by Tim Sandlin
Dr. Hazen said, “Push her knees up under her armpits.”
When Roger and I didn’t jump to his order, Honor yelled, “Now.”
We each took a thigh—me, with two hands, Roger with the free one—and pushed toward Eden’s head, way beyond what I would have thought possible.
“Is this right?” Roger said, but no one answered.
Roger needed to know this was normal, it happened every day. He looked across at me for reassurance and didn’t get it. I was swallowing vomit.
Dr. Hazen said, “Take her suprapubic,” and Honor shoved Roger hard, pushing him toward Eden’s head. Roger said, “What?” but Honor was already up on the bed, with both her hands planted on Eden’s belly and her knees on Eden’s ribs, giving Eden her weight and saying, “Come on, Eden, push it. Push it!”
“The arm’s caught up behind his head. Wedged in good,” Dr. Hazen said. He rotated his wrist into the baby’s face, sending Eden into a higher pitch of screaming.
I said, “Cesarean?”
Honor gasped between pumps on Eden’s belly. “Too late.”
The blood and noise were nothing like births I’d seen before, and nothing like the births I’d seen in movies or read about in books. It went beyond my imagination, and I knew I was seeing a human come to life, or die, or maybe both at once. I knew whatever this was mattered. Life is important.
Dr. Hazen had both hands on the baby, one supporting the head, the other up inside Eden Rae. He twisted the baby clear around, till the eyes faced downward. I could see the nape of the baby’s neck. It looked like wax paper.
Dr. Hazen said, “Now.”
Honor shoved all her weight into Eden Rae’s belly and the baby squirted out so quickly Dr. Hazen almost missed the catch.
It was over. Eden fell back, sucking air but no longer trembling from pain. Roger and I lowered her thighs. Honor calmly came off the bed. I reached for my breathing bag. The delivery turned matter-of-fact.
Dr. Hazen cradled the baby in his left arm and clamped and clipped the cord. He said, “We avoided breaking his clavicle. That’s a plus.”
Honor rubbed the baby roughly with a towel, as if scrubbing out an ink stain, as the skin tone went from blue to pink. The baby started to cry.
“What happened?” Roger was crying also.
I said, “Eden had a baby.”
Eden released her hold on Roger’s arm, leaving finger indentations and orb-shaped blood lines where the nails had dug in. She turned her head to the side, away from Roger, staring at the gray wall. Her eyes were open.
After a bit, Honor said, “It’s a boy.”
Eden blinked, once.
Honor said, “Do you want to see him?”
Eden said, “Get it away from me.”
Honor turned and walked out of the room with the baby. The vein pulsed in Eden’s throat, beating like the baby’s heart. Roger reached across the pillow and touched the pulsing vein.
Eden said, “I want to go home.”
Roger drew his hand away from her neck. He made his decision.
10
The robbers me and Bill killed were named Henry and Hank Miller, and from what Shadrach told me, we’d done worse things than put an end to those two. They went out of Butte, Montana, where they’d been strikebreakers during the copper wars. Their method of stopping a strike was to shoot the leaders until more cooperative leaders took control. Their mistake was in trying to blackmail the copper kings for ordering the crimes. The kings owned the judges, they didn’t care who knew they ordered a bunch of union killings.
That got the Millers run out of Butte. Then they turned to saloon robbing, which led naturally enough into bank robbing. They picked Shadrach up at a sporting club in Virginia City, where his job was general grunt for a pack of high-strung women. Shad didn’t mind where the Millers took him, so long as it was out of Virginia City. Up till our little bank, Shadrach had been made to stay outside with the horses. Ours was a shakedown run for one of the bigger banks in Billings where they had real money.
“I flunked the test,” Shad said.
“You’re alive, and the Millers are dead.” I said. “They’re the ones flunked.”
