The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  “Hello, Harry.” Frank Niles smiled. “Miss James.”

  Harry nodded. Iris stood beside him feeling like the lights had suddenly been switched on.

  “Where are you two off to?”

  “We’re walking Iris home,” Harry answered swiftly, and he turned to her, waiting. He was waiting for her. Iris nodded, afraid to trust herself to speak. Marnie’s eyelids lowered slightly, as if she’d seen a sign.

  “So long,” Harry said.

  “See you,” Marnie called out. Iris stepped off the curb after Harry. They walked away from the bright splash of town in the opposite direction, where the arm of land curled into a fist, and began the slow climb up Yarrow Road to Iris’s cottage. After a long patch of quiet, they heard footsteps up ahead on the tarmac, though Iris’s bicycle lamp caught nothing but the dark hedge and the rosehips, black balls hanging. A man appeared in the light.

  “Otto,” Harry said.

  Startled, the German man lifted his eyes off the road; he seemed not to have seen the two of them coming, or their light. He stepped around the beam of the lamp and moved toward them.

  “Harry,” he said, and nodded at Iris.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, yes. I am just walking.” He nodded again.

  “Okay, Otto.” Harry clapped the man on the shoulder. “Good night.”

  “Good night.” His footsteps carried on behind them into the pitch black. She wondered how he made his way on the dark road like that.

  “He walks up here most nights, I think.” Harry started walking again.

  Iris gave the bike a push. “Why?”

  “He comes up to the bluff to stare at France.”

  “Dear God,” Iris breathed.

  Harry’s hand found hers on top of the bicycle handle and closed over it. Just like that, she thought, amazed. They kept on walking without a word. She let her hand slide off the handle so they were walking hand in hand now; the farther they went, the more quiet and the clearer it grew that they had arrived. That’s how these things started. So little.

  And then, very gently, he slowed, turning toward her, resting one hand back on the bicycle so they were holding it upright together and he pulled her toward him and she had to shuffle a little to get close, maybe a hairsbreadth taller than he; when his lips found hers, she did have to tip slightly to meet him. His kiss was soft at first, his lips against hers gentle, an introduction. Then it seemed he had decided something, for he pulled her toward him harder and drew her in close, and in the dark, with her eyes shut, she had simply walked through a door into this soft, wet place encircled by a man, kissed and kissing, and she could have been anywhere, she realized—anywhere at all, if this man kissed her in the post office, she’d walk into the circle gladly and lose herself over and over to find this spot in the dark, this damp wide opening.

  They kissed for a long time, and when they pulled away, she realized they were still standing in the middle of Yarrow Road, and that her hand was stiff with cold on the bicycle handlebars. She thrust it into her pocket, letting the bicycle fall against her hip.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes,” he said, and they started back up the road, as though nothing had happened, she marveled. There was all the time in the world now, because it would happen. This would happen. She had never felt so free. That’s how these things started. So little. She turned and smiled at him in the dark. They started slowly off again.

  Outside Jim Tom and Maggie Winthrop’s fish house, someone sat on the stairs, the red ember of a cigarette a punched hole in the dark.

  “Evening,” a voice called out to them.

  “Who’s that? Jim Tom?”

  “Aye.”

  “All right there?”

  “Maggie’s having the baby.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Aye. We’ve got Will Fitch inside.”

  “Good luck, there.”

  “Aye, thanks.”

  They walked in quiet the rest of the way up the hill, the lights of Franklin behind them like a low cluster of stars, the shingled sides of the houses they passed glowing violet in the half-moon. The porch light was on at the Fitch house, making even darker the row of summer cottages of which Iris’s was the last, the only one the owner, Mr. Day, had insulated and put a stove in for himself.

  “We used to break in here when we were kids, to smoke, in the off season,” Harry said following Iris onto the tiny cottage porch and then through the door. She reached for the switch under the lamp shade and the light sprang on. Though the largest in the row, Iris’s cottage had been fixed like all the others. Two rockers and a tiny sofa placed “in conversation” at the edges of a round hooked rug. Two tiny bedrooms on either side of the living room, and between them a kitchenette along the back wall. Everything fresh. Everything bright. Nothing important but the air and water flipping lazily back and forward outside the trim windows. On all of the porches, two wooden chairs sat facing the harbor. It had been just what Iris wanted when she arrived last year.

  Without looking at him, she moved to pick up the teakettle and took it over to the sink to fill it. The water coughed in the pipe and then glugged out.

  “Who’s we?”

  “Frank Niles and me—and Fitch. The doctor’s father.”

  She set the kettle on the stove, lit the pilot, then turned on the flame. She pulled two mugs down from the shelf above the stove and set them on the counter. Pausing, leaning against the kitchen wall, she reached down into her skirt pocket and felt for her cigarettes and lighter, shaking out a cigarette and putting it in her mouth, glad of the distraction. “I hear he was a drunk.”

  “Yes,” said Harry simply.

  She looked up. He took the lighter gently from her fingers and then he reached and pulled the cigarette from her lips. He was going to kiss her again, she realized, and she felt more awkward in here, in the light, standing in the middle of her own kitchen, than she had in the wide open dark of the town road. He leaned forward against her, placing his hands on the wall behind her head, and drew her lips to his; without thinking, she put her hands on the loose waist of his coat and pulled it, pulled him to her. Beneath his mouth, she smiled.

