“Addie,” he whispered, and she near startled out of her chair at his sudden nearness.
Her creator, her protector, he felt in his drunken stupor, and his eyes filled with tears as he laid his hands on her little ankles, whispering fervently, “I won’t let you get cold agin, I pledge to the Almighty. I’ll never let you get cold agin.”
“Cold? What’s wrong, Sylvanus? I’m not cold.”
“Never, never”—he shook his head, tears rolling down his cheeks—“swear to God, Addie, you’ll never be cold agin.”
“But I’m not cold. Are you crying?” and her voice rose in alarm. “Is it Eva?” she cried, half rising. “What’s the matter, Syllie?”
“Shh, I knows, I knows you can take care of yourself,” he said, easing her back into her chair. “Everybody knows Addie can take care of herself. I’m not saying that—”
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing. I don’t want you worrying, that’s all. I knows, I knows”—he raised his hand placatingly— “you thinks I’m foolish to be worrying about you like this, but that’s just what I’m saying—I’m going to take care of you, I just wants you to know that, that’s all. I’m—I’m going to take care of things.”
She had pulled back, staring at him in astonishment as he stuttered his way through this last speech. When he’d done, she said blandly, “You’re drunk.”
His eyes widened into a hurt look. “Now that’s a fine thing to say. I says I’m going to take care of you and you calls me drunk. Well, sir.” He rose all in a huff, hating that he lurched, hating that she watched him wavering toward the bedroom. Jeezes, the wind still had him and he clutched the door frame as it swerved before him. Taking good aim, he then fell onto the bed. “Aah, it’s warm, so warm,” he murmured, burying his face into its comfort, hearing her as she called out something—what was that? The wood? Put in some wood? Was she saying put in some wood? And he would, his dear, lovely Addie, he would put in some wood, he would stog that stove to its tops, he would redden its cast-iron front with heat, he would never, ever leave her agin, his Addie, his lovely Addie—
“Nice fellows,” he murmured as he opened his eyes a bit later, feeling her tugging at him, scolding him about getting the bedclothes wet. “Nice fellows.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
TOKEN FROM GOD
H
ER WATER BROKE
two weeks before her time. A cold snap had fallen, crystallizing the air and sending everyone chopping the ice from their wells, two, three times a day. Not wanting her to be alone or his mother trekking through the snowbanks, Sylvanus laid down his axe and saw and stayed home that week. When she cried out to him from the kitchen one mid-afternoon, her tone fraught with fright, he threw down the shovel from where he’d been shovelling off the door place, and ran, pummelling along the footbridge to get his mother. Practically lifting her off her feet, he half carried, half walked her back across the brook, shoving her inside his kitchen. Snatching the scarlet red cloth off the table, he tore back outside, furiously waving it—a signal he’d set up that the midwife was needed.
He met her a hundred yards to the other side of his mother’s house, looking like a lost janny with the dark woollen blanket wrapped around her bony old shoulders, and the skin of a beaver tied around her head. It wasn’t how his Addie had planned it—this old thing with the wisps of hair scarcely covering a splotchy scalp, and the fat stubby butt forever stuck to her bottom lip; but too late now for the young thing in Ragged Rock who was doing all the birthing these days. Coaxing and pleading for the crone to hurry, hurry, please hurry, he kept two steps ahead of her, not wanting to pick her up and run with her as he had his mother. When finally she made her examination and determined that it would be hours, perhaps days, before the baby was born, he bent to Adelaide’s begging looks, and layering himself in woollens and skins, he raced Manny’s horse and sled through the woods, across the ice-covered ponds and down the hills into Ragged Rock.
But the young midwife was gone—up to Hampden to deliver a child there. He bounded back into his sled and was well on his way to fetch Florry instead when a sudden dread fell upon him. Pulling back on his reins, he stopped cold. And with foreboding weighing his limbs, he pulled the horse around and started toward home. Suze came tearing out of her mother’s house, a scarf wrapped around her head and dough still clinging to her fingers as she hauled on a hooded parka.
“She’s started, haven’t she?” she yelled out, bolting in front of the horse. The horse snorted, jerking sideways around her, but she clung to the grip on the sleigh, pulling herself up without him even stopping. “Where’s Florry, then? How come she’s not coming? My gawd, you’ll break our necks,” she cried out as he whipped the horse, near tossing her off the sled as they sped down a bank, jolting up the other side and over the roughened hobbles of a frozen brook. He said nothing, saw nothing, giving the horse his head and the whip to hurry the hell up and get him back home.
