Different Seasons(188)
She now turned and started back toward the hospital.
“Nurse!” I called. “No time for that. Get one from the ambulance. This baby is coming now.”
She changed course, slipping and sliding through the slush in her white crepe-soled shoes. I turned back to Miss Stansfield.
Rather than slowing down, the locomotive breathing had actually begun to speed up ... and then her body turned hard again, locked and straining. The baby crowned again. I waited for it to slip back but it did not; it simply kept coming. There was no need for the forceps after all. The baby all but flew into my hands. I saw the sleet ticking off his naked bloody body—for it was a boy, his sex unmistakable. I saw steam rising from him as the black, icy night snatched away the last of his mother’s heat. His blood-grimed fists waved feebly; he uttered a thin, wailing cry.
“Nurse!” I bawled, “move your ass, you bitch!” It was perhaps inexcusable language, but for a moment I felt I was back in France, that in a few moments the shells would begin to whistle overhead with a sound like that remorselessly ticking sleet; the machine-guns would begin their hellish stutter; the Germans would begin to materialize out of the murk, running and slipping and cursing and dying in the mud and smoke. Cheap magic, I thought, seeing the bodies twist and turn and fall. But you’re right, Sandra, it’s all we have. It was the closest I have ever come to losing my mind, gentlemen.
“NURSE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!”
The baby wailed again—such a tiny, lost sound!—and then he wailed no more. The steam rising from his skin had thinned to ribbons. I put my mouth against his face, smelling blood and the bland, damp aroma of placenta. I breathed into his mouth and heard the jerky susurrus of his breathing resume. Then the nurse was there, the blanket in her arms. I held out my hand for it.
She started to give it to me, and then held it back. “Doctor, what ... what if it’s a monster? Some kind of monster?”
“Give me that blanket,” I said. “Give it to me now, Sarge, before I kick your ass**le right up to your shoulderblades.”
“Yes, doctor,” she said with perfect calmness (we must bless the women, gentlemen, who so often understand simply by not trying to), and gave me the blanket. I wrapped the child and gave him to her.
“If you drop him, Sarge, you’ll be eating those stripes.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“It’s cheap f**king magic, Sarge, but it’s all God left us with.”
“Yes, doctor.”
I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and watched the crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and backed away from the body. Its breathing, like the baby’s, hitched and caught ... stopped ... hitched again ... stopped ...
I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was her head. And obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one knee and turned the head over. The eyes were open—those direct hazel eyes that had always been full of such life and such determination. They were full of determination still. Gentlemen, she was seeing me.
Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath slipping rapidly back and forth between those lips and through those teeth as she “locomotived.” Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips parted. They mouthed four words: Thank you, Dr. McCarron. And I heard them, gentlemen, but not from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal cords. And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our words, were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound. But there were seven of them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven syllables in that phrase, Thank you, Dr. McCarron.
“You’re welcome, Miss Stansfield,” I said. “It’s a boy.”
Her lips moved again, and from behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound boyyyyyy—
Her eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed. She began to “locomotive” again ... and then she simply stopped. Whatever had happened was now over. The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance driver had perhaps seen some of it before he fainted, and some of the onlookers might have suspected something. But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly accident out here ... and a new baby in there.
I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood, looking stonily away toward the Garden across the way, as if nothing of any particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing ... or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.
As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to weep. As I recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped me to my feet and inside.
McCarron’s pipe had gone out.
He re-lit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence. Outside, the wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and looked up. He seemed mildly surprised to find us still there.
“That’s all,” he said. “That’s the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of fire?” he snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment. “I paid her burial expenses out of my own pocket. She had no one else, you see.” He smiled a little. “Well . . . there was Ella Davidson, my nurse. She insisted on chipping in twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But when Davidson insisted on a thing—” He shrugged, and then laughed a little.