Montana Rose

by Mary Connealy

  “I’m carrying this frying pan for you.” Red pried her fingers off it. “Now tell me where you want it.”

  She fussed and scolded at him as she shooed him toward the fireplace.

  Red thought, Maybe we don’t have all the time in the world. A man can die a hundred times, in a hundred different ways, in twenty-four hours.

  CHAPTER 23

  She had to finish dinner.

  She had to clean up the kitchen afterward, not just tidy but clean down to the bone.

  She had to scrub the floor, but she couldn’t scrub a dirt floor. But she had to!

  She had to scald all the cook pots and search out the last particle of dust. Cobwebs! There might be cobwebs!

  What about the slit that opened off her bedroom? What kind of filth lurked in that dark passageway? She had to ferret out every threatening speck so nothing dirty would touch—Her mind veered away from the why. She didn’t dare think about the baby on the way.

  She became aware that under the urgent need to hurry, she was hearing two different voices guiding her. For the first time in a long time she was separated from herself. The china doll, trying to be perfect, but with a twist because the china doll had been trying to be perfect for Griff. Now, her only standard was for herself, because Red never asked her to be perfect. But in some disjointed way, she knew the drive to have everything sparkling clean and in order was linked to the china doll.

  And the other Cassie, the furious, childish Cassie, wanted everything just right, too. But she wanted to holler. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to make Red clean the stupid house himself, for heaven’s sake. She shouldn’t have to clean in her condition.

  Which led her to think of the baby coming, and her mind careened off again. Having a baby was too huge. She was too young. She wasn’t ready to give birth to a child, let alone raise one.

  Panic roiled in her stomach, blared in her head. The childish Cassie wanted to release all of the tension with violence ... or at least with a temper tantrum to end all temper tantrums. She yanked tight on the reins of her emotions and kept the angry, terrified Cassie silent.

  To cover her turmoil, she forced the china doll to the forefront of her mind and worked. She had to wash and iron her nightgown. It had to be immaculate. She grabbed a bucket and hurried toward the cooler.

  Red took it from her.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I’ve been here right along, Cass.” Red gave her a worried look as he rested his hand on her arm. “I’ll get water. You shouldn’t be doing heavy lifting.”

  “Everything has to be clean. Everything has to be absolutely clean.” Her ears hurt a little, as though she’d shouted the words, but it hadn’t sounded loud, so that couldn’t be the source of the pain. Somehow her ears hurting must be Red’s fault. She wanted the nightgown washed in boiling water, and he was holding on to the bucket. Everything in the room had to be spotless.

  He glanced around the room. “It’s fine. You won’t even be in the room anyway.”

  Not be in the room? A vision of her baby being born without her being in the same room with it ricocheted around in her head. What kind of stupid thing was that to say?

  He stared at her funny for a few seconds, and Cassie had the sudden sick feeling that maybe she’d spoken her thoughts out loud. She shook her head. Impossible. She’d never call Red stupid, no matter what kind of idiot he acted like.

  His eyes widened and he glanced nervously from her, to the bucket, to the cooler, and back to her again. She got the impression he was afraid to leave the room.

  She had to wash her nightgown. The baby might take twenty-four hours, but she didn’t want to rely on that. She reached for the pail, determined to take care of fetching water if he was too lazy and useless to help her.

  His eyebrows shot up all the way to his red hair. He held the pail away from her and practically ran into the cooler.

  She wondered what had him acting so weird.

  He came back out with a full bucket. They always left one sitting under the trickling spring to fill. Speaking softly, using the same voice she’d heard him use on a spooky, green-broke horse, he said, “I’m not acting weird.”

  She thought that was an odd comment to make. It was as if he’d read her mind. She shook her head to clear it of such a distracting possibility.

  “My nightgown.” She raced into her room and came back with the white gown Muriel had given her.

  She tried to take the pail from Red.

  “Where do you want it?” he asked.

