by Donna Mabry
Tommy went running to the living room, where Dr. Wilson had left his bag on the floor next to the chair, brought it, and put it in the doctor’s hands.
The doctor looked at me. “Get me all your towels and some water.”
That made me come to myself, and both Tommy and I ran for the kitchen. While Tommy pumped a big bowl full of water from the kitchen pump, I grabbed a stack of towels from the pantry and ran back in the bedroom.
The doctor had pulled all the covers off Helen and pushed her feet back toward her hips. Her skirt was up around her waist, and she wasn’t wearing any step-ins. I stopped dead in my tracks. I couldn’t move. I had never even seen my sister naked and now this was awful.
“Give me the towels,” the doctor said.
I dropped the pile onto the bed next to Helen. Tommy, his face white as a ghost, brought the water. He put it down on the floor and then dragged a small table over so it was at the doctor’s hands.
“Get some more water and heat it up,” the doctor said to Tommy, who looked relieved to have a task and ran back out of the room. Helen moaned loudly, but never opened her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was even conscious.
The blood flow seemed to have let up. Doctor Wilson straightened out Helen’s legs and pulled the covers over her. He pressed his hands against the sides of her stomach and held them there for a long time.
“She’s not having pains yet. Maude, get me a clock or a watch.”
I ran to the living room and found Tommy’s watch from the little pedestal that it rested on. It was the one that his father had given him that he carried only on Sundays. The doctor stood and pulled the chair up next to the bed. He motioned for me to sit. He took my hand and pressed my palm against Helen’s side.
“First babies take a long time coming. I can’t stay here all afternoon and night. I’ll be in my office when you need me. It’s right down the street.” He pushed my hand firmly against Helen’s side. “Feel her stomach?”
I nodded.
“Watch her face, and you’ll be able to tell when a pain is coming, even if she doesn’t wake up. When the pain starts, her stomach will get real hard for a few minutes and then it will let up for a while. At first it will be a long time from one pain to the next, but they’ll get closer together all the time. Do you understand?”
I nodded again.
“Good, now, when those pains start coming about five minutes apart you have Tommy come and get me.”
Again, I just nodded that I understood. The doctor stood and left the room. I could hear him talking to Tommy in the kitchen, then the slamming of the screen door.
All afternoon and into the evening, I sat staring at Helen’s face and watching for it to change. I kept one hand or the other pressed against my sister’s side, changing hands when one got tired, but her stomach never changed. Tommy came in and out of the room every half-hour with a puzzled expression on his face. He would look at me and ask if anything was happening, and I would shake my head in silence. Finally he threw his hands up in the air in surrender. “I have to get another woman to help us. It isn’t right for only a little girl and a man to be in here with this going on. I’m going to get my Aunt Deborah.”
Tommy’s mother had passed away the year before, and Deborah was the only female relative he had left. She lived on the other end of town.
I knew it would take more than a few minutes for him to get back, and I was afraid to be left alone with such a big responsibility, but the thought of having someone else come to take over the job eased my mind. My eyes locked onto Tommy’s. He seemed to be asking for my approval. I forgot I was only seven years old.
“That’ll be good,” I said. “Hurry up.”
He raced out of the house. He hadn’t been gone two minutes before Helen let out a loud moan and stiffened her body. Under my palm, I could feel Helen’s stomach become as hard as rock. I looked at the watch standing on the table. It was seven thirty-five.
“Seven thirty-five.” I said it out loud so I would remember the time. After a few minutes Helen relaxed and her stomach softened. It was happening like the doctor said it would, and it made me feel better. It was going to be all right. Tommy would bring Aunt Deborah, and when the pains got close enough, they would have the doctor there.
Only, it wasn’t a half-hour before the next pain came. I stared at the watch as Helen’s stomach hardened under my hand. It was only five minutes. I wanted to call out for help, but there wasn’t anyone else within the reach of my voice. I was afraid to leave Helen alone to go run for the doctor, and afraid not to run for the doctor.
