The Lost Country

by William Gay

  The doctor’s on his way, the nurse at the station told him when asked. The nurses are back there prepping her for delivery. Everything’s being done, you can relax now. She’s in capable hands.

  He sat in the waiting room and looked at a magazine. He had half finished an article on bass fishing before it came to him that he was not remotely interested in bass fishing and did not even know what he was doing with it. He smoked a cigarette and drank a cup of cardboard flavored coffee poured down from a machine and sat and watched the night’s emergencies come and go.

  For a fugitive of order he had come to a strange pass. A world of cohesion here, of symmetry as if all the world’s order had been distilled and ended up here. Nurses and doctors came and went, faces calm, here no one exploded with anger, everything was contained well under control. In capable hands, she’d said. If there was a place in all the universe where mishaps were brought to rights, then surely it would be here. Even the voices grow calm within the walls here, steady weights are lifted, has the money not already been paid.

  Here in this glow of cold white fluorescence even time was held in abeyance. The sun neither rose nor set. The lights never went out, so day never ended, nothing marked time’s wheeling save the changing of shifts, the hours of births and deaths, hello and goodbye. The changing faces of the nurses.

  A wail of ambulances made him restive and he walked the halls of this resort for the maimed or dying. Standing near the emergency room doors he saw them suddenly explode inward, simultaneously with this moved aside for two attendants running down the hall. Two uniformed city cops held the doors wide and the attendants fled into the night where an ambulance set with rear doors already sprung wide and reappeared almost instantly bearing between them a stretcher where lay an enormous and bloody black man. Seemingly beheaded he lay in a great welter of blood with his eyes open and alive. He was turned on his side with the slashed side of his throat upward and agape and faintly pumping like the gills of a fish. As they fled past Edgewater he could smell the coppery odor of blood and see in the man’s hip pocket a smashed bottle and a spreading stain of whiskey and blood. They were gone down the hall to another door that opened and closed behind them.

  Is it all right if I make a local call?

  Go right ahead.

  He took up the phone and then realized he did not even know the number, had to search it out in the directory. It seemed strange seeing the name in print: Emma Bradshaw. It rang and rang and still she slept on. At last it ceased and he heard her voice, querulous and apprehensive, tinged with dread. The phone that rings deep in the night.

  He told her what she had to know and hung up. Bradshaw was gone as he was wont to be when the bells of need tolled so Edgewater called the cabstand and had a taxi dispatched.

  I need to find out something.

  Well. The doctor’s here now, and he’s with her in the delivery room. There’ve been some complications but everything’s being done that should be.

  What sort of complications?

  She’s just having a difficult delivery.

  Well. Thanks.

  Back in the waiting room there was a boy who was like a caricature of a prospective father. Edgewater watched him and seemed to grow calmer himself. The boy smoked and chewed his nails and behaved precisely as if he were some actor awaiting imminent fatherhood in a film.

  Sometime in the hours of early morning he slept and awoke to find the old woman watching him with bleak eyes. There was a bad taste in his mouth and his eyes hurt and sleeping in the chair had given him a dull ache at the base of the skull. He rubbed his eyes. Asleep he’d forgotten where he was. He picked a cigarette out of the pack and lit it.

  Have you seen her?

  They let me go in a minute but they’ve got her all doped up. The baby didn’t make it. They wanted me to tell you. They said to let her rest.

  They fell silent, wary of each other. Curious that it should have come to this. Old enemies honoring an armed truce perhaps. Gamblers just waiting for the next card to fall. Edgewater stretched his feet out, tried and failed to get comfortable. After a while the door opened on its near soundless hinges and a nurse beckoned to the boy awaiting news of his wife. You’ve got a little girl, she told him. He arose to follow her and her eyes glanced once at Edgewater and met his momentarily then sidled away.

