“Most women say the same thing, Mrs. Jacobs,” the doctor answered. Her cursing didn’t bother him. He’d surely heard a lot of patients coming out from under ether. He hadn’t even noticed. Edna had, and was smirking.
Nellie went on taking stock. She’d felt a lot of labor pains before Hal and Edna brought her to the hospital, and a lot more before the doctors put her under. But she’d missed the ones at the end of the affair, and those were far and away the worst. And she’d missed the process of, as one of her fallen sisters had put it many years before, trying to shit a watermelon. Sure as sure, this was better.
“Would you like to see your daughter, Mrs. Jacobs?” the doctor asked.
“Would I ever!” Nellie said. Smiling, the doctor turned and beckoned. A nurse brought the baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, up to Nellie. Clara was tiny and bald and pinkish red and wrinkled. Edna had looked the same way just after she was born.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Hal said.
“Of course she is,” Nellie answered. Edna looked as if she had a different opinion, but she was smart enough to keep it to herself.
“If you want to give her your breast now, you may,” the doctor said.
What, right here in front of you? Nellie almost blurted. That was foolish, and she figured it out before the words passed her lips. He’d had his hands on her private parts while delivering Clara. After that, how could she be modest about letting him see her bare breast?
But she was. He must have read it in her face—and, of course, he would have seen the same thing in other women, too. He said, “Mr. Jacobs, why don’t you step out into the hall with me? I think your wife might have an easier time of it with just the ladies in here with her.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course,” Hal said. He followed the doctor out of the room, looking back over his shoulder at Nellie as he went.
“Slide down your gown, dearie, and you can give your wee one something good,” the nurse said. She was a powerfully built middle-aged woman with the map of Ireland on her face. After Nellie exposed her breast, she set the baby on it. Clara knew how to root; babies were born knowing that. She didn’t need long to find the nipple and start to suck.
“Ow,” Nellie said, and made a hissing noise between her teeth. She’d forgotten how tender her breasts were and would be till nursing toughened them up.
“She’s getting something, sure enough,” the nurse said. Nellie heard the gulping noises the baby was making, too. The nurse went on, “You’ll be better off if you go right on nursing her, too. Breast-fed babies don’t get the bowel complaints that carry off so many little ones, not nearly as often as them that suck a bottle.”
“Cheaper and easier to nurse a baby, too,” Nellie said. “Nothing to buy, nothing to measure, nothing to boil. I’ll do it as much as I can.”
Edna watched in fascination. “They know just what to do, don’t they?”
“They do that,” the nurse said. “If they didn’t, not a one of ’em’d live to grow up, and then where would we be?”
“You were the same way,” Nellie told Edna. “I reckon I was the same way, too, and my ma, and her ma, and all the way back to the start of time.” She didn’t mention little Clara’s father, nor Edna’s father, nor her own father, nor any other man. That wasn’t because she assumed they were the same way, too. It was because, as far as she was concerned, men weren’t worth mentioning.
After about ten minutes, the baby stopped nursing. Nellie handed her to the nurse, who efficiently burped her. Clara cried for a little while, the high, thin wail of a newborn that always put Nellie in mind of a cat on a back fence. Then, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch on her back, she fell asleep.
Nellie found herself yawning, too. Not only were the remnants of the ether coursing through her, but she’d also been through labor and delivery: hard work, even if she hadn’t felt most of it.
“Rest now, if you want to,” the nurse said. “We’ll want to keep you here for a week, maybe ten days, make sure you don’t come down with childbed fever or anything else.” She cast a speculative eye toward Nellie. That or anything else no doubt meant or anything else that’s liable to happen to an old coot like you.
Had Nellie had more energy, she might have resented that. As she was now, without enough get-up-and-go to lick a postage stamp, she simply shrugged. A week or ten days with nothing to do but nurse the baby and eat and sleep looked like heaven to her.
