Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(77)

It’s started. I’m just telling you. But I don’t want to go into town yet. It’s too soon. He said it would be a while after they started, about twelve hours or so, he said, so there isn’t any rush yet. I’m just telling you.

They were holding on to a big red calf, holding it down in the corral dirt on its side so they could check it, while its excited mother eyed them balefully from a distance of about ten feet. The McPheron brothers looked up at the girl. Then it was as if they had all at once, and both at the same moment, understood what it was that she was trying to tell them. They released the rope on the calf and it bawled and jumped up and trotted over to its mother, hiding behind her where the old cow had already begun to lick it into calmness and quiet, while the two men came hustling over to the fence across from where the girl stood and said, What’s this? Are you sure?

Yes, she said.

And you’re feeling all right? Raymond said.

I feel fine.

But you shouldn’t even be out here, Harold said. You ought to be back there in the house.

I just came out to tell you, she said. That they started.

Yes but, he said—well damn it, Victoria, you shouldn’t even be on your feet. You need to go back to the house. This ain’t no place for you.

I’m all right, she said. I just wanted to tell you. I’ll go back now.

She turned and started back. They stood together at the fence, watching her, this slight young heavy-laden girl with the long black hair fallen down her back, walking carefully, picking her steps slowly across the rutted gravel drive under the late afternoon sun. Then she stopped once out in the open before she got up to the house. She stood still, her head bowed, holding herself, waiting for it to pass, then after a time she raised her head again and she went on. Five minutes later the McPheron brothers, without saying anything to each other about it, without ever having to make any apparent decision whatsoever, turned all the mother cows and calves back out into the pasture, quit the work corral together and followed the girl, one after the other, directly into the house.

They found her lying on the old soft double bed in her room. They hovered over her. They let her know that they thought she should get up, they wanted to take her into town now, not to wait, that they thought that such would be better, safer, they didn’t want to take any chances, they told her to take care and get up cautiously and they would drive her in right now, and that in effect altogether she should hurry up and do it in a slow way. But she simply looked at them and said again, Not yet. I don’t want to be a bother and make a fool of myself.

So they waited the rest of the afternoon. They waited through the remainder of daylight. Then the sun started down and the air darkened. The brothers turned the lights on in the house. Raymond went out into the kitchen and made some supper for the three of them at the stove. Yet when it was ready the girl would not eat; she came out and sat with them for a while at the table and drank a little warm tea, but that was all. Once while she sat with them a pain came to her and she stared straight ahead, breathing, and when it was over she looked up and smiled at them and waved a little dismissively with her hand. They watched her from across the table, stricken. Presently she rose and went back into her room and lay down. The brothers looked at each other. After some time they got up and went in and sat down in the parlor under the single floor lamp and made a pretense at reading the Holt Mercury. It was very quiet. Every twenty minutes or so one or the other of them would rise and go in and stand at the doorway to look at her in the old bed.

Then about nine o’clock the girl came out of her little room into the dining room carrying her bag. She stopped beside the walnut table. I think we should go now, she said. I think it’s time.

At the hospital the nurses asked her all the questions. Name, and expected date of confinement, and blood type, if the membranes had ruptured, and when, what the contractions were, how often, how long, where she felt them, what bleeding, the amount and color of it, movement of the baby, last food taken, what and when, what allergies, what medications. She answered these all with patience and thoroughness while the McPheron brothers stood in a kind of mute panic and intolerable outrage, waiting beside her at the counter, waiting for them to be done with this exasperation and waste of time and remove her to safety. Then the nurses wheeled her away into the labor room while the brothers waited behind in the hall, and she got out of her clothes into a loose hospital gown and the one nurse examined her and afterward said she was only three centimeters dilated, that was all. She asked if she could say again how long she had been feeling the pains. The girl told her. Then yes, she would very likely be a good while yet since she was no more dilated than that. Still, that was something no one could ever tell about, how long it would be, because she herself had seen cases where the babies came very fast once they had decided to start coming, and they could hope.

After an hour, when nothing was changed, the nurses allowed the McPheron brothers to come in and stay with the girl in the labor room. The girl had asked the nurses to let them. They came in very quietly and circumspectly, carrying their hats in their hands, as if they were attending some formal occasion or entering upon some religious service for which they were late due to circumstances beyond their control even though their best intentions had been otherwise, and sat down against the wall beside the bed and seemed reluctant at first even to look at her. It was a double room with a ceiling rail for a curtain to be drawn close around the bed, and the bed was raised so that the girl was sitting up in it. The nurses had started an i.v. and there was a monitor on a stand at the head of the bed. When they did look at her, her face appeared flushed and a little puffy. Her eyes had a dark look in them.