Coop

by Michael Perry

  My friends Andy and Wendy helped me put together a video essay about Ricky and the culverts for Wisconsin Public Television. Then a magazine asked me to write about my favorite place in the world. The question is unanswerable (there is a mountain in Carbon County, Wyoming, that pulls at me like the moon; there is a pine tree near here that fits the curve of my back; once I stood in a ruined Welsh castle and felt a thousand years old), but I chose the culverts for that, too. Ricky’s daughter saw the television piece and wrote me a letter. When I started the magazine essay, I wanted to reread the letter, so I dug through the piles on my desk until I found it. When I pulled the folded paper sheets from the envelope, a pair of photographs fell out. They were of Ricky—when I opened the letter the first time they had stuck inside and I hadn’t seen them. In rough notes toward the essay I had mentioned Ricky’s dark eyes but wondered if I was recalling them accurately, as memories have a way of conforming to our stories the more we tell them. But there in those photos—one of Ricky as a young man and one of him older, from the years I didn’t know him—were the very eyes memory conjured. I must restrain my speculation; there was so much more to this man than my few stories predicated on our childhood days, the odd newspaper clipping, and a funeral. But looking at those eyes now, I think Ricky knew early on he wasn’t suited for this world. I think he carried that army shovel figuring if worse came to worst he could at the very least dig in. Thing is, we never did finish any of our hideouts. I think Ricky died still digging.

  You learn not to pretty these things up. You learn to take them as they are. I go to the culverts one day and just sit quiet. Two steel tubes and a halfhearted creek: I guess I could do better for a favorite place. But grandeur is for postcard trips. For the long haul, I want the click and trickle of flat water moving, the shelter of the grass, a road close to home. The chance to slip from sight at the sound of motors. I throw a pebble for Ricky, but I’m not looking for angels in the tag alders. I just watch the creek flow from beneath me and out of sight around the bend. When I was a kid I yearned to follow that water—on a raft, in a canoe, maybe simply barefoot with a stick. Now I just dangle my boots and let the cold spring air make my nose run, and I watch Beaver Creek slide smooth and quiet until it reoccurs to me that the world is constantly trying to bring everything level.

  I have gone in to Eau Claire to hang out with some of my firefighter pals (including my friend Mills) at Station #5 when I get the call from Anneliese. “I’m having contractions,” she says. “I’m not sure this is it, but they seem to be getting stronger.”

  “Are you saying I should come home?” I ask. Specific instructions work best.

  “Yes.”

  The crew is just making supper, so they send me on my way with a tin of homemade lasagna. Someone wrote “Good Luck!” on the container. I thought that was nice. Driving home through the lowering light, I don’t know what to think. In fact I am numb to the idea of what’s happening. When I get home, I stow the car in the garage and walk in to find Anneliese. She’s on the couch. I hug her, ask her how she’s feeling. The contractions are steady, she says. Cripes, I think, here we go. I get a watch and time a few. Then I call my mom. And then Leah, the midwife.

  Leah arrives around 8:00 p.m. Her student and assistant arrive shortly after. When Mom and Anneliese’s friend Jaci join us, I look around at all the women and I’m grateful, but I’m also wishing my buddy Mills was available. We have a twenty-year history now, having met when he was a medical first responder and I was a freshly minted nurse and EMT. These days he is a full-time firefighter and paramedic and I am a medical first responder. Now that I am back down in this area, we occasionally respond to the same emergency calls again. Only now, when we meet on scene, he is the one in charge. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced responsibility role reversal—truth is, I enjoy it. In his career, Mills has delivered six babies, so a while back when I realized the home delivery team was trending all-female I asked Mills if he would be my doula. “Y’wha-wha?” he said. Only partially tongue in cheek, I explained that a doula provides physical and emotional support through the birth process. He beamed and accepted. Unfortunately, tonight he’s pulling a twenty-four-hour shift back at Station #5 and won’t be off until tomorrow morning.

