Except for them the room is empty. Margaret sits down and turns on the shaded lamp beside her chair. “Mat, you’re worn out. Why don’t you go on home now? I’ll be fine. As soon as anything happens I’ll call you.”
“No ma’am,” he says. “I’m in this for the duration. What would I do off by myself? I couldn’t sleep.”
Margaret takes her embroidery out of her purse, puts on her glasses, and sets to work. “Well, sit down then, and make yourself at home.”
“Shouldn’t we call Bess and Wheeler?”
“I don’t think so, Mat. Not tonight.”
He figured so. She is too practical to call for unnecessary help. All they have to do is wait, and they can do that by themselves.
“Well. All right.”
But he does not make himself at home. It is not in him to yield to this impersonal place. He shifts about the room, looking at the pictures on the walls, looking out the windows, rattling the change in his pocket. He still has his hat on. Because it is, to him, so insistently a waiting room, a timeless space wedged into time, far from any place where he would be at home, it seems to exclude some thought that he needs to think. Whatever might be done cannot be done here. He thinks of Hannah suffering in this alien place, kept apart from them, with such defiant love as makes him an enemy to all the world but her.
From a door saying DO NOT ENTER a nurse comes into the waiting room. As Mat turns to question her, she goes through the swinging door on the opposite side. He wonders if the doctor has come. Surely, he thinks, if he was here they would have seen him come in. Coming aware that he is cursing under his breath, realizing what a doubtful hold he has kept on his feelings, he makes himself sit down. Though he has wished to be dependable and useful, he has failed even to be quiet. The thought shames him, reminding him of other times when he has failed of that steadiness that he most required and expected of himself, and would most have prided himself in had he been capable of it. The only sounds now in the silence that has come over them are the cries of nighthawks flying above the hospital and the town.
Suddenly, without the sound of the approach of footsteps from the other side, the forbidden door is flung open and Dr. Markman comes in, looking the same as he always does—hair in his eyes, tie loosened, rumpled suit looking as though the pockets might be filled with wrenches or fish or garden seed.
“Well,” he says, “how the old folks bearing up?”
“Tolerably well,” Mat says.
“How’re you, Margaret?”
“I’m fine. How’s Hannah?”
“She’s all right. And going to be all right, too. There is no need to worry.” He looks at his watch. “Well, I’m going to try to nap for a couple of hours. This is probably going to take a while.”
“When do you think it’ll be, Doc?”
“Oh, about morning. Hard to say.”
He goes back through the door he came out of, and it is quiet again. Now that the doctor has gone, Mat can think of half a dozen questions he should have asked. He wishes he had asked to have word sent from time to time. But that chance is gone now. It could be a long time before they will hear anything more. He tries to read, but only stares at the blurring print, not seeing it, his mind filled with anxiety in which the cries of the nighthawks circle and approach and recede like thoughts. Finally he gives up, and folds his hands. His shoulder is aching again. He is both painfully tired and wide awake. They are in the midst of what they must go through.
Margaret’s head is again bent over her work, and he watches her now, for several minutes as intent on the movement of her hands as she is. Finally, leaning forward, he says: “I wish somebody would come out and tell us something.”
“I’m sure they will, if there’s a reason to.”
He looks at his watch. It is only two o’clock. He gets up again and stands at one of the windows.
Years ago Anvil Brant’s old father, having come in his last years to the troublesome habit of waking up hours before daylight, sat in Burgess’s store listening to a conversation about spring weather and the lengthening of the days. “Days and nights both getting longer,” he said. “I can tell it.” Mat remembers that now and laughs and tells it to Margaret. “I know what he meant,” he says.
“Morning will come,” Margaret says. “It always does. And the baby will be born.”
“It won’t be as long as it has been, anyhow,” he says, but that doesn’t comfort him. “Well,” he says, “I believe I’ll go see if I can find some coffee somewhere.”
“Do you think you’ll find a place open?”
