by Doug Kelly
Suddenly, a contraction came and made Amy clench her teeth so strongly she thought her teeth would break. An unnatural wail of pain came from deep inside her. “It hurts so badly.” She cringed again. “Something is wrong.”
Her husband stood helplessly and looked at Joel, waiting for him to do something. Joel saw this and tried to ignore it, but he could not. He felt the impending doom and tried to swallow it into the depth of his soul.
“Come on, man, you need to do something,” David pleaded. “You’re a doctor. Do something.”
“She’s in good hands, Dave. My wife has done this before.” Joel tried to speak reassuringly, but he knew there was not much comfort he could give a man who was pleading for his wife’s life and the life of his unborn child.
Amy raised her head. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. “Something is wrong. I feel funny.” Paleness swept across her face, and her head crashed back to the pillow. Her eyes rolled back, and her hands contorted under the blanket.
“Something is wrong here!” David screamed. He lunged forward, grabbed his wife’s shoulder, and shook it. “Amy! Wake up!” She did not respond.
Her jaw went slack, and her head tilted to the side. Her eyes were still open, but unresponsive, and she turned paler. Kim went to the other side of the bed, threw the blanket back, and opened the robe. Bright red blood pooled between Amy’s legs. Her uterus, engorged with blood, had ruptured along the old surgical scar and was bleeding internally. Amy had thought her water had broken, but it was blood and she was bleeding fast.
Kim put an index finger to Amy’s neck to feel for a pulse. She carefully checked both sides, and then slowly raised her head. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, David.”
David collapsed to his knees at the side of the bed. Horrified and in shock, he tried to speak, but his mouth formed over silent words. Linda, Mary, and Ruth went to the corner of the room. Unconsciously trying to distance themselves from the horror, they backed into the wall. They stared silently as the tragedy unfolded.
Joel went to his knee by David’s side. He reached out and touched David’s back. As he did, Joel said, “David, I’m so sorry—”
“Do something!” David snapped.
“David, I need to tell you—”
David stood and turned to push Joel to the floor. “Do something! Now! Save her!”
Joel found his balance and stood up. He held his hands forward, toward David. “Let me talk to you. I understand—”
David began to walk aggressively toward Joel. “You don’t understand anything. That’s not your wife lying there. Is it?” He lunged at Joel.
Joel stumbled backward and bumped a dresser. A steak knife intended for cutting the umbilical cord fell off the dresser and onto the floor. David pounced on the knife and quickly pointed it at Joel. Joel raised his hands and backed into the wall.
“I hate you!” screamed David, as he raised the knife above his head.
Dylan sprung from the doorway, grabbed David by the wrist and throat, and took him to the floor. He twisted David’s wrist and shook the knife free. David stopped resisting, curled his body on the floor, and sobbed uncontrollably.
Kim sadly put her hand on the pregnant belly. She felt a faint kick. “Joel?”
He hung his head low. “I’m sorry, dear—”
“Shut up! I felt a kick.”
Joel’s head immediately turned to the knife on the floor. He grabbed it and kneeled by David, still reeling with emotion and curled into the fetal position.
“David!”
David opened his blurry eyes and saw the knife.
“Just kill me. Do it now, I’ve got no reason to live.”
“For God’s sake, man, snap out of it,” Joel barked. “Kim thought she felt the baby kick.”
David held his breath.
“Do you want me to try and take the baby? I need your permission. Is that want you want?”
“Oh, God, yes. Do it now.”
Kim held the kerosene lantern close to the pale corpse stretched long on the bed. Linda, Mary, and Ruth moved the full-length mirror behind the lantern to reflect a column of light onto Amy’s abdomen. Joel’s blade hovered over the old incision. He felt his hand shake, so he gripped the knife handle more tightly and took a deep breath. The knife was not very sharp, and he feared it would tear the flesh open rather than cut it. He made a long horizontal incision and saw the uterus, torn open and hemorrhaging. He cut it open farther and pulled out a baby girl. The umbilical cord was healthy and intact on the placenta. He felt it still pulsing. Mucus covered the infant, and the skin was a dark blue color. The little infant girl was not breathing. Joel put his mouth on her nostrils, sucked the mucus out, and swept the baby’s mouth clear with a finger.
