Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  He got no sleep, or no sleep that counted. He dreamed of the woods and thousands of birds turning and turning, a vortex above the trees, black against the gray of the sky. The next morning at seven, when Callie had been in labor for twenty-four hours, Dr. Costard came in again and sent Henry away while he made his examination. After five minutes the doctor came out and stood at the door pulling off his rubber glove.

  “How is she?” Henry asked. His voice was like an old woman’s, or like his father’s—exactly like his father’s.

  “She’s coming along,” the doctor said. “We’ll just have to be patient a while yet.” He walked over toward the desk and Henry followed him. The doctor said when the nurse looked up, “She’s dilated to three cm’s. Have her examined again in four hours.”

  “Is that good?” Henry asked. “Three cm’s?”

  “It’s a start.” The doctor smiled, plump-faced, like a hotel keeper. He had curly hair turned silver around the front.

  “How much farther does she have to go?”

  “Quite a ways yet.” He looked at Henry, then put his hand on his arm. “Ten cm’s,” he said. He smiled.

  “Will it be today, you think?”

  “Could be. There are a lot of things we’re not sure of yet in this business.” He started down the hall, toeing outward.

  “She’s been in labor for twenty-four hours,” Henry said, following him. He said it quickly, his middle fingers interlocked and pulling at each other.

  “They’ll do that sometimes.” The doctor waved at him vaguely, with his back turned, and walked on. Henry watched him go.

  An hour later they called him to the waiting room and he found the breakfast George Loomis had left—cheese, crackers, two apples, coffee. George hadn’t been able to wait. It was eight miles each way from his place, but that wasn’t it, Henry knew.

  He started back for the labor room to eat, and as he passed the cigarette machine he stopped and bought a pack of Old Golds with filters. He stood for a minute looking down at the package and then he remembered: Willard Freund leaning into the lamplight in the lean-to room behind the diner, rain drumming on the roof, the room full of the smell of burning wood, and Willard reaching toward the table for the cigarettes he’d laid there, the pack glossy under the lamplight, yellow and red. Old Golds were what Willard Freund smoked. He saw the woods again in his mind, the gray, dead tamaracks, the darkness farther in, the birds. He stood for a long while looking down at the package.

  It went on, hour after hour. Doc Cathey came and went and nurses came on duty and went off again, and nothing happened. Once they gave her a shot to stop the labor and give her a rest. Henry smoked and just held Callie’s hand now. Delivery carts rolled by in the hall outside the door, and sometimes he heard the cries of newborn babies. When he looked out he saw new fathers talking, smoking cigarettes and looking in through the windows along the hall at the rows of baby beds—two squat, red-necked men with water-combed hair that needed cutting. Later there was another man, an Italian in an expensive suit. Callie lay still, white, with beads of sweat on her forehead. Outside the window the snow was still blowing, too thick to see through. At 6:oo P.M. Dr. Costard came in and examined her and gave her a shot. He smiled, as if sociably, then patted her arm. “I’ll drop back later to see how you’re doing.”

  Callie ignored him.

  Outside the door Henry said, “Still the same?”

  The doctor puckered his lips, then smiled again. “No change to speak of.” He waved, then paused, turning back. “If things haven’t improved by morning maybe we’ll section her.”

  Henry waited, balanced on the balls of his feet.

  “Caesarian,” Dr. Costard explained. He winked, smiling. “But no use rushing Mother Nature. We’ll see how she does tonight.”

  “She’s a bleeder,” Henry said. “When she cuts herself she keeps on bleeding.”

  The doctor nodded, still smiling. “We’ll see.”

  Henry went back, touching the wall as he walked.

  It was dark. He stared at the shadows thrown by the nightlight, then turned his head to stare at the dominoes in the box. His father’s. They would sit up nights, his mother and father—his huge shirt would be open, showing spongy skin like wet clay and gray, curling hairs—and they’d stare at the oil-cloth-covered table where the dominoes lay, the winding paths, the boneyard, the fourteen in play up-ended like tombstones, and after a long time his father would place one and would smile, almost giggle, old-womanish, and his mother would place one right away, and then there would be the waiting again, like a wait in a game of chess, and then, as if kingdoms depended on it, his father would place another. He almost always won. There would be specks of dust on the bourbon in his glass, and once in a while his hand would move to the glass mechanically, and the corners of Henry’s mother’s mouth would tighten. He would sit with his eyebrows drawn outward for a moment after he’d drunk, his thick lips wet, his forehead white, and then he’d say, Ah! as if drunk for pleasure.

