Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  But that was later; that was during the troubled years immediately ahead, when he turned to the work for more consolation than he needed now. Now he was just beginning. It was twenty years later, ten years after all his troubles were over, that Mrs Sturgis — ‘Mother of Bristol’ by then — collected the drawings, had them bound in tooled morocco with watered silk end-sheets and his name stamped in gold on the cover, and presented them to the city council in a ceremony which included a speech of acceptance by the mayor. She instructed that they be placed on display in the foyer of the city hall for all the people to see, and it was done. They stayed there through another twenty years, on display under glass, and the people came and looked at them — the crowded, multicolored sheets that had begun as maps and wound up resembling work done by a latter-day amateur Bruegel or Bosch looking down from a seat in the clouds — and found in them confirmation of their suspicions (“Look! Look at there,” they said; they sniggered and nudged each other; “I told you he was crazy as a betsy bug. Look how he spent all those years!”) until finally Mrs Sturgis was dead in her turn and the map-drawings were removed to the belfry, filed among the dusty clutter of old records, deeds and resolutions, council minutes and building permits, all jumbled together for the pigeons to coo and strut over and stain with their droppings.

  Now, however, he was only beginning the work; it was still in simple black and white and on a small scale, used mainly to fill the hours while he waited for his child to be born. Ella went past her time, unbelievably swollen, and at last the pains came on her. They were protracted. When the doctor said, “Bear down; bear down, now,” she bore down and chewed at her under lip to keep from crying. No one had told her it was going to be like this. The doctor stood beside the bed, sleeves rolled, watching over the tops of his spectacles, calling her ‘mother’ to encourage her. “Bear down, Mother. Be brave,” he said, and she tried. She had decided at the outset that this was her chance to show Mrs Sturgis that there could be bravery under adversity even where there was no trace of the Wingate strain.

  That was what she intended, but by the end of the first day she was too taken with pain and exhaustion to be concerned about anything except the sensations of the minute. She stopped chewing at her lip, and now whenever the pain returned and shook her, she filled the house with her screams. Between times, she called on God to forgive her her sins. By morning of the third day she was begging to be allowed to die.

  Hector was not with her then; he had not been with her since the start. On the evening of the first day, believing that she needed him, wanted him by her or anyhow close at hand, he went upstairs and stood outside her door. Until an hour ago she had kept control of herself, chewing at her under lip, but since then she had been making a steady whimper, punctuated from time to time with groans. He meant to knock, then put his head around the door and wish her well, anything to let her know that he was standing by, sharing her travail so far as he was able. However, as he raised his arm to rap on the panel, Ella suddenly broke into a new series of cries, high yelps like those he once had heard a hurt dog make, and he lost his nerve; he dropped his arm and broke. He was halfway down the stairs before he realized he had run.

  Next afternoon he tried again. He went upstairs and stood outside the door, and this time he saw her. It was during a lull. As he stood there, trying to make up his mind to knock, the door came open; a Negro woman faced him with a basin in her hands, and he saw beyond her shoulder into the room. Ella sat in the center of the bed, leaned slightly forward, gripping the knotted ends of two sheets tied to the footposts. Posed thus in an attitude of terrific exertion, like an oarsman collapsed on his sweep at the end of a course, she glistened with sweat. Her gown had been slit up the front, from hem to neckline, the pale enormity of her belly filling the fork of her thighs, and her breasts, formerly so beautiful but large as melons now, sagged obscenely. Her face was toward him, the lips bloodless, the jaw dropped slack, and though her eyes were open, staring out of bruised sockets, she did not see him. She obviously did not see anything.

  “Shut that door!” the doctor shouted.

  “Scuse me,” the woman said.

  Hector scurried aside, and as she came past him, holding the basin shoulder-high like a tray held by a butler on the stage, he saw the monogrammed W at one corner of the crumpled towel that had been laid across it. That meant it was one of the fine pieces of linen brought from France by his grandmother after her wedding tour. ‘Oh-oh,’ he thought. ‘I hope Mother doesnt see theyre using that.’

