Chapter 17
The rain had gone from a drumming to a drip off the eaves, and Clara could not have said when.
She noticed it the moment there was room to notice anything — that the storm, somewhere in the last hour, had worn itself down to breathing. The lamp had burned low. The window had gone from black to a dark gray.
The last stretch was the longest and the shortest of the night.
Lydia had gone past words some while back.
She knelt against the bed and worked, and rested when the work let her, and worked again, one hand closed on Clara's and the other on Nathan's arm, and what Clara had to give her by then was almost nothing and exactly enough: a wet cloth to her mouth between times, a steady voice saying rest now, and now, and now again — the low voice she had used all night over Willie Pritchard.
Nathan knelt on the far side and gave his arm and said nothing at all.
It came the slow way, a little and a little and a little, and then all at once there was no more waiting in the room at all.
The child came into Clara's hands small and slick and blue-gray and still. For the length of one breath nothing moved. Then the little chest jerked, and caught, and the cry came, and it filled the house.
A girl. Small, and early, and raging, and alive.
Out in the kitchen something clattered onto the stove and was not picked up.
Clara did what her hands had been taught.
She tied and cut with the good scissors, wiped the angry face, wrapped the child close in the warmed flannel, and laid her on her mother's chest. Lydia's hands came up around the bundle and held it.
She said nothing at all, and her face was running wet and perfectly steady.
Nathan had got to his feet. He looked at the two of them and did not move and did not speak, and his ears had gone past red altogether.
"There," Lydia said at last, to the top of the small head. Her voice had almost nothing left in it. "There, now. You couldn't have waited for Calder like a sensible person."
She had to get her sister off the floor and into the bed, and her own hand could not leave her to do it.
She had opened her mouth to work out how when Nathan's arms came past her — one behind Lydia's back, one under her, gathering wife and child up off their knees so slow and so careful that Clara's palm never lost its place through the whole rise of it.
He laid them down against the pillows with a gentleness that looked like fear.
Clara went up onto the bed's edge with them, her hand riding the movement, and drew the sheet over her sister, and tucked the small warm weight of the baby back into the crook of Lydia's arm.
Then came the hour after, and Clara went to work in it.
It isn't the birth that kills them. It's the hour after.
Her hand knew the place before she told it to — flat and low through the sheet, above the bone, the way Calder's had shown hers over a stranger's belly in the spring.
Under her palm the muscle sat firm and round and clenched.
Hard as a green apple. That's what it has to stay.
It was hard. She left the hand there and did not move it.
The afterbirth came. Clara called for the lamp.
It was Mrs. Garrett who brought it, and she brought it as far as the doorway and not one inch past. She stood in the frame with the lamp held out at the full length of her arm, and her face had gone the color of the sheet, and she did not look at the bed.
She looked at the doorpost beside her own hand.
The lamp was not coming into the room, and Clara did not ask it to.
You keep a hand on her the whole hour after, whatever else is happening in that room.
And you look at it. Whole. Every single time, even when you're dead on your feet. Especially then.
"Cole," she said, low and level, without taking her eyes from her sister.
He was there before the word was well out.
She did not turn her head to him — she could not — but she felt him move: the lamp lifted from Mrs. Garrett's hand at the door, a quick tread across the room, a crouch at her shoulder.
She heard the paper settle where she pointed him.
At the edge of her eye the light came down close, and held there, steady.
Her right palm never left her sister. She bent over what he lit for her and made herself look at all of it, twice, and it was whole — every piece, and the skin not broken anywhere.
It took what it took, and he held the light through all of it and said not one word.
Then he folded the paper away at her word and carried the lamp back to the door. Clara had not moved from the bed, nor lifted her hand once. Under her palm she found the hardness beginning to go.
It went soft slowly, from deep, nothing to see and everything to feel. Clara rubbed it up, firm, the heel of her hand working in a slow circle, and it answered — drew down under her hand, gathered, hardened — and she counted to a hundred, and somewhere in the eighties it began to soften again.
The minute it softens under you, you rub it up hard again, and you keep on until it answers.
She kept on. The sheet wanted changing sooner than it should have.
She changed it one-handed, her right palm never leaving its place, and did not look at what she carried to the basin, and kept the basin on the near side of her, where Nathan could not see into it.
She rubbed, and counted, and it answered, and softened, and answered slower.
Her mouth had gone dry. She worked her hand in its slow circle and made her breathing stay even, because Nathan was watching her face and would take his weather off it.
Lydia lay with the child on her chest and her eyes half open, and her lips had gone pale, and she was not talking. Lydia not talking was the loudest thing in the room.
"Clara." Nathan's voice, low, from the other side of the bed. Not a question. Just her name, and everything in it.
"I know," Clara said. "I've got my hand on her."
There was a small brown bottle in a black bag on the far side of the river. Clara had watched it come out at the Petersen birth and go back in unopened. When nothing else is answering, that is what there is, Calder had said, which is why I'm no use to a woman on the wrong side of a river.
The river was up, and the river was the whole distance between that bottle and this bed. If her hand and the steam and the hour would not do it, nothing else was coming.
In the doorway Mrs. Garrett stood where she had stood all night, her hands empty now, her back to the bed. She had not looked, and she did not go.
Her hand worked. The ache had gone out of her arm and into her shoulder and up the back of her neck, a deep burning she would still feel in a week, and she did not stop for it. Stopping was not one of the things there were tonight.
