John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Yolanda!” he calls. “I need you now!”

She is beside him, holding the shoebox, as he turns the tiny, wrinkled thing in his hand to rub its arms and legs. The color begins to change and it makes something like a hiccup.

“Oh my,” says Yolanda. “Oh my.”

“It’s still in me, Daddy,” says Jessie, her hot breath turning to steam in the freezing room. “I can feel it.”

“That’s the placenta,” he tells her. “Just push with the cramp and it will come out.”

He holds his rubber-gloved hand out toward Yolanda. “Alcohol.”

She splashes the alcohol over his fingers and when they are relatively clean of effluvia he pulls down on the lower eyelids, black bead of a pupil swimming, and squeezes a drop of silver-nitrate solution into each. More than a precaution, considering the father.

“Can I take it?” Yolanda asks.

“Not yet. You see those pieces of string?”

“Yes.”

“Clean your hands with the alcohol. The length of your finger from the body — tie the cord off there. Don’t pull tight. Then another knot an inch farther.”

Jessie’s cry is exhausted as she stiffens and pushes again. The placenta presents itself in a drooling of fluid.

“Jessie, I’m here, baby,” Yolanda calls, concentrating on her tying. “Every-thing is just fine.”

“Is it alive?”

Yolanda flicks her eyes up to his. “We’re going to do our best,” he says. “It’s so early—”

“It’s a girlchild,” says Yolanda. “I think.”

The body is limp in his hand, veins showing through in the places where its skin is unwrinkled, its abdomen extended, extremities a purplish blue, its respiration shallow. The few little sounds he can induce from it are low and weak. There is the tiniest spark of life glowing within.

“What do we need to create and maintain a fire?” Dr. Osler used to say. “Heat, oxygen, and fuel. An infant is no different.”

Dr. Lunceford waits for the pulse to end, then slices the umbilical between the two knots his wife has tied. “Tear the short side of the box down so it’s open at the end — that’s it—” He folds a gauze pad over the cord end and fixes it with a clamp. “Now let’s put it in the cotton—”

“I want to hold her,” calls Jessie.

“You can’t, baby, not yet.” Yolanda cradles the creature in her two hands and holds it close. “But look—”

Jessie looks horrified at first, then tears pour from her eyes and steam on her cheeks. “It isn’t finished.”

“It’s just little , that’s all. We’ll have to take special care.”

Jessie stiffens involuntarily, the rest of the placenta sliding to where Dr. Lunceford can pull it out. “Get it in the cotton,” he says, impatient, “and into that warming compartment.”

Yolanda lays the creature gently into the shoebox, pushing the cotton tight around its tiny listless body, and hurries from the room. The Sloane Maternity Hospital has at least one Tarnier couveuse, and if there is room will place infants from the charity ward inside. But transporting it in this cold—

“You can relax now,” he says to Jessie. “Close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply.”

He drops the placenta onto the newspaper spread on the floor, quickly sponges her as clean as possible with the alcohol and then begins to suture the perineum, the cocaine obviously fully in effect as Jessie seems not to notice. She is looking over his shoulder to the kitchen.

“I’m going to call her Minnie.”

Dr. Lunceford sighs. It is hard to make the stitches close enough with only the meager lamplight to see by. “Minnie is a nickname, not a name,” he says. Her own is Jessamyne Root Lunceford, Root being his mother’s maternal surname, but Junior never called her anything but Jessie.

“Minerva,” she says, shifting her eyes to him. “Minerva is Minnie.”

It is the name of the most popular midwife in Wilmington. The name of the woman who, if by some miracle the creature in the oven survives, will be its other grandmother. He refuses to be provoked.

“Plenty of time to think about names. Try putting your legs down.”

It costs her some pain, and he steps to the head of the bed to help pull her into a more comfortable position. She takes hold of his hand.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she says.

“We don’t have to continue to—”

“I mean sorry that you had to do this.”

Her eyes look clear, her color good. He pulls the blankets back up over her shoulders. “I consider it a privilege.”

She gives him a little smile then and asks that he send her mother in. It means she wants to be alone with her. He steps carefully over the mess on the floor. It looks like there has been a slaughter.

“The bread won’t rise if you keep the door open,” Yolanda says. “It keeps bothering me.”

“In an hour, if — in an hour , we’ll heat some mineral oil and then clean it off. I’ll put a cup of water in there, keep the air moist. And I’ll have to buy a breast pump—” as he says it he is not certain he has enough money, “—and see what Jessie can provide. Until then we’ll see if it will take some sugar water from the eye dropper—”

Yolanda stands up abruptly. “She’s not going to die,” she states, and goes to sit with Jessie.

He can see his own breath by the light of the oil lamp. The wind is howling outside, a storm, and he imagines it has been going on for some time without him noticing. His wife’s jewelry has been dumped out on the peeling kitchen table, a jumble of the rings and necklaces the pawnshop owner would not accept. We are not helpless, he thinks, sitting alone in the kitchen. With Yolanda’s will and his experience, his training — we are destitute, but not helpless. Dr. Lunceford scoots the chair closer to the coal stove and brings his face close to look into the warming compartment at it, at her, wrinkled barely breathing handful of a creature out where she has no business being yet, and he is suddenly filled with a rush of something that is neither rage nor relief nor despair.

It is defiance. They have taken everything else, money, home, pride, but they will not take her. They will not take her.

Little Minnie.

He sits on a wooden chair in a hallway lined with other petitioners on wooden chairs, backs to the wall, hats in their laps, all turning to look whenever somebody comes out from the room. Directed by the secretary, Mr. Cortelyou, he has made his way from the central hall past the stairway landing to the east sitting hall, shifting from chair to chair closer to the desired audience, warmed now by the mid-morning sunlight spilling through the enormous fanlight window at the end of the corridor, sitting directly across from the President’s study. He is still discomfited by the aspect of the residence — not shabby, exactly, but worn in a rather neglectful way. The building, beyond the magnificent Tiffany-glass doors of the vestibule, suggests a once-resplendent hotel long past its glory days more than the symbolic centerpiece of a nation’s government. There are cracks in the ceiling, carpets faded past respectable use, a curious smell. The bottom floor is crowded with tourists and curiosity seekers, the stairs lively with clerks and household retainers carrying the implements of their station. He expected something more august, more Olympian.

The interview has been difficult enough to obtain. George White, now the last of his race in the House, imposing on a number of his prominently placed sympathizers, keeping the particulars vague enough to escape alarm, hinting at political capital to be earned in the South. It is a surprise to be here at all.

“I have chosen not to run again,” White explained to him, “because I value my own neck, and because I value the safety of my constituents. Even great armies retreat when the vagaries of the day presage a disaster.”