  A son was born the following night, soon after supper, and weighed eighteen pounds at birth. That was a record. When the news spread around the town there were a dozen variants of the same old joke, “Who does he suspect?” for people remembered the time when Hector was born, when a report was circulated that he weighed less than four pounds and had no hair or fingernails. Ella of course was unaware of this; she was not aware of anything except relief at having emerged from three days of labor. When Hector finally came into the room to congratulate and thank her, leaning down to kiss her cheek, all she said was “Dont. Dont shake the bed.”

  Next morning, though, lying with the child beside her, she seemed to say to the world at large and to Mrs Sturgis in particular, ‘I may not have done it exactly the Wingate way. It’s true I yelled; I certainly did, and loud. But look. Eighteen pounds!’ She exulted, and Hector exulted with her, sucked into the rearward vacuum of her pride.

  “He looks like one of those Japanese wrestlers,” he said, careful not to nudge the bed as he stood there looking down at his son.

  Even Mrs Sturgis had to admit there had never been such a baby born in Bristol. She had indeed been outdone. But she also asked herself if it didnt verge on the common for a newborn infant to be so big and strapping.

  No one could deny, however, that he was well-behaved. He seldom cried, not even when he had such a bad cold three weeks later and had to be put under a sheet with the croup kettle and wear a camphor poultice on his chest. The doctor was more concerned than he let them know. Finally the cold was cured; there seemed to be no ill effects. Two days later, though, when the nurse was changing the baby’s diaper, she called Ella and showed her something. “How come that?” she said.

  Too embarrassed to ask Mrs Sturgis for advice, Ella spoke to Hector about it that night in bed. She hesitated, undecided how to phrase it in this connection, though she would have had no difficulty otherwise. Then she told him. “His thing,” she said. “It’s turned sort of blue on the tip.”

  “His what?”

  “You know …”

  By morning the blueness had spread; the baby’s lips were a darker red and his face was flushed. The doctor came and made another examination with the stethoscope hooked in his ears and a worried expression on his face. “Keep him wrapped up warm,” he said. “Try not to let him exert himself. We’ll see in a couple of days.”

  “But, Dr Clinton—”

  “We’ll see. Dont worry; we’ll see.”

  The condition grew worse, the dark red of the baby’s lips shading toward purple. His eyes were dull, unresponsive, his breathing labored. There was no fear that he would exert himself, for he had become torpid, lying quite still and taking a deep breath every once in a while, as if he were breathing a rarified atmosphere. He never cried; yet somehow, to Ella and Hector at any rate, that only made it worse. A sick child was supposed to cry; that was the way they told you they were sick. But this one lay in silent misery, not even fretful.

  Dr Clinton spoke to the three of them, Mrs Sturgis and Hector and Ella, after a second examination two days later. He employed the detached, somewhat distant manner of medical men when the case is no longer in what they call the hands of science, and as he spoke he looked over the rims of his glasses, first at one and then another of the trio, undecided whether to address Ella and Hector as the parents or Mrs Sturgis as the head of the household, the one who paid the bills. He ended by dividing his glances about equally.

 
“To go back to the beginning,” he said. He paused, studying the toe caps of his brightly polished shoes. He was a bachelor. “That wasnt just a cold we brought him through. It was pneumonia, and I dont mind telling you I was considerably worried, concerned. Then I felt better; he seemed to come out of it fine. Now it turns out I was right to worry.” He removed his glasses and began to rub the lenses with a clean linen handkerchief which he took from the breast pocket of his salt-and-pepper jacket. His eyes looked weak and naked, out of focus. There was a red pinch-mark on each side of the bridge of his nose. “The pneumonia has affected the heart. Rheumatism — rheumatic. It’s like a rheumatic arm or leg: wont function properly. The blueness, now. That means the blood isnt being distributed properly. It’s a matter of faulty circulation because of the damaged heart. You follow me?” He put his glasses on and his eyes seemed to spin back into focus.

  “Yes,” Mrs Sturgis said. Ella and Hector nodded doubtfully.

