The Talk-Funny Girl (35 page)

B
oard by board we finished sheathing the two sides of the main roof. As much as anything I had ever done, I liked standing high up on the boards and looking out over the town. From the top of the cathedral I could see the roofs of all the buildings nearby, the white steeples of two churches, and, beyond them, a piece of the Connecticut with hills folding down to either side. Sands had told me that when we finished screwing the oak boards into place, and then finished with the small connecting side-roofs, a team of men would come to put hundreds of small squares of slate over them—one of the few things he seemed unable to do himself. We still had the three doors to hang, he said, and metal gutters to run along the roof edges above them, and then a patio and walls to build before the landscapers came to smooth the grade. If we timed it right, he said, we’d finish the outside work just
as the weather started to turn cold. We’d have a new furnace installed and could spend the long winter on interior work: figuring out how we wanted the inside walls to look, laying down smooth concrete and then a wooden floor over it; putting in some kind of seats or pews or furniture, he hadn’t decided yet.

I didn’t ask where the money for all that would come from. I didn’t want to think about those things. I felt that new strength inside me, but, having lived for so many years in a universe of complete unpredictability, I didn’t much trust plans, especially plans that made the future look like a happy place. While I was on the job, I tried to bring my thoughts only to the task at hand—the hot black plastic of the drill handle after it had been sitting in the sun, the sound the bit made as it bored through the dense oak, the way Sands and I had to always lean in against the roof to keep from falling over backward and sliding all the way down onto the top of the staging, the way we’d use a crowbar to pry a slightly crooked board in tight against the one just below it. I tried to concentrate on those things, but Sands and his elaborate plans were like a sugary tongue licking against the skin of my arms and face.

As time passed, I thought of my parents a bit less, but I never stopped worrying about the baby. The summer went on; the days began to shorten and the nights to grow cooler. Aunt Elaine often brought a newspaper home; I scoured it for news of Pastor Schect and his church. But there was nothing, no news from the woods or West Ober, no evidence that those people still existed at all. Once, without my aunt knowing, I put twenty dollars in an envelope and mailed it to my mother and father at the Waldrup Road address and included a note saying they should use it for the baby. The letter was never returned or acknowledged, and I never saw my parents in town, and neither Cindy nor Sands nor Aunt Elaine offered any word of them. It was as if, wounded yet again by the world of people, my mother and father had retreated still farther into the north woods and were living there off the small trout my father caught in the stream, the deer he poached with his bow and arrow, the berries and ferns my mother picked.

And then one day in August, just at the point where I had started to believe I would never see them again, I was on a ladder struggling to fit together the pieces of metal gutter over the front door when I heard a familiar rumbling and backfiring. I looked up to see my father’s truck racing down Main Street toward me. Sands was working at the peak of the roof, caulking the last joints there before the slate workers came, and my first thought was that my father had come to kill him. The humiliation of our visit had festered and swollen and burned in his mind all those hot weeks—I’d suspected that would happen; I’d suspected my life had gotten too peaceful to be real—and at last something, a remark my mother made, a few days of having no money for meat, had blown the smoldering coals to life, and he’d gone out and borrowed or stolen a shotgun, and here he was, speeding like a crazy man down Main Street, about to jump out of the truck and start firing.

I tried to call a warning to Sands, but before I could accomplish that the truck skidded to the curb and I could hear a panicked yelling. The passenger door swung open. My mother put one foot gingerly to the ground and I saw her large belly and then, a second later, blood all down the front of her jeans. For an instant I thought my father had cut her. But then he, too, was out in plain view, trotting in a wide circle as he came around the truck, his face torn open by what were almost screams. “Help!” he was trying to say, but what came out of him was “Heh! Heh! Heh!” And then, “Heh, Majie you! Heh me! Heh! Heh! Heh!”

By the time I climbed down and ran to the truck, with Sands two steps behind me, my mother had managed to get both feet on the sidewalk. She was leaning back against the edge of the seat with her arms spread, one holding the armrest of the door, one the body of the truck. Her face was painted in fear, too, but the colors were different, a palette of various off-whites: cheeks, forehead, chin. Her eyebrows were arched and her nostrils flared and her mouth stretched, and everything was stuck in that position as if she was trying to let the pain pour out of her through her face. There was blood everywhere—on the step
of the pickup, the seat, the sidewalk. It soaked the inside halves of the legs of her jeans. Without the smallest hesitation, Sands picked her up and carried her to his truck. I held the door open. He set my mother in and propped her upright until I could climb in after her. Neither of us even looked at my father. Sands backed the truck around and sped out of the lot too fast, bumping down over the curb so that my mother let out a tortured groan. Her head sank down toward my lap and I held it in both arms.

We went flying down a side street to the river road, then over the bridge, my mother making small cries, “God, God, God,” as the truck bounced over the uneven surface. We shot up the ramp onto the interstate and went along there in the fast lane, over a hundred miles an hour, I was sure. Once, I glanced in the side mirror and thought I saw my father’s truck shrinking in the distance. I worried about the police, but Sands just kept the accelerator down, both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road. Shortly before we reached Watsonboro, I felt my mother lose consciousness in my arms, and I began shaking her head lightly between my palms. “Ma, Ma. Go awake, Ma,” I said. “Go awake.”

Sands skidded up to the emergency room entrance and snapped off the engine. He took my mother under the back and behind the knees, the blood dripping, her belly looking like a huge egg about to break open, and he ran with her through the automatic doors and into the emergency room. I was a few steps behind. Sands yelled to the nurses that he had a pregnant woman, that she was in trouble, but he didn’t have to do that: Just the belly and the blood showed what was happening, a thin trail of it from the truck into the waiting area, and then in big drops on the linoleum there. A nurse came out and hurried us through a door and into one of the treatment rooms.

