He looked at the crack of yellow light under the bedroom door.
Jim Millet had said three days ago when he’d pulled in for gas, “You be sure and call the doctor yourself. There’s a night nurse down there gets a real charge out of delivering babies herself.” Dr. Costard, the obstetrician, had told Callie almost the same thing. He’d patted her arm with his white, soft hand and said, “When the time comes, be sure to call me, Mrs. Soames. Don’t leave it to the hospital. They get rushed sometimes, and you know how it is.” But that had been in mid-afternoon, when Dr. Costard was wide awake.
The chores lights were on up in Frank Wells’ barns on the hill, but no lights in the house. They’d driven to Cobleskill for a family reunion. It was too bad, for Callie’s sake. But then, they’d never been close. Frank Wells drank most of the time, these days, and though he was never much trouble himself — sometimes on his way home from town he’d pull off the road and down into the creek to sleep it off — it made things troublesome, in the end, because Callie’s mother was religious. She played the organ at the New Carthage Salem Baptist Church. That was partly why Callie’d come to work at the Stop-Off in the first place, she said. To get away.
He squeezed his upper lip between his finger and thumb and blinked slowly. He got up, shoved his hands down into his limp bathrobe pockets, and moved to the bedroom door.
“Looks like you’re gonna have that watermelon after all,” he said.
Callie smiled back. Neither of them ever called it a baby.
It looked as if she had pillows inside her nightgown. Her legs and arms and neck were thin, gray, and her head, turned toward the yellow plastic bedlamp, was flushed and too large.
“If it didn’t come soon I was going to call it off,” she said.
Henry went to her, smiling, sliding his slippers on the hardwood. He stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, then touched her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. She didn’t move her hand to his.
Under the light her hair looked dry. He stood for a long time looking at her and smiling, thinking, Well I’ll be damned, it’s really come time. And in his mind he saw Willard Freund leaning over the diner counter, sharp-elbowed, tiny-eyed, smiling and talking to Callie. In his mind he could see it as if it were yesterday, Willard’s wide mouth, his cocked eyebrow, his face lighted under the lamp, the cluttered room behind him dark. Sometimes the three of them had talked. And then he’d found out what Willard was doing, had done already by that time because by that time he was gone, had run out on her as a man would run out on some common country whore. And now he would catch himself watching the woods, though it wouldn’t be from the woods he’d come; he’d come by the highway if he came. He’d come in with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up, his eyes shy, and maybe Henry would feel sorry for him because he’d been a damn fool, and then again maybe he’d kill him, he didn’t know. Sometimes before he knew what it was he was thinking he would look at his wide, short hands and would close them slowly.
She said, “Let’s go to bed, Henry. It may be hours yet.” She looked past him; she hadn’t even turned her head.
He nodded. It was the truth that he needed his sleep. He wasn’t a kid any more. Twenty-five years older than she was, old enough to be her father. A fat old man with a weak heart, as Doc Cathey, their regular doctor, had said. “You get your beauty sleep, boy. You keep on settin’ up half the night and one of these days Callie’ll be a widow.” Doc had chuckled, hunched up and watching him sideways as if the idea of it pleased him all to hell, and maybe it did.
(Out by the gas pumps Doc had sat in his dented-up car fidgeting with his plastic hearing aid, his head brown and wrinkled as an old baldwin, and then he’d grinned, embarrassed maybe, and he’d said, “I s’pose you don’t want to talk about it, eh? … about Willard?”
Henry had half-turned as if he’d heard a footstep crunch the gravel behind him, but there was only the long, flat diner, the new white-painted house, and, beyond the roof, mountains and white clouds, and birds flying, starlings. He turned back to the car and put his hand on the cold metal of the gas pump, and Doc leaned farther out the car window, his eyes squinted almost shut behind the thick glasses. “You know I ain’t one to noise things around. Don’t bring on no coronary for nothin’. I never said she ain’t happy with you and this place here, I never inferred it.” He looked down at Henry’s hands.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said. His voice was quiet, so quiet it surprised him. It was like a woman’s voice. The old man looked at him, and Henry could hear the noise of the starlings half-a-mile up the mountain.
The corners of Doc’s mouth twitched back. “Now, you listen here. Somebody was gonna bring it up sooner or later, whether it’s the truth or not, and there’s people could be a lot meaner about it than me. You get use to hearing it, boy, get use to it. It’s for your own good; you take my advice.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said again, a whisper this time. He leaned toward the car and touched the door handle. He felt sweat prickling. The dog appeared beside the diner, ears lifted, watching.
Doc Cathey counted out his money with his thumb clamped down so hard on the bills that they almost tore as he pulled each dollar free. Henry took the money and didn’t count it. The old man switched on the ignition and ground on the starter button. A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I’m just trying to help out,” he said. “You know that. Don’t be a damn mule.” Henry didn’t say a word, and after a minute the old man rammed the car into gear and out onto the highway, spattering gravel. The dust he stirred up hung in the air, mixing with the smells of gasoline and exhaust fumes; then, very slowly, it settled.
Henry went in, moving automatically, looking up the highway toward the hill. In the sticky heat of the diner he rang up the price of the old man’s gas, not looking at the register, bent over it but not looking at it, and then, knowing what he was going to do and knowing he would have to fix it, he closed his two hands around the age-dry sides of the cash drawer and bent the wood outward until it split and broke away. Change fell out and hit the floor and rolled, ringing. His chest burned white hot. After a minute Callie came up and stood behind him, not speaking at first. He pulled at his lip. She said, “Have you gone crazy or something?” She waited. “Henry, go take a nap or something. You act like you’ve gone crazy.” She spoke slowly and evenly, keeping back from him.
“Callie,” he said. His voice cracked. He thought for a split-second of his father’s voice.
They looked at each other, and then she looked out at the pumps, or past them. Her lips were puffy from the dryness of August. “I can manage out here. Go on.” She didn’t come any nearer. That afternoon Henry went hunting. He shot three crows, and it took him till after dark.)
He pulled out of his bathrobe and slippers and crawled into bed and snapped off the bedlamp. He lay there awake, or lay there believing he was awake, breathing shallowly. Two hours later, at seven, the labor pains started, and Callie said, “Henry!” She shook him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she had been up for some time. She was dressed up as if for church, even wearing her hat.
It was the twenty-ninth of December and the road to Slater was ice-packed and banked by gray drifts. The sky over the mountains was as gray as the snow, and there wasn’t so much as a sparrow moving on a telephone wire, and not a trace of wind. Black telephone poles stood out sharply against the gray all around them, pole after pole, a series winding downward as if forever. He was conscious of them as he passed them; even when he thought about other things, his body registered the rhythm of the telephone poles going by.