Did they tell you it may be a while yet? she said.
They nodded.
I should have waited, she said. I came in too soon.
No, now, Raymond said. You come just right. We come too late, if anything. This is a considerable lot better for you here, instead of out at the house.
I didn’t want to be such a bother, she said. I thought I was closer.
No, Harold said. You done us a favor. We was going to get a little antsy waiting like that, miles out of town that way. We was pure ready to come in about five hours earlier, if you want to know.
I just wanted to have it right away and not for you to have to wait around. Now that’s not going to happen.
Well, you can just stop concerning yourself about that, Raymond said. Don’t you even think about us. You just take care of your own business there and you do what you need to do. And if there’s something else we can do, you got to let us know. We don’t know a thing about this. We don’t know how to help you.
Well, Harold said, I guess we could go get the calf-puller. I reckon we know that much about getting new things born into this world.
She looked at him. There was a kind of blank look on her face.
Oh, hell, he said. You got to excuse me. I was trying for a joke. I didn’t mean nothing, Victoria.
She shook her head a little and smiled. Her face was quite flushed and her teeth looked very white. I know that, she said. You can joke if you want to. I want you to. You’re both so good to me. Then another pain came and they watched her tighten into herself in the bed, breathing and panting, her eyes closed. After a little while, when it was finished, she opened her eyes again but it was clear that her concentration was still focused on what was going on inside herself and nowhere else except there, and the McPheron brothers sat in the chairs against the wall near her bed and worried about her more than they had ever worried about anything in the last fifty years and watched it all and stayed with her into the night.
At midnight old Dr. Martin came in and said they might as well go home for a while. He had come in to check on the girl for himself and had found that she was still far from delivery. It wasn’t that unusual, he said, since it was her first baby. He said he would be staying all night himself, sleeping at the hospital, and that the nurses would call him if she got closer, and the nurses could call them too, if that’s what they wanted. But the McPheron brothers wouldn’t leave. They stayed in the room and the girl managed to sleep a little between the contractions, taking little bits of naps occasionally, while beside the bed they sat up awake, silently, in a kind of daze, waiting with her. The nurses came in and out several times every hour to check on her and the brothers would have to step outside in the hall then, and then they would come back after the nurses were satisfied. It went on in that way through the night. By daybreak the McPheron brothers looked bad. Their faces looked as haggard and colorless as chalk, their eyes gone scratchy and red. The girl was relatively calm, though, and determined to do it right. She was very tired but she was all right. She was still concentrated and working hard. She begged them to go home and rest, but they would not leave at her request any more than they had at the doctor’s.
Finally, at about nine o’clock in the morning, during one of the brief periods when they were waiting in the hallway, Harold said to his brother, At least one of us has got to go home and feed. You know that.
I’m not leaving, Raymond said.
I didn’t think so. I figured as much. I’ll be back, then. You stay here. You stay in here for both of us. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
When they were allowed into the room again Harold told the girl what he was doing and she said, Yes, he should please do that, and he touched her on the arm and walked out. Raymond sat down again on the chair near her bed. When the contractions came he offered what encouragement he could think of to give her and she worked hard, and time continued to pass.
Then sometime later they told Raymond to step out into the hall again. He stood and waited for them to finish examining her but it took longer than usual, and then they came out, wheeling the girl on the bed and he saw her and she looked at him and smiled a little, and they took her on down the hallway before he could think to say anything to her at all or even to make some gesture of hope for her sake. One of the nurses informed him that Dr. Martin was giving her oxytocin by i.v. drip to accelerate the labor and they were moving to delivery now. The nurse said he should go outside and get some air, he looked like he needed it. One of them would find him afterward.
Is she going to be okay?
Yes. You mustn’t worry.
He stood outside at the back entrance to the hospital in the fresh air and stood just breathing and waiting, not leaning against anything but simply standing away from the wall and the porch support as if he had been located there by some happenstance and told not to move or to lean against anything that might hold him up or support him until somebody should come and tell him he could do otherwise. No one else was out there. He stared toward the alley and the back parking lot. He stood, and didn’t move. His arms dangled at his sides. An hour later Dr. Martin found him that way, still standing in a kind of rigid isolation on the back step.
McPheron?
Raymond slowly looked at him.
You can see her now.
Victoria?
Yes.
Is she alive?
What? Of course she is.
She’s all right?
She’s awake and she’s talking. But she’s tired. Don’t you want to know about the baby?
What is it?
It’s a girl.
And you say Victoria Roubideaux is all right.
Yes.
Raymond studied him.
And what you say, that’s the truth.
Yes. I tell you, she’s all right.
I didn’t know, Raymond said. I was afraid. . Then roughly he stooped forward and took hold of old Dr. Martin’s hand and pumped it hard, two times, and let it go, and then he started back inside.
She still had the baby with her in the bed lying on her chest when he entered the room in the maternity ward, and she was gazing at the baby, holding it close. She looked up when he came in, her eyes shining.
He says you’re okay, Raymond said.
Yes. Isn’t she beautiful? She turned the baby toward him.
He looked at it. The baby had a full thatch of crow-black hair and its red face was misshapen a little, pushed out of its true shape, and there was a scratch on its cheek, and he thought in his inexperience that the baby looked like an old man, that it resembled nothing so much as some old wrinkled grandpa, but he said, Yes, she’s a beautiful little thing.
You want to hold her?
Oh, I don’t know about that.
You can.
I don’t want to harm her.
You won’t. Here. You’ve got to support her head.
He took the baby in her white hospital blankets and looked at her, holding her fearfully out in front of his old face as though she were a piece of rigid but delicate kitchen crockery.
My goodness, he said after a minute. The baby’s eyes looked up at him without blinking. Well, my my. My lord almighty.