Edna took a different perspective. “A week? Ten days?” she exclaimed in mock anger. “You’re going to leave me running things by myself so long, Ma? That’s a lot to hand me.”
“I’ve already done a lot,” Nellie said. “Besides, the place has to bring in enough to pay for my little holiday here.”
It didn’t, not really. She and Hal had saved up enough to meet the hospital bill. Hal knew how to sock away money. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Nellie wished she were better at that. She’d learned some from paying attention to the way her husband handled things. Maybe she could learn more.
Edna stopped complaining, even in fun. Nellie thought she recognized the gleam in her daughter’s eye. Hal wouldn’t be able to watch Edna the way Nellie had ever since she’d become a woman. Edna wouldn’t have a lot of time to get into mischief, but a girl didn’t need a lot of time to get into mischief. Fifteen minutes would do the job nicely.
And maybe, nine months from now, Edna would have an ether cone clapped over her face and wake up with a baby hardly younger than its aunt. If she did, Nellie hoped the baby would have a last name.
She yawned again. She was too tired even to worry about that very much. Whatever Edna did in the next week or so—if she did anything—she would damn well do, and she and Nellie and Hal would deal with the consequences—if there were consequences—later. The only thing Nellie wanted to deal with now was sleep. The light overhead and the hard hospital mattress fazed her not at all.
Before she could sleep, though, her husband came back into the room. He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “The doctor tells me you could not have done better. You will be well, and little Clara will be well, and every one of us will be well.”
“Bully,” Nellie said, and then a new word she’d started hearing in the coffeehouse: “Swell. Hal, you’re sweet as anything, but will you please get the hell out of here and let me rest?”
“Of course. Of course.” He almost stumbled over his own feet, he went out the door so fast. He paused in the doorway to blow her a kiss, and then he was gone. A moment later, Nellie was gone, too.
They woke her in the middle of the night to nurse the baby again. By then, all the anesthetic had worn off. Not to put too fine a point on it, she felt like hell. The night nurse brought her some aspirin. That was sending a boy to do a man’s job. She wondered if she’d be able to go back to sleep once they took Clara away again. She did, which testified less to the tablets’ effectiveness than to her own overwhelming exhaustion.
When she woke in the morning, she was ravenous. She would have yelled at Edna for serving a customer such greasy scrambled eggs, overcooked bacon, and cold toast. The coffee they gave her with it might have been brewed from mud. She didn’t notice till the whole breakfast was gone. While she was eating, she noticed only that it filled the vast, echoing void in her midsection.
After Clara had had breakfast, too, a nurse escorted Nellie down the hall so she could take a bath. It was the first time she’d had a good look at her body since the baby was born. She didn’t care for what she saw, not even a little bit. The skin of her belly hung loose and flabby, having been stretched to accommodate the baby who wasn’t in there any more. It would tighten up again; she remembered that from the days following Edna’s birth. She’d been a lot younger in those days, though. How much would it tighten now?
If Hal wanted her less after she came home…that wouldn’t break her heart. It would, if anything, be a relief. She resolved to lay in a supply of safes.
Now that she knew she could catch, she didn’t intend to do it again. If Hal didn’t care to wear them—She grimaced. There were other things they could do, things that carried no risk. She hated those things, having had to do them for men who laid coins on the nightstands of cheap hotel rooms, but she hated the notion of getting pregnant again even more.
As it had been on the way to the bathtub, her walk on the way back was not only slow but distinctly bowlegged. She remembered that, too. She’d had a baby come through there, all right. Clara was waiting for her when she returned to her bed. Nellie startled herself with a smile. Another baby, no. This one? “Not so bad,” she said, and took her daughter in her arms.
On the night of November 4, Roger Kimball headed over to Freedom Party headquarters on King Street to get the Congressional election returns as fast as the telegraph brought them into Charleston. He’d tried to get Clarence Potter and Jake Delamotte to come along with him. They’d both begged off.
