Roxanna Slade Part 13

"Then will you stay with me?"

"I ain't no midwife now," Coy said. "But there's one down the road?"

"Old Mamie? She been dead three or four weeks; went to her funeral. Must have forgot to tell you. Mamie rose up and preached in the midst of us all, had to bolt down the lid of that coffin to stop her."

You never knew when Coy had drifted out of her head, when she was joking or bringing a true report from a world not much like your own. Miss Olivia had told me she believed that Coy was

older than the major which was hard to imagine, considering how Coy worked seven days every week with no sign of weakness. Anyhow the news about Mamie, true or false, was hard to take. I paused there trying to see my way out.

Coy finally pointed behind toward the main house and said "Nothing to do but call Miss Olivia, mean as she be. You want me to?"

I said "You know it's the last thing on G.o.d's Earth I want."

Coy nodded. "Last thing."

"But you can't help me out here on your own?" I was somehow dreaming of doing it myself.

"Coy too old," she said. "Might kill you and that baby both." When I paused for a moment, she actually turned and took a step to leave.

What could I say then but "Fetch Palmer's mother please, and you come help her"?

Coy did all that.

By the time Palmer got back just before sunset, I'd had the boy with n.o.body's help but Miss Olivia's, Coy's and my own strong mind. When Miss Olivia got to the Office, I begged her pardon for any mistakes I'd made on her. But I also said in the briefest words that I meant to have a healthy child and would she please not try to alarm me now or ever again with her constant worries if that's what they were.

She nodded once.

And from then on I was not scared a minute. Once the pains began and settled into waves, I bore down hard as an old cotton baler. Oddly that went on for fewer hours than it usually takes with a first-round mother, though it must have seemed like a year to me. Like the memory of my first night with Palmer, my wedding night and other painful times, any memory of my labor pains is long since faded. Anyhow the child, with all his parts in place and looking normal, gave his first howl in late afternoon.

Coy said she'd never known a heifer to deliver so fast.

Even Miss Olivia managed to praise me in roundabout terms. Still I took the boy from her as soon as she'd let me and held it close through the nap I took before Palmer walked in. Even when I heard Miss Olivia say to Coy "You know what they plan to name this child?" I kept my eyes shut.

Coy said "No. But it's hers to name."

And the child slept on beside me. So far I was too flat exhausted to feel an automatic love. Those were days before bonding was invented. What I know I thought, in one of the instants I was awake before napping again, was I'll tear the head off anyone or thing that touches this boy to take him from me. I'd scarcely killed fifty houseflies till then in twenty-two years, but I knew I meant what I thought precisely.

I let Palmer decide on the name. Of course we'd already talked in private about likely names for a boy or girl, but we'd never come up with anything certain. And we skirted the biggest question of all--which kin if any we wished to honor. So the first time we were alone that evening, I took pretty much all the strength I had and said "Name him, Palmer."

He looked down at me, and I knew what was coming. I didn't know what I'd do when he said it. He was gentler than I'd guessed, and he asked me first. "How would you feel about him being Larkin?"

It came out automatically. I said "Oh G.o.d--"

Palmer said "Don't worry. Can I name him for Major?"

I looked to the boy himself for any guidance. He was nursing my breast, and his eyes were turned up at me as if he could see the first puzzle float past in his world, but he seemed to have no preference whatever when it came to names. So I said to Palmer "You were right the first time. Can I just put my own father's name in the middle?" Father's given name was Augustus, which led to the boyhood nickname Gus that all his life he refused to answer to.

So Palmer said it all straight out with a waving bow that touched the floor--"Larkin Augustus Slade, welcome here." Then he broke into the nearest approach to a wide smile he'd ever experienced in my sight at least--Palmer, I mean. "Let that be it" was the last thing he said that I could still hear.

Tired as I was, I was satisfied with that.

From that critical day I well understood what a brave soul Miss Olivia was to accept my

terms and lead me through those straits in safety. I mean she took that child from the fork of my body, cut the cord, tied it off, saw the afterbirth pa.s.s and buried it past the reach of the hounds--all before she and Coy cooked supper.

When Dr. Rogers came out the next morning to check on the aftermath, he said he couldn't have helped me any more with his own hands.

And Miss Olivia told him it was the sixth child she'd delivered in her life not to speak of her own. Couldn't he finally issue her a license?

He told her no license was necessary for anybody with her plain skills.