After a few minutes the pain let up. I bolted from my chair and ran out to the front porch, down the steps and over to the Thompson’s house next door. I pounded on the door with the side of my fist as hard as I could. One of the older boys opened the door and looked at me in surprise.
I shouted, “The baby’s coming! I need Doctor Wilson at Tommy’s right now, please go get him.” Then I turned on my heel and ran back to Helen’s bedside. Helen was relaxed again and looked like she was sleeping. I sat back down on the chair and pressed my hand against Helen’s now-familiar stomach. In a few minutes another pain came, only this time Helen’s eyes popped open for the first time since that afternoon, and she screamed loudly. She turned her head and saw me. She gave me an accusing look, as if I was what was hurting her. I caught Helen’s hand in both of mine and squeezed it a little. “It’s going to be all right, the baby’s coming. Tommy went to get his Aunt Deborah and the doctor is on his way.”
Helen pinched her eyes shut, threw back her head and screamed again. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. Helen pulled her knees up, pressed her chin down, and gasped for air.
“Oh, no, oh, no, here it comes now,” Helen hissed from between her clenched teeth.
I pulled down the covers and looked. The baby’s head was sticking out of her. It was covered in blood and ooze. My stomach churned. I held onto Helen’s hand. It was all I could think of, I didn’t have the slightest idea what I should do. Then I heard the screen door slam again and the doctor came in the room carrying his bag.
I looked up at him, and I know I must have looked scared to death. “It’s coming out already,” I said.
Doctor Wilson pushed me aside. He laid his bag on the bed next to Helen and flipped the top of it open. He spread out one of the towels I’d brought in earlier over the table next to the bed and began pulling strange looking tools out of the bag, lining them up on the towel.
“Get one of those other towels and hold it open,” the doctor said to me. I shook out a towel and held it out to the doctor with one hand.
“No, I’m going to put the baby into it, drape it over your arms so you can take the baby and wrap it up.”
I did what he said with the towel and stood there holding out my hands. I watched, scared to death, as the baby’s shoulders and arms came out. It was horrible and terrifying and like I was in some sort of spell. I couldn’t turn away. The doctor held onto the baby’s sides and pulled gently until the rest of its body came sliding out. It had a long, rope-like thing on its stomach, with the other end still fastened inside Helen. The baby looked very small to me, but I had no idea what it was supposed to look like. I saw the private parts and realized it was a boy. I had never seen a human boy’s parts before. The only babies I’d ever seen were already dressed, and much larger, but they were at least a few weeks old and born after nine months and not just seven.
I waited for a cry, but it didn’t come. The doctor held the baby upside down and shook it a little. There was still no cry. He slapped it smartly a few times on the bottom, then patted it firmly on the back. Nothing. He put it on the towel I was holding, wrapped it and took it back from me. Cradling it in his arms, he blew into its mouth several times. He held it up and pressed his ear against its chest.
Then he sighed and laid it down on the bed. He tied some string on the cord and then cut the baby loose from Helen. He folded the towel up over the baby’s
body and then handed it to me. I reached out and took it and cradled it in my arms the way I had been doing with my dolls only a few days before. The doctor had just turned his attention back to Helen when Tommy and Aunt Deborah came into the room. She saw the wrapped up bundle in my arms and must have understood what had happened.
Aunt Deborah took my arm and pushed me toward the door. She said, “Tommy, take this girl out of here. The doctor and I will finish this up.”
Tommy obediently put his hand on my shoulder and steered me out of the room. We walked into the kitchen. I stood there with the tiny bundle in the crook of my arm.
Tommy looked at me. “Did it cry a lot?”
“He didn’t cry at all,” I said.
Then what I was saying struck him. He sat on a chair and reached out his hands. I handed the baby to him and he laid it on the table. He pulled back the towel and stared at it.
He reached out and touched his fingertip to the little face. Tears ran down Tommy’s cheek. “Look what we had, Maude. We had a little boy. Helen said if it was a boy, she would let me call him Henry Mathias, after my granddad.”
