Hawaii - James Michener [165]
Abraham looked dumbly at his associate and started toward the bed, but his own labor pains returned with violence, and he had to flee the delivery room, but Abner's problem was solved by a vigor-movement on the bed, where Sister Urania, caught in the violence of birth, was kicking her clothes away and screaming for to help her. Abner, swallowing like a schoolboy and shaking with embarrassment, approached the bed, and then strangely all of his uncertainty vanished, for he thought with boundless thanks to? God: "That is surely the head. It is a normal presentation."
Outside, when the wail of the child was first heard, the two midwives said gravely, "He had better have the herbs ready."
Abner, preoccupied with the baby boy he held in his hands and with the nerve-racking job of cutting the cord and then tying it, summoned desperately every memory of his midwife's textbook and did a creditable job. Then he stood for a moment in the shadows, perplexed, holding the new child in his hands, and knowing not what to do, but finally he went out into the dawn and handed the child to a native woman, whom the Hawaiians had summoned twenty-four hours before, certain that she would be needed, and this woman placed the child to her breast.
The first midwife said: "He ought to be watching the mother."
The second replied: "I wonder if he is massaging her stomach to help her throw out the afterbirth."
And the first asked: "Do you suppose he would want these herbs?" And she indicated a brew that her people had used for two thousand years to stop bleeding.
But the second replied: "He would not want them."
Inside the shack Abner now feverishly thumbed his book, refreshing himself as to what he must do next. He cleaned the bed, washed the mother, listened to her breathing, and then saw with alarm that something was happening that the book did not tell about. "Brother Abraham!" he called in fear.
"What is it?" the sick husband replied.
"I am afraid she is bleeding more than she should."
Brother Abraham knew nothing, but he quickly looked through hi book, and while the two well-intentioned missionaries tried vainly to catch the shreds of knowledge that would have saved a life, on the rude bed Sister Urania grew weaker and weaker. The long day1! exertions and the long night's exhaustion were inexorably exacting their toll, and her face grew gray.
"She should not be sleeping so soundly," Abner cried in panic,
"What can we do?" Hewlett moaned. "Oh, God! Don't let her die now!"
Outside, the midwives said, "They ought to be massaging her stomach, but they seem to be talking, instead." And gradually over the large crowd of natives that had stayed through the night, crept the knowledge that the frail white woman was dying. The idea came upon them like the rays of the morning sun, sweeping down from the coconut palms, so that the Hawaiians, to whom birth was a mystical matter, were already weeping before the missionaries knew that Urania had bled to death.
Later, sitting exhausted under a kou tree, Abner said dully, "Brother Abraham, I did all I could to save your dear wife."
"It was the will of God," Hewlett mumbled.
And yet," Abner cried, hammering the medical text with his "there must have been something in here we didn't read." It was the will of God," Hewlett insisted.
The Hawaiians, watching, said, "How strangely the white men do things."
"They are so smart about reading and guns and their new god," an old woman observed, "that you'd expect them to have found a better way than this to birth a baby."
"What is most curious," pointed out another, "is that in America men do the work of women," but the old woman who had been most critical of the midwifery was first to acknowledge: "Even so, they make fine children."
After the burial of Urania--the first of many mission women