“You stole our horse,” I said, my cheek in the rifle’s weld so that I could shoot the moment he might draw a pistol or try to run.
“Your horse?” he said, his voice high-pitched but cocky for a young boy.
“Drop the lead and I won’t shoot you,” I said.
“Does a week of feeding my uncle’s mare grass and water make her yours?”
Which is what I would have countered with if I was staring down the barrel of a rifle and a stolen horse pawed and sulled at my side. “If it’s your family’s,” I asked, “where are they?”
“Dead,” he said, “like everyone else.”
“Why’d you beat the girl?”
“She came after me with a stove lid, the bitch. What are you doing living there?”
“It’s no concern of yours. Not anymore. Now drop the lead and leave the horse.” He stood there, not frozen or scared, just indifferent, like we’d been talking about what price he got in town for goods that were stored elsewhere. “Drop the lead and walk on,” I said again, “or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
He dropped the lead and brought the carbine around fast from his shoulder, faster than I thought possible, and the two of us stood in that position, duel-like. I could have killed him in the space of a breath, but he seemed pitiful to me, and yet noble for holding hard to this last remnant of his life.
“It’s not loaded,” I said.
“You don’t know that I’ve got bullets, do you?”
“I know.”
He lowered the barrel and pushed the rifle around to his back, hooked his thumb around the strap in one hand and the horse’s bridle in the other, and stood looking at me in the dusk.
“All right, then,” he said. “Shoot a man for a horse.” And he let go of both strap and bridle and stood there in the road with his arms outstretched, so that the mare thought he meant to give her some room, and she stepped into the grass to graze.
I held my rifle steady and aimed for the center of his chest, stroked the stock with my trigger finger above the guard, and breathed deeply in and out to calm myself. After a while, the boy turned and gave the horse a tug and she walked off along behind him, just as they had been doing when I came upon them, and I waited until they were out of range, ejected the last round from the magazine into the dirt, heaved the rifle into the woods, where it landed in thick moss beneath an oak, and ran at a trot back to the house and the girl.
I NURSED HER INTO THE EVENING AND NIGHT, HELD HER AND wiped her face as she came in and out of a light consciousness, and then she slept for a long stretch, so that I fell asleep, too, in the chair I kept at her bedside. She woke in the darkness of midnight, shook me awake, and said, “It’s time. It’s broken.”
I lit a lamp and looked down at the mess of sheet and ticking on which she slept and could see what looked in the light like mingled daubs of blood. She saw it, too, and said, “No, it can be that way sometimes. I was careful to shield myself when he hit me. Wash and put the water on.”
But she was still ashen and sweating, and I made her lie back down in her bed after I had stripped the soiled sheets and thrown some shirts and coats over the bare frame. For a long time, she lay resting and breathing deeply, time I took to bank the stove, get more water from the well, and fill the pot to boil.
When her labor began, I knew enough to tell that it was going to be hard. I had been around many animals giving birth, and the ones who seemed stronger, as though masking a fear, were the ones for whom birth often turned from life to death. But I had never been with a woman in labor, and I wondered if I would know what to expect, what to look and listen for.
For the first few hours of her contractions, she breathed and moaned and tried to rest, and I could comfort her only with the cool, wet rag. Then, as they came closer and intensified, she sat up and panted. “Jozef, my hand, hold my hand,” and she pushed down on my hand, the bed, the ground, and cried into the night, and this went on for hours as the morning came on, and then day, and what I never expected was the long resistance that child had to being born. I knew he wasn’t breech. But he was turned and so couldn’t move fully into the birth canal. I coaxed her and held her and tried to massage away her pain, but it grew and grew with yet more and longer hours, it seemed, the child not coming, only screams, and in my own exhaustion I weakened and buckled and wept, because in the early spring month we lived in that pastoral, waiting for this moment, I had prayed and dreamed that this girl might be some answer to another prayer I had made in a prison cell in Sardinia, that the misery and death I had dealt and seen might somehow be turned around, might somehow be wiped clean by a life unexpected.
I noticed that the sun was setting in the west, and I thought how quickly and yet full of burden a day can begin and end, and she pulled me close to her and said that if the child lived, I had to take it back to her village, that they would want it and care for it, in spite of her.
“Promise me, promise me,” she whispered, her lips brushing my cheeks. And I said that I would, and that she would come, too, because we had a long way yet to go. But she turned her head on the pillow and said, “No. It won’t be. Not me. Just go. Across the Sajó. It’s close. You’ll see. The baby,” she said, and wailed, and I knew that if she didn’t deliver soon, she and the baby both would die.
But she seemed to know this as well and, without my directing her, rose from the bed and sat on the edge so that gravity might do its best as a midwife. I placed a blanket on the floor and then held her from behind for support as she clenched her fists and stood and inhaled deeply, and the screams that came were unearthly, and the power in her back and arms was enough to bring tears to my eyes and make me wonder if she might crush my own hands as she bore down.
I saw the gush of fluids then and moved around quickly to take the child from her and keep it from strangling. The head had crowned and with each push more of the face emerged, though there was no wiping away or staunching of blood, so much blood it was, as though the child must swim through it as both test and augury, for she had torn, as I had seen sheep tear when the lamb was large or ill-positioned, and I knew later, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop, that something had ruptured inside.
But in that moment of birthing, I grabbed the head, fully free, and as she pushed, I worked out the shoulder caught in her tiny girl-like pelvis, and it was a boy, stiff and blue, but he bent slowly and then kicked and wakened, determined but exhausted as he gulped his first breath of air and bellowed weakly there in the cup of my arms. I tied off the umbilicus with a strip of cloth and cut it with a pair of sewing shears and then wrapped him in a sheet and placed him in his mother’s arms.
She lay back on the bed. She was white and breathing shallowly, but she pulled her son to her and spoke to him softly in Romany, secrets I knew nothing of and would never hear whispered again. His bellows became mews as he searched her out in his hunger and then latched and sucked, and the two rested there.
When I returned with more rags and sawdust, she was coming in and out of sleep and looking ghostly from blood loss, but the boy clung to her and what life there was in the first and last precious drops of foremilk she fed him, until she was dead. I lifted him from her and he wailed out of longing, as I did, too, out of a grief I’d never known, so that the two of us were like a chorus of orphans lost and broken in the world. And as we sobbed, I bundled the child and made a sling on my chest out of webbing I had cut from the dead soldiers’ backpacks a long two months ago, and I felt her in that house, helping me and hurrying me, as though the valley wind itself whispered, Cross the Sajó! I had no idea how far, or how long, I or the child would be able to endure. We were both empty of what it was we desired. I went to her on the bed, pulled the quilt up to her chin, whispered, “Milujem t’a,” and kissed her cheek, which was cold and pale.