Maurey laughed at my preposterousness, then she stepped onto the log. I was holding my left sock to my nose to see if it stunk, when a sound made me look up. Maurey’s arm jerked, she leaned right, then fell forward across the log and dropped from sight. The sound when she hit was awful—part splash, part crack, a gasp.
I tore down the bank, fell myself, and landed on my hands and knees in the creek. When I scrambled across to her, she lay crumpled on her back in shallow running water with her left leg at an impossible angle, cussing like king-hell shit.
Mostly it revolved around Jesus and fuck. “Christ, it hurts. How did that happen? I can’t fall.”
“Don’t move.”
“Something’s broke, Sam. Fuck.” Her face twisted up with her eyes closed and her teeth showing. I lifted her head and back out of the creek, but when I touched her leg, Maurey screamed. “God-fuck, what are you doing?”
“I need to see this.” I turned her sideways so her body was leaning on the steep bank, but her lower legs were still in the water, which was probably for the best. My own feet, especially the bare one, stung for maybe ten seconds before going numb.
When I pulled her pants leg up, she screamed again, only not so loud. There was blood, not a gross amount, but enough. When I bent to check the inside of her leg, a white shin splinter poked through the skin. Reminded me of Otis.
“Your leg’s broke, Maurey.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” She suddenly went white as the bone and gasped. Her eyes concentrated hard on something I couldn’t see, then the spasm passed and she was back.
“Something’s bad in my guts,” Maurey said.
“Around the baby?”
“God, I hope this isn’t a miscarriage. I read about miscarriages.” She yanked her pants down from the back. Between her legs was running with water and a trickle of blood.
“Is that creek water?”
She touched the rivulet. “It’s coming from me. God, I hurt.” She bit her lower lip and the tears came. “Crap. I’m going to die before I have the baby.”
“Which hurts most, your leg or your belly?”
My stupid question brought her around. “Jesus, Sam, I can’t pick between pains.”
I took off my shirt and wrapped it around the blood flow from her leg, but when I touched near the bone, she clenched up. Then she breathed real hard and held her belly. After a few seconds, she gradually calmed down.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I’m either losing the baby or having it. I wish I knew the difference. Nobody ever told me shit. Mama’s in the nuthouse when I need her, Daddy hates me. My hair’s all wet.”
That last one scared me. “I’m going after Buddy.”
Maurey grabbed my arm hard. “Don’t leave me here, Sam. I don’t feel good.”
“I have to find help, we don’t know what to do.”
The tears streamed without a crying sound. “But Dad doesn’t like me.”
“Maurey, I have to get help. There’s no choice.”
She pushed me away. “Go ahead and leave when I need you. I’ll lay here and die alone.”
“You won’t die. I promise.”
“You promised you wouldn’t squirt. You promised you wouldn’t fall in love. You promised you wouldn’t go back to North Carolina. When was the last time you kept a promise?”
“I promise you won’t die.” After that she stopped talking. I waded into the creek and found a rock to prop her right leg on, but I figured the left one should stay in the water. She probably couldn’t feel it by now anyway. Then I checked the flow in her crotch. The water coming from her was bad, but the blood scared me. I couldn’t tell if the flow was slowing down or getting worse.
“You comfortable enough?”
She didn’t say anything. I changed my mind and decided to pull the broken leg out of the creek after all. She might lose it from freezing.
“If it gets to hurting too much, put it back in the water.”
Maurey nodded.
I touched her shoulder, then scrambled up the steep bank. Maurey’s voice came small and frightened. “Sam?”
“What, hon?”
“Thanks.”
It would have been faster if I’d gone back up the far bank for my left shoe. By the time I reached the ranch, my foot bled like Maurey’s leg. The cowdog Simon chased me the last thirty feet up to the ranch house, so knocking on the door was out.
I blew into a room with Buddy and Hank squared off at a linoleum table, both cradling cups of coffee. Petey shoved trucks off kindling next to the wood stove.
“Maurey fell, she’s hurt.” I bent over and held my knees.
Hank recovered first. “Where?”
“Up the creek, a quarter mile, a half mile, I don’t know. Her leg’s broke and her crotch is bleeding.”
Buddy was on his feet and moving, gathering rope, sheets, his knife, something from under the sink. Hank ran to his truck and brought back a hatchet. If you ever have an emergency, have it around cowboys.
“Exactly where is she?” Buddy asked.
“She fell off a log over the creek, past the third beaver dam.”
“The warm springs?”
I nodded. “Maurey said you didn’t know about it.”
“How bad’s the bleeding?”
“Not much blood, but lots of clear stuff.”
Hank glanced at Buddy. “She broke her water.”
Buddy’s bushy head went up and down. “Sounds like a tear in the placenta. Watch Petey while we’re gone.” He threw some towels in a day pack and they left.
Lydia did thirty-nine hours of labor before I was born. “It was Nazi torture,” she told me. “Ninety-seven degrees and Deep South humidity. Contractions for days. The nurses hated me for being young and rich. I turned into a cat, spitting on them whenever they touched me.”
“Nurses are supposed to be compassionate.”
Lydia made a forceful “Huh” sound. “These dykes laughed at me, said I was a sissy little girl. I called one an evil iron-cunt and she said I was an unwed bitch who didn’t deserve painkillers, that I wouldn’t be so quick to seduce Southern boys again if I was punished.”
“Sounds like a confrontation.”
“I screamed for eight hours. They tied my arms down but I bit the iron-cunt in the shoulder blade. The Negro orderly slapped me till I let go.”
Lydia said the doctor gassed her about three centimeters too soon just to shut her up, then he and Caspar went out for barbecue and one of the nurses delivered me.
“That slimey-balled doctor charged full price for delivery and he wasn’t even there. He was off licking his fingers with Daddy.”
“But after all that agony, look what you have now,” I said.
“What?”
“Me, aren’t I worth it?”
“Sam, nobody is worth giving birth.”
Shannon was born at 1:45 the next morning. I’ll never figure where Maurey came up with the name Shannon, but it’s pretty and Shannon herself is beautiful as sunshine.
Buddy and I sat on bruised peach-colored plastic chairs in the waiting room playing Chinese checkers. The nurses hadn’t known exactly what stance to take where I was concerned. Little girls had had babies in the Jackson hospital before, only not with little-boy fathers doing the pace thing outside with the little girl’s father, especially little-boy fathers wearing no shirt and only one shoe. Someone found an orderly smock-looking shirt small enough to more or less fit, but I ended up taking off my right shoe and sock so my feet would match. The left foot was a cut and bruised mess that no one offered to fix. I guess if you aren’t a patient they don’t worry with you.