Rick turned agonized eyes to me. I shook my head. "That's mild. Just wait until she's readyto deliver. Don't take it personally. You should have heard what I said to Morgan. She won't remember it. Come on. Carefully, on the table."
Rick laid Heather gingerly on the pallet of newspapers.
Eli handed around obstetrical gloves. The gloves were intended for cows and horses, so the clear plastic reached all the way to our armpits. Then she handed me a pad orange with Betadine.
"Soap and water's fine," I said. "Or better nothing at this stage."
Susan wheeled up and stopped so sharply I was afraid she'd tip over. She could barely see over the linen and blankets on her chair. Eli took them and began to prop them under Heather's head and back.
"Shep, take Susan back over to my house and stay there," I said. "We're going to need Eli and Vickie and Lanier to hold Heather's legs and give her something to brace against."
"Right.
I glanced at Susan. Her eyes were the size of soup plates. I smiled at her. "You've seen plenty of puppies and kittens bom. This isn't any different."
"I want to stay," Susan whispered. "Can I?"
"No way," Shep said and grabbed the back of her wheelchair. "We'll be at Maggie's."
"But Moooommm."
Shep was already loping to my patio door.
"Rick, you and Heather had birthing classes, didn't you?"
"It wasn't like this."
"Didn't they show you how to sit behind her and prop her up?"
"Uh-huh."
"Do it."
"You heard her," Heather snarled. "Get back there now, dammit. "
Rick peered down at his sweet little bride as though she'd suddenly sprouted six fire-breathing heads.
"Now! "
"Where is that ambulance?" Vickie asked.
I stripped off Heather's sodden panties.
Without instruction, Lanier and Eli had positioned themselves on either side of Heather, who now sat semi-recumbent with her knees in the air and her legs spread.
"Hang on to those legs," I said. "I'd just as soon she didn't kick me in the mouth."
Heather gave an inchoate choking yelp.
"It's okay, baby," Rick said soothingly and patted Heather's shoulder.
"You put that hand down where I can get to it, buster, you're going to draw back a nub."
Eli dried Heather's face with a towel.
"Oh, God, I'm going to make a mess!" Heather bawled.
"Okay, Heather, I'm going to check your cervix," I said. I looked and stood up so fast I nearly clipped Lanier in the chin. "The head's already crowning. I'll need to turn it."
Heather growled and pushed.
I gently turned the baby's body. "Thank God it's not breech." No way could we have done what my wonderful LPN Taisie did when Sarah was born. Heather was too far along to get up on her hands and knees and rock.
"Okay, kiddo," I said. "A couple of more good ones and all I have to do is catch." I was amazed at how calm I sounded. Actually, my adrenaline was pumping so hard I'm surprised it wasn't spewing out my eyeballs. I glanced up at Eli. She smiled a tight little smile and nodded almost imperceptibly. She knew I was scared. But I couldn't let Heather or the others know.
Heather squalled, "Here we go again!"
"Heather, honey, if Rick lifts you up more, can you hook your hands under your knees?" Eli asked. "That'll give you something to hang onto while you push."
"Rick!" Heather commanded. He rolled her farther up. She hooked her hands under her knees. They slid off immediately. "I'm all sweaty."
Vickie wiped her palms and legs and grasped her hand. "Better?"
"Yeah. It's starting. Grrrrr."
"Heather, honey, bear down, grit your teeth, yell your heart out. Cuss Rick," Eli said.
"Damn straight. Oh, sheee-ut."
"Oh, yeah, baby," I whispered. "Come to Auntie Maggie."
Heather yelled obscenities that Rick probably had no idea she knew. He hung on gamely, although I suspected his hand would be sore for a week. Heather didn't have enough leftover energy to chomp on it.
I squatted down in a position I hadn't assumed since I played catcher on my high school softball team. "One more. Almost there. Gotcha!" The baby girl's shoulders popped free and a moment later the entire baby slid into my hands. I grasped her and held her upside down. The baby coughed once, then mewed like an angry kitten and squirmed.
