The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [2]
Thankfully, after Papi left, the señora was still for a moment. Her pain seemed to have subsided a bit. Drowning in the depths of the mattress, she took a few breaths of relief.
We sat for a while with her fingers clinging to mine, like when we were girls and we both slept in the same room. Even though she was supposed to sleep in her own canopy bed and I was to sleep on a smaller cot across from hers, she would invite me onto her bed after her father had gone to sleep and the two of us would jump up and down on the mattress, play with our shadows, and pretend we were four happy girls, forcing the housemaid—Juana—to come in and threaten to wake Papi who would give us a deeper desire for slumber with a spanking.
“Amabelle, is the baby’s bed ready?” With her hand still grasping mine, Señora Valencia glanced at the cradle, squeezed between the louvered patio doors and her favorite armoire deeply carved with giant orchids and hummingbirds in flight.
“Everything is prepared, Señora,” I said.
Even though I wasn’t used to praying, I whispered a few words to La Virgen de la Carmen that the doctor would come before the señora was in agony again.
“I want my husband.” The señora clamped her eyes shut, quietly forcing the tears down her face.
“We will send for him,” I said. “Tell me how your body feels.”
“The pain is less now, but when it comes on strong, it feels like someone shoves a knife into my back.”
The baby could be leaning on her back, I thought, remembering one of my father’s favorite expressions when he and my mother were gathering leaves to cram into rum and firewater bottles before rushing off to a birthing. Without remembering what those leaves were, I couldn’t lessen the señora’s pain. Yes, there was plenty of rum and firewater in the house, but I didn’t want to leave her alone and go to the pantry to fetch them. Anything could happen in my absence, the worst of it being if a lady of her stature had to push that child out alone, like a field hand suddenly feeling her labor pains beneath a tent of cane.
“Amabelle, I am not going to die, am I?” She was shouting at the top of the soft murmuring voice she’d had since childhood, panting with renewed distress between her words.
We were alone in the house now. I had to calm her, to help her, as she had always counted on me to do, as her father had always counted on me to do.
“Before this, the most pain I ever felt was when a wasp bit the back of my hand and made it swell,” she declared.
“This will pain you more, but not so much more,” I said.
A soft breeze drifted in through the small gaps in the patio doors. She reached for the mosquito netting tied above her head, seized it, and twisted the cloth.
Gooseflesh sprouted all over her arms. She grabbed my wrist so tight that my fingers became numb. “If Doctor Javier doesn’t come, you’ll have to be the one to do this for me!” she yelled.
I yanked my hands from hers and massaged her arms and taut shoulders to help prepare her body for the birth. “Brace yourself,” I said. “Save your strength for the baby.”
“Virgencita!” she shouted at the ceiling as I dragged her housedress above her head. “I’m going to think of nothing but you, Virgencita, until this pain becomes a child.”
“Let the air enter and leave your mouth freely,” I suggested. I remembered my mother saying that it was important that the women breathe normally if they wanted to feel less pain.
“I feel a kind of vertigo,” she said, twitching like live flesh on fire. Thrashing on the bed, she gulped desperate mouth-fuls of air, even though her face was swelling, the veins throbbing like a drumbeat along her temples.
“I will not have my baby like this,” she said, trying to pin herself to a sunken spot in the middle of the bed. “I will not permit anyone to walk in and see me bare, naked.”
“Please, Señora, give this all your attention.”
“At least you’ll cover my legs if they come?” She grabbed