Thomas was cutting the hay and shocking it to cure, while Joseph picked out the cattle for sale and drove them into the new corral. Burton prepared for his trip to Pacific Grove to attend the camp-meetings. He piled a tent, utensils, bedding and food in the buckboard, and one morning he and his wife set out behind two good horses to drive the ninety miles to the camp-ground. Rama had agreed to take care of his children for the three weeks of his absence. Elizabeth came out to wave him off, and she was glowing with health again. After her little spell of illness, she had grown beautiful and well. Her cheeks were red with coursing blood and her eyes shone with a mysterious happiness. Often Joseph, watching her, wondered what she knew or what she thought to make her seem always on the verge of laughter ‘She knows something,’ he said to himself “Women in this condition have a strong warmth of God in them. They must know things no one else knows. And they must feel a joy beyond any other joy. In some way they take up the nerve-ends of the earth in their hands.” Joseph regarded her narrowly, and stroked his beard as slowly as an old man would.
With her coming time, Elizabeth grew increasingly possessive of her husband. She wanted him to sit with her all day and all evening, and she complained a little when he told her of the work to be done. “I’m idle here,” she said. “Idleness loves company.”
And he replied, “No, you’re working.” He could see in his mind how she was doing it. Her helpless hands lay crossed in her lap, but her bones were casting bones and her blood was distilling blood and her flesh was molding flesh. He laughed shortly at the thought that she was idle.
In the evenings when she demanded that he sit with her, she put out her arm to be stroked. “I’m afraid you’ll go away,” she said. “You might go out by that door and never come back, and then there’d be no father for the baby.”
One day when they were sitting on the porch she asked abruptly, “Why do you love the tree so much, Joseph? Remember how you made me sit in it the first time I ever came out here?” She looked up to the high crotch where she had sat.
“Why, it’s a fine big tree,” he explained slowly. “I like it because it’s a perfect tree, I guess.”
She caught him up, then. “Joseph, there’s more than that. One night I heard you speak to it as though it were a person. You called it ‘sir,’ I heard you.”
He looked fixedly at the tree before he answered, and then after a while he told her how his father had died wanting to come West, and he told her about the morning when the letter came. “It’s kind of a game, you see,” he said. “It gives me a feeling that I have my father yet.”
She turned her wide-set eyes on him, eyes full of the wisdom of child bearing. “It isn’t a game, Joseph,” she said silently. “You couldn’t play a game if you wanted to. No, it isn’t a game, but it’s a good practice.” And for the first time she saw into her husband’s mind; all in a second she saw the shapes of his thoughts, and he knew that she saw them. The emotion rushed to his throat. He leaned to kiss her, but instead, his forehead fell upon her knees, and his chest filled to breaking.
She stroked his hair and smiled her wise smile. “You should have let me see before.” And then she said, “But likely I hadn’t proper eyes before.”
When he lay with her at night and she rested her head on his arm for a little time before they went to sleep, she begged night after night to be reassured. “When my time comes, Joseph, you’ll stay with me? I’m afraid I’ll be afraid. I’m afraid I’ll call and you won’t be near. You won’t be far way, will you? And if I call, you’ll come?”
And he assured her, a little grimly, “I’ll be with you, Elizabeth. Don’t be worried about that.”
“But not in the same room, Joseph. I wouldn’t like you to see it. I don’t know why. If you could be sitting in the other room and listening in case I should call, then I don’t think I’d be afraid at all.”
Sometimes in these nights in bed she told him of the things she knew, how the Persians invaded Greece and were beaten, and how Orestes came to the tripod for protection, and the Furies sat waiting for him to get hungry and let go his hold. She told them laughingly, all her little bits of knowledge that were designed to make her superior. All of her knowledge seemed very silly to her now.
She began to count the weeks until her time—three weeks from Thursday; and then two weeks and one day; and then, just ten days off. “This is Friday. Why, Joseph, it will be on a Sunday. I hope it will. Rama has listened. She says she can even hear the heartbeats. Would you believe that?”
One night she said, “It’ll be just about a week now. I get little shivers when I think about it.”
Joseph slept very lightly. When Elizabeth sighed in her sleep, his eyes opened and he listened uneasily.
One morning he awakened when the chorus of young roosters crowed on their perches. It was still dark, but the air was alive with the coming dawn and with the freshness of the morning. He heard the older cocks crowing with full rounded notes as though reproving the younger ones for their cracked thin voices. Joseph lay with his eyes open and saw the myriad points of light come in and make the air dark grey. Gradually the furniture began to appear. Elizabeth was breathing shortly in her sleep. A slight catch was in her breath. Joseph prepared to slip out of the bed, to dress and to go out to the horses, when suddenly Elizabeth sprang upright beside him. Her breath stopped and then her legs stiffened and she screamed with pain.
“What is it?” he cried. “What’s the matter, dear?”
When she didn’t answer he jumped up and lighted the lamp and bent over her. Her eyes were bulging and her mouth had dropped open and her whole body quivered tensely. Then she screamed hoarsely again. He fell to rubbing her hands, until, after a moment, she chopped back on the pillow.
“There’s a pain in my back, Joseph,” she moaned. “Something’s wrong. I’m going to die.”
He said, “Just a moment, dear. I’m going for Rama,” and he ran out of the room.
Rama, aroused from sleep, smiled gravely. “Go back to her,” she commanded. “I’ll be right over. It’s a little sooner than I thought. She’ll be all right for a while now.”
“But hurry,” he demanded.
“There’s no hurry. You’ll start walking her right away. I’ll get Alice to help now.”
The dawn was flushing when the two women came across the yard, their arms full of clean rags. Rama took charge immediately. Elizabeth, still shocked by the sharpness of the pain, looked helplessly at her.
“It’s all right,” Rama reassured her. “It’s just as it should be.” She sent Alice to the kitchen to build a fire and to heat a wash-boiler of water. “Now Joseph, help her to her feet, help her to walk.” And while he walked her back and forth across the room, Rama slipped the covers from the bed and put the quilted birth pad down and hooked the loops of the velvet rope over the foot posts. When the blighting pain struck again, they let her sit in a straight chair until it was over. Elizabeth tried not to scream, until Rama leaned over her and said, “Don’t hold it in. There’s no need. Everything you feel like doing is needful now.”
Joseph, with his arm around her waist, walked her back and forth across the room, supporting her when she stumbled. He had lost his fear. There was a fierce glad light in his eyes. The pains came closer and closer together. Rama brought the big Seth Thomas clock in from the sitting-room and hung it on the wall, and she looked at it every time the pains came. And the pains grew closer and closer together. The hours passed.
It was nearly noon when Rama nodded her head sharply. “Now let her lie down. You can go out now, Joseph. I’ll be getting my hands ready.”
He looked at her with half-closed eyes. He seemed entranced. “What do you mean, ‘getting your hands ready’?” he demanded.
“Why washing and washing in hot water and soap, and cutting the nails close.”