But if the child should come before the doctor arrived—
She paced across the room again, then back toward the door, wringing her hands before her. She was not accustomed to feeling useless, but there was nothing she could do now other than be with Elise—oh, Lord, where was her husband, Dorrie wondered as she moved back toward the bed, bending again to sponge Elise’s face off as another pain came and went. Elise took a deep breath and licked her dry lips once it was over. “He’ll be here soon; I know he will,” she said, reaching to take Dorrie’s hand.
“Sure he will, honey,” Dorrie said, making herself smile at the girl as she sat down at the edge of the bed. “An’, don’t you worry. Ain’t nothin’ t’ havin’ a baby. I was up cookin’ supper only a hour or two after I had each one ’a mine.”
Elise ran her tongue over her lips again, moistening them. “You’re a terrible liar, Dorrie,” she said, smiling for a moment.
“Ain’t I, though,” Dorrie said, and reached up to pat the girl’s cheek. “But, don’t you worry none. That man ’a yours’ll be here any minute with that doctor, an’ he’ll make sure you an’ that baby both have a easy time ’a it.”
“I know he will,” Elise said, moving slightly on the bed and releasing Dorrie’s hand, and Dorrie knew that another pain was beginning to build for the girl. Dorrie watched her face until she could take no more of it, then got up from the bed and moved again toward the window to stand staring out at the rain: I will cause it to rain upon the earth, she found herself quoting silently, forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. She looked back to her friend—Janson, for God’s sake, please hurry, she thought, please hurry.
She paced away from the window toward the bed, to the chifforobe across the room, and then back to the window, until she felt she would wear a path in the floor.
The door banged open and Janson came in, wet, muddy to the knees—and alone. He started toward the bed, his face a study in fear, but Dorrie intercepted him half-way across the floor. “Where’s th’ doctor?” she demanded.
“He wouldn’t come. Said he had a patient—” He looked past her, toward the bed and his wife.
“She’s havin’ that baby soon. You’ve got t’ get somebody t’ help her.”
“Damn it—don’t you think I know that!” he yelled into her face, then pushed past her and toward the bed, stopping to kneel beside it and take his wife’s hand in his own. “I couldn’t get th’ doctor t’ come, Elise. I tried—”
“I know you did.” Her voice was quiet, almost too soft to understand.
“I’ve got t’ go get Gran’ma. I got Mr. Brown’s wagon an’ team from up town; I tried t’ get th’ grocery delivery truck, but it was in a ditch at the edge of town because of th’ rain—”
“Your gran’ma’s too far off,” Dorrie broke in, and Janson looked up at her. “That baby ain’t gonna wait that long.”
She could see his hand tighten over his wife’s, and his worried eyes returned to Elise.
“Granny Alice from over in colored town delivered all ’a mine, an’ she’s closer. Mrs. Smith at th’ edge ’a town is even closer than that. You got t’ go get her, or, if she ain’t there, Granny Alice—”
“I will, just tell me where—” He started to rise to his feet, but Elise stopped him.
“No.” She held tightly to his wet sleeve, a look of near desperation in her eyes. He knelt again at her side, taking both her hands in his.
“Elise—I cain’t get th’ doctor t’ come; I got t’—”
“No, no, not that—don’t leave me; I don’t want you to leave me. I want you here when—” The last word was gasped out between clenched teeth and Dorrie saw her face wrench with pain again.
“Elise—” Janson’s voice sounded frightened. He held tightly to her hands even as she twisted his own, his eyes never leaving her pain-closed ones.
When it was over she licked her lips and looked up at him, the fear in her eyes almost more than Dorrie could bear. “You’ve got to be here. We’ll be okay if you’re here—”
“Elise, I cain’t. I got t’ get somebody t’ help—”
“No, I want you here—”
“I’ll go,” Dorrie stated, knowing she could take no more of this helplessness, no more of the sounds of pain, no more of this hot, sticky room. “I can drive a team an’ wagon just as good as you, an’ I know right where t’ go—”
“But, if—” Janson looked from her to Elise, and then back again, unable to put his fear into words. “What if—if the baby—”
“It won’t get here before I can get back. You just stay with her—” She started for the door, looking back to the man’s worried face for a moment before going out into the rain—he looked so young himself, so utterly lost and helpless, kneeling at the side of the bed, his wife’s hands held tightly in his own.
She hurried as fast as her size would allow to the wagon, getting up onto the driver’s seat as the horses moved skittishly to her presence. She closed her mind to the rain that soaked immediately through her clothes, making them cling warmly to her skin as she whipped the horses hard. They whinnied in protest and the wagon jerked forward, almost unseating her. Within seconds her dark hair was loose from its bun, hanging wet and heavy down her back as she whipped the horses even harder, hearing the protesting honks and curses of the driver of a car that she almost ran from the road and into a muddy yard alongside a village street. She knew that she had to get Mrs. Smith or old Granny Alice as quickly as possible, for she had lied again. Elise’s baby was coming very soon.
