Читать книгу The Sojourner - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 12

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Nothing was real to him except the scent of lilacs. He had slept a little toward morning. Wakening, his thoughts were as nebulous as the April dawn. He was suspended in a gray void, and it seemed that he and Benjamin were dead together, and some other with them, whom he could not place for the moment. He had not meant to sleep. And had he slept, and was he now awake? When a man closed his eyes at night he did not know whether he would open them in the morning. And was he then dead or living? He did not, himself, know. Only another, observing his breathing, could say, “The man is not dead, but sleeping.”

A breath of April wind stirred the curtains and the fragrance of the lilacs came stronger and with it that sense of danger. He started up from the couch and staggered a little. Nellie’s lilacs, that was it. Nellie had brought the lilac bushes from her father’s home, when was it, a year ago, and they were in bloom, sickening of odor, and Nellie was in labor with his child. Now he heard her cry. He went to the pump to splash cold water on his face and hands, for it seemed only decent to be clean as he went to her.

Aunt Jess the midwife met him at the door of the downstairs bedroom.

She whispered, “The pains are coming faster. I think she’ll make it soon. Come in and speak to her.”

He groped to the side of the great white-sheeted bed. Nellie was as white, but veins stood out as blue as her eyes. Her curls were wet on the pillow. She turned her head toward him.

An agony seized her and her face twisted. She moved her head from side to side and moaned. The midwife gripped her hands.

“Bear down harder, Nellie dear, bear down. Aunt Jess is holding on to you. Ase, you’d better get out. Call the girl. Get my hot water going, lots of it.”

He stumbled to the kitchen. He had kept a low fire all night in the range, and in minutes he had it roaring, and pots and kettles filled with pure spring water, and boiling. The Swedish girl, Hulda, hired for the time being, came down the back stairs rubbing the sleep from her eyes, then seemed to shake herself, and went into brisk action. She trotted back and forth with hot water and cloths warmed in the open oven. She took a moment out to start a pot of coffee.

“Don’t leave it boil over, Mr. Linden.”

He should be doing his chores, he thought, but he could not bring himself to leave the house. The first ray of sun reached the garden and pointed like a finger to a few early green sprouts. Nellie had worked in the garden for an hour after her first pains, her chubby little fingers scarcely reaching past her great belly to press a plant here, scatter a row of home-saved seeds there. It seemed to him that all planting of seed was a man’s work, but she had driven him out when he had finished cultivating, fertilizing and laying off the rows. Green stuff made good milk for the cow, she had said, and winked, and she knew the way she wanted it. The hired girl scurried in for another kettle of water, sweating.

She panted, “Coming fine, Mr. Linden. Don’t look so mournful.”

The words were like a bone thrown to a good dog by the fire. He felt lost, almost an outsider. The world had turned completely female. He seemed to have had nothing to do with the child, nothing with the woman. He was only tolerated in his own house. The she-rites of fertility possessed it. He heard then the wail, the strange, anguished, angry protest against human birth. He stood up, shivering. Where had the creature of his making come from, that it was so disturbed to leave? What would be his share in making its life not quite as intolerable as the scream said it feared? When the midwife at long last called him, her voice was triumphant, that of an Amazon blowing a trumpet made for a woman’s mouth.

He walked past her to the bed. He had a moment’s dread that Nellie would turn her head away from him. How could a woman forgive a man for so much pain? He had forgotten her own cat-like pleasure. He looked down at her. Aunt Jess had bathed her with sweet-smelling soap, had dressed her in her bridal nightgown with lace ruching at the throat, had brushed her shining curls and tied them with a blue satin ribbon. Nellie’s eyes were twinkling.

“ ’Twasn’t much fun,” she said.

She arranged mysterious folds of cloth at her side, drew one away to show the child, red, wrinkled, apparently blind, and wretched. She puckered her own face in imitation.

“If ’twasn’t a boy,” she said, “I’d say, drown it. Guess being ugly won’t matter.”

