The Way of Jayne, Part 2

The Cobb triplets, all three, were sick. It’d been six months since the town midwife had helped Ma Cobb birth the babies and Jayne had assisted in their first spongebath. Timmie, Jayne’s slightly younger twin sister, had been mother to the babes more than Ma since they were born allowing to the weird being on Ma in a small way most of the time since the birth, and in a big way other times.

Timmie didn’t mind mothering. She’d been like a co-mother to Mattie who’d come several years after she and Jayne drew breath and she’d always loved doing for little ‘uns. If she kept her good school grades up, kept learning at a prodigious rate, she thought she might like to turn her natural love for kids into a teaching job some day.

Jayne helped out when she asked him to, indeed, she didn’t have to ask him most of the time. He came off all brash bluster in this boy-to-man stage but he had a heart sensitive enough to just naturally know when the big sister of the family had had enough and needed him to shoulder the load.

But when something came up that the thirteen year old siblings couldn’t handle, like what was ailing the babies right now, they didn’t know where to turn. Pa was mostly indisposed, on the juice, and Ma, well, Ma was a butterfly. She sat half in a rocking chair mentally flapping iridescent wings, smiling and at peace with the world without being in it for about the past three hours. She’d eat when she needed to if given food, would go to the bathroom alright, but wasn’t much of a mother to anybody but her own self.

All hell was breaking loose in the kids’ room but she couldn’t care, serene in her rocking perch. In the room barely 10 feet from her three small voices screeched fit to pierce each other’s eardrums, each baby feeding off the next one’s cries. Thank the god of aural tranquility, they seldom even let forth a cry of anger or upset as long as they were fed and dry, normally. They were good babies, and almost no trouble. Except for now when they