Holding Wonder, page 22
The light? I sat up and fumbled for the shoe where I'd left my glasses. What was a light doing on this flat? And so close that it filled the whole of my window? I wiped my glasses on a fold of my gown and put them on. The wide myopic flare of a light concentrated then to a glow, softer, but still close. I rolled the car window down and leaned my arms on the frame.
The room was small. The floor was dirt, beaten hard by use. Rain was roaring on a tin roof and it had come in under the unpainted wooden door, darkening the sill and curling in a faintiy silver wetness along one wall. A steady dripping leak from the ceilingless roof had dug a little crater in the floor in one corner and each heavy drop exploded mudily in its center. Steam plumed up from the spout of a granite-ware teakettle on the small cast-iron stove that glowed faintly pink through its small isinglass window on the front. The light was on the table. It was a kerosene lamp, its flame, turned too high, was yellow and jagged, occasionally smoking the side of the glass chimney. It was so close to me that the faint flare of light was enough to make shadowy the room beyond the table.
"It's that peripheral thing again," I thought and looked straight at the lamp. But it didn't fade out! The car did instead! I blinked, astonished. This wasn't peripheral—it was whole sight! I looked down at my folded arms. My sleeves were muddy from a damp adobe window sill.
Movement caught my attention—movement and sound. I focused on the dim interior of the room. There was an iron bedstead in the far corner. And someone was in it—in pain. And someone was by it—in fear and distress.
"It hurts! It hurts!" the jerky whisper was sexless and ageless because of pain. "Where's Jim?"
"I told you. He went to see if he could get help. Maybe Gramma Nearing or even a doctor." The voice was patient. "He can't get back because of the storm. Listen to it?"
We three listened to the roar of the flooded washes, the drum of the rain and, faintly, the plash of the leaking roof.
"I wish he was—" The voice lost its words and became a smothered, exhausted cry of pain.
I closed my eyes—and lost the sound along with the sight. I opened my eyes hastily. The room was still there, but the dampness by the door was a puddle now, swelling slowly in the lamplight. The leak in the corner was a steady trickle that had overrun its crater and become a little dust covered snake that wandered around, seeking the lowest spot on the floor.
The person on the bed cried out again, and, tangled in the cry, came the unmistakable thin wail of the new-born. A baby! I hitched myself higher on my folded arms. My involuntary blinking as I did so moved time again in the small room. I peered into the pale light.
A woman was busy with the baby on the table. As she worked, she glanced anxiously and frequently over at the bed corner. She had reached for some baby clothes when a sound and movement from the corner snatched her away from the table so hastily that the corner of the blanket around the baby was flipped back, leaving the tiny chest uncovered. The baby's face turned blindly, and its mouth opened in a soundless cry. The soft lamplight ran across its wet, dark hair as the head turned.
"It won't stop!" I don't know whether I caught the panting words or the thought. "I can't stop the blood! Jim! Get here! God help me!"
I tried to see past the flair of light but could only sense movement. If only I could—but what could I do? I snatched my attention back to the baby. Its mouth was opening and closing in little gasping motions. Its little chest was laboring but it wasn't breathing!
"Come back!" I cried—silently?—aloud? "Come back! Quick! The baby's dying!"
The vague figure moving beyond the light paid no attention. I heard her again, desperately, "Vesta! What am I supposed to do? I can't—"
The baby was gasping still, its face shadowing over with a slatey blue. I reached. The table was beyond my finger tips. I pulled myself forward over the sill until the warped board of the wide framing cut across my stomach. My hand hovered over the baby.
Somewhere, far, far behind me, I heard Peter cry out sleepily and felt a handful of my flannel gown gathered up and pulled. But I pulled too, and, surging forward, wide-eyed, afraid to blink and thus change time again, I finally touched the thin little subsiding chest.
My reach was awkward. The fingers of my one hand were reaching beyond their ability, the other was trying to keep me balanced on the window sill as I reached. But I felt the soft, cold skin, the thin hush of the turned back blanket, the fragile baby body under my palm.
I began a sort of one-handed respiration attempt. Two hands would probably have crushed the tiny rib cage. Compress—release—compress—release. I felt sweat break out along my hairline and upper lip. It wasn't working. Peter's tug on me was more insistent. My breath cut off as the collar of my gown was pulled tightly backward.
"Peter!" I choked voicelessly. "Let me go!" I scrambled through the window, fighting every inch of the way against the backward tug, and reached for the child. There was a sudden release that staggered me across the table. Or over the table? My physical orientation was lost.
I bent over the child, tilting its small quiet face up and back. In a split second I reviewed everything I had heard or read about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then sent my fervent petitionary prayer into the lungs of the child with the first breath.
I had never tried this before, but I breathed—not too hard! It's a baby—and paused and breathed and paused and breathed, losing myself in the rhythm, losing my sight in a too-close blur, afraid to close my eyes.
