Callie said, “Henry’s negative.”
Nobody spoke for a minute. Henry sucked in his loose upper lip and felt the quick light ticking of his heart. The old man didn’t move. Henry said, “That’s right.”
Callie leaned up on one elbow and said, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter on the first one. The doctor said so.”
Doc Cathey peeked at her over the rims of his glasses, then at Henry. “May be,” he said. “That may be. They know everything, these fancy city doctors.” He shook his head. “You’ve thought up every complication I know of, you two.”
Callie asked, “How much longer you think it will be?”
“Lord knows. If your insides are froze up like I think, it’ll take a good long while yet, maybe two days.”
Callie lay back again. She closed her eyes, and Henry leaned toward her, groping with one hand for the foot of the bed, watching her face. Her mouth was closed and her nostrils were narrow, as if she’d stopped breathing. After a minute she said, almost in a whisper: “It’s the waiting that’s so awful.” She opened her eyes and looked at Henry, then closed them again and moved her head from side to side on the pillow. Her lips tightened, then relaxed. Henry touched her foot.
Out in the hall Henry asked, “Will it pain her much?”
“Maybe a little,” the old man said. “Maybe a good deal.” He fiddled with his hearing aid and watched Henry out of the corner of his eye, with a smile like a grimace. “She’ll get tired, and her insides’ll likely rip all to hell.” Then he said, “Worried about her, ain’t you?” He went on smiling and watching him. Henry closed his right hand and the nails bit into the palm.
“ ’Course I am. Anybody’d worry,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
Doc Cathey pushed one hand down into his coat pocket and closed the other over Henry’s arm. “ ’Course they would.” The queer smile was still there.
When Henry went back, Callie lay facing away from the door. She didn’t say a word as he came in.
3
Callie slept and Henry stood at the window watching darkness settle in. Lights went on in the front room of the house across the street, and down at the end of the block the supermarket neon blazed pink and blue, Miller’s. It began to snow again as he watched — big, light flakes that dropped onto branches and hung there as more flakes fell, mounding up. A boy passed on the sidewalk, pushing a bicycle, and four women got off the bus at the corner and came up the street slowly, carrying packages. None of them looked toward the hospital as they passed. Down on the supermarket parking lot there were cars and farm trucks parked, some of them with their taillights on, glowing like a few last scattered coals in a furnace. People moved around on the lot and inside the supermarket, on the other side of the full-length windows, and on the sidewalks beyond the lot — children, grown-ups, old people — a hundred or more in all. He pursed his lips. It was queer, now that he thought of it, how many people there were in the world, moving around, hurrying — in Slater, in Athensville, Utica, Albany, down in New York City — millions of ’em moving around, bent forward a little against the snow. He sipped the coffee Doc Cathey had brought and then he stood looking again, holding the cup in his two hands, feeling its warmth under his curled fingers. Millions and millions of people, he thought. Billions. His mind couldn’t seem to get hold of it. Callie groaned and half-wakened, and he set down the cup and went to her and fitted his two hands around the small of her back and pressed in as Lou Millet had told him he’d done with his wife to ease the pain. She breathed deeply again; her breathing was the only sound in the room.
He sat down by the bed and stared at the fuzzy shadows thrown by the nightlamp — a long shadow curving away and two thinner straight lines running into it, the head of the bed. When he shut his eyes he saw the highway in front of the Stop-Off, and trucks moving along it, dark, speeding up for the second of the two hills that rose one on each side of his place, and then the road leading down to Nickel Mountain where the bends got dangerous and where the upgrades got steeper, leading through bare-branched beeches and maples and into the firs and tamaracks and then into open space where if it wasn’t bad weather a man could see stars and, far below, the river. Callie groaned again and he pressed in on her back. It was hours since they’d checked her.
The door opened behind him and light flattened across the bed. The nurse said, “Somebody to see you, Mr. Soames. Out in the waiting room.”
He hesitated. When she didn’t come in he said, “It’s been hours since they checked my wife.”
“I’ll tell them at the desk. I’m off duty now.” She turned away, and he eased himself up out of the chair and moved into the hall. Callie groaned behind him and he stopped. She was quiet again.
In the dimly lighted corner of the waiting room George Loomis sat in his too-big sheepskin jacket, with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, turning the pages of a magazine with his left hand, his head bent down to see. His right jacket sleeve hung empty. He was thirty — there was gray in his hair — but he looked like no more than a boy. He glanced up and grinned as Henry came near.
“Any news?” George asked, getting to his feet.
Henry shook his head. “She’s been in labor for sixteen hours. The labor room next door they’ve had three women in and out.”
George went on grinning, watching him, and Henry wondered all at once if it was pride that had made him say sixteen hours right away. Maybe he was hoping Callie would be in labor for a week.
George patted his jacket pockets, hunting. “It takes a while sometimes,” he said. “Cigarette?” He found the package, fumbled with it, tapped it against his leg to shake a cigarette out to where Henry could get hold of it, and held it up. Henry took it though he never smoked now, on account of his health, and put it between his lips. George held the matchbook and struck a match, all with his one hand — the wall beside him brightened for a moment — and lit Henry’s cigarette, then his own. They sat down. “You look tired,” George said.
Henry waved it away. “You’re out pretty late, aren’t you?” There were dark green shadows under George’s eyes and his cheekbones jutted out. His mouth was pale, like the mouth of a dead man. He hadn’t gotten his strength back since the accident.
“Chores,” George said. He held the cigarette out sideways, as if to see if it was straight, and Henry knew well enough what he meant. Chores with one arm — three hours for a one-hour job — because neighbors could come, a hundred of them, to milk while you lay in the hospital, and fill your yard with stove wood, and grind your grist and chop your corn and water your chickens and plow for you, but after a while you had to come home, and they had to go cut wood for themselves and grind grist and plow and plant, and if you were young yet, like George Loomis, you still had years of wood yet to cut. Even with two arms it wasn’t easy.
“How’s she doing?” George asked, turning away as he spoke, looking up at the owl on the wall.
“Fine so far. Doc Cathey thinks it might be rough.”
George nodded as if Doc had told him already. “Callie’s one hell of a gal.” He looked back at Henry. “What can I get you?”
Right over their heads an old man shouted something, or groaned, and George’s eyebrows drew inward. Henry looked at the ash on his cigarette, moved it carefully toward the ash tray, and scraped off all but the red cone. He remembered then and said, “We don’t need a thing.”
“I’ll bring you some breakfast,” George said. “Doc says you didn’t eat all day till he brought in some supper. He says to tell you be sure and get your rest.”