“She already sent Melita and Elsie home,” said Eva, meeting Suze at the door. “I don’t allow she’ll be wanting you, either.”
Leaving Suze to fight it out with his mother, Sylvanus pushed in through the door, quailing at the sight of the midwife’s clawed hand upon his Addie’s naked belly and the other probing at her most private part.
“No place for a man,” the crone whined, her mouth all sunken without the habitual butt sitting upon it.
But he wasn’t budging. “Not to worry,” he crooned into Addie’s ear as she cringed beneath the hag’s claw. “Mother’s keeping the fire going good and the water heated, and she’s done enough birthing herself to know a few things.”
Adelaide nodded, her face pale, pensive. “I don’t want nobody here,” she cried, hearing Suze’s voice through the door.
“She’ll stay in the kitchen, but you’ll not get rid of me, lady. I’m sitting here till that baby’s bawling in my arms.”
And thus he sat through the evening, his head close to hers, mindful to keep his breath off her face because of her not liking smells, and coaxing her through what must’ve been Dante’s frozen circle of hell, for never had he felt a night so cold, and never had he witnessed a body writhing and locked into such pain. A horse, once; he’d seen a horse scream and pound the ground to bits with its hooves as it sprawled on its side, eyes bulging with exertion, nostrils splayed, and every muscle taut to the point of tearing as that strong, lean beast screamed and pounded its way through the night. When finally, in the light before dawn, a weakling foal was expelled from its innards, the horse lay convulsing into death. And, Lord, how his heart now feared for this sprout of a woman who would not scream, and who would not moan or pound her pillow despite her taut and jerking body, and who held her breath despite everyone telling her not to and gritted her way through paroxysm after paroxysm of pain with mere little gasps escaping her tightly clenched teeth.
But as the night wore on, minute by minute, hour by hour, and morning dawned and she lay sweltering in sweat, her face more stark than the wintered land outside, and her eyes more wild than the waters of the neck, her moans started making themselves heard. Only she was too tired now to manage more than the slightest sound, and he stood behind her, silently cursing the woman Eve for believing such a thing as a venial sin, and helped push his wife, his suffering sinner, into a sitting position as she grunted and pushed and grunted until finally, as a pale glimmer of sun glanced in through the window, she pushed the thing into being.
He wept in his relief, trailing kisses across the terrible damp of her forehead as she fell back, depleted, onto her pillow. “See, see,” he choked, “it’s over, all over. Everything’s fine, just fine.”
But all was not fine. It wasn’t fine at all. At some point during the night, while heavy frost was chilling the waters of Cooney Arm, the baby’s umbilical cord settled across the mouth of Adelaide’s womb. And as a thin sheet of ice caught over the waters of the arm in the false light of dawn, choking the flow through the neck, so the unborn, with its own weight pressing against the cord, began choking itself of blood and air. And now, this morning, as the blue of the sea fused beneath a thin cataract of ice, so too, was the blue of the newborn in the midwife’s hands fused within the shroud of its own caul.
“What is it? What’s wrong with it!?” Adelaide cried.
“It’s dead, my dear. Your baby’s dead,” said the old midwife.
“Dead? Eva!” But Eva was crossing herself, her eyes closed, her head bent in prayer. Adelaide struggled to sit up, to see. “Syllie!”
“Shh, don’t look, it’s—it’s all right,” he said, holding her back, his eyes as rooted as hers onto the thing in the midwife’s hands, all white and shrouded; the membrane of an egg that ought never to have been seeded.
“It’s a caul,” said the crone, her little rock eyes aglow in the lamplight as she brought the thing closer. “It brung you a caul. A precious gift is a caul—will save your man from drowning like his father and his brother.”
“No! No, don’t touch it—don’t touch it!” cried Adelaide, and she squeezed shut her eyes, screaming, “Eva, stop her, stop her!” as the old midwife started pulling on the white film.
“Mother’s got it, shh, Mother’s got it, Addie,” soothed Sylvanus as she coiled into his neck.
Eva crossed herself once more and, leaning forward, took the thing from the crone’s hands.
“Addie, listen to me,” said Eva. “You too,” she said sharply to Sylvanus as he shook his head, gesturing toward the door for her to be gone. “It’s only a film. It’s a pretty baby underneath. You need to see that, Addie, you need to see your baby—Addie,” she pleaded as the girl cringed deeper into Sylvanus’s neck.
