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grandchild.’ And I paid the hospital bill.
    â€œAfter your birth, I found out they’d christened you Jacob Habakkuk Zephaniah. I begged them to shorten it to Jay. Then I looked Caleb straight in the eyes and said: ‘You’re a father now. You need a job. God feeding the sparrows, but he’s not feeding you and your family. I am. Now if you expect prayer to feed you, you better start getting results, because, beginning today, I stop.’ It was then that your father took advantage of the building boom created by those people who’d gone to England in droves decades before and were returning home to retire. The stones he collected never covered all the household expenses, but I saw he was making an effort so I didn’t cut off my assistance; I only halved it.
    â€œI warned Anna again: ‘One child! One!’ I grabbed her by the shoulders, right here, on this back porch where we are now, and shook her. So five years later, when she became pregnant again, I said: ‘Child, this time, you’re on your own.’
    â€œJay, I was raised mostly by my mother’s mother. A broomstick of a woman. Wise and with more love in her than water in this sea.” She swallowed. I heard the catch in her throat. “My unmarried mother was 17 when she had me. We were not a beating family. I don’t beat. As you know, I can be stern and I do more helling and damning than I should — and nobody has to tell me I’m bossy — but hitting” — she shook her head — “out of the question. I told the wretch I married after the death of your grandfather: ‘If you ever hit Anna, this marriage is over, and don’t you ever yell at her.’ One good thing I can say about your granddad Kirton is that he adored Anna. As a baby the moment Anna started wailing, he would rush to comfort her, change her diapers, wash and powder her. I never heard him say an angry thing to her, and he knew children should be hugged and encouraged to use their imagination. So, imagine the rage I was in when Anna told me Caleb often strapped you. Jay, I hope your mother forgave me for the cussing I gave her that day. ‘Why didn’t you grab Jay and leave?’ I asked her. I told her, come hell or high water, I was going to rescue you. I would ask her in private: ‘Is Caleb still hitting Jay?’ And she would lower her eyes and say no. The day she showed up here dizzy and said she was leaving Caleb, she confessed that she’d lied to me, that the beatings were still happening.
    â€œLet’s go back to the beginning. I visited, to see you and Paul — for anger or not, blood is thicker than water — and I swore to my God, who, as you know, dwells nowhere else but in my own bosom, that there wouldn’t be a third child. ‘Your wife is tired,’ I told your father. ‘I would like to give her a short holiday. I don’t think the Rapture will happen while she’s gone, and if it does you two will meet in heaven.’
    â€œI told Anna: ‘I am taking you to Barbados to have your tubes tied.’
    â€œYour mother replied: ‘Caleb will divorce me if he finds out. He wants seven children. He already has names for the three daughters he wants: Hope, Faith, and Charity.’”
    I chuckled, remembering my father’s sermons on charity.
    â€œJay, I gave her such a stare, she lowered her head.
    â€œâ€˜You can’t blame him, Mama. He was lonely; he was an only child. Caleb was still in the womb when his father left for Panama. No one ever heard from him. His mother died from TB when he was seven. His aunt and her husband, who raised him, drowned in a fishing-boat accident when he was 15. You can’t blame him for wanting a big family. Mama, I want daughters too. They care about family. Boys care only about their penises.’
    â€œJay, we were silent for at least a minute, then your mother said: ‘Mama, I can’t