He stared. He had helped with the birthing of countless lambs and calves and colts. He had come on baby squirrels and foxes in their nests. This was his first sight of a new-born human. All the other animal young arrived complete, contented. It was as though they were born knowing—or not knowing—some fearful secret.

He said, “I suppose he’ll change. Nellie—how are you?”

She patted her stomach under the covers.

“Empty, thanks be. Empty of everything. I’m hungry.”

The great bulk of Aunt Jess filled the doorway. Her face shone like a harvest moon.

“Fine boy there, Ase. Never brought a better. You’ll have help on the farm before you know it.”

He looked with a vast surge of pity at the miserable little bundle of flesh. It was blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. It would be a fine thing to have a tall son to plow and harvest with him, to plant seeds and crops and fruiting trees perhaps as yet unknown of. It was also shocking to imagine this unhappy thing, now making sobbing sounds in its throat, as already precipitated into the world, toiling with hard hands, its back bent under more than weight of hoe or axe or pitchfork. He yearned over his son and over his beloved who had borne him.

Nellie said, “Now maybe he won’t want to farm. His Uncle Ben didn’t. Aunt Jess, go tell Hulda to fix me a big breakfast.”

He reached out for her hand and knelt and held it against his cheek. It was so small and warm, so strong and certain. His fear for her fragility left him and he put his arms around her.

She said, “Better send Hulda down the road soon to call Ma. You have your breakfast, then go bring your mother.”

He had been astonished from the beginning by her patience with Amelia. The venomous barbs had fallen away from her soft skin as though it were underlaid with rawhide. He was touched now, and grateful. Nellie had refused to have her mother in the house during her labor. He believed that she had forbidden it to save embarrassment at the exclusion of his own. Actually, her animal instinct had insisted on the presence only of the capable mid-wife.

Ase brought Amelia to the room before Nellie’s mother had time to arrive. Amelia might surprise them all, he thought, by behaving well, but he felt safer to take no chances. She began by speaking courteously enough.

“A boy, Ase says. That’s good. Men are needed around here. You don’t look as if you’d suffered.”

Nellie patted the blue satin bow. The glitter in her eyes was surely a sign of well-being.

“Take a look at him. Pretty as his Pa.”

Amelia eyed the infant.

“What will you name him?”

Nellie said, “We sort of thought you’d like to have another Benjamin.”

Ase was puzzled. They had agreed on the name of Nathaniel, if the baby was a boy. Amelia stepped back from the bed.

“Haven’t you any decency at all?”

Nellie’s bright eyes widened.

“Why, Mother Linden, what do you mean?”

Amelia was trembling.

“After you and Benjamin—oh, you are a shameless thing.”

“You mean it would look as if it was Ben’s baby. Guess you’ve forgotten Ben’s been gone a year and a half. They don’t make babies out of old women’s nasty ideas.”

It seemed to Ase that he must reach out to pull his mother from this trap Nellie had laid for her. Yet perhaps Nellie had been right, to force Amelia into the open, and so lay a ghost. He laid a hand on his mother’s arm. She shook it off.

“Forgotten how long he’s been gone? Every hour’s been a drop of blood gone out of me.”

She put her handkerchief to her lips.

“I’m sorry, Nellie, for what I suggested. I was—mistaken. But I must forbid the name of Benjamin. He will want it for a son of his own.”

“Well, then, how about ‘Nathaniel,’ Ase? Call him ‘Nat’ for short. You can stop a dog or a boy better with a short name, when they’re getting into mischief.”

Amelia gathered her torn dignity about her and nodded.

“A very good name. It’s been in the family. I, of course, shall always call the child by the full name.”

She turned to leave.

“But don’t get the idea that the boy makes any difference about the land.”

The battle, then, was a draw, but with blood let on both sides. Somehow the air was clearer. He opened a window, and past the white ruffled curtains blowing, came the scent again of the lilacs, not now quite so sickening.