A Northern Light (10 page)

The next six hours were the longest of my life. Mrs. Crego ran me ragged. I built a fire in the hearth to warm up the house. I rubbed Minnie's back and her legs and her feet. Mrs. Crego sat on the milking stool and rubbed Minnie's belly and pressed it and put her ear against it. Minnie's belly was so big it scared me. I wondered how whatever was in it would ever get out. We gave her castor oil to speed the contractions. She threw it up. We got her up and made her walk around and around the room. We sat her down again. We made her kneel, we made her squat, we made her lie. Mrs. Crego had her eat some gingerroot. She threw that up. I stroked her head and sang "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?", her favorite song, only I changed Bill Bailey to Jim Compeau, which made her laugh when she wasn't moaning.

Toward afternoon Mrs. Crego took another herb out of her basket. Pennyroyal. She made a tea out of it and made Minnie drink a big cupful. Minnie kept that down and the pains got worse. She was in agony. She suddenly wanted to push, but Mrs. Crego wouldn't let her.
She
pushed instead—on Minnie's enormous belly—and rubbed and pummeled and kneaded until she was panting and the sweat was streaming down her face. Then she wrenched Minnie's knees apart and peered between them again. "You son of a gun, you ... Come on!" she yelled, kicking the stool away. Minnie sank back against me and cried weary, hopeless tears. I put my arms around her and rocked her like she was my baby. She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine, and said, "Mattie, will you tell Jim I love him?"

"I'm not telling him any such mush. Tell him yourself when the baby's out."

"He's not coming out, Matt."

"Hush. He is, too. He's just taking his time, that's all."

I started to sing "Bill Bailey" again, but my heart wasn't in it. I watched Mrs. Crego as I sang. She was heating more water. She dunked her hands in it, then soaped them up, and her wrists and arms, up to her elbows. Then she rubbed her hands with chicken fat. I felt my insides go rubbery. I didn't want Minnie to see what was coming, so I told her to close her eyes and I rubbed her temples gently, singing all the while. I think she slept for a few seconds. Or maybe she passed out.

Mrs. Crego shoved the milking stool back in place with her foot and sat on it. She placed her hands on Minnie's belly, and moved them all around. She was very quiet. It seemed to me that she was listening with her hands. She frowned as she listened, and for the first time I saw fear in her own eyes.

"Is he coming out now?" I asked.

"They."

"What?"

"She's got two babies. One wants to come out feet first. I'm going to try and turn him. Hold her now, Mattie."

I threaded my arms through Minnie's. Her eyes fluttered open. "What's going on, Matt?" she whispered. Her voice sounded so scared.

"Its all right, Min, it's all right..."

But it wasn't.

Mrs. Crego put her left hand on Minnie's belly. Her right hand disappeared under Minnie's shift. Minnie arched her back and screamed. I thought for sure Mrs. Crego would kill her. I held her arms tightly and buried my face in her back and prayed for it to end.

I'd never known it was like this for a woman. Never. We'd always been sent to Aunt Josie's when Mamma's time was near. We would stay there overnight, and when we came back, there was Mamma smiling with a new baby in her arms.

I have read so many books, and not one of them tells the truth about babies. Dickens doesn't. Oliver's mother just dies in childbirth and that's that. Bronte doesn't. Catherine Earnshaw just has her daughter and that's that. There's no blood, no sweat, no pain, no fear, no heat, no stink.

Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.

"He's turned!" Mrs. Crego suddenly shouted.

I risked a glance at her. Her hands were on Minnie's knees; her right one was bloodied. Minnie's screams had become short, repeating keens, the kind an animal makes when it's badly hurt.

"Come on, girl, push!" Mrs. Crego yelled.

I let go of Minnie's arms. She took my hands, squeezed them so I thought she would crush them, and pushed for all she was worth. I could feel her against me, arching and gripping, could feel her bones shifting and cracking, and I was astonished. I never knew that Minnie Simms, who couldn't lift the big iron fry pan off the stove when we boiled maple syrup in it for sugar on snow—at least not when Jim Compeau was around to do it—was so strong.

She grunted as she pushed. And snorted. "You sound like a pig, Min," I whispered.

She started laughing then—crazy, helpless laughter—and collapsed against me, but not for long because Mrs. Crego swore at me and told me to keep my mouth shut and told Minnie to keep pushing.

