by Brett Lott
He'd had enough; this was over; he wanted off; and he was about to move from the pall of irritation the woman spread, when he heard "Could you get me one of those, sonny?"
He set his face toward the light, in case she was referring to him.
"Hey! Sonny, could you—"
"Aggie," the bartender said from behind. "Leave the kid alone."
Charles put down a dollar. "It's all right," he said. "Get her one.
"You know the house rules," the voice said. "Not unless she walks in with you. You know, Aggie."
There was a silence of restructuring accommodation, as if they were contemplating the movielike beams within the broader band of light, with only the sound of traffic in its breezes of accompaniment outside and, as if in answer to that, the broom sweeping the floor behind. Then the woman's talk seemed to stir in a different direction. "You hurt?" she said. "It's my fault, it's all my fault. You think you're the only one who suffers? One-crack mind, one-crack mind. One of these days you're going to wake up with your voice changed and realize you was always queer."
Sensation gave like snowslides in him, and his joints ached from dread. There was something terribly wrong with him, he was convinced, that he kept attracting these grotesques. He must be more than monstrous himself (he had to fend off textbook images of abnormalities at birth), if he was already acclimated to this death, or acting as if he were. Because what had been disturbing him under everything else these past months was that he'd had an affair at the same time Katherine had had hers, as if they'd been signaling one another of their need to break free at the thought of being bound, and he felt he got what he deserved when she confessed. But then he'd feared, first, that the child wasn't his and, next, that it wouldn't live.
"Like you lost your best friend," the woman said, and he turned and found her eyes on him, gray-gold in the light. She sucked at the tooth awhile as if to extract its essence. "Don't let it get you down. They're always at you. They never let up. You got an ounce of sympathy yourself? You got sympathy with me?"
"Yes."
"Yeah, you say you do, but they all do." Customers had come in, and she threw her head back as if to indicate them, then called in a loud voice, "Ain't that right, Jack?"
"Sure, Aggie," the bartender said.
"'Sure, Aggie,' he says, like he's my echo. They don't let up no matter what. I said to him, 'You want a mother, a wife and kids, you want a young girlie type, or you want a queer?'"
"What are you after?" Charles asked.
She leaned toward him and smiled a sweet-old-lady's smile, pegged at its corner by the tooth, and said, "A nice big jug of rose wine. Maybe a hunk of you, Butch."
He took two dollars and dropped them and the other over the papers in front of her on his way out, feeling mistily benevolent; she'd never know the state in him this had risen from. Then out in the sunlight, blinking as if stunned, he felt he'd been lanced through the place near his ribs where the talons curled. He couldn't tell Katherine he'd come here. Not while she'd lain over there alone. How could he have listened to Harner? And then he sensed something further hurrying close and heard in a whisper at his ear, Murderer. You'll never quit paying for this.
The gray-haired nurse stood up from her desk as he stepped through the swinging doors; she, too, had her duty to see to now. He'd decided to talk to Katherine, and let everything take its turn from her. The nurse gripped him by his coat sleeve and said, "This time we won't forget," and led him to a line of lockers behind a wall of the curving anteroom—dim atmosphere of high school and the stripped-down purity of physical sports, with their innocence of the actual world, he now knew, in their unvarying perimeters and established rules, not to mention the false assumption that they were training grounds for life. From a shelf over the lockers she got a gown and shook it so it unrolled, unraveling its billowy length, and then held it out for him, and he stepped into it, over his jacket and all. With a hand on him as if to hold him there, exhaling something minty, she came around and started tying it at his back, and in the starchy chill of its cloth drawing close he felt he'd entered the hospital at last, and the hospital held Katherine and their dead son.
He gulped at the grief that went down his throat like brine and saw sudden dark spots traveling over the front of the gown as though its substance were eroding. "I understand," the nurse said, and set one of the caps on his head, then rested her hands on his shoulders. "It's terrible to lose the first. God comfort you." She shook him.
He recovered, but in the anteroom, seeing Harner at the column encircled by the desk, in his suit and tie once more, motioning him over, he felt his anger and grief collide. "We have some forms we'd like you to sign," Harner said, and put on his slack-lipped grin. Two minutes alone with him, Charles thought, just two minutes.
"It's merely a formality," Harner said, and his eyes swerved at the freezing cry of a newborn. "Then you can see your wife."
In heavy type on the top sheet on the desk Charles saw Death Certificate. Farther down, written in: respiratory failure.
"Why should I sign it?" he asked. "I haven't seen him."
"Oh, not that," Harner said, and shuffled the papers until he came up with two others, one of which read Waiver. Again Charles said, "I haven't seen him."