Then there was movement! Breathe. And a gasp! Breathe. And a turning! Breathe. And a thin wail that strengthened and lifted and filled the room.
My eyes ached with keeping them wide and I was gasping. Blessedly the room swam grayly. I thought, Peter! Oh, Peter! And felt a small twitch at the hem of my gown. And felt the flannel tug me back to awareness. There was a movement beyond the lamp.
"My baby." The voice was hardly audible. "Hattie, let me see my baby before I die."
"Vesta!" Hattie's voice was sharp with anxiety. "Don't talk about dying! And I can't leave you now. Not even to—"
"I want to see my baby," the faint voice persisted. "Hat-tie, please—"
I looked down at the still wailing child, its face, reddening with life, its clenched fists blindly beating the air. Then I was with the baby near the bed. The young face in the shadows below was a vague white blur. The baby fit into the thin curve of the young shoulder.
"I can't see!" The pale suffering face fretted in the shadows of the bed corner. "It's too dark."
Hattie whirled from the empty table, the lamp she had just lifted tilting heavy black smoke against one side of the chimney, slanting heavily in her hands. She righted it, her eyes terrified, and looked quickly back over her shoulder. Her face, steadied by the determined set of her mouth, was white as she brought the lamp to the bed, her free hand curving around the top of the chimney to cut the draft. She held the lamp high above Vesta.
Vesta weakly brought herself up to one elbow above the baby and peered down at the crumpled face and the smudge of dark hair.
"A girl," she smiled softly. "Name her Gayla, Hattie. It's a happy name. Maybe she will be—" Her face whitened and she slid slowly down from her elbow. "Oh, I wish," she whispered. "I wish I could see her grown up!"
The sound of the rain filled the silence that followed, and the tug on my own gown was no longer a tug, it was an insistence, an imperative. My gown was straining back so that I felt as if I were a figurehead on a ship. I moved involuntarily backward.
"Who came?" Vesta's fading voice was drowsy.
"There's nobody here but me." Hattie's voice jerked.
"I thought someone came." Now she was fading and the whole room was stirring like a bowl full of smoke and I was being drawn back through it, hearing Hattie's, "There's nobody here but me—"
The sound of the baby's cry cut through the rain-sound, the swirling smoke and Hattie's voice. I heard Vesta's tender crooning, "There, there, Gayla, there, there."
Then I faded—and could finally close my eyes. I faded into an intolerable stretching from adobe window sill to car window, a stretching from Then to Now, a stretching across impossibility. I felt pulled out so thin and tight that it seemed to me the sudden rush of raindrops thrummed on me as on the tightened strings of some instrument. I think I cried out. Then there was a terrific tug and a feeling of coming unstuck and then I was face down, halfway out of the car window, rain parting my hair with wet insistent hands, hearing Peter's angry, frightened voice, "Not even sense enough to come in out of the rain!"
It took quite a while to convince Peter that I was all there. And quite a time to get my wet hair dried. And to believe that there were no mud stains on the sleeves of my gown. And an even longer, disjointed time to fill Peter in on what had happened.
He didn't have much to say about what happened from his point of view. "Bless the honest flannel!" He muttered as he wrapped me in a scratchy blanket and the warmth of his arms. "I was sure it was going to tear before I could get you back. I held on like grim death with that flannel stretching like a rubber band out the window and into the dark—into nothing! There I was, like hanging onto a kite string! A flannel one! Or a fishing line! A flannel one! Wondering what would happen if I had let go? If I'd had to let go!"
We comforted each other for the unanswerable terror of the question. And I told him all of it again and together we looked once more at the memory of the white, young face floating in the darkness. And the reddening small face, topped by its smudge of black, floating in the yellow flood of lamp light.
Then I started up, crying, "Oh Peter, what did I save her for?"
"Because you couldn't let her die," he said, pulling me back.
"I don't mean why did I save her. I mean for what did I save her? For making her own way? For that's enough for her kind? For what did I save her" I felt sorrow flood over me.
Peter took my shoulders and shook me. "Now, look here," he said sternly. "What makes you think you had anything to do with whether she lived or died? You may have been an instrument. On the other hand, you may have just wanted so badly to help that you thought you did. Don't go appointing yourself judge and jury over the worth of anyone's life. You only know the little bit that touched you. And for all you know, that little bit is all hallucination."
I caught my breath in a hiccoughy sob and blinked in the dark. "Do you think it's all hallucination?" I asked quietly.
Peter tucked me back into the curve of his shoulder. "I don't know what I think," he said. "I'm just the observer.
And most likely that's all you are. Let's wait until morning before we decide.
"Go to sleep. We have hunting to do in the morning, too."
"In all this rain and mud?" I protested. "Wait till morning," he repeated.
Long after his steady sleeping breath came and went over my head, I lay and listened to the intermittent rain on the roof—and thought.
