Stephen King - Different Seasons

'Nurse!' I called. 'No time for that. Get one from the ambulance. This baby is coming now.'

She changed course, slipping and sliding through the slush in her white crepe-soled shoes. I turned back to Miss Stansfield.

Rather than slowing down, the locomotive breathing had actually begun to speed up ... and then her body turned hard again, locked and straining. The baby crowned again. I waited for it to slip back but it did not; it simply kept coming. There was no need for the forceps after ell. The baby all but flew into my hands. I saw the sleet ticking off its naked, bloody body - for it was a boy, his sex unmistakable. I saw steam rising from it as the black, icy night snatched away the last of its mother's heat. Its blood-grimed fists waved feebly; it uttered a thin, wailing cry.

'Nurse!’ I bawled, 'move your ass, you bitch!' It was perhaps inexcusable language, but for a moment I felt I was back in France, that in a few moments the shells would begin to whistle overhead with a sound like that remorselessly ticking sleet; the machine-guns would begin their hellish stutter; the Germans would begin to materialize out of the murk, running and slipping and cursing and dying in the mud and smoke. Cheap magic, I thought, seeing the bodies twist and turn and fall. But you're right, Sandra, it's all we have. It was the closest I have ever come to losing my mind, gentlemen.

'NURSE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!’

The baby wailed again - such a tiny, lost sound! - and then it wailed no more. The steam rising from its skin had thinned to ribbons. I put my mouth against its face, smelling blood and the bland, damp aroma of placenta. I breathed into its mouth and heard the jerky sussurrus of its breathing resume. Then the nurse was there, the blanket in her arms. I held out my hand for it.

She started to give it to me, and then held it back. 'Doctor, what... what if it's a monster? Some kind of monster?'

'Give me that blanket,' I said. 'Give it to me now, Sarge, before I kick your fucking asshole right up your fucking shoulderblades.'

'Yes, doctor,' she said with perfect calmness (we must bless the women, gentlemen, who so often understand simply by not trying to), and gave me the blanket I wrapped the child and gave it to her.

'If you drop him, Sarge, you'll be eating those stripes.'

'Yes, doctor.'

'It's cheap fucking magic, Sarge, but it's all God left us with.'

'Yes, doctor.'

I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and watched the crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and backed away from the body. Its breathing, like the baby's, hitched and caught... stopped ... hitched again ... stopped ...

I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was her head. And obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one knee and turned the head over. The eyes were open - those direct hazel eyes that had always been full of such life and such determination. They were full of determination still. Gentlemen, she was seeing me.

Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath slipping rapidly back and forth between those lips and through those teeth as she "locomotived". Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips parted. They mouthed four words: Thank you, Doctor McCarron. And I heard them, gentlemen, but not from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal cords. And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our words, were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound. But there were seven of them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven syllables in that phrase, Thank you, Doctor McCarron.

'You're welcome, Miss Stansfield,' I said. 'It's a boy.' Her lips moved again, and from behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound hoyyyyyy Her eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed. She began to locomotive again ... and then she simply stopped. Whatever had happened was now over. The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance driver had perhaps seen some of it before he fainted. But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly accident out here ... and a new baby in there.

I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood, looking stonily away towards the Garden across the way, as if nothing of any particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing ... or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.

As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to weep. As I recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped me to my feet and inside.

McCarron's pipe had gone out He relit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence. Outside, the wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and looked up. He seemed mildly surprised to find us still there.

'That's all,' he said. That's the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of fire?' He snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment 'I paid her burial expenses out of my own pocket She had no one else, you see.' He smiled a little. 'Well ... there was Ella Davidson, my nurse. She insisted on chipping in twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But when Davidson insisted on a thing-' He shrugged, and then laughed a little.

'You're quite sure it wasn't a reflex?' I heard myself demanding suddenly. 'Are you quite sure -'

'Quite sure,' McCarron said imperturbably. 'The first contraction, perhaps. But the completion of her labour was not a matter of seconds but of minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it had been necessary. Thank God it was not.'

'What about the baby?' Johanssen asked.

McCarron puffed at his pipe. 'Adopted,' he said. 'And you'll understand that, even in those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible.'

'Yes, but what about the baby?' Johanssen asked again, and McCarron laughed in a cross way.

'You never let go of a thing, do you?' he asked Johanssen.

Johanssen shook his head. 'Some people have learned it to their sorrow. What about the baby?'

'Well, if you've come with me this far perhaps you'll also understand that I had a certain vested interest in knowing how it all came out for that child. Or I felt that I did. There was a young man and his wife - their name was not Harrison, but that is close enough. They lived in Maine. They could have no children of their own. They adopted the child and named him ... well, John's good enough, isn't it? John will do you fellows, won't it?'

He puffed at his pipe but it had gone out again. I was faintly aware of Stevens hovering behind me, and knew that somewhere our coats would be at the ready. Soon we would slip back into them ... and back into our lives. As McCarron had said, the tales were done for another year.

The child I delivered that night is now head of the English Department at one of the two or three most respected private colleges in the country,' McCarron said. 'He's not forty-five yet. A young man. It's early for him, but the day may well come when he will be President of that school. I shouldn't doubt it a bit. He is handsome, intelligent, and charming.

'Once, on a pretext, I was able to dine with him in the private faculty club. We were four that evening. I said little and so was able to watch him. He has his mother's determination, gentlemen...

'... and his mother's hazel eyes.'

3: The Club

Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I contrived to be the last, and Stevens looked at me with no surprise when I said: