Good Ground

by Tracy Winegar

  She could not keep from crying, the tears rolling down her cheeks as she bore the pain with pitiful whimpering. Gradually, the contractions eased, and she was still until they began again. Then, her body was wracked with another contraction, and she braced herself, her whole body tensing. Gritting her teeth, she held her breath, waiting for the pain to subside. Jim silently prayed for it to pass each time. Then, as the contraction slowly eased, she breathed deeply again with relief until she had to brace herself for another.

  Jim tried coaxing her into relaxing. But even as he said it, he felt foolish. How could she relax in such a condition? He hated his inability to help her, to say or do anything that would take away her suffering. He was desperate to do anything that would bring her comfort. Why was he so useless? What was the point in saying something so obvious? She attempted to nod, to let him know that she was trying, but her half-hearted attempt ended before it began.

  She grunted, writhed, gasped for breath, resisting the urge to push. As much as she fought to hold the baby, it seemed that the baby did not want to be held. He could barely make out her words as she cried out desperately that the baby was coming.

  Jim lifted Edith’s dress and watched in amazement as the baby slipped out onto the bed, miniature and blue. It was a girl. Her tiny head was about the size of a small apple, and her little arms weren’t much longer than his fingers. The baby did not cry as he cradled her in his calloused hands.

  Looking upon her, he understood that his daughter would not draw a breath, would not stir or open her delicate eyelids, laced with fine blue veins, so that he could even know the color of eyes that were hidden beneath them. She was as light as a feather, her skin wet and slippery. Her dark hair was plastered to her petite scalp, but he kissed it anyway, choking back the sorrow he felt.

  Edith stirred, raised herself up onto her elbow. Upon seeing the lifeless little body he held, she let herself fall back onto the bed with a wail, not even trying to control her tears.

  This recollection and the gun held tight in his grip gave him strength. Yes, with the thought of her fresh in his mind, he figured he could kill a man. Steeling himself with the bitter pangs of disappointment and her loss, he could kill a man. It was with determination that he stomped up onto the covered porch and beat loudly on the doctor’s door.

  All was dark and still inside the Cape Cod that was painted white with green shutters. The house sat on a corner lot surrounded by rose bushes and giant oak shade trees, the picture of tranquility and solitude, but the abrupt sound of Jim’s banging broke the silence of the house within.

  It was a very brief wait before the doctor pulled the door wide open so swiftly that Jim was slightly taken aback. He stood frozen, leaning heavily on the door jamb, meeting the doctor’s startled expression with his own. The two men stood observing one another—one hazy from drink and rage, the other hazy from just coming out of a sound sleep—and for a moment the stillness returned again. As Jim looked at the doctor, he seemed oddly different in his nightshirt, out of his usual trousers and black jacket. No one in town dressed like the doctor did except for the banker. He looked very human standing there then without his best clothes on.

  To see him with his hair tousled and his bare legs peeking out from his nightshirt threw Jim off. For a moment, he forgot why he was there.

  “Jim Hooper?” the doctor finally got out. His eyebrows were knit together to match the confusion in his voice. Apparently Jim was the last person he had expected.

  “Doctor Fielding,” he said with a little nod, just as if they were exchanging a greeting under normal circumstances.

  The doctor hesitated briefly before standing aside and motioning for him to come in. Jim stepped across the threshold, his hand firmly on the grip of the pistol in his coverall pocket. He stopped in the front hall and looked around.

  Gilda Fielding had the finest parlor he had ever seen. He walked aimlessly about the moonlit room, gazing at the framed photos, the stitcheries, the lace doilies, the plump velvet settee, the rocking chair with its fat red cushion, a piano in the corner against the wall, and a fireplace all dandied up with molding and red brick. Yes, it was an elegant room, something proper that he would have liked to have been able to give to Edith.

  Even as that thought came to him, he tossed it away. He could not imagine her there. She would have been out of her element in a room such as that. She had been of a much simpler mold.