“Oh, I expect so,” he says, doubting it, but determined to go. “Do you want some coffee?”
“I suppose not. Maybe I’ll go to sleep.”
What he is hoping is that while he is gone the baby will be born, and that he will come back to find all well and the waiting finished. Once down the stairs and out the door, he walks rapidly through the sleeping streets of the town, the silence broken only by the cries of the invisible nighthawks still circling in the air over the trees and the roofs and by the echoing beat of his own footsteps.
He comes to the main street and turns along it. The lights are brighter here and more frequent. From time to time, a car or a truck passes. Mat walks nearly the whole length of the street, finding no place open. He is nearly ready to turn around and start back when, just before the approach to the bridge, he sees a lighted sign: MORT’S DINER.
Going in, he sees at the end of the counter a waitress in a soiled white dress, sitting on a high stool, head propped on her right hand, sound asleep. He is still standing in the door, holding the screen open. So as not to embarrass her he lets it slam behind him. Looking at the signs on the walls, pretending not to have seen her, he notices that she wakes and, hurriedly picking up a wet rag, begins mopping the top of the counter. He goes over and sits on one of the stools opposite her.
“Good evening,” she says. “What for you?” She looks and sounds like she must have been asleep a long time.
“Hello.” He smiles. “Long nights, aren’t they, to have to work by yourself?”
She studies him a moment, and then says: “Well, he ought to be here before long. He usually comes right about this time.”
Irritated at first to have been cast so automatically in that role, Mat sees that the girl’s assumption implies a compliment to herself that she must need—she is remarkably homely, and sleepiness does not improve her. Careful this time not to smile at her, he says: “I’ll have a cup of coffee.”
She fills a cup for him, slides it across the counter, and pushes sugar and cream toward him. She sits down again, propping her head up as before with her hand, though now her eyes stay open. On a shelf behind her a small radio is playing dance music, turned low.
The coffee is both stale and strong, the taste of it a shock.
“Pew!” Mat says to himself, setting the cup down. But to the girl he says: “Now there’s something to wake a man up. You’d have trouble sleeping through a drink of that.”
She merely looks at him, her face long, bony, blank. Whether the look is meant to express indifference or suspicion, or is just empty, he cannot tell.
The music fades off the radio. The clipped neutral voice of an announcer comes on with a news report. Though Mat listens, especially to the war news, when it is over he cannot remember anything that was said.
He realizes how tired he must be. His mind, though almost unbearably wakeful and restless, is failing to connect one time to another. That he is there in the diner, staring down into his half-emptied cup, seems strange to him, hardly believable. His own two hands seem to have reached into the circle of his vision out of a dream.
Deliberately, he forces his mind back to Hannah and the baby about to be born, maybe already born. And he goes back to the hospital, hastened by imaginings of what may have happened during his absence.
When he steps into the waiting room, Margaret is sitting with her eyes shut, her head leaned against the chai
rback. At first he supposes that she is asleep, and he walks quietly. But she sits up and opens her eyes.
“Were you asleep?”
“No. Resting.”
“Has anything happened?”
“No.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“Not yet.”
He looks at his watch. It is a quarter after three.
He sits down, the quiet of the room grows round him again, and it is as though he never left. He only feels tireder, more exposed to what is happening and will happen. For the first time all night he admits into his mind the awareness of the pain surrounding him in the rooms of the hospital. He submits to the fact of it, nerves bared to it, knowing that it surrounds him in ever-widening circles that finally take in the world. Over the roof the nighthawks circle and cry, their voices like small stones striking together under water.
Without expecting to, he falls asleep. The familiar ache sits on his shoulder now like a red bird, not moving.
