B004XR50K6 EBOK

by Kathleen Shoop

  “She?”

  “I know it’s a girl, you’ll see.”

  Jeanie squinted at him then fell back onto the mattress. They’d been so overwhelmed with the move, settling in, suffering the constant breaking of disastrous environmental waves over their community that the Arthurs had scarcely spoken of the baby inside Jeanie. She’d barely thought of it herself. Yet, in the moments since her contractions began, Jeanie couldn’t have felt closer to the baby or sadder at the possibility of it not living. She needed that baby, someone to care for, to need her.

  Another wave of contractions came, then another on top of it and before long, she was bearing down to push. She pushed so hard that the baby flew out of her, landing in between her legs, shocking both Jeanie and Greta. But the crash of the landing made the baby begin to wail immediately.

  “It’s a girl,” Greta said. She handed the baby to Jeanie. “Let me get the scissors.”

  “A girl?” Jeanie watched the baby’s face curl into any number of angry faces, crying so hard that Jeanie was afraid she’d cut off her own airway. She cooed at the baby, pulling the bed covers over top of them both. She was so small, legs twig-like, skin transparent, sounding more animal than child. This baby was definitely early, at least two months, yet she was mighty and seeing the baby fight, angered by her rude entrance into the world, reassured Jeanie.

  Jeanie leaned forward, looking past her knees to Greta.

  “What’s wrong?” Pain shot through her belly. Greta looked up from between Jeanie’s legs, eyes wide, and though Jeanie could feel her lips moving, she knew she was forming words, she couldn’t hear her words leaving her mouth. Jeanie thought she was begging for Greta to help her, but Greta faded to an outline of a person and then darkness shut over Jeanie’s consciousness, blacking out her world.

  Jeanie woke and the room was moody with candles from the Thanksgiving table flickering from various spots in Templeton’s house. Jeanie shot up in the bed. Her hand flew to her stomach to find it remarkably flat.

  “Greta? My baby? I need to hold her. My head’s foggy, what did you give me?”

  Greta sat in the chair next to Jeanie, still as stone. “It’s early hours of the day after Thanksgiving. Three a.m., around about, I imagine.”

  Jeanie looked around the room. “Where’s my baby?”

  “She’s over there in the cradle. We’ve wrapped her tight. There’s just a matter of time, now.”

  Jeanie felt Greta’s words settle into her skin, chilling her. Jeanie would not allow her daughter to die simply because she was born too early. “Bring her to me,” Jeanie said.

  Greta held her position.

  “Get her,” Jeanie said.

  Greta rose slowly and plodded to the center of the room where the baby had been nestled into a wooden box near the stove, to keep warm.

  Greta turned with the baby in her arms. In the darkness, her clear-blue eyes were bathed in wetness and silent tears saturated her entire face as though Jeanie were supplying the sobs and Greta the tears.

  Greta sat on the bed beside Jeanie, settling the baby into Jeanie’s body. Jeanie stilled.

  Greta stood and slid back onto the wood chair beside the lounge where Jeanie lay, examining her miniature baby. In Jeanie’s mind, she calculated her weight, the size of a healthy hen. Three pounds or so. Her perfectly formed face, legs with no fat to speak of, each blue vein visible. Jeanie traced them, causing the infant to flinch. The cold air from being uncovered wakened her. She nearly growled at Jeanie, squalling like a bird of prey, angry to have been roused.

  Jeanie smiled down on her. Good, be mad. And live. Better to live, fueled by anger, than to not live at all. Jeanie shifted the blankets to the side and put the baby to her breast. She sucked for a moment then her eyes flew open and she stopped as though choking.

  “Well, you are a fighter. An early bird. A woman with a plan,” Jeanie said. “You’ll fit in just fine.”

  Jeanie wrapped her back up knowing that it could take a day for her milk to come in, that the baby would be fine. She looked up at Greta whose brow was wrinkled, more so than usual.

  “Don’t doubt her, Greta. She’s going to live. I know it might sound crazy but she will.”

  “I didn’t say anything about crazy,” Greta said. She rocked back and forth.