  “What?” he asked against her lips.

  She shook her head. One thing would lead to another, she need not think at all. The whistle blew on the kettle and he reached a hand out and switched it off.

  After a long time, he leaned back. “I ought to leave you,” he said.

  “Ought to?”

  He kissed her again. “Ought,” he smiled. “Not want.”

  Her hand bunched the cloth of his jacket and tugged at him, like a child.

  “Hold on.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have something.” She blushed and walked back along the hall into her bedroom, stopping at the bureau. Her heart was pounding so hard in her chest, it nearly hurt her. She had imagined handing the certificate to him, neat and clean, offering it with a small smile so he knew it was done gladly. But standing in front of her bureau, her face in the mirror looked terrified. Whatever would he think? She hesitated.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” she whispered to herself. She bent and pulled open the drawer, thrust her hand in and closed it over the envelope in the middle of her sweaters.

  “Here.” She held it in front of her. “I wanted you to have this before—”

  He looked at her, curious. “What is it?”

  “Here,” she said again.

  He took the envelope from her. “You’re giving me a letter?”

  “Of a kind.” She couldn’t look at him. He turned the envelope over and slid the certificate out.

  “Intact?”

  She nodded, blushing furiously.

  He put both hands around her waist. “I’m an old, broken-down man, you know, not a catch at all.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that—I didn’t mean that I was catching you.”

  He laughed. “I’m hardly intact.”

&nb
sp; “I mean, I just thought—”

  “Shh.” He touched her face. And she saw that it was all right.

  OUTSIDE there were stars so thick you couldn’t put a finger through a hole in the sky. Harry set off in the direction of town, his body electric with the fresh memory of the woman he had watched for so long simply stepping right into his arms. After a few minutes, he turned and counted the house lights shining in a row—from Bowtch’s to Fitch’s, to where the town ended with Iris. The image of her picking her way uprightly beside him in the crowd tonight flashed into his head. What had she been saying? He had thought he smelled lemons in her hair and had leaned closer as she spoke. He slipped his fingers inside his coat pocket where the certificate rested against his heart, and walked the rest of the way into town with his hand loose upon the paper.

  Ahead of him a sound rose like an animal caught in a trap. He frowned and stood still, listening. The sound grew into a groan and the groan swelled, and even from where he stood, outside and twenty feet away, he knew it was Maggie. Christ. He paled, listening. Holy Christ. And he turned and headed as quietly as he could away from that noise and down the dark road into town.

  7.

  AS HER CRY died out of the room, Maggie lay sweating on the bed, growing clearly weaker. Worse, her contractions were slowing. Eleven minutes had passed between that one and the one before.

  “Maggie,” Will whispered. “I need to get you to Nauset.”

  She was shivering now; he couldn’t tell if she had heard him.

  “Maggie.” He reached forward to help her onto her feet.

  Suddenly Maggie grunted. “I need to get up,” she cried. “Will, I need to stand up!” She looked up at him with wild, unseeing eyes, her chest heaving. Jesus, he needed another pair of hands. Her legs began a spastic tremble and she flung herself over to her side, but she was too weak to pull herself up and off the bed.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Maggie.” He sat behind her and thrust his arms under her armpits and heaved both of them forward to standing. They took two steps away from the bed and Will realized that she was too weak to stand by herself, that he was holding her up on her feet and as she leaned forward at the waist, her eyes closed and with one deep grunt the baby shot out from between her legs straight onto the floor. She gave another great groan, and went limp.

  “Shit,” Will cried. Maggie fell to her knees, forcing Will to hold on, lowering her gently to a spot beside the blood-covered baby, squirming on the floor. “Okay,” he gasped. “Okay, Maggie, take it easy.”

  His training took over. Moving quickly, he wiped the baby’s eyes and nose and cleared the airway with a bulb syringe. He pulled the baby close and her little chest heaved its first breath. “It’s a girl, Maggie,” he said, elated. “What do you think of that, Maggie. A little girl?” Quickly, he clamped and cut the cord, a sudden shock of happiness coursing through him as he wiped her whole body and wrapped the tiny new one in a clean blanket. It was all right. Light was beginning to streak the night, in glorious pink bursts. It was done. The baby let out another furious tiny wail and he chuckled down at her, tucking her into the length of his arm and turned to hand her to her mother.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Maggie had fallen asleep where she lay on the floor, her eyes closed, dripping with sweat and panting, gone gray. She was sliding into shock; the smell and the fever had been warnings. He set the baby in the middle of the bed.

  “Maggie,” he said sharply, trying to rouse her.

  As fast as he could manage, Will half lifted, half shoved Maggie back onto her feet and lay her on the bed beside her baby. Pulling back her nightgown, he felt the uterus to see if the afterbirth was ready to deliver, but when he put his hands on it, a clot of blood the size of a melon glutted out from between her legs, stinking like death. “Okay, Maggie,” Will said, terrified. The odor was a dense thick paste in the room. “Okay, now.”