  (”Fat’s what got him,” Doc Cathey had said. “The same thing that’s gonna get you. I just hope you got your will made out.” That was before Henry had married Callie. Nowdays Doc would say: “You lose ninety pounds, boy, or Callie’ll be a widow.” He would leer when he said it and touch Henry’s arm, as if he were one of the family.)

  The wind pushed past the window and blurred the outlines of the pine close to the street, bent in the churning snow. Except for the blooms of brightness in the snowy air, you wouldn’t know there were lighted windows across the street. The snow had covered up everything now. The short space of lawn that you could still see was drifted high, and where there had been bushes before, right under the window, there were only mounds. Up in the mountains the roads would be closed, and truckers would be pulled up into farmers’ yards, and maybe pulled up in front of the Stop-Off, too, because the place was never shut down, the neon sign burned night and day, week in week out, or had until now anyway, and it was worth a little bad driving to get to where people knew you. There would have been accidents by now, maybe. There sometimes were in blizzard time. Trucks jackknifed across the road or turned upside down at the foot of a cliff, half-sunk in the river, the icy water running through the cab, the bearded trucker dead a hundred, two hundred miles from home. It didn’t happen often, but it happened. When you ran a diner for fifteen, twenty years maybe it seemed oftener than it was. You saw them, you dished up chili to them, and coffee and pie and cigarettes, and they waved and left, and you told their jokes to somebody else, and two weeks, two months, two years later you saw their clean-shaved faces staring out at you, dead, from the paper. That’s how it seemed. He thought of George Loomis. His picture had been there too, and he’d been as good as dead; it had been touch-and-go for a week. That day too there’d been snow falling—an October snow, thin, icy, almost rain.

  (“Jesus Christ,” Lou Millet had said. He never talked much, Jim was the talker. Jim Millet was there too, drinking coffee, his nose still wrinkled from what he’d seen. “George Loomis,” Lou said. “Poor bastard must be hexed. You’d think he’d be just about ready to change his name and start all over.”

  Callie had stood with her back to them, wiping cups. Her hands moved, but the rest of her was motionless, the way she’d stood a long time ago when they talked about Willard Freund, before she’d found out about him, before he ran away and left her in trouble with nobody on earth but fat Henry Soames to turn to, a father to her in Frank Wells’ place, or so he’d thought until that night in the lean-to when she’d said to him, “What can I do?” She was wearing a man’s white shirt, and rain had pasted it to her.

  Jim Millet talked and she listened with her mouth pressed shut.

  “It was bloody,” Jim said. He shook his head and took another gulp of coffee. “The damn corn binder was still running.”

  Henry had seen the place—this was later, though—a rocky strip of land four rods wide and a half-mile long that angled along beside the woods, up above th
e swampland. It looked like a place where something like that would happen, and what was strange, it wasn’t three rods from the place where fifteen years ago Ba-Ba Covert had rolled over his spike-wheeled tractor and crippled himself for life and would have killed himself if he’d been sober. White stumps jutted up out of the water, and around the edge of the swamp there were half-dead willows and then locusts and then two tamaracks so tall that in late afternoon their skeleton shadows stretched the length of the cornlot.

  “Ok,” Lou said, not looking at Jim, watching Callie.

  “The goddamn cylinder was going around and around—” He made a circling motion with his right hand, touching his left bicep and circling away, touching the bicep again, circling away. “You could see slivers of bone—I never see nothin’ like it—red with blood and then redder in half-a-second, and the blade chewing away like a fuckin’ rasp.”

  Lou stood up. “Ok,” he said.

  Jim had nodded, looking into his coffee again. He said, “Christ in a crock.”