  “Fill a basin and hang it over the fire.”

  He did as she asked with alacrity.

  She threw her nightgown in the still-cold water to soak. While she was there, she checked the cook pot, fiercely determined that today of all days the potatoes wouldn’t be scorched. She leaned into the fireplace, and using a towel to protect her hand, she lifted the lid on the pot that hung side by side with the stewing nightgown and stirred.

  Red took the lid out of her hand and pulled her away from the fire and dealt with the potatoes himself.

  Then she elbowed him aside and checked the ham in the cast-iron skillet that sat nestled off to the side of the flames.

  “Watch out for the fire.” Red pulled her back.

  She was just straightening from her task to slug him in the shoulder when the baby made itself known again. She looked down at her stomach in disgust. How was she supposed to get her work done and forget about the coming difficult hours if the child kept pestering her?

  “You’ll do fine, Cassie. We’ll get everything done that needs doin’.”

  He was reading her mind again and that made her angry, and she had to clamp down on the irate Cassie inside of her all the more. She was aware of Red uncurling her hand, one finger at a time, from his shirt. But she didn’t remember how her hand had gotten there to begin with. Then the pain got strong enough that all she was conscious of was Red holding her and sharing his vast strength with her. When it eased, she was sitting in his lap again, and that struck her as completely ridiculous when she had dinner cooking and a house to clean. She leaped off his lap and went back to work.

  The noon meal was fine except she didn’t eat it and Red ate his so fast she didn’t remember his sitting down to the table. And it was all burned because she was forever finding herself hugged up tight against Red. One time she stood up to find the potatoes boiled dry and scorched until they were ruined. Red said he liked them that way and set the pot aside.

  The next time the pain eased, the ham had dried out. Cassie didn’t mean to cry over something so insignificant as a burned piece of meat, but she heard Red telling her not to cry and so she supposed she had. Red didn’t seem to mind the blackened ham. He said he loved ham and potatoes just that way. And when the biscuits burned, Red was the one who pulled them out of the fire, and he blamed himself for not getting them sooner, so that was his own fault.

  She thought, Why does he keep distracting me and holding me when he knows I have work to do?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll never distract you again. I promise.”

  Which was stupid of him since she hadn’t told him what she was thinking.

  Then he said, “I agree completely. It was stupid of me.”

  Which confused her all the more, especially since a few minutes later she found herself in his arms again, and after his promise!

  He dished himself up a full meal, then she was being held close and the meal was gone. She wondered if he’d enjoyed it.

  He said, “It was delicious.”

  At that point she resigned herself to having a husband who could read her mind and released that worry from her overcrowded collection of worries.

  Somewhere the acceptance of Red’s mind reading reached through the strange panic that had seized her from the moment of her first pain. She started to feel almost entranced by him. His voice seemed to be the only solid ground as her body acted on its own, hurtin
g her for no reason.

  Red crooned to her and stayed by her side while she fussed over her kitchen and the bedroom. He took orders, stirring her gown in the boiling water and rinsing it and wringing it out. Then he even heated the flat iron and pressed the nightgown until it was dry and left it draped over a chair near the fireplace to rid it of its last bit of dampness while he helped her hunt down cobwebs in the cave passageway.

  At some point, she quit working altogether and just sat in a chair Red always had at hand and barked orders at him. Then her stomach would begin to tense up and she’d freeze up from her chores, and Red would be right there, a port in the storm that raged around her. He’d hold her and whisper gentle petitions to the Lord for courage and wisdom. The time came when the pains became too persistent, and she had to give up on cleaning the house, although she demanded he mop the kitchen floor.

  “It’s a dirt floor, Cass. It’ll turn to mud.”

  Then he was wiping tears from her eyes and promising he’d scrub the floor until he was down to bedrock. He held her then and kissed her hair and talked in the casual way he always did to God, bringing a holy presence into the room with them.