“Addie.” It was Suze, her voice a tremulous whisper. “You should look. It’s not awful at all.”
Addie stiffened at the sound of Suze’s voice. “Why’s she here?” she cried, near hysteria, and tearing away from Sylvanus, she latched onto the pair of frightened grey eyes staring at her from across the room. “Get out!” shrieked Adelaide. “Get out, get out!”
“Addie, stop it,” pleaded Sylvanus, and held her tighter as she recoiled against his shoulder. The crone approached, taking her arm.
“Cursed! You’ll be cursed,” she hissed, “sending back a token from God. Ungrateful woman.”
Sylvanus pushed away the crone’s hand. “Get her away,” he cried out to his mother and buried his face in Adelaide’s hair as she sobbed hysterically.
Taking the midwife’s arm, Eva led her from the room.
“Shh, be still, be still,” he pleaded with Adelaide. “Don’t listen, nobody listens to that old hag. Borning babies is the only good she ever done. Mother’s taking care of things. Please, Addie,” he begged as she shivered against him. He continued holding her for a while until she became quiet.
“Leave me be now, Syllie,” she whispered.
“Addie.” He touched her brow. It was cold, clammy. She pulled away, her face now lost to him.
No, don’t you turn from me, Addie, he wanted to say. But said nothing. Rising, he stepped softly out of the room.
“Close the door,” she said quietly.
A lasting look at her still form beneath the blankets, her averted head, and he closed their door.
PART FOUR
Adelaide
WINTER 1955 TO SPRING 1960
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SUZE’S GIFT
S
HE REMAINED STILL
, her face hidden in her pillow for the rest of the morning and throughout the day, unwilling to sleep, unwilling to speak, unwilling to have anyone sit with her. The next morning, however, Eva came into her room with a small coil of oakum, as nicely combed out as you could get the tarry hemp, and closing the door, helped her sit up and undo her nightdress. Locking eyes with herself in the mirror, Adelaide watched expressionlessly as Eva first wrapped a piece of red flannel around her bared upper body, pinning it, and then started lacing the oakum tight around her swollen breasts, so tight she could scarcely breathe, the rough sticky hemp scratching those little bits of flesh the flannel didn’t cover, the stink of tar bringing water to her eyes.
“There. It’ll take a few days,” said Eva sympathetically after she had finished and was helping her rebutton her nightdress, “but the milk should dry up after that. Not too tight, is it?”
She shook her head, and after Eva had left, she pulled the bedclothes over herself, forbidding anyone to enter her room, even Sylvanus. Yet when he came home with a roll of white cotton, she wouldn’t allow her door to be shut. Half turned into her pillow, she followed his hands as he wrapped the stillborn, with no knowing of its gender, in layers and layers of white cotton till it looked like a misshapen wing. Laying it into a wooden box he’d fashioned himself, they buried it with the shortest of ceremony in the little cemetery in Cooney Arm. Most everyone came, but as Sylvanus had once said to her of the people in cities, they all muted together the way trees blend to make a wood. She felt only the numbness of her hand curled into the warmth of his, her eyes, glazed by tears too chilled to flow, and the dark beneath them, pressing in like bruises, and as stark, no doubt, as the uncovered earth upon that field of white.
The days following the funeral she would find herself sitting forward in her chair, looking out through the dried hawkweed hanging in her southern window, her arms wrapped around herself, her legs tightly crossed, and the most pensive look straining her face—like sitting on the edge of one’s seat, awaiting judgment, she sometimes thought, and wondered if perhaps she was. Token, the old midwife had said, the caul was a token from God. But, nay! Tokens! Old women’s foolishness, she kept telling herself, turning her attention instead onto her visitors. They all came, the ones from Cooney Arm. Even from Ragged Rock, they came, risking the newly frozen waters of the bay to pay their respects and bring bread and cookies or some other small thing. She watched them as they sipped tea and munched on the cookies and cakes, searching for those things unsaid, but might lurk within their eyes, like the tsking, slanderous eyes of her mother and her mother’s neighbours those times they’d caught her hove off on the daybed, reading books when the house was filling with filth. For that’s how she felt since the morning of the delivery, since the moment the stillborn with its caul was raised before her, and the beady, hard eyes of the midwife were raking over her—befouled. Too lazy and haughty she had been to take note of those good medicines brought to her, and in her neglect, she had rendered herself unfit to bear a strong, healthy baby. And then her fretting, selfish ways had expelled it before the breath of God sounded it.