“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.”
Joseph placed a hand on both boys’ shoulders. His singsong voice was lullaby low as he led them back to their beds.
“Go on back to sleep and dream of all the surprises tomorrow has in store for you.”
Rebekah winced at the word surprise, which was not the optimal way to lure little eight-year-old brothers back to bed.
Abram and Isaac rubbed their eyes. “Surprises?”
Joseph didn’t falter over his poor choice of words. “Each day is a gift from the Lord. So, it stands to reason that within each gift, there is a surprise.”
The boys looked first at each other, then at Joseph. “Really?”
Rebekah shook her head as the trio disappeared into the bedroom. Beanie squirmed in her arms and coughed. Obviously hungry, he began to sputter and fuss. She bounced him up and down.
Joseph emerged a moment later. He wiped make-believe sweat from his brow. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said surprise.”
“How’d you get them to go sleep?” She held the bundle of boy toward Joseph. He held him expertly in one arm and extended the other to her.
Rebekah took it and pulled herself to her feet. She tested the weight on her bad foot. Pins pricked up her leg and she grunted.
“Well,” he started, “I simply explained that in each day, or each gift from the Lord, is a surprise. It’s up to us to find our own special surprise from Him each day.”
His eyes shone like onyx as he stared into her face. In his haste to be of assistance, he’d lost his hat. Locks of ebony hair stuck out in all directions and a few were plastered to his forehead. Rebekah’s stomach lightened with the beats of butterfly wings. Silvery moon rays streamed through the hall window and illuminated their linked arms.
For one moment, one brief, illogical moment, Rebekah allowed herself to pretend that Joseph was telling her how he’d gotten their own sons to sleep, not her little brothers. Deep, inner warmth pulsed through her body with each quickening heartbeat.
“What a sweet little man. Beanie you said?” He stroked the infant’s fuzzy cheek. Beanie turned and began to root towards Joseph’s finger.
Joseph smiled and clucked softly.
“Short for Benjamin,” she affirmed. “I guess I’ll have to wash my quilt swatch now before I can finish it. Too bad.”
They shared a soft giggle.
“He looks to be a pretty big boy. How long is he?”
Rebekah looked at the infant, still safe and snug within Joseph’s arm. “I figure about twenty-two or twenty-three inches. Pa will measure him tomorrow against the rope, just as he has done all the others. Then, he will mark it in the kitchen.”
Joseph hefted him in his arm. “He certainly isn’t a light baby.”
