What, he said.
Could you put it under the bed again? I believe it does ease it some. And it’s for luck.
And toward morning she called him again.
Yes, he said.
What is it? Here.
I don’t hear nothin.
Here. Over here.
He went to her. She put his hand on the crude tick.
Your water’s broke, he said.
The rain had stopped and a gray light lapped at the window glass. There was no sound but the small patter of waterdrops on the roof, no movement but the slow wash of mist over the glade beyond which the trees rose blackly.
It’s done mornin, he said.
I’ve not slept nary wink.
He was holding watch at the window, his own face drawn and sleepless. I believe it wants to clear, he said.
I wonder if they’s ary fire in under them ashes.
He returned to the hearth and poked among the dead coals and blew upon them. I doubt they be a dry stick of wood in the world this mornin, he said.
The sun rose and climbed to a small hot midpoint in the sky. In the yard the man’s shadow pooled at his feet, a dark stain in which he stood. In which he moved. In his hand a chipped enamel waterbucket now, headed for the spring, entering the woods where a path went and following it through kneehigh ferns, by rotting footlogs across a pale green fen and into a pine wood, scrub hardwoods, the ground soft with compost and lichens, coming finally to a cairn of mossgrown rock beneath which water issued limpid and cold over its bed of suncolored sand. He bent with the pail, watched with bloodrimmed eyes a leopard frog scuttle.
Coming into the clearing again he heard her call out. He crossed the glade rapidly toward the cabin, the water licking over the bucket rim and wetting the leg of his overalls. All right, he said. All right.
But that still wasn’t it.
It hurts bad now, she said.
Then let’s get on with it.
But it wasn’t until midafternoon that she began. He stood before the bed in which she lay bowsprung and panting and her eyes mad and his hands felt huge. Hush, he said.
Cain’t ye fetch her?
No. Hush.
The spasms in which she writhed put him more in mind of death. But it wasn’t death with which she labored far into the fading day.
Late in the afternoon he rose and left her and walked in the glade. Doves were crossing toward the river. He could hear them calling. When he went in again she had crawled or fallen from the bed and lay in the floor clutching the bedstead. He did think she had died, lying there looking up with eyes that held nothing at all. Then her body convulsed and she screamed. He struggled with her, lifting her to the bed again. The head had broken through in a pumping welter of blood. He knelt in the bed with one knee, holding her. With his own hand he brought it free, the scrawny body trailing the cord in anneloid writhing down the bloodslimed covers, a beetcolored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel. He pinched the mucus from its face with his fingers. It didn’t move. He leaned down to her.
Rinthy.
She turned her head. Far look and slow flutter of her pale lashes. I’m done ain’t I? she said. Ain’t I done?
Yes.
They Lord, she said.
When he picked it up it squalled. He took up the cord like a hank of strange yarn and severed it with the handleless claspknife he carried and tied it off at both ends. A deep gloom had settled in the cabin. His arms were stained with gore to the elbows. He fetched down some towels of washsoftened sacking and wet one in the water-bucket. He wiped the child and wrapped it in a dry towel. It had not stopped wailing.
What is it, she said.
What?
It. What is it.
A chap.
Well, she said.
It’s puny.
Don’t sound puny.
I don’t look for it to live.
It sounds peart enough.
You best sleep some.
I wisht I could, she said. I ain’t never been no tireder.
He rose and went to the door, standing for a moment in the long quadrangular light of evening, his elbow against the jamb and his head resting on his forearm. He opened his hand and looked at it. Dried blood sifted in a fine dust from the lines of his palm. After a while he went in and poured water into the tin basin and began to wash his hands and his arms, slowly and with care. When he came past the bed wiping his face with the towel she was asleep.
The child slept too, his old man’s face flushed and wrinkled, small fingers clenched. Reaching down and refolding the towel about it he took it up in his arms and looking once again at the woman crossed to the door and outside.
The sand of the road was scored and banded with shadow, dark beneath the pine and cedar trees or fiddle-backed with the slender shade of cane. Shadows which kept compass against all the road’s turnings. He stopped from time to time, holding the child gingerly, listening.
When he reached the bridge he turned off the road and took a path along the river, the swollen waters coming in a bloodcolored spume from about the wooden stanchions and fanning in the pool below with a constant and vicious hissing. He followed it down, carrying the child before him delicately, hurrying at a half-jog and keeping one eye skyward as if to measure against his progress the sun’s, the deepening shade. Half a mile downriver he came to a creek, a stream of amber swampwater that the river sucked from high grass banks into a brief immiscible stain of dark clarity. Here he left the river and took a new course into the wood.