MA

I knew the Cecil girl needed to die after I helped my ewe through her first lambing. Even as she laid in the corner of the barn bellowing, belly heaving, I had faith she would lamb well. She was the firstborn among three—a fighter, a good omen.

But the first two lambs fell to the ground limp as rubber chickens. They were folded in on themselves like letters, half-formed, with no bones to give them shape. There were two hollows where their eyes should’ve been, and they stared up at me wide and empty, like the deer skulls I sometimes found in the woods.

When I was young and my marriage was new, my nightly prayer for a child couldn’t find its way to God. I lost a baby a year for a decade. After mourning each one, I thought about resigning myself to a barren life. But birth is the miracle that illuminates life’s darkest corners and I always knew that I’d be rewarded for my sacrifices.

And I was right. Finally, God gave me George.

When the ewe expelled her last lamb, he came out breathing and perfect. She immediately began licking him clean, ignoring the fleshy heap of his siblings at her side. Ewes don’t dwell on loss.

Animals may not have souls, but all babies fresh from the womb are close to God. You can see it in their faces. Snow-white wisps of wool curled around the lamb’s ears and at the edges of his eyes. They were wet and black as a pond at night, haloed with a glow of fear and wonder, and as he sleepily took in the world under his mother’s tongue, for just a moment, I thought I saw a flicker of consciousness trapped inside an animal prison.

He was gentle and soft—not a creature made for war. Just like George.

My son wasn’t a fierce boy and we’d agreed that, when the time came, he’d be best suited for Civilian Public Service. Whispers said Washington bureaucrats fast-tracked Appalachian boys to the infantry because they were better fighters. We mountain folk are a hardy lot, but I knew it in my soul: If George went to the front lines, I’d never see him again.

For a while, George saw things my way—even if no one else did. Pearl Harbor lit the whole country on fire. Blusters about repaying evil with insult were thick as smoke in the air. But I didn’t care about the Germans and the Japanese and their ambition. Our homestead is deep in the valley, cradled in the arms of the mountains. Even if the whole world burned, no one would find us here.

George didn’t see it that way for long, though—not after the Cecil girl lost their child. When he was conscripted and told me he needed to get his affairs in order, I cried so hard I thought my tears would flood the earth. I said evil things to him that day—to dig his own grave and save me the trouble, that I hoped screwing foreign whores was worth dying for, that he couldn’t wait to leave his Ma destitute and alone.

I didn’t mean any of it, but I didn’t have to tell him. We know each other in the way only mothers and sons can. The next morning I made eggs and grits, his favorite, and, without a word, the hurt evaporated like morning dew from the pastures. Still, sometimes I wish I’d said I was sorry. Whenever I wrote him letters, I imagined what the apology might look like scratched in my poor handwriting and it was never enough.

My husband—God rest his soul—always said that love lives best in the knowing silences between people. But when I didn’t receive a letter from George after a couple of months, I wondered if my husband was wrong.

I gathered up the ewe’s stillborns. They slipped into the bucket like soap in a porcelain bowl, curling around each other as though they were still entwined in the womb, sleeping in the soft-mouthed way babies do. It wasn’t until I saw the shine of their slick skin stretched thin over crater eyes that I remembered what they were. I’d soon dump them in the compost heap, where the holes in their faces would become nurseries for maggots until they dissolved into the earth. No one would remember them—not even the ewe.

The world is a brutal place and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that God’s greatest gifts always come at a price. I prayed on this often when I sat at my children’s memorials—ten little stacks of mountain stone crowned with wooden crosses. My husband made them for me at the edge of our yard so I wouldn’t have to drive into town to visit the graves. I liked to sit with them in the quiet, just like I did the night before the babies were buried to guard their souls against the devil. They were proof of all the pain I endured before finally creating a living thing and granted me the divine knowledge that suffering makes life whole—reminders of our greatest purpose.

