by Jeffrey Lent
“I’ll carry you nowhere right now.” Norman opened the bedroom door and stepped in. As he did the doctor said, “My fee’s the same I sit here or deliver the child.”
Connie looked down at him as she passed into the room. “Thank goodness for that,” she said. “We can all rest easy now.”
Marthe had the lamps down and the room was golden. She sat in a corner working a cat’s-cradle, her hands up before her with spread fingers, the geometry of strings taut and everchanging as her erect fingers dipped and lifted, her hair a waterfall onto her shoulders. The room redolent of her wood-smoked woman and the stale mint tea and underlying all that the faint taint of blood. Leah was still up against the pillows, her head back deep into them and her arms spread over the covers in ease. On the night-table the washbasin stained in a swirled stream. A clot of damp cloth also stained beside the door.
Norman went to the bedside and stood over it, looking down. She looked up at him, her face relaxed, without expression. As if waiting for him. She said, “Hey there, Norman.”
“I went to hell’s half acre and back.”
“I’m sorry bout that.”
“You might’ve told me what you wanted.”
“It wouldn’t have done no good, I did.”
He nodded. “It was a waste of time, still.”
“Not my fault. Wasn’t me in a panic.”
He looked off across from her to the far wall. Cabbage roses faint and faded on old paper. Each seemed with its own shadow from the lamp. He looked back to her. “I was afraid of losing you.”
Without smiling, her face lit with humor. “It’ll be more than this gets rid of me.”
He shook his head. “You oughtn’t have been alone though.”
She studied him a moment as if making up her mind. Then, her voice lowered for only him to hear, “I wasn’t.”
He took his hands from his trouser pockets and ran them together before him, his fingers muscled and swollen with work. As if he wanted to touch her. As if he wanted to take something up and hold in them. As if he wanted them available, visible, capable, before the unknown of the room. The cabbage roses almost an audience of dim worn past faces. He assumed she was speaking of the child in her belly but did not want to know if it was otherwise. She watched his hands and he watched the depth of glow in her eyes on him. Thinking she understood everything his clumsy hands were reaching for. She reached a hand then and covered his knit fingers with her own: long supple slender hand that gripped hard once and went back down onto the quilt beside its mate, both resting over the heave of belly. Norman turned then to speak to Marthe.
“Snowcrust must’ve been iced up pretty good in the woods tonight.”
She tilted only her head in shrug. “Them bearpaws cut the ice pret good. Sides, it kept me movin.”
“What do you think about this woman lying here?”
She continued working the cat’s-cradle, her eyes off it and on Norman. “A liddle hard to say. What I think, that bleed just a liddle—what?—false nothing just to scare you. She go through the night fine I bet she go rest the way. Maybe she done something more she ought to. I bet she go just fine. But we wait the night to declare that. Dawn come then we can bet she go the last two, three weeks so fine. But she be stay in that bed even then, not up moving round, caring for you, hey?”
Norman nodded and stepped close to her. “Anything I can get for you, Marthe? Anything you need?”
“Me? I’m just fine. Tell you, what you need to do, get that man out the hall something to drink. I sit here, can smell the need coming off him even worse than his fear. It settle ever thing down round here, you do that.”
“I can do that. I was inclined to deny him.”
She shook her head at him. “Naw, don’t do that. He suffer, we all gonna suffer.”
“I’ll do it,” Norman said. “I need to put those horses up anyhow.”
“You seen the ice busting out the river?”
“Yuht. Godawful big chunks shelving up atop each other, riding and jamming the channel broken in the middle.”
She nodded. “Been years I seen that. Used to love I was down to see it. Don’t get round like old times, me.”
“I appreciate you made it down to here. That horse would’ve rode double, I bet.”
“Less far to fall, them snowshoe.” She grinned at him. “Get on, put you horse up and fix that doctor, him be hurtin pretty good by now I bet.”
“Yuht. I bet.” He turned to the bed, Leah watching him. He felt awkward, oversized in the room of women. His sister in the straight chair by the washstand. She’d gone out while he was talking to Marthe and was back in her skirts. So he only settled his gaze serious upon Leah and said, “I’ll be back.”