Life didn’t swap out in a single breath the way it had during the quake or when the boiler blew. This time took longer, even though it was just as certain. At first, things went even better than before. There was an element of townfolk looked up to killers of bank robbers. Young boys pointed me out in the street as someone to admire. Mr. Cox gave me a ten-dollar bonus. Frank Lesley quit being so snooty. Agatha’s sparking level took on a new interest. Whenever she talked about me killing Hank Miller, her skin colored and her breath grew quick. She saw me as dangerous and desirable.
Shadrach moved into my place there out by the Great Northern track. I’d missed having company in the evenings since Dad got smashed into, and it was a pleasure having him around, even though he had to get up at dawn every morning and run up to the Coxes to do Bill’s bidding.
In my estimation, Bill took advantage of the situation with Shadrach. Bill figured he had himself a slave. He made Shadrach jog two miles for soda pop and wash his long johns and dry down his horse. I never heard Shad complain, but when he came in at night, he was worn through.
Things could have gone along in that vein for a good while, and I wouldn’t have minded. Of course they didn’t. We’d killed two Miller brothers, but as fate had it, there was four of them.
***
Billings had an underground bowling alley. People nowdays think there weren’t bowling alleys and skating barns and even telephones before the Great War, but we had all those in Montana. It was an interesting time to be young and live in a town, ever month some new marvel arrived. Anyway, me and Agatha and another couple was at the bowling alley, and I rolled a hundred ten. Agatha rolled higher, on account of the pinboy was sweet on her and set her pins tighter than mine. You could see them bunched up so close if you so much as blew on the number one, all the rest collapsed.
I forget what the other couple rolled. The boy was lanky, I remember that. The girl laughed at the wrong places. She could of rolled higher than her boy too, but she was feminine enough to throw a few frames so he wouldn’t be outshone by a woman. Agatha would never lose a game on purpose to make a man feel superior, and I admired her for that.
I bought Agatha a strawberry ice but not one for myself because I was still saving money, and we came outside. The bright sunlight made vision difficult for a moment, when all of a sudden, I heard three pops, and the glass window behind exploded, cutting the boy we was with across the eyebrow. I hit dirt and pulled Agatha under a Brush Runabout. Agatha was upset no end. She’d fallen on the strawberry ice, and for a moment, I thought she was shot. That was an awful moment. I thought ever’one I cared for was going to die violently and I’d best not care for anyone again. It couldn’t have been two seconds before I knew Agatha wasn’t dying, but that’s how fast my mind worked.
A police came running and asked me what happened and I said I didn’t know. Then the volunteer fire wagon swept past, headed north toward the Great Northern depot. I saw smoke and concluded that the shack Dad bought for thirty dollars was afire. I ran up, but nothing could be saved, including the money I had hid under the floor.
Shadrach was there. He said Roy and Ephir Miller started the fire. I said, “Who?” and he said the dead robbers’ brothers, and we’d best leave town in a rush. We went to find Bill, who was hiding in the basement of the Bluebeard. Two hard cases had come to the Cox house and inquired after him and me. He told them we were not home. At first, they didn’t believe him, so he told them where I lived.
“You got my home burned,” I said.
“What else was I supposed to do? They’d have killed me if I hadn’t told them something.”
It was agreed we should evacuate Billings. My first impulse was to buy a train
ticket the opposite direction as Bill and Shadrach proposed to go, but I had no money. Bill loaned me a mare of no-count named Molly Maguire, and that put me in his debt. We gathered our belongings, which in the case of me and Shad was nothing much, and prepared to flee.
Agatha cried. She said I was running off when she needed me.
“Those men won’t bother you after we’re gone,” I said.
“But I’m old enough now to marry.”
This brought me up short. I touched a tear as it crossed the freckles on her cheek. “We’ll marry soon as I come back. The Millers’ll get on to something else quick enough.”
“No, they won’t. They’ll follow you. I’m not going to be a widow, Oly Pedersen.”
“Let’s worry about making you a widow after we’re married.”
