A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

Author:Lydia Millet
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

SUKEY SAT BESIDE her dead mother all night holding the baby. When morning came the angels convinced her to bathe it, and they steered her out of the barn and into the cottage.

I gave Jack and Shel a task to distract them: find the goats, make sure they were still around. We didn’t want to lose any, I said.

Then I went to the mother’s car, parked at a hasty angle behind the ones we’d driven in, and popped the trunk. There was a bag of baby clothes, with a bottle and a packet of minuscule diapers. She’d had it all ready, I thought, and felt a wave fold over me.

She’d wanted to care for her infant. And now she never would.

Sukey dressed the baby in a cotton sleeper with feet attached.

I tried to call her stepfather using the mother’s cell—Sukey nodded mechanically when I pointed to his name under Contacts—but there was no answer. Mailbox full.

So we had two problems: how to feed the baby, and what to do with the mother’s body.

One of the angels had a bag of powdered milk, but that would make the baby sick. Another angel—a biologist who’d been surveying birds along the trail and joined the others when the storm hit—warned against it.

We didn’t have a mother, so we needed infant formula.

Burl set off in a car to look for it. There was a gas station convenience store, he said, about five miles away. They might have some.

David and Terry helped wrap the mother in a shroud made of sheets. The angels conferred in hushed tones in a corner of the barn, near an empty chicken coop.

I snuck up and crouched behind a donkey to listen.

“She’s just a kid,” I heard one whisper. “Trying to take care of a newborn, for Chrissake. We can’t put it on her.”

“. . . a suggestion. And let her say yes.”

“Or no.”

“Burial here isn’t legal.”

“That’s why I said fire.”

“But burial can be undone. When things get back under control. Fire? Not so much.”

“Maybe we wait?”

“But that could be traumatic. You know. The decomp. Could be a lot of days before we go anywhere. Weeks, even.”

“The father?”

“Out of the picture. They can’t raise him.”

“What if they need it for an autopsy?”

“They’ve got bigger fish to fry. CNN said thousands.”

Thousands of what?

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