The year was 1995.

Boney Fork, West Virginia, was not a place people drove through on purpose.

It was a string of crooked houses along a muddy creek, tucked so far back in the hills that the sun seemed to set two hours early.

The roads were gravel and rusted mailboxes.

The nearest store was nine miles away.

In one of those houses, a two-room shack with a tin roof and walls made of rough-cut lumber, five newborn babies were crying at the same time.

Their mother, Delia Mae Pack, had just given birth to quintuplets.

She was twenty-three years old.

She weighed less than a hundred pounds before she got pregnant.

After carrying five babies, she looked like a ghost.

Her cheekbones pushed against her skin.

Her arms trembled.

Her nightgown was soaked with sweat.

She had delivered all five babies on a mattress in the back room.

A neighbor named Hazel Whitmore had helped her.

There was no doctor.

There was no ambulance.

The nearest hospital was over an hour away, and Delia Mae had gone into labor too fast.

Delia Mae had not eaten a real meal in two days.

She could already feel her milk trying to come in, but there was nothing behind it but water and desperation.

She loved all five of them with a ferocity that scared her.

But she was terrified.

She had not planned to become a mother at twenty-three.

She had not planned to become a mother of five on the same day.

But the Lord did not ask Delia Mae Pack what she had planned.

He just handed her five crying souls and walked away.

Her husband, Vernon Ray Pack, had been a handsome man once.

When Delia Mae met him at a church picnic in 1991, he had a smile that made her feel like the world was not so heavy.

He talked about leaving West Virginia.

He talked about getting a good job in Ohio.

He talked about a little house with clean white siding and a refrigerator full of food.

Delia Mae believed him.

She was eighteen and lonely and tired of being hungry.

So she married him three months later.

At first, he was sweet.

He brought her wildflowers from the roadside.

He called her his little bird.

But the sweet did not last.

The first time she got pregnant, he lost his job at the lumber mill.

The second time she got pregnant, it turned out she was carrying five babies.

The doctor in town had to tell them twice because Vernon Ray refused to believe it the first time.

‘Five?’ Vernon Ray had said in that cold little clinic.

He laughed, but it was not a happy laugh.

It was the laugh of a man whose dreams were being buried alive.

‘You got to be joking. Five?’

The doctor was not joking.

Delia Mae had sat on the paper-covered table and felt all the blood drain from her face.

She was scared too.

But she was not angry.

She already loved them.

Vernon Ray stopped loving her that day.

He started drinking more.

He started staying out late.

He stopped calling her his little bird.

He started calling her a lead weight around his neck.

Then the labor began on a wet Tuesday morning.

The rain was coming down so hard that the creek behind the house turned brown and angry.

Delia Mae was hanging wet clothes on a line inside the kitchen when the first pain hit her.

She dropped a towel on the floor.

She grabbed her stomach and let out a low moan.

Vernon Ray was supposed to be at the sawmill, but he had not gone in that day.

He was sitting on the porch with a cigarette and a cup of cold coffee.

He did not come inside when she moaned.

He just flicked his cigarette into the yard.

Hazel Whitmore came running through the rain because her dog had started barking like the devil was walking up the hollow.

Hazel was sixty years old.

She had birthed seven children of her own.

She took one look at Delia Mae and started boiling water.

‘Get me every clean rag in this house,’ Hazel said.

Vernon Ray stayed on the porch.

He sat there with his arms crossed while his wife labored in the back room.

He could hear her screaming through the thin walls.

He could hear Hazel praying.

He could hear the rain hammering on the tin roof.

He did not listen to any of it.

Inside the back room, Delia Mae fought for her life.

The first baby came at 4:17 in the afternoon.

A tiny girl, purple and screaming.

Hazel cut the cord with a pair of scissors she had boiled in a pot.

The second baby came nine minutes later.

A boy, smaller than the first, his little chest heaving.

Delia Mae was losing strength fast.

‘Push, Delia Mae, push,’ Hazel commanded.

‘I can’t,’ Delia Mae whispered.

‘You can and you will.’

The third baby came at 4:38.

Another girl, with a full head of dark hair.

Delia Mae’s vision began to blur.

The room tilted.

She felt herself slipping.

When the fourth baby came, she passed out for almost a minute.

Hazel slapped her cheeks and shouted her name.

‘Delia Mae, you come back to me, you hear? You got one more.’

Delia Mae opened her eyes.

There was blood on the sheets.

There was blood on Hazel’s hands.

There was blood on the floor.

But somewhere deep inside her, a voice said, ‘Not today.’

She pushed.

The fifth baby came at 5:02.

The room fell quiet except for the sound of tiny lungs trying to figure out how to breathe.

Hazel wrapped each baby in old flannel shirts.

Delia Mae opened her eyes and saw five small faces.

She started to cry.

Not from sadness.

From fear and love so tangled together she could not tell them apart.

Then the front door banged open.

Vernon Ray Pack walked in from the porch.

He was not wet from the rain because the porch had a roof.

He had smoked half a pack of cigarettes.

The smell of smoke rolled into the room and mixed with the smell of blood and wood fire.

He stopped in the doorway.

He looked at the mattress.

He looked at the five bundles.

His face did not soften.

It hardened.

‘Five?’

His voice was strange.

Flat.

Dangerous.

‘Five, Delia Mae? Five?’

He turned and grabbed his duffel bag off a nail by the door.

He started shoving clothes into it like the place was on fire.

Delia Mae clutched two of the babies against her chest.

The other three lay on a folded quilt on the floor.

They were crying.

She was crying.

The rain was still beating the roof.

‘Vernon Ray, don’t leave us,’ she begged.

Her voice was barely a whisper.

‘Help me. We can get through this together.’

He did not look at her.

He stuffed a flannel shirt into the bag, then a pair of jeans.

Then a belt.

Then a box of matches.

Like he was packing for a camping trip, not abandoning his family.

‘No,’ he said.

The word landed like a door slamming shut.

‘I don’t want this life. I want to succeed. These children are a burden. They are a curse.’

Delia Mae felt the air leave her