“Ma,” she began. Icy fingers of fear clenched tightly at her throat. A very real pain seared there, just beneath her chin. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Dear Father,” Elnora prayed, oblivious to Rebekah’s plight. “Please turn the baby or he’ll die.”
Rebekah placed her hands alongside the tense bulge on Elnora’s stomach. “Please Father, help me save my little brother or sister.”
She closed her eyes and tried to visualize how he or she was laying. Her eyes still closed, she began to sing.
“Dein heilig statt hond sie zerstört.” She crooned the ancient song, penned by early Anabaptist martyr Leonhard Schiemer, in Pennsylvania Dutch. She drew out each word of the hymn as long as the note would allow and gave her song a peaceful, chanting feel. Rebekah lowered her face nearer to her mother’s belly. Singing in a steady and even tone, she continued. “Dein Altar umgegraben.”
She pressed against the bulge with a firm hand and felt the fluttering movements of her tiny sibling.
“Oh,” Elnora cried. “He’s moving!” Sobs overtook her words. Rebekah noticed a trembling in her mother’s knees that wasn’t there before.
Sure enough, under the pressure of her hand, the baby was turning.
Elnora whimpered and shoved her hand into her mouth. Rebekah noticed a trickle of blood drip down her mother’s wrist.
Rebekah felt a fullness settle into her mother’s lower abdomen.
“Thank you, Father,” she prayed. Streams of sweat stung her eyes and glued her hair to her forehead. The solemn hymn still crept from her lips. “Dazu auch deine Knecht ermördt.”
Beneath her hands, her mother’s belly tightened, and Elnora began to push.
Her mother screeched.
“The head!” Rebekah announced. “It’s a head.”
Her mother’s mind was elsewhere, far removed from her daughter as she worked hard to bring her baby into the world. She was silent after the scream, her eyes shut tight.
The front door slammed, and booted footsteps pounded across the bottom floor, then up the stairs. Rebekah held her sibling’s fuzzy, black-topped head as the baby began to rotate again. Then it stopped.
Joseph’s head appeared above the staircase.
“What do you want me to do?” His voice sounded as frenzied as she felt.
“It’s stuck!” Elnora’s words were tinged in fear.
Rebekah leaned in to investigate. “Joseph! I need the shears!”
Joseph stumbled up the stairs, tripped, and slid into Rebekah’s bedroom. A moment later, he scuttled out with shears in hand. “Here!”
She took them and snipped the cord that had become entangled around the baby’s neck. The rest of his robust body slid out easily.
“I need something to wrap him in.”
Joseph disappeared and returned a moment later with her partially-completed quilt. Without a second thought, she swaddled the baby and rubbed his back with her palm.
“Go tell Pa we’ve got a little Benjamin,” Rebekah ordered, not thinking to be polite.
“Benjamin, right,” Joseph repeated as he hurried toward the stairs. “I got back just in time.”
Baby Benjamin loosed a piercing cry into the darkness.
“Thank you again, God. You were with all of us from start to finish.”
She cooed and rocked the angry baby. “Ma, he’s a fine boy. Baby Benjamin. We’ll call him Beanie.”
Silence.
“Ma?”
Samuel and Joseph emerged from the blackness. “Ma won’t answer me!” Her voice wavered, helpless, in the darkness.
Samuel was at Elnora’s head in an instant, cooing and rubbing her forehead.
Joseph stood on the top stair and, for the first time Rebekah could remember, he looked awkward and out of place. He wrung his hands at his waist and, with his gaze darting about, seemed unable to focus on anything.
In the sudden silence, Rebekah noticed that all the happy sounds that had filled her home moments before suddenly ceased. All that remained were tiny, sweet sucking noises as Beanie ate his fist and her father’s muffled pleas of as he begged her mother to live. Beanie screeched again, his cry shattering the grave moment.
Samuel’s head snapped up. His long black beard swept over the end of Elnora’s nose.
“My new baby son.” His voice broke.
Rebekah could only point as her mother brushed her nose with one weak hand.
Elnora groaned and shifted on the unforgiving floor.
Samuel cradled his wife’s head in his hands. Tears glistened on his cheeks and hung from his inky beard like early morning dewdrops in a cobweb. “Thank you, Father.” The words formed quietly on his lips.
Beanie screeched again.
“Here, mama.” Samuel scooped his wife easily into his muscled, dusty arms. “Let me get you into the bed.”
“What’s goin’ on—” Little Isaac’s voice was heavy with sleep.
“—out here?” Abram, his twin, finished. The pair yawned at the same time.
Rebekah snapped into big sister mode. “Nothing for eight-year-old eyes to see.”
“Then what’s that on the floor?”
“Yeah, Rebekah, what’s that on the floor?”
As the sleep faded from their eyes, the unending stream of questions began.
“And what’cha holding?”
“An’ what was that noise earlier? It sounded like a bawlin’ calf.”