  We move upstairs to the bedroom so Leah can examine Anneliese. For the first time I notice Anneliese is trembling. I’ve never seen her so vulnerable. I hold her hand and she squeezes back and it hits me how powerful this is going to be, and then Leah says, “You’re only two centimeters.” Quite a ways to go yet, then. Anticipating the long night ahead, Leah and her helpers go into a back bedroom to sleep. Leah recommends that Anneliese try to do the same, but Anneliese is too nerved up, so we go back downstairs. I stoke the woodstove, and we time some more contractions. Then Jaci takes some goofy pictures, including one of me staring at Anneliese’s bare belly with a look of bewilderment. I really don’t have to dig too deep for motivation.

  Many years ago when we burned the old feed mill in New Auburn, I was allowed to rescue the blackboard where the managers used to update feed prices. It’s made of enameled steel and reads CO-OP FEED—ANIMAL HEALTH across the top. It hung in my New Auburn kitchen for years. When we moved into the Fall Creek farmhouse, I hung it from a nail in the kitchen here. Jaci has been using the blackboard to log contractions. Beneath the times you can still make out faint renderings of the price of cracked corn and sunflower seeds. It’s nice, sitting there on our old couch with a good fire going in the stove and my mother off to the side knitting, her aluminum needles clicking softly in the yarn as Jaci keeps time.

  And then it all stops. The contractions fade, then cease. Hoping for a kick-start, Anneliese and I go for a walk. Outside, the wind is wintry cold, and oak leaves skitter across the driveway. The warm spate is over, and it feels more like autumn than spring. We walk out the drive and down to the mailbox, then back up the drive and out the ridge, where we stand quiet for a while. The moon glows behind a thin veil of clouds, shedding just enough glow so that we may see the general shape of the land. I hold Anneliese close, her cheek cool against mine. I can feel her trembling still, but I don’t feel very sheltering or strong. Sometimes I don’t make much of a grown-up. I’m a little boy who prefers to shape his stories just so.

  It is nearly midnight when we head back inside. Leah rises to check Anneliese again. Still two centimeters, and the contractions haven’t returned. “Get some sleep,” says Leah. “Rest, in case things start again.” She goes back upstairs to sleep some more herself. Anneliese and I climb the stairs. Lying in bed in the dark, I remember the Friday night in high school when we got all revved up for kickoff and then the ball blew off the tee. I admit the analogy has limitations and may not translate across the gender divide. In any case, I have the rare good sense to keep it to myself. I can feel the disappointment and frustration in the way Anneliese lays beside me. Eventually we sleep.

  In the morning everyone is gone.

  On the chalkboard Jaci has erased the contraction times and written:

  THURSDAY EVENING

  SHOW

  POSTPONED

  Due to

  Stage Fright

  There we were with that stretch of glorious and fraudulent weather, and now we are back to stinging ears and snow on the ground and foolish jump-start robins shivering in the maple trees. Many of the early-breaking buds are frost-burned black. One of the maples flanking the path to my office has a broken limb, and an icicle of sap hangs from the fractured wood. The run of warm weather brought an abrupt end to the sap run, and we pulled the taps. Once the trees bud out, the clear sap turns faint red and bitter—professional sugarers say the sap has “gone buddy.” Amy and Anneliese went to observe the boil-down with Jan and Gale, and now we have a gallon and a half of maple syrup in the pantry as well as a few maple sugar candies in the freezer—technically the first food from our new patch of land.

  So it’s cold again, but the earth is turning. Nighttimes it’s been dropping to th
e teens, and the muddy spot on the office footpath is coated with ice, but it fractures easily when I step on it, and mud oozes up through the cracks. Down on the woodpile sits a mason jar. The day we stacked wood Amy noticed me sweating, and, unbidden, filled the jar with water and brought it to me. I drank it down to an inch from the bottom and set it atop the stack, where it sat at such an angle that now the base is filled by a lopsided puck of ice. I see the glass there on the split oak and turn immediately maudlin, blind-sided by the idea that the jar and the water are representative of how the most fluid, workaday moments become fixed in sweet irretrievable history in the very instant of their occurring.

  I have promised Anneliese that when the baby comes I will spend an entire week with her and the new child, returning no phone calls, answering no e-mails, working toward no deadlines. In the meantime, I am churning away as usual, constantly rearranging the days into an endless chain of last-minutes. I see that glass as an emblem of placidity surrounded by the snarl of my subsequent overbooked peregrinations and hustle. Long ago, I think, my daughter drew water and brought it to me. A grand thing in its simplicity. I lift the jar, then replace it, suddenly convinced that it covers a hole where all the time drains away.