Finally the tight knot inside me dissolved and I relaxed against Peter.
Now that I had seen Gayla born, I could let her be dead. Or I could keep her forever the dreaming child in the playhouse on the school grounds. Why I had become involved in her life, I didn't need to know any more than I needed to know why I walked through the wrong door one time and met Peter. I tucked my hand against my cheek, then roused a little. Where were my glasses?
I groped on the car floor. My shoe. Yes, the glasses were there, where I always put them when we're camping. I leaned again and slept.
-
AS SIMPLE AS THAT
"I won't read it." Ken sat staring down at his open first grade book.
I took a deep, wavery breath and, with an effort, brought myself back to the classroom and the interruption in the automatic smooth flow of the reading group.
"It's your turn, Ken," I said, "Don't you know the place?"
"Yes," said Ken, his thin, unhappy face angling sharply at the cheek bones as he looked at me. "But I won't read it."
"Why not?" I asked gently. Anger had not yet returned. "You know all the words. Why don't you want to read it?"
"It isn't true," said Ken. He dropped his eyes to his book as tears flooded in. "It isn't true."
"It never was true," I told him. "We play like it's true, just for fun." I flipped the four pages that made up the current reading lesson. "Maybe this city isn't true, but it's like a real one, with stores and—" My voice trailed off as the eyes of the whole class centered on me—seven pairs of eyes and the sightless, creamy oval of Maria's face—all seeing our city.
"The cities," I began again. "The cities—" By now the children were used to grown-ups stopping in mid-sentence. And to the stunned look on adult faces.
"It isn't true," said Ken. "I won't read it."
"Close your books," I said, "And go to your seats." The three slid quietly into their desks—Ken and Victor and Gloryanne. I sat at my desk, my elbows on the green blotter, my chin in the palms of my hands, and looked at nothing. I didn't want anything true. The fantasy that kept school as usual is painful enough. How much more comfortable to live unthinking from stunned silence to stunned silence. Finally I roused myself.
"If you don't want to read your book, let's write a story that is true, and we'll have that for reading."
I took the staff liner and drew three lines at a time across the chalk board, with just a small jog where I had to lift the chalk over the jagged crack that marred the board diagonally from top to bottom.
"What shall we name our story?" I asked. "Ken, what do you want it to be about?"
"About Biff's house," said Ken promptly.
"Biff's house," I repeated, my stomach tightening sickly as I wrote the words, forming the letters carefully in manuscript printing, automatically saying, "Remember now, all titles begin with—"
And the class automatically supplying, "—capital letters."
"Yes," I said. "Ken, what shall we say first?"
"Biff's house went up like an elevator," said Ken.
"Right up into the air?" I prompted.
"The ground went up with it," supplied Gloryanne.
I wrote the two sentences. "Victor? Do you want to tell what came next?" The chalk was darkening in my wet, clenched hand.
"The groun'—it comed down, more fast nor Biff's house," supplied Victor hoarsely. I saw his lifted face and the deep color of his heavily fringed eyes for the first time in a week.
"With noise!" shouted Maria, her face animated. "With lots of noise!"
"You're not in our group!" cried Ken. "This is our story!"
"It's everyone's story," I said and wrote carefully. "And every sentence ends with a—"
"Period," supplied the class.
"And then?" I paused, leaning my forehead against the coolness of the chalk board, blinking my eyes until the rich green alfalfa that was growing through the corner of the room came back into focus. I lifted my head.
Celia had waited. "Biff fell out of his house," she suggested.
I wrote. "And then?" I paused, chalk raised. "Biff's house fell on him," said Ken with a rush. "And he got dead."
"I saw him!" Bobby surged up out of his seat, speaking his first words of the day. "There was blood, but his face was only asleep."
"He was dead!" said Ken fiercely. "And the house broke all to pieces!"
"And the pieces all went down in that deep, deep hole with Biff!" cried Bobby.
"And the hole went shut!" Celia triumphantly capped the recital.
"Dint either!" Victor whirled on her. "Ohney part! See! See!" He jabbed his finger toward the window. We all crowded around as though this was something new. And I suppose it was—new to our tongues, new to our ears, though long scabbed over unhealthily inside us.
There at the edge of the playground, just beyond the twisted tangle of the jungle gym and the sharp jut of the slide, snapped off above the fifth rung of the ladder, was the hole containing Biff's house. We solemnly contemplated all that was visible—-the small jumble of shingles and the wadded TV antenna. We turned back silently to our classroom.
"How did you happen to see Biff when his house fell on him, Bobby?" I asked.
"I was trying to go to his house to play until my brother got out of fourth grade," said Bobby. "He was waiting for me on the porch. But all at once the ground started going up and down and it knocked me over. When I got up, Biff's house was just coming down and it fell on Biff. All but his head. And he looked asleep. He did! He did! And then everything went down and it shut. But not all!" he hastened to add before Victor gave tongue again.