"Well, in effect what these say is there's been a birth, and then that you'll be making a gift of the case to the hospital. Our research is acknowledged across the United States, and this might be a way of helping out somebody in a similar situation. We would take care of all matters of disposal, so you wouldn't have to worry about that."
"It's no worry. I want to see him."
"I think perhaps it might be better if you didn't." That smile once more, which quivered now at its corners with Harner's authority.
And cut into Charles's own fears, so that he couldn't ask why it would be better if he didn't, while "disposal" brought to mind the whirring mechanism that can shake a whole sink. He pictured a miniature casket at the edge of an open grave, with Katherine down beside it, the air black around her, and wasn't sure he could take that. He was trapped. "I want to talk to Katherine first."
"I don't know if it's something she should have to handle now, seriously. Do you? I know it might feel like a tough decision, but it's pretty much routine, or procedure here, because of our research."
And then Charles saw, as down a corridor darker than the one where the lockers stood, a flaking fetus in a jar, on a set of shelves among hundreds of others, and heard the refrain from a folksinger's ballad, that for every child born another man must die. He felt an exchange of that sort, with deeper implications, taking place right now, while the tick and cluck and shuffle of doors and footsteps and equipment seemed to be those actual lives and deaths moving in and out in an endless passage. The only light of exit at the other end came shining from the promise of seeing Katherine.
He signed the papers.
Harner gave a nod, as if to confirm Charles in his manliness, and then led the way to one of the branches off the anteroom, down a hall, to a door. "She might be resting," he said in a rasping whisper, as if he'd injured his voice. " I f she is, maybe you should let her. Just take a peek so you can say you were in. She's been terribly excited about this—maybe overly so. We'll give you five minutes, and then in a while get her to a room—you'll want a private one for her, I know—and you can spend as much time there with her as you like."
This place was still smaller, with monitoring equipment against one wall and only enough space to pass by the stretcher where it was parked. The blonde nurse stood facing him, at its foot.
"Done," she whispered, her eyes enlarging on him, and then there was only the door at her back flapping in its frame at her retreat. A hypodermic syringe, with a final crystalline drop depending from its needle, lay on a stainless-steel tray on the stainless-steel counter supporting the equipment.
Katherine's hair, curled from exertion or moisture, hung less low from the stretcher, and she was moving a hand under the smock, testin
g her stomach. He stepped around to where she could see him, taking her free hand, and was confronted by a glossy incandescence in her eyes.
"It's so flat!" she exclaimed. "It's hard to believe it's so flat! That that's me! I wish you could have been with me through it all. I was totally engulfed by it, by the birth—by him, I mean. I'm sorry I was so out of touch before. I got afraid. Once things were going all right, I kept saying, 'Nathaniel! Nathaniel! I'm here, I'm with you all the way!' I felt his head come out—it was wonderful!—and then I knew something was wrong. The rest was hardly there."
She looked away, toward the monitoring machines, and he knew he couldn't tell her what he had to until this, which must be the ecstasy of birth, had subsided. She turned back with the incandescence in her eyes at a further level. "Suddenly he was entirely himself and left such feeling with me. I'm the only one who understands it right now, but you will, you will! My only regret is how I failed you."
"You came through it like a pro, I heard."
"No, no, he's gone. I know. I lost him. They told me. He died."
"You haven't failed me, I'm the—"
"I've failed you. You wanted him so badly."
He realized now that he had. "You haven't failed me. It's my fault."
"I was afraid you'd say that. I knew you would. Don't, please, for me. Please. I wanted to see him, but Harner wouldn't let me. 'I guess he just couldn't wait,' he said. All I wanted to do was see him. It wouldn't have bothered me. If I could only have seen just his hands. But maybe it's better. Maybe I'd have nightmares. They rushed him away, and then I saw Harner and another doctor, across the room by the windows, working with him. Their backs were to me. I couldn't see him. The nurse was so great. She—"
"The blonde one?" He wanted to get this all straight, as if for the terrible recompense to come.
"Yes, she was great! Back in the recovery room, well, here, I said, 'I just wanted to see him. I don't care how ugly he was.' And she said, 'There wasn't a thing wrong with him. He wasn't ugly. He was a beautiful baby. He was simply too tiny.' Can you imagine how intelligent he must have been to have done this?"
"What?" The talons in him flexed.
"He wanted to bring us closer together, and this was the only way. He knew that. He was so much like you, really—ready to give up everything to make things right."
"Kath."
"I'm in a different perspective. It's from the feeling he left. I know that time and events can't really destroy love. It's something you can't understand by reading about it. I had to learn that, and he knew it. We both had so much to learn from him!"