Bill called for me to get on my damn horse. I kissed Agatha on the mouth, then mounted, and the three of us rode south.
***
My idea as to why people in modern days think the West before the war was bleak and without improvements is because the only ones writing books back then was the sons and daughters of homesteaders. Farms and ranches is all you hear about, ’cause cowboys are more interesting than fellas who work in the bank. Birthing calves and surviving hailstorms is entertainment—if you ain’t doing it—whereas skating barns is entertainment to do, but not to read about. The truth is, folks in Billings had more in common with those in New York City, or maybe even Paris France than they did with ranchers forty miles south of town. Down along where the Big Horn crosses the Wyoming border, there weren’t indoor toilets and telephones. No bowling alleys. Dropping into that part of Wyoming was like stepping back twenty years.
Shadrach took us to his family’s line camp up above Horseshoe Bend on Medicine Mountain there. Bert Pierce, his father, trapped fur along with Shad’s brother Meshach. If you’re wondering about Abednego, he died in birth. Took his mama with him. Bert Pierce didn’t turn to opium as my dad did, but he gave up ranching and personal hygiene. Two bachelors who skin animals for a living make for a rank household. Those two had also been around one another long enough they’d dispensed with the use of words. Bert still spoke, when he had to, but Meshach had reduced communication to five or six animal sounds which covered ever’thing from “Pass the buttermilk” to “Get out of my way or I will kill you.” We stayed at their place a week, and I never did hear Meshach say a word in English.
An old man name of Silas Crombie owned the former Pierce ranch, along with most all the other former-home ranches in the area. Rumor had it Silas Crombie wasn’t above giving a nudge to some of those ranches teetering on the brink of calamity. I wouldn’t doubt it. He was mean as a badger with bad teeth.
Shad got us hired at the Crombie Ranch, him and Bill as cowboys, me as common labor. Crombie hinted that I was a charity case, but he sure didn’t work me like he was doing favors. While Bill and Shad hardly ever got off their horses in the course of a day, I rarely got on one.
They started me in irrigation. Now it is over and done, I admit that I came to enjoy irrigation. There is a satisfaction to be gained in moving water. You clear the ditch, remount the head gate, learn to read flat ground. It was gravity flooding we did. Water flows downhill, and there’s nothing in God’s plan you can do to bring it back uphill but wait for rain. The cattle stayed in the mountains all summer while I grew grass. Buffalo grass is best, but don’t ask me why, buffalo grass pretty much disappeared with the buffalo. Mostly what was left was sweet flag and bottlebrush, some timothy. Early fall, me and a couple others—not Bill or Shad—cut hay, then the cowboys moved the cattle onto my meadows, where they grazed till winter, when the hay came back into the picture.
It wasn’t banking, but I was alone most of the day, outdoors, and that was nice. Nightfall in the bunkhouse was spent with dime Western novels and poker. Poker brings out the worst in a man. Bill won on a regular basis throughout July and the bulk of August, until one night I caught up with him out by the horse trough.
“What you think them poker boys would do if they caught a man cheating?” I asked Bill.
He stuck his head under the water, then pulled out and shook himself like a dog. “Shoot him, maybe. Beat him within an inch of his life and get his ass fired, for certain.”
“There’s thumb cuts in the face cards. I didn’t put them there.”
He placed his hat on his wet hair and faced me. “You got an idea of who did?”
“Nope. But before the next new deck, I recommend you trim your nails.”
After that, Bill’s winnings evened up. General belief in the bunkhouse was he’d had a run of luck and it played out. The superstitious blamed an owl Bill shot. I kept to myself.
***
Soon as irrigating was done, Crombie decided to replace the buck fences with barbed wire. Stringing wire isn’t near as satisfying as moving water. Crombie had seen pictures of the latest posthole digger in the Police Gazette, but he was too stingy to buy the real thing.
He said, “Nothing but two shovels clamped face-to-face. We can do that.”
I got blisters on blisters from digging holes with his two shovels.
