used to be damned good at knowing when a woman had caught pregnant, sometimes before the woman knew,
sometimes before she had any business being pregnant, if you see what I mean.”
Delores laughed and nodded.
“She said it was their smell – their smell changed, and sometimes you could pick up that new smell as soon as
a day after she had caught, if your nose was keen.”
Delores was nodding. She had heard of such things, certainly.
“But, fact is, none of those things mattered, because I knew she knew – she knew all three of those things
she’d told me, and she hadn’t come by her knowing in any slinky way. To be with her was to believe in bruja
– her bruja, anyway. But it didn’t go away, that feeling, the way a dream goes away when you wake up, or the
way your belief in a good faker goes away when you’re out of his spell.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, there was a chair with a saggy old cane seat near the door and I guess that was lucky for me, because
when she said what she did, what I was looking at kind of grayed over and my knees came unbolted. I was
going to sit down no matter what, but if the chair hadn’t been there I would have sat on the floor.
“She just sat there, waiting for me to get myself back together, and went on knitting. It was like she had seen
it all a hundred times before. I suppose she had.
“When my heart finally began to slow down I opened my mouth and what came out was, ‘Fin going to leave
my husband.’
“‘No,’ she came back right away, ‘he is gonna leave you. You’re gonna see him out, is all. Stay around. There
be a little money. You gonna think he hoit the baby but he din’t be doin it.’
“‘How,’ I said, but that was all I could say, it seemed like. ‘How … how … how . . .,’like that. Even now,
twenty-six years later, I can smell those old burned candles and kerosene from the kitchen and that old sour
smell of dried wallpaper, like old cheese. I can see her, small and frail in this old blue dress with little
polkadots which had once been white but were the yellowy color of old newspapers by then. She was so little, but there was such a feeling of power that came from her, like a bright, bright light-”
Martha drained the last of her champagne and set her glass down on the table with a little click.
“Well, it don’t do any good to go on and on about it,” she said. “If you’d been there you would have felt it. But there ain’t anyway I can describe it if you wasn’t.
`How I do anythin or why you married that country piece of shit in the first place ain’t neither of them
important now,’ she said. ‘What’s important now is you got to find the child’s natural father.’
“‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Johnny’s the child’s natural father.’ Anyone listening would have thought she
was as much as saying I’d been screwing around on my man, but it never even occurred to me to be mad at her.
I was just too confused.
“She kind of snorted and flapped her hand at me, like she was saying Pshaw. ‘Ain’t nothin natural about dat
man.’
“Then she leaned a little closer and I started to feel a little scared. There was so much knowing in her, and it
felt like not all that knowing was nice.
‘Any chile a woman get, the man shoot it out’n his pecker, girl,’ she said. ‘You know dat, don’t you?’
“I didn’t know any such thing but I felt my head going up ‘n down just the same, as if she’d reached across the
room with hands I couldn’t see and nodded at for me.
“‘That’s right,’ she said, nodding her ownself, ‘and that’s the way God made it. It’s like a seesaw, ain’t it? Sho!
A man shoots cheerun out’n his pecker, so them cheerun mostly his. But it’s a woman who carries em and