Instead of hitching up the wagon, still a common mode of transportation in rural North Dakota in the 1920s, your grandmother’s father rouses her and her two sisters and tells them to help their mother deliver the baby that is killing her. When the girls pull their new brother from between their mother’s blood-slicked thighs, he is not only the thirteenth child, he weighs a brutal thirteen pounds, and will have thirteen letters in his name. Your grandmother will adore him, help raise him, and privately refer to him as “unlucky number thirteen,” although the rest of his life will be relatively long and free of bad fortune beyond the genuine unluckiness of causing his mother to die. His mother, who will never get out of bed again despite the frantic ministrations of her daughters, will succumb to “childbed fever.” (Or perhaps exhaustion and despair. Your grandmother told you it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.) Your great-grandfather will tell the oldest girls to be sure to get the bloodstains out of the sheets the next time they do laundry. None of them will return to school—they are now needed at home to raise the new baby and care for the other nine children.
Five years later your grandmother will marry a man who supports her vow to have just three children, no more, and in the end they will have three, but the second child, a boy born between your mother and her younger sister, will die at six months. Your grandfather, a carpenter, will build a tiny casket and bury his only son behind their little wooden house. Neither he nor your grandmother will ever speak of this baby.
Your grandmother will make sure her daughters graduate from high school and go to college. This is the secret message carried in the other cookbook. {read}