"Lay her on Heather's chest with a bath towel over her," I whispered. "Eli, you got the suction bulb?"
Eli began gently to suction the baby s mouth and nostrils. Once covered with a towel on Heather's tummy, the baby settled down at once.
"Don't cut the cord until it stops pulsing," I said. "We've still got to deliver the afterbirth."
Heather's hair clung to her skull; sweat dripped down her cheeks. She gazed down at the bloody, soapy little creature on her chest in wonder. She touched the baby's downy head gently and began to count her fingers.
I glanced up at Rick. He stared at his daughter as though someone had hit him right between the eyes with a two-by-four. How Morgan would have loved to see Sarah and Nathan born! Damn the doctors who had wanted to make birth sterile instead of joyful.
"Hey, little critter," I said. "Welcome to the world."
From somewhere down the road came the sound of an approaching siren.
Eli's head snapped up. "Well, finally," she said, as the red and white ambulance careened up the driveway and rocked to a stop by Eli's side porch.
"Over here! You took your sweet time getting here."
"Sorry, ma'am. Memorial Day traffic. Hey, y'all had the baby already?"
"You can take over," I said. "From here on, it's your problem."
"Who delivered it?"
"I did," I said.
"You're shaking," Eli said. She took my arm and led me toward her back stairs.
"Damn right. What if something had gone wrong?"
"You'd have handled that the best you could." She glanced over her shoulder. The EMTs were preparing to load Heather and the little girl onto a gurney for transport. Rick still held Heather's hand, but she no longer threatened to bite it off. She had eyes for nothing except the small miracle in the EMTs arms.
"I didn't really take a good look at the baby," I said.
"Lots of black hair."
"That'll fall out," I said.
"Give me a minute." Eli went to Rick and touched his arm. He seemed to wake from a dream. "Go with them. We'll bring your truck to the hospital."
"Huh? Oh, yeah. The truck." His face softened. "Aren't they beautiful?"
He didn't wait for an answer. Two minutes later the EMT ambulance, Rick, Heather and their new baby girl raced off into the evening.
"You're welcome," Eli called after them.
Vickie gave me a high five, bloody gloves and all. She was crying.
As a matter of fact we were all crying. I grabbed Eli's hand. "What if that had been Sarah or Lisa having a baby? Bringing a new life into the world is scary stuff."
"The cycle goes on," Eli said. "God, I am getting downright maudlin."
Even if by some miracle Sarah or Lisa did decide to present me with grandchildren, they'd never know what a wonderful man their grandfather had been. "I don't know about y'all," I said, "but I could sure use a drink."
Chapter 41
In which Maggie meets some angry buffalo
Rick and Heather asked Eli and me to be Margaret Elizabeth Halliday's godparents. Of course we accepted. They planned to call her Meg, not Maggie, but she was still named after Eli and me.
I decided to clean out Morgan's closet on the Fourth of July. Independence Day. I made Eli stick with me while I did it.
I had secretly been perusing those brochures Morgan had collected, and frankly, the thought of going alone to a country where I didn't speak the language bothered me. I asked Eli if we could close the practice for a couple of weeks and both travel to Europe. She simply snorted at me and went back to work
Eli didn't know about my new passport.
I made an appointment with an agent at a local travel agency. Vickie had worked with us several times, and seemed to be re-learning to handle large animals. She thought selling her practice might be the only way to get Herb to agree to the divorce settlement. Eli still wasn't happy thinking about having someone buy me out, but she did agree that adding Vickie to our existing practice might be a good thing. That was a good first step.
When Rick called me at dawn one hot Tuesday morning in August, my first thought was that something was wrong with baby Meg.
No, she's blooming," Rick said. "Growing like a jimson weed. We're having the christening the first week in September. Y'all are godmothers. You have to be there."
We chatted for a few minutes while I tried to figure out why he'd called me. Finally, he took a deep breath and asked, "What do you know about buffalo?"
"I've treated a few. A couple of my clients raised beefalo for a while until they found out there's no market for the meat. Why?"