Mary’s thoughts turned quickly to the child she had lost. She took the crucifix from around her neck, clutched it tightly, and prayed in a corner of the room. Please, God, don’t take the baby. Please leave us with this beautiful miracle of life.
Joel put the baby on her back. He covered her nose and mouth with his lips, and he tried to breathe life back into the child’s blue body. He felt his gentle breaths make the small rib cage rise and fall. He did not stop. The baby’s color slowly began to change to pink, and then she cried. He tied a string on the umbilical cord, cut it, and wrapped the baby in a tiny blanket. Joel remembered the birth of each of his three children. After each birth, the obstetrician handed the baby to his wife and encouraged her to nurse the newborn child. This mother was dead; he was not sure what to do. He looked at his reflection in the glass of the bedroom window and saw a butcher staring back at him, holding a dead mother’s child that he had just torn from a corpse’s womb. He began to feel sick.
“Joel,” Linda said in a meek voice. “I should take her. I know what to do.”
Joel did not question Linda and handed her the crying baby. She sat down and lifted her shirt. She still had milk, and the infant latched on to her nipple and sucked contentedly.
David went to Linda’s side, sat on the floor, and wept.
Joel went to the other side of the room and found a clean towel. He was wiping his hands with it when Dylan approached.
“Nice work, Doc.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“You saved a life tonight.”
Joel scoffed. “I suppose this is the way it is. We can’t intervene in the natural process of life. Get used to it.”
“What about the body?” asked Dylan.
“We need to get rid of it. The quicker, the better.”
“I’ll go talk to David.”
Dylan covered Amy’s body with the top sheet on his way across the room. He went to David’s side and knelt on one knee to speak with him.
“David, I’m sorry to bring this up, but—”
“The body. My wife’s body?”
“You’ve been through a lot. If you want me to take care of it, I can and will. If it is something you want to be a part of, I’ll wait, but we shouldn’t wait long.”
“No, you do it. I want to remember her the way she was. Do it for me. Okay?”
Dylan patted him on the back. “Okay.” He stood up and went over to Joel.
“Dylan?” David called. He closed his eyes when he lifted his head to speak to Dylan. He tried to avoid looking at the bulge of his wife’s corpse under the sheet. “Say something nice when you do it.”
“I promise.”
Dylan and Joel tried to be as respectful as possible as they rolled the body in the top sheet and then in a thick comforter. They took the body and left the room without saying a word.
They walked past Dylan’s house with the body and put it down on an area of short grass in the field. Dylan went back to his house and found a shovel near the backyard garden. He jogged back again, put the tip of the spade to the ground, and jumped on it. The spade did not move.
“Shit! It’s frozen,” said Dylan.
“Now what?”
Dylan leaned on the shovel and closed his
eyes. He tapped the end of the handle on his forehead as he thought.
“I’ll be right back,” said Dylan, as he ran away once more. He put the shovel back and went to the garage. Inside, he found an axe and a can of gasoline. He returned to Joel with both.
“What are you doing?” asked Joel.
“The ground is frozen, so it’ll have to be a funeral pyre.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“We can’t just leave her here, and we can’t bury her.”
“Then let’s get this over with.”
They went to the edge of the trees, cut enough wood to create a bed of logs, and placed her on the wood.
“David wanted me to say something,” said Dylan. “I’m not good at that.”
Joel took off his hat. “Let me do this.” He bowed his head and said, “Lord, Amy was a good woman. She was a good mother and wife. She has left behind a grieving husband and an infant that will never know her. Please take her from this world to a better place. Accept her into Heaven. Let her join the son she already has waiting for her there. Thank you. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
Dylan poured the gasoline onto her body and the wood. He gestured for Joel to step away, and he flicked his empty lighter. A flame erupted upward with a small amount of black smoke. The dry wood quickly took the flame, and the heat became intense. They kept stepping back from the growing heat and watched it all turn to gray ash. The heat from the flames made the ashes rise high in the calm, cold air, and it spread across the meadow. The snow circling the pyre began to melt into small pools of water. The pools reflected the flames. They turned to walk their separate ways home, and they heard the call of an owl in the woods echo throughout the neighborhood.
