“It’s time.” They all looked toward the door where Louisa now stood. “Baby’s coming,” she said.
Davis shoved his son aside, and Lou jumped out of the way as he stalked up to the door.
“Gawd damnit, you got no business here, woman. Get the hell off my land afore you get the butt of my shotgun agin your head, and that damn girl too.”
Louisa took not one step back. “You can help with the baby coming, or not. Up to you. Come on, Lou, and you too, Billy. Gonna need both y’all.”
It was clear though that George wasn’t going to let them go. Louisa was very strong for her age, and taller than Davis, but still, it would not be much of a fight.
And then from the woods they heard the scream. It was the same sound Lou had heard the first night at the well, but even more horrifying somehow, as though whatever it was, was very close and bearing down on them. Even Louisa stared out apprehensively into the darkness.
George Davis took a step back, his hand clenched, as though hoping for a gun to be there. Louisa clutched the children and pulled them in with her. Davis made no move to stop them, but he did call out, “You just make sure it’s a damn boy this time. If ’n it’s a girl, you just let it die. You hear me? Don’t need me no more gawd damn girls!”
As Sally pushed hard, Louisa’s pulse quickened when she first saw the buttocks of the baby, followed by one of its feet. She knew she didn’t have long to get the child out before the cord was crushed between the baby’s head and Sally’s bone. As she watched, the pains pushed the other foot out.
“Lou,” she said, “over here, quick, child.” Louisa caught the baby’s feet in her right hand and lifted the body up so that the contractions would not have to carry the weight of the baby, and so as to better the angle of the head coming through. She knew they were fortunate that after so many births, Sally Davis’s bones would be spread wide. “Push, Sally, push, honey,” Louisa called out.
Louisa took Lou’s hands and directed them to a spot on Sally’s lower abdomen. “Got to get the head out fast,” she told Lou, “push right there, hard as you can. Don’t worry, ain’t hurt the baby none, belly wall hard.”
Lou bore down with all her weight while Sally pushed and screamed and Louisa lifted the baby’s body higher.
Louisa called out like she was marking water depth on a riverboat. Neck showing, she said, and then she could see hair. And then the entire head showed, and then she was holding the child, and telling Sally to rest, that it was over.
Louisa said a prayer of thanks when she saw it was a boy. It was awfully small, though, and its color poor. She had Lou and Billy heat up cans of water while she tied off the cord in two spots with the bobbin string and then cut the cord in between these points with a pair of boiled scissors. She wrapped the cord in one of the clean, dry cloths that Lou had baked in the oven and tied another of the baked cloths snugly against the baby’s left side. She used sweet oil to clean the baby off, washed him with soap and warm water, and then wrapped him in a blanket and gave the boy to his mother.
Louisa placed a hand on Sally’s belly and felt to see if the womb was hard and small, which is what she wanted. If it was large and soft, that might mean bleeding inside, she told Lou in a small voice. However, the belly was small and tight. “We fine,” she told a relieved Lou.
Next, Louisa took the newborn and laid it on the bed. She took a small wax ampule from her lard bucket and from it took out a small glass vial. She had Lou hold the baby’s eyes open while Louisa placed two drops inside each one, while the child squirmed and cried out.
She told Lou, “So baby ain’t go blind. Travis Barnes gimme it. Law say you got to do this.”
Using the hot cans and some blankets, Louisa fashioned a crude incubator and placed the baby in it. His breathing was so shallow she kept sticking a goose feather under his mouth to see the ripple of air graze it.
Thirty minutes later the last contractions pushed the afterbirth out and Louisa and Lou cleaned that up, changing the sheets once more and scrubbing the mother down for the final time using the last of the baked cloths.
The last things Louisa took out from her bucket were a pencil and a slip of paper. She gave them to Lou and told her to write down the day’s date and time. Louisa pulled an old windup pocket watch from her trousers and told Lou the time of birth.
“Sally, what you be calling the baby?” Louisa asked.
Sally looked over at Lou. “She call you Lou, that be your name, girl?” she asked in a weak voice.
“Yes. Well, sort of,” said Lou.
“Then it be Lou. After you, child. I thank you.”
Lou looked astonished. “What about your husband?”
“He ain’t care if ’n it got name or ain’t got one. Only if ’n it a boy and it work. And I ain’t seed him in here hepping. Name’s Lou. Put it down now, girl.”
Louisa smiled as Lou wrote down the name Lou Davis.
“We give that to Cotton,” Louisa said. “He take it on down the courthouse so’s everybody know we got us another beautiful child on this mountain.”
Sally fell asleep and Louisa sat there with mother and son all night, rousing Sally to nurse when Lou Davis cried and smacked his lips. George Davis never once entered the room. They could hear him stomping around in the front for some time, and then the door slammed shut.
