The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer Page A

teeth so she’d know I meant it, “I’ll tell Father about what you do with Timothy out behind the kitchen garden, and then he’ll flay you for sure.”
    Well, Mary’s afraid of me and so I knew she wouldn’t tell. But I spent yet another sleepless night thinking about my father and what he would do to me when he saw the truth.

    I let my mother and father wonder why I’d come home for a day before I told them. But then I had to do it. My father called me a slut, a slattern, a whore, and all that. He slapped me so hard I had the handprint a hour later and then he went to find as much ale as he could swallow.
    “It’s simply another excuse for him,” I said to my mother as she bathed my cheek where he’d smacked it. “He’ll blame me for his headache tomorrow but he’d have had it anyhow and you know it.”
    “Yes, I know it,” my mother said. Then a doubt crossed her face. “Susan, the same as happened to Ellen didn’t happen to you, did it? Surely not?”
    “No,” I told her as I’d told Mary, but gentler, for she was my mother and still grieving from poor Ellen’s fate. “No, Mother, it came about in the regular way.” I tried to speak nicely, for to be sure, I felt the shame of it, though the shame was mostly for getting myself in trouble than for the deed itself.
    “But who was it, Susan? Your father’ll smack you til you tell him and I want to know too.”
    “Mother, listen,” said I. “Father’ll never get anything out of the man who did this, believe you me. It’s impossible. We might as well pretend it’s a virgin birth for all the good it’ll do him to try.”
    It upset my mother and my father too that I acted so calm about it all. But I did not know how else to be. It might have made my father soften if I’d cried more but I didn’t so he didn’t. In truth, I had drawn so much from my pot of tears for Ellen that I could hardly pull up more for this. It caused me a great, hard pang to think that I had ruined myself to be married, that’s true. But my mind excused it thus: no man whom I’d accept had ever looked at me twice and it might never have happened even if I’d kept my virtue. And if it came to pass that I wanted to marry, say, if my father continued to abuse me forever and I had to leave his house, there’d be some ugly widower in need of a mother to his brats who’d take me. There was always such a one.
    The fact is that I did not hate the creature inside me; not at all. I recall one day, as I walked through the snow to milk our cow, I felt a kick so hard it took my breath away. I found a stump to sit on and watched my stomach, even through my heavy skirt and apron, as it moved like a basin of water carried too fast. It was astounding, it was.
    I remembered watching my mother, time after time, as she stood in the garden or at the table, with her stomach jutting so that she could hardly do her work. She was a woman who looked rosy when she was with child and prettier then, than when she wasn’t. Carrying a babe would put some flesh on her and she wouldn’t look as gaunt as she often did between times. My father seemed to see it too; he’d sometimes give her a kiss or a squeeze in front of all of us, just to see her blush and smile.
    My brothers and sisters, the older ones still in the house, seemed ashamed at first of my condition, but as time waned it became a matter of course, the way things do when you’re living with them day to day. Indeed, round as I became, I was still stronger than most of them and worked harder than any of them. In my time away in service, they’d forgotten that I could hold my own quite well, but they learned it again soon enough.
    When Bill, who was seventeen and between Alice and me, called me “saucebox” under his breath when I wouldn’t fetch something for him that he wanted, I caught his hair in my hand and pulled it so hard he cried like a baby. “If ever you say such again,” I said to him, in a calm, scary way I have made my