  And Callie had said afterwards, “You forget things like that can happen.”

  Henry had nodded. “Poor devil. He’s had one hell of a life.”

  She said, “If only he’d find some nice girl, after that other one, I mean.” Her eyes were half-closed, thinking. “It’s not right for a man like George to live up there in that big old house all alone that way. He must have loved her something awful—or hated her.”

  “Well, it’s none of our business,” Henry said.

  “Whose is it, then?” she asked. She was like an old woman sometimes. He put his arm around her. The next morning Henry had gone to see him, and he’d stayed at the hospital all day.)

  He looked at the snow. There would be trucks parked by the Stop-Off, banked in, hub-deep by now, and maybe Willard Freund would be there in his dented-up, sawed-down Dodge, with the motor on, and the heater. But, no. He was back, but he’d be at his father’s place. Sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading Scorchy Smith and Out Our Way in the paper, or up in his bedroom playing his banjo or lying with his eyes open, staring at nothing, like a blind man, the way he always did, and grinning, shy. Maybe he even grinned when he slept.

  5

  Henry stayed awake. He sat with his hand on Callie’s, his eyes staring at the shadows at the head of the bed, his mind wandering up and down roads that would be drifted in now, where truckers would sit shivering in their cabs. Suddenly he remembered his father sitting gigantic in the chair by the fringed lamp on a winter night, reading a book. He hadn’t remembered his father so vividly for a long time. He could almost count the liver spots on the side of the old man’s head. Then he remembered his father as he’d been toward the end, sitting asleep like a boulder with his hands folded over the head of his cane, his unlaced shoes toeing inward. Chippies could walk on his shoulders without waking him. He’d looked dead.

  The night nurse came on, the cross one, and cleaned up the room and muttered and left.

  At 1:00 A.M. the pains all at once got sharper, and he saw Callie’s eyes open. She whispered, “No,” and he leaned closer, holding her hand more tightly. Her eyes closed again and she whispered, the corners of her mouth trembling, “Surely it can’t last much longer.”

  He sat still, waiting. He could smell the plants in the hall. She groaned again, and the groan was different now, there was fear in it, and Henry’s chest tightened so hard he had to brace himself against the pain. She moved her head from side to side on the pillow, tears running down her cheeks, and then she lay still again for a minute. Another one came and she whimpered, “Oh, please, please, God.” It passed. She whispered, “Henry, get the doctor here, get a nurse.”

  He got up and went to the door and out to the desk but there was nobody there, and he stood biting down on his lip, panicky, tears in his eyes too now, his palms wet. The night nurse came out of a room down the hall and glided toward him with a water pitcher. She stopped suddenly when Callie screamed.

  “My wife,” Henry whispered. “Please, that’s my wife.” He caught himself breaking a leaf from the big poinsettia and tearing the leaf between his fingers.

  She glared at him and moved on again and put the pitcher on the desk, then went back to the room where Callie lay and closed the door behind her. Another nurse came up from behind him—the quiet nurse with the square face—and touched his arm and said, “Poor kid.”

  “I’ve never seen her like this,” Henry said.

  She nodded. “It’s like that sometimes.”

  “Couldn’t you call the doctor?”

  “I can’t. Miss Childres will, when the time comes.” She winced, because Callie was screaming again, piercing. “Cheer up,” she said then. “Six months she’ll never remember a thing.”

  The night nurse, Miss Childres, came out, pulling off her rubber glove. There was blood on it. She nodded, smiling, passing Henry. She said, “We’re coming nicely.”

  “She’s bleeding,” Henry whispered. “For God’s sake, call the doctor.”

  “All in good time,” Miss Childres said. “The perineum is tearing. Perfectly normal.”

  Heat leaped through his chest and he clenched his fists. “Wait,” he said, his upper lip lifted. “Other women don’t go through all that. I been sitting here two days.”

  “It happens sometimes,” Miss Childres said. But she went to the desk phone and lifted the receiver. Henry hurried back to the room.

  She wasn’t white now. Her face was flushed, as if she were burning up. She was breathing hard. She lay with her teeth clenched, tears squeezing out of her closed eyes.