She laughed with an openness he seldom heard in her, and he began to shrink from this and her growing vision of the event. He was diminishing by degrees, he felt, until he had to take hold of the stretcher at her head to keep himself from being drawn into her, consumed. Then she pulled him down to her and kissed him on the mouth, and whispered with the intimacy of their bed, "No doubt about it. We've had our first child."
Then the perineal bottle in the bathroom of their apartment, in the stilled and grayish light through frosted glass; the green dress she never wore again, in shadow at the back of their closet; the barrenness of her secretary, as if she'd cleared it of even the essentials; the crescent-shaped planter of flowers he'd brought to her room in the hospital, with an eighteenth-century figurine in brown knee breeches and a long yellow coat with lace cuffs and lace froth at the collar, fixed in a contemplative pose, standing among the blossoms, which the florist at the last moment had set in place, and which Charles was unable to look at from the first without Nathaniel registering in him, followed by a tickling trill down his throat; the few articles they'd got for the child, chiefly a red-and-blue banner imprinted with stylized Buckingham Palace Guards, which followed them through every move (like the figurine he kept gluing and regluing until one day it was gone, with no explanation from her) and would suddenly appear out of a box, like another presence, striking them speechless; her feeling of betrayal that he'd signed the body away without telling her, and her depression that remained so long it seemed it would never leave, and when it did it would reappear without warning and set up further silences within her, making her mistrust her ability to work as she once had; his anger at Harner and the hospital, which kept revolving in him and reached its peak in the fall, so that more than once he started toward a lawyer to sue, but found himself foiled each time as if by the season, his favorite, in a release of grief and melancholy—for he was never able to bear the loss with equanimity, or with her wholly physical sense of loss.
It wasn't until after they'd had not only a second child but a third, and then a fourth, graced by this heritage, and he was leaning under the hood of a pickup on a fall afternoon with gold-red trees around awash in a wind and a son underfoot, running off with his tools, that he finally coughed out, "Good God, forgive me." And felt freed into forgiveness, for himself, first, then for her, the rest falling into place—for her because she'd never explained her experience during the birth and what she'd learned from it, as she'd said she would. But he knew now that the child had always been with him, at the edges of his mind and in his thoughts, as much as any of their living children (more, he thought, as he set aside the wrench in his hand and watched the tops of the trees above him springing in the wind), and he began then to look out on those children, on this boy with his hair going back in the wind, and on Katherine and on others, with less darkness in his eyes; that is, he began at last to be able to begin again to see.
LARRY WOIWODE is one of the most distinguished writers in America, a highly respected author who has received a multitude of awards, and whose work has illuminated readers since the publication of his first novel, What I'm Going To Do, I Think, in 1969. His other works of fiction include Silent Passengers: Stories, Indian Affairs, The Neumiller Stories, Born Brothers, Poppa John, and Beyond the Bedroom Wall. His nonfiction includes Acts, his meditation on being a writer and the book of Acts, and What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts. A native of North Dakota, he lives on a 160-acre farm near Mott, where he continues to write.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"What We Knew When the House Caught Fire" by David Drury. © 2004 by David Drury. This story originally appeared in Little Engines. Reprinted with permission of the author.
"Dosie, of Killakeet Island" by Homer Hickam. © 2006 by Homer Hickam. Printed with permission of the author.
"Loud Lake" by Mary Kenagy. © 2006 by Mary Kenagy. This story originally appeared in Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion. Reprinted with permission of the author.
"Resolved," by Marsena Konkle. © 2006 by Marsena Konkle. Excerpted from the novel A Dark Oval Stone, Paraclete Press. Printed with permission of the author.
"An Evening on the Cusp of the Apocalypse" by Bret Lott. © 2005 by Bret Lott. This story originally appeared in The Difference Between Women and Men, Random House.
"Landslide" by David McGlynn. © 2006 by David McGlynn. Printed with permission of the author.
"Ax of the Apostles" by Erin McGraw. © 2004 by Erin McGraw. This story originally appeared in The Good Life, Mariner Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Exodus" by James Calvin Schaap. © 2006 by James Calvin Schaap. This story originally appeared in The Other Side. Reprinted with permission of the author.
"The Results of a Dog Going Blind" by Rebecca Schmuck. © 2004 by Rebecca Schmuck. This story originally appeared in WORLD Magazine. Reprinted with permission of the author.
"The Virgin's Heart" by A. H. Wald. © 2006 by A. H. Wald. This story originally appeared in Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion. Reprinted with permission of the author.
"Firstborn" by Larry Woiwode. © 1989 by Larry Woiwode. This story originally appeared in The Neumiller Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission of the author.