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She was still standing there when I got to her. I picked up her rope, heavy with mud. She let me lead her to the barn door. I opened it and took her to her stall. Shaking, I leaned against the stall railing. I wiped the rain from my eyes. I dripped mud. My knees throbbed. My back ached. I had fallen hard; I was fooling myself to say different. It didn’t have to mean trouble, though, not bad trouble. I had fallen once with John, and nothing happened to him. But I hadn’t been nearly as far along.

My legs wobbled. Jerseybell’s breathing was labored, and she was hot to the touch. I was the same way. I wanted to sit and rest but couldn’t, not with the little girls waiting for me. Bracing myself, I went back out into the storm.

I made my way up the rise in the heavy rain to the house. The mud was turning into a mush that oozed like quicksand. I slipped twice, landing on my knees, but the falls were slow and didn’t hurt all that much. I told myself that I had done what needed doing. I had gotten Jerseybell in.

On the open porch, my arms almost too tired to do it, I took off my wet, mud-covered coat and hat and hung them on a wall nail. Before I had both boots off, my dress was soaked. The girls, I knew, were scared stiff. It was cold and my teeth chattered, but I stayed in the rain anyway. I took off my dress and let it fall on the porch floor in a muddy heap.

I stood on the porch in my underdress. I let the rain wash the mud from my legs and feet. I closed my eyes against the lightning. I raised my face. Rain. Sweet, sweet rain. The baby was all right; it had to be. I couldn’t take it any other way. Mud ran from my hair. Rain, sweet rain. I began to cry. No more putting Liz in the well. No more going without water. We were saved.

I drank in more rain. Grit crunched in my teeth. The wind gusted. I shivered with a chill. Winter. Winter was coming. Don’t think about it. God sent this rain to ease your worries. Now stand up and make the best of it. That was what my mother used to say.

The words gave me courage. I drew a ragged breath. I went inside then and saw to the girls.

The worst of the storm passed while I scrubbed the burned pot. The rain didn’t stop though. It rained while I got a fresh pot of mush going and it rained when me and the girls sat down to eat. After supper, I got some water from one of the rain barrels, heated it on the cookstove, and put the girls in the washtub. I scrubbed their hair. I dug the dirt out from between their toes, and I got it out from under their fingernails. I washed their elbows and their ears. I scrubbed and scrubbed and they let me. The girls played—Liz too—laughing as their small hands patted the water. When I finished, I got some more fresh water and washed Emma’s burned hand, even though this made her cry. Everybody sparkling clean, I put them to bed and read them a story. Then I went to the parlor and put a lantern in each of the two windows. There, sitting in one of the red upholstered chairs, I waited for the baby to kick, a sign that it was all right.

A watched pot never boils; that was something my mother always said. And the baby wasn’t going to kick if that was all I thought about. I got up and started a fire in the potbelly stove to get the wet chill out of the house. The rain beat down on the tin roof, and that was a pleasing sound, but the ground had turned into a boggy gray sand. When it got that way a person could sink up to his ankles in it. I didn’t see how Isaac could get everybody home. The horses couldn’t make it. Neither could Mary and John; it’d wear them thin.

It worried me. There weren’t any stars to guide them home. I hoped they had taken shelter in a calving pen. Or maybe, if they were lucky, the three of them had made it to the empty Walker house.

It was easy to get turned around in the Badlands. From time to time we heard stories about someone getting lost and wandering miles off track. Or worse. Last fall, Ralph Nelson, an old-timer who had lived in the Badlands for over thirty