  Doctor Fielding lingered near the doorway, merely observing Jim as he satisfied his curiosity by prowling the parlor. When he saw that Jim had finished with his inspection, he said quietly, still mindful of his sleeping wife and daughters, “What did you come for, Mr. Hooper?” His voice was quiet and sympathetic.

  Jim turned to look at him square in the eyes, not wanting to appear the coward. “I come to kill you, Doctor. I come to shoot you dead.”

  Chapter 3

  THE MANTEL CLOCK TICKED loudly in the darkened silence, and a thick tension hung in the air. Neither man moved. Neither spoke as they stood opposite one another, each trying to surmise what the other’s thoughts might be. Jim felt as if time had stopped, as if the doctor hadn’t heard or understood what he had said. Perhaps he had thought it a joke. Anyhow, the older man seemed unfazed by the threat.

  “You hear me?” Jim forced out through clenched teeth.

  “I heard you, but you’ll do no such thing,” the middle-aged man replied in a slow, even tone. There was no fear in those wise brown eyes. No panic of an impending end to his life. Only confidence that Jim was not capable.

  “I brung my gun,” Jim said, fumbling to pull it out of his pocket to prove it. “If I ain’t gonna do it, then why’d I bring my gun for?”

  “Don’t be foolish. Put that thing away before it goes off by accident. You and I both know you couldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I’m not about to put this thing away. I aim to use it. You listenin’?”

  “It won’t do you any good, Jim. It won’t change anything. You must know that.”

  “Maybe won’t change nothin’, but go a ways to makin’ me feel better, anyhow.”

  “You been drinking?”

  “A little,” Jim admitted. He knew Edith wouldn’t have liked that. She would have said only trash gets drunk. She would have scolded him for such an indulgence.

  “How about you go into the other room there and sleep it off,” the doctor offered.

  “I’m of a sound mind! The drink is gone! And I didn’t come to sleep. I come for you, Doctor.”

  “Jim, what could I have done?” he asked gently, as if he were speaking to a young child.

  Standing in the gloom of the fancy townhome, Jim concentrated his hostile glare upon Doctor Fielding, who was watching him closely, waiting for what would come next. He felt nothing but hatred. If the doctor had only come when his wife had needed him, she would still be alive, still be with him. He didn’t care that someone else had needed the doctor just as badly as Edith had. It only made him more angry to think the doctor had chosen to give someone else life over Edith. Edith, who had been so good and true. No amount of reasoning would convince him otherwise.

  “What could I have done?” the doctor repeated, waiting for an answer.

  “You coulda done plenty.”

  “Put the gun down and go on home.”

  Jim stepped closer to the older man and put the gun to the doctor’s chest, pushing it hard against the striped flannel of his nightshirt. “I can’t.”

  “You won’t do it. You don’t have it in you.”

  Jim raised his voice. “I don’t, you say? I’ll show you! I said I come to kill you, and I aim to do just that!” His bellow echoed in his own ears, ringing through the corridors of the doctor’s silent home, as intrusive as if someone had raised their voice in the hush of a church house.

  It was at that moment that a shrill little cry pierced the silence. Jim flinched, looking about wildly, thinking perhaps that he was being haunted by his own child. He pulled the gun away f
rom the doctor’s chest and dropped it as if it had burned him to the touch. The pistol clattered loudly on the hardwood floor. The doctor retrieved the gun and tossed it onto the settee.

  “Darn it, you woke the house now,” Doctor Fielding growled as the place came to life. He went through the parlor door into his examination room across the hallway as Gilda rushed down the stairs, braids bouncing.

  Jim was frozen, his feet like lead where he stood in the parlor, watching the scene unfold with wonder, forgetting briefly what his errand in going there had been.

  Doctor Fielding came back from his examination room, holding an infant over his shoulder, patting it gently on the back. He stopped before Gilda and grimaced a little. “Go back to bed, Mrs. Fielding. I’ll take care of this one.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked, sounding guilty, as if she wanted very much to go back to bed.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” the doctor told her. “I hope it didn’t wake Millie and Rachel.”

  “I’ll check in on them,” she promised and then turned and headed back up the stairs, apparently unaware that they had a visitor in their parlor.

