The Baby

By Imogen Drake

Winner of the ORB’s HT24 Short Fiction Prize, judged by Nancy Lemann.

Sometimes she strapped him to her chest and walked out through the fields. He would grow quiet and settle in against her, but his eyes never closed. It was through his eyes that she saw the sheep, gathered at the edge of the electric fence to watch them pass. The cows, nosing at the ground and swinging their tails, calling to one another in soft, deep voices. The pigs frightened him, so she was also scared of them, the way they scrambled and grunted, the ground torn beneath them. In the distance the mountains were a stripe of light blue against a somehow lighter sky. She’d been working for the family for around two months. It was the middle of summer and it seemed like there was a storm every other night, the clouds gathering thick while she was still with the baby, often breaking just as she arrived home. The baby’s name was Peter, or sometimes Petey. He had two bottom teeth and cheeks so fat they weighed down his face. When he fell asleep on her chest she felt they were merged together, so that peeling him off once he woke up was a loss. 

One morning she was out on the road, pushing him in the stroller while he slept. The road was unpaved and the stroller drew up dust as it rolled along. She pulled down the brim of her hat against the heavy sun, wiping sweat from her upper lip. In the distance she could hear the hum of a Gator, most likely the baby’s mother, driving out across the farm. 

The day before, the mother had returned to the house twenty-three minutes late. The girl had paced in circles around the kitchen table, watching the clock, the baby on her right hip. He seemed to know too that his mother was late and was sobbing, immune to any comfort the girl offered. After a while, she stopped walking, bouncing him instead. She made soft shushing noises, almost inaudible beneath his crying. On one side of the kitchen was a big window, left open just enough for the cat to squeeze in and out. Outside the window stood a deer, its back legs in a flower bed. Sunlight was coming through the thin skin of its ears, turning them red. She stood and watched it for as long as it let her, Peter crying in her arms all the while.

When they returned from the walk, there was a large trailer in the driveway, the kind meant for carrying livestock. There were cows inside, waiting to be sent to the butcher. She couldn’t see them but she could hear them, kicking at the sides and then stopping for a moment and then kicking again. Inside the house she could still hear it, the dull thud of their hooves against the metal. 

Peter had woken up and she sat him in his highchair. She fed him a mix of applesauce and yogurt. He could clap, and blow a raspberry, and sometimes when she left for the day he would wave goodbye from his mother’s arms. Now, from the big kitchen window, she saw clouds coming in, dark and heavy, a line where they met the clear blue of the surrounding sky. Later, he fell asleep again and she did the dishes. The storm was closer and she could hear thunder. The mother was supposed to come home soon. The girl scrubbed the sink and the counter, then sat at the table and watched the sky grow dark.

When Peter woke up the rain had started, and though the sun had not set yet and wouldn’t for some time, it could have been the middle of the night. He was not fussy as he had been the day before. Sitting on the girl’s lap, he was quiet, unfazed by even the lightning, which lit up the outside world in bright pulses. She thought of his mother out in that storm, imagined her huddled between cows, hiding from the sky. She thought of the cows in the trailer, long since taken away from the farm. 

She called the mother once she was thirty minutes late. She did not pick up, and the girl did not call again. Had there been a father to call she might have called him, but there wasn’t, and so she waited. Petey ate. He clapped his hands. He rolled from his stomach to his back, and then back to his stomach again. When the mother came home, the storm had almost passed. It was growing light again, now the fading light of late afternoon. The girl heard the front door open and shut. She heard the creak of the bench in the mudroom as the mother sat down to pull off her boots. They were in the baby’s room and she soon appeared in the doorway, soaked to the skin. It was then that Peter began to cry, big, grateful tears that left him reaching up, grabbing at empty space. His mother, wet as she was, bent down and picked him up, and he settled without hesitation into her arms.

The next morning the girl woke up early. It wasn’t quite light outside, but it was no longer dark, either. Her brothers were asleep upstairs in the room they shared. Her father had left for work by now and was probably already there, taking loaves of fresh bread from the oven. Her mother was alone in the big bed, sleeping on her side. The girl thought she would go and crawl into bed beside her, lay there under the covers until it was time to get up. Her mother would wake up when she came in as she always did, tell her not to toss and turn, to try and fall back asleep.

“I’m awake now,” she would say. “I can’t fall back asleep.”

“You can,” her mother would reply. “You just have to close your eyes and lie still. Lie perfectly still.”

IMOGEN DRAKE is a visiting student at Wadham College. She is from Philmont, New York.

Art by Cordelia Wilson