Louisa slipped out several times to check on the other children. She gave Billy, Jesse, and the other boy, whose name Louisa didn’t know, a small jar of molasses and some biscuits she had brought with her. It pained her to see how fast the children devoured this simple meal. She also gave Billy a jar of strawberry jelly and some cornbread to save for the other children when they woke.
They left in the late morning. Mother was doing fine, and the baby’s color had improved greatly. He was nursing feverishly, and the boy’s lungs seemed strong.
Sally and Billy said their thanks, and even Jesse managed a grunt. But Lou noticed that the stove was cold and there was no smell of food.
George Davis and his hired men were in the fields. But before Billy joined them, Louisa took the boy aside and talked with him about things Lou could not hear.
As they drove the wagon out, they passed corrals filled with enough cattle to qualify as a herd, and hogs and sheep, a yard full of hens, four fine horses, and double that number of mules. The crop fields extended as far as the eye could see, and dangerous barbed wire encircled all of it. Lou could see George and his men working the fields with mechanized equipment, clouds of dirt being thrown up from the swift pace of the machines.
“They have more fields and livestock than we do,” Lou said. “So how come they don’t have anything to eat?”
“ ’Cause their daddy want it that way. And his daddy were the same way with George Davis. Tight with a dollar. Didn’t let none go till his feet wedged agin root.”
They rattled by one building and Louisa pointed out a sturdy padlock on the door. “Man’ll let the meat in that smokehouse rot afore he give it up to his children. George Davis sells every last bit of his crop down at the lumber camp, and to the miners, and hauls it to Tremont and Dickens.” She pointed to a large building that had a line of doors all around the first floor. The doors were open, and plainly visible inside were large green plant leaves hanging from hooks. “That’s burley tobacco curing. It weakens the soil, and what he don’t chew hisself, he sells. He got that still and ain’t never drunk a drop of the corn whiskey, but sells that wicked syrup to other men who ought be spending their time and money on they’s families. And he goes round with a fat roll of dollar bills, and got this nice farm, and all them fancy machines, and man let his family starve.” She flicked the reins. “But I got to feel sorry for him in a way, for he be the most miserable soul I ever come across. Now, one day God’ll let George Davis know ’xactly what He thinks of it all. But that day ain’t here yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
EUGENE WAS DRIVING THE WAGON PULLED BY the mules. Oz, Lou, and Diamond were i
n the back, sitting on sacks of seed and other supplies purchased from McKenzie’s Mercantile using egg money and some of the dollars Lou had left over from her shopping excursion in Dickens. Their path took them near a good-sized tributary of the McCloud River, and Lou was surprised to see a number of automobiles and schooner wagons pulled up near the flat, grassy bank. Folks were hanging about by the river’s edge, and some were actually in the brown water, its surface choppy from an earlier rain and good wind. A man with rolled-up sleeves was just then submerging a young woman in the water.
“Dunking,” Diamond exclaimed. “Let’s have a look.”
Eugene pulled the mules to a stop and the three children jumped off. Lou looked back at Eugene, who was making no move to join them.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“You g’on, Miss Lou, I gonna rest my bones here.”
Lou frowned at this, but joined the others.
Diamond had made his way through a crowd of onlookers and was peering anxiously at something. As Oz and Lou drew next to him and saw what it was, they both jumped back.
An elderly woman, dressed in what looked to be a turban made from pinned-together homespun sheets and a long piece of hemp with a tie at the waist, was moving in small, deliberate circles, unintelligible chants drifting from her, her speech that of the drunk, insane, or fanatically religious in full, flowering tongues. Next to her a man was in a T-shirt and dress slacks, a cigarette dangling like a fall leaf from his mouth. A serpent was in either of the man’s hands, the reptiles rigid, unmoving, like bent pieces of metal.
“Are they poisonous?” whispered Lou to Diamond.
“Course! Don’t work lessen use viper.”
A cowering Oz had his gaze fixed on the motionless creatures and seemed prepared to leap for the trees once they started swaying. Lou sensed this, and when the snakes did start to move, she gripped Oz’s hand and pulled him away. Diamond grudgingly followed, till they were off by themselves.
“What stuff are they doing with those snakes, Diamond?” asked Lou.
“Scaring off bad spirits, making it good for dunking.”
He looked at them. “You two been dunked?”
“Christened, Diamond,” Lou answered. “We were christened in a Catholic Church. And the priest just sprinkles water on your head.” She looked to the river where the woman was emerging and spitting up mouthfuls of the tributary. “He doesn’t try to drown you.”
“Catolick? Ain’t never heard’a that one. It new?”
Lou almost laughed. “Not quite. Our mom is Catholic. Dad never really cared for church all that much. They even have their own schools. Oz and I went to one in New York. It’s really structured and you learn things like the Sacraments, the Creed, the Rosary, the Lord’s Prayer. And you learn the Mortal Sins. And the Venial Sins. And you have First Confession and First Communion. And then Confirmation.”
