Hunt
Jennifer Goodland

It took a great deal of courage for Mary to ask about the problems she had with her twins. The doctor was still a man, and a proper farm wife shouldn’t be so indecent, she knew, but he was the only person within a hundred miles of the desolate, unsettled prairies that could comfort the anxious mind of a first-time mother.

            She undid her blouse and he looked at her nipples while she looked at a sampler framed on the doctor’s wall. “Give us this day our daily bread,” it said. She left a few minutes later, uneasy still, but there was no permanent damage. It’s normal, the doctor told her, for teething babies to sometimes bite during breastfeeding, even hard enough to draw blood. They have no idea what they’re doing, it’s a reflex, like they’re testing out their new teeth. No harm intended. Eventually the breasts toughen. After five or so children, she would barely feel it when it happened. And with her twins —well, no wonder it hurt, she was getting it from both sides. She didn’t have time to feed them separately, not with a million chores.

            Mary got home and unloaded her babies from the back of the buckboard coach. She carried them inside, undid their bundling, and let them wander and explore on the rag rug covering the floor of the kitchen. She made a cold dinner for herself, and walked around the main room a bit reading from her small Bible. Perhaps it would provide some comfort from her unease about her children.

            Soon they would start walking. They were already fine crawlers, and had a real knack for getting underfoot. Just like their father, she thought, as she stepped high to avoid a small, grasping hand. John was going to be in Omaha for another week delivering goods, and it seemed like he was never around when she needed him. Still, his absences were all in the name of making sure his family could always put food on the table. If she had a dog, now, that would make her feel safer. It could watch the cattle and alert her against intruders. But John forbade her from getting a dog. Early on in their marriage they’d gotten one, a sleek cattle dog, but one night it got into the chicken pen and killed one of the hens. He shot it. Once a dog gets the taste of chicken, he said, it’ll always hunger for that taste and the kill. Some of them, it’s in their nature, and you got to put it down while you still have livestock to protect. And John knew best.

            Across the room, she heard one of her babies crying. She closed her Bible and walked to him —as she got halfway there, something grasped her foot and she threw herself off-balance trying to avoid it. She fell and hit her head on the cast-iron stove John gave her when she told him she was expecting. Mary wanted to sleep so badly —where were the twins? She saw the one who’d been crying, but he was smiling instead, and crawling toward her. The other one let go of her dress and crawled along her side to her stomach. He reached a chubby hand into his mouth and felt along his gums at the new teeth that were coming in so quickly. As she passed out, she tried to remember the name of that dog.