Then he stood, handed the baby back to me, and went out the kitchen door to the back yard. I could hear him crying something awful. After a moment I wrapped the baby back up and held him to my chest. I took him to the rocker in the corner of the kitchen and sat and rocked slowly. I pulled back the towel and looked into his perfect little face from time to time, expecting to see him move, expecting him to make a lie out of what I knew was true.
I don’t know how long it was before the doctor came to the kitchen.
“Where’s Tommy?” he asked.
I kept on rocking and nodded my head toward the back door. The doctor understood. He went out to the yard and, through the open door, I could hear him talking to Tommy.
“Helen’s going to be all right. She can have as many children as she wants, but she lost a lot of blood and she’s going to have to rest for a long time. I don’t want her out of the bed for at least two weeks and even then, she’ll be weak for a while. She’ll need someone to stay with her and take care of her while you’re at work.”
Tommy’s voice sounded shrill and scared as he answered the doctor. “My Aunt Deborah has kids still at home. She can’t stay here all day.”
“Maude can do it. She’ll be here anyway, and she’s very grown-up for her age.”
“Maude? Here?”
“Of course, Helen’s the only family she has left. Where else would she go?”
“I don’t know. I never thought of that.”
“I know. It’s been a horrible day. I’ll talk to the undertaker and the preacher about the funerals. You try to get some rest now. Tomorrow won’t be much better than today.”
I got up from the rocker and took my little bundle to the room that had been all made up for the baby. Tommy had painted it a soft yellow, with white woodwork, and there was a chest of drawers and a cradle. I put the baby in the cradle and put a blanket up to his little chin. I stroked his head, still matted with the stuff of birthing.
The extra blankets off the bureau made a pallet on the floor for me. I took off my shoes and socks, lay down, and pulled a blanket up over me, and then cried for the first time, but it wasn’t a sorrowful crying. I was so awful angry that the Lord had let this happen, angry right down to the marrow of my bones. It made me even more afraid to feel that way. I had been taught, and I believed, that it was a sin to be angry with God. I was afraid that God would punish me for the way I felt. The baby Helen had been so excited about was dead, my mother was dead, and my daddy was dead. How could God love us and do this to us?
The truth of what the doctor said scared me more than everything that happened. There was no one to take care of me now but Helen, no other family. For my own sake, I had to take care of her. I had to see to it that nothing bad happened to her.
After a while, the house was finally dark and quiet, and sometime after, my tears stopped coming and the anger oozed out of me, I got up and took the baby from its cradle. I lay back on my pallet on the floor and held the baby in my arms. I didn’t sleep until the sun had started to lighten the room and the awful night had passed.
Chapter 2
I woke in the morning to the sound of voices in the next room. I didn’t move, but listened for a while, trying to make out what was being said. The door to the bedroom opened and the preacher’s wife, Sister Clark, came in carrying some clothes over her arm. She and Brother Clark served at the Holiness Church my family went to. She was a nice, mostly happy-looking young woman, not much older than Helen, with light brown hair, green eyes and a gentle touch. She laid the clothes over the side of the cradle, knelt down by my pallet, and took me by the hand. “Maude, you need to get up now. We have to get ready for the funerals.”
I didn’t move, only looked up at her. Sister Clark reached over and took the baby out of my arms. “I have to take him to the undertaker’s, Maude. He has to get him ready. Now you get washed up. I set out some clothes for you to put on. They came from your friend Susan. She wanted to share what she has with you. Everything in your house got burnt up.”
I got to my feet. “Everything?”
Sister Clark nodded, her face full of sympathy. “The whole house burned to the ground.”
I thought about my pretty blue dress that Momma made me for my birthday. She’d embroidered little butterflies around the hem and the edges of the sleeves. I’d only worn it once. It was gone now, and so was my doll with the china head. I didn’t play with it anymore, but all the same, it hurt to know that I would never see it again.
