Christina Kline - The Exiles

Some hours later she was woken by a searing pain in her abdomen. She lay still for a moment, listening to the thrumming rain, trying to decide what to do. It was so dark she couldn’t even see the ribs of the bunk above.

“Hazel.” Leaning out of her berth, she reached across the aisle and poked the place she knew the girl would be. “ Hazel . I think it might be time.”

She heard a rustling. “What does it feel like?” Hazel’s voice was groggy.

“Like what I did to Buck.”

Hazel laughed.

“I’m not joking.”

“I know you’re not joking.”

Over the next few hours, as waves pounded the hull and the ship pitched in the sea, Hazel talked Evangeline through the clenching and unclenching. Breathe, she told her; breathe . The pain in Evangeline’s gut spiked and ebbed. When the hatch of the orlop deck was finally unlocked, Hazel helped get Evangeline up the stairs. “The air will do ye good,” she said.

The women around them were mostly silent. Everyone knew what had happened to Olive.

The sky was the colors of a bruise, yellow and purple, the dark sea strafed by wind and sudsed with white. The air was thick with brine. Sailors shouted from pulpit to jib, tightening the sails as the ship heaved and slashed through the waves.

Hazel and Evangeline paced the deck, pausing when the pain surged or a cloud emptied rain. Sips of tea, a bite of hardtack. Trips to the privy. A distracted game of whist. In midafternoon a commotion lured them toward the stern: Buck—filthy, wiry, with matted hair and sunken eyes—had been released from the hold. Twenty-one days it had been.

He narrowed his eyes at them. Spit on the deck.

“Mr. Buck.”

Evangeline turned.

Dr. Dunne stood several feet away, hands clasped behind his back. “Consider this a warning. Stay away from these prisoners or you’ll be back in the hold.”

Buck held up his hands. “I ain’t done nothin’.” Twisting his lips into a smile, he slunk away.

Hazel looked at Evangeline. “Put him out of your mind.”

She tried. But it was hard to dismiss the menace of that smile.

Time passed slowly. The pain became more intense: a searing clamp. Evangeline could barely stand.

“I think she’s ready,” Hazel told the surgeon.

He nodded. “Bring her down.”

Hazel guided Evangeline down the ladder to the tween deck. Behind a screen in the surgeon’s office, she helped her into a cotton shift. When she was finished, Hazel stood in a corner of the room, making no move to leave. The surgeon didn’t say a word.

Evangeline was delirious, bathed in sweat.

Dr. Dunne began asking Hazel to help in small ways. Hand me a wet cloth. Mop her brow . She brought him a basin filled with water and a bar of lye soap, and after he washed his hands, she gave him a towel to dry them. When she noticed Evangeline tugging at the red cord around her neck, Hazel unfastened the necklace and placed it on a shelf.

After two hours it became clear that the birthing process was stalled. Evangeline wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “What’s happening?”

“Breech.” Dr. Dunne sat back on his stool and rubbed his forehead with his arm.

“Breech?”

Hazel stepped forward. “Your baby is special,” she told her. “Feet first.” To the surgeon, she said, “May I help? I know how to do it. The turning.”

He sighed, then lifted his arms from the elbows as if to say, Come on, then.

Hazel spread her fingers out on Evangeline’s stomach, feeling all the way around it.

Evangeline gazed at her with alarm. “Is the baby in trouble?”

She felt Hazel’s cool hand over hers. “You’ll both be grand. Just listen to my voice. Breathe in.”

She breathed in.

“Now out.”

She breathed out.

Hazel stroked her hair. “Move toward the pain. Think of it as . . . a lantern guidin’ your way.”

The surgeon sat back on his stool, observing.

Surrendering to Hazel’s demands, Evangeline breathed when she told her to, pushed when she told her to, followed the pain as if it were a lantern along a winding path. She began to sense the contractions before they happened, as they gathered force within her, and rode each wave of pain to its crest, the agony so intense that at a certain point it became a kind of euphoria. Rain drummed on the deck above their heads, muting her cries. She felt Hazel’s small hands inside her, shifting, turning, coaxing the baby down. She no longer knew whether she was screaming or silent, writhing or still. And then . . . and then . . . a release. An emptying.

A baby’s piercing cry.

She lifted her head.

Time flattened. Widened. Her senses returned. She smelled the fishy odor of the whale oil in the lamps, the muttony candle wax, the iron sweetness of her own blood. She gazed up at the wide beams in the ceiling, nailed in place by long iron spikes. Heard the soft patter of rain on the deck, the last remnants of the storm.

At her feet, Hazel was smiling her foxy smile. Auburn curls were plastered damply to her forehead, blood splattered on her apron. A naked infant in a blanket in her arms. “A girl.”

“A girl.” Evangeline struggled up on her elbows to see.

Dr. Dunne placed another pillow behind her head and Hazel handed her the featherweight bundle and all at once she was looking into the dark eyes of a baby. Her daughter. Staring at her intensely. Had anyone ever stared at her so intensely?

“Do you have a name?” Hazel asked.

“I didn’t dare to think that far ahead.” Holding the child in the crook of her arm, Evangeline inhaled the yeasty smell of her hair, stroked the tiny mollusk-shell ears and sea anemone fingers. Was that her father’s nose, perhaps?

Hazel motioned to her to open her shift. She guided the baby toward Evangeline’s breast and tapped her bottom lip, prompting her to open her tiny mouth. When the baby latched on, Evangeline felt as if a string had been yanked from her nipple to her gut. “The more she suckles, the faster you’ll heal,” Hazel said.

As Evangeline cupped the infant’s small head, her forefinger found a soft spot in the middle. She looked at the surgeon with surprise.

He smiled. “So the brain can grow. Don’t worry. It will close.”

“So the brain can grow. How could I not have known?” she marveled.

And thought of all the things she had not known.

It was early in the evening in the surgeon’s quarters. The baby was swaddled in a blanket, tucked into the curve of Evangeline’s arm. The surgeon was in the infirmary, attending a sailor with influenza. Hazel sat in a chair with his volume of The Tempest, mouthing words to herself.

Evangeline pointed at the book. “Where are you?”

“‘This rough magic I here ab-abjure, and, when I have . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“‘Required.’ Q-U is like K-W.”

Hazel nodded. “Re-KW-ired. ‘Required some heav-en-ly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses . . .’”

“‘That this airy charm is for.’”

“It’s bloody hard,” Hazel said. “‘Ye taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.’”

Evangeline smiled. “Well done.”

Hazel closed the book. “How d’ye feel?”

“Sore. And it’s so hot. This room is stifling.”

“It’s always hot these days. Even after the rain.”

Evangeline lay back against her pillow. Tossed her head from side to side. “I must get some air.” She glanced down at the sleeping infant. “Before she wakes.”

“You want to go up the ladder now ?” Hazel frowned. “The deck will be slippery. And it’s dark.”

“Just for a minute.”

Hazel put down the book. “I’ll come with ye, then.”