All the same, two nights later when I was still weak as water but clearer minded, I turned to Palmer in the midst of the night and said "Understand-- I've got to take this baby and go to my home. Your mother has done all she could to down me. I've fought all I can. That's not in my nature to keep on doing, and I can't keep winning. She's too strong a fighter. She'll kill me soon. So once I'm strong enough to stand, I'll take young Larkin to my family home and treat him like your much-loved son till you finish up here and move down to join us in a place of our own."

Palmer had known for months of my hope to rent Betsy Magee's back rooms. But the roots of my hair actually rose at the risky sound of my voice declaring my will. I'd never heard of any woman saying such things and lasting the night. I half expected my gentle silent mysterious husband would strike my mouth and be justified.

He didn't, though for longer than ever he held me waiting to see what he'd do. Dark as the room was, Palmer took my face in both of his hands and held it steady. Steady and so firmly that a little more pressure and my skull might have cracked. For the longest time he kept his silence, looking at what I couldn't imagine in the near black air. So far as I knew, there was nothing in his line of sight but my stark face in the chilly dark. At last he said "You understand how much this will complicate my life?"

I told him I did.

"You know I could stop you."

I said "Palmer, you could kill me this minute with a snap of the neck. You could kill my baby even easier than that."

"I thought this baby was between us, Anna." I told him it most certainly was, but I

also told him I thought it was our life we were talking about. However complicated his life might get, our life would stand a chance of lasting if I struck out of here and he followed suit as soon as he could. I knew not to mention the marriage vows. I'd irked him more than once by harping on those.

He was bound to hear me, but again he was silent as the air between us. Then in a minute his hands moved down a little on my head; and he gave it two fairly strong turns, left and right. A third turn might well break my neck--he was always that strong. But when I kept quiet, his grip eased a little and his hot forehead came down and leaned on mine. What he said was "I won't try to stop you. I'll see what I can do beyond that."

I told him that any question of us, this new young family we'd apparently started, was in his hands.

Palmer said "You're G.o.dd.a.m.ned right it is." But when he seized me hard again, I could tell it was more than half mock strength.

And then I knew that, with any luck at all, we'd have a life for better or worse. When Larkin Augustus woke in his basket a quarter hour later, I whispered for Palmer to bring him over and let me feed him. Respectable white women were not supposed to set foot to the floor for at least ten days after labor.

Palmer didn't move.

I could hear his slow-paced sleeping breath, but I lacked the will to wake him up. So I slowly inched my way through the room, lifted the child like a ticking bomb, went back to the bed and fed him there up against his far-gone good-hearted father.

FOUR.

The problem in trying to tell the story of a human life is easy to state. People's lives-- from the wildest lover's to the bravest scout's--are uneventful for way over three-fourths of their length. If you don't believe (and I know I don't) that every instant in a life is urgent to that person's fate, then you could write a satisfactory life of the busiest man or woman who ever lived in less than two pages, often on a postcard. Most things that happen to a person leave no more trace than last month's raindrop.

Like most people, wherever they live or travel, I've been engaged in little more than a drab-colored village event--certainly not the official state fair with charming lights and music and giants. All the same I'm almost convinced that, if you can tell the absolute truth about the five or ten moments that mattered in any one life, then you'll have shown how every life is as useful to the world and to the eyes of G.o.d as any president's or pope's. Or so I've believed and I doubt I'm lying. If I hadn't always trusted in that unknowingly for most of my time, I'd have died by my own hand long since. To make those moments understandable though, you're forced to surround them with the bones of what caused them and what they caused.

In any case after Larkin Augustus was born, Palmer and I seemed to step fairly quickly into that new plan I knew we should make. The baby and I stayed beside Palmer in the separate Office for another month longer. When I'd been stopped from going home in time for the labor, my mother got Miss Olivia's permission and came up to stay near me and help with the boy. Muddie slept in the main house, and some nights she took August with her and let me have some unbroken sleep. I had so little breast milk to give him that we'd started right off feeding him bottles when he cried for more.

Muddie and Miss Olivia managed to be civil despite the fact that Muddie called the boy Augustus from the first minute she held him in her arms. In fact I noticed in a very few days that Miss Olivia was following suit with apparent content. Even Palmer didn't try to change the practice, though I would sometimes hear him say the word Lark as he played with the child. I thought at the time that everybody silently realized how painful it would be to say the name Larkin many times a day, so we all just quit. I was the one who after a week or so shortened the name to simple August, and that caught on with everyone but Muddie for the rest of his life. She insisted on Augustus to keep Father's name alive.

I'd asked Palmer to prepare Miss Olivia for mine and the baby's move down to my home, and he said he'd already done that with no comment pro or con from her. In mid-January then in a terrible freeze, Muddie and I with August and

our luggage went out to climb into Palmer's car. We'd seen Miss Olivia at breakfast, and I'd just a.s.sumed she'd come out to wave us off when we left. People always did back then if they had two legs and could walk ten yards. But no, Miss Olivia stayed inside the house, plainly visible behind the parlor window.

When Palmer took the baby from Muddie so she could climb in, he thrust the boy high up in the air to give Miss Olivia a last little glimpse.

She refused to take it. Or at least she didn't smile or wave. But her eyes which had kept every volt of their power stayed on young August till the final instant.

I suspected she was thinking That's the last time I'll see him. I blew her a kiss against my better judgment to say she was wrong.

She was right for nearly the next four months. Palmer stayed with his mother by the river, claiming he couldn't just leave her in the cold. And when winter broke in time for planting, he stayed on to be sure the tenants got it right. Of course he visited me and August almost every week but still said nothing about moving down. So I chose May Day as my deadline, and then I wrote him to say I'd rented Betsy Magee's set of rooms and would he please send Betsy the first month's rent? It was partly a bluff. I hadn't moved in, hadn't even told Muddie. But when Betsy sent me word that her latest aging bachelor-roomer had been found cold dead in the midst of a nap, I asked her to give me a one-week option which she readily did.

To my great relief Palmer sent the check by return mail and a letter to me. He asked me to move on into Betsy's rooms, saying he'd join me by the middle of the month. He felt he owed his mother two weeks' notice. In my answer I didn't point out that he'd had four months to get her prepared. But I certainly said we were looking forward to his arrival. Then Father helped me move a few things plus August of course. And we experienced a curious two weeks, the boy and I. I'd felt drawn to him from the very start. He never had that awful drawn-up boiled-red spider look that so many newborn children have for the first few weeks, and he cried so little that Palmer asked me if something was wrong with the boy's

vocal cords.

Not at all as it turned out. He just saw no cause to howl for his food or companions.h.i.+p or a change of position in his crib. He had good sense quite prematurely. By the third or fourth day if August needed something he'd lie still and make low talkative noises as if he fully understood the idea of conversation and was practicing up with throat exercises till he knew sufficient words. It was in that two weeks that I actually came to love young August past the natural bond of motherhood, and the reason was something I've never told till now. It lay in the things I was fairly sure he told me, young as he was, in our days alone together.

The late spring days were warm and long. At Betsy's I had very little to do but talk to her while she sewed clothes and get the baby through his few duties--the feedings, his complicated daily bath and numerous naps, then the walk to Muddie and Father's for supper every evening. So lonely and idle as I was, I'd lie down most afternoons with August beside me on the big bed all nested in pillows. And we'd sleep soundly, waking maybe if Betsy knocked and offered us lemonade and one of her peculiar desserts or whenever the late sun struck my face and let me know it was time to dress us and head for Muddie's.

It was in those slow long afternoons that August actually spoke to me. I know I was sane. I well understood no child that young could begin to talk. I may just have been undergoing some phase of the illness I'd known before in the form of melancholy, the deep dark blues that would haunt me till something worse eventually replaced them. If the baby blues were the problem, this time they made me subject also to real streams of joy.

And that fresh happiness came always when August and I were alone together. I'd wake up as I said, and beside me there would be August with his ebony eyes fixed on me like the magnet he was compelled to obey. I'd offer a smile, a touch on his cheek, I'd call him sweet names. He'd never break that locked-on stare of his, so I'd go silent and take the message I all but knew he longed to press toward me.

It always came as some form of the words Swear to me you'll never leave or Swear you'll save me from every danger. Sometimes a stormy

frown would gather around his eyes as if my answer which was always Yes had failed to a.s.sure him. And then I'd actually say the word Swear. That would mostly calm him, and he might smile very briefly as he broke his stare and turned aside from me to express delight in the way infants do--by surrendering their whole bodies to a brief muscular spasm that straightens their arms and legs.

I understand that a similar message is what most children say to the world, or to their parents anyhow, from the moment they're born till the moment they know they need to cut their own path away. Or at least that's what I understood for more than half my life. In recent years of watching the news, I've been forced to conclude that a great many children have monster parents and are terrified every minute they're awake till they're old enough to flee or die from the knowledge.

Nonetheless I've never doubted that the fact of those long afternoons, with that first child my body had made, turned into one of the two or three most urgent things I tried to do in the following years. Though I'd had a perfectly safe childhood, I still felt the need to swear to August that he'd have at least that much safety if I had my way. Also in silence I swore to give Palmer Slade everything I had that he needed, providing of course he chose to join his child and me on a permanent basis. All that was left was to vow to myself that I'd somehow stay peaceful and strong enough to keep the other pledges I'd made right on to the grave.

Palmer kept his word, the word I'd pressed out of him. In the third week of May 1923, he drove up at Betsy's just after sunset. I'd had a siege of sadness all day--no reason but the prevailing silence of recent months and too long a separation from normal adults that could speak my language. Being that moody right on into the afternoon, I'd sent word by a pa.s.sing boy to let Muddie know that August and I would skip supper tonight and stay quietly at Betsy's. I should have known that any such message wouldn't just be received.

No, in under an hour here came Leela dressed for a palace with our supper in a basket, food enough for a family of twelve. So while I was sorting through all the dishes, Leela sat by August's crib and read him a story. He'd seldom lie still for more than ten seconds

with anybody but me and Leela--he loved every word that came out of her mouth whether it came from her own mind or just from the Bible-story book Miss Olivia had given him at birth. The book had belonged to his Uncle Larkin and had Lark's childish drawings in the margins.

Leela was there then when Palmer arrived, and I plainly recall she showed him more welcome than I could manage at first anyhow. I was too stunned, I guess, and too relieved to grin and jump as a young wife maybe should have. Not till I saw his fine long head and the far-back smile in his eyes did I actually believe that the man I'd married had kept his promise and was still mine for life or tonight anyhow.

Shy as he'd always been with me, Palmer said the thing most mates dream to hear. He set his suitcase down inside our new private door that had its own key. He kept a distance of four or five feet, but he offered both hands and said "Your wandering boy is home."

At least I had the sense to say "I couldn't be gladder" which was simply the truth. It surprised me to hear it.

It seemed to surprise Palmer Slade even more. For an instant his face went blank as paper. I thought he was showing the hurt he'd taken from his silver-tongued mother when he left her alone as a crow on a dead tree, but then his eyes closed, and he launched the best laugh of his life to that point. Or so I felt.

And August actually laughed out loud in Leela's arms, very likely the first laugh he ever gave us and one of the rare entirely happy moments of any human life, even one as open-armed as his.

In the final days Palmer lived at the river place, he had bought a small truck, coal-black like all cars in those days and one of the first mechanical trucks in our part of the world. It had cost more money than we had to spend. So Palmer was buying it on time which I've never trusted. Still he had to have a reliable way to get to his duties on the Slade place and all the extra jobs he did, finding and estimating timber for several lumber companies and the paper mill. As we settled into life together at Betsy's, he was spending six days a week dawn to dark on the road or out of my sight

anyhow.

That was normal enough. Most men, white and black, worked similar hours or longer. Women did too of course, though we seldom left the yard and we worked till bedtime--some women till long afterwards if they had repulsive husbands. Anyhow slim as everybody's income was, Palmer kept his chin shaved, wore a clean s.h.i.+rt daily and took every chance for a small piece of work in addition to his Slade-farm duties. Pay was that scarce and paltry.

One good thing for him, me and August--Palmer generally got home clean at night and was not too exhausted to be himself beside us through supper till often he'd nod off helplessly by nine o'clock upright in his chair. Almost always from his days in the pine woods, he'd come in smelling of pine sap or rosin, a welcome odor. And the worst he had to show for his lonely treks through the underbrush were occasional scratches, chigger bites and in summer the ticks. I can't recall that we feared ticks then. Maybe spotted fever hadn't traveled east yet from the Rocky Mountains. All the same I hated to see their bodies, swollen pale blue with his blood as they sapped Palmer's waist and back, deep into his warm groin and privates and down both his legs.

As soon as he walked through the back screen door, I'd make him strip, hand me his clothes; and I'd put them on the porch till I had time to check them. Then I'd ask him to walk straight on to the tub. Betsy had put a great copper tub in the bedroom corner. I'd have hot water ready on the stove in a kettle. I'd test it first in the crease of my left arm so as not to scald him. Then I'd slowly pour it from the back of Palmer's neck all down his body till every tick--he'd be studded with them--turned loose and died. After that I'd soap him good and scrub him.