Sister Clark held the baby as if it were still alive, and I liked her for that. She sighed. “Under the circumstances we’re not going to have a wake. There’ll be a service at the church at ten o’clock.”
I picked up the dress she brought and held it up in front of me. It looked a little big, but I didn’t complain. She patted me on the head. “That’s a good girl. I’ll stay here with Helen until after the funeral. She’s not in any shape to go to the service. She’s going to need you to take care of her for a while. When you get dressed I’ll show you what to do for her.”
I dropped my head and nodded. I promised myself that I would do everything I could to take care of my sister, partly because I loved her so, and partly because, if I lost Helen, there would be no one to take care of me, no one at all.
Sister Clark left with the baby. I went into the kitchen, pumped a basin of water and took it to the washroom. I took off my clothes from the day before and washed myself, then put on Susan’s clothes that Sister Clark brought me. When I finished dressing, I went out and sat in the parlor. I watched Tommy and Sister Clark going back and forth to Helen’s bedroom. I got up only one time. That was when Tommy left the bedroom door open. I walked over to the door as quietly as I could and peeked in. Sister Clark sat by the bed reading the Bible out loud. Helen lay with her eyes closed as if she were asleep. Her chest rose and fell to a regular beat, and there was a bit of color in her cheeks. That made me feel better, and I went back to my chair and sat there until Tommy walked in and told me it was time to go. He had dark rings under his eyes and a haunted look on his face.
As we went out the door, I took his hand in mine. “She’s going to be all right, Tommy.”
He looked down at me with a weak smile. “If you say so,” he said.
The Holiness Church was different for me that day. All my life I’d looked forward to the services. They sang bright and lively tunes, except on the Sunday mornings when they had the Lord’s Supper and sang “Break Thou the Bread of Life.” They clapped their hands in joy. People would stand and testify about how good God was to them, and how Jesus had saved them and changed their lives.
Sometimes, someone would go down front after the sermon and repent of some sort of sin. I always wondered what it was they’d done that was so bad, but once, when I asked her, Mom shushed me and told me it was nobody’s business but God’s and the sinner’s. That
seemed fitting to me.
That day, no one was happy, no one sang brightly, and no one clapped their hands. The soft sound of women crying lasted throughout the service. Brother Clark did his best to comfort us. He was a man who made you trust him. Blond hair, blue eyes, and a handsome face, he was about thirty. His big build didn’t come from studying the Bible, which I know he did every day, but from doing the chores on his parent’s farm that he still tended for them.
That day, he didn’t pace back and forth in the pulpit and wave his arms the way he usually did, but stood in one spot and talked about how Brother and Sister Clayborn had both accepted the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior years ago and had lived a life that testified to the truth of it. He said that he was sure that they’d attained the state of grace that every member of the church should work toward, to be able to live life in purity, no longer sinning. He said that now, this very day, they were sitting at the right hand of God. He told us how the baby was there as well, since he’d died before he could sin.
I’d done so much crying the night before that I didn’t cry at the church that day. I found the comfort I needed in the preacher’s words because I believed them to be true.
After Brother Clark finished, we sang another song and the three pine boxes were lifted onto the shoulders of the men of the church. It took six of them to carry the largest, which held my daddy. Four of them carried mom, and one man carried the little box with the baby, walking down the aisle with it held in two hands in front of him. A farm wagon was waiting outside. We all walked together behind it to the little cemetery on the outskirts of town, singing hymns all the way.
The boxes were lowered into the three holes that had already been dug. Brother Clark said a few more words about how we are formed out of the dust and would return to the dust and then said another prayer for the comfort of us left behind. One by one the congregation filed past the holes, each of them picking up a handful of dirt and throwing it on top of the boxes. Tommy and I went last, but I didn’t pick up a handful of dirt to throw. I couldn’t do it. Momma hated dirt. I hung my head, kept my eyes on Tommy’s feet, and walked past the holes, not looking down into them.