The Birth House. Ami McKay

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      Experience Ketch was hunched over in her bed, clutching her belly. Her oldest daughter, Iris Rose, was standing next to her, dipping a rag in a bucket of water then offering it to her mother. Mrs. Ketch took the worn cloth and clenched it between her teeth, sucking and spitting while she rocked back and forth.

      Miss B. sat on the edge of the bed and held Mrs. Ketch’s hand. She talked the woman through her pains enough to get her to sit up and drink some tea. The midwife wrapped her wrinkled fingers around Mrs. Ketch’s wrist, closed her eyes and counted in French. She pinched the ends of Mrs. Ketch’s fingertips and then pulled her eyelids away from her pink, teary eyes. “Your blood’s weak.” Miss B. pushed the blankets back and pulled up Mrs. Ketch’s bloodstained skirts. Her hands kneaded their way around the tired woman’s swollen belly, feeling over her stretched skin, making the sign of the cross. After washing her hands several times, she slipped her fingers between Mrs. Ketch’s legs and shook her head. “This baby has to come today.”

      Mrs. Ketch moaned. “It’s too soon.”

      “Your pains is too far gone and I can’t turn you back. If you don’t birth this child today, all your other babies don’t gonna have a mama.”

      “I don’t want it.”

      Iris Rose knelt by the bed and pleaded with her mother. “Please, Mama, do what she says.”

      The girl’s much younger than me, twelve at the most, but she’s as much mother as she is child. From time to time she’ll show up at the schoolhouse, dragging as many of her brothers and sisters behind her as she can. She barks at the boys to take off their hats, scolds the girls as she tugs on their braids, making her voice as big and rough as an old granny’s. For all her trying, it always turns out the same. By the time the snow flies, the desks of the Ketch children are empty again.

      Mrs. Ketch needs them home, I guess. I’ve heard that each of the older ones is assigned a little one to bathe, dress, feed and look after, so they don’t get lost in the clutter of a house filled with dirty dishes and barn cats. With six brothers of my own, I think I can say there’s such a thing as too many.

      When Mrs. Ketch’s wailing went on, Tom and the older boys disappeared out to the barn. With Iris Rose’s help, I tucked the rest of the children into an upstairs room. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest. “Now don’t you make another sound, or Daddy’ll come running through the hollow and up these stairs with an alder switch!” The room went quiet. Six small greasy heads went to the floor, six bellies breathed shallow and scared.

      “Can I watch?” Iris Rose asked.

      “If you promise not to say anything.”

      “I’ll be silent. I swear.”

      I left her on the stairs, peeking through the broken, crooked pickets of the banister.

      Miss B. and I turned back the straw mattress and tied sheets to the bedposts. She tugged hard at them. “See now, Mrs. Ketch, you know what’s to do … when the time comes, you gots to hold on for dear life and push that baby out.” Miss B. motioned for me to steady Mrs. Ketch’s shaking knees. “And it’s comin’ fast and hard as high tide on a full moon. Pousser!”

      Mrs. Ketch bent her chin to her chest, the veins on her neck throbbing. “Let me die, dear Lord. Please let me die.”

      Miss B. laughed. “How many times you been through this, thirteen, fourteen? You should know by now, the Lord ain’t like most men, He ain’t gonna just take you home when you ask for it …”

      Just last Sunday Reverend Norton went on and on about the trespasses of Eve, pounding his fist on the pulpit, his face all red and puffed up as he spit to the side between the words original and sin. While he talked at good length about the evils of temptation and the curse Eve had brought upon all women, he never mentioned the stink of it. I never imagined that “the woman’s tithe for the civilized world” would smell so rusted, so bitter.

      I kept the fire in the stove going, unpacked clean sheets from Miss B.’s bag, did whatever she told me to do, but no matter how busy I made myself, my stomach ached and my hands felt heavy and useless. I don’t think my nervousness came from it being my first birth, or even from seeing such pain and struggle in a woman, but more from hearing the sadness, the wanting, in Mrs. Ketch’s cries. Nothing we did seemed to help. She sobbed and cursed, her wailing and Miss B.’s coaxing going on for an hour or more, I’d guess, or at least long enough for Mrs. Ketch to give up on a miracle and have a baby boy.

      He was a sad, tiny thing. His flesh was like onion skin; the blue of his veins showed right through. If I had looked any harder at his weak little body, I think I might have seen his heart. Miss B. bundled him up in flannel sheets and handed him to Mrs. Ketch. “Hold him, now, put your chest to his so he knows what it’s like to be alive.” But Experience Ketch didn’t want her baby. She didn’t want to hold him or look at him or have him anywhere near. “Get that thing away from me. I got twelve more than I can handle anyways.”

      I couldn’t stand it. I took him from Miss B. and pulled him close. I whispered in his ear, “I’ll take you home with me. I’ll take you for my own.”

      Out of the corner of my eye I saw Iris Rose run up the stairs. I turned to Miss B. “He’s looking so blue, his arms, his legs, his chest. His breath is barely there.”

      “He’s born too soon.” She made the sign of the cross on his wrinkled brow. “If he’d been born three, four weeks later, I could spoon alder tea with brandy in his mouth, make a bed for him in the warmin’ box of the cookstove and hope he pinked up, but as it is …”

      I stopped her from going on. “Tell me what to do. I have to try.”

      Miss B. shook her head. “If you can’t see him through to the other side, then you should just go on home. Mary and the angels will soon take care of him. I have to see to his mama.”

      I sat in the corner and held tight to the dying child.

      Miss B. wrapped a blanket around us. “Some babies ain’t meant for this world. All you can do is keep him safe until his angel comes.”

      “There’s nothing else I can do?”

      She leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Pray for him, and pray for this house too.”

2

      BETWEEN MY PRAYERS and Miss B.’s spooning porridge into Mrs. Ketch’s mouth, the baby died. It was almost dawn when Brady Ketch came home. He stomped through the house, drunk and demanding to be fed. “Experience Ketch, get outta that bed and get me some food.” The poor woman tried to get up, as if nothing had troubled her at all, but Miss B. held her down. “You need rest. Lobelia tea and rest, then more tea and more rest. At least three days to get your strength, but a week would be best. If you don’t, you gonna bleed ‘til you’re dead.”

      Mr. Ketch staggered, reaching for the bundle of blankets I was holding in my arms. “Let me have a look-see there, girl. What’d we get this time, wife? Another boy, I hope. Girls don’t eat as much, but they take their toll every-ways else. I don’t trust nothin’ that can’t piss standin’ up.” He pinned me against the wall, his dark mouth leaving the skunky СКАЧАТЬ