“Easy.” Blanche listened to the whole show with sharp ears.
Ella May was not afraid, but she was frightened that Tike would be. Tike, himself, was not afraid but was only nervous because he feared that Ella May would be afraid.
Blanche had been the one to carry healthy feelings between wife and husband many times before, in her hospital training and in a dozen or so actual births that she had been on. Just how she came to be at the Hamlin shack is a long story that runs through the births of several babies for a hundred miles around. She had all of the papers that a trained nurse needs, yet she was not an actual medical doctor. She could stand in for a doctor but could not replace him. She could perform most of the things that a doctor could perform, yet she was not called a doctor. There was only one expert baby doctor in this entire county, only one who had all of the most modern tools, equipment, and knowledge. There were two others, an old absentminded grouch that might or might not come, and a younger fellow with a black mustache who upset the nerves of his patients by making strange remarks from famous plays and operas. Blanche did not charge a fee of any kind. She heard of a pregnant woman by word of mouth, and simply paid her a visit, had an all-day talk, and as a general rule she stayed a few days or weeks, received her room, board, and whatever sum of money the people paid her. She was very well known and warmly welcomed into any ranch or farmhouse door, yet at the same time, being so pretty, she had many kinds of passionate skirmishes with men. As to her love life, nobody seemed to know anything for certain, and many tales traveled the country both pro and con. She was not what is called a midwife nor a hoodoo healer of any kind. Her full breasts and strong body had caused more than one man to attempt to go to bed with her both indoors and out. Tike Hamlin, feeling a craving for an active sex life, had managed to feel of her body a few times, and burned several hours of each day and night to feel more of her. Of course she was several thoughts ahead of him on this matter, and had never entered into the spirit of the thing with him.
Tike had never in his life learned the unhandy art of keeping his cravings a secret. To him a craving was a craving—he did not make them, so did not have to feel ashamed of them. He had said over and over to Ella May that he would “really like to roll that Blanche in a way that she’d admire.”
Ella May felt like she was not in a position to satisfy Tike in her usual way, so if there was a ripple of hurt in her, she more than made up for it by ripples of joy that she was with a child, which to her was the world’s greatest work. She did not proceed to even scold Tike for smacking his mouth at the sight of Blanche. She simply told him a dozen times, “It is purely up to you and Blanche, not me.” Tike even went to great pains to try and convince Ella that he had been with another woman or two since her pregnancy, but she had always known that he was lying. Over and over, he had asked her if she would get mad at him if he was to roll Blanche in the hay. And over and over Ella had shaken her head and said, “If you feel that you need the practice, go ahead.”
And now that the three of them were close together in the one little room, Tike felt all of the joys and hurts that Ella May felt with his baby in her belly. He already felt proud of the new jobs that would come along as the kid grew. He ran here and there, lightened Ella’s chores, and did most of her lifting and pulling, yet he could not shake this hot fire out of his brain that flared up as his eyes looked Blanche up and down. It was not the feeling of wanting to go away with her and live the rest of his life, it was just the old craving to touch her, to hold her, to feel her skin, to kiss her, and to bite her all over. He even tried to hold such a feeling down, not to let it come into his mind, but the more that he fought against it, the bigger the thing moved inside him.
Blanche knew that the labor pains of Ella May there on the bed would not bring any relief to Tike’s passions. The baby would be there howling and kicking before the morning light, but Tike would keep on feeling this way toward Blanche even after Ella May was up walking around.
“How would you like to have a job, Tike?” Blanche asked. She walked to the wash bench, the stove, the closet, to her suitcase, then filled two large buckets and a teakettle with water and set them on burners to heat. “One that will get you out from under my feet for a few minutes at least?”
“Wish’t I was under yore feet. But I ain’t.”
“Do you want a job? Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Put on your coat and your gloves and go out and get that shovel there against the house, then go down by the cowshed somewhere, there back of it, and dig us a hole.”
“Hole.” Tike stood for a moment. “Kinda hole?”
“Just a hole. Oh. About the size of a washtub. So deep.” Blanche moved so smooth and fast about the room that Tike followed her every step. He watched her like she was some kind of a machine moving.
