Gordon Dickson - Wolf and Iron

It was time for Merry to move to the birthing stool. Jeebee carried her to it; for she was now exhausted from the labor. Her mouth was dry from the panting and he held a cup to her lips so she could take another of the small sips of water he had been giving her. She was very exhausted now, and she was just passing into the stage the childbirth books had warned about, called transition. That point at which the body shifts gears, giving up the labor of the cervix, which is now completely dilated. Merry looked at the end of her tether, worn-out, depressed, and desperate. She was past the point of being reasonable, and she glared at Jeebee.

“I’ve got to give up. This is all your fault. I’m never going to do it again.”

“It won’t be long now,” said Jeebee, “it won’t be long. Just hang in there a little while yet. You don’t want to stop now… ”

At this point she was shivering, and when Jeebee touched her, her skin was icy cold. He wrapped layers of blankets around her. Time moved on. Gradually, warmth began to return to her, and the period of depression passed.

Suddenly she had one great contraction that made her gasp. She had pushed involuntarily, and now Jeebee no longer encouraged her not to. From now on pushing was appropriate. Now, it only hurt her when she was building up pressure to push. This was as the childbirth books they had memorized had told them. When she actually pushed, the pain would go. Jeebee was to ask her about this afterward, and she would tell him, then, that she didn’t know if it had. She just hadn’t remembered.

She had a death grip on the crossbar, now almost hanging with all her weight from the tripod.

The baby descended still further. Now it was crowning, beginning to show its forehead at the enlarged entrance of the vagina. Jeebee was busy gently helping the opening, pulling back Merry’s body from around the emerging head.

Before his eyes, he saw the first of the miracles happen. The birthing books had warned that he might have to help position the baby, but this time at least, it was not necessary. Before his eyes the physical part of the head and the body behind it rotated by itself, so that the shoulders were now up and down vertically.

The head began to emerge, and Jeebee cupped it softly with his hand, supporting it and holding it back a little so that it would not come too fast and tear membranes in Merry’s body. With his other hand, the right hand, he continued to help pull back the body around the opening, and Merry pushed with all her strength, pushed and pushed…

It was at this moment, in just the flash of a second, that Jeebee saw Wolf once more back in the room. Wolf was just putting his shoulder down to shoulder-shove-and-roll on the stained blanket Jeebee had ripped off the bed earlier after Merry’s water bag burst. But Jeebee had no time to waste on Wolf now. All of his attention had to stay on Merry.

When he was once more free to flash a look in Wolf’s direction for another split second, he saw Wolf lying in watching position, paws crossed in front of him and his eyes taking in the whole process.

The head was all the way out now and Jeebee was still supporting it, kneeling and sitting on his heels so as to keep himself and the baby below Merry and the stool top. Suddenly, the lower shoulder emerged at last, and with that, everything suddenly began to move quickly.

Jeebee tried to keep the baby from coming too fast, but it came swiftly, nonetheless, now that the difficult parts of it were past the narrowest part of the opening passage.

Almost immediately it seemed he held the baby in both hands. He continued to sit on his heels, making sure he held the baby below Merry’s body and watching the umbilical cord to see if it was still pulsing.

It was. But as he watched, the pulsing gradually slowed and ceased.

Cradling the tiny naked figure in his left arm with his hand still half enclosing and supporting the head, he reached blindly back behind him to the foot of the bed and got one of the sterilized, boiled, still-damp cloths off the pile he had left there. With it, he gently cleaned the baby’s nose and mouth of mucus.

This was the point at which the books had called for suction to completely clear the nose and mouth of the newborn. But they had nothing of rubber or other elastic to make one. Jeebee put his mouth over the tiny nose and mouth and sucked gently. He felt only a touch on his tongue to tell him anything had come out. He spat sideways onto the plastic sheet.

As soon as the baby was able to breathe he took in a deep breath and uttered a tiny, immediate wail of a cry. Softly, with the cloth, Jeebee continued cleaning the rest of the little face. As soon as the baby’s eyes were uncovered they flashed about, incredibly blue.

With the flash of the eyes, something expanded powerfully in Jeebee, a silent explosion of emotion that he would have not believed possible, a connection of himself with this child of his he was holding.

He had identified his earlier feeling of protection with the moment he had been ready to kill Wolf to protect the food he had found. He changed his mind now. What he felt at this moment in protectiveness toward the infant in his hands was much greater. It faced outward, like an armed wall against the world and anything that might threaten his child.

He continued, wiping clean the little body.

It had been, on emergence from Merry, a plainly blue color, beneath a thin white covering that looked like nothing so much as cream cheese. It was a boy, Jeebee noticed for the first time. Now, unexpectedly, rapidly, it began—and this was the second miracle—to turn pink. Jeebee, cautiously supporting the baby with both hands now again, lifted him and laid him on Merry’s chest. Her arms came up wearily but immediately to enfold it, and to direct its head toward her left breast, which was closest. Immediately, instinctively, the baby found her nipple with his mouth and began to nurse.

For his first moment of relaxation from tension, as he watched the two of them, Jeebee began to realize that he was reeling from fatigue and emotional backwash from his emotional experience just now, which he suddenly realized had been foretold in the childbirth books. It had been his moment of instinctive bonding with his son. Now it would never leave him.

Jeebee stayed, kneeling where he was by the birthing stool, caught for a moment in a half daze, mesmerized by the timeless picture of Merry feeding her child. Then his sense of urgency jerked him out of the daze suddenly. There was still work for him to do. He looked at the bed now and located the scissors he had boiled, before he had laid them there on one of the boiled cloths; and next to them an adjoining cloth supporting two clean strips of rawhide cord, almost small enough to be fish line.

With one of these he tied off the cord about an inch from Merry’s skin, and then tied the other cord about an inch and a half beyond that. Then using the scissors from a sewing box they had found at the ranch house, he cut between the two ties and the baby was free.

He rose unsteadily, suddenly aware that he could hardly stand on his cramped leg muscles after having sat in a kneeling position so long. Blood flowed back into his legs.

Gently, he picked up Merry with the baby from the birthing stool and laid them both, just as they were, on the clean sheet he had exposed in that moment in which he had stripped the stained top one and the plastic sheet after Merry’s water had burst.

Merry accepted the move without seeming to notice it. She was half sitting up now, with double pillows between her and the head of the bed to support her back. She was still having mild contractions, and every so often, a small flow of red-stained fluid that Jeebee remembered was called lochia drained onto the sheet beneath her.