The Tie That Binds(59)

I came to when we bounced off the near side of the iron bridge rail. We were shooting across to the other side then where we caught the far end of the bridge; the car spun, crossed back to the right side of the highway, cleared the bridge, and then dove nose first off the road-edge; it slammed into the bank of the barrow ditch and rocked back with a leaded jolt onto its top. We were thrown upside down scrambling on top of one another with sharp cutting edges of glass everywhere. There was the bad smell of gasoline, the sound of something dripping. Lyman was out cold; Edith was moaning in shock about her arm. Mavis and I were shoved together, her face twisted away from me against the dome light and her knees drawn up against her stomach. She was crying.

“The baby.”

“Are you all right?”

“But the baby.”

“We’ve got to get out of here. It’ll catch fire.”

I started kicking with my boots at the door, but it was jammed hard against the ditch bank, and the other door was sprung so it wouldn’t open. The back window was smashed free of glass except for jagged pieces around the edges, so I kicked those off and crawled out into the ditch. I began to pull Mavis out after me.

“Please don’t,” she said. “Please don’t move me.”

“I have to. I can’t leave you in there.”

I pulled her by the arms as carefully as I could, trying to cradle her head and to support her back, and she was still crying in a soft whisper. I got her out and laid her down in the weeds away from the car. She was lying there in the dark with her knees up. Over her legs her dress was wet and sticky, but I didn’t tell her that. I went back and pulled Edith; she cried out when I tugged one arm so I shifted to the other, and then Lyman after her, out the back window into the ditch. Then a car was there; against the headlights I could see figures sliding down toward us from the lip of the road.

It was Ed Taylor and his wife. They helped me carry Mavis and Lyman to their car; Edith, though she was still in shock, was able to be led up the steep bank. Ed drove us all to town to the hospital.

But it wasn’t enough. The baby came that night anyway after a bad time with the forceps and quite severe hemorrhaging. He was born dead. It was a boy too, like we agreed it would be. He had a shock of black hair and on his face a blank pinched look like an old man; there were bruises on the sides of his head from the forceps, and one of his ears was torn. The nurses showed him to me so I could attest to his death. Later, when Mavis came out of the anesthetic she wanted to see him. I told her no, she didn’t; I felt bad enough myself and I didn’t think seeing a dead baby would make her feel any better either. But she said, “I want to see him.”

So I took the dead little boy in to her, and she had him then, lying flat on her back, with one arm around him on her chest. Mavis was just pale and quiet with tears shining in her eyes; for a while then she was gone from me, gone from all the world and all of us still in it, retreated into someplace where none of us could reach her or interest her in county fairs or jokes about pickle exhibits and betting systems. None of that mattered now. And I began to think it was going to be bad trying to get the baby from her, that I was going to have to talk hard to get him released from those quiet, pale arms; but she wasn’t crazy; Mavis wasn’t mad. She was just deep hurt and saying good-bye to him, and finally she told me his name was John for my father; and then she held him up to me and I took him back to the nurses, while she fell off into a sad sleep.

So for a day or two I had three people to visit in the Holt hospital. Lyman wasn’t a lot to talk to, though; he was groggy with pain-killer and as distant as last Thursday. They had him in traction with a broken neck. And down the hall Mavis stayed quiet for a while, sleeping when she could, and when she couldn’t sleep staring in pain towards the far corner of the room. So it was Edith I talked to during that brief period after the car wreck. They had her arm in a cast, and she kept saying how sorry she was, like she had assumed all responsibility for the wreck, as if she had been driving the car herself.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It happened;

that’s all. And anyway, he’s out of it now. Maybe that’s something.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “I was looking forward to him, Sandy. I wanted him to come down the road to see me. Like you used to, all these years ago.”

“Yes,” I said. “He would have liked that.”

“I think he would have,” Edith said. “I wanted him to.”

So I went from one room to another, did chores at home and returned, and then several days later, when both Mavis and Edith were strong enough to be released, we had a private funeral for him up on that rise above the barn. Lyman was still in traction in the hospital, so it was just the three of us—Mavis, still pale and quiet and in pain, and Edith with her arm in a white cast, and me with some stitches where the glass had cut my face. We buried the box, which seemed only half as big as a peach crate—it weighed nothing—buried it beside the little boy’s grandfather and great-grandmother. None of us said anything when the damp sand was packed firm on top of it. We couldn’t think of words that would make any difference.

Then it was finished. There was just the feeling afterwards of being empty. My wife couldn’t accustom herself to there being nothing inside her, nothing kicking and stretching anymore to plan for. She spent a lot of time in the room she had prepared for the baby. It had a crib in one corner with a new sheet stretched tight on the mattress; the store tag was still on the sheet; over the window there were fresh curtains. I found her up there one afternoon in front of the window staring towards the Goodnoughs’ house.