  Edgewater sat for a time in the Fleetline and watched the night wear its weary way out but it was too cold to stay outside for long and the heater did not work. He stayed long enough to wake himself thoroughly for in the morning hours before dawn the cold grew bitter and then he went back inside. Nothing seemed to have changed, he felt he’d been there forever. A familiar of the waxed halls, the closed doors, the soft hushed comings and goings. The constant hum of unseen machinery, a distasteful smell he could not identify.

  He went back to the waiting room and stood staring out through his own dark still reflection to the neat rows of box elders and beyond, the asphalt slick and wetlooking under the lights, and past this further the streetlights running along the highway with their quaking coronas of nearblue light and the infrequent passage of cars, headlights flaring soundless and ghostly though the thick glass. A backdrop of sleeping houses, an occasional window lit, sickness or trouble in their night as well. The focus of his gaze shifted and this vision faded and beyond his reflection was a waiting room with its rows of empty chairs and the old woman with lowered head, hand to her brow, asleep or praying. Weary Madonna. That it should come to this. Mother and daughter linked by a circle of pain.

  Near daylight he drove downtown and circled the block until he found a café open. Entered and sat among early morning deer hunters, a few drunks out all night and afraid to go home or perhaps they had none. He ordered coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich, sat half entranced waiting at the counter, staring unseeing at tiers of sectioned pies under plate glass, cardboard mockups of sandwiches and carbonated drinks. He ate the sandwich without really tasting it and when it came sipped the hot coffee, absentmindedly wiped his buttery fingers on a paper napkin. He paid and went out. On the street he paused for a time and then he went back in and ordered a bacon and egg sandwich for the old woman. He paid for that and a container of coffee and went out again.

  The town still slept. He sat in the car amidst a calm silence and watched. The sun was just rising over shantytown, the railroad tracks gleamed as if they had been polished in the night. He closed his eyes and felt the spare warmth of the sun through the glass and began to hear far off as yet the approach of the train. The sun crept on. It crept across the jungle of kudzu until the tie yard commenced itself out of light colors appearing. You could watch them come, the trees rising up burdened and grotesquely disfigured by the weight of vines, the sun’s slow slant sweep across it and past and across the tarpaper roofs and cindercolored walls of shacks and yawning porches with swings dependent from lengths of chain and bare earth chickenscratched, with trees from whose branches hung lank and motionless swings fashioned from automobile tires. On trucks with splayed tires and stone-shattered glass and wrecksprung doors and from thence onto moted glass in curtainless windows onto the sleeping faces of drunk and whore and child alike, night’s dreams were ending, sweet day had broken.

  Mr. Edgewater?

  Yes.

  Dr. Klein would like to see you. I believe he’s across the hall in the emergency room. He would have seen you in his office but things have been pretty hectic around here this morning.

  All right.

  He walked on down and across the hall to where the emergency room was marked by a row of lights about its door and a metal placard. He pushed the knobless door and it opened on freeswinging hinges, he went on in. He felt enormously hollow inside, empty, cold winds sang there like winds singing off stone.

  A man in white standing by a table while a nurse was applying a compress of gauze to the arm of an old man sitting up on a metal stool. There were drops of blood on his pants and on his shoes. The doctor turned when the door ope
ned, a wry little man with thinning hair.

  Mr. Edgewater?

  Yes.

  I’m Dr. Klein, your wife’s physician. I wanted to talk to you in my office but I guess you’d gone to eat breakfast? Your wife is rising now. We’ve moved her to 11-B and of course you can see her, but she’s heavily sedated. She won’t be coherent. She’s had a very difficult time. He was snipping the gauze, tucking it under, a neat workmanship job, taking up a roll of adhesive tape.

  I know.

  An extremely difficult time. She seems to have a kidney infection.

  What about the baby?

  There was a pause, indicative, if the conversation had ceased here Edgewater would still have known. It was a stillbirth, Mr. Edgewater. I’m sorry. The baby was already dead. That was one reason things were so complicated.

  I see.

  I’m sorry. It goes without saying that we did everything we could.

  Of course. You said she was in 11-B?

  11-B, yes.