He dreams he is at work, harrowing a broken field. He can see nothing. He can see a cloud of bright dust rising thickly from the disks of the harrow. He can smell and taste the dust. His eyes are gritty with it. And then the dust seems to draw in and around him until he can no longer see it. He becomes aware of the compactness of his body. He can see his hands holding the reins as he drives the long, slowly shortening rounds of the field. He can see all the surface of the worked earth. He is aware of a point like an eye in the center of the field that his circling will finally bring him to, and where it will end. The dust rises around him again, blotting his sight, to become what next he does not know.
It grows dark. He is aware of water near him, and trees around him, the sound and feel of a cold rain falling steadily, though he can see nothing. For a long time he has been walking in this dark place, stopping to listen, and going on. Unable to see, never knowing exactly where he is in the double strangeness of a familiar place made strange, he must cover all the great dark breadth of the water with his listening, though he expects to hear nothing. He is without hope. He may never have had hope. But he is torn by such grief and love for the child lost or dead that he does hope.
Now in the darkness the sound of the laboring of a powerful engine seems to approach him and grow louder. Now he feels beneath his body the lurching and swaying of a heavy machine. For some time he cannot bring himself to realize who he is or what he is doing. And then there comes a little more light and he does see. With the blade of a bulldozer he is trying to scrape up enough dirt from a frozen, rocky slope to fill a grave. The grave is as big as a field. Young men, soldiers, lie in rows in it, awaiting the covering earth. They lie on their backs, unspeakably submissive to the approach of the great machine. He has a hurt in his shoulder, but whether it is a wound or the claws of a red bird perched there, he cannot tell. He knows with sorrow who he is. He knows that there is a face among all those of the dead that he cannot bear to see. The engine pulses steadily on.
“Mat.”
He knows that the voice calling him is outside the dream.
“Mat.”
It is Margaret’s voice, near, but outside. Now her hand has taken hold of his arm.
“Mat! Mat, wake up!”
He thrusts himself forward, opening his eyes, breaking through, and out, into the room. Margaret is leaning over him, her hand still on his arm.
“Mat?” she says.
“Hm?”
“Are you awake now?”
“Yes. I believe so.”
Elbows on knees, he rubs his hands over his face.
“What in the world were you dreaming?”
“I declare, I can’t remember,” he says, lying. “I can just remember it was a bad one.”
Out on the river, half a mile or more away, he can hear the engine of a towboat laboring up against the current. Though he is awake, he still feels the dream near him, and the sound of the engine still carries its fear.
It slowly fades into the distance, and he sees that the dawn light has begun to grow, drifting through the windows into the heights and corners of the room, dimming the lamp. He grows aware that the birds are singing. The trees, the streets, the air over the town are filled with their voices. They seem to spend themselves recklessly in singing, as though willing to die of it. He gets up, goes to the window, and stands looking out. He can see two rows of houses set back to back, their yards and gardens fenced in neat rectangles, big shade trees growing in them so that not far off he can no longer see the ground but only the billowing green treetops, broken into here and there by the slants and angles of roofs. In the nearest garden there are flowers blooming, irises and peonies, purple and pink and white. The people in the houses seem not to have wakened yet. As far as he can see up and down the street there is no one in sight. Thin shelves and strands of mist stretch over the back lots and among the roofs and the still tops of the trees. As he watches, the mist slowly takes the stain of the rising sunlight.
And then, into the forgotten room behind him, he hears a door swing open.
“Oh!” Margaret says.
He turns, blinking to accustom his eyes to the dimness, and sees, lying half upright in the doctor’s gloved hands, naked and red, still wet from the womb, a newborn child.
“Look, Mat,” Margaret says. “It’s Hannah’s baby. A little girl.”
Mat is looking, afraid to open his mouth, not knowing whether he would laugh or cry. The baby works legs and arms helplessly in the air, twists its body, manages a weak yell, and keeps yelling. The joy he heard in Margaret’s voice swells in Mat now, leaving hardly room for breath.
Dr. Markman, hair in his eyes, a day and night’s growth of whiskers on his face, stands there holding the baby, grinning like a fisherman.
