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air, her sobs grew heavier, swelled up with anguish, and spilled forth. She threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, and wailed. Great bellows thrashed the air. She cried like this until her voice grew hoarse like a crow’s caw.
    Crouching behind the tree, I listened and watched as she wiped her cheeks, pulled down her red shirt, brought up her bib, latched her overalls, and pushed herself off the ground. Her wet, red-streaked face made me sad. Her misshapen body was foreboding and ominous. When she gulped down air and said, “Dear Lord, give me strength. I won’t make it if You don’t,” I felt such a sorrow that I touched my own stomach and wondered how Mamie Tillman, who had no husband, could be with child. I was thinking about this, feeling scared and confused, when she turned around, breathing heavily, and ambled up the lonely yellow hill with no pasture rose in sight.

    W hen Mamie had become a gray blotch in the distance, I stepped out from behind the black pine and headed home. The sun was still hot, but starting to slip down. It’s tuckered out, I thought, shining on too much pain. Ever since I could remember, Matanni had told me about the pain of bearing children. My own dear mama had grieved three times afore I was born, she had said. God had taken three of her babies. The longest one, she’d carried five months. “After so much pain and sorrow,” Matanni had said, “she weren’t taking no chances with you.” According to my grandmother, my mama knitted me ten birthing blankets. Five pink ones and five blue ones. Matanni said that if I had been a boy, Mama was aiming to call me Bedloe, because she knew how much Patanni wanted to keep the family name alive. “But you were a girl, and you were named Icy,” Matanni had said. “’Tweren’t no other name for you.”
    I stopped to study a small pink blackberry. Newborn and not yet ripe, it was fragile and delicate. Leaning over, I blew my warm breath against it and watched as it trembled but clung tenaciously to the vine. With any luck, I thought, it’ll grow into a big, fat, juicy blackberry. In the beginning, I had been lucky I was conceived the night of the shooting star when Poplar Holler was sprinkled with stardust. Fairy dust, Mama called it. But Daddy called it coal dust after she died. For him, grief and dynamiting had turned Poplar Holler gray.
    Squeezing through a honeysuckle hedge, I thought about what Matanni had told me. My mama hadn’t acted like Mamie Tillman. She hadn’t pulled up her shirt and tried to erase me from her stomach. Instead, she had placed her delicate hands upon her belly and caressed her skin, wanting to protect the baby inside.
    â€œHit ain’t right that your mama never knowed you,” my grandmother said. “Hit ain’t right that your daddy died so young. They kilt themselves to have you and got none of the pleasure, none of the joy of seeing how you growed up. Such a pretty little girl you’ve become!”
    Mamie Tillman had behaved differently. Beside Little Turtle Pond, I had seen her cry like her heart was splitting, angrily rubbing her belly. With no husband to bring home coal dust and money, she was alone. Only the turtles in Little Turtle Pond, the sweat bees—flitting near the water’s edge—and I, Icy Sparks, knew her secret; but we wouldn’t tell. No, we wouldn’t breathe a word. We, keepers of secrets, had to stick together.

    W hen I rounded the curve, I spotted Matanni and Patanni rocking on the wide front porch, sipping ice tea. Lightning bugs lit up the dusk. Insects and night birds chanted. I noticed the climbing crimson roses that covered the trellis to the right of the front steps and the yellow-orange flowers of the butterfly weed growing from the bald earth beside the corners of the porch. Then, at the edge of the woods, Matanni’s pride, the Turk’s-cap lilies, six feet high with nodding