Twenty-five centimetres times four over a ninety centimetre width – that would be twelve tiny blankets per metre, Margaret calculated in her head as she dropped the armload of material rolls onto the counter for cutting.
“A metre of each, please.”
Neutral colours for boys or girls, she thought, as if it mattered. The shop assistant, a rotund young woman with asymmetrically cut and coloured hair, rolled out the fabric.
“Whatya making with this?” she asked, cheerfully.
“Baby blankets.”
“Oh – nice,” she said, the surprise in her voice conveying that she didn’t really mean it. “But there’s much softer fabric in the baby range by the window – much nicer on the babies’ skin if you want to go and have a look before I cut this.” Her voice rose, almost pleadingly, trying too hard to be helpful. Customers were few and the day was long.
“No, this is fine. It’s cheaper. They won’t feel it. These babies are dead. And this is much more absorbent.”
The shop assistant’s face froze in confused horror.
“The bodies can be a little…moist,” explained Margaret, as if that would somehow clarify everything. She hardly noticed that her matter-of-fact tone had thrown the young shop assistant into a brick wall. The young woman was decidedly less chatty as she cut and folded the fabric pieces. She kept glancing up at Margaret worriedly and was still slack-mouthed by the time Margaret walked from the shop’s sloping doorway onto the street to catch midday mass before heading back to her one-roomed house at the retirement village.
As soon as she had finished her lunch of a half sandwich and weak tea – her ageing body really didn’t need much to survive these days – she set to cutting and hemming the thin fleece fabric. The stylised print didn’t really appeal to her much, but she liked the soothing pale hues of the material. Diligently she pinned and sewed each hem, tucking the corners in carefully, as if the grieving mothers and silent babies would notice the neatness of the sewing.
It was a far cry from the corner of rag she had wrapped her dead baby in, she thought, as she finished the fourth side on her second blanket. An old piece of red-checked farm shirt had swathed her child. Ron had worn the brushed cotton through not just elbows but the back, faded with sweat and sun. Still good for polishing silver, the scraps had found their way to the washhouse cupboard. They were all she could grab as she had stood at the wringer washing machine, feeling the baby coming well before its time.
Ron hadn’t even known she was pregnant. She just hadn’t had the heart to tell him when there were already five little faces between them at the dinner table. They had welcomed each one and certainly hadn’t done any of those modern things to stop them coming, with or without the church’s approval. He hadn’t noticed the rounding of her apron yet again, the paleness of her face as she made school lunches and sent the older three off on the school bus. Usually famished from half a day’s work milking cows before the sun had risen, a hearty cooked breakfast was more on his mind than his wife’s health. She didn’t complain. That was just the way of it. You got on with your work, you did your household duties, you took care of the family and if there was any time at the end of the day for companionship and comfort, well, that was both a treasure and a wife’s obligation.
So when she felt a deep ache down in her lower belly similar to the on-coming of a heavy period, as she performed the morning chores like a well-rehearsed dance, she dared not tell him of the baby nor the pains. It will come and it will go, she consoled herself.
Once Ron had headed back out to the farm to shift stock, fix water pipes or go about some of the myriad of jobs the land constantly demanded, she had got on with the washing while the younger two happily dug away in the sandpit just outside the washhouse out the back of their small farmhouse. Gradually the pains got deeper and more intense, just like her previous five labours, until she could not deny herself the reality. This baby, destined not to take a breath, was coming into the world it had already forsaken.
Margaret held onto the sides of the white pot-bellied agitator washer as it churned left and right, the rhythm of the surging reflecting the waves of pain that convulsed through her body. She grabbed for the red-checked rag as she bore down and caught the form that was definitively a baby, but also unmistakably ill-formed and under-developed. She swallowed back a sob as she cleaned herself up as best she could, half revolted at the red swollen form, half deeply saddened at losing something she had barely even had.
Edward and Catherine hardly glanced up from chattering together over their mud pies, as mother took the spade and feebly dug a hole under the peach tree beyond the vegetable garden. Weak and tearful, she dug as far down as she could, placing the red-ragged form in the hole. Sitting on her knees, she sobbed quietly as she crumbled the dirt between her fingers. The bundle was still warm as she covered it over, replacing the square of grass neatly back in place as if she were burying nothing more than a stray kitten that had been found dead in the haybarn. A wilting patch of dandelions hung sadly in tribute to the unnamed baby within.
A quick cup of milky sweet tea before she could face any lunch and Ron hardly noticed she was quieter than usual as he ate his thick white-bread ham sandwiches. Once Catherine was down for her midday sleep and Edward absorbed in his blocks, she allowed herself an unusual hour to sit and rest, feet up on the polished wooden coffee table. She would have scowled at Ron if he ever did so. Letting colour re-fill her cheeks and the pain in her abdomen subside, she gradually regained some strength to face the afternoon of schoolchildren demands once they spilt forth from the school bus, of food and chitchat, help with homework and items for projects and more food, baths, bedtime stories and night-time prayers.
It wasn’t until late that night when she lay in bed, feeling her soft empty belly where was once a small, solid lump, that she allowed herself to cry softly into her pillow.
“What’s up with ya, dear?” asked Ron gruffly, but not altogether un-caringly.
She dared not start to speak, lest the words fall out uncontrollably and regretfully. Instead, she shook her head and wiped her tear with the edge of her nightie.
“Bah, women. Must be that time of the month, is it?” Without waiting for an answer, he kissed her gruffly, brushed off her cares with a shake of his head, rolled over and promptly fell asleep, snoring rhythmically.
She never had told him, to his dying day, about the baby he never knew. Two more live, healthy and demanding ones in the subsequent years had consoled Margaret enough to shuffle the emotion way down deep in the bottom drawer of her consciousness. Only occasionally did she shake out the memory, dust it off, and try to picture the face of the baby. Was she remembering it, or was she making it up – perhaps a little like Ron, but her shape of the head, she thought? Before the tears pricked in the back of her retina, she tucked the memory back in its drawer, closed it and got on with her day. That’s just what you did. No fuss. No sense in complaining. Nothing to be done about it now, anyway.
By the time she had relived the memory, there was the first stack of twelve neat little blankets, perfectly hemmed, in pretty, subdued colours, ready to be parceled off and sent to the local Stillbirth and Neo-Natal Death support group. At least these babies would have something decent to be held in, cried over, cuddled and buried in, she thought. And still two more metres waiting to be sewn up tomorrow. Margaret packed up her sewing machine and placed it in the cupboard, switched off the light in the spare room. What might there be in the fridge for dinner?