  Sudy was sleeping. The old woman was sitting in a chair by her. It was a small room with two beds, two sinks and two chairs, a green curtain on a rod suspended from the ceiling separating the room so he couldn’t see who was on the other side. He glanced at Sudy and then approached the old woman and proffered the paper bag and she stretched out something more claw than hand and slapped it from him. It hit the floor at his feet, he could see the dark brown spread of coffee staining the bag. He picked it up. There was a wastepaper basket with a black plastic liner in front of the radiator and he threw the bag into it.

  The girl was white, she lay pillowed on her blond hair, the hair was damp at the temples, darker there, ash tendrils against her cheek. She stirred momentarily in sleep or whatever drugged state she inhabited. She looked helpless, vulnerable.

  Sudy? He leaned above the haggard face.

  Her eyes fluttered and she said something. He leant to hear but he did not understand it: one word, it had sounded like a name, but if it was, it was not his own.

  ———

  Late in the afternoon, weary and desolate, he drove back to Grievewood, a place so aptly named. The house cold and dark, shadows gathered within and it seemed some old house abandoned long ago to nightprowlers and the elements, no one living here at all. The front door stood ajar still, the fire in the fireplace dead and burnt to a powdery white ash the wind through the front door lifted and stirred like flakes of dry snow. There was a steeped-in smell of old smoke.

  He put on a pot of water to boil for coffee and when it was hot he heated water in a pan for shaving and sat at the kitchen table drinking the bitter coffee and waiting for the water to heat. He peered through the kitchen window to the old garden spot thick with spears of brittle weeds, beyond it the bleak gentle roll of winter hills. The house seemed cavernous, emptiness multiplied by itself, old voices called down the sleep starved corridors of his brain and he thought he heard her voice, her laughter. His own voice saying things he wished he’d said but hadn’t.

  When the water was hot he carried the watermarked mirror he’d found and his soap and razor out to the dogtrot where better light fell through the screened entrance. He lathered his face and shaved, the soap drying quickly in the windy hall. He went back in and washed himself and put on clean clothing in the room with its still-tousled bedclothes, her shoes at the foot of the bed, the aspirin on the seat of a kitchen chair by his side. A halfglass of water. Here time seemed not to have progressed at all. Even the alarm clock had stopped, though not to mark her hour of travail: it had trundled on a few more hours before ceasing. He viewed the room as a stranger might, already felt a bitter remove from it, as if the pleasures and the ultimate disquiet of this bed had befallen someone else.

  He gathered together a few things he thought she might want or need, a clean gown and underwear, her hairbrush, toothpaste and a toothbrush. He worked hurriedly, like a thief expecting interruption. When he had all the things in a paper bag he went on out to the car. During the day clouds had moved smoothly in from the west and the sky was a dull gray. A band of lighter gray lay on the horizon and he thought later it might snow.

  He pushed open the door to 11-B and saw not Sudy but an elderly woman appended with wires or tubing in her wrist and nose, an old shocked-looking woman with wild tufts of irongray hair and frightened eyes. For a moment he thought Sudy had died and then he backed out and made inquiries at the nurses’ station.

  Mrs. Bradshaw had her moved into a private room. She’s in 16-B, down and across the hall.

  He went down the hall with the brown paper bag. She was alone and she was sleeping when he went in. In this room there was a view of the outside, he sat in a folding chair by the window and stared across the gray winter world. A few cold-looking birds foraged the grass near the building’s edge, rose fluttering to the bare branches of a mimosa tree, sat disconsolate and uncertain as if they wished they’d followed their brothers south. True to his premonition a few flakes of snow fell, tilted in the wind and listed soundlessly against the glass. A cold wind tilted the branches of the tree and the birds rose out of his sight. He sat for a long time while the light waned and the day drew on.

  Billy?

  He turned. She was just lying there watching him. He arose and carried the paper bag over to the side of the bed. There was a metal nightstand there with a shelf in the bottom and he set the bag there.

  It died, didn’t it?

  Yes.

  It was a little boy.

  Well, it couldn’t be helped, Sudy. Are you feeling all right?