  Later in the day Mister Big Shot appears in the yard. At his side, a girl bird. He struts beside her as if a tail ain’t nothin’ but a drag. I think of me beside my wife, and then I think, even us bald guys get lucky sometimes.

  Just as when Anneliese had her spate of Braxton-Hicks contractions nearly three months ago, I kept obsessively checking the baby’s heartbeat after the night she thought she was giving birth. And every now and then for the next several days I keep asking Anneliese if the baby is still kicking as before. She assures me it is. After all the ramp-up with no payoff, we’ve been left a bit adrift. The bright blue birthing tub stands at the top of the stairs, the water perfectly still. We walk around it.

  A few days after the fact, I talk to Albert Frost, an old-timer from up by the home farm. Albert is in his nineties, his wife dead some ten years now, but still lives on his farm within sight of the culverts where Ricky and I used to play. Albert was always skinny as a crow’s leg (my brothers call him “Fat Albert” and grin) and nowadays he uses a cane, but he has stayed on the home place and stubbornly fends for himself. I tell him we are waiting on a baby. Tell him about the false start. He chuckles. “When my first boy was born, there was a storm coming,” he says. “They claim a big storm will bring it on.

  “They had seven babies at the hospital that day. My kid was born at eight in the morning. By noon I still hadn’t seen him. So I asked the nurse, and she held him up behind the glass.

  “Homeliest little fart you’ve ever seen. I was pretty disappointed. But I thought, ‘Well, he’s healthy. I better not complain.’

  “Then I heard the nurse saying, ‘What’s your name?’ I told her, and she said, ‘This one isn’t yours,’ and she held up another one.” He laughs. Like it was yesterday.

  “Yeah, but Albert,” I say, “did that one look any better?”

  He’s still chuckling. “Well, I thought so,” he says, “but I suppose I was prejudiced.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Across the valley, the bare-bone tree line is thickening. The maple leaves are fit to bust but holding fast, this year’s greenery still clasped in a tight fetal furl. The bud scales are dark red, infusing the canopy with a rubrous blush, shrouding the hills all smoky maroon. It is mid-afternoon, sunny, and still. I hear sparrows.

  There is a baby on my lap.

  Ten days have passed since the false alarm. It has been tough on Anneliese, going right to the precipice only to have her body shut down and scuttle the whole production. The sleeplessness returned tenfold, and with it the doubt, the brittle emotions, and the desperate weariness. She is occupied above all with the desire to get the baby born.

  The morning after Easter I am at my desk above the garage when I see her pass by the window. She comes through the door and sits wide-legged and heavy in the saggy green chair. “I think maybe it’s happening,” she says. Apparently she had been up at 2:00 a.m., timing contractions while lying on the floor beside our bed. At some point they faded and she climbed back in bed and went to sleep. Ever helpful, I slept through the whole thing. Now the contractions have returned. “They’re strong enough that I have to stop and wait them out,” said Anneliese. We chat a while. A handful of contractions come and go. Then, as Anneliese stands to leave, a big one hits. She bends over, cradling her belly with one arm. She grimaces and blows through pursed lips. When the contraction passes, she returns to the house, and I phone Leah the midwife. We talk it around a while, me not wanting to pull the alarm early again, but Leah says it sounds like she should head our way, especially since she has a ways to drive. When I get to the house I find Anneliese on the sofa, gripped by another contraction. Her mother, Donna—who has been visiting more or less on standby—is at her side.

  Shortly, Jaci arrives. She and Donna take Anneliese for a walk along the ridge. When the three of them return, the contractions are coming apace and Anneliese has to stop whatever she is doing to breathe through them. She says it helps if I rub her back, and while I am doing this, I notice Amy hovering around the edge of everything. She is beginning to look apprehensive. Since the time we began to plan for a home birth, Anneliese and I have talked with Amy several times about whether or not she would like to be present for the delivery. I’ve been torn about it from the beginning. I’m all for it if she wishes, but I also can’t see any reason she should be compelled to stay if she is disturbed at the sight of her mother in distress. All along she has been saying yes, but right now her eyes are a little too wide. We talk it over again now, and Amy says she wants to come upstairs with us when it is time, but I also discuss it with Donna and she agrees to take Amy out of sight and earshot if she so requests. For now Anneliese and Amy go outside together and sit in the hot tub beside the deck.

