Switched

My great-grandfather never wanted eight children. Food in the early 20th century Oklahoma was a finite resource, any farmer could tell you that, and children were just a catalyst to that resource being depleted. They meant time and money, and a wife whose beauty was slowly swallowed up by wrinkles with the arrival of each bawling infant. My great-grandfather was satisfied with the first two children, even though they were girls. One of them had toes that hadn’t quite formed right, with the webbing still there between them. It wasn’t very noticeable, but my great-grandfather decided this was another sign that two was more than enough children; there was no use creating any more disfigured kids to eat up the little food they brought in. When he accidentally made two more girls, he decided to stop sleeping with his wife, my great-grandmother. But nights are hard to get through alone, and sometimes, to distract oneself from calloused hands and sore feet, from the crop not growing as it should, a person likes to turn to the body next to them and find a moment’s comfort. Three more children were conceived this way.

During the seventh pregnancy, my great-grandfather prayed for a miscarriage. When he was hoeing the hard earth left over from a cold winter he wished that the baby, the size of your pinky finger, would slide out effortlessly. They would bury it in a shoebox like they did the extra kittens, for the wife’s sake. When the buds started peeking out with pink eyes from the trees, my great-grandfather wished the baby would be born early, a hard grapefruit of a child so that it would cease breathing on its own. When my great-grandmother’s belly swelled out and it looked like another healthy baby was on the way, my grandfather stopped wishing for anything all together.

In the tail end of summer, my great-grandmother went to the hospital with contractions and pushed alongside another woman who was giving birth at the same time. The other woman’s baby came first, quietly, and there was no sound other than her ragged breathing and her husband’s pacing. WIthin minutes of this other birth, my grandfather became a father to yet another girl. Immediately after this baby was delivered, she was taken to another room to be cleaned up. My great-grandfather, in a fit of frustration and rage at letting this happen again, also left the room, trailing after the nurses.

When the nurses returned with only one baby, it was obvious something was wrong. “Where is she?” my great-grandmother asked. The nurse shook her head. “It didn’t make it,” she replied, and started cleaning up the afterbirth. My great-grandmother became hysterical, asking her husband what had happened, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain, only looked out the window in silence. On the other side of the partition, soft mewls came from the other woman’s child. My great-grandmother sobbed and screamed at her husband to do something, that their child couldn’t have died, that she would have felt it, but he did nothing. The nurses had to move my great-grandmother to another room. Before my great-grandmother’s bed was wheeled out to the hallway, though, she peered over her pillow at the neighboring mother. In the woman’s arms was a naked little girl, with the new parents hovering over her, admiring what they had made. The infant stretched her arms and legs, and my great-grandmother's last vision of the baby were her wrinkled, red feet, with the webbing still linking each toe.