Wings for Nurse Bennett

by Adeline McElfresh

  The men were over there now—no doubt talking about Herman Thornton Elder, Sarah thought, trying to fit the wispy brown wren of a man with sketches of that missile-launching area and those three men—

  Wishing that she hadn't thought of any of them, she pulled on her jacket.

  "Jan-Doreen," she said, "while you and Andrea rest, I'm going to run over and check on Mr. Jefferson." And smilingly, "I don't think I trust him out of my sight."

  "Tell them not to eat all those sheep steaks." Sarah promised and went out into the crisp cold air. Although Mrs. Emlyn predicted the storm was over, she didn't see a glimmer of a star to say the sky was beginning to clear.

  The blackness, a gray-ghost of a night because of the snow, seemed to have closed down on the tiny valley, smothering it in fold after fold of impenetrable nothingness that not even the fire Al and Andy were tending could penetrate. They had plenty of wood, thank goodness. And for now, at least, food—even if it was, as Mac McDavie had announced at first bite, "tough as whet leather." She smiled at that.

  It had been tough, so tough that the longer she chewed the bigger and tougher the bite seemed to become, but at least it was food and there was plenty of it.

  Seeing her, Andy Stevanic came running. "Is—is everything all right?"

  "Everything's fine, Andy. It's going to be a while, though, I'm afraid."

  He nodded, and even though, in the dark, she couldn't see the misery etched on his terribly young face, she knew it was there. When he was inside it had been such eloquent misery, even in the nickering firelight, that she'd been glad when he had left the cabin.

  "Is there anything—I mean—"

  Impulsively, understandingly, Sarah touched his arm. "She's going to need you to hang onto, after a while. Right now, why don't you go in and talk to her?"

  He almost bolted into the cabin and Sarah, not seeing Al at the signal fire, followed the narrow, trampled-hard path through the snow to the other cabin, only a few yards away.

  "May I come in?" she called through the leather door.

  "Come on," Mac McDavie answered. And when she was inside, "How're things going?"

  "All right."

  "She's a great little gal."

  Sarah nodded. She wondered if Mac McDavie would have kept after that big ram until he was ready to drop, if he could have struggled back with it, if it hadn't been for Jan-Doreen—and Andrea. He was like most men, she thought. A pregnant woman is something special, to be revered and looked out for—

  She smiled. "You are not to eat all that sheep. Orders from Jan-Doreen."

  "My jaws still ache from eating what I did."

  George Jefferson, who had been sitting on the edge of his bunk when she entered, grumbled; "Well, at least you got your fill. My little gut's still afraid of my big one." He glared at Sarah in mock disgust. "I suppose tomorrow I'll get broth again."

  "You're better. Patients always are when they get grouchy."

  "You know, I think I am." He looked thoughtful. "I think I've said this before: maybe I am chronic."

  "So have I," Sarah said and quoted herself, "Don't count on it."

  After taking his temperature—it was still an even 101—she returned to the other cabin. Jan-Doreen was counting off the things she had for the baby, but at her parents' home in Vincennes.

  "Wouldn't you know it, Sarah!" she wailed as Sarah entered the cabin. "Poor Andrea isn't going to have a stitch!"

  Sarah said, smiling, "Well, there are Jenny's good linen napkins. Not every baby has linen diapers."

  "I think I'm getting another one, Sarah."

  Sarah glanced at her watch. There had been less time between this pain and the last one…

  It was a quickening that continued as more hours passed, just as the pains intensified, and when Sarah examined Jan-Doreen again dilation was coming along well. Andrea was moving into the pelvis, her progress forced by the contractions of the womb laboring to expel its precious burden, and soon— In a few hours, Sarah thought and again checked the time.

  After two. Jan-Doreen had been in labor more than eight hours, which, Sarah knew, was considered average labor for babies after the first one.

  These first babies, though— She kept the sigh, which was one of sheer weariness, inaudible, strictly for herself.