  “Wellp —” Dr Clinton rose, holding his satchel; “I never believed in withholding the facts.” Hector helped him into his overcoat. “Thanks.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob and stood there for a moment, head lowered. “Well, we’ll see how it comes out,” he said as he opened the door; “We’ll see,” and left. Hector and Ella noticed that this time, in contrast to the last time he had said ‘We’ll see,’ he did not add ‘Dont worry.’

  The child was six months dying, which left it not a year old at its death. During this period Ella was possessed by a terrible sense of helplessness, a knowledge that there was nothing she or anyone could do. All her life she had heard of rheumatism as a fever of the joints, to be treated with liniment and massage, yet in this case there was not even a medicine that could be prescribed. She began to have a nightmare, recurrent throughout the six months of the baby’s dying.

  She dreamed she was in the center of an amphitheater, and people in white costumes were seated in the gallery. They leaned forward, watching. An arc light, overhead, glinted on the enameled table in front of her; she recognized it as a table from the kitchen. Her baby was on the table. Arranged in a convenient row beside it were a paring knife, a threaded shoemaker’s needle, and a bottle of brown liquid which at first she thought was whiskey. The voices of the spectators made a rising murmur beyond the down-funneled light, tiers of faces in the outward darkness, but every now and then an authoritative voice would shout for silence and the murmur would stop, then resume on a lower key, rising again.

  — Quiet! the voice commanded.

  The murmur ceased.

  — All right, miss. Begin.

  It was as if she had been rehearsed. She took up the paring knife, made a neat incision high on the left side of the baby’s chest (there was hardly any blood) and took out the heart. It was shaped like the hearts on valentines; it seemed to be made of pink satin, with a sheen in the brilliant light from overhead. Around the amphitheater the murmur rose, individual voices coming through:

  — Look.

  — She cut out her baby’s heart.

  — Look!

  But she would not be distracted. She raised the bottle, poured a few drops of the brown liquid over the heart (it was liniment; she could smell it now) and began to massage gently, being careful not to put any strain on the little rubber tube that ran from the tip of the heart into the body, through the incision. At this the voices rose excitedly:

  — Ella! Ella!

  That meant they knew her. She did not know whether she knew them, though occasionally, despite her determination not to be distracted, she heard a voice she thought she recognized. But were they cheering or were they angry? The murmur grew to a roar as she replaced the heart, took up the curved needle, and began to stitch the lips of the incision with the waxy shoemaker’s thread.

  — Quiet! Quiet! the authoritative voice commanded.

  But they would not be quieted. They would still be roaring in her ears when she came awake with a start, to find Hector shaking her shoulder and calling her name in a tone that was at once a plea and a reproach:

  “Be quiet, Ella, be quiet.” The smell of liniment, brought out of the dream, seemed to be strong in the room. Then it was gone. “You were having that nightmare again,” Hector would say. “Are you all right now?”

  There was always the hope that the heart would cure itself; the doctor had said it might, and indeed that was the only chance. But the torpidness, the labored breathing, the discoloration grew worse. When the milder weather of early summer set in and there still was no improvement, Dr Clinton told her to take the baby out into the sunlight. “Fresh air and sunshine,” he said pontifically, holding up one finger. He was glad to be making some sort of prescription, and he made it more for Ella’s sake than for the child’s, which he had given up already. So she dressed it in the knitted suits it had outgrown even before it was born, put it in the perambulator, and walked up and down in front of the house, pushing.

  People approaching along the road, no matter how they tried to be polite, could not keep their eyes off the baby. It was so big, bulging Buddha-like out of its clothes, and so obviously a representation of death: it had a monstrous fascination for them. With those dark lips shading toward purple, that liver-colored skin, it was like something displayed at a sideshow, in a vat. Though they did not want to seem to be snubbing or pitying her, they would struggle to turn their heads as they drew near, or at least hold their gaze above the level of the perambulator. Yet they could not keep their eyes away, no matter how they tried; they could not keep the look of horror off their faces. They twisted their mouths into sickly smiles, raised their hats, and wished her a good day. Then they hurried on, not looking back for fear that she might look back, too, and catch them at it.

