The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [66]
For the first few hours of her contractions, she breathed and moaned and tried to rest, and I could comfort her only with the cool, wet rag. Then, as they came closer and intensified, she sat up and panted. “Jozef, my hand, hold my hand,” and she pushed down on my hand, the bed, the ground, and cried into the night, and this went on for hours as the morning came on, and then day, and what I never expected was the long resistance that child had to being born. I knew he wasn’t breech. But he was turned and so couldn’t move fully into the birth canal. I coaxed her and held her and tried to massage away her pain, but it grew and grew with yet more and longer hours, it seemed, the child not coming, only screams, and in my own exhaustion I weakened and buckled and wept, because in the early spring month we lived in that pastoral, waiting for this moment, I had prayed and dreamed that this girl might be some answer to another prayer I had made in a prison cell in Sardinia, that the misery and death I had dealt and seen might somehow be turned around, might somehow be wiped clean by a life unexpected.
I noticed that the sun was setting in the west, and I thought how quickly and yet full of burden a day can begin and end, and she pulled me close to her and said that if the child lived, I had to take it back to her village, that they would want it and care for it, in spite of her.
“Promise me, promise me,” she whispered, her lips brushing my cheeks. And I said that I would, and that she would come, too, because we had a long way yet to go. But she turned her head on the pillow and said, “No. It won’t be. Not me. Just go. Across the Sajó. It’s close. You’ll see. The baby,” she said, and wailed, and I knew that if she didn’t deliver soon, she and the baby both would die.
But she seemed to know this as well and, without my directing her, rose from the bed and sat on the edge so that gravity might do its best as a midwife. I placed a blanket on the floor and then held her from behind for support as she clenched her fists and stood and inhaled deeply, and the screams that came were unearthly, and the power in her back and arms was enough to bring tears to my eyes and make me wonder if she might crush my own hands as she bore down.
I saw the gush of fluids then and moved around quickly to take the child from her and keep it from strangling. The head had crowned and with each push more of the face emerged, though there was no wiping away or staunching of blood, so much blood it was, as though the child must swim through it as both test and augury, for she had torn, as I had seen sheep tear when the lamb was large or ill-positioned, and I knew later, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop, that something had ruptured inside.
But in that moment of birthing, I grabbed the head, fully free, and as she pushed, I worked out the shoulder caught in her tiny girl-like pelvis, and it was a boy, stiff and blue, but he bent slowly and then kicked and wakened, determined but exhausted as he gulped his first breath of air and bellowed weakly there in the cup of my arms. I tied off the umbilicus with a strip of cloth and cut it with a pair of sewing shears and then wrapped him in a sheet and placed him in his mother’s arms.
She lay back on the bed. She was white and breathing shallowly, but she pulled her son to her and spoke to him softly in Romany, secrets I knew nothing of and would never hear whispered again. His bellows became mews as he searched her out in his hunger and then latched and sucked, and the two rested there.
When I returned with more rags and sawdust, she was coming in and out of sleep and looking ghostly from blood loss, but the boy clung to her and what life there was in the first and last precious drops of foremilk she fed him, until