Janson had never felt so useless, or so frightened, seeing pain that he could not stop or control, wanting to help Elise, but unable to think of anything he could do that might lessen what she was going through. He knelt beside the bed, wet and muddy still, and he prayed—please, God, don’t let the baby come without somebody to help. Please, God—
She squeezed and twisted his hands when the pains came, digging her nails into his flesh until both hands throbbed. “I’m so sorry—” was all he could think to say over and over when each was finished. Though he did not know what it was he was sorry for.
He silently cursed the doctor for refusing to come, cursed Dorrie and the midwife for taking so long, and Mrs. Breedlove when she would not come to help—he should have made the doctor come, he kept telling himself.
He watched her face as another pain began to build, seeing her eyes close and her face set a moment before she wrenched at his hands again—please, God, help me, he prayed. Please, God—
It was over. After the hurt and the fear, after the cries of pain, and the scream of a new life—it was over. Janson sat beside the bed in the old rocker, moving only enough to keep the chair in motion slowly back and forth. He was exhausted, his mind dulled from lack of sleep and food throughout much of this day—but it was over.
He rocked slowly, his mind wandering over all that he had seen and learned today—he was a father now, the baby newly born and sticky still and screaming when Dorrie had arrived with the old midwife. Janson had been driven from the house immediately, told to go wait on the porch out of the way where he belonged until they called for him, but that did not seem to matter—he had seen his own son being born.
He rocked slowly, the warm baby wrapped in a faded hand-me-down blanket in his arms. The baby was quiet now, after his loud screams of protest at his entry into the world. He slept peacefully in Janson’s arms, his little hands curled into fists against his chest, and Janson watched him, just as he watched Elise where she slept in their bed. Dorrie would be back soon, bringing plates of food for him and Elise from the supper she was preparing for her own family. Janson had not eaten all day, but that bothered him little. He just wanted to sit and rock his son, sit and watch his wife sleep.
Elise smiled briefly as she slept, her face peaceful now
after the nightmare she had lived through. He wondered what she dreamed, and if she dreamed, after the treatment she had suffered under his incompetent midwifery—she had seemed to forget it all as soon as the baby was born. She was crying and laughing at the same time as she counted the little fingers and toes, even as Dorrie and the midwife came in and drove Janson from the room—by the time they allowed him back inside, the baby was cleaned up and the bed changed. Elise was in a fresh cotton nightgown and the baby was in her arms. “He looks so much like you,” she kept telling him. “Don’t you think he looks just like you?”
She fell asleep holding the baby, and Janson took him gently from her arms so as not to wake her, then sat down in the rocker to watch her sleep, too exhausted to do anything but sit and watch the peaceful breathing of his wife and son. They had agreed months before to name the baby Henry Alfred if it were a boy, after Janson’s father and Elise’s brother, and Janson could not help but to think that his father would have been pleased when he heard Elise first use the name. “Hi, Henry—do you like your name?” she had said very softly, in a tone Janson had never heard her use before.
Before today he had never even held a baby in his arms, but it seemed such an easy thing to do now—he was a father, and Elise was a mother. He looked at the little face, seeing both of them there, the shape of Elise’s nose and mouth, his own dark hair and coloring. Elise’s child—he should have been born to the finest things in life, to the experienced care of a doctor, born in a soft feather bed, and wrapped in the finest linen blankets. Instead, her child had been conceived on the straw mattress of a narrow, sagging rope bed, and born into inept hands that knew nothing but hard work. He had been wrapped in a faded, hand-me-down blanket, never to know the comforts and luxuries of life to which Elise Whitley’s child should have been born. He would never have the fine education, the nice clothes, and the gentle way of life that could have been his birthright. There was so little Janson could give him compared to all he should have known, so little, except for one thing.
At first he did not know he was speaking aloud, but he was not surprised at the sound of his own voice in the quiet room, a voice speaking of land rich and red, of rolling hills, green fields, and tall cotton, of land so fertile that it only needed a man’s hard work to spring to life. He spoke, and he dreamed, with dreams that were as much a part of who he was as life or breath were, dreams that had known their birth in some time long past before Janson had ever known life, in a tenanted field in Ireland, or along the Trail the Cherokee had marched to the West, and that had come to him along with the blood in his veins. He spoke, and he dreamed, sitting in half a rented house in a mill village, while his soul walked free on land that he knew would be his again one day.
When Martha Whitley received the letter from her daughter, the letter announcing the birth of Martha’s first grandchild, she cried for half an hour. Elise was her only daughter, and Elise was a mother now. Elise was a mother.
She went to tell William as soon as her tears were dried, standing just inside the doorway of the library in her home, speaking to William where he sat looking over a ledger at the cluttered rolltop desk against the far wall. “We have a grandson, William.”