  “I’ll make her live. I can do that, you know. I am that strong. I have enough will for both of us, all of us.”

  Greta nodded then looked into her lap.

  Jeanie knew it wasn’t fair to say things like that, to somehow imply that Greta hadn’t been in the position of forcing her child to live.

  “I’m sorry. I just need, this baby has to—”

  Greta put the palm of her hand over Jeanie’s forehead, then the back of her hand. “Shhh, now you just rest. You’ve been fitful, you should rest, that’s your only concern.”

  Jeanie nodded, feeling fevered. “I know. But I can’t lose one, Greta. I’m strong, I believe I can make my children live, but I know I can’t live without one of them. That much I know.” Jeanie kicked off her covers, drenched in sweat.

  Greta nodded and went to the stove. There, she took several rocks that she had warmed over the cook-stove and wrapped them in a woolen blanket. She tucked the blanketed rocks beside the baby.

  “Here, for when the sweats force you to throw the blankets, the rocks should keep her body temperature stable. And you’ll need some laudanum for just one night, for the pain,” Greta added.

  Jeanie hesitated, then nodded. She knew she would have to, as she had with her other births.

  “Just half the dose. I don’t want to sleep for long. Just enough to get my strength back.”

  Her teeth chattered. Greta gave her the medicine. She wiped Jeanie’s brow and smiled down on her as Jeanie imagined she must have done so lovingly to all her children. And that was the final image Jeanie saw before falling into a deep sleep, grateful to her bones that she had met Greta Zurchenko.

  Jeanie awoke to sunlight bathing her so fully she was sweating from its directness. Where was she? She jerked up to her elbow then fell back on the bedstead, dizzy. She was still tucked inside Templeton’s home. She looked down to see she was wearing her nightgown. Frank must have gone for it at some point. The baby! The thought startled her. She realized only then that her daughter had been nestled beside her, under the nightgown, against her skin.

  One breath caught on the next as Jeanie skinned the blanket off by kicking her feet. She wrestled with the buttons of her nightgown and she felt lightheaded, fearing she would find her baby stiff having had her last breath stolen by the very nest Greta thought might have helped with the baby’s body temperature.

  Jeanie gripped the baby under her arms, her body so small Jeanie’s fingers knitted together across her back. “Breathe, breathe,” she said. The baby was warm and pliable, though Jeanie could see no visible signs she was inhaling. Her egg-shaped head, bowed slightly at her neck, bore none of its weight no matter how small, her face as tranquil as a mother could want her baby to be. Jeanie held her face to her ear to hear her breathe. Nothing. Jeanie’s staccato panting was all she could hear. She laid the baby across her legs and as still as wood, she sat, waiting to see a tiny rise in her chest.

  And there it was, a small rise in the chest and an accompanying wail.

  “Is that what I sounded like, Mama?” Katherine came into the room, watching the series of events that led to the baby’s bellowing.

  Jeanie felt her breasts tighten, fill with pain, making her want to feed the baby. She would try again. She settled her onto her breast and she took a few sucks before choking and turning from Jeanie with an expression of pure piss and salt and the angst of a cantankerous old man.

  “You sounded much different,” Jeanie said. She smiled at Katherine while shushing the baby and rubbing her back. “This little girl wasn’t quite ready to be born. I suspect her insides aren’t fully grown or she wouldn’t sound so funny, like a puppy that lost its mother.”

 
; Katherine nodded at her mother but didn’t go closer to her.

  “Could you get me the cleanest cup you can find, Katherine? We’re going to have to be creative because it appears something’s not right with her eating from the breast.”

  Katherine rocked on her feet as though about to follow her mother’s directions then she stopped.

  “Katherine?” Jeanie said.

  “Father and Ruthie and everyone, really, said we’re to just make the baby as comfortable as possible. That there’s no way a girl born, they suspect, two months early could survive such an inauspicious start. There’s simply no way.”

  Jeanie rolled those words in her mind, waited for anger to swell because of them, but all she felt was calm certainty, like she had when the children survived the fire. Sometimes a mother just knows.

