Трейси Шевалье - At the Edge of the Orchard

“Maybe I’ll try it, if this don’t get in the way.” Molly patted her belly. “Give me another kiss, Robert, then I’ll head on up, and see you soon as you’re ready to come find me.” She seemed somehow to pull out of the awkward situation with her dignity intact.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Billie Lapham said, raising his top hat again, and Nancy murmured in agreement.

“You too. And good luck, honey!” Molly nodded at Martha, then tapped her driver with the top of her parasol and they moved on.

They were all silent for a moment. Once Molly was out of earshot, Billie Lapham started to laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned, Goodenough! You sure keep us guessin’, don’t you?”

Once Billie Lapham had ridden ahead to Murphys, the wagon continued slowly down the mountain. Robert remained riding behind it until Nancy called out, “Don’t stay back there, Robert Goodenough. You come up alongside us so you can answer some questions!”

Robert sighed. He would prefer not to talk, and to be alone, so that he could take in the reality of Molly and another baby. His life was rapidly filling with other people, without the time to figure out how that was going to change things. No one else seemed bothered by this, though. It wasn’t their life that was being tumbled around.

He brought the gray forward so that he was level with the women. Even looking at them made him blush: though Martha was clearly in pain, she was also smiling, and Nancy was openly grinning. “All right, now,” she said, “tell us all about her!”

Robert reluctantly explained about meeting Molly in Texas and again in Sacramento, and his subsequent visits to French Creek. He mentioned her cooking but not the other side of her job, and hoped they would not speculate too much. He found it embarrassing to have to reveal this side of his life, but at least it distracted Martha from her contractions. She let Nancy ask the questions, but she listened as closely as she could.

When Nancy had finally finished interrogating him, Martha nodded at her belly and said, “This baby will have a cousin.” Put that way, with her simple words making the lines between her and Robert and Molly clear, Robert felt a whole lot better.

Billie Lapham had two back bedrooms ready for them at Murphys Hotel when they arrived mid-afternoon, and had found a doctor and even a rare woman to help with the birth. The room was as nice as Molly had said-nicer than any room Robert had stayed in, with carpet on the floor and striped wallpaper and solid mahogany bedboards and washstands and good glass in the windows. He could not imagine sleeping well in it.

He hovered in the doorway as the woman got Martha into bed, but she waved him away. “Out-you’re no use,” she muttered. “Don’t need a doctor either-this ain’t no illness.”

“I’ll be nearby,” Robert called to his sister, but by then she had moved into the kind of pain that blocked out everything around her, and he doubted she heard. For a while he waited out in the hallway, but when she began to scream he went out and walked up and down Main Street.

Murphys was like other mining towns, full of supplies and alcohol, but it had a heft to it-like a building with a proper foundation laid-that made it likely to survive gold fever and become something more. Robert saw none of this, however, too shaken by his sister’s screams to notice the sturdy planks laid out for walking along the streets, the brick buildings, the gutters that had been dug. For a while he sat in one of the saloons with a glass of whiskey before him, but he was not a drinking man, and eventually he left, the glass untouched.

He preferred the outskirts of Murphys, where a few miners were camped. A creek-a tributary of the Stanislaus River-ran back behind the hotel, and he sat for a long time on its bank, watching a family dig up the mud from the bed and sluice it through a rocking box-one of the few who were still mining using the early methods Robert was familiar with. It was unusual to see a woman and children mining. He wanted to stop the woman and ask her what was happening to Martha, how a woman could survive so much pain. But he didn’t: she’d had the two children he could see with her and clearly survived that, and she would probably say as much about his sister. So Robert sat in the sun and watched them find their meager flakes of gold and tried not to think.

That was where Billie Lapham found him. Lapham was a man who wore his emotions physically, and Robert knew from the moment he saw his friend hurrying down the path that Martha was all right. He let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

“Goodenough, you got yourself a nephew!” Billie Lapham pumped Robert’s hand and wiped his forehead. He clearly liked being the bearer of good news.

“How’s Martha?”

“Oh, she’s fine. Tired, of course. It’s incredible what women have to go through, ain’t it?” He shook his head in wonder. “She’s asking for you, and I said I’d find you. Looked everywhere except back here. C’mon, I’ll take you to her.”

She was lying in bed with the baby in her arms, oblivious to the activity around her: Nancy Lapham bringing her a cup of tea, the doctor putting away bottles and metal instruments Robert didn’t want to look at too closely, and the woman bundling sheets into buckets of water. Before he joined his sister he paid the doctor and gave something to the woman too. Then he sat on the chair next to the bed. “Martha,” he said.

“Oh, Robert,” she rasped, her throat raw from yelling. “You’re here.” Martha’s hair was clumped together with sweat, and she had new lines around her eyes and mouth. The pain she had just been through had pressed its heavy mark on her. But when she held out her hand to take his, her grip was firm.

“You all right?” Robert asked. Despite the woman taking the sheets away, the room was metallic with the smell of blood.

“Sure I am. I’m just glad he’s out. Look at him.” She pointed a tiny, wrinkled red face at him with the radiance only a mother can have for her baby. Robert couldn’t take in his nephew for the moment; it was his sister he was concerned with.

“What shall we call him?” Martha said.

Robert shook his head. “You decide.”

“I want to call him after our father. James.”

Robert flinched. “Your father, you mean,” he said after a moment, though immediately he regretted bringing up the subject at such a time.

But Martha looked at him steadily. “I meant what I said. Our father. I never paid attention to what Ma said about Uncle Charlie. She was just-well. She was being Ma. Fighting to the last.”

Robert wasn’t so sure. He had put his mother’s last words to him up on a high shelf that he never visited. But maybe he would let Martha do the visiting for him.

“Let’s call him Jimmy to start with,” she said. “James is awful serious for a boy.”

Robert had another, dim memory of the name Jimmy carved on one of the wooden crosses that marked the graves of his dead brothers and sisters in the Black Swamp. When his mother was drunk she had shouted at God and the swamp fever for taking her oldest boy. Maybe a new Jimmy was some kind of an answer to that loss.

The red face let out a sudden cry. Robert reared back like the gray would when it saw a snake, but Martha pulled open her dress and put him on her breast. Robert looked away. “You want anything?”

“Some bread soaked in a little milk would be nice-I’m starving! And a towel to wrap around Jimmy for a diaper.”

Robert went down to the restaurant and ordered food for Martha and himself, and asked about towels. These were unfamiliar domestic arrangements to him, and he found himself thinking about his bedroll, about the gray in the stables, about the camps surrounding Murphys and the fires the miners would soon be sitting around, eating tack and hard biscuits and smoking cigars. Would he ever join such campfires again? He could not imagine Martha sitting by one with a baby in her arms or, later, a child playing at her feet. But then, he had never imagined her coping with the rough life on board a ship going around South America.