Chapter Twenty One
On a cold winter afternoon, Sandra Sisk opened the front door of her home. Through the glass storm door, she watched the tempestuous winter breeze blow the snow into shifting dunes across the front yard. With an empty plastic bucket in one hand, she gripped the cold metal handle of the outer door and braced for the chill as she opened it. She stepped onto the front porch and went to the nearest snowdrift to fill the small bucket with snow. As she came back inside, the wind slammed the storm door shut behind her. In the living room, she placed the bucket of snow in front of the gas fireplace, on one end of the marble hearth. The window in the living room faced west, and she partially opened the drapes to let in the afternoon sunlight. A column of light fell across the floor and onto the center of the hearth. She moved the bucket to the center of the hearth, and the sunlight captured it. Sandra draped a blanket over her boney shoulders, sat on a chair in the living room, and stared at the slowly melting snow. That small amount of activity exhausted her. She was still trying to recover from the ravages of influenza that had spread throughout the neighborhood.
Desperate people had gone door-to-door begging for help and in doing so, unwittingly spread the virus. The sickness took the weakest and the most malnourished during the winter cull. In a cruel way, nature was taking its course, thinning the herd, and only the strongest survived. Ironically, all the deaths left more food for the survivors, and the survivors had become better nourished. Her husband, John, was lucky. He did not get sick, and took full advantage of nature’s cruel twist of fate. As each family died, he scavenged their pantries and brought home the stolen food, but he shared with no one, barely even with his wife. She was defenseless against his rage and retribution. As she sat watching the snow melt in the bucket, desperate for a cup of water to drink, she wondered if she would be better off dead.
John was upstairs when he heard the front door slam shut from the wind. He came down the steps to investigate. He wore a gray sweatshirt, denim pants, and thick wool socks that he had confiscated from a neighbor’s corpse. He took slow, deliberate steps as he came down the stairs, carrying a Mason jar half-full of grain alcohol in one hand and its metal lid in the other. Spilling any of the precious fluid that he was growing to depend upon would have been unthinkable. At the bottom of the staircase, he saw the blue plastic bucket of slowly melting snow on the marble hearth and realized that the door that had slammed shut had been his wife retrieving the snow. Nonetheless, he decided to provoke her into conversation and harass her for disturbing him.
“What was that noise?” bellowed John. He swirled the glass jar and took a sip as he stood behind his wife.
Sandra did not turn around. She moved her eyes to the glass cover of the gas fireplace and focused on John’s reflection in the glass. She saw the bitterness in his expression, and his resentment toward her. Deep in her heart, Sandra felt the same emotions for her husband and dreaded every day of her existence because of him. Evidently, paybacks are hell, and that was where she was living now, with the devil. Something began to stir inside her soul. She began to feel her hatred for John bringing energy back to her weak legs, and she stood and turned to face her husband before she realized what she had done.
“You!” snarled Sandra. A weak and crooked finger came from under her blanket. She pointed at John. Her dingy yellow fingernails were long and had dirt underneath them. “This is all your fault.”
John was shocked at his wife’s demeanor. A voice from a dark recess of his mind called out for him to claim retribution for her insolence. He took another sip, screwed the metal lid tightly on the jar, and went into the kitchen to put the container of liquid courage on a countertop. He removed the dusty cordless phone from its base, blew the dust off it, and marched back to his wife. She still glared at him with deep resentment. John narrowed his eyes and scowled back at her as he passed the phone from one hand to another.
Sandra’s anger took over again, and her tongue lashed at her husband. “I hate—”
“Watch your mouth!” warned John.