"One of the people I know from the cow station just drove home from a sale in Houston with three buffalo. He wants me to come check them out. Could you ride along? I don't know a damned thing about buffalo."
"Let me check my schedule. I'll call you back."
"How's ten sound?" I said when I got him. He agreed.
I drove down to the cattle station and met him. When I climbed into his dusty pickup, I asked, "Who is this guy and why on earth did he buy buffalo?"
Rick turned south drove the back roads to 1-55. "He owns a convenience store and gas station at one of the lesser interchanges on 1-55. He says he's been looking for something besides gas and hot dogs to attract customers."
"So he picked buffalo? Is the fool suicidal?"
"He won't admit it, but I suspect he was drunk as a skunk when he bought them at a sale in Houston and hauled them home."
"Does he have the first notion what he's dragged home?"
"Nope. Me neither. That's why you're here."
"Do you know whether these are cows or bulls?" I asked Rick.
"We're about to find out," Rick said as we pulled into a service station beside the interstate.
The buffalo might not yet have attracted paying customers, but a couple of elderly gentlemen lounged around on the front porch of the small grocery store. A posthole digger thudded out of sight in the back.
The store was the sort of country mom and pop grocery store that served sausage biscuits in the morning, sandwiches at lunch, and fried chicken at night from its buffet counter. A sign on the door read "We take W.I.C. and food stamps. Se Habla Espanol."
I would be willing to bet they also ran tabs for everybody in the neighborhood and were paid when the crop came in or the social security check arrived. The place was freshly painted and spanking clean. Even the big front windows gleamed. I guessed there'd be more brands of chewing tobacco and snuff inside than there were brands of candy bars, and more cases of beer than cola.
Out of sight around the far side of the building came the bawl of annoyed buffalo. The scent of their bodies had wafted all the way to the gas pumps in front of the store.
"My eyes are watering," I said. "It's the methane. For heaven's sake, don't light a match anywhere near them or we'll all be blown to kingdom come."
"Y'all the vets?" A skinny would-be cowboy shoved off from the building and came over to us, only taking time to spit a stream of tobacco juice out of the right side of his mouth.
"Jimmy Joe," said an aged black man who sat on top of the outside cooler. "Mr. Pete'll skin you alive he catches you spittin' on his clean concrete."
Jimmy Joe ignored him. "Mr. Pete's around back supervising. His crew's nearly 'bout finished with the pen for them things. I'll go git him."
I walked up to the elderly black man and nodded. "Seems to be quite an event."
The man grinned. He was missing most of his teeth, but managed not to lisp. "Mr. Pete'll do some foolishness when he's in the drink," he said. "But this foolishness done took the cake." He shook his head. "I done tole him you can't keep nothing that big in no little pen."
"How big is little?"
"Four-five acres. He gonna build'em a run-in shed for bad weather too."
His bright eyes turned dull and shifted away from me. That was the signal that Mr. Pete must have been walking up behind me. I turned and smiled. His small features huddled in the center of his round face like the holes in a bowling ball. He had small blue eyes, a pug nose, and a cherub's mouth with pink, moist lips. He had a spherical body and thighs so round that he swayed from one foot to the other as he walked. He was perspiring and wiping his bald skull with a red bandanna and grinning.
"I do declare, I done got two of you. Will wonders never cease."
"We came to see your ladies," I said with an answering smile. "Where are they?"
"Y'all come right on with me." He trundled off around the comer of the building toward the bawling.
An eighteen-wheeler stock trailer stood back of the store. I noted it shivered slightly every time one of its occupants shifted or stamped. Through the slats I could see three great brown woolly shapes lifting their heads to bawl their umbrage.
"Y'all come on. Ain't they the finest things you ever done see? Folks gonna be driving near into the ditch to get up here to show their little 'uns the great American buffalo."
"Mr. Pete, how long have they been in the trailer?" Rick asked.
"Got'em home yestidday aftemoon'bout supper time."
"And you drove straight from Houston?"
