Different Seasons - Stephen King [258]
'It's cheap fucking magic, Sarge, but it's all God left us with.'
'Yes, doctor.'
I watched her half-walk, half-run back to the hospital with the child and watched the crowd on the steps part for her. Then I rose to my feet and backed away from the body.
Its breathing, like the baby's, hitched and caught stopped hitched again stopped
I began to back away from it. My foot struck something. I turned. It was her head. And obeying some directive from outside of me, I dropped to one knee and turned the head over. The eyes were open-those direct hazel eyes that had always been full of such life and such determination. They were full of determination still. Gentlemen, she was seeing me.
Her teeth were clenched, her lips slightly parted. I heard the breath slipping rapidly back and forth between those lips and through those teeth as she "locomotived". Her eyes moved; they rolled slightly to the left in their sockets so as to see me better. Her lips parted. They mouthed four words: Thank you, Doctor McCarron. And I heard them, gentlemen, but not from her mouth. They came from twenty feet away. From her vocal cords. And because her tongue and lips and teeth, all of which we use to shape our words, were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound. But there were seven of them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven syllables in that phrase, Thank you, Doctor McCarron.
'You're welcome, Miss Stansfield,' I said. 'It's a boy.' Her lips moved again, and from behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound hoyyyyyy-Her eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed. She began to locomotive again and then she simply stopped. Whatever had happened was now over. The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance driver had perhaps seen some of it before he fainted.
But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly accident out here and a new baby in there.
I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood, looking stonily away towards the Garden across the way, as if nothing of any particular note had happened, as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.
As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to weep. As I recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped me to my feet and inside.
McCarron's pipe had gone out.
He relit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence. Outside, the wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and looked up. He seemed mildly surprised to find us still there.
'That's all,' he said.' That's the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of fire?' He snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment 'I paid her burial expenses out of my own pocket She had no one else, you see.' He smiled a little. 'Well there was Ella Davidson, my nurse. She insisted on chipping in twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But when Davidson insisted on a thing-' He shrugged, and then laughed a little. 'You're quite sure it wasn't a reflex?' I heard myself demanding suddenly. 'Are you quite sure -'
'Quite sure,' McCarron said imperturbably. 'The first contraction, perhaps. But the completion of her labour was not a matter of seconds but of minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it had been necessary. Thank God it was not.'
'What about the baby?' Johanssen asked.
McCarron puffed at his pipe. 'Adopted,' he said. 'And you'll understand that, even in those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible.'
'Yes, but what about the baby?' Johanssen asked again, and McCarron laughed in a cross way.
'You never let go of a thing, do you?' he asked Johanssen.
Johanssen shook his head. 'Some people have learned it to their sorrow. What about the baby?'
'Well, if you've come with me this far perhaps