  Time dragged toward the late dawn. Al kept the fire in the cabin going now that Andy didn't leave Jan-Doreen's side even for the few minutes it would take to bring wood from the lean-to, and more than once Sarah found herself running the mental checklist of things she was going to need. Scissors. Strips of gauze. Sterile gauze pads. Cotton and Q-Tips. Boracic acid solution— Everything was ready, even to the rubber sheet that Jenny had thought to slip into the medical bag.

  Jenny hadn't overlooked a thing, Sarah thought, When she'd said she had tried to think of every eventuality, even babies, she had been right…

  Meeting Andy Stevanic's harried eyes, she smiled reassuringly.

  He stopped flexing his hands, to which Jan-Doreen had been clinging during her pains. The grin he managed was extremely weak and Sarah thought suddenly that Jenny had forgotten one thing: an analgesic or something for fathers-in-waiting.

  Andy was right where he should be, though, right where Dr. Lindon, at the hospital in Dayton, maintained a father should be, in the labor room. "What if he does get sick and maybe pass out? It's not going to hurt him, and having him there means one hell of a lot to his wife…"

  Reverberations of that staff meeting had reached even the students' lounge (it had been when she and Jenny were students) and had, Sarah was sure, added fuel to the high-flaming esteem with which Jenny— and every other nurse who'd ever worked with him —regarded the young obstetrician.

  Sarah hid a yawn behind her hand. Waiting, it was easy to slip into the past… and she wasn't sure that she wanted to. Not into her own, anyhow. She had been gone from Dayton only a week, and from Ralph's office only a few days longer than that, and already the plush suite of reception and examining rooms seemed remote.

  So did Ralph, sometimes, she thought. And he shouldn't.

  How could a person with whom you were in love seem in another world?

  As Ralph did… as he always had, she realized with a suddenness that was startling.

  Too sharply aware of it, she stiffened, as Jan-Doreen did in anticipation of each pain. Her world and Ralph's were as far apart as her world and—and Angie Ferdinand's, she thought.

  As far removed from each other as Ralph's and Mrs. Ferdinand's were not—

  She almost welcomed the swift staccato sound of the shot whipcracking through the darkness outside.

  Jan-Doreen cried out, "Andy!"

  "It's all right, honey. Want me to go see?"

  "No!" Her hand tightened on his.

  Sarah already was at the door. "I'll find out," she said, and stepped outside. Mrs. Emlyn was beside her.

  Mac McDavie was coming toward them. "Nothing," he explained before they asked. "A wolf came sniffing around that sheep hide."

  Which Mrs. Emlyn had been quick to warn them would happen, "A raw hide like that—"

  Now she asked, "Did you get him?"

  "No, worse luck."

  His tone said as plainly as words could have: And one shell less. "Sounds like she's having a hard time."

  Sarah said that she wasn't, not particularly, and knew that he didn't believe her. Men so often expected babies to give a gentle nudge and say "Here I am" and be born, as easily as that… She watched him go on toward the signal fire and Al Malcolm, and after a brief time followed Mrs. Emlyn back into the cabin.

  Jan-Doreen's fists were clenched against the onset of another pain, and when it subsided Sarah sponged her sweaty face with a towel moistened in snow water melted in one of their tin cups. She needed the iron kettle for the supply of hot water she was going to need to sterilize the scissors and strips of gauze for tying off the cord.

  "Jan-Doreen, honey," she said after a time—and another pain, a particularly sharp one,
it seemed, "let's see how Andrea's coming along, shall we?"

  The light was not the best, but the top of the baby's head was beginning to appear.

  "She has Andy's hair," she said lightly. "Blond. It won't be long now, honey."

  "Andy—"

  Jan-Doreen's smile was awfully tired, Sarah thought. As, for Heaven's sake, why wouldn't it be?

  "—if it isn't a girl—"

  He bent quickly to kiss her—to hide the tears Sarah was sure she saw spring into his eyes—and when the quick, stabbing, white-hot pain grabbed again he pressed his face against hers.

  "I love you, Jan-Doreen—I love you—love you—"

  Sarah didn't hear any more. Suddenly there wasn't time. Andrea—or Andrew—had decided to be born and the skin around the vulva was being stretched much too rapidly.