“Gonna do? Bury ’er?” He moved across the floor, half smiling and half afraid.
Ella May lay on the bed and saw herself in her earth house. She did not hear what had been said. She moaned and sighed in a babylike way to her own self for her own amusement.
“Shh.” Blanche took Tike’s heavy shirt down from its nail and held it up behind him as he slipped into it. “Shh. Just a little hole big enough to bury the afterbirth in, that’s all. Here. Here’s your coat. I know it’s as cold out there as a blizzard can be, but we have got to get rid of it and we can’t leave it out on top of the ground anywhere because the animals will all smell it and get into it.”
And then, to keep Ella May from catching on, Tike walked out the door, cursing, “All I got to say is, by God, damn me to hell anyhow, this is one fine time to send me out into th’ face of a damned blue blizzard to get just one little lousy bucket of water.” He slammed the door, shaking the house all over, and carried his shovel down behind the cowshed.
Ella May and Blanche could hear the dim ringing of Tike’s shovel against the hard-frozen topsoil. To Ella it sounded not like a shovel but like the voices of bells, bells of a thousand tones, and the bells had tongues and sang out of their mouths. She saw the bells all over the plains and heard them as they filled the room. They felt the baby push, move down a part of an inch, then push and move down another way. The pain she did not want Tike nor Blanche to see. That needle pain that burned above her left breast she smiled and laughed to hide. Tike down behind that cowshed in this blizzard did not have the least idea that the ring of his shovel was in the room. In her mind, somehow, Ella mixed the sound of the shovel in with the crank of the separator, the rattle of milk buckets. She closed her eyes as her dreams spun past, and talked in a smiling whisper.
Blanche understood a few words but not enough to make any sense out of them. She worked with her cloths, old rags, papers, fixed her two rubber sheets near the head of the bed, speaking to Ella as if she knew every pain, smile, thought. All four of the coal oil burners on the stove were lit and shot whitish, reddish purple lights out through the mica glass doors. Fumes from the newly lit burners mixed in with the steamy vapors from the buckets of water and Blanche felt the sting in her nose. She frowned as she worked and prayed that the fumes would not make it any worse for Ella May. The steamy oil soot became heavier in the air and settled on cobwebs in the high corners where the winds touched easiest. And Blanche worked with a heavy, empty weight in her body, a weight that grew heavier when she looked about the house of rot. She licked her tongue across her lips, then swallowed the saliva in her mouth and tasted the acid burn of the winter dust and oil fumes.
Ella May’s lips tasted the poison dust, and she asked, “Where are all those cowbells coming from?”
Blanche set her ears in the direction of Tike’s shovel. She worked around the stove, touched a pot, stooped to look in the door of a burner, carried an extra dipper of water from the wash bench to pour into the buckets. Her nose was stubby, shiny, and pink like a slick-skinned cherry. Tears blurred her eyes like hot breath on a cold windowpane. She thought of opening up a window or cracking a door, but knew it wou
ld only bring more dirt. The smells from the oil stove made her eyes pink around the rims, and caused her temples to throb and ache. All that she said in reply to Ella May was, “Hmmmm? Bells? Cowbells?”
Ella May tried to smile. “I hear bells. They couldn’t be church bells.” She moved under the covers. “They must be cowbells.”
“Possibly so. Here, raise up your hips a wee trifle. Let me spread this rubber sheet there under you. Here. That is fine. Now. Lift your feet and legs. Do you feel any terrible pains? Here. Now. There. Isn’t that better? Is it not?” Blanche’s hands put the rubber sheet in place before the drafts of cold wind could reach Ella May’s skin. “There are no other kinds of bells that ring out here on these plains that I know of. How is that, now?”
