John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Henry said.

She nodded. “It’s like that sometimes.”

“Couldn’t you call the doctor?”

“I can’t. Miss Childres will, when the time comes.” She winced, because Callie was screaming again, piercing. “Cheer up,” she said then. “Six months she’ll never remember a thing.”

The night nurse, Miss Childres, came out, pulling off her rubber glove. There was blood on it. She nodded, smiling, passing Henry. She said, “We’re coming nicely.”

“She’s bleeding,” Henry whispered. “For God’s sake, call the doctor.”

“All in good time,” Miss Childres said. “The perineum is tearing. Perfectly normal.”

Heat leaped through his chest and he clenched his fists. “Wait,” he said, his upper lip lifted. “Other women don’t go through all that. I been sitting here two days.”

“It happens sometimes,” Miss Childres said. But she went to the desk phone and lifted the receiver. Henry hurried back to the room.

She wasn’t white now. Her face was flushed, as if she were burning up. She was breathing hard. She lay with her teeth clenched, tears squeezing out of her closed eyes.

“They’re calling Dr. Costard,” Henry said. “You’re getting there. The nurse says you’re coming fine.” He gave her his hand and she clutched it.

Callie shook her head. “I can’t stand it. Henry, I can’t.”

And then she screamed again. Henry bent over her and pressed her hand to his stomach, and tears ran down his cheeks. The nurse came in with a hypo and Henry hung onto Callie’s hand, and, when it was over and the nurse had left, Callie screamed again. Henry tensed against the scream, and then all at once he was sobbing. It made him feel free, as though he’d burst out of a tight, solid box.

In ten minutes Callie was out of her head. She screamed at the sound of a cart passing by in the hall, and screamed again when the overhead light went on and the doctor came in, and screamed when the doctor touched her wrist. She gripped Henry’s hand as if to crush it.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Henry said, shouting at them. “It’s not that she isn’t brave. It’s killing her.”

The doctor nodded. He said to the nurse, “Get another hypo ready.” The nurse left. “You’d better leave, Mr. Soames.”

Henry didn’t move.

“You’d better leave,” he repeated. He smiled, grim.

The younger nurse came in, and Costard said, “Bring in a wagon, we’ll move her into Delivery.”

The girl nodded and glanced at Henry, then left. Calmly, the doctor pried Callie’s hand away from Henry’s. Callie screamed again, half-sitting up in bed, her mouth a flat, black rectangle, screaming, Goddamn you, Goddamn you! Henry why don’t you help me! She twisted, and it moved the sheet. The sheet underneath was bloodstained.

The doctor turned to Henry. “You’d better leave.”

Henry backed toward the door. Callie screeched after him, I hate you. It doesn’t matter. I hate you. I love somebody else.

He sat for five hours in the waiting room out front. He held a magazine in his lap, on the cover the lower branches of a Christmas tree and under them the same magazine, the same cover, the same Christmas tree, magazine, tree, magazine, falling away like a shaft. For four hours he heard her screams and sat motionless, his hands closed over his face. Between her screams he heard voices mumbling, but there was no one near. It grew light outside and the wind dropped off and the nurses changed shifts. A day nurse touched his arm and said, “Coffee?” He looked up and nodded, not understanding. He said, “My wife—” She came back with coffee and he sipped it and his mind cleared a little. “She’s stopped,” he said. For an instant he felt light, giddy; then a vague possibility came to him, and after a moment, staring at the magazine without seeing, he was sure of it: She was dead. It made his heart trip. “She’s dead,” he whispered. The nurse said, amused, “Nonsense.”

Doc Cathey and George came in, talking and laughing. George hesitated at the door. Henry called out, getting up, “They phoned you?”

George shook his head, still holding back. “Not me. Baby born yet?”

“She’s dead. I think Callie’s dead.”

Doc Cathey stood still for a second. “Chickenmanure. They ain’t that stupid.”

Henry shook his head, pulling at his hand so hard it hurt. “She was in labor for forty-eight hours, and then the bleeding. I don’t know. I think—”

“Faddle,” Doc Cathey said. He leered, but he pivoted away and went through the double doors. He didn’t come back.

George said abruptly, “You and I are going to have some breakfast. Come on.”

Henry stood there unsteadily, his seat and the backs of his legs numb, and then went for his coat. George closed his hand over Henry’s elbow as they moved to the door and out into the cold and down the steps. The brilliance of snow on the lawn, on trees, on rooftops, stabbed at Henry’s eyes. For an instant the ring of mountains around them seemed to be moving; then they were utterly still, blue-white.

George slid in behind the wheel and ground on the starter a minute before the truck motor caught and roared. The truck cab shook, and through a gap in the floor boards Henry saw the motionless, soft snow on the road. George slipped his hand around the wheel to the gearshift and pulled it to low, then shifted to high and caught at the wheel.

“You’re tired, Henry,” he said. “If this business kills anybody it’s gonna be you.” And then he said, “Or maybe it’s me it’ll kill.” He laughed.

It might have been a boy, Henry thought. A boy like George, maybe born unlucky, who’d grow up to be orphaned and go off to the army and half-kill himself for a Japanese girl sixteen years old and a prostitute, or that was what Lou Millet said, and would come back home after that and crawl back to farming, a worn-out farm with worn-out equipment that would eat him alive, limb by limb, and maybe after that his heart if there was anything left of it. They’d have named him James.

Henry said, “If Callie was to die—” It came to him that he didn’t believe any more that she would die. He’d stopped thinking it the minute he’d seen George and Doc Cathey. He felt better, then worse. He should never have left. They might call for him any time.

George said, “The hell with you. You’re gonna have a little boy with a big wide slit of a mouth like Callie’s and a three-foot span across the shoulders and he’ll love up the country cunts till a guy like Freund looks like a eunuch.”

Henry breathed in shallowly and held it, and after a second he saw that George was shocked too, afraid even to explain what he meant, if he could, because Henry might have missed it. Henry tried to think what to say. He watched the brown snow on the street flash by under the floorboards.

George stopped the truck at Leroy’s place, and they got out and went down the ice-coated steps and in. The air was too warm, greasy. The place was crowded, a few women but mostly the old men who came in every morning from houses and attics and furnished rooms to get breakfast. At both ends of Leroy’s place there were mirrors; they made the room go on forever. Henry thought again of how many people there were in the world — fifteen, twenty here, ten thousand in town, another six thousand in Athensville, still more in Albany, Utica — it was hard to believe: “All these people sitting here without a worry,” he said, “and my poor Callie—”

George slid into the booth, looking down, then grinned and said, “It’s a funny damn thing … human beings, horses, cats. …”