And then, finally, with a noise that was part scream, part groan, part grunt, and sounded like it came from deep inside the earth instead of deep inside Minnie, a baby came.

"Here he is! Go on, Minnie, push! Good girl! Good girl!" Mrs. Crego cheered, guiding the baby out.

He was tiny and blue and covered in blood and what looked like lard, and he struck me as thoroughly unappealing. I started laughing, delighted to see him despite his appearance, and two seconds later, Mrs. Crego handed him to me and I was sobbing, overwhelmed to be holding my oldest friend's brand-new child. The baby was crying, too. He was wailing bloody murder.

The second baby, a girl, came with far less ado. She had a caul over her face. Mrs. Crego pulled it off right away and threw it on the fire. "To keep the devil from getting it," she said. I could not imagine why he would want it. Mrs. Crego tied off the thick gray cords attached to the babies' bellies and cut them, which made me feel woozy. Then she got a needle and thread and began to stitch Minnie up, and I thought I was going to faint for certain, but she wouldn't let me. She bossed me right out of my light-headedness. We got Minnie cleaned up and the babies, too, and found fresh sheets for the bed and set the bloodied ones soaking. Then Mrs. Crego brewed Minnie a pot of tea from fennel seed, thistle, and hops to bring her milk in. She told me to sit down and catch my breath. I did. I closed my eyes meaning to rest for just a minute, but I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, I saw Minnie nursing one of the babies and smelled biscuits baking and soup simmering.

Mrs. Crego handed me a cup of plain tea and touched the back of her hand to my forehead. "You look worse than Minnie does," she said, laughing. Minnie laughed, too.

I did not laugh. "I am never going to marry," I said. "Never."

"Oh no?"

"No. Never."

"Well, we'll see about that," Mrs. Crego said. Her face softened. "The pain stops, you know, Mattie. And the memory of it fades. Minnie will forget all about this one day."

"Maybe she will, but I surely won't," I said.

There were footsteps on the porch, and then Jim was inside, bellowing for his supper. He stopped his noise as soon as he saw me and Mrs. Crego, and his wife in bed with two new babies beside her.

"You've got a son," Mrs. Crego said to him. "And a daughter, too."

"Min?" he whispered, looking at his wife, waiting for her to tell him it was true.

Minnie tried to say something but couldn't. She just lifted one of the babies up for him to take. The emotion on his face, and then between him and Minnie, was so strong, so naked, that I had to look away. It wasn't right for me to see it.

I shifted in my chair, feeling awkward and out of place, and heard the letter crinkle in my pocket. I had been so excited to tell Minnie all about Barnard, but it didn't seem like so much now.

I stared into my teacup, wondering what it was like to have what Minnie had. To have somebody love you like Jim loved her. To have two tiny new lives in your care.

I wondered if all those things were the best things to have or if it was better to have words and stories. Miss Wilcox had books but no family. Minnie had a family now, but those babies would keep her from reading for a good long time. Some people, like my aunt Josie and Alvah Dunning the hermit, had neither love nor books. Nobody I knew had both.

"Is this how you spend the money I give you? Making up Mother Goose rhymes?"

I jerked awake at the sound of the angry voice, uncertain for a few seconds where I was. My eyes grew accustomed to the lamplight and I saw my new composition book under my hand, and my dictionary next to it, open to my word of the day, and realized it was late at night and that I'd fallen asleep at the kitchen table.

"Answer me, Mattie!"

I sat up. "What, Pa? What money?" I mumbled, blinking at him.

There was fury on his face and alcohol on his breath. Through the sleep fog in my head, I remembered that he'd gone to Old Forge earlier that afternoon to sell his syrup. He'd had twelve gallons. We'd boiled nearly five hundred gallons of sap to get it. It was his habit on these trips to go into one of the saloons there and allow himself a glass or two of whiskey from his profits, and some male conversation. He usually didn't get back before midnight. I'd planned to be in bed well before then.

"The housekeeping money! The fifty cents I give you for a bag of cornmeal! Is this where it's gone?"

Before I could answer him, he grabbed my new composition book off the table and ripped out the poem I'd been writing.

"'...a loon repeats her plaintive cry, and in the pine boughs, breezes sigh...," he read. Then he crumpled the page, opened the oven door, and threw it on the coals.