PART FOUR
Chapter 12
GOING DOWN
“It’s Hannah’s baby,” Margaret said.
Nor did Mat call it or think it Virgil’s. Tenderness for Hannah cried out in him too at that moment, and he thought of her.
But from those words, it seems to him, though joy crowded upon him for a while, he began a second descent into sorrow that carried him down more steeply than the first.
Though in his joy he spoke of Virgil to himself, he did not speak of him to Margaret or to Hannah. He does not dare to risk the possibility that Virgil is alive, because he does not dare admit the possibility that he is dead. There is a shame in that, and it has killed his joy.
Going to Hargrave with Margaret to bring Hannah and the baby home, Mat feels a growing premonition of dread. He can foresee the coming days as clearly as if they had already happened. The life of the house will change, accommodate itself to the needs of the new life, and then in a few days the new will be learned, what once was unexpected will become a habit—and they will go on as before. Mat dreads that leveling-off. He has begun to look forward without hope.
On the drive home he keeps mostly silent. Margaret and Hannah are in good spirits, happy in the thoughts and plans that surround the child. Mat is aware that his silence must be noticeable to them, must seem unkind. But fated to go down into the intelligence of death—already going down—he feels himself beyond the reach of all that might lift him back. All the force of his life seems to have withdrawn into his own body, to survive or perish there beyond the help of anyone but himself. Beside him, lying in the crook of Margaret’s arm he can see the baby’s head, covered with bright down. Aware as he is of the potency of hopelessness and death in himself, the sight of that head is almost more than he can bear.
Once they are home, the women and the baby safely inside, he leaves without a word.
DANGEROUS GROUND
In the guest room the new order is quickly established. Hannah is helped into bed, the baby given to her to nurse and then put down in the cradle to sleep. Tiptoeing and whispering, Margaret and Nettie put things away and straighten the room.
They have hardly finished and slipped out, closing the door quietly behind them, hoping Hannah
will sleep too while the baby is asleep, when there comes a knocking on the kitchen door so loud it seems to rattle every loose thing in the house.
“Oh, Lord!” Margaret says to Nettie. “Now who’s that?” She hurries off in the direction of the racket, hoping whoever it is has not come to visit.
It is Old Jack, making a great show of wiping his feet on the doormat, though they are not muddy.
“Good morning, Uncle Jack,” Margaret says. “How are you? Come in.”
“I’m all right,” Old Jack says. But he stands there, leaning his hand against the wall, slowly scrubbing his left shoe against the mat, as if he has come just to wipe his feet. The trouble is that he is making a formal social call, and he does not know quite how to manage it. But now he hastens to mend his manners.
“How’re you, honey?”
“Just fine, Uncle Jack.”
“Honey,” he says, “I come to see the baby. Where’s he at?”
“It’s not a boy, Uncle Jack, it’s a little girl.”
“I knew it,” he says. “Excuse me, honey.”
At the door of the room Margaret tells him, “Be quiet now, Uncle Jack. The baby’s asleep.” She looks in, whispers to Hannah that company has come, and then goes in, beckoning Old Jack to follow.
He does go in quietly, following Margaret to the cradle, where he stands a long time, leaning over, looking down at the baby. Then, making a vague gesture toward it with his right hand, as if starting to touch it and remembering not to, he goes around the bed to the side where Hannah is lying. Smiling up at him, she gives him her hand, and he takes it, pulling off his cap and bowing as he speaks.
“What do you think of the baby?” she asks him.
“I think he looks mighty nice. Mighty nice.”
Hannah makes the sort of bright conversation with him now that she usually does, asking him questions, talking of pleasant, inconsequential things. He stands beside her, nodding, answering, smiling, admiring. Now that he is no longer cramped by any obligation to speak of it, the tenderness he feels toward her and toward the baby becomes plain. This place of mothering and renewal, though he cannot approach it in words, draws him to be in it, to lighten and warm himself in the idea of it.
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 97