"Yessir. Bought 'em at the stock sale, loaded 'em up and started for home right away."
"Were you planning to buy buffalo?"
"Not a-tall. Took the trailer down there to get me some Santa Gertrudis straight out of Mexico. Then I saw them gals and I just had to have 'em."
"Maggie," Rick whispered. "They've been in that trailer for two days."
I walked over to the new paddock and left Rick to talk to Mr. Pete without interference. The black gentleman had come around the other side to stand by me. I offered my hand. "I'm Maggie McLain."
"Sam Jones, ma'am. Folks 'round here call me Uncle Sam."
"Where did you learn about buffalo?"
"Spent some time in the prison farm in Memphis a long time ago when I was young and stupid. Had to take care of them buffalo they got in that herd down there in the park." He shook his head. "If that didn't scare a fool straight, wouldn't nothing but a bullet do it. Mr. Pete don't know what he's done got hisself into."
"Have you told him?"
"I tried." He pointed to the seven-foot tall metal fence posts that were driven into the ground to form the perimeter of the buffalo pen, and the diamond wire mesh stretched between them. "He thinks them flimsy posts and that fancy horse wire gonna hold a buffalo, he got another think coming."
"That's all he's using?"
"He did have sense enough to hang that gate from six by sixes set in ce-ment. Every one of them posts ought to be six by six and set the same way."
"With construction steel fencing instead of horse fence," I said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'll tell him."
"He ain't gonna listen."
"We can but try."
I walked back to Rick, who was waving his arms in exasperation.
"Now, don't have a cat fit," Mr. Pete said. "I'm gonna turn I ern out in a little minute."
"That fence will not hold a buffalo," I said quietly.
"Sure it will."
"I promise you, they will go through it like a hot knife through cold butter."
"Pshaw. Will not." He grinned gently. "Not gonna need to go anywhere nor want to once they see that clover and lespedeza I got in that pasture. Already got a stack of hay rolls in the back for 'em too once the first frost hits. They'll think they done landed in hog heaven and won't never go nowhere else."
"I pray you're right," I said.
"Now, I was just telling thi
s young man here, they told me down in Houston one of these ladies was pregnant. Trouble is, I lost track of who's who. I need to know which one of 'ern is gonna calve."
I stared at him in confusion. "How do you expect us to check? You don't have any pipe stocks in that pasture we could run them into. They have to be checked one at a time."
"Shoot, I know that." He looked Rick up and down. "I figured one of y'all could climb up on one side of the trailer and one on t'other, then one can reach in and hold up the tail while the other hangs over the side and feels for a calf"
I choked.
"I was trying to explain to Mr. Pete here his idea would be both dangerous and ineffective," Rick said.
Mr. Pete snorted. "Oh, come on, son. I guess a big of boy like you could climb on down into the trailer with'em, I mean they're sweet as pie, but it's kinda messy in there right now what with the manure."
"Not to mention the tempers of three buffalo who have been cooped up for thirty-six hours."
"Well, what the Sam Hill did I get y'all out here for anyways if you can't do a simple little job like testing them buffalo."
Rick started to speak, but I held up a hand. "Mr. Pete, there are only two ways that I can see for you to find out which ofyour buffalo is pregnant. The first is if you come out here some morning and find one of them suckling a calf."
"Shoot! That's no good. I got to know now so I can look after her right."
"Then the only way you're going to find out is if she whispers in your ear."
"Well, hell's bells."
The rangy man slouched up at that point. "Mr. Pete, we got the gate hung. Pasture's finished. You can turn 'em loose."
"Don't you do it, Mr. Pete," Uncle Sam said.
"Shoot, Sam, I know what I'm doing. Now, folks, y'all wait 'til I get them buffalo unloaded into the pasture, then we can lasso one at a time so you can check them."
He turned away without waiting for our reply, climbed into the cab of his eighteen wheeler and started the engine.
"Maggie, what do we do?" Rick whispered.
"Get into your truck, turn it around to face the road and get ready to floor it if you have to."
"You mean run before he turns them out?"
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