  Jeanie jerked her head toward the kitchen. “You go on and bring me that clean cup. It has to be absolutely clean so there’s no chance of passing infection, and bring it to me and you’ll sit with me and learn to care for your sister because I’m going to need your help and as sure as I’d enlist an army to ensure your health, we’ll do the same for your sister. She won’t die, you needn’t worry. There’ll be no dying here, we’re not dying people.”

  Katherine’s lips split into a quick smile then she darted into the kitchen and came back with a stack of tin cups. “Here, Mr. Templeton bought these in Yankton. He didn’t need to use them yesterday, they’re brand new, but I rinsed this one to be extra sure. They’re pristine, Mama, in the prairie sense, anyway. He asks about you every fifteen minutes or so. He and James take turns reporting to Father.” Katherine handed Jeanie the cleanest looking one.

  “Now, that’s my girl,” Jeanie said, wrapping the baby in a blanket. When the infant was curled inside the bundle, Jeanie held her up toward Katherine.

  “Hold your sister. I need to expel some milk into this cup and we’ll feed her. What should we call her? We’ll drip the milk into her mouth with our fingers. When I was a girl there was a piglet, a teeny bugger, and Mr. Samuels fed that creature with his finger, dripping the milk from his finger right into the piglet’s mouth. I think that’s exactly what we’ll do with this one. What should we call her?”

  Katherine recoiled at the sight of her mother squeezing her breast like a cow’s udder then she patted her sister’s head, smoothing the thin hair back from her forehead like Jeanie would have done.

  “Mama?”

  Jeanie yanked at her breast. “Yes, dear Katherine.”

  “Last night, while you were tossing, pained, under the laudanum, you said your life was a pie—”

  “A pie!”

  “Yes, you said the pie was cut so that merely a sliver, a hair’s breath contained joy and contentment, that the rest of it was utterly awful. No part of the pie offered any sort of thing you wanted in your belly.”

  Jeanie squinted. “That’s gibberish, Katherine. Don’t tell me you’re worried.”

  “It’s just so different than anything I’d ever heard you say, you don’t look for trouble. You see good in all things, solutions to all problems, yet in the midst of your delirium, you sounded so articulate, with this metaphor, as though you’d contemplated it before.”

  Jeanie looked at the ceiling, trying to remember, knowing she could have very well said those things, because she had felt that her life had shifted to represent those exact proportions of happiness and displeasure. Jeanie shook her head, not wanting to show her daughter weakness, to allow anything but positive thoughts into her daughter’s mind, because although Jeanie was suffering from a sudden shift of mind-set, she didn’t want her daughter feeling the same.

  “Katherine, a pie? That’s too utterly, utter. Really, that’s juvenile even for a lowly writer of everything domestic, wouldn’t you say? I was pained, crazy with fear. This baby will live and we will live, together, full of pleasures and hopes and happiness. Even if things are hard for a while. We will live and we will live together.”

  “Well, you did start talking about dreaming that Father had no face, that you couldn’t see him even though he was standing right there. I suppose that is as fantastical as anything.” Katherine broke into a smile and lay down beside her mother.

  “See that, dreams, delirium, none of it means anything in the real world.”

  Jeanie reveled in the warmth of Katherine’s body, her sweet demeanor.

  “Oh, galoshes. I worried myself for nothing.”

  Katherine and Jeanie sighed at the same time in the same way, both satisfied that the other was okay, that the world had reset itself in their eyes, that they could push on.

  “I feel better, Mama. Thank you.”

  Jeanie did, too. She studied her daughter, smoothing her light hair back from her face. Yes, Katherine’s expression had relaxed and her shoulders released the tension she had clearly been holding. Jeanie savored the moment, Katherine laying on her side, molded into her body, while she dripped milk into the baby’s mouth, hoping if the infant couldn’t swallow correctly, that at least her throat would allow the milk to dribble into her belly without choking her to death in the process.

  And so, the next month went. The baby girl was named Yale by her siblings who researched names in literature, the Bible, and by polling every person who walked into and through Darlington Township. They chose Yale because the original Yale in Greek mythology possessed remarkable strength that surprised all who said he was weak.