“Better. Yes. But I, ah, see ten million faces inside of bells. Half like bells. Half like people singing. I see the people in the bells and the bells in the people. And they’re all a-ringing together. All ringing at the same time. All together.” Ella May’s lips fell wide apart, she spoke her words against her pillow. The warmth from her breath on the slip felt good against her eyebrow and she moved her cheek closer to the warm spot. “Every cowbell has ten people inside it, and ten people come and go with every cowbell. Ten people live, ten people die, and the cowbell keeps going on. And every time the old cow rings her bell on her neck, ten people talk the dingle of the jingle. And when the old cow is measured and sold the bell goes away with her or the bell falls somewhere behind, and somebody’s toe stumbles across it where it fell, and the voices are in it. But the voices have just been lost in the mud and dried in the dirt. And I’m walking and I’m looking. And so this is me here walking and looking. And I never did to my soul know why, but I always did get the best feeling in the world, just, just out of finding an old brassy cowbell. I see it dried in the dirt. I stop and I dig it out. I clean it out good and then I take hold of the handle or the strap and I shake it just as hard as I can. And of course it doesn’t ring. It won’t ring because I left some plugs of dirt in it. So I feel away up inside of it with my finger and I dig out the crusts of dirt. Rain-mixed, sun-dried dirt. All kinds of horse hoofs wading around in the mud. Men and women with their kids tromping loose hay and grass, dry manure, down in and through the mud. And they push the cowbell down into the mud and they cut it up into big square blocks. And while they lift and haul and work, once in a while the cowbell will ring, just a little dingle, just ever so little a dingle. But all of their voices I hear inside the brass of the bell. And when they cut the square blocks, isn’t it funny? Their voices soak into the sun-dried bricks. And when the bricks are lifted up into a house, then all of their yelling, joking, laughing, crying, everything, is all in the walls and the ceilings, and the floors, and the yards and the fields and the house. Crazy. Silly old, goofy old cowbells.”
Blanche worked fast about the room. She took a white slipover uniform from her suitcase under the bed and tied her hair up tight in a colored handkerchief. She heard a sound in Ella’s talk that could have been caused by a fever from some sort of a pain that Ella tried to hide. A rambling delirious tone. A flow of words from some unconscious place. Ella had not labored long enough to be so feverish. Blanche shook a thermometer and put it under Ella’s tongue.
Ella May’s face felt a bit too hot to the touch of Blanche’s hand, but she guessed this was because her hand was cold from dabbling in the water on the stove. Through the black glass of the north window Blanche saw the first flakes of snow fly in the storm. The wind had blown too hard for the past few hours, the night had been too cold, the clouds had blown too fast, too high, for the snow to form. “A blue blizzard is not a blue blizzard unless the snow blows in with it,” she said to herself. But her words must have been louder than she guessed because Ella May covered her pains with a smile and answered with the glass tube in her mouth, “Unless th’ shnow jusht blowshhh itshelf to death itsh not a genuine blue blizhard.” And Blanche pushed her hand against Ella’s forehead saying, “Do not try to talk. You will swallow the thermometer. I haven’t got another.”
And then through the blow of the snow they both heard again the ring of Tike’s shovel against the deeper dirt by the shed.
“There’sh my bellsh. See?” Ella stiffened herself.
“I told you to lay still. Be quiet. I don’t hear any bells. I only hear Tike up in the attic with his tractor parts. Will you please please be quiet just for a while, Ella May? I want to see if you’re running any fever. Still.”
“That Tike is forever and forever working with those old parts. He thinks that he can build a new tractor out of them. You don’t hear any bells?” Ella May rolled on her pillow. She opened her eyes a tiny slit and the whirl of the room before her caused her to shut them again with a squint. “People? Bells?”
“Quit your dreaming.” Blanche lifted the thermometer from Ella’s lips and held it up in the lamplight. “It is too hard on you. Hmmm.”
“I think you are just lying,” Ella told Blanche. “You are just an old liar. Liar woman. Liar woman all dressed up to fool me. I’d rather to dream than to live and not be able to.” And then a bit later she said, “Dream.”
“Hush. I thought so. You’re feverish. Two points above. Hmmm.” Blanche tapped her fingernails against the iron vines and flowers at the head of the bed. “Anything else hurting you besides your baby? Is there? Any other pains anywhere? I have to know. Is there?”