  The doctor came back to where Jim was planted, a rather unpleasant expression on his face as he bounced and patted the bundle he carried. “You probably scared the poor thing half to death. For shame, Jim Hooper.”

  “What you got there?” he asked, craning his neck to get a better view.

  “A baby, Jim. It’s a baby,” he said in exasperation.

  “You and the wife don’t got no baby. Your little ’uns is all big and growed now.”

  “It isn’t ours. It’s that Borden girl’s.”

  The baby continued to wail plaintively, and the doctor switched his bundle to the other shoulder.

  “Why isn’t she takin’ care of it?”

  “Because she’s dead,” the doctor replied in an irritated tone of voice. “She was too young for having babies, and it killed her. Died on Saturday. The children’s home down in Nashville can’t come around until tomorrow afternoon to get this boy.”

  “Don’t her kin wanna lay claim on him?”

  “No one wants a thing to do with this little child. This one’s mama wasn’t one with a good reputation around here. No one can say for certain who the father is, and no one wants a bastard child. He’s just another mouth to feed,” Doctor Fielding explained. “Times are hard.”

  Jim stood there in his dirty overalls, with his unshaven countenance, and held out his rough hands, dirt caked beneath his nails and around his cuticles, wanting. “Can I have a look at him?”

  The doctor hesitated, eyeing him suspiciously.

  Jim knew the doctor was undecided and sought to sway him. He held his arms out a little further and gave him a pleading look. In spite of Jim’s recent threats, the doctor reluctantly handed the baby over to him.

  As Doctor Fielding lit a lamp, Jim carried the little babe with great care to the rocking chair and pulled the blankets back, inspecting the roundness of his cheeks, the dimples over each knuckle on his hands, his big belly, his naval—still a bloody stump—and fat thighs that tapered to fat calves and down to minute toes at the end of his long, slender feet. He is a fine thing, Jim thought. His body was solid, sturdy, and so very different from his little daughter’s delicate physique.

  The baby continued to wail. “Boy, don’t he howl!” Jim mused with a chuckle, pleased with the baby’s strong lungs. He glanced up at the doctor with a half grin and then back to the baby.

  “Yes, he does howl,” the man replied with a little less enthusiasm.

  “This here is how my mama done it with her youngins,” Jim said. Using his legs as a work space, he laid the baby’s plump form along them as he tucked the baby’s arms in next to his body and wrapped the blankets tight around him, barely giving him room to move. Then, holding the baby close to his chest, he began to rock, and the baby grew still and quiet. “He’s a fine little feller.” Jim cooed as he and the babe regarded one another. “Whowee,” he said to the baby. “Whowee.”

  “You seem to have a knack with him,” Doctor Fielding observed. He moved Jim’s pistol aside and sat down heavily on the settee, watching the both of them.

  Jim was quiet, somehow seeming settled and at peace as he rocked the baby, smelling his fuzzy scalp, patting his tiny bottom. At some point, Doctor Fielding drifted off, lulled to sleep by the pace of the rocker on the floor as it squeaked and creaked.

  The baby in Jim’s arms made him reflective. His mind settled on Edith, on the baby they had made together, the child that was their own that now lay in her mother’s arms in the grave upon the hill. He would have done anything to stop Edith’s tears that last day, to have given her some comfort.

  Jim was painfully aware of the sorrow she was feeling. After a time, Edith stopped crying, wiping her cheeks with her work-worn hands. She told him then that she would have called the baby Ruby for her mother, and in a daze directed him to the crib in the corner where he could find a quilt she had pieced. Jim did not want to move, certain that if he held still long enough, he would find that it was all a dream, none of it real. But he couldn’t ignore her request. He laid the little body on the bed next to Edith and did as she told him, going to the crib he had crafted with his own hands. Picking up the pieced quilt, he took it back to the bed and wrapped the baby in it then laid the tiny bundle against Edith’s arm. As much as it hurt him to set the baby aside, his concern was for Edith now.