A muscle worked in William’s cheek, but he did not speak or even look up to acknowledge her presence in the room, keeping his head bowed over the column of figures in the book before him.
“Elise had a little boy two weeks ago.” When he still did not respond, she took a few steps farther into the room. “William, we have a—”
“We have no grandson,” he snapped, though he never brought his eyes to her, “and we have no daughter—she made her choice; don’t bother me now with news about her when she’s nothing to us anymore.”
“She’s my daughter, and she’s yours, too.”
He sat for a long moment, not moving. “She’s nothing to me,” he said at last, not looking up.
“I don’t believe you mean that.” She moved farther into the room, going to stand just behind a large, overstuffed chair near the desk, bracing her hands against its tall back for support. She always seemed to need support these days, her legs weak and easily tired from under her, her breath hard to catch. She looked at William’s bowed head—he could not feel that way about his own child; he could not. He had to care about his daughter and his only grandchild, no matter what it was he said. “Elise said the baby’s perfect—she sounded so happy in her letter, William.” He seemed to be listening—he had to be. She leaned more fully against the chair back, wondering why her heart seemed to be beating so rapidly within her. “She says he has Janson’s black hair, but that he’s already got a Whitley temper—they gave him Alfred’s name as his middle name, William, and his given name is Henry, after Janson’s fath—”
“Damn it, woman!” He rose to his feet quickly, upsetting his chair. “Have you gone deaf, or just stupid in your old age—I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it—not about her, or her brat, or that half-breed son-of-a-bitch she ran off with. Do you think I want to know she was carrying his brat while she was still living under my roof? Do you think I want to know he was getting at her for months before I ever knew about them—I can count, woman. All you’ve done is tell me she was a cheap little whore in addition to being stupid and ungrateful. We don’t have a daughter anymore, and we sure as hell don’t have a grandson.”
She stared at him, leaning more heavily against the chair for support. “You’re a fool, William.” She felt suddenly too tired to argue, too tired for anything—how could she have been so wrong, for so many years. She had thought she had known him—even after all she had learned because Elise had fallen in love with Janson Sanders, she had still thought she had known him. She had believed that buried somewhere within him was something of the man she had married all those years before. But there seemed to be nothing left of that man now. He was as dead to her as was her own beautiful Alfred, her son dead now more than this past year. “That baby is absolutely innocent; he hasn’t done anything to harm anyone—how can you hate your own grandchild?”
“That Indian’s brat is none of me!”
“You’d deny your own flesh and blood?” Why was the room suddenly so close, her breath impossible to come, her heart beating rapidly. “You’d deny—deny your own—”
The room went dark, her senses spinning about her. She dug her fingers into the chair back, but could not feel her fingers, could not feel anything—
When she awoke, she was lying on the sofa in the library. Disoriented for a moment, her eyes searched for Elise in the room—she had been talking to Elise; had been—
Then she remembered. Elise was not here. She was living far away, in Alabama, with her husband. And her new son.
Martha brought her eyes to William where he knelt beside the sofa. He patted her hand, a worried expression on his face.
“Martha—are you all right?—Martha—” His eyes held more gentleness than she had seen in years when she looked at him.
“Yes?” She wondered at the sound of her own voice. It sounded so small, so weak there in the room.
“What happened—are you all right?”
“I—I fainted—”
“I’m going to call the doctor,” he said, rising to his feet and releasing her hand.
Martha started to sit up, to protest that she did not need a doctor, that she was fine, but found that she could not and sank back against the sofa as the room began to darken about her again. For a moment she could not remember where her daughter was, then it came back to her—she wanted to see Elise. She wanted to see her grandchild, just once. She wanted to—
“She’s going to die, William,” Matthew Lester said for the second time, as if William had not heard him the first.
“She can’t—” William spoke quietly, standing in the front parlor of his home with the doctor while Martha slept upstairs in their bed under the watchful eyes of Mattie Ruth
Coates. Martha couldn’t die—she was still a young woman, still very much the same girl he had married what seemed to him now so few years before. He could more easily believe that he would die than that she might.
“She is—there’s nothing I can do to help her, William. I wish there were—”
“But she—” He could find no words. He could not even remember what he had been about to say.
Matt lay a gentle hand on his arm. “She knows, William. I didn’t tell her, but she knows.”
William turned his eyes back to Matt, his friend for so many years, the doctor who had delivered all four of his children, his own first cousin—he was wrong. He had to be wrong.
“She wants to see you, but she wanted me to give you this first.”
There was a letter in William’s hands, and he wondered how it had gotten there, a letter folded into an envelope and addressed in Martha’s hand: Mrs. Janson Sanders, it said, with a tremble in the script that should not have been there. Mrs. Janson Sanders, with an address in Alabama.
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