Genesis

            One evening during the late spring of 1977, Sherman, still covered in black dust from the mines, and Jackie, worn out from another day of chasing children and hanging clothes on the line, made their way to the barn, perhaps, and copulated under a sun-warmed tin roof.  This was their favorite pastime, most likely because neither were avid readers and they had not yet found Jesus.

            They married young, in 1963, when he was nearly 19 and she was three days shy of 17, already four and a half months pregnant with their first child.  The baby boy, whom they named Gregory, came screaming out of Jackie’s uterus on February 6, 1964, at 8:45 a.m.  She found wee Greg in his crib, lifeless, some six weeks later.  They lowered his tiny casket into the ground on the hill just above the barn, the barn where they found themselves years later stretched across carpet-cloaked bails of hay. 

            Neither of them really gave a second thought to the broken condom.  He climbed down from the loft, rigged up the horse, and finished plowing the garden.  She lit a cigarette, her 60^th of the day, and walked back to the house to cook supper.

            Weeks later, Jackie found her stomach rebelling against her nearly every day.  Her first thought was cancer, how she was too young to die and what would happen to the children.  She and Sherman had managed to produce three since the first:  Judy Ann in 1965, Michael Anthony in 1967, and Jody Arnold in 1973.  In a near panic at the thought of motherless children, she called her sister.  “Maybe you’re pregnant,” the sister conjectured.  Appropriate tests confirmed this suspicion.

Probable site of my unplanned conception

            Months later, swollen with my life, Jackie lopped off the very tip of her left index finger on a screen door.  The woven metal stood out from the edge, attacking her, catching her unaware.  She held her abdomen with her bleeding hand, wondering if I felt her pain.

            During the early hours of a snowy February morning, Jackie recognized the familiar pangs of labor.  Sherman’s father hoisted her into his Jeep Wrangler and drove her into town, population 488, to Mary Breckinridge Hospital.  At 8:35 a.m. on February 6, 1978, I made my way down the walk-worn path of my mother’s birth canal.  The nurse in the delivery room was the same one present 14 years earlier, when Jackie delivered her first child.  They shared knowing glances and awkward words.

This is the only baby picture I have of myself

            Before checking for the appropriate number of digits and without any thoughts about the impact 20,000 cigarettes had on my development, Jackie zoomed in to my left index finger, fearing (and perhaps hoping) that the screen somehow managed to get my finger too.   But I was unscathed and intact, and the screen door was gone when I left home as a teenager.