Tattler's Branch Read Online Free PDF

a wet nappy. Dehydration was a killer of infants.
    “Sh, sh,” she crooned as she wrapped the baby again and gathered her up. The little girl lay limply in her arms as she rushed to the kitchen and pulled the string to the bare overhead bulb. She laid the baby on the table and opened the blanket around her, taking in the child’s sloping forehead, the flat nose and low-set ears. The baby barely gripped Lilly’s finger when she stroked her tiny palm. “Poor dear little thing.”
    Leaving the baby where she lay, Lilly went to Armina’s pantry and got a can of condensed milk. At the sink she filled the teakettle. Thankfully, Armina was not one to let her stove grow cold. Lilly lifted a stove lid with a prong, shoved a chunk of hickory down the eye, and set the kettle to boil.
    Kip pawed something on the floor. Keeping his nose low to the ground and his rump in the air, he watched as a bottle spun in circles toward Lilly’s feet. He barked expectantly   —like he’d found something necessary.
    “My word, Kip, it’s a baby bottle. The baby’s bottle. What’s it doing on the floor? But then why wouldn’t a bottle full of curdled milk be on Armina’s kitchen floor?”
    Kip cocked his head as if giving thought to Lilly’s question.
    “After all,” Lilly said as she popped the rubber nipple fromthe bottle and poured its contents into the slop bucket kept under the curtained sink, “we’ve just found a baby on her bed. It all makes a strange kind of sense.”
    The baby whimpered from her nest on the table as Lilly washed the bottle and nipple. The teakettle roiled. She poured a cup of the water and set it aside to cool, then sterilized the bottle, the nipple, a mason jar, and a zinc lid. While she waited, she dropped a tea ball into a white mug and fixed herself a strong cup of tea. She needed it. This night might never end.
    After her tea had steeped, she punched a hole in the top of the tin of milk. She stirred a spoonful of the creamy liquid into the cup of water and mixed the baby’s formula. Upending the can, she let the rest of the milk drip slowly into the canning jar.
    A cushioned kitchen chair comforted Lilly as she sat holding the baby in her arms. She teased the baby’s lips with the nipple, but she would not suck. A stream of milk leaked from the corner of her mouth and dribbled onto her gown. Tiny embroidered yellow ducks paddled across the front of the long white sleeper. “Somebody loves you,” Lilly crooned. “Somebody loves you to have dressed you in a gown so fine.”
    The baby looked at Lilly through weary, fading eyes. Lilly had seen those deathbed eyes before but never on one so young. “Don’t give up,” she said, giving the baby a gentle shake. “Don’t you give up on me.”
    Babies were not Lilly’s specialty. Oh, she could turn a breech or wield a set of forceps with the best of them, butonce babies were delivered, the mother or a midwife was the expert. Lilly much preferred a full-blown heart attack or a compound fracture to the ills of the newborn. If only her own mother were here. She would know exactly what to do. As the only baby catcher on Troublesome Creek, Mama had probably delivered a thousand infants by now. She would be a great help when Lilly had children of her own.
    Lilly pinched the baby’s cheeks to make a seal around the nipple. Milk gushed out her nose, and in mere seconds her pale face turned a dusky leaden color. Upending the infant, Lilly let the milk drain, mopping it up with a tea towel.
    With one finger she examined the roof of the baby’s mouth and found the hidden cleft that allowed communication between the cavity of the nose and mouth.
    “Two strikes,” she said as the baby made a snuffling sound and the color returned to her face. “Let’s pray there’s not a third.”
    Lilly bundled the baby, the bottle, and the remainder of the condensed milk, then said, “Come on” to Kip.
    The dog stuck close as they walked down the road to the clinic,