Resentment energized Sandra to finish her sentence, and she defiantly snarled, “You!”
Stunned at her disobedience, John yelled, “Bitch!” and struck her with the back of his hand. His wife went to the floor, covering her face. She tasted blood at the corner of her mouth. John tossed the phone at his wife, and said tauntingly, “Dial 9-1-1.”
A shadow came through the west window, moved across the living room floor, and quickly disappeared. John left his wife by the hearth and went to the window to see what had just gone by. He saw someone he did not recognize. She was a petite woman with long, brown hair, walking a goat on the street in front of his house. It was Ruth Miller. He looked to his left, where she had come from, and thought about the goats at Tom’s barn. Thoughts raced in his alcohol-fueled mind, and he concluded that the woman was stealing the goat. He thought that if he caught a thief, he might be able to redeem himself in the community. He was going to confront the bandit and felt that he needed something to show his authority. His shotgun and bandolier were upstairs. John brought them downstairs and put the bandolier across his chest. He put shells in the shotgun, and disregarding the cold temperature, only put on a wool cap. A coat would cover the bandolier of shotgun shells, and he wanted to wear it like a badge of courage for the thief or anyone in the community to see. Before he opened the door, he looked back at his wife and saw her on the floor. He pumped the shotgun and flicked off the safety. Sandra watched him from the corner of her eye as he walked out the door. Her heart was as cold as the slowly melting bucket of snow beside her.
Ruth struggled with the bleating goat that she had volunteered to retrieve from Tom’s barn. She pulled on the rope leash, trying to coax it away from a stand of dry weeds at the end of the street. She was ready to turn left and go back to Dylan’s house. There were three male goats at Tom’s barn, and they had decided to butcher this one as a gift for David and Linda. After losing his wife, David was in a state of lethargic depression and was not able to provide any help for Linda or his newborn daughter. Linda was taking care of David’s daughter, nursing her, and she needed food.
From where she stood, Ruth saw Dylan’s house at the end of the street. In the cold air, she grew impatient with the
goat. She pulled once more on the rope and the goat pulled back. Her fingers were very cold, and she regretted not bringing gloves for what she had thought was going to be a short, easy walk to get the goat. Ruth flipped up the collar on her coat and raised her shoulders to keep her neck warm. It did not work. From down the street where she had walked, Ruth saw somebody approaching her that she did not recognize. It was John. He shuffled awkwardly across the icy road, heavily intoxicated. The warmth of the previous day had melted the snow. Overnight, the temperature dipped below freezing and refroze the snowmelt into ice, making it difficult to walk.
As he got closer, she saw that the stranger had a shotgun, and she became anxious. She turned and looked at the end of the street, thinking that Dylan’s house seemed to be getting farther away. Behind the goat, she bent down and quickly flicked its testicles with her cold fingers. It bucked and jumped away from the weeds in the direction Ruth had hoped. She began to slip her way across the ice again, back home with the goat.
Cloaked in a drunken stupor, John walked the slick street as fast as he could. His hand tightly gripped the wood stock of the shotgun, for fear of dropping it. Because his bare hands were becoming numb from the cold, his finger unknowingly touched the trigger. John closed the gap.
“Hey,” John called out to Ruth. “You need to stop.”
Hearing John’s voice, the goat stopped walking to turn and look at the man. Ruth tugged at the rope to encourage the goat to keep going, but it did not. John took short, slow steps toward Ruth. Intermittent patches of snow crunched under his boots. The cold breeze quickly swept away the condensing vapor of his breath.
When he was close enough for Ruth to see his glassy eyes, she held up a hand and said, “Stop!”
“I don’t think you’re in any position to tell me what to do,” warned John. In that instant, he noticed how beautiful the shivering woman was. Now, regarding her as more than just a thief, he quickly changed his mind. She was beautiful and what he considered as just his type. In addition to her beauty, she was small, very petite, and therefore physically easy to control. If she was a crook, he thought he could offer her refuge. She could stay at his house, and he could dispose of his wife to make the offer more accommodating to the stranger.