, and left her arms aching in a way that felt, if not good, than honest. She set the cradle on the floor and rocked it once with her foot. It was not beautiful.
The rockers were slightly mismatched, and she knew it, and could not fix it without more time than she had, but it rocked true, and the slats were strong, and it was the right size. And she put her hand on the side of it, and held it still. The child moved inside her. Then, a long, slow roll that felt different from the usual kicks, more deliberate, more like a repositioning than a reflex. She had read enough to know what that could mean.
Not yet, she said. I'm not finished. She was not. Or she was not finished deciding she was ready, which was not the same thing, but felt like it at 11:00 at night with a cradle on the floor and no one else in the cabin. Amos came on a Friday morning, 3 days before the birth, while she was carrying water from the creek.
It was a task she had slowed considerably because the child's weight had changed her center of gravity in ways she was still adjusting to, and she had stopped three times in 20 yards the day before, and was intending to stop twice today on general principle. He came from the north as usual, pulled up short when he saw her on the slope with the bucket, and dismounted without speaking, and took the bucket from her hand in one clean motion, and carried it the rest of the way to the cabin door. She did not thank him. He did not ask her to. He set the bucket down and turned to look at her when she arrived.
When? He said. Soon, she said. He nodded. He looked at the cabin, the garden, the clearing, then back at her.
Is there someone coming? A midwife. Mrs. Baxter from the boarding house in Durango said she'd come if I sent word. I sent word 5 days ago.
And if she doesn't get here in time, then I'll manage. He looked at her with the expression of a man preparing an objection and she preempted it. I've been at six births, she said. My mothers, my aunts, three neighbors back in Kentucky and a woman on the wagon train coming west. I know what needs to happen.