  There was too much blood. There was a tremendous lot of blood, and more still pulsing from between Maggie’s legs. The baby opened her mouth and wailed a thin reedy sound and Will saw that Maggie didn’t seem to hear. She seemed intent on racing backward out of life, the color draining out of her face, her breath coming in gasps. She was drenched with sweat, and the blood would not stop coming. She was going to hemorrhage to death.

  “Maggie?” Will reached for the pulse at Maggie’s neck. It was there, but it was desperately faint.

  “Maggie, stop,” Will heard himself pleading to the panting figure on the bed, just like any desperate man—not a doctor at all—calling down the tunnel along which Maggie seemed to be slipping. “Stop. You’ve got to stay right here.”

  He rifled through his bag for the ergot and drew the syringe, tapping his finger against the glass so the clear liquid rose to the end of the needle. But when he turned around to the silent, unrousable woman on the bed, Maggie had stopped panting. Maggie had simply stopped. He reached again for her pulse but this time there was nothing. Will straightened, the syringe pumping its juice out uselessly on the bedcovers. The time stretched impossibly, his brain trying to understand that there was no way back to the other side of this, just moments ago, when Maggie was alive and the baby in his arms. No way back to just half an hour ago.

  How had he lost her? How did he—? (Did he? Or was it in her? Was it in her?) Nobody could have stopped that bleeding, he knew it with one part of his brain: the uterus had failed and shut the body down. Perhaps if they had been in a hospital, perhaps if there had been more doctors, a nurse. A sob rose up in his throat and Will shook his head savagely; there was no time for tears.

  He could hear Jim Tom’s step on the stairs, climbing toward them. He ought to cover Maggie, he ought to straighten the bed. What did one do? The baby girl punched a fist out of the blanket she was wrapped in, and Will saw forward into the life of this tiny little girl and of the boys downstairs, without their mother. He saw the eldest boy, that singing boy, looking up as his father came heavily into the room. He saw the suppers ahead, the boys and their father at the table. The empty spot nearest the stove. He saw all the way through to a day in summer two years ahead perhaps, the baby girl walking, the boys and her, all of them passing him, the doctor on the street. He saw them stare at him.

  And he would know, despite the charity of the town—the whispers and the nods, the doctor did his best—he would always know: Maggie had died because he had not read the signs. There had been warnings and he had not seen them fast enough to save her.

  Will stood, bloodstained and frozen to a spot on the floor in the middle of the room, understanding the scene with the perfect clarity of an exhausted mind. Maggie had died because he failed. He was a Fitch, after all. Here was his place in the lottery. Here was his war. The hand had dipped into the bowl and fished out this number. Everyone’s life rested on a central fact, Emma insisted. And here was his.

  “Will?” Jim Tom cried from the doorway.

  8.

  GOOD NIGHT, people called to Emma on the street. Good night, and then again Good morning. All through that month, after Maggie’s funeral, after Will went back to work, day after day everyone in town was very kind, very kind; those were the words Emma kept cycling through her head, drawing around her like a muffler. One evening, Emma was bending down to reach the corn starch and the women in the next aisle over in the market hadn’t seen her.

  “I saw the new baby,” Marnie Niles was saying to Florence Cripps. Emma turned around.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Florence answered.

  “Jim Tom seems to be holding up.”

  “I’ll bet Will blames himself,” Mrs. Cripps sighed.

  “Well, even good doctors have their little graveyards, God knows.”

  Without a word, Emma turned and pushed past the two women and through the market door, ignoring their calls to her. She walked the three blocks along the darkening street to find Will. But there was no light on in the infirmary and when she got there, she saw a sign with his tiny print on it, hangi
ng on the door. BACK TOMORROW, it read. Only that. Her eyes filling, she turned and began the walk home.

  On the morning Maggie died, he had come home and she had run to him so glad to see him, she hadn’t thought his ashen face had anything in it that could hurt her. At first she had thought he was just exhausted from the long night at Maggie’s, but then she realized he was clinging to her.

  “What happened?” Emma asked, beginning to feel frightened and leaning away to see his face.

  He shook his head.

  “What? What is it?” She drew back, close to him. He started weeping into her hair, and she clung fast to him, letting his tears slide down through her hair onto her forehead, trying to figure out what had happened.

  “The baby?” she whispered at last. “Did something happen to the baby?”

  He held her tighter.

  “Will?”

  “No,” he cried into her hair. “Maggie.”

  “Maggie?” She didn’t understand what he said.

  “I lost Maggie.”

  She pushed away from him. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?” But her heart was pounding in her chest.

  “Maggie is dead. I lost her.”

  “No you didn’t,” she said quickly. “No you didn’t. Will. It wasn’t you. There must have been something wrong. It wasn’t you.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Will?”

  “I couldn’t stop her bleeding.”

  He didn’t seem to notice that she was holding on to him again. She stroked his face. “It’s all right,” she whispered. He closed his eyes. “It’s all right,” she soothed. He listened to her, and she nearly thought he had gone to sleep, when he roused himself and shook his head as though he’d made a decision.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Her hands paused on either side of his face. “What doesn’t matter?”