Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [181]
“No,” says Olympia.
The bailiff glances up at Olympia and then over at Littlefield.
Olympia stands. “Do not.”
Tucker puts a hand on her arm.
“Miss Biddeford?” Littlefield asks with some bewilderment.
“I withdraw my petition,” Olympia says quickly.
“But Miss Biddeford, a judgment has been entered on your behalf.”
“I will not take him,” she says.
“Miss Biddeford.”
“I cannot.”
Albertine is cradling the boy. Olympia turns and walks briskly down the aisle past Haskell, who does not speak or attempt to stop her. She moves through the massive doors of the chamber and out into the stone hallway with its bronze busts. Her heels clicking loudly, she walks the length of the hallway to the door of the courthouse and opens it. She flinches, having forgotten the mob that has been waiting for her. Quickly now, so as not to lose her resolve, she makes her way blindly through the reporters and the men with signs. She emerges onto the sidewalk, turns, and moves as fast as she can to the next corner. And it is only then, with the crowd behind her and all her life before her, that she truly understands what she was meant to have known from the very beginning. He is not hers. He was never hers.
YOU MUST NOT hold your breath. You must breathe each time you get the pain.”
The girl grunts with a sound hardly human. The thin blond hair is wet and matted against her forehead. Both the calico shift and the bedclothes are rough and wrinkled with perspiration. If it were not so near the end, Olympia would change them yet again.
Occasionally, the girl’s father, in overalls and woolen shirt, his face unshaven, comes to the door and looks in, though he seems to do this out of duty and not from any desire to see his daughter. Olympia prays that the child to come is not the product of the father and the girl. Earlier, the girl told Olympia she was fifteen, which Olympia guesses is correct. There seems not to have been a mother for at least a decade.
The girl grunts again and pulls on the sheet that has been tied to the post at the foot of the bed for this purpose. Olympia anoints the girl’s vulva with lard and gently examines the progress being made by the descent of the head. Earlier, Olympia covered the horsehair mattress with a sheet of rubber and then spread old newspapers all along that to absorb the birth matter. She has brought with her clean flannels, scissors, coarse sewing cotton, muslin, and a paper of safety pins, all of which she has laid out upon the only table in the room. She has washed the girl’s nipples with a solution of strong green tea and made her a birthing skirt out of yet another clean sheet. Olympia soaks the washcloth in the ice-cold water the father has been bringing from the well, wrings it out, and places it on the girl’s forehead.
“Go look out onto the road,” Olympia says to the father, who seems to need occupation. “He must be coming soon.”
Olympia fears that the girl’s pelvis will be too narrow. Olympia could possibly manage the birth herself, but she would rather that Haskell were here with his greater experience and his forceps. Already the girl has been in labor for twenty hours, and her strength is nearly depleted.
Olympia glances around the room. Some attempt, she can see, has been made at cheer, although the girl is clearly not a skilled housekeeper. Faded red curtains, misshapen from many washings, are fastened onto the two windows of the room with small nails hammered into the frames. On the floor is an oiled cloth, the design of which has nearly been erased by wear. A knitted blanket, with several holes, is folded at the foot of the bed, away from the mess of the birth. But even these touches of human habitation cannot hide the rude truth of the room, one of only two in this small cabin so far from town. The walls are not plastered, and the beams of the peaked roof are exposed. With no wardrobe, the girl and the man hang their clothes on wooden pegs.