“No. You lied to me. Hush. I wouldn’t tell you if I had a red-hot stove poker stuck in my chest. I’ve told you ten dozen or more times, no. No. No. Just the baby.”
“Any sprains? Bruises? Headaches? Have you hurt yourself in any way that pains you?” Blanche wiped the thermometer on a white cloth, then dropped it into its case and down in her pocket. “You have more pain than you should at this early hour. If you feel any others, tell me. I have to know.”
“Just the baby. Drawing. Pushing. This pushing down. All of this. Just the baby. After this is over, I’ll be fine and dandy,” Ella lied, but her story had a truthful sound.
Blanche knew that if the pains were causing so much delirium and fever at this early hour, she could expect things to get several times worse before the child saw lamplight. She had seen other cases where old forgotten sore spots, bone and ligament bruises, sprains and fractures, had flashed back into the mind of the woman again to hurt her and frighten her to such a degree that her muscles were tight, nerves tense, and the birth was delayed for several hours and became twice as painful and far more dangerous. She could treat such a thing now if only Ella May would point out to her any such places of pain caused by old hurts. There was pressure on one or more of her nerves, there were feverish worries in her brain. These caused all of the earlier pains to magnify and, already, to run into rambles of unconscious speech. Possibly she could trace it down as the night wore on.
Tike dragged his shovel back across the yard and listened to it ring down against the hard-frozen ground. It rang louder when he tossed it up against the side of the house. He was a walking bag of fears and hopes and the ringing was still in his words when he shoved the door open and said, “Snowin’ ta beat hell out there. Say, ain’t I a papa yet, after all my diggin’ and freezin’?”
In the blowing flame of the lamp he saw Blanche with her finger against her lips, and his words trailed off down the Cap Rock. He ducked his head in bashful sorrow because he had let it slip his mind Ella was not to know that he had been digging a hole in the sod to bury her afterbirth in.
“Shh.” Blanche could not be seen any too plainly in the flicker of the lamp. But her “Shh” was plainer than any snake that Tike had ever heard hiss in the grass.
“Tikey Doodle?” Ella’s voice was high, scattered, broken off into loose stems, then drowned out by a howl of swift wind whining up under the floor. “You? Tikey Dude?”
“No tellin’ what you’ll think to call me next.” He slid out of his coat and sweater and hung them up on their nails. “Yes. This is me. Where’s my brat? I mean b
aby? I come ta git ’im.”
“You will catch your death of dampness up there in that old roost. You just leave those old tractor parts go until some day when it is warmer.” Her words were strained through the bedclothing.
Tike looked at Blanche with his mouth open. “Ahhh. Roost? Ah. But, Lady,” and then he fished for a story. “Ahh, honest ta God, Lady, I got th’ best tractor in Texas put together up there. It’s a su’prize! Soooprize! We’re gonna take on six hundred more acres of wheat land, Lady! Six hundred! I took alla them ole parts, an’ took ’em, an’ I twisted ’em, I mean, I took ’em, an’ I wired ’em all up together! All together! An’ I made the biggest pertiest tractor in th’ world!”
“I have not entertained the slightest inkling of a doubt.” Ella’s laugh dealt her more pain above her breast. “And just what is the name of it? Your tractor?”
“Ahhh. Hamlin. HAMLIN! Better’n any other kind on th’ market! Just wait’ll ya rub yer eye out on it!”
“I’m simply dying to.”
That word dying sent trembles of icy sweat up and down Tike’s backbone, but he shuffled from one foot to the other and tried to act braver. “You’ll hear plenty about it. Don’t worry. Just take it easy and let that little Tike Hamlin git outta yer belly first, ’cause I cain’t git my tractor down outta th’roost without his help. So just lie there, an’ don’t worry, an’ take yer pace easy. ’Cause he’s, he’s th’ only one can lift it down while I hold the roof up fer ’im.” He felt such a shaking in his body that he started to fall to his knees and crawl over to the side of the bed. It was Blanche that motioned him back with her hands as if to say, “We don’t want to get her all nervous again.”
House of Earth Page 16