She said, “I know.”
To Connie he said, “I’ll take care of your horse.” As he went out Leah asked Connie about the ride uphill. Then he pulled the door shut. The doctor was missing. Norman went downstairs and found him in the kitchen standing over the range with a fresh cup of coffee. Norman pointed to the door to the cellar steps and said, “Down there’s a piddly cask of applejack. Cider in the barrel’s not bad too. I got to care for my horses; then I might join you in a tipple.” The doctor raised rheumy eyes upon Norman and gazed at him hard, the look of a man caught between being found out and deliverance. He sighed and slowly twisted his cup in the saucer, his motion deliberate, calibrated. He pursed his mouth and relaxed it open. “The girl is fine?”
“She is.”
“I feel I’m no help here.”
“You’re here come help is called for.”
“That’s right.” The doctor twisted the cup a final time and let go of it. “You need help with your horses?”
“No,” said Norman. “Go on down cellar. Could be a jolt’d do us both good. I’ll be only a couple of minutes.” Thinking, Let him go ahead and satisfy himself without being watched and then catch up to him before he’s too far gone. Thinking that inside himself was the same dweller owned the doctor; thinking his fields and woodlot and numbing round of work was not so different from the sweetened bite of drink. He wondered what it was for the doctor. And wondered if he’d grow to know his own more as age came to him. Hoped it would not be so. And saw no reason to believe that. So he scooped up Marthe’s bearpaws to set in the entryway where the webbing would stay cold and coatless went out into the night, leaving the doctor to himself.
In the yard Pete and Tommy stood head to head, the one still in the cart shafts and the other trailing rope lines as if tied to the ground. Both swung heads to regard Norman as he came forth from the house. Steam rose from their nostrils and light ice lay prickling their raised coats. It had gone cold. The breaking river was a distant thing in the cold-stilled air. Norman was ready for the relentless deep thawing of April; ready for April altogether. What it was bringing. He went to Pete and lifted off the bridle with the makeshift reins and set it over one of Tommy’s hames. Freed, Pete went for the barn. Norman dropped the cart shafts from Tommy’s harness and went to the head of the horse and rubbed his bristled nose with one hand, breaking off the ice beads and warming it. He tilted his head back to look at the constellations: Orion overhead but swinging now to the south as well as the west. Wherever heaven lay, he doubted it was out among the stars. He didn’t know where it was. He didn’t touch the bridle but laid his hand along the muzzle of the horse and said “Step up” and took his hand away. The horse followed him to the barn.
The lamp wick was guttered and the chimney fouled with sooted smoke, the room weaving with shadow seeming to crawl the walls and sprawl away on the ceiling; the contraction that woke her was a hard stab that broke a gasp from her, waking her from a dreamsleep of contractions and constrictions, the feeling of not being able to get her breath and immediately as bad as they were it was better to be awake. She had slid down the pillow bolster and sideways and so righted herself quietly and squirmed to a body comfort. The room was empty of people but for Marthe who sat collapsed into sleep in the c
orner rocker. Leah lay in bed silent, taking long steady breaths against the next building pain, not wanting to wake Marthe or anyone, not yet, wanting to be alone with this while she could. When they came the pains were of such violence that they seemed to seize her and each left her with long moments of tear-eyed breathlessness. Then she would calm and gather toward the next. She thought to herself it was like having fatal hiccups and almost laughed aloud. It was nothing like that but the idea brought out a half laugh.
And then was lonely, not the loneliness of a child or the aching want of love felt when meeting Norman but the sharp desire for her mother, needing her mother there and then in the room with her, that need a brittle ache, a gorge in her soul: her mother. And that ache magnified with knowing nothing of where her mother was or how, even trying to see her, to envision or conjure something of her face. She would be a young woman still; for the first time Leah realized this. They knew nothing of each other. If there had been a way to send word someway she would’ve but there was none. Not even a letter. It had been as if in fleeing the old life she’d fled all the way into herself. Alone. How else to judge yourself and measure what distance covered if not through the reflected lens of parent or sibling? All this gone from her. And the wanting, the desire, was as if attempting to send a letter to a younger self. And so this left Norman. She felt a great fear of him, never once expressed and never would be. How could she explain that what she loved terrified her? He would understand and seek calm for her and so misunderstand completely. What she feared could not be reassured. The ones that can so simply destroy can never know they hold that power. Told to his face he’d laugh it away or at most watch her as a stranger for a day or two before falling back to his old easy rhythm with her. She knew his life too was shaped by hers but his was of solid construction: of granite rock, hardwood, black-turned earth. Hers was not even spiderweb but the dew-beads strung there on a summer morning.