  “They’re calling Dr. Costard,” Henry said. “You’re getting there. The nurse says you’re coming fine.” He gave her his hand and she clutched it.

  Callie shook her head. “I can’t stand it. Henry, I can’t.”

  And then she screamed again. Henry bent over her and pressed her hand to his stomach, and tears ran down his cheeks. The nurse came in with a hypo and Henry hung onto Callie’s hand, and, when it was over and the nurse had left, Callie screamed again. Henry tensed against the scream, and then all at once he was sobbing. It made him feel free, as though he’d burst out of a tight, solid box.

  In ten minutes Callie was out of her head. She screamed at the sound of a cart passing by in the hall, and screamed again when the overhead light went on and the doctor came in, and screamed when the doctor touched her wrist. She gripped Henry’s hand as if to crush it.

  “I’ve never seen her like this,” Henry said, shouting at them. “It’s not that she isn’t brave. It’s killing her.”

  The doctor nodded. He said to the nurse, “Get another hypo ready.” The nurse left. “You’d better leave, Mr. Soames.”

  Henry didn’t move.

  “You’d better leave,” he repeated. He smiled, grim.

  The younger nurse came in, and Costard said, “Bring in a wagon, we’ll move her into Delivery.”

  The girl nodded and glanced at Henry, then left. Calmly, the doctor pried Callie’s hand away from Henry’s. Callie screamed again, half-sitting up in bed, her mouth a flat, black rectangle, screaming, Goddamn you, Goddamn you! Henry why don’t you help me! She twisted, and it moved the sheet. The sheet underneath was bloodstained.

  The doctor turned to Henry. “You’d better leave.”

  Henry backed toward the door. Callie screeched after him, I hate you. It doesn’t matter. I hate you. I love somebody else.

  6

  He sat for five hours in the waiting room out front. He held a magazine in his lap, on the cover the lower branches of a Christmas tree and under them the same magazine, the same cover, the same Christmas tree, magazine, tree, magazine, falling away like a shaft. For four hours he heard her screams and sat motionless, his hands closed over his face. Between her screams he heard voices mumbling, but there was no one near. It grew light outside and the wind dropped off and the nurses changed shifts. A day nurse touched his arm and said, “Coffee?” He looked up and nodded, not understanding
. He said, “My wife—” She came back with coffee and he sipped it and his mind cleared a little. “She’s stopped,” he said. For an instant he felt light, giddy; then a vague possibility came to him, and after a moment, staring at the magazine without seeing, he was sure of it: She was dead. It made his heart trip. “She’s dead,” he whispered. The nurse said, amused, “Nonsense.”

  Doc Cathey and George came in, talking and laughing. George hesitated at the door. Henry called out, getting up, “They phoned you?”

  George shook his head, still holding back. “Not me. Baby born yet?”

  “She’s dead. I think Callie’s dead.”

  Doc Cathey stood still for a second. “Chickenmanure. They ain’t that stupid.”

  Henry shook his head, pulling at his hand so hard it hurt. “She was in labor for forty-eight hours, and then the bleeding. I don’t know. I think—”

  “Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He leered, but he pivoted away and went through the double doors. He didn’t come back.

  George said abruptly, “You and I are going to have some breakfast. Come on.”

  Henry stood there unsteadily, his seat and the backs of his legs numb, and then went for his coat. George closed his hand over Henry’s elbow as they moved to the door and out into the cold and down the steps. The brilliance of snow on the lawn, on trees, on rooftops, stabbed at Henry’s eyes. For an instant the ring of mountains around them seemed to be moving; then they were utterly still, blue-white.

  George slid in behind the wheel and ground on the starter a minute before the truck motor caught and roared. The truck cab shook, and through a gap in the floor boards Henry saw the motionless, soft snow on the road. George slipped his hand around the wheel to the gearshift and pulled it to low, then shifted to high and caught at the wheel.

  “You’re tired, Henry,” he said. “If this business kills anybody it’s gonna be you.” And then he said, “Or maybe it’s me it’ll kill.” He laughed.