Quick, before the next pain come, I put water on the stove to boil. And I swept the kitchen floor clean as I could. There was still red silt from the flood in the cracks of the boards, but I cleaned it all I could and spread a blanket and quilt on the floor in front of the stove and laid the towels and washcloths beside it. I even got a pillow from the bedroom and put it on the quilt.
Even though I knowed it was coming, I was not prepared for the force of the next pain. It come from behind, like a saw ripping through my backbone and innards. The teeth of the saw felt an inch long and so dull they tore flesh in gobs and strings. What am I going to do? I thought. I can’t stand this much suffering. I can’t do this all by myself. The pain was so hard my legs folded under me and I sunk down on the quilt. I laid down on my side trying to ease the hurt. I curled up trying to make it hurt less. Nothing helped. I pushed the palm of my hand against my back and that helped a little. The pain was a wall slamming into me. I seen the pain was going to get worse, not better. The pain was going to be worser than anything I had ever imagined.
I was so weak I couldn’t do a thing but lay there. The ceiling of the kitchen wobbled and stretched and spun around above me. I held on to a table leg to make things get still. What hope is there? I
thought. What hope is there for the baby? And I seen how I had to do everything for the baby. It didn’t matter about me. If I was finished I was finished. But the baby had to be saved. The baby had to be protected. But I was near helpless on my own.
The only sweetness in the world I could think of was that Jesus might be looking down on me with love and concern. There was nobody else to see me in my misery. There was nobody else to help me through. “Please, Jesus,” I said, “show me some mercy. Not for my sake, but for the little baby.”
I was sick and weak and scared, and I was flat on my back. The pain between my legs come worser than before. But it felt like somebody took my hand. It felt like there was a firmness in the air around me. I clinched my fists and gritted my teeth as the pain got bigger. There was a scream in the house and I wondered who was hollering. And then I seen it had to be me that screamed. The water was boiling on the stove and light through the window showed it was getting on into the afternoon. I had lost track of how long it might be between the pains. It seemed I was in pain almost all the time. I thought of the passage in the Bible where it says, “I will multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” The word “sorrow” sounded more dignified than “pain” or “hurt.” Sorrow was about understanding, about a long time passing.
The hurt was so bad I twisted on the floor and hit the quilt with my elbows. “Lord, help me through this sorrow,” I said. My face was so wet the sweat was getting into my hair and making it all tangled. My back was so sweaty it stuck to the quilt. I would be wore out and ready for rest if it wasn’t for the pain. Even though I didn’t know how much further, it was certain I had a long way to go before I was done. It was a full day’s work. And I remembered that’s what they called giving birth: labor. I was in the
labor
of giving birth. It was hard labor. I would try to think of it as work and not as pain. I had
a mountain of work ahead of me. I might as well pitch in. There was no way I could get out of it. There was no way I wanted to get out of it.
This is my work, I thought. This is the work only I can do. This is work meant for me from the beginning of time. And this is work leading through me in an endless chain of people all the way to the end of time. Other women have done their work down the course of the years, and now it’s my turn. There’s nothing to do but take hold of the pain and wrestle with it. It was not a choice to give in.
But as the stab of pain got bigger and wider in my belly, a raging red flood of pain pouring through me and out of me, I seen I had to grip on to something. I couldn’t just lay with my back on the quilt and push hard as I needed to. I had to push against the pain. I turned around on the quilt so I could hold to the table legs. That give me something to brace against, and I needed to brace myself to push.
The work was to push the baby out from inside. It was hard as pushing the whole world a few inches. Pushing the baby out was hard as shifting the earth and the heavens. I gripped the cold legs of the table like I was going to heave the table at the ceiling. There was still a little dried silt on the legs from the flood. The silt crumbled in my grip like talcum, melting in sweat. We are just earth, I said. But what a miracle of earth flesh is, earth shaped and changed so it takes on feeling and can breathe and think and remember.
The pain that hit me then felt like it was crushing my bones. It was pain so hard my breathing froze. Tears squirted from my eyes and mixed with the sweat on my cheeks and temples. I flung my head from one side to the other, slapping my cheeks on the quilt. The quilt was soaked with sweat. This is what it means to be a human being, to labor and to hurt, I thought.