“If your madman friends do win some seats, I’ll want to go out and get drunk, and I don’t mean by way of celebration,” Potter had said. “That being so, I may as well go straight to a saloon now. The company’s apt to be better, anyhow.”
“I aim to get drunk no matter what happens,” Jack Delamotte had echoed. He’d gone along with Potter.
Summer soldiers, Kimball thought. They’d been willing enough to think about using Jake Featherston, but hadn’t settled down for the long haul of using Featherston’s party. A submersible skipper learned patience. Those who didn’t learn ended up on the bottom of the ocean.
Smoke filled the Freedom Party offices when Kimball walked in. As soon as the door closed behind him, he held up a gallon jug of whiskey. A raucous cheer went up, and everybody in the place welcomed him like a long-lost brother. His was far from the only restorative there; several men already seemed distinctly elevated. He laughed. Potter and Delamotte could have got drunk here and saved themselves thousands of dollars—not that thousands of dollars meant much any more.
“We’re leading in the fourth district up in Virginia!” somebody at one of the bank of telegraph clickers announced, and more cheers rang out. People had yelled louder for Kimball and his whiskey, though.
He poured himself a glass and raised it high. “Going to Congress!” he shouted, and another burst of happy noise filled the rooms.
It must have spilled out into the street, too, for a gray-uniformed cop poked his head inside to see what the commotion was about. Somebody stuck a cigar in his mouth, as if the Freedom Party had had a baby. Somebody else asked, “Want a snort, Ed?” Before the policeman could nod or shake his head, he found a glass in his hand. He emptied it in short order.
“First votes in from Alabama—we’re winning in the Ninth. That’s Birmingham,” a red-faced Freedom Party man said.
Applause rang out, and a couple of Rebel yells with it. People raised glasses and bottles on high and poured down the whiskey as if they’d never see it again. “Congress is going to be ours!” somebody howled. That set off more applause.
It made Kimball want to laugh or cry or bang his head against the wall. A couple of seats made people think they’d win a majority, which wouldn’t, couldn’t, come within nine miles of happening. Maybe Clarence Potter was right: maybe the Freedom Party did attract idiots.
From everything Kimball had heard, even Jake Featherston wasn’t predicting more than about ten seats’ ending up with Freedom Party Representatives in them. That didn’t make up a tenth part of the membership of the House. And if the leader of a party wasn’t a professional optimist before an election, who was? Kimball had figured the night would be a success if the Freedom Party elected anybody. By that undemanding standard, things already looked to be going well.
“Here we go—First District, South Carolina. That’s us. Quiet down, y’all,” somebody at the bank of telegraph tickers called. People did quiet down—a little. The fellow waited for the numbers to come in, then said, “Damn, that Whig bastard is still a couple thousand votes up on Pinky. We’re way out in front of the Radical Liberals, though.”
Kimball looked around to see if Pinky Hollister, the Freedom Party candidate, was in the office. He didn’t spot him. That didn’t surprise him too much: Hollister actually lived not in Charleston but in Mount Holly, fifteen miles outside of town. He was probably getting the results there.
“Well, we scared the sons of bitches, anyways,” a bald man said loudly. That signaled yet another round of cheers and clapping.
“To hell with scaring the sons of bitches,” Kimball said, even more loudly. “We scared the sons of bitches up in the USA, but in the end they licked us. What I want us to do, God damn it to hell, is I want us to win.”
Another near silence followed that. After a moment, people started to clap and yell and stomp on the floor. “Freedom!” somebody shouted. The cry filled the room: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”
Dizziness that had nothing to do with the whiskey he’d drunk or with the tobacco smoke clogging and thickening the air filled Kimball. He’d known something of the same feeling when a torpedo he’d launched slammed into the side of a U.S. warship. Then, though, the pride had been in something he was doing himself. Now he rejoiced in being part of an entity larger than himself, but one whose success he’d had a hand in shaping.