And thought then again of her mother, birthing Leah at fifteen or sixteen, younger even than when Leah left home, birthing her in the small rank cabin alone with only the old woman Rey for aid. Rey probably all the help she needed, looking at Marthe Ballou sleeping in the corner, her mouth sagged open. Those old women always around someway. Witches, nearly. Knowing more than is good for them to know until you need them to know it. And wondered how her mother must’ve missed her own mother then, the little girl having a baby alone far from home. And was less lonely then, as if seeing all this stretching back made more sense for where she was lying and how. As if someway her mother was there with her. Knowing she would want to be was as if she were. Leah held her hands up over her face and between contractions wept silent into them. Oh God she wanted her mother.
When she took her hands away Marthe was watching her. Not moved in the chair but for her eyes open. A faint gray light smeared the window and the room was cold. Leah wiped her nose with the back of her hand and felt the pain reach and sear deep in her and went through that all the while looking back at Marthe. When it was done for this time Marthe leaned forward in the rocker and said, “You all right there, you?”
“I guess so. Seems like this baby wants to be born.”
Marthe stood. “I thought maybe so.”
It was a gray day. Dawn brought vain thin color to the underbelly of low rolled cloud and the wind turned and it was warm. Time to time spits of rain or sleet fell. Norman and Connie did morning chores together and in silence, each with their own aches from the night before and each with their ears strained, leading their whole bodies through the work, listening as if striving toward the silent house. The faint ping only of rain on the tin barn roofing. A little after nine Glen Clifford arrived in a high-wheeled gig to fetch the doctor for a man with both legs crushed during the night when he slipped standing too close on the heaving riverbank beside the bridge in Randolph, the man trying to watch out for ice lodging against the bridge abutments. Glen back in an hour without the doctor, who found the man dead and repaired then to his home to sleep away the night’s long nurse at the applejack, sending message with Glen he’d come if needed. Glen and Connie sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee while Norman sat and fiddled or stood to pace, the house holding so easily the drifting down of drawn groaning and small choked-off cries. Midday Connie warmed food that none ate save for Norman, who ate a whole loaf of bread sliced and spread with butter. Then terrible cries rose and rose until they seemed to be only one long-drawn pitch of a soul fighting to escape itself and Norman bounded the stairs to the room where Leah drove him out with her cursing of him: God damn you Norman What’d you do to me Goddamn you. Marthe catching him at the door to stroke his arm, telling him to pay no mind, it was the pain of it; she needed that fight; it would pass. He went back downstairs through the kitchen to the cellar to draw a pitcher of cider but when he carried it back to the kitchen Glen was gone again and Connie was over the range, pushing back and forth the copper boiler and the big kettle and several smaller pots all filled with water, as a commander keeps all craft standing to in formation before a stout wind. All she sought was each at a constant simmer. He sat alone with a mug of cider but could not stand the cries and rose and carried the cider with him to the barn, where he sat in the small shop room on the south side and sharpened tools and watched out the window at the spring weather rolling in. And so missed when Glen returned carrying Mrs. Pelham with the fey Breedlove woman as familiar or shadow or simple reinforcement but when Norman stepped forth from the barn midafternoon he saw the livery’s best covered carriage, the wheels caked with mud and the underside coated above the axle, and knew then not only who had arrived but also that Glen would one day soon marry his sister. The carriage was no vehicle for weather thus. He wondered if the use of it had been approved by Clifford the elder or if the son had taken it upon himself. Either way the meaning of it was clear. And went to the house to find the women silent in the parlor balancing cups of tea on knees drawn together, each listening not only to the rising and falling of life searching up the stairs but also to their own memories or hopes. Glen twisted from his stance at the window to duck his head at Norman. Norman spoke to the women and left them there, taking Glen to the kitchen to pour him cider. Now on the stove alongside the simmering pots was the great lard kettle, bubbling. As the men sat silent Connie came in and began to turn doughnuts into the lard and out again with a wire hook. She piled a plateful and carried them into her mother and Breedlove. Norman and Glen stood beside the stove and ate them as they rose and were drained on brown wrapping paper, the grease on them scalding the roofs of their mouths. The broken open sweet steam rising of sugar and yeast.
