In this chapter Emily's past is revealed and at the age of six she begins her life as a girl.

Chapter III

Julia ran her fingers through Emily’s soft hair and listened to her daughter’s faint breathing. She could only construe the events that had taken place tonight at the Marshes dinner party as a bad omen for the future. She drew in a deep breath and sent up a silent prayer to the Almighty, asking Him to watch over her family through the coming days. After all her family had been through, they were going to need as much help as possible when David Marsh found out that Emily would not be marrying Jonathan. It wasn’t an absence of love or the fact that Jonathan had assaulted Emily that was going to annul the marriage contract, but something much more fundamental. Emily was really a boy.

It was a secret the family had spent years hiding. They had even moved from their farm by the small town of New Antioch in the Augustine Parish to keep her safe. Julia remembered the turbulent events that had begun over sixteen years ago. She remembered vividly how much James had complained about the weather and the prospects of a mediocre harvest. She had had her hands full with the children. Sarah, three years old, had been a handful, as she was walking everywhere and had even nearly gotten lost outside while Julia was attending to Aaron’s needs. Aaron, who had been just over nine months old at the time, was teething, and he fussed constantly.

When the fall harvest came, all of James’s worries were realized when he was only able to make a little less than what he had the previous year. The day he came back from town, James complained about everything: the lousy weather, the shoddy equipment, and the health of his animals. By then, she had suspected that she was pregnant. It had been over eight weeks since she had bled. She had fierce cravings for eggs, and she was becoming highly irritable, things that had happened only when she had been pregnant with Sarah and Aaron.

It had been a cold night in late October when she finally decided to tell James. They were lying in bed, trying to keep warm, as the rain and wind battered their small home. Aaron was sound asleep in the bassinet, and the sounds of his soft breathing filtered into her ears.

She placed her hand on her husband’s shoulder, “James,” she whispered.

“Hmm.”

“I think … I think I might be pregnant again.” She had always been reluctant to tell him of a new pregnancy, not because he would be unhappy or upset, but because her first pregnancy had ended with a miscarriage, and she didn’t want to worry him.

“Oh,” was James’s disheartening response.

Silence filled the room as he absorbed the news.

“Are you okay?” Julia asked.

James was silent for a moment longer. “I don’t know. I’m worried. I always hoped that after Aaron we wouldn’t have any more kids. I worry that I won’t be able to keep us fed, ’specially if we have another poor harvest. Worse still, I’ve heard stories ’bout other farmers who’ve had their crops burned and livestock killed, just so the landowners in New Antioch can bankrupt ’em and take their land. If we can’t make enough money, how’ll we back on our feet if something bad happens?”

Julia rolled away, “I know. I didn’t wanna burden you while you were harvesting, but I thought you should know.”

He rolled over and put his arm around her waist. “I mean, I’m happy. I just don’t want anything to happen where we might have to give up our land.”
“I guess we’ll just have to trust in each other and in God to make sure that everything will work out,” she said.

But as Julia’s belly grew, so did her husband’s worry. By the time she could feel the baby kicking, the bitter cold winter choked the land and several of the farm’s animals died from exposure. That winter also came without the vital life-giving snows that would moisten the soil for the next planting season. There were even times that James would complain out loud that he was going to have to sell the land just to keep the family fed.

The springtime was filled with anxiety for Julia. Throughout the last trimester of her pregnancy, she had experienced a number of false labors, and her younger sisters briefly moved into the cramped farmhouse to help watch the children and comfort Julia while she rested.

After a false labor, Julia finally had the real thing the afternoon of May 1, 329, but the baby kept her waiting for a grueling thirteen hours.
“It’s a boy!” Julia’s sister Maria exclaimed. Her sister’s declaration caught Julia by surprise. Through all her pregnancies, she had always had an intuition as to whether she was having a boy or a girl, and with both Sarah and Aaron she had been right. She had been so sure that she was having a girl with this pregnancy that she hadn’t even thought of a boy’s name for the baby. But, as her sister handed him to her, she couldn’t help but notice a slight resemblance between him and her uncle Erik, so she named the baby Erik Richard La Rouche after him.

The moment she handed Erik over to James, he seemed transformed. The dour look of worry that had overcome him during her pregnancy disappeared as he laughed and smiled with his newborn son. On that day, it had seemed as if God smiled on her family. They had three healthy, beautiful children. Then the weather soon changed for the better, and that fall James reaped one of the best harvests of his entire life.

Continue reading Chapter 3:
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