  Oh, God— Torn flesh, infection—here—

  Swiftly Sarah covered her hand with a towel snatched from Mrs. Emlyn's knowing hand and pressed in, feeling the baby's chin and maneuvering it gently —gently—through the opening.

  Moments later Jan-Doreen's baby was in Sarah's hands—a tiny, bluish, slime-covered mite that didn't give the first wee-kitten mewling sound even after it had been grasped by the heels and held upside down while the tiny eyes, mouth and nose were cleaned with a gauze pad— Sarah patted the baby's back again.

  Oh, God! Was the baby stillborn?

  After all this—

  Chapter 10

  In those next minutes the cabin might have been the sterile, superbly equipped delivery room at the hospital in Dayton, Sarah might have been Dr. Lindon himself as three fingers of her right hand moved lightly but briskly up and down the baby's back. Without result.

  Oh, God, she thought. Please.

  The thought became a prayer, a plea for the baby's life.

  The cabin's stillness, broken only by the whisper of the fire, the quick sharp snap of a spruce log burning through and sending a tiny shower of sparks toward the chimney's maw, seemed suddenly harsh.

  They were watching her, watching the baby, Andy and Jan-Doreen gripped by a dread-filled, growing, gnawing fear, Mrs. Emlyn knowing that something was going wrong—already had—

  With a part of her that seemed oddly detached, Sarah was aware of their eyes, of their steadily mounting fright that almost matched her own.

  What had gone wrong?

  What could have?

  Jan-Doreen had had a fairly long labor, yes. But not as difficult a one as might have been expected under the circumstances and there had been no indication that the baby was not alive.

  Had it been those final moments, when, with startling suddenness, the baby had come?

  Surely—

  "Miss Bennett," Andy Stevanic sounded as if he were choking, "is—is—"

  "Come on, honey, howl," Sarah said to the still not breathing baby. She didn't want to ignore Andy—she couldn't do that—and yet—

  With deft sureness she grasped the tiny ankles with her left hand and held the baby up.

  Come on, Andrea—

  But it was a silent plea this time as she spanked the small red-pink buttocks, briskly but gently.

  Oh, God! Wasn't this going to work either?

  Andrea, honey—

  The thought that she didn't know whether the baby was Andrea or Andrew—there hadn't been time, in this brief span that seemed an eon, and besides, some remote fragment of consciousness reminded her, sex could be awfully unimportant—sprinted through her mind.

  That same remote fragment of her awareness told her that Al Malcolm had come in and was standing, unmoving, unbreathing even, it seemed, just inside the door.

  "A-Andy," Jan-Doreen whispered, "I love you, darling."

  Dr. Lindon would have said I told you so.

  That thought went sprinting too, for as Andy Stevanic reached blindly for his wife's hand and buried his face against her throat the baby made a snuffly whisper of a sound that quickly became a weak, baby-kitten mewling.

  "Well, now," Mrs. Emlyn's matter-of-factness was edged with relief, "that's more like it. Tie off the cord, Sarah, and give him to me."

  If either Jan-Doreen or Andy heard that "him" —or her answering, "It's a girl"—they gave no sign, and as she cleaned her hands with some of their precious isopropyl alcohol Sarah thought that they were like parents all over. They had their baby, everything is all right—

  When she remembered Al, he had gone, slipped out as silently as he had come and gone to the other cabin to tell Mr. Jefferson and Mac McDavie…

  Using the strips of gauze and the scissors they'd already sterilized by boiling in the iron kettle, she tied off the cord in two places, the first knot perhaps five inches from the baby's navel and the other two or three inches farther, made sure they were tight but not too, and then carefully cut the umbilical cord.

  "There! Honey," to the baby, "you're on your own! Jan-Doreen—" She held the baby for Jan-Doreen to see.

  "Ohhhhh, Sarah! Andy! She's so-ugly!"