"Please, Pa, don't. I didn't spend the housekeeping money on it. I swear it. The cornmeal's in the cellar. I bought it two days ago. You can look," I pleaded, reaching for my composition book.

"Then where did you get the money for this?" he asked, holding it away from me.

I swallowed hard. "From picking fiddleheads. And spruce gum. Me and Weaver. We sold them. I made sixty cents."

The muscle in Pa's cheek jumped. When he finally spoke, his voice was raspy. "You mean to tell me we've been eating mush for days on end and you had sixty cents all this time?"

And then there was a loud, sharp crack and lights were going off in my head and I was on the floor, not at all sure how I'd got there. Until I tasted blood in my mouth and my eyes cleared and I saw Pa standing over me, his hand raised.

He blinked at me and lowered his hand. I got up. Slowly. My legs were shaky and weak. I had landed on my hip and it was throbbing. I steadied myself against the kitchen table and wiped the blood off my mouth. I couldn't look at my pa, so I looked at the table instead. There was a bill of sale on top of it, and money—a dirty, wrinkled bill. Ten dollars. For twelve gallons of maple syrup. I knew he'd been hoping for twenty.

I looked at him then. He looked tired. So tired. And worn and old.

"Mattie ... Mattie, I'm sorry ... I didn't mean to...," he said, reaching for me.

I shook him off. "Never mind, Pa. Go to bed. We've got the upper field to plow tomorrow."

I am standing in my underthings, getting ready for bed. My camisole is sticking to my skin. It feels like a wet dishrag. It is beastly hot up here in the Glenmore's attic, and so airless I can barely draw a breath. That's no bad thing, though, on a night like tonight when you share a room with seven other girls and all of you have been waiting tables and washing dishes and cleaning rooms in the July heat and none of you has had a bath, or even a swim, for three days running.

Cook comes in. She pokes and scolds, telling this girl to tuck her boots under the bed, that one to pick her skirt up off the floor, threading her way down the middle of the room.

I hang my blouse and skirt on a hook at the side of my bed and pull the hairpins out of the twist Ada did for me this morning—a Gibson-girl style and one that looks better in the drawings in
Ladies' Home Journal
than it does on me. Then I peel off my stockings and lay them on the windowsill to air.

"Frances Hill, you get those boots polished tomorrow, you hear me? Mary Anne Sweeney, put that magazine away..."

I lie down on one side of the old iron bed I share with Ada, on top of the faded quilt. Ada is kneeling at the other side, praying. I would like to pray, but I can't. The words won't come.

"Now listen, girls, I want you to go right to sleep tonight. No reading or talking. I'm getting you up early tomorrow. Five-thirty on the dot. Never mind your whining. We've got people coming from all parts—important people—and I want you looking sharp. There's to be no whispering or gossiping or carrying on. Ada?"

"Yes, Cook."

"Lizzie?"

"Yes, Cook."

"Mrs. Morrison needs you all on your very best behavior. Sleep well, girls, and remember that poor thing downstairs in your prayers."

I wonder how I am supposed to remember the dead girl downstairs and sleep well. Seems to me it's got to be one or the other. I hear Ada get up off the floor, then feel the mattress shake and bounce. She plumps her pillow and tussles around. She curls up on her side, then stretches out onto her back. "I can't sleep, Matt," she whispers, turning toward me.

"I can't, either."

"She wasn't much older than us, I don't think. Do you really suppose her young man is still alive?"

"He could be. They haven't found his body," I say, trying to sound hopeful.

"They're still out there, Mr. Sperry and Mr. Morrison and more besides. I saw them going into the woods after supper. They had lanterns."

We are both silent for a minute or so. I turn on my side and slide one hand under my pillow. My fingers touch the letters.

"Ada?"

"Hmmm?"

"When you make someone a promise, do you always have to keep it?"

"My ma says you do."

"Even if the person you promised to dies?"

"Especially then. On his deathbed, my uncle Ed made my aunt May promise never to take his likeness down off the wall, even if she married again. Well, she did marry and Uncle Lyman, her new husband, didn't care much for Ed watching his every move. But May wouldn't go back on her promise. So Lyman bought a bit of black cloth and glued it across Ed's photograph. Like a blindfold. May reckons that's all right, as Ed never said anything about blindfolds. But you can't break a promise to anyone who's dead. They'll come back and haunt you if you do. Why are you asking?"