  Her face was colorless; it seemed the bronze tone of her skin and the freckles had completely disappeared. She began to shake, and the trembling became so violent that her teeth chattered. The harder she strained to stop the tremors, the worse they became. Jim tucked a blanket around her, and she asked for another. He piled another on top of her, and after a time the shaking stopped. He sat on a stool next to the bed, clutching her hand. He supposed that Edith knew that he was worried over her, that he was frightened. As she hemorrhaged beneath the blankets, she murmured apologies to him. She was sorry. She was sorry.

  Surrendering to his horror at the stillbirth of his daughter and the fear and helplessness he couldn’t control, Jim began to weep. He doubted that he would ever manage to erase the horrific scene from his brain, ever dispel the picture of his daughter as he held the little, blue, premature body in his hands.

  He let his head fall upon the bed beside Edith, beside the bundle that held their lifeless baby. She ran her fingers through his hair, soothed him, waited until he had calmed. He was quiet for a time with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to block out what he had just seen, what he was now feeling.

  Edith’s voice was unsteady and weak as she assured him that they would have another. That she would fill the house to the rafters with his children. She swore it to him. Why would she make such a promise?

  There was something in her declaration that made him alarmed all over again. He asked her if she was all right. Barely able to whisper, her energy gone, she told him she was tired. Jim smoothed her hair away from her face and told her to rest for a time; the doctor would be along soon.

  Nodding, her eyelids fluttered shut, and she fell asleep. That was the last time he had seen her blue eyes. He wondered if perhaps their little baby girl would have had eyes as blue.

  Doctor Fielding finally arrived in his black Model T with Gilda in tow. Jim’s eyes were dull and without expression as he let them in. Jim stayed in the front room, standing in the corner, swaying on his feet, wringing his hands, while Gilda tried to ask him questions, tried to get him to talk, as the doctor went into the bedroom. Finally, Jim broke away from her and drifted to the bedroom where the doctor had found Edith lying under a pile of quilts, her face slack, her body still. Jim knew she was dead. It hung heavy in the atmosphere, tickled the hairs on his neck. It had a particular sound and smell to it. All those things permeated the stale air in the room as he looked upon Edith’s lifeless form. When the doctor pulled back the blankets, he saw the baby, swaddled in a new quilt, the umbilical cord still attached
to the placenta. The older man cut the cord and covered the baby’s face and then pulled a quilt over Edith’s sallow features as well.

  Then he looked up at Jim with a sort of horrified expression, which only further confirmed the truth of it. While Jim knew, he couldn’t reconcile himself to the fact that they were gone. It didn’t look like her, therefore, it could not be her.

  “Let her rest a bit, and she’ll be up and about in no time. See if she don’t.”

  Jim buried Edith and their daughter, after Gilda had dressed and prepared the bodies, up on the hill in the old family cemetery surrounded by a sagging wooden fence, the dark green grass growing up around chalky stones carved with names and dates, overlooking the house and tobacco fields and barn. He dug the grave himself and laid the two in it. He knew that from up there, Edith would be able see out across the lush farmland to the creek as it ambled along its path and glimpse a spectacular vision of the sun as it went down behind the tree-covered hills beyond. That was a sight that she had always loved on the few occasions they had afforded themselves to laze on the porch swing in the evenings. It gave him some comfort that, if she’d been there to say, she would have chosen that very spot.

  She was gone. Their baby too. Now, as he rocked this child, the one of flesh and bone, he realized that his memories had no substance. They were gone and done with. There was nothing tangible to them like the warm bundle he held onto now. He could feel the little one stir in his arms occasionally, could hear him softly sigh, and see a half smile curl his lip as a sweet dream drifted through his slumber. He was real, in the here and now.

  Chapter 4

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN GILDA came down, dressed properly for the day, she looked quite astounded to find her husband sleeping on the settee and Jim sitting in the rocking chair, still rocking away, the baby in his arms. Jim tried to smile shamefacedly, but it ended up being more of a puckered brow and a grimace instead. The baby squirmed in his arms, and he quickly began patting it, soothing it, and then the baby was still again.