  But the light on her face didn't say so…

  It was another hour before Sarah could leave the cabin for the breath of sharply cold air that was a godsend. The placenta came quickly, and afterward Sarah kneaded Jan-Doreen's womb ever so gently through the relaxed abdominal wall, kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, keeping the womb rock-hard beneath her working fingers so that bleeding would be controlled. Hemorrhage now was the thing she feared. Without blood or plasma or even the equipment necessary to transfuse person-to-person, the thought of Jan-Doreen losing too much blood was a nightmare.

  As those terrible frightening minutes just after the baby had been born had been.

  She could think of them now and recognize her fear, let it turn her knees to a wet sponge, flutter like some terrified wounded thing there behind her sternum… Remembering, she drew a deep, shuddery breath.

  The baby—"Andrea," Mrs. Emlyn had been quick to christen her—lay on the spruce-bough bed close beside Jan-Doreen, snugly wrapped in a turkish towel and Mrs. Emlyn's silver fox cape.

  And looking like a papoose, Jan-Doreen had just murmured sleepily.

  "All babies look like papooses," Sarah told her. "Even blond ones." Although her fingers were beginning to ache, she kept on kneading, gently, gently.

  "Next time you see them lined up in a nursery, you notice." Jan-Doreen's sigh was tired. "Andrea would have been the beautifulest baby there."

  "A while ago you said she was ugly," Sarah reminded her with a smile.

  "Oh, that was when she was just born."

  Laughing, Sarah thought that she could feel the womb contracting with the continued kneading. The danger wasn't over, there still might be hemorrhaging from the womb, and a baby's first few days—

  Reminding herself of those things, Sarah checked to be sure there was no excessive bleeding. Then she took the iron kettle and went outside. Al or Mac McDavie could clean it and pack in more snow for melting. They were going to have to clean the cabin too; but first, coffee. The last of Mrs. Emlyn's coffee— Somehow the thought did more to sap her than bringing Andrea Stevanic into the world had, and it didn't help to tell herself that she was just tired. She was, she was weary to the marrow of her bones, but, oh, God! She bit her lip. She mustn't cry now—

  Damn— Paul Fergis closed his eyes but it didn't help. The blobs and darts, the concentric circles and fragments of circles, all of them fuchsia-colored and saffron and fiery green as if he were seeing a madly disintegrating aurora borealis, went right on pinwheeling, exploding, stabbing at his eyeballs. He stumbled, steadied himself, forced his eyes squint-wide. This sunlight on snow was worse than the storm, he thought. A whole hell of a lot worse. His eyeballs burned and every once in a while felt as if splinters were being jabbed into them. His lids were swollen and raw-feeling.

  Norstead's were too. The angry red of fresh-killed beef. Norstead's eyes were bloodshot, his lips were chapped and cracked, as were his own, Paul knew.

  Sometimes he tasted blood, but he no longer put his gl
oved hand against his mouth. He had done that until the back of his glove showed too many streaks of blood, frozen and turned a dark brown now.

  The sun had been up when the clouds, which had been showing signs of breaking away for some hours before, finally cleared and Paul figured they were walking in a more or less west-northwesterly direction.

  Although they had lost it a time or two, they were still following the river, not daring to leave it because in this country a man could go round in circles for days until he dropped in his tracks for the wolves. How much longer they could go on, though, even with the river to guide them, was something else again.

  A man's body had to have rest and warmth and food, and his and Norstead's had had damned little of either since they'd left the cabin. They'd broiled the ptarmigan over a jack-pine fire, but the snowshoe rabbit he had managed to knock in the head this morning as it sat, snowed-in and cozy, had been eaten raw as they plowed on, sometimes to their thighs in snow, sometimes scrambling over a rough, frozen, snow-ice surface that would rip a man's hands and knees to shreds if he slipped and fell.

  Even raw meat gave a man strength, though, and when you were hungry enough it didn't matter too much that it was raw and bleeding.

  He waited for Norstead to catch up. "How are your eyes?"

  Norstead's groan wasn't entirely simulated.

  "Mine too," Paul said.

  They stood for minutes, not talking. Because they were too tired or too discouraged?

  Paul put the question from him. Hell, yes, they were tired and discouraged, but they couldn't stop, they couldn't give up!