Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [58]
It is nearly midnight when we head back inside. Leah rises to check Anneliese again. Still two centimeters, and the contractions haven’t returned. “Get some sleep,” says Leah. “Rest, in case things start again.” She goes back upstairs to sleep some more herself. Anneliese and I climb the stairs. Lying in bed in the dark, I remember the Friday night in high school when we got all revved up for kickoff and then the ball blew off the tee. I admit the analogy has limitations and may not translate across the gender divide. In any case, I have the rare good sense to keep it to myself. I can feel the disappointment and frustration in the way Anneliese lays beside me. Eventually we sleep.
In the morning everyone is gone.
On the chalkboard Jaci has erased the contraction times and written:
THURSDAY EVENING
SHOW
POSTPONED
Due to
Stage Fright
There we were with that stretch of glorious and fraudulent weather, and now we are back to stinging ears and snow on the ground and foolish jump-start robins shivering in the maple trees. Many of the early-breaking buds are frost-burned black. One of the maples flanking the path to my office has a broken limb, and an icicle of sap hangs from the fractured wood. The run of warm weather brought an abrupt end to the sap run, and we pulled the taps. Once the trees bud out, the clear sap turns faint red and bitter—professional sugarers say the sap has “gone buddy.” Amy and Anneliese went to observe the boil-down with Jan and Gale, and now we have a gallon and a half of maple syrup in the pantry as well as a few maple sugar candies in the freezer—technically the first food from our new patch of land.
So it’s cold again, but the earth is turning. Nighttimes it’s been dropping to the teens, and the muddy spot on the office footpath is coated with ice, but it fractures easily when I step on it, and mud oozes up through the cracks. Down on the woodpile sits a mason jar. The day we stacked wood Amy noticed me sweating, and, unbidden, filled the jar with water and brought it to me. I drank it down to an inch from the bottom and set it atop the stack, where it sat at such an angle that now the base is filled by a lopsided puck of ice. I see the glass there on the split oak and turn immediately maudlin, blind-sided by the idea that the jar and the water are representative of how the most fluid, workaday moments become fixed in sweet irretrievable history in the very instant of their occurring.
I have promised Anneliese that when the baby comes I will spend an entire week with her and the new child, returning no phone calls, answering no e-mails, working toward no deadlines. In the meantime, I am churning away as usual, constantly rearranging the days into an endless chain of last-minutes. I see that glass as an emblem of placidity surrounded by the snarl of my subsequent overbooked peregrinations and hustle. Long ago, I think, my daughter drew water and brought it to me. A grand thing in its simplicity. I lift the jar, then replace it, suddenly convinced that it covers a hole where all the time drains away.
Later in the day Mister Big Shot appears in the yard. At his side, a girl bird. He struts beside her as if a tail ain’t nothin’ but a drag. I think of me beside my wife, and then I think, even us bald guys get lucky sometimes.
Just as when Anneliese had her spate of Braxton-Hicks contractions nearly three months ago, I kept obsessively checking the baby’s heartbeat after the night she thought she was giving birth. And every now and then for the next several days I keep asking Anneliese if the baby is still kicking as before. She assures me it is. After all the ramp-up with no payoff, we’ve been left a bit adrift. The bright blue birthing tub stands at the top of the stairs, the water perfectly still. We walk around it.
A few days after the fact, I talk to Albert Frost, an old-timer from up by the home farm. Albert is in his nineties, his wife dead some ten years now, but still lives on his farm within sight of the culverts where Ricky and I used to play. Albert was