  Still, no matter how much they might seem so, six months were not forever. Summer burnt itself out, gave way to fall; fall was prolonged, and then on a morning in mid-November, a time of woodsmoke and reddening leaves, Ella woke, turning to the crib beside the bed, and a miracle had happened in the night. The discoloration was gone; the blood-colored mouth had returned to pink and the skin was pale as ivory. Her heart gave a leap, then held and throbbed as she saw her mistake. The baby was dead.

  They buried this fourth Hector the following afternoon in the Wingate plot, a cedar grove where the first Hector, dead in Mexico, had a marker, where the second, dead by violence too, was buried, and where the third would someday join the fourth. They would lie sleeping with their wives, all the Hectors except the first and the last.

  Mr Clinkscales’ voice reached Ella through a mist of tears: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”

  “It’s better off, poor thing,” people said. “Better for it, and better, too, for everyone concerned.”

  In time even Ella came to think so. Recovered from both the birth and death of her child, she turned to Hector with the old urgency — the low moan so deep in her throat that it was almost a growl, the busy hands that knew just where to touch him, the clasping thighs with a heat to their inner surfaces like fever — and found no resurrection of the flesh. Ever since her second day in labor he had been haunted by what he had seen in the bedroom past the shoulder of the woman in the doorway. When he looked at Ella now he saw her as she had been that day, the animal agony, the eyes in the bruised sockets, the swollen body glistening with sweat. No matter how he tried to put it aside (as for instance he had done at the time, by worrying because the doctor was using one of his mother’s fine linen towels for a sopping rag) it stayed with him, along with the reproach of having been the cause of all her suffering.

  Then the child was born and there was a lull to this. After all, eighteen pounds: perhaps it was worth it. Women had gone through this, to some degree, since time began. He told himself that and he felt considerably better. Then this other thing happened; the child fell sick. What began with a blueness of the glans, a slight discoloration — an ailment with a somewhat comic tinge — had spread until
he no longer had a son, he had a monster. The doctor spoke of rheumatism; a rheumatic heart, he said. But that was no answer, that was merely a fiction to fill a gap; after all, he had to speak of something, if for no other reason than to earn his fee. What was it, really? Hector asked, and then a terrible question came. Was it the curse, the sin carried down? He lay in bed or leaned across the drawing board and asked himself these things, and from then on, whenever he looked at Ella he saw her in the agony of labor, like an oarsman collapsed on a sweep, and whenever she touched him, even by accident, he felt his flesh grow cold beneath her hand.

  She gave him six months. For she knew his life, how he had failed as a planter, as a man-about-town, as a father, and now that he had failed in this way too, she considered six months a liberal wait. When the time was up, she struck out on her own.

  The husband and the mother-in-law both knew it from the start, of course, yet there was nothing they could do but wait for her to reach a stage of revulsion like the one she reached a month before her marriage. It could happen again, they told themselves; nothing ever happened for once and for all. In point of fact, however, despite the outrage to her sensibilities — nothing like this had ever happened in the family before, except perhaps her brief affair with the man she later married — Mrs Sturgis waited because she was afraid that any action on her part might alienate Hector, and Hector waited because he was too filled with a sense of his inadequacy to risk the chance of being shamed with it.

  He had not realized how inadequate, though, until a night soon afterwards when Ella came in late and found him sitting fully dressed in the bedroom, waiting for her. Her clothes were rumpled and she walked unsteadily; he smelled whiskey. “Where have you been?” he asked her, spacing the words. He stood there pale and trembling, yet with considerable dignity, and when she came past without a sign that she had even heard the question he struck her with his open hand. It made a sound as abrupt and sharp as a pistol shot in a theater. Ella sat on the floor with a sudden, collapsed motion, her hair falling over her face. Then, to his horror, he saw her separate the strands with her fingers crooked and look up at him, smiling. His palm tingled.