  I just feel real weak and everything.

  When you get tired tell me and I’ll go or just sit and let you sleep.

  I slept all day.

  He sat awkwardly beside the bed and he seemed unable to think of anything else to say. He turned toward the window to see was it still snowing but he couldn’t tell, dusk was deepening and the world closing in.

  I’m not going back down there, Billy. I’m going home.

  You won’t have to go back. I’ll find a furnished place here in town and rent it. I guess that place wasn’t too good an idea to start with.

  No. That’s not what I meant. I mean I’m going back home. I’ll stay there awhile and then I’m going to get a job. There are things I want, things I need you don’t even know what are. Things we’d never have. You won’t work. You quit a perfectly good job over something that had to be done and money don’t mean a thing in this round world to you. When you’ve got it you throw it away and when you don’t that’s all right too. You’re just as happy. I can’t live like that, Billy.

  He sat listening to all this with no trace of surprise, with a kind of tired inevitability, a vague ache of emptiness.

  You never wanted to marry me anyway, Billy. You had your own reasons for what you done, you always do.

  And all you wanted was a name for the baby.

  She was crying a little. The little thing don’t need it now, she said. I wanted to be respectable.

  Respectable? he asked in disbelief.

  See? You don’t even know, or care. You don’t care about anything. You’re…just all to yourself, there’s not enough to go around. You don’t need anybody else. It’s like you’re not even there.

  There were things he could have said but he did not say them. He sat silent as if under some edict or judgment, as if he awaited some invisible presence to arise and speak in his behalf, the natural order of cause and effect itself to plead his case. Or awareness that things once set in motion must one day cease.

  Edgewater crossed a trestle spanning an overpass and from this height he could see the city. He sat for a while dangling his feet in empty space and peering out across the tops of a vacant lot given over to a spreading hedge of mimosa, bare of leaves and in the cold clear air their delicate branches looked bonelike and fragile. Past their tops and farther there were two boxcars tilted on their sides and being swallowed by hedges like some old undiscovered train wreck of long ago and he thought for a fey
moment he might kick among the bones of the victims for their coins and jewelry. Beyond the boxcars a thin and near translucent border of willows and past that as if it were some ambiguous border marking the beginning of civilization a few scattered houses and the tarred and graveled roof of the Cozy Court Motel with the sparse scattering of cars and the café sat cattycorner by the highway to the right and taller than buildings of the town he could see the courthouse set on its rows of hedges and symmetrical square of asphalt and he sat for a moment trying to pick out the barred windows he had stared out from that day. If time were eternal and looped there might come an instant that time veered and stopped into a momentary synchronicity and he thought for a moment he might see his face at the bars or his face there might see him here on the trestle in the wind but he doubted one face would recognize the other silhouetted dimensionless and profound against the bluegray sky. He got up and walked the rest of the way across the trestle down a ramp of riprap and slag and cut past the tilted boxcars with their air of old doom and toward the scattered houses and ultimately the Southside Café.

  He went down a dry gully half filled with old car parts and tires made outsized and grotesque by its embroidery of vines as if the hedges were in the act of devouring them, drawing nourishment from them. He crossed a field of cheap wine bottles and beer bottles and cans and up a steep bank he stopped in someone’s backyard. There was a boy of four or five there playing on his knees in the dirt and pushing along a hoescraped road some small vehicle rusted and dented as if it were the survivor of countless miniature highway catastrophes. The boy looked up at Edgewater with no surprise or anything at all on his face and Edgewater nodded at him solemnly and walked on past the house.

  From within the house noises flared in threatened violence and he abruptly veered away from the brickhedged wall and quickened his pace as if whatever violence this house possessed might be contagious. Something glass broke against a wall and fell and a woman said, Here go ahead and drank it up goddamn you. Schoolclothes money and all. A deeper voice replied something unintelligible to Edgewater or perhaps just incoherent. The female voice gained volume and stridency almost a wail of despair. If I don’t get away from here l’ll lose my fuckin mind, she said.