When the pain was at its most terrible, I felt myself opening up. I set up on the quilt, the pain was so awful. I opened my legs wide as
I could. I opened myself wider than I ever dreamed I could. Inside the pain was the pleasure of stretching. It was pleasure so intense I couldn’t name it. It was pleasure so hard I felt blood tearing out of my veins and through my skin. The pleasure stabbed through me like it was going to bust my heart wide open. The light from the evening sun was coming through the kitchen window on my face, near blinding me. The window was so bright it seemed to shine all on its own. The window throwed light on me like it was watching over me, like it was picking me out with the shaft of white light.
I leaned forward far as I could and put my hands between my legs. Sweat and hair got in my eyes, and I couldn’t brush them away. What I felt coming through me was bigger than an onion, a hairy onion, or apple. I pushed with all the strength in the last inch of my body and the little head come out more. “Please, Jesus,” I screamed. I took hold of the little head which was all slick and hot and wet, like it had butter on it, butter and blood. I cradled the head as tender as I could and pulled.
The light from the window shot right at the place my hands took hold on the little ears and I thought of seed and word, and the way preachers talk about the word in the womb. “Please, Jesus,” I said again, and took hold of the head like it was the most precious fruit. I can’t describe how good it felt to pull so hard. My eyes stung and bulged I was straining so. I pulled on the head, and then I felt the shoulders. It was a precious little body, just a handful, all bloody and sticky. I lifted it on out as easy as slipping a bean from its pod. I was so weak and wore out I was shaking. This is what leads to everything else, I thought.
I held the baby up into the gold light from the window and its eyes was closed and its face and body was slick with blood and a kind of gray butter that stuck to it all over. The blue, bloody rope that twisted from its belly back inside me had to be cut. But I didn’t have any knife or scissors handy. And I couldn’t put the baby
down to go fetch them. There was nothing to do but pull the baby close to my face and bite the twisty cord. It tasted of the salt in the blood and slick stuff. Everything was salty and rich. I could eat the cord if I had to.
And I seen it was a little girl. I had been guessing it would be a boy without knowing it. And now it was a little girl I was holding. I cupped my left hand around the baby’s belly to hold her and slapped the little bottom with my right hand. There wasn’t any response. Could the baby be dead? I looked at the face. The little eyes was still closed. I slapped the butt again, and there was a low tearing sound, more like a lamb or goat than anything human. But it become a cry. It was the cry of a baby. The baby was breathing.
Her skin looked gray under the juice and blood. But where I rubbed it clean, the skin was pink. She was almost too little to hold. I held her in both hands and looked at the closed eyes and the wrinkle in the nose. I held her up in the light from the window. I was so tired I couldn’t hardly set up, yet I felt stronger than I ever had before.
“THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG with that baby,” Hank said. It was the first thing I heard when I woke up from the ocean of sleep. I had sunk into sleep after the pains of the afterbirth. I had cleaned myself up as best I could, then wrapped the baby in a blanket and put it beside me on the pallet. I had gone to sleep without knowing it, dreaming of the baby being born and turning into a flower. But it was a flower that had to be fed milk.
“That baby is gray as pipe clay,” Hank was saying. But he wasn’t talking in my dream. I was waking up.
“It’s a skinny baby,” I said. Hank was bending down to look at the bundle in the cradle of my arm.
“It’s an early baby,” he said. “I don’t think the Lord was ready for it.”
“I delivered her,” I said. I had slept so deep I was calm. I wasn’t going to let anything rile me. I had done all the work myself and I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was sore inside and outside and my legs was stiff. But I was happy to remember what all I had done.
“That baby needs a wash,” Hank said.
“Washing is not as important as feeding,” I said.
“This baby looks too weak to nurse,” Hank said. He bent down like he was going to pick up the baby, and without thinking I tightened my arm around the bundle. It was
my
baby, and I could nurse it.
“The kitchen floor’s no place for a baby,” Hank said.
“Where is Ma Richards?” I said.