And then the last of Calder came to her — Calder in the Petersen doorway, pulling on her coat, saying it offhand, over her shoulder.
Get them on early, always. It fetches the milk down. And it draws the womb down after it, which is worth a great deal more than the milk.
Clara looked at the child on her sister's chest.
"Lydia." She kept her voice level and her hand where it was. "Put her to the breast. Now, love. Help her find it."
Lydia's eyes came the rest of the way open. Her hands moved on the bundle, slow and heavy. Nathan's hands came in from the other side and steadied the child while she turned her, and the small blind mouth rooted, and lost it, and rooted — and took hold.
The room went still around the sound of it.
Clara stood with her palm spread flat and low, and waited.
Under her hand, slowly, the softness began to answer. It gathered as it had gathered for her rubbing, but deeper, further down, a long slow drawing-down that did not slacken when she eased her hand — and held — and hardened, and stayed hard. Hard as a green apple.
She kept her hand there the whole hour, whatever else happened in that room. Calder had said the whole hour. She was not going to be the one who cut it short and found out why.
The sheet, the next time it was changed, hardly wanted it.
The lamp had gone from the doorway. Out in the kitchen the stove door went, quietly.
Nobody said anything for a long while. The rain dripped off the eaves, and the window went from dark gray to gray, and the sound at the breast went on, greedy and ordinary.
It was Nathan who broke the quiet, and it took him three tries.
He had come around the bed to where he could see the child's face. He stood over the two of them with his big hands hanging. He cleared his throat, and stopped, and cleared it again, and his ears went scarlet. Then he said it, halting, to the top of the damp head:
"Ada."
Their mother's name.
"If it still suits," he said.
"It suits," Lydia said.
Her eyes were shut. Her hand found his and closed on it, without any strength in the closing, and he sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully, a big man making himself small, and stayed.
"Early," Lydia said, most of the way to sleep, to nobody in particular. "No Crowell was ever early for anything in her life. She must be yours."
Nathan looked down at the child a long moment. He did not answer. His thumb moved once over the back of his wife's hand.
Clara changed the water in the basin and washed her hands. They shook now that the work was done. She stood at the basin and let them.
Full light came gray, the rain gone to almost nothing.
Mrs. Garrett left at dawn. Clara came out to the kitchen and found her already in John's coat, the sleeves turned back. The kitchen behind her was scrubbed and banked and ready for the day, every cloth boiled and hung.
They looked at each other, the two of them, across the kitchen.
Then Mrs. Garrett put one hand on Clara's arm — the same hand that had stopped her at the bedroom door at the start of the night — and pressed it once, and took it back, and went out.
Clara followed as far as the step.
Down at the road a man was coming up through the gray, leading a horse too done to be ridden — John Garrett, mud to the hip, his hat gone shapeless with rain. He stopped at the gate when he saw his wife coming and did not come further.
"Water's not dropped a hand," he called up, to the house in general. "Ford's under and staying under. Nobody's crossing today."
Nobody needed to. He looked at the house a moment — the smoke going up straight, the quiet of it — and took off the ruined hat and put it back on. When Mrs. Garrett reached him he took her arm over his, and the two of them went away down the road together, the spent horse walking behind.
Clara stood on the step Nathan had built until the two of them were small on the road and then gone. Mrs. Garrett never once looked back. Nothing had passed between them in words, and nothing in it wanted words.
Cole had not left.
His hat lay out in the middle of the yard where it had lain all night, brim up, holding rain. He walked past it twice with an armload of wood and left it there both times.
The axe had been going since first light.
She knew the sound of it by now, and this was not the night's sound — not the hard fast swing of a man burning off what he could not carry.
This was slow, spaced, ordinary. A man laying in wood for a day that was going to come after all.
The woodpile had been restacked. The horses had been fed; Clara could hear them working at their hay through the barn wall.
When she came back into the kitchen the fire was up and there were eggs on, and he stood over the pan with his sleeves still rolled from the night, giving the eggs his full attention.
He carried the first plate to the bedroom door on a tray, with coffee, and knocked once, with one knuckle, and handed it in to Nathan, and came back.
Then he put a plate in front of Clara, where she had sat down at the table without noticing she had sat.
"Eat," he said.
She ate. The eggs were burned slightly. She ate all of them and did not say one bright thing about it.
He sat down with his own plate, and the two of them ate at the two ends of the Holts' table, while out past the window the sky lifted a little and a rooster somewhere down the road informed the county that it was morning.
"You'll want sleep," he said at last.
"Soon. I want to sit with her a while yet, and be sure it stays."
He nodded and did not argue it. He took the plates. At the door he stopped, half-turned, with a thing he meant to say. What he said instead was, "The wood's in. I'll see to the horses."
He went out, and crossed the yard, and did not look at the hat.
Clara went back in to her sister and put her hand where Calder had taught her. It was hard as a green apple, and it stayed hard, and she sat with it a while longer only to be sure, past the need of it.
The lamp was out. The gray at the window had gone to plain morning.
Off past the trees the river was still up and still loud, but the sound had a top to it again, and Clara heard that and knew what she was hearing.
Lydia slept, and Ada slept against her, and Nathan sat on the edge of the bed with his empty plate beside him and his hand under his wife's hand, awake, watching the two of them breathe.
When she was sure of it Clara took her hand back and tucked the blanket close. Then she sat on in the chair Nathan had built, in the morning light, and let the house be quiet around her.