Wish You Well(66)

apple crate by the stove a baby barely a year old lay under a stained blanket. Louisa went

to the sink, pumped water, and used the bar of lye soap she had brought to thoroughly

clean her hands and forearms. Then Billy led them down a narrow hallway and opened a

door.

Sally Davis lay in the bed, her knees drawn up, low moans shooting from her. A thin girl

of ten, dressed in what looked like a seed sack, her chestnut hair hacked short, stood

barefoot next to the bed. Lou recognized her too from the wild tractor encounter. She

looked just as scared now as she had then.

Louisa nodded at her. "Jesse, you heat me up some water, two pots, honey. Billy, all the

sheets you got, son. And they's got to be real clean."

Louisa put the sheets she had brought on a wobbly oak slat chair, sat next to Sally, and

took her hand. "Sally, it's Louisa. You be just fine, honey."

Lou looked at Sally. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her few teeth and her gums stained dark.

She couldn't be thirty yet, but the woman looked twice that old, hair gray, skin drawn and

wrinkled, blue veins throbbing through malnourished flesh, face sunken like a winter

potato.

Louisa lifted the covers and saw the soaked sheet underneath. "How long since your

water bag broke?"

Sally gasped, "After Billy gone fer you."

"How far apart your pains?" Louisa asked.

"Seem like just one big one," the woman groaned.

Louisa felt around the swollen belly. "Baby feel like it want'a come?"

Sally gripped Louisa's hand. "Lord I hope so, afore it kill me."

Billy came in with a couple of sheets, dropped them on the chair, looked once at his ma,

and then fled.

"Lou, help me move Sally over so we can lay clean sheets." They did so, maneuvering

the suffering woman as gently as they could. "Now go help Jesse with the water. And

take these." She handed Lou a number of cloth pads that were layered one over the top of

the other, along with some narrow bobbin string. "Wrap the string in the middle of the

cloths, and put it all in the oven and cook it till the outside part be scorched brown."

Lou went into the kitchen and assisted Jesse. Lou had never seen her at school, nor the

seven-year-old boy who watched them with fearful eyes. Jesse had a wide scar that

looped around her left eye, and Lou didn't even want to venture to guess how the girl had

come by it.

The stove was already hot, and the kettle water came to a boil in a few minutes. Lou kept

checking the outside of the cloth that she placed in the oven drawer, and soon it was

sufficiently brown. Using rags, they carried the pots and the ball of cloths into the

bedroom and set them next to the bed.

Louisa washed Sally with soap and warm water where the baby would be coming and

then drew the sheet over her.

She whispered to Lou, "Baby taking its last rest now, and so can Sally. Ain't tell 'xactly

how it lies yet, but it ain't a cross birth." Lou looked at her curiously. "Where the baby he

crossways along the belly. I call you when I need you."

"How many babies have you delivered?"

'Thirty-two over fifty-seven years," she said. " 'Member ever one of 'em."

"Did they all live?"

"No," Louisa answered quietly, and then told Lou to go on out, that she would call her.

Jesse was in the kitchen, standing against a wall, hands clasped in front of her, face down,

a side of her hacked hair positioned over the scar and part of her eye.

Lou glanced at the boy in the bed.

"What's your name?" Lou asked him. He said nothing. When Lou stepped toward him, he

yelled and threw the blanket over his head, his little body shaking hard under the cover.

Lou retreated all the way out of the crazy house.

She looked around until she saw Billy over at the barn peering in the open double doors.

She crossed the yard quietly and looked over his shoulder. George Davis was no more

than ten feet from them. The mare was on the straw floor. Protruding from her, and

covered in the co-coonish white birth sac, was one foreleg and shoulder of the foal. Davis

was pulling on the slicked leg, cursing. The barn floor was plank, not dirt. In the blaze of

a number of lanterns, Lou could see rows of shiny tools neatly lining the walls.

Unable to stand Davis's coarse language and the mare's suffering, Lou went and sat on

the front porch. Billy came and slumped next to her. "Your farm looks pretty big," she

said.

"Pa hire men to help him work it. But when I get to be a man, he ain't need 'em. I do it."

They heard George Davis holler from the barn, and they both jumped. Billy looked

embarrassed and dug at the dirt with his big toe.

"I'm sorry for putting that snake in your pail."