Crombie chose a Ross Four-Point wire, which you may not be aware is the most vicious damn wire ever made. Had barbs could skin a pig. This was before modern stretchers and staples, when your wire was as liable to snap free and whip across your face as not. My entire autumn was spent stanching blood flow. To this day, I get a tic in my left eye when I see a barbed-wire fence.
And, add to the natural pains of fencing, we had a late-year thunderstorm. I was stretching wire across Alkali Creek, when lightning struck fence a good half-mile up the ridge. The charge traveled down wire and caught me so hard I was blown clean out of my boots. When I told them jokers at the bunkhouse, nobody believed me. I showed the burns from my Levi grommets, but they still called me a liar. I’d of quit, but the next day, the rain turned to snow. Only a fool quits a job going into wintertime.
***
Agatha Ann wrote me a love letter every Sunday afternoon after church. I’d bought her a jar of red ink on her last birthday, and she had wonderful penmanship. People used to put stock in penmanship. Now, nobody gives a hoot. You want something wrote nice now, you hire it out.
She’d started Billings Polytechnic, where she was learning literature. She wanted to write poetry and set it to music. Her poetry was melodious. She used words such as soul and heart and blackness in every poem. She wanted us to be wed soon so she could have babies. She said babies would make her a higher-quality poetess. Her plan was for me to work in daylight for Mr. Cox and come home at night and help her make babies, and the next morning she would write a poem about her soul.
The letters generally took a week and a half to reach the ranch, sometimes much longer. Once, I got three in a single day. Bill teased me about mail from a girl, but I knew he wanted love letters himself, if only for the chance to show off. It irked him no end the girl writing me was his sister. To his dying day, Bill maintained Agatha was homely and my only interest was their father’s bank.
I do not possess any of Agatha’s red-ink letters. To save them from Bill’s mockery, I memorized each one, then burned them in the cookstove. However, at this time, I will recite you one.
This letter came between Christmas and New Year’s 1914.
My Dearest Oleander,
I hope you are staying warm and indoors since the winter thus far has been brutal in Yellowstone County. I trust it is not so loathsome in Wyoming. Frank Lesley escorted Jerusalem Snider and I to the moving pictures yesterday evening. They played a Theda Bara picture named The Galley Slave. Jerusalem and I agree Theda Bara is the ideal of womanhood. If you do not return home soon and make an honest woman of me, I believe I shall go to California and become an actress. Ha!
Your loving betrothed,
Agatha Ann Cox
I asked Bill
who Theda Bara was. He said she was a sex maniac. He’d heard she had relations with Douglas Fairbanks and Dorothy Gish at the same time. I didn’t tell Bill his sister wished to emulate her.
***
Bill was not the one to talk about sex maniacs. He himself was of an age where hardly a thing in the world mattered more than the rut. Except maybe talking about the rut. Bill claimed to have taken hundreds of women. To hear him, you’d think every fallen angel between the South Canadian River in Oklahoma and the Milk in Montana fell before his unquenchable appetite. He acted like he’d done something the rest of us should envy, but all them women Bill had, he paid for. Don’t take skill to seduce a whore. Takes five dollars, tops.
The one hardship Bill saw to life as a cowboy on the Crombie Ranch was the three-day ride to the nearest professional.
“I can’t concentrate on my work if I’m filled up with pressure,” he complained.
Shad told him to relieve his pressure on a yearling. Shad had worked in a bad house, and he said those women have no pity. “You’ll gain more satisfaction from a calf,” he said. “Calf won’t go down to the kitchen after and make fun of your whanger.”
I personally never witnessed Shadrach having his way with a bovine. He may have been pulling my leg, I do not know. All I know is, more than once I heard him say your average maverick is sweeter than your average whore, and it could be the truth that he knew first-hand. I wouldn’t have doubted it, coming from his brother Meshach, so maybe Shad was raised that way. He was still my friend. I’ve never judged folks by their inclinations.