I’d tried to make the Cecil girl see this after she lost George’s child. When she showed up with her daddy on our porch round as an egg, finally unable to hide what she and George had been up to on their weekly walks, I swarped her with a belt through the door. Watching her cower was some consolation for the mess she’d gotten us into, and after I got my blows in, we prepared for life as a family. She’d help me make preserves and tend to the animals, spending afternoons sipping raspberry leaf tea to ease pregnancy’s discomforts. George even began carving her a wedding spoon after finishing his chores.

She started calling me Ma and for the first time since my husband passed, I got a glimpse of what a whole, proper family looked like.

But when she lost the child, so went our peaceful life. I told her to keep trying, that birthing a baby was the closest a woman could ever get to Creation. She didn’t want to hear it. The little share crop ran home to her daddy down the road and left my son to offer himself at the altar of war.

What did the Cecil girl know of God? What did she know of life’s tribulations?

I lost myself in the hollow eyes of the ewe’s stillborns, gazing at me from their bier bucket. God once asked people to sacrifice beasts in his honor—a reminder of His power to wash sin away. Then, when God gave His son to man, the blood purified us all. We became souls resurrected, worthy of living eternal. We shared in his suffering so we may also share in his glory. So many before us lost something precious to prove themselves righteous—Jephthah, Abraham, Sarah, Christ himself. Who were we to complain about sacrifice?

For my son to return home safe and whole, something precious needed to be lost. God said it himself: Without the shedding of blood, there’s no forgiveness.

So, you see, I knew—just knew—that the Cecil girl was George's path home.

The next time the Cecil girl came by to ask about George, I slipped so much bloodroot into her tea that she doubled over, gripping her belly just long enough for me to aim the rifle I kept next to the front door. I made it quick. Shot her clean between the eyes—the humane way—just like I did for our hogs.

After giving her up to God, I took her into the barn and stripped her naked as a newborn. My husband always told me that dressing a hog was sacred, a time to thank Heaven for the bounty and the animal for serving its purpose. But as I fed the meat hooks through her ankles to lift her, I couldn’t muster much gratitude. Considering the kind of life she lived, the girl should’ve been honored to be made holy like this.

After hoisting her up with the pulleys, I placed the lamb on the floor, where he settled in her shadow. I could feel him watching me work and I knew he was pleased.

When I cut her open, I felt less disgusted than I’d expected. Instead, I marveled at the shudder through her sternum as I reached behind it with my knife and flicked her heart, like a tractor roaring to life. Then again, I’m a farm girl through and through. I broke chicken necks before I could even read. Why would a woman like me, so strong in faith and constitution, turn away from the wonders of the body? Who wouldn’t be humbled before tangles of flesh and bone, the scaffolding of God’s greatest creation?

When I removed my hand from her abdomen, the blood spilled out in quiet pulses onto the lamb. He accepted it willingly, even as the red began to spread across his pale face, and, to my surprise, his tail quivered with excitement, like when he suckled from the ewe.

I’d expected it to be a moment of baptism, but it felt more like slaughter. The night was unnaturally still, as though the whole valley was holding its breath. I sang hymns to summon some holiness into the barn. I tried to make my voice soft, the way I imagined George heard the ghosts of his boyhood lullabies as he fell asleep in lands foreign and strange.

The blood pooled in the trough of the lamb’s nose, and as I wiped it away, his nostrils flaring desperately for air, I saw all of the beauty we’d created with this new sacrament. In each struggled breath there was a new beginning—all regrets cast out, all harms forgiven, all George’s sins and mine washed away.

Once I bled the Cecil girl, I took my time gutting her—careful not to knick the intestines—so she would be easier to carry to the compost. When the ugly business was done, I washed the lamb and brought him into the house.

As I settled into bed, he sat heavy-lidded beside me in a nest of George’s old blankets. The moonlight streamed in the window behind him, ringing his head with a crown of light. He looked like a little apostle.

We slept well in the quiet night.