  He asked her about preparing the bed for the time the baby would come.

  She told him of Muriel’s instructions on how to boil water and lay out the baby’s clothes and sterilize a knife to cut the cord and lay thick sheets on the bed to protect the mattress. Cassie didn’t know what the mattress was being protected from, but she was determined to follow Muriel’s orders to the letter.

  The lantern was lit, which seemed odd to Cassie, because it wasn’t noon yet, and Cassie found herself with bare moments between the pains to try and bring order to her thoughts. She thought about demanding time and privacy to put on her nightgown, but then her stomach was grabbed as though a mountain lion sank its teeth into her belly, and somehow she was in bed, wearing her nightgown.

  The next clear thought she had was that she must have put her nightgown on very swiftly and gone to bed, because somehow she was in bed but she didn’t know how she’d found the strength. Unless she’d found it from Red. He was always there. Always within reach.

  The petulant Cassie began to rear her head more fiercely. She wanted to hurt Red because she was hurting, and it didn’t seem fair that she had to hurt alone. She wanted to scream at him and loathe all men through him, because he could never have a child, but he could make a child grow inside a woman and then leave her to die alone.

  She even daydreamed of taking a swing at him several times. The china doll controlled all those ugly impulses though, kept them tucked inside, free to rage in her imagination without harming the man who was her only grasp on life.

  Suddenly the pains changed. She felt as if she were caught up in the center of a tornado. She saw all the whipping winds whirling around her, but she herself was spared their violence for an instant. Then weight, like the entire mountain over her head, pressed down on her belly, crushing her, crushing her baby. She wanted to cry out because of the unfairness of their home caving in on her after she’d been through so much. Red’s voice reached her, warring with the terror in her mind, offering words of calm assurance.

  Red sat beside her on the bed. She heard him pray over her as he wiped sweat from her brow. He calmed her as the mountain receded and her bedroom took shape. He moved away from her and she wanted to cling to him.

  “It’s coming, Cass honey. The baby’s coming. I see the head. It’s almost time. It’s almost over.” He kept talking, kept calling on God to be with them, to give them strength sufficient to the task they faced. The words eased the rest of the weight from her, even as she felt the agonizing pressure again. But the mountain didn’t cave in again. Red’s words kept the roof from falling.

  Strength sufficient for the task. That’s all she needed. She asked for that herself, speaking the words out loud. She didn’t need to take on the whole world ... or even face the next twenty-four hours that it would take for the baby to be born. She only needed to survive the very instant she was living in. She asked for the baby to live even if she gave up her own life, as seemed inevitable now. The pressure intensified, then relented enough for her to take a breath, then came surging back.

  Red shouted just as the strain on her body became unendurable. And in an instant she went from agony to relief. And Red laughed out loud, and something dark lifted away from Cassie’s mind, far enough that she heard a quavering noise. The noise, that tiny cry gripped at her heart and held on so tightly she knew it would never let her go, and she knew she would never want it to.

  Her eyes darted toward the noise to see Red standing with a writhing, noisy, messy creature in his hands. She was so exhausted that she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. Reality tried to force its way past her confused, exhausted mind as a tigress awoke in her at the sound of her unhappy child, but for a long minute she couldn’t make that squalling, white and red bundle in Red’s arms be the baby she knew she’d just borne.

  Then Red pulled a soft blanket around what he held. He sat on the bed beside her on her left and held the baby in the crook of his left arm. He leaned close to her until the noisy baby would have rested across her chest if he’d put it down. He tilted the baby so she could see its face, and the wild confusion that was fogging her mind cleared and the baby was real to her at last.

  Red laughed and drew her attention briefly away from the child, the extension of herself. Red was a mess. A joyful mess. His hair was wild as if he’d run his hands through it a thousand times in the few minutes since her pains had started. His brown shirt was wet and tinged pink all across the front. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows as he liked to wear them when he did his woodwork in the evening.