“I didn’t bring her,” he said. “I got halfway up the mountain and turned back, cause I thought something might have gone wrong.”
“Bless you,” I said.
“Now we could use her help,” Hank said.
“Too late now,” I said.
“Let me get you to the bedroom,” Hank said.
“I can walk myself,” I said. I couldn’t just keep laying on the pallet on the kitchen floor in front of the stove. Hank picked up the baby and I started to raise myself, but pain shot through my belly and I was too weak to move my legs. I was so weak I fell back on the quilts, helpless to set myself up.
“Be all right in a minute,” I said.
“You just lay there,” Hank said. He carried the baby into the living room and then come back and picked me up. I was so sore it hurt wherever he touched me.
“Be careful with the baby,” I said as he carried me into the bedroom. I was too weak to do anything but collapse into his arms.
After Hank put me down he leaned close and kissed me. As his lips brushed mine our foreheads touched. He smelled like tobacco juice and he felt cool.
“You’re burning up,” Hank said.
“I’m just tired,” I said.
“You’ve got a fever,” Hank said. He lit a lamp and brought it to the stand beside the bed.
“I ain’t got childbed fever,” I said. I knowed that women who took a fever after childbirth got infected inside them, and most of them died.
“You’re hot as a coal,” Hank said, and his voice seemed to stretch out a little in the air. I could remember having a fever when I was a girl and people’s words sounded stretched and broke apart.
“I just need a drink of cold water,” I said. I knowed it would make Hank mad again to think I was sick. I wanted him to see I was just tired.
Hank brought me a dipper of water and I sipped it. The cold water made me shiver, and the shudder made me feel the ache in my bones. Besides the soreness in my middle and groin, there was an ache in my joints and in my legs. I shivered again. I could remember feeling the ache in my bones from a fever. I felt like I had been bruised in every joint.
“I just need to rest,” I said. But my arm shook as I handed the dipper back to Hank.
“I’ll go after the doctor tomorrow,” Hank said.
It was long after dark by then, and Hank left the lamp turned down low. I laid in the bed shivering and I could hear everything Hank said from out in the kitchen. His voice wobbled in curves.
IT SOUNDED LIKE I was in the room with Hank. And then it was like he was far away and I was listening through a tunnel or pipe under the house. I could hear Hank humming to the baby. He had got a jar of milk from somewhere, maybe from the Pooles, and he was dropping it in the baby’s mouth with an eyedropper. It was late at night, but it wasn’t the night after the baby was born. It was two nights later,
maybe. I wasn’t sure. It was later than I had thought, and I had been sick a long time. Hank was trying to feed the baby from a bottle in which he had put sugar water or something like barley water, but it didn’t work. The baby was too weak to drink more than a few drops at a time.
And I knowed where the baby slept. It didn’t sleep beside me in the crook of my arm in the bedroom. It slept in a shoebox in a chair by the fireplace. I had heard Hank describe the place he was fixing for the baby. She was too little for a cradle, even though Hank had made a cradle out of poplar wood the week before. The baby was too delicate to move. The diapers had to be laid under it and over it.
“I HAVE GOT the baby clean,” Hank called. I knowed he was worried. He wasn’t used to handling no baby. “I’m going to make it a sugartit.”
“It needs milk too,” I said.
“I don’t think you can nurse it,” Hank said.
“I can nurse it,” I said.
“You’re too weak to set up,” Hank said. “And you’ve got a fever.”
“Bring the baby here,” I said.
“The baby is too weak to move,” Hank said.
“It’s my baby,” I said, “and I have got a right to nurse her.” It sounded like I was talking somewhere faraway. It sounded like I was in another room.
“You’re too sick to know what you’re saying,” Hank said.
“Bring me the baby,” I said.
“I’ve heard fever ruins a woman’s milk,” Hank said.
“All a baby needs is its mother’s milk,” I said.
Hank went out to the living room and come back carrying the baby in two hands like she was a coal of fire he didn’t want nothing to touch. She was wrapped in a diaper that swallowed her up. I took
the baby in my hands and wrists and held her to my chin. Her little bottom in my palm was small as a hen egg.