Holding Wonder

The light woke me. Struggling, I freed one elbow from the cocoon of my blanket and lifted myself, gasping a little from a stiff neck. I was lost. I couldn't square the light with any light in our house nor the stiff neck with my down pillow nor the roar around me with any familiar home noise.
For a moment I was floating in a directionless, timeless warm bath of Not Being. Then I pulled myself up a little higher and suddenly the car and all the circumstances were back and I blinked sleepily at the light.
The light? I sat up and fumbled for the shoe where I'd left my glasses. What was a light doing on this flat? And so close that it filled the whole of my window? I wiped my glasses on a fold of my gown and put them on. The wide myopic flare of a light concentrated then to a glow, softer, but still close. I rolled the car window down and leaned my arms on the frame.
The room was small. The floor was dirt, beaten hard by use. Rain was roaring on a tin roof and it had come in under the unpainted wooden door, darkening the sill and curling in a faintly silver wetness along one wall. A steady dripping leak from the ceilingless roof had dug a little crater in the floor in one corner and each heavy drop exploded muddy in its center. Steam plumed up from the spout of a granite-ware teakettle on the small cast-iron stove that glowed faintly pink through its small isinglass window on the front. The light was on the table. It was a kerosene lamp, its flame, turned too high, was yellow and jagged, occasionally smoking the side of the glass chimney. It was so close to me that the faint flare of light was enough to make shadowy the room beyond the table.
"It's that peripheral thing again," I thought and looked straight at the lamp. But it didn't fade out! The car did instead! I blinked, astonished. This wasn't peripheral!-it was whole sight! I looked down at my folded arms. My sleeves were muddy from a damp adobe window sill.
Movement caught my attention-movement and sound. I focused on the dim interior of the room. There was an iron bedstead in the far corner. And someone was in it-in pain. And someone was by it in fear and distress.
"It hurts! It hurts!" the jerky whisper was sexless and ageless because of pain. "Where's Jim?"
"I told you. He went to see if he could get help. Maybe Gramma Nearing or even a doctor."
The voice was patient. "He can't get back because of the storm. Listen to it?"
We three listened to the roar of the flooded washes, the drum of the rain and, faintly, the plash of the leaking roof.
"I wish he was-" The voice lost its words and became a smothered, exhausted cry of pain.
I closed my eyes-and lost the sound along with the sight. I opened my eyes hastily. The room was still there, but the dampness by the door was a puddle now, swelling slowly in the lamplight. The leak in the corner was a steady trickle that had overrun its crater and become a little dust covered snake that wandered around, seeking the lowest spot on the floor.
The person on the bed cried out again, and, tangled in the cry, came the unmistakable thin wail of the new-born. A baby! I hitched myself higher on my folded arms. My involuntary blinking as I did so moved time again in the small room. I peered into the pale light.
A woman was busy with the baby on the table. As she worked, she glanced anxiously and frequently over at the bed corner. She had reached for some baby clothes when a sound and movement from the corner snatched her away from the table so hastily that the corner of the blanket around the baby was flipped back, leaving the tiny chest uncovered. The baby's face turned blindly, and its mouth opened in a soundless cry. The soft lamplight ran across its wet, dark hair as the head turned.
"It won't stop!" I don't know whether I caught the panting words or the thought. "I can't stop the blood! Jim! Get here! God help me!"
I tried to see past the flare of light but could only sense movement. If only I could-but what could I do? I snatched my attention back to the baby. Its mouth was opening and closing in little gasping motions. Its little chest was laboring but it wasn't breathing!
"Come back!" I cried-silently?-aloud? "Come back! Quick! The baby's dying!"
The vague figure moving beyond the light paid no attention. I heard her again, desperately, "Vesta! What am I supposed to do? I can't-" The baby was gasping still, its face shadowing over with a slatey blue. I reached. The table was beyond my finger tips. I pulled myself forward over the sill until the warped board of the wide framing cut across my stomach. My hand hovered over the baby.
Somewhere, far, far behind me, I heard Peter cry out sleepily and felt a handful of my flannel gown gathered up and pulled. But I pulled too, and, surging forward, wide-eyed, afraid to blink and thus change time again, I finally touched the thin little subsiding chest.
My reach was awkward. The fingers of my one hand were reaching beyond their ability, the other was trying to keep me balanced on the window sill as I reached. But I felt the soft, cold skin, the thin hush of the turned back blanket, the fragile baby body under my palm.
I began a sort of one-handed respiration attempt. Two hands would probably have crushed the tiny rib cage. Compress-release-compress-release. I felt
sweat break out along my hairline and upper lip. It wasn't working. Peter's tug on me was more insistent. My breath cut off as the collar of my gown was pulled tightly backward.
"Peter!" I choked voicelessly. "Let me go!" I scrambled through the window, fighting every inch of the way against the backward tug, and reached for the child. There was a sudden release that staggered me across the table. Or over the table? My physical orientation was lost.
I bent over the child, tilting its small quiet face up and back. In a split second I reviewed everything I had heard or read about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then sent my fervent petitionary prayer into the lungs of the child with the first breath.
I had never tried this before, but I breathed-not too hard! It's a baby-and paused and breathed and paused and breathed, losing myself in the rhythm, losing my sight in a too-close blur, afraid to close my eyes.
Then there was movement! Breathe. And a gasp! Breathe. And a turning! Breathe. And a thin wail that strengthened and lifted and filled the room.
My eyes ached with keeping them wide and I was gasping. Blessedly the room swam grayly. I thought, Peter! Oh, Peter! And felt a small twitch at the hem of my gown. And felt the flannel tug me back to awareness. There was a movement beyond the lamp.
"My baby." The voice was hardly audible. "Hattie, let me see my baby before I die."
"Vesta!" Hattie's voice was sharp with anxiety. "Don't talk about dying!. And I can't leave you now. Not even to "I want to see my baby," the faint voice persisted. "Hattie, please-" I looked down at the still wailing child, its face, reddening with life, its clenched fists blindly beating the air. Then I was with the baby near the bed. The young face in the shadows below was a vague white blur. The baby fit into the thin curve of the young shoulder.
"I can't see!" The pale suffering face fretted in the shadows of the bed corner. "It's too dark."
Hattie whirled from the empty table, the lamp she had just lifted tilting heavy black smoke against one side of the chimney, slanting heavily in her hands. She righted it, her eyes terrified, and looked quickly back over her shoulder. Her face, steadied by the determined set of her mouth, was white as she brought the lamp to the bed, her free hand curving around the top of the chimney to cut the draft. She held the lamp high above Vesta.
Vesta weakly brought herself up to one elbow above the baby and peered down at the crumpled face and the smudge of dark hair.
"A girl," she smiled softly. "Name her Gayla, Hattie. It's a happy name. Maybe she will be-" Her face whitened and she slid slowly down from her elbow. "Oh, I wish," she whispered. "I wish I could see her grown up!" The sound of the rain filled the silence that followed, and the tug on my own gown was no longer a tug, it was an insistence, an imperative. My gown was straining back so that I felt as if I were a figurehead on a ship. I moved involuntarily backward.