  She wasn’t an easy baby, as Yale seemed to carry her strength into every area of her being. She did not give in easily to sleep, or happiness or anything that would be pleasing for other infants. She seemed to be miserable, as though an adult stuffed into a small skin with all sorts of ideas to tell and plans to enact but without any means to express them except for conveying her disgust with being in that very position.

  But, for Jeanie, it didn’t matter. This miracle allowed her to funnel every bit of energy into her, knowing it would result in something good and great.

  Frank was slow to warm to Yale. And that hurt Jeanie for a time, remembering the way they used to playfully fight over who would do what for which child. Jeanie smiled at the image of Frank changing a diaper, with his face reflecting the mutual joy he and the children took in one another’s presence. He never generated or reflected that emotion with Yale. That thought would trip Jeanie up, causing her to stop whatever she was doing and be grateful that she was the only living person who knew Frank’s behavior had transformed. For all the children knew, this was exactly how Frank had been with them.

  Templeton had been kind enough to share his home with the Arthurs as they weren’t prepared to move Jeanie and the baby to the dugout until they were sure Jeanie was recovered from the birth. The days in Templeton’s house were emotionally warm even when it physically was cold. James enjoyed Templeton’s continuous companionship as they challenged one another in predicting the weather and they even went so far as to feel out a spot—near the bee tree where they claimed the best indications of weather could be garnered.

  Frank enjoyed the month at Templeton’s because he could putz with his woodwork—creating useless though beautiful, intricate designs and then disappear to contemplate the beauties of nature for half the day. And Jeanie, in the swell of new motherhood, felt no interest toward Templeton beyond simple gratitude that he allowed them to stay on.

  Katherine and Tommy enjoyed the use of Templeton’s horse so each could have their own to visit friends, even getting caught at the Zurchenko’s for six days when a snow storm blew through while they were warming up there after a ride.

  Templeton and Frank had waited out the initial snowfall then made their way across the plain, plowing through the snow in order to discern the safety of the children. James fed the fire while Jeanie fed Yale, and in their silence, both were alone with their thoughts, sharing gentle laughs and stories of the past or reading books that the children had brought from home.

  Every once in a while Jeanie would start at the thought that
she wasn’t worried about Katherine and Tommy, that again she felt in her soul they were okay, that there was no way they weren’t. She wondered once for five minutes what this said about her. Did she really know in her bones that her children were safe or had she merely accepted that some day on that prairie one of them wouldn’t be? No, no, that definitely wasn’t right. She was not Greta, she could not mourn for a day and carry on as though a life stomped out was meant to be. She shook her head at herself.

  “Mama?” James said squatting near the fire.

  “I’m fine. Everything is fine, sweet James.”

  James squinted at her and stood. “I’ve got to twist the hanks and I’m going to try to follow Father’s path, see if there are any buffalo chips there. I won’t go far, but we can’t let the fire go too low.”

  “Are we out of cow chips and wood? Those hanks burn so fast they’re not always worth using.” Jeanie rocked the baby who had, after two hours of angry thrashing and screeching, finally dropped off to sleep.

  James pulled on his boots, coat, overpants, and hat. “That’s all we have until the snow breaks a bit.”

  “Be safe, my darling. I can’t have you not here,” Jeanie said.

  “Are you talking to me or Yale, Mama?” James grinned.

  Jeanie looked up from the baby. “I suppose I’m talking to you both.”

  “Nothing will happen to me, Mama. That much I do know.” James knelt in front of Jeanie and snuggled his cheek against Yale’s. Jeanie inhaled the scent of both of them. Her babies.

  James rose and strode across the floor, his swagger having transformed from boy to man at some point on the prairie. This was a person who could take care of himself. Someday Jeanie would have to let him go, let him marry, start his own home, but she didn’t need to think of that.

  James yanked open the door and snow blew in, giving the wind eerie shape and weight. James raised his hand above his head in a wave goodbye, but didn’t look back to see Jeanie return it.