Blue Valley - Prologue and Chapters One and Two

PROLOGUE

1923

The baby was wrong. Wrong in ways that brought up words like “unnatural” and “abomination”. Wrong in ways that made Kat wonder if she knew anything about the world. So wrong that she touched the hugeness of her belly to make sure her own baby had not dropped out of her, inexplicably, without labor pains.

But she was both relieved and sad that the baby lying in the dirt was not hers, because as frightening as this child was to the farm’s proprietor and the twenty pickers surrounding her, she was beautiful, somehow older than a newborn, fat and well-nourished, yet coated with dirt from her birth.

Benito, elbowed through the crowd. “Get back to picking, unless you think the child can join the line.” He pointed to Kat, “You help me. You’re not much good on this line today anyways.” He pulled his knife from his pocket, and Kat knew what he meant to do.

She glanced at her husband, Alphonse, whose bin of strawberries was nearly full, such was the speed at which he picked. He stood to his full six-four, “If she was available I’d say so.”

“She’ll get her day’s pay,” Benito said, standing between Kat and Alphonse.

“I don’t want her touching that thing. Not while she’s carrying my son.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered, though no one heard. They had been hearing nothing but the baby’s cries; delicate, not demanding, more for attention than nutrition, since they had dug her from the ground.

At first, they thought the cries in the distance were from coyotes in the hills, then perhaps a trick of the wind, until one of the pickers suddenly yelped, and pointed to the rows below. Peeking from the ground inside a perfect circle of soil, was a baby’s face. The rest of the its body was trapped underground.

Alphonse was the first to react. He shouted for a shovel. Benito barked orders, but they faded into the wind.

Kat reached down, stooping like she couldn’t for the strawberries, and dug around the face. Another woman helped, but all Kat saw were hands, and the face and the shovel blade carefully pushing dirt away. Soil got in the baby’s mouth. It gagged and cried. Panicked, Kat dug her hands into the loam, reaching for the baby’s body, feeling around muddy wet flesh, until her fingertips found the crevices under the baby’s arms.

She pulled, but the baby didn't budge. She felt strong hands under her arms, pulling. Her heels dug in, fingers wrapped around the dirty child as she pulled until she thought her elbows would come apart. When Alphonse got his shovel in under the baby Kat was thrown back like a fisherman with a suddenly loose line.

She panted from the effort. The baby lay on her chest, quiet now, slicked with mud.

Alphonse rushed toward her, then fell back in horror with the sign of the cross at his fingertips.

Seeing the baby, the others stepped back. Behind her, Kat heard someone vomiting.

A thick cable of white roots draped across her leg, too thick for strawberries, too healthy for an upturned tree. She tried to shake it off, but it was too heavy. She pulled at its warm, soft flesh, sticky with supple white rootlets. She must have yanked a tree root when she pulled up the baby.

But the nearest tree was two fields over.

Alphonse pulled her out from under the child as Benito, whose wife’s barrenness was a constant pain to them, made the decision that a wrong baby was better than no baby.

“Leave her,” Alphonse said to Kat. To the other pickers he shouted, “Get out of here, all of you.” They hesitated. Alphonse wasn't their boss, but he was a hard man to deny. Some ran as fast as they could. Some backed away, then ran. Only Kat, Alphonse, Benito and the baby were left.