“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The shout went on and on. It was intoxicating, mesmerizing. Kimball howled out the word along with everybody else. While he was yelling, he didn’t have to think. All he had to do was feel. The rhythmic cry filled him full.
The door out onto the street opened. Kimball wondered if another cop was going to come in and try to make people quiet down. (He hadn’t seen the first policeman leave. There he was, as a matter of fact, drinking like a fish.) A good many people must have had the same thought, for the chant of “Freedom!” came to a ragged halt.
But it wasn’t a cop standing there. It was Anne Colleton. Not everybody in the office recognized her. Not everybody who recognized her knew she’d helped the Freedom Party. Most of the people who followed Jake Featherston were poor, or at best middle-class. One of the reasons they followed him was the vitriol he poured down on the heads of the Confederacy’s elite. And here was an obvious member of that elite—Anne could never be anything else—coolly inspecting them, as if they were in the monkey house at the Charleston zoo.
Kimball started to explain who she was and what she’d done for the Party. Before he could get out more than a couple of words, she took matters into her own hands, as was her habit. “Freedom!” she said crisply.
At that, the chant resumed, louder than ever. Men surged toward Anne, as men had a way of doing whenever she went out in public. If she’d accepted all the drinks they tried to press on her, she would have gone facedown on the floor in short order. After she took one, though, she was vaccinated against taking any more.
Instead of acting like a chunk of iron in the grip of a magnet, Kimball hung back. Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.
“Hello, Roger,” she said when she did finally notice him in the crowd. “I wondered if I’d find you here.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he answered. “Best show in the world—this side of the circus, anyhow.” She laughed at that. He said, “I didn’t expect to see you here, though. If you got out of St. Matthews, I reckoned you’d go on up to Columbia.”
“I didn’t come down just for the election,” Anne said. “I’ve taken a room at the Charleston Hotel on Meeting Street. The shops in Columbia don’t compare to the ones they have here.”
“If you say so,” Kimball replied.
“I do say so,” she answered seriously. “I know what I want, and I aim to get just that, nothing less.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Some ways, we’re very much alike, you and I.”
“That’s a fact,” he said. With a scowl, he went
on, “If you’re going to tease me, pick another time. I’ve got a little too much whiskey in me to take kindly to it tonight.”
“That’s frank enough.” She appraised him as frankly. “But I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t gong to tease you if I found you tonight: I was going to invite you up to my room. I just told you, I know what I want, and I aim to get it.”
He thought about turning her down to prove she couldn’t take him for granted. It might make her respect him more. It might also make her furious. And he didn’t want to turn her down. He wanted to throw her down on a big soft bed and take her while she clawed his back to ribbons. If she had something like that in mind, he was ready, willing, and able—he hadn’t drunk so much as to leave him in any doubts on that score.
“We’re ahead in the Seventh in Tennessee,” a man at the telegraph tickers announced, which produced a new roar of applause. Through it, the fellow went on, “That’s around Nashville. They had the damnyankees occupying them—they got themselves some debts to pay.”
Another Freedom Party man was keeping an eye on a different telegraphic instrument. “The Redemption League looks like they’re gonna win themselves a seat in Texas,” he said. “Ain’t as good as if we did it, but it’s the next best thing.”
“How long do you want to stay here?” Anne asked.
“Up to you,” Kimball answered. “We’ve already done about as much as I reckoned we could, and there’s a lot of votes out there waiting to be counted. Maybe we really will get ten seats, the way Featherston said we would.”
“That would be remarkable,” Anne said. She echoed his own thought: “Most brags before an election turn to wind the second the voting’s done.” She slipped her arm into his. “Shall we go celebrate, then? My motorcar’s a couple of doors down.”
She was still driving the spavined Ford she’d got after the C.S. Army commandeered her Vauxhall. That told Kimball she hadn’t come all the way back from the financial reverses she’d taken during the war. But then, who in the Confederate States had? He wondered what would have become of him had he not had more than usual skill with a deck of cards.
Blood and Iron Page 27
