Bethania, NC, July 1868.
The rising sun splatters its fiery glaze across the red banks of Germanton through Stanleyville to the town of Bethania, North Carolina, eliciting cock-a-doodle-doos along its wake. Annie pushes up from her chair, wobbles barefoot across the linoleum kitchen floor, grabs a towel and pulls the final pan of ginger cookies from the wood-fired oven. She is finally done.
“Hallelujah,” Annie exclaims, letting the oven door slam shut.
Yawning deeply, she drops the pan of hot cookies onto the wooden table with a clatter, shakes her head briskly from side to side to wake up, grabs the tea kettle fills it with water and sets it on the stove. She has baked through the night, and now only wants to sit and rest for a minute, but there’s no time. Mr. Wilson would arrive shortly to pick up his order of fifty dozen ginger cookies to sell at the bakery in Salem.
These last cookies, the pan cooling on the table, are not for the bakery. She baked this batch for her neighbors’ children – William and Sallie Conrad’s girls – Doris, Elizabeth and Abigail. Sallie died the previous year from dysentery when the girls were only eight, seven and five years old, leaving Doris, the oldest, to help her father raise her sisters.
Annie, having fretted that substituting brown sugar for molasses in the girls’ batch might change their appearance, is relieved to see the characteristic pimply tops on the cookies. A function of baking soda, not molasses, probably...she thinks, tasting a broken cookie from the pan.
“Mmmmmmm, nice crunch,” she mumbles, and hungrily devours the remaining cookie piece.
“Must remember not to drop the pan next time,” she smiles. The baby stirs in her belly. “Well, good morning,” she says, smiling toward her unborn child. “Alright, one for me, one for you…”
Cupping her stomach with one hand, Annie seeks out the prettiest, most perfect, and biggest cookie she can find. “Here, mama’s baby,” she coos, munching, eyes closed, swaying side to side, rubbing her swollen belly.
***
Annie herself was orphaned at 13, the previous year, when her father Lonny died in a hunting accident; her mother, Lucy, died 10 months prior from complications with diabetes. Annie believes this is the real reason she so adores the Conrad girls, it’s self-affirming and therapeutic to love motherless children. In fact, the five-year-old baby girl, Abigail, Abbie for short, reminds Annie of her own younger self. Annie, too, remembers preferring to be outdoors than helping her mother in the kitchen at that age. Also, Abbie once confided to Annie that she feels closer to her mama in heaven when she’s outside where God lives. Annie gets that and agrees. The two older girls, Doris and Elizabeth, on the contrary, welcome their stepped up adult roles. They compete to do housework and delegate Abbie to collect eggs, feed the chickens, and water the garden.
Annie turned 14 in May, and now her pregnancy shows. The girls now call her Miss Annie and ma’am when she visits – their father insists. However, except that she’s expecting her first child, most days Annie still feels like the girl she used to be last summer, before him.
Oh, how Annie misses and needs her mama right now! The baby kicks, and her next thought sobers and excites her: In one month I will be somebody else’s mama!
***