Norman felt as if each of his bones and joints and muscles were weakened to breaking. As if he’d been holding himself upright against a descending sky. Almost as if back with the long marching. His eyes ached and brimmed red. If not careful, his hands would shake as he reached for one thing or another. The cider helped only in that he no longer felt as if he’d fall down. It had been a long night with the doctor and at some point during it he’d failed to anticipate the day. Believing she’d hold out the short weeks left. Now he felt a sickness through him, not of his own making but as if he’d failed her some way. Some way he could never call back. Never do over. Her cries overhead had gone off now, had faded to deep grunts and body-drawn groaning. He had decided she would not live through this. He had decided he could forgive no one. Least himself. His revulsion was complete, near to panic. He stood eating doughnuts.
Then the house was quiet. He walked the kitchen. Connie came down and using thick rags lifted the copper boiler to carry up. He offered to take it and she looked at him and said no and went out. He listened to her footsteps up the stairs. Then quiet again. Then the single cry: high, torn, slicing keen as a razor, new. Raging into life. As if thrust from the womb and also torn from the breast of a greater, kinder mother. As if knowing no kindness had been done it. Furious rage. One raw gulped-out cry. As if knowing all the souls within the house straining to hear that
cry knew this loss and so welcomed her joining them. Or had forgotten they knew it and so welcomed her as surrogate to themselves. That cry then: new, and very old.
Norman went upstairs to view his wife and daughter as soon as both were washed clean and swaddled, the child in lambskin with the fleece still on and Leah in a fresh nightgown and with the bed changed and the room cleared of the bloodied and soiled linens and toweling—Leah still sobbing and shaking, holding the child to her opened plump breast—and he went to the long narrow closet built-in and drew out an additional quilt and spread it over the bed, drawing it up close under the infant. Then Leah raised the child from her breast and the girl was silent as Norman held her, down before his chest as a small fragile piece of firewood, gazing into the puckered face with pinched closed eyes, holding her thus and feeling nothing, a small scrap of fear only and nothing more. The fear then nothing more than fear he might drop her or not hold her right. He’d expected something other than this but could not say what it was. So he only held her silent and read her features and looked to Leah and asked what they might call her. And Leah spoke her name, not as a question, not as a possibility but as an arrived-at thing and he shortened it and so it was done. Then he handed her back to her mother and Leah slid her gently sideways until the nipple brushed her mouth and the girl took it. And Leah, no longer sobbing but still racked with shaking, turned eyes up to him, eyes hooded with a bliss he’d seen before there and that seeing now ran a tremble through him, as if seeing something he ought not to. Leah smiling, her face etched with light over the long drain of fatigue, telling him to leave them then, telling him to send his mother up. And he looking down at her, his body and brain jangling, still had the moment of himself to bend and press his cold lips to her hot forehead before righting himself and agreeing he’d of course do that.
And so descended the stairs to find his mother at the parlor door, her face wary and soft at once, a small woman lined and frightened and radiant, close to tears. He touched her and told her it was a girl and for her to go up, and heard her tread the stairs, her steps tentative and gaining as she went; not the first time in six years she’d been in the house but the first time she’d climbed those stairs her feet knew as her own, and he swung out into the kitchen thinking there was all too great a pain in this to make sense of, too great to hope to change and yet no different than it could ever be. It was all he had and it made no sense. In the kitchen Marthe and Connie and Glen sat at the table, too high-spirited for him to understand and he went past them, saying nothing but what he had to, refusing Glen’s help as he worked into his chore coat and went out into the young dark for the barns.