In seconds, a doctor stepped into the room. I looked at my mother’s pale face and closed eyes and begged the nurses to let me stay, but Sands and I were made to leave. We went and stood in the waiting room at
first, our clothes crimson and wet, everybody looking at us. “Elaine Archimbault,” I said to the woman who seemed to be in charge. “A nurse here. She’s the sister to that woman all blood. Elaine Archimbault. She’s here working now, a nurse. My aunt.”

Another patient—an unconscious man with an enormous body and huge, bald head—was wheeled through the entrance. Five or six people who must have been family members crowded in after him. Sands and I stepped outside. Sands moved the truck away into the parking lot, and we stood out there next to it, keeping our eyes on the entrance. I was praying. I watched the nurses in their white uniforms come out and stand not far from the door on their cigarette breaks. I watched ambulances come up to the door, twice, the attendants calmly removing a stretcher from the back and wheeling a patient in. I looked for my father’s truck but didn’t see it and I wondered if he’d run away, or been stopped by the police for speeding, or gotten lost.

Finally, Aunt Elaine appeared at the automatic door and looked for us. Sands waved a hand. We walked toward each other and met in the middle of the tarred road that led out of the parking lot. “Your mother’s in surgery,” Aunt Elaine told me. She had a hand on my shoulder and was looking up into my eyes and speaking partly in a nurse’s voice, and partly another way. “The doctors are taking the baby by cesarean. They’re both still alive. It’s going to be a while before you can see her, so you should go home and get into some other clothes and maybe have something quick to eat and then come back. Don’t be too long. When you get here, come in the main door and go to the desk there and tell them to call me first before anything else. All right?” She looked up at Sands, and I could tell she wanted to hug both of us but was holding herself away because of all the blood. She squeezed my shoulder with her hand and looked into my eyes. “All right?”

“Yes.”

“There are good doctors here. Don’t worry too much, honey. Pray if you want to. I can’t tell you to do that, but if you want to, pray now.”

T
he seat of Sands’s truck was sticky. We had no choice but to sit on it and make the short drive to Aunt Elaine’s. Sands stayed outside while I went in and showered, put my clothes in a plastic bag and threw them in the trash, got dressed, and came outside with a thick blanket. I laid the blanket on the seat and we drove into town and I went in and bought a pair of pants and a shirt and some underwear for him while he waited outside. He had to go back into the store to change. When he came out he was carrying the bloody clothes in a plastic bag, which he threw into the Dumpster. “They thought I’d just murdered somebody,” he told me as I was unfolding the blanket to go under him. “I had to show them my ID, if you believe that, before they’d let me out of the place.”

At the hospital, I went up to the volunteer at the main desk and said, “Elaine Archimbault,” and waited. In a little while I saw my aunt coming out of an elevator, and I knew just from the first look at her face what the news would be. “Come up,” Aunt Elaine said, putting an arm around my waist. And to Sands, “Could you wait?”

The hospital elevator was all shining metal. Aunt Elaine had an arm around me, but there were other people in the elevator so we didn’t speak. On the floor where I was to see my mother, I followed my aunt into a small waiting room—four chairs and a table with old magazines on it, no people—and there Aunt Elaine turned me and put both hands on my shoulders and looked up into my eyes. “The baby was born,” she said. “A girl. It might live or it might not. It was born too early and there was some trouble.… Your mother is … There is internal bleeding that they haven’t been able to stop, and she lost a lot of blood before she got here. If she lives it would be a miracle. You can see her but she’s very weak. If you have something you want to say to her, say it this time, all right, Marjorie?”

“All right.”

Walking down the hallway, Aunt Elaine held my hand and I didn’t
mind that. We turned into a white room. My mother was in the bed there, and beside her stood a nurse doing something with a tube that was snaking into my mother’s arm. My mother was small and thin in the bed. Her face and arms and hands were the color of wet paper, and her hair looked damp and was pushed back from her forehead in a way she never wore it. I moved in front of my aunt, walked up to the bed, and put the fingers of both hands on my mother’s arm. The nurse finished what she was doing and left. Aunt Elaine left. My mother’s eyes opened, closed, opened again. There was a small wrinkle at one corner of her lips. “You Majie,” I thought she said.

“Ma.”

Another little twist in the mouth muscles.

“Ma, the baby’s a girl.”

It was almost as if she laughed then, a bump in her chest and throat, a faint “huh” escaping from between her lips.

“Pa … where?”

“I don’t know it, Ma.”

There was another bump of sound.

For probably a minute we didn’t say anything else. My mother was using all her concentration just to breathe. Her eyelids fluttered. I could see that she was afraid, but not terribly afraid, not panicky, not terrified, just struggling to breathe.

“You were a good ma … to untie me.”

My mother’s eyes had nearly closed but when I said that she managed to push them open for a few seconds. She didn’t exactly shake her head, but she moved it half an inch to one side, said something that sounded like “Don’t know” or “You don’t know,” then let her eyes close. I stayed there, keeping my fingers on her arms and my eyes on her pale face. She seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. I watched her chest, waiting for it to stop moving, but the breathing went on and on, shallow but steady. I waited there an hour or more, praying in whispers, unable to make myself say anything else though there were things I wanted to be saying. Aunt Elaine came back in and stood quietly for
a time, then told me it was all right if I wanted to leave. My mother couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t know we were there. I shook my head and stayed.

My aunt left and came back again twice. Another nurse came in, then a woman doctor, and I was edged away from the bed and toward the wall so they could work. For a long time I stood there, catching glimpses of my mother’s face over the doctor’s shoulder, feeling Aunt Elaine’s arm around me, praying and praying. “There’s nothing you can do, honey,” Aunt Elaine whispered. “It would be all right to leave.”