The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

to be kind. Lauren didn’t feel guilty,not yet. “You chose her, Mom, you just didn’t know how hard it would be.”

“But I chose you, too, Lauren,” Mom said. “I conjured you. I’d seen you before. They put you in my arms and I knew it was you.”

Jane

It had to be bigger than Wichita. Wichita, they could quantify. Last summer. Forty-six days of siege. Two thousand six hundredarrests. Thirty thousand protesters in all. Flattening heat, clothes soaked and throats dry. They sang and clapped and refusedto budge. Their action was slowness and stillness. They locked arms in front of the entrances to the clinics, laid prostratebefore the doors. They propped themselves up on their elbows, joints and pelvic bones grinding into the scorching pavement.They lay beneath the wheels of cars, filling their lungs with miasma, coughing out prayers for the dying. They felt the hoovesof police horses in their ribs and went limp in the arms of arresting officers. One hundred at a time, they crawled towardthe police, cornering the cops against fences and clinic walls, a military-precision pincer move. In came the federal marshals,and still they crawled and clapped and sat. “God’s law before man’s law,” they chanted, cross-legged on the concrete. Theyknit baby caps and booties where they sat, crocheted colorful blankets. A college-aged protester with tangled mermaid hairwas knitting a white woolen baby sweater, tiny fabric roses embroidered along the collar. She was swept off to jail, flaton her back, hair swimming behind her, dozens hauled off along with her, only for busloads of new protesters to take theirplace. Sometimes a protester would take her own place: arrested and jailed and released and then arrested and jailed again,all in the same day.

The protesters aspired to be Paul fallen from his saddle, Peter crucified under his own terms. “A woman’s body, a woman’s choice”—that was the other side’s refrain. But they could make choices with their bodies, too. Their bodies were not their own. They could give up their bodies on behalf of others. And they won, for a time. For seven days last summer, then ten days, then a month, in July, straight into August, they said that there were no abortions in Wichita. Jane didn’t know how they knew for sure.

There was nothing unattainable about the victory in Wichita. These were ordinary people. They did things anyone could do,things a baby could do. Sitting in place, crawling, singing, clapping, unwilling to budge, refusing to cooperate—these werea baby’s pastimes. They made choices fit for babies. Along with the bloody placards and bundles of baby blankets and newborn-sizedclothes, they also brought folding patio chairs and Styrofoam coolers. One man, stout in his navy polo shirt, sat cross-leggedin a patch of grass, red rubbery carnage propped against his knees, eating a sandwich. Working men and women, moms and dads,putting in an honest day’s work.

“Thirty million,” the reverend was saying in the video. The Respect Life members were watching a television set on elevatedwheels that Father Steve had pushed into the classroom. The reverend had beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers; hewas smooth and bland as batter. “Can you imagine?” the reverend asked. “Thirty million innocents. Once you think about it,once you truly wrap your head around it, you start to see them everywhere. That extra, empty desk in your son’s classroom—”

Their eyes moved to various empty desks in the classroom, then back to the video.

“Whom did God intend to be sitting at that desk? Learning the alphabet, his multiplication tables? Would he have grown upto be your own son’s best friend? Grown up to be the doctor who delivered your babies? Grown up to be president?”

The reverend was walking through a lakeside scene, green and rolling, denuded of people. Could have been Lake Chautauqua.

“You see them everywhere, even though you can’t see them. Is that mother, beside you at church, missing a baby? Is that little girl, running on the playground, wondering where her brother went? We can’t answer all these questions. But God can. God has the answers. God knows us before we are born. God is with us even then. God is with the babies when they are murdered in the womb. We cannot know why God allows the sin of abortion. Why God allows a baby to be slaughtered inside her—”

Father Steve turned off the video. “The language gets a little heated at times,” he said, flipping the lights on. “The reverendcomes from a different rhetorical tradition than we do. But we can find inspiration in his passion, even as we forge our ownpath.”

Drizzle chattered on the classroom windows. It was the end of March, sky slushy gray with lake effects, last crumbling patchesof snow melting into newborn grass. They were aiming for Good Friday or Easter. “As it happens,” Father Steve said, “a babyconceived during Wichita’s Summer of Mercy will be born during Buffalo’s Spring of Life.”

“The message is very powerful,” said Betty among nodding heads. “It’s a bit much, but—yes.”

“Where are the Catholics in this?” Jane asked. “Is there a Catholic video?”

“We are the Catholics,” Father Steve replied. “This is a multidenominational effort.”

“You know,” Betty said, “just the other day, this Presbyterian gal said to me, ‘Oh, but you’re not Christian—you’re Catholic’—”

“Will this nonsense ever stop?!” Phil exclaimed.

“—so, I mean, there are many boundaries to be broken here,” Betty finished.

“Our work will not be without its difficulties,” Father Steve said. “At times it will be painful. It’s a battle, and it won’tbegin or end with us. But a soldier in battle knows to find interludes of respite and sustenance. We will remember to rest,to eat, and to drink. Our labors should not preclude folding chairs, coolers full of drinks. For the Lord is my shepherd—”

“I shall not want,” the group replied. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside quiet waters.”

“We know how to tailgate, after all—we are from Buffalo,” said Father Steve, who was from Schenectady.

In Wichita, the cops had to drag