At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [151]
But God is good, and there wasn’t pain but you was blessed for it; and the little blessing lay asleep in her rickety pram. Every few moments Nancy touched her hand to her cheek, checking for chill, but everything was rosy yet. And she really was rosy, was the little mite. That yellowy tinge, it had her in torments of worry that first week, it was after lifting, like Aunt Sawney always said it would, and her skin now was soft and pink and, I don’t know, velvety something. And you’d want to be bending down the while, to sniff her smell, that was all powdery-milkery. Oh it would put you in mind of eating her, so it would. “I could eat you, gobble you right up,” she said, shaking her head into the oranges crate, and she was sure a smile was after fainting across the face, though the sleepy mite was dozing still, with her squoze-up eyes and her thumb just licking her mouth.
The truth of it was, she couldn’t wait to be showing the little babba off. Oh not to the street, never mind the street, the street was only ignorant, so it was. And as for that curate, making her take off her ring for the christening, that was plain badness. No, but to show her off to the daylight and let her know there was a sun up there and a blue sky to shine out of, and she’d know, without even knowing she knew, the joy it was with the sun on your face. If only the hint of it, mind, for she kept her eyes out of the glare for fear it might wake the little mite and she’d go all dazzled.
Jim come out of the shop, with a rug in his arms, and she said, “Did you bring that out for your niece?” He had. But wasn’t the little mite smothered, near or next to, as it was. So she bade Jim wrap the rug round her own shoulders instead. You’d swear she was nettles or briars the way he wouldn’t touch her, only let the cloth fall in place. “Is that out of your bed?”
He said it was, coloring a touch. She drew it closer round her, the blanket Gordie had slept in under.
Poor old Jim. There was a cloud hanging over him, she didn’t know what it was, only she hoped he wasn’t jealous of all the attention. Night the babba was born, he comes home, but he’s only hanging about the door. Say hello to your niece, says old Macks. And that’s exactly what he does. Hello, says he, like he’d be shaking her hand next. Then at the christening when he was standing godfather and they came to that bit about the gentleman below, do you denounce his works and pomps?—it took a while for him to answer till they all turned to look. Then out he thunders, I do, and the blaze in his eyes you’d swear ’twas old Nick himself at the font, and the little man defying him heart and soul. Even that twister of a curate looked startled out of his stole.
Whatever it was, there was no touching him these days and he was for ever at the wash-bowl. He washed his face so hard, he rubbed the smiles away.
He was watching one time when she was changing the babba. She could tell he was checking off the anatomy and muddling out the parts in his head. “See that,” she said, and of course he did, for he was gawping and blinking at it, the nubble out of the babba’s belly. “That goes down sure. We all had that, even you when you was little.” She breathed on a penny, placed it on the nubble, before wrapping the napkin round. “That grows into your tummy button,” she told him. Oh I know, says he, coloring away. Knew that all along, he did of course. And sure God love the dote. At home she had all the beasts of the field, let alone her brothers and sisters. She pitied the townie children who’d know no better than they’d learn off the chickens in the yard. Declare to God, and I laid an egg, ’twould put no pass on Jim.