Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman

pushed her curling dark hair back from her damp forehead. Breakfast done, it was time to start dinner. The carcasses of three chickens lay before her on the countertop, chickens she’d raised from biddies, fed and, just this morning, before the girls got up, wrung the necks of. She’d had Esther scald, pluck and gut them outside the kitchen door. It was cold out, but the smell of the hot wet feathers had upset her stomach ever since Will was born.
    She wondered if there was something wrong with her insides. What could she expect, twelve children in fourteen years. The childbearing hardly ever gave her innards time to take care of themselves.
    She wished she could do more for her babies, all of them. She’d always wanted their lives to be better, but it looked like they were going to be just the same as hers, her parents’ and their parents’ before them. As long as any of her kin had ever been able to trace their family histories back, telling the long looping and relooping tales while they sat by the fire at night, stories full of great-grand-aunts and second cousins once removed, they had always worked the land, and they had always been poor.
    Too poor, she imagined, to ever buy all their children what they’d like to, or even just something, for Christmas.
    She glanced up from the chickens she was cutting into frying pieces, a special treat for Christmas dinner, three chickens for the twelve of them not counting the baby, and looked at the tree standing in the corner. The children had decorated it the night before with popcorn, bits of bright ribbon, and the few precious glass ornaments her mother had passed down to her. At the top was a tin star William had brought her from Shreveport so many years ago she could hardly remember, a present when they were courting.
    Beneath the tree was one present for each child, wrapped in newspaper: a new pair of work boots, a sweater she’d knitted, a shift with tiny rosebuds she’d embroidered around the scooped neck, all necessities, with one exception. This was the year that Rosalie would get her doll.
    The children knew better than to expect much, but each year there would be something special for one of them. At first the treats had been in descending order from the oldest, but then there had been the year that Virginia, her namesake, had taken ill and they’d known that she wasn’t going to make it through the winter. So an older child had been skipped over and Virginia’d gotten the tin-backed mirror that she’d begged for. She’d lain in bed for many an hour, inspecting her pale face and watching herself braid her long red hair. Virgie had thought it a foolish gesture, but the children had all insisted that the mirror be buried with Virginia when she died.
    After that, the order had gotten all cattywampus. The next year Lester had taken ill, and so he’d gotten his coveted basketball, but he’d made it through, praise the Lord, though sometimes Virgie regretted the present as the slap slap slap of it against the house threatened to drive her to distraction.
    What with one illness and another, Rosalie had been passed over. Virgie knew that the child understood, but it didn’t stop the tears of disappointment from welling in her eyes when the presents were all opened and once again hers was a pair of underdrawers or a new apron. Because Virgie knew that more than anything in the world Rosalie had always wanted a real doll.
    She had seen the very doll of her dreams last fall in a store window in Natchitoches, the day William had loaded all the children into the wagon behind two mules for the trip for the Natchitoches Parish Fair. In the late afternoon, after a day filled with the wonders of the Snake Lady in her bespangled costume that made the boys gape and the girls avert their faces, caramel corn balls and meat pies bought with pennies saved all year, and the row after row of jars of prize golden peaches and bright red tomatoes, the hot dusty children had piled