  When Leah arrives she goes to the deck and visits with Anneliese. I’m off muddling around, checking the water in the birthing tub, looking for my swimsuit, wondering if I should sneak one more high-speed cram session with Emergency Care in the Streets. Out on the deck, Leah tells Anneliese, “Well, we might as well check you.”

  “If I’m at four centimeters, I don’t even want to know,” says Anneliese, wrapping herself in a towel and walking into the house.

  I kneel beside Anneliese, holding her hand as Leah performs the examination. Leah’s eyebrows shoot up and her eyes widen. I’m startled, thinking something is wrong. “You’re at six or seven,” says Leah. “Looks like you’re on your way!” Anneliese beams, and yet at the same time I see an edge of determination set in, as if she is saying, OK—let’s go here.

  I call Mills. He’s puttering in his wood shop. Looks like this is it, I tell him. “I’m on my way,” he says.

  After that, I go into what can most charitably be described as a cotton-headed sleepwalk. The feeling in the pit of my stomach is like unrisen bread dough. Not dread, exactly, but reality. I see Mom’s car in the driveway. Perhaps as a means of avoidance, I become obsessed with preparing the birthing tub. I remove the cover and stow it. Return to check the water temperature. Decide the level is a little low and go down to get a bucket of water from the laundry room. With the midwife and my mother at her elbow, Anneliese moves upstairs.

  Mills arrives. He is is wearing camo pants, black Crocs, and a ball cap. It’s a relief to see a scruffy male. And it doesn’t hurt to think of those six babies he’s delivered under all conditions. He has a batch of newspapers and several copies of the Tradin’ Post under one arm and his Big Gulp mug of water in hand. “Go ahead and hang out in the office,” I tell him. “If I there’s trouble, I’ll shoot off a flare.” I’m hoping my bravado doesn’t sound as tinny to him as it does to me.

  Back in the house I join Amy in the bedroom beside Anneliese. My mother is at the foot of the bed and Donna is across the room at the window. Now the contractions have
become painful. Anneliese is quiet, but her face contorts with focus as she breathes through them. It helps when I press against her lower back just like the nice lady taught us downstairs in the living room the day we got the giggles. Between contractions Anneliese smiles at Amy and speaks soothingly. Amy smiles bravely, but I sense she is ready to crumple and run.

  When the water breaks right at the peak of the next contraction, it catches Anneliese off guard. “Oh!” she exclaims. Frightened by the rush of fluid and the pitch of her mother’s voice, Amy begins to cry. Donna scoops her up and takes her downstairs. I follow, and taking Amy out on the deck, I hold her in my arms and explain what has happened. I tell her what it means that the water broke, and remind her of the times we talked about it before, and that it is good that it has happened. I tell her that it is very hard for Mommy to give birth, but that Mommy is very happy. She rubs at her eyes, and nods, and hugs my neck, and I tell her it’s OK if she would rather do something else for a while. She nods again, and when I am back upstairs I hear the clang of the empty steel trailer bouncing behind the four-wheeler as Donna takes Amy out to gather firewood.

  I check back with Anneliese, then take the bucket back downstairs into the laundry room and begin filling it again. I’m running the water over my hand, adjusting the temperature, when the apprentice pokes her head through the door. “I really think you need to get up there,” she says. I follow obediently with my pail of water.

  Anneliese has gotten more uncomfortable and has decided to move to the tub. Leah and I help her in. A terrific contraction catches her with one foot in and one foot out, and we’re hung up for a while. “I don’t think I can make it in,” Anneliese says, and I get panicky visions of the baby dropping out right there. Then the contraction wanes and she settles into the tub. I scoot (I have now cranked it up a notch) into the closet to change into swimming trunks in case I have to crawl in the tub. Then I come out and position myself behind Anneliese to massage her shoulders and let her rest her head against my chest between contractions, which are growing in strength and frequency. Leah is coaching calmly, Mom is watching from the landing of the stairs, and the apprentice is standing by.