  She forgot about his being a mess when she looked in his eyes. He was looking at the baby, and for a moment, Cassie saw the eyes of a man who had witnessed a miracle. She drank in the wisdom and purity of what she saw in Red and absorbed his joy into her soul.

  After a bare second studying him, she looked back at her baby with a renewed strength of her own. All she could see was a tiny, wrinkled face. Red had the blanket she’d knitted wrapped snugly around the squirming infant, even over its hair.

  The baby howled with its eyes shut tight and its mouth wide open. The baby’s whole body shook from the force of the cries. Suddenly, five tiny fingers poked up from the blanket. Cassie was awestruck by the miniature perfection of her baby. One of Red’s big work-callused hands reached between Cassie and the baby, and he touched the wee baby fingers with one of his own, lifting and caressing gently.

  The baby’s hand suddenly grasped hold of Red’s index finger. The tiny hand didn’t reach all the way around, but the grip was tight. Each finger bent, grasping firmly. There were nails, so little they were barely visible, tipping each finger.

  Everything a human being ever had, the baby brought with it into the world in a package so small it would fit inside a mother’s belly, and Cassie knew why Red looked as though he’d seen a miracle. She was witnessing one, too.

  She looked away from the baby to Red. He was still smiling; his eyes still blazed with joy. But now a tear streaked its way down his face. Cassie felt her whole world tilt dangerously at the sight of the single tear. She wasn’t aware of moving, but she saw her hand touch Red’s face and wipe the tear away.

  When she touched him, he looked away from the baby. Something solid stretched between them as their eyes locked. More than an emotion, more than a shared memory, it was a connection so tangible that it could have been built from stone. Cassie believed she could hold it in her hands if she wished. Cassie felt it, whatever it was, wrap around her just as the baby’s cry had, entwining with her heart so deeply that it could never be undone.

  CHAPTER 24

  Red’s hand came to rest on Cassie’s where it lay on his cheek. He pressed her palm against his skin. The baby screamed louder, and the wriggling presence between them deepened the closeness Red felt between them, if that was poss
ible.

  Red’s heart turned over to see dark circles under Cassie’s heavy-lidded eyes. He knew how tired he was after staying by her side during the endless day and night of her laboring. He couldn’t imagine her fatigue. He knew he should insist she rest, but the love that glowed out of her for the baby was too precious to interrupt with something as earthbound as sleep.

  Her feather-light touch on his trailing tears moved him so profoundly that he knew he would never be the same. He leaned down to Cassie until their bodies cocooned the baby gently between them, and still holding her hand, he kissed her. He pulled his lips away a scant inch. Her eyes had drifted shut. “Open your eyes, Cass.”

  She did, but he could see the struggle she put up to keep her heavy lids raised.

  He looked at her, but his gaze reached inside and joined with the ties that were binding them together, until he was part of her and she was part of him. “I love you, Cassie Dawson. I love you and I love our little...”

  With a sudden start, Red remembered something vital.

  A tiny spurt of fear flashed in Cassie’s eyes. “What is it?”

  Red said, chagrined, “I just realized I don’t know if the baby is a boy or a girl.”

  They looked at each other again, and suddenly they were laughing. All the fear and hard work and wonder erupted from them. Red’s deep, warm chuckle and Cassie’s gentler laughter mingled, as surely as their hearts had mingled moments ago.

  They didn’t laugh for long, because the baby gave a particularly furious roar of anger and drew their attention. Red held the infant while Cassie, with hands trembling from exhaustion, unwrapped the blanket.

  “A girl,” Red whispered. “She’ll be as beautiful and ornery as her mama.”

  Cassie said, “I’m not ornery.” Then she said, “Look at her toes.” They were as perfect as the rest of her.

  Red said, “Check her over good. Then we’d better wrap her back up.”

  Cassie nodded. “She needs a bath ... but out by the fireplace where it’s warm.”