“I’ll do it,” he said.
“It’s time for you to go, Joseph. The time is short.”
“No,” he said sullenly. “I’ll take my own child. You tell me what to do.”
“You can’t, Joseph. It’s not a thing for a man to do.”
He looked gravely at her, and her will gave away before his calm. “It’s a thing for me to do,” he said.
As soon as the sun had risen the children congregated outside the bedroom window, where they stood listening to Elizabeth’s weak screaming, and shivering with interest. Martha took charge from the first. “Sometimes they die,” she said.
Although the morning sun beat fiercely upon them, they did not leave their post. Martha laid down the rules. “First one that hears the baby cry says, ‘I hear it!’ and that one gets a present, and that one gets the first baby. Mother told me.” The others were very much excited. They cried in unison, “I hear it,” every time a new series of screams began. Martha made them help her to climb up where she could peek quickly into the window. “Uncle Joseph is walking with her,” she reported. And later, “Now she’s lying on the bed and she’s holding the red rope that mother made.”
The screams grew ever closer together. The other children helped Martha to look again, and she came down a little pale and choking at what she had seen. They gathered close about her for the report “I saw—Uncle Joseph—and he was leaning over—” She paused to get her breath. “And—and his hands were red.” She fell silent and all the children stared at her in amazement. There wasn’t any more talking or whispering. They simply stood and listened. The screams were so weak by now that they could barely hear them.
Martha wore a secret look. She cautioned the others to silence in a whisper. They heard three faint smacks, and instantly Martha cried, “I hear it.” And even a little after, they all heard the baby cry. They stood in awe, looking at Martha.
“How did you know when to say it?”
Martha was tantalizing. “I’m the oldest, and I’ve been good for a long time. And mother told me how to listen.”
“How?” they demanded. “How did you listen?”
“For the spank!” she said in triumph. “They always spank the baby to make it cry. I won, and I want a hair-doll for a present.”
A little later Joseph came out on the porch and leaned over the porch-rail. The children moved over and stood in front of him and looked up. They were disappointed that his hands were not still red. His face was so drawn and haggard and his eyes so listless that they hated to speak to him.
Martha began, lamely, “I heard the first cry,” she said. “I want a hair-doll for a present.”
He looked down on them and smiled slightly. “I’ll get it for you,” he said. “I’ll have presents for all of you when I go to town.”
Martha asked politely, “Is it a boy-baby, or a girl-baby?”
“A boy,” Joseph said. “Maybe you can see it after a while.” His hands were clenched tightly over the porch-rail, and his stomach still racked with the pains he had received from Elizabeth. He took a deep breath of the hot midday air and went back into the house.
Rama was washing out the baby’s toothless mouth with warm water while Alice set the safety pins in the strip of muslin that would bind Elizabeth’s hips after the placenta came. “Only a little while yet,” Rama said. “It will be over in an hour.”
Joseph sat heavily in a chair and watched the women, and he watched the dull, pained eyes of Elizabeth, filled with suffering. The baby lay in its basket-crib, dressed in a gown twice as long as itself.
When the birth was all over, Joseph lifted Elizabeth and held her in his lap while the women took up the foul birth pad and made the bed again. Alice took out all the rags and burned them in the kitchen stove, and Rama pinned the bandage around Elizabeth’s hips as tightly as she could pull it.
Elizabeth lay wanly in the clean bed after the women had gone. She put out her hand for Joseph to take. “I’ve been dreaming,” she said weakly. “Here’s a whole day gone and I’ve been dreaming.”
He caressed her fingers, one at a time. “Would you like me to bring the baby to you?”
Her forefinger wrinkled in a tired frown. “Not yet,” she said. “I still hate it for making so much pain. Wait until I’ve rested a while.” Soon after that she fell asleep.
Late in the afternoon Joseph walked out to the barn.
He barely looked at the tree as he passed it. “You are the cycle,” he said to himself, “and the cycle is too cruel.” He found the barn carefully cleaned, and every stall deep with new straw. Thomas was sitting in his usual place, on the manger of Blue’s stall. He nodded shortly to Joseph.
“My coyote bitch has a tick in her ear,” he observed. “Devil of a place to get it out.”
Joseph walked into the stall and sat down beside his brother. He rested his chin heavily in his cupped hands.
“What luck?” Thomas asked gently.
Joseph stared at a sun-sheet cutting the air from a crack in the barn wall. The flies blazed through it like meteors plunging into the earth’s air. “It’s a boy,” he said absently. “I cut the cord myself. Rama told me how. I cut it with a pair of scissors and I tied a knot, and I bound it up against his chest with a bandage.”
“Was it a hard birth?” Thomas asked. “I came out here to keep from going in to help.”
“Yes, it was hard, and Rama said it was easy. God, how the little things fight against life!”
Thomas plucked a straw from the rack behind him and stripped it with his bared teeth. “I never saw a human baby born Rama would never let me I’ve helped many a cow when she couldn’t help herself.”
Joseph moved restlessly down from the manger and walked to one of the little windows He said over his shoulder, “It’s been a hot day. The air’s dancing over the hills yet.” The sun, sinking behind the hills, was melting out of shape. “Thomas, we’ve never been over the ridge to the coast. Let’s go when we have time. I’d like to see the ocean over there.”
“I’ve been to the ridge and looked down,” Thomas said. “It’s wild over there, redwoods taller than anything you ever saw, and thick undergrowth, and you can see a thousand miles out on the ocean. I saw a little ship going by, half-way up the ocean.”
The evening was setting quickly toward night. Rama called, “Joseph, where are you?”
He walked quickly to the barn door. “I’m here. ‘What is it?”
“Elizabeth is awake again. She wants you to sit with her a while. Thomas, your dinner will be ready in a little.”
Joseph sat beside Elizabeth’s bed in the half-dark, and again she put out her hand to him. “You wanted me?” he asked.
“Yes, dear. I haven’t slept enough, but I want to talk to you before I go to sleep again. I might forget what it is I want to say. You must remember for me.”
It was getting dark in the room. Joseph lifted her hand to his lips and she wriggled her fingers slightly against his mouth.
“What is it, Elizabeth?”
“Well, when you were away, I drove up to the pine grove on the ridge. And I found a clear place inside, and a green rock in the place.”
He sat forward tensely. “Why did you go?” he demanded.
“I don’t know. I wanted to. The green rock frightened me, and later I dreamed of it. And Joseph, when I am well, I want to go back and look at the rock again. When I am well it won’t frighten me any more, and I won’t dream about it any more. Will you remember, dear? You’re hurting my fingers, Joseph.”
“I know the place,” he said. “It’s a strange place.”
“And you won’t forget to take me there?”
“No,” he said after a pause. “I won’t forget. I’ll have to think whether you should go.”
“Then sit for a while, I’ll go to sleep in a few moments,” she said.
19
THE summer dragged wearily on, and even when the autumn months came the heat did not grow less. Burton came back exalted from the camp-meeting town of Pacific Grove. He described with enthusiasm the lovely peninsula and the blue bay, and he told how the preachers had given the word to the people. “Some time,” he said to Joseph, “I’ll go up there and build a little house, and I’ll live there all the year around. A number of people are settling there. It will be a fine town some day.”