“Yeah,” said Oz, “and when you’re dying you get the… what that’s thing, Lou?”
“The Sacrament of Extreme Unction. The Last Rites.”
“So you won’t rot in hell,” Oz informed Diamond. Diamond pulled at three or four of his cowlicks and looked truly bewildered. “Huh. Who’d thunk believing in God be such hard work? Prob’ly why ain’t no Catolicks up this way. Tax the head too much.”
Diamond nodded at the group near the river. “Now, them folk Primitive Baptists. They got some right funny beliefs. Like you ain’t go and cut your hair, and women ain’t be putting on no face paint. And they got some ’ticular ideas on going to hell and such. People break the rules, they ain’t too happy. Live and die by the Scriptures. Prob’ly ain’t as ’ticular as you Catolicks, but they still be a pain where the sun don’t shine.” Diamond yawned and stretched his arms. “See, that why I ain’t go to church. Figger I got me a church wherever I be. Want’a talk to God, well I say, ‘Howdy-howdy, God,’ and we jaw fer a bit.”
Lou just stared at him, absolutely dumbstruck in the face of this outpouring of ecclesiastical wisdom from Professor of Religion Diamond Skinner.
Diamond suddenly stared off in wonder. “Well, will you look at that.”
They all watched as Eugene walked down to the water’s edge and spoke with someone, who in turn called to the preacher out in the river, as he was pulling up a fresh victim.
The preacher came ashore, spoke with Eugene for a minute or two, and then led him out into the water, dunked him so that nothing was showing of his person, and then preached over him. The man kept Eugene down so long, Lou and Oz started to worry. But when Eugene came up, he smiled, thanked the man, and then went back to the wagon. Diamond set off on a dead run toward the preacher, who was looking around for other takers of divine immersion.
Lou and Oz crept closer as Diamond went out in the water with the holy man and was fully plunged under too. He finally surfaced, talked with the man for a minute, slipped something in his pocket, and, soaking wet and smiling, rejoined them, and they all headed to the wagon.
“You’ve never been baptized before?” said Lou.
“Shoot,” said Diamond, shaking the water from his hair, the cowlick of which had not been disturbed in the least, “that’s my ninth time dunked.”
“You’re only supposed to do it once, Diamond!”
“Well, ain’t hurt keep doing it. Plan to work me up to a hunnerd. Figger I be a lock for heaven then.”
“That’s not how it works,” exclaimed Lou.
“Is so,” he shot back. “Say so in the Bible. Ever time you get dunked it means God’s sending an angel to come look after you. I figger I got me a right good regiment by now.”
“That is not in the Bible,” insisted Lou.
“Maybe you ought’n read your Bible agin.”
“Which part of the Bible is it in? Tell me that.”
“Front part.” Diamond whistled for Jeb, ran the rest of the way to the wagon, and climbed on.
“Hey, Eugene,” he said, “I let you knowed next time they’s dunking. We go swimming together.”
“You were never baptized, Eugene?” asked Lou as she and Oz clambored onto the wagon.
He shook his head. “But sitting here I got me a hankering to do just that. ’Bout time, I ’xpect.”
“I’m surprised Louisa never had you baptized.”
“Miz Louisa, she believe in God with all her soul. But she don’t subscribe to church much. She say the way some folk run they’s churches, it take God right out cha heart.”
As the wagon pulled off, Diamond slid from his pocket a small glass jar with a tin screw cap. “Hey, Oz, I got me this from the preacher. Holy dunking water.” He handed it to Oz, who looked down at it curiously. “I figger you put some on your ma from time to time. Bet it hep.”
Lou was about to protest, when she received the shock of her life. Oz handed the jar back to Diamond.
“No, thanks,” he said quietly and looked away.
“You sure?” asked Diamond. Oz said he was real sure, and so Diamond tipped the bottle over and poured out the blessed water. Lou and Oz exchanged a glance, and the sad look on his face stunned her again. Lou looked to the sky, because she figured if Oz had given up hope, the end of the world must not be far behind. She turned her back to them all and pretended to be admiring the sweep of mountains.
It was late afternoon. Cotton had just finished reading to Amanda and it was apparent that he was experiencing a growing sense of frustration.
At the window, Lou watched, standing on an overturned lard bucket.
Cotton looked at the woman. “Amanda, now I just know you can hear me. You have two children who need you badly. You have to get out of that bed. For them if for no other reason.” He paused, seeming to select his words with care. “Please, Amanda. I would give all I will ever have if you would get up right now.” An anxious few moments went by, and Lou held her breath, yet the woman didn’t budge. Cotton finally bowed his head in despair.
David Baldacci Page 21