I knew something was wrong when I woke up and felt the same stillness that’d choked the barn the night before. The routine sounds of the dog whining for morning scraps and bickering hens were absent. The front door was wide open. The lamb was gone.

Putting one of George’s blankets around my shoulders, I walked outside to find the ewe and the other animals scattered limp across the pasture, bodies sparkling with dew. It wasn’t until I leaped over the fence to come closer that I noticed the blood leaking from holes in their hooves and scratches circling their heads.

It wasn’t just the livestock. The dog was slumped over in his usual spot beside the pasture where he guarded the animals, surrounded by blood-stained dirt the color of spilled wine. I nudged him with my foot and his head sagged backward. He had the same wounds as the others, but his eyes were still open, fixed on the sky, as though he’d watched God himself descend from heaven.

I couldn’t find the lamb.

As I walked back to the house, the sound of tires against gravel resounded through the woods—a car approaching. I expected to see the Cecils but instead, a Western Union Messenger telecar emerged from the trees.

George never sends telegrams.

A boy stepped out from the driver’s seat, only a few years younger than George, dressed in uniform.

“Are you Sarah Clark?”

The messenger spoke but I could barely hear him—condolences, confirmation letters. My boy was gone.

“You’re here alone? Should I call someone?”

My face was hot and wet. Tears. Snot. Blackness closed in at the edges of the world. For once in my life, I might not have been strong enough to fight the urge to faint.

“M’am?”

“The lamb” was all I could utter.

“Lamb? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Where’s my boy?”

“M’am, I’m sorry. He’s gone.”

“No. You’re wrong. He’s here. The lamb.”

“I don’t understand.”

Like when I birthed all of my babies—the living and the dead—the only thing that kept me from unconsciousness was screaming.

“I need him now!”

Stunned to silence, the boy shook his head, looking around aimlessly. I couldn’t stop screaming.

“I might… Could that be him there?”

The boy pointed at a rhododendron reaching its gnarled fingers out of the woods. There was a smear of white, barely visible behind knots of branches and leaves. I ran over to the shrub, falling to my knees as I tore the lamb out of the plant’s woody clutches. He felt like paper in my arms.

I brought his face so close to mine I could feel the wool scratch against my forehead, still stained pink from the night before. He looked afraid but uninjured. I searched for signs of my boy in the lamb’s face, trying to glimpse at the beauty I saw the day he was born, to divine meaning in what I’d done. I even wondered if I’d see evil there, laughing at the fool they’d played. But all I saw were the hollows in the heads of his stillborn brothers and the emptiness that resided there.

He was just a lamb, destined for the market or slaughter—an animal just like the rest.

Fear gripped me. Tighter than when I lost each one of my children, tighter than the day George was born and I knew I’d need to protect him forever.

It’s a bottomless fear, knowing you’ve damned yourself to no end.

After the messenger said his sorry goodbye, I collapsed into bed and watched the sunlight creep across the room until it disappeared.

I’m still here in the dark. I can’t rise.

I left the lamb outside. He’s bleating madly, calling for the ewe. He’ll summon every fox and coyote for miles—maybe even a bear. He’ll be stone dead as my son by morning. Someone will come for me too in the night. It’ll be the devil if I’m lucky, though it’s more likely to be the Cecils, searching for their daughter. The devil comes later.

Maybe I’ve already been dragged into hell. The lamb’s cries echo through the trees up the mountain, rattling the memorials of my dead children, cutting through my bones. I can’t even hear the swell of my own sobs. All I can hear is the lamb—crying the words all good people do as they meet their end.

Ma? Ma? Ma?

***

Jacquelyn White is a content marketing manager living in Asheville, NC with her husband and very fluffy cat. Her wor​​k has appeared in ​​Marrow Magazine, ​​The Copperfield Review, and ​​The Speculative Edge, among other places. When she's not writing for work or pleasure, ​you can find her hiking, enjoying a glass of wine, or reading a good book. Learn more at www.jacquelynwrites.com