Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [182]
And then she hears another sound, a motor, distant at first, fading away altogether and then louder as it makes its way up the rutted dirt road. The girl is lucky in giving birth this week; in another week, the roads will be so muddy that no motorcar will make it at all. Olympia sees a flash of scarlet and beige and waits for the familiar thunk of the automobile door.
Haskell enters the house without knocking, a habit he cannot break even when they go visiting.
“Olympia,” he says when he comes into the bedroom. He sets down his satchel and slips off his coat. He puts his hand on her shoulder. It is his need, Olympia knows, to reassure himself that she is still there, even after all these years.
“She is wanting to bear down,” Olympia says. “But her pelvis, I think, is too narrow.”
“How far along is she?”
“Past half a dollar.”
Haskell walks to the table where the basin is, rolls his cuffs, and washes his hands, exclaiming at how icy the water is. Olympia glances at his broad back. His hair is graying some now, even though his beard is still walnut. He walks to the other side of the bed and looks down at the girl, who is so exhausted that she falls asleep between the pains. Through the window, Haskell and Olympia can see the father standing beside the Pope-Hartford, clearly more interested in the motorcar than in the progress of his daughter.
“No mother present?” Haskell asks.
Olympia shakes her head.
Haskell narrows his eyes. “Tell me this is not what I think it is.”
“I do not know. I have had the same thought. I pray not. The girl refuses to say who the father is, but that could be for any number of reasons.”
In the eight years they have been working together, she and Haskell have attended incestuous births before. Once they birthed a woman who made no attempt to hide her obvious physical affection for her brother, a situation that rattled Haskell no end.
“What is the father’s name?”
“Colton.”
She bends to the girl. “Lydia, this is Dr. Haskell,” she says as the girl is awakened by another pain.
In answer, the girl grits her teeth and makes again the short rhythmic grunts.
Haskell lifts her birthing skirt and examines her.
“I am not sure about the pelvis,” he says. “But it is definitely near time. How did you get here?”
“Josiah.”
“The Reverend Milton called you?”
“Yes, I tried to reach you at the clinic. Josiah said he would stop by to see if he could find you. Apparently the father only went to the minister after his daughter had been in labor more than ten hours. I think they thought they could manage the birth themselves.”
Haskell shakes his head. In synchronous movements — which are the same, yet never exactly the same — Haskell slides the girl down along the bed, lifts her knees, and gently secures her ankles to the bedposts while Olympia props her up into a half-sitting position with pillows and sacking behind her. As she does this, she speaks constantly to the girl so that she will not be unduly afraid. Earlier, during a respite from the contractions, Olympia explained to Lydia the procedures that would happen, having surmised, rightly, that the girl had no idea whatsoever about the birth to come. Even so, the child looks frightened half out of her mind, simply from the pain if nothing else.
“She can bear down now,” Haskell says.
“Lydia,” Olympia instructs. “Strain as if at stool.”
The girl strains. She grunts and pants for breath. And then, on Olympia’s instructions, she repeats the process. And then again. And then again.
“The head is presenting,” Haskell says after a time. “I shall not need the forceps after all. Lydia, bear down hard now. Push with all your might.”
The girl screams as if she were being torn apart. Outside by the car, the father freezes. The head is born, and Haskell passes his finger around the infant’s neck to find out whether the navel-string is wound around it. “Lydia, bear down hard now,” Haskell commands, this time with some urgency in his voice. He pulls on the cord, loosens it,