A Bantam Little Shadow
Diah had planted more than corn that spring.
Rachel, in a late November letter
to her sister, Thankful, back in Wallingford,
described her new life in Wyoming Valley—
the ample, well-built house and open hearth,
the Susquehanna River close at hand,
the flora and the fauna of the forest,
the children diligent and dutiful,
the first year’s meager yield of winter wheat.
Her dread at being pregnant once again.
But since she knew no eastbound travelers
to whom she could entrust her forthright letter,
and later, thinking it had seemed too boastful,
while at the same time fearing she might hurt
her sister who had given birth but once,
Rachel burned the letter, page by page,
one night while stirring the next day’s cornmeal pottage.
And as she stirred, she thought about the baby
due in three months’ time, whose birth, despite
her inner reservations, pleased her husband.
Diah called to mind the midwife’s warning
back in Connecticut, and knew the toll
that Walter’s birth had taken on his wife,
and yet he welcomed this eleventh child.
Humming to himself Saint David’s Tune,
he carved a rocking cradle out of oak
and pledged that, should the baby be a girl,
she’d take her mother’s name. And so it was,
that on the twenty-eighth of February,
baby Rachel came into the world.
The chapter title A Bantam Little Shadow comes from the poem “Song of the Egg” by Deborah Warren.
COMING SOON: PART TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN
