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After he left, I started to cough. Then, my stars! The pain changed in character. I thought I had a lightning bolt lodged in my spine, though I couldn’t let on with the children near. I had been leaning on Sister’s remedy to see me through. And if that failed, Doc’s Heroin. But how could I bear down if I was doped? I needed all my wits. And what if those medicines fatally depressed the baby? Once a heavy thought has a grip, it is hard to dispel. I knew labor proceeded at a pace and mine was stalled. I felt my efforts coming to naught. This is the reckoning, I felt. I’m flagging, I’m past repair. I’m at the last gasp. Soon I will not want my body or the breath I breathe. This is the end of the world.
“Go get Kitty,” I told Edna, who was standing by. My sister-in-law had been delicately raised, that was evident. She was genteel and artistic, though the man in the moon would make a better midwife. The children could do worse in a stepmother, I thought. She came in, and I showed her and Edna the basin on the chair for bathing baby, the penny and binding for its navel, the boiled scissors, baby clothes, and diapers.
“Mamie darling, don’t be blue,” Kitty said, in her namby-pamby way. “You must use the happy dust the doctor gave you. It is much favored as a stimulant, I’ve heard.”
“You’re a good sister, Kit,” I told her. “If the baby’s a boy, I want him to be called James, after my brother. And if it’s a girl, you can call her Annabel Lee.”
“Stop it, Mamie,” Kitty said. “You’re frightening me.” Her hands were shaking like a palsy victim’s.
“Ma, are you dying?” Edna asked, and Charlotte started to cry.
I’d seen women lose heart and die of exhaustion. I’d seen them die with babies half in and half out. They died because they were frightened. I fully understood it. But seeing those little girls with the solemn waif look already on them, staring at their mother like she was a hobgoblin, I came to my senses. I realized nobody was going to help me. I was it all. And I told myself to get cracking.
“Don’t be crying,” I said. “Your mother is a fighter. How can I die when there’s a baby coming?” Course I can grunt it out, I told myself. God send me a pauper’s low Mass funeral with no solemn requiem sung by three priests if I cannot. And I pulled on the towels I’d rigged, and I bore down.
Suddenly it seemed my little shut-in had been cooped up long enough. Suddenly it wanted liberty. It was coming like a locomotive headlight. It was coming quick as scat. God Almighty! Now this baby was helping. Now this baby wanted to be born. “ ‘Anne bore Mary—’ ” I kept praying, for that was the one phrase I could recall. The pain waxed as it waned, with no pause, and I let the head creep slowly into my hands, though Immaculate Mary, it must be easier to thread camels through needles. The head, the shoulders, then the rest!
I caught the baby and laid it on my stomach. It lay there like a red frog, belly down. I rubbed its back to make it breathe. I held it upside down and patted the soles of its feet. I wiped the blood out of its mouth and blew on it. I dunked it in water. At last I tossed a pinch of Doc’s powder over its head and dabbed Sister’s soporific of vegetable origin behind its ears. It gasped and was alive. May God protect the child!
After I’d cut the cord and had the afterbirth, I got up and cleaned the room of gore. Kitty brought in my Joseph and baby Dorothy. “Meet Annabel Lee,” she said. I was imagining what Joe would think of this name. Annabel Lee Garrahan? Sounds like a lost soul, he’d say.
“You know, Kit, now that I see her, she looks more like she should be called Anne.” I had it in mind to name her after Anne who bore Mary. And Anne Sullivan who taught Helen Keller to read. And Anne of Green Gables, an orphan of renown.
Reprinted from The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton. Copyright (c) 2008. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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