The Last Letter (32 page)

“Here, I’ll clean that up, Mama.” Jeanie wretched again, with mostly clear liquid coming up after the last heave. She watched James clean up her vomit. When he’d gotten most of it by way of the cloth, he looked at his mother and wiped sweat from her hairline with the back of his hand. “I’ll get some water and a fresh cloth. See, if we were in our little dugout, all I’d have to do is take a shovel and carry the soiled part of the floor away. Clean, lickety-split, good as new.”

Jeanie chortled. “Well, I guess our definition of clean has changed a bit, hasn’t it?”

James kissed his mother’s forehead and left the house, shouting for Frank to fetch some water. He stuck his head back in the door. “Don’t worry Mama, the baby will be fine. She’s strong like you, I can feel it.”

“She?”

“I know it’s a girl, you’ll see.”

Jeanie squinted at him then fell back onto the mattress. They’d been so overwhelmed with the move, settling in, suffering the constant breaking of disastrous environmental waves over their community that the Arthurs had scarcely spoken of the baby inside Jeanie. She’d barely thought of it herself. Yet, in the moments since her contractions began, Jeanie couldn’t have felt closer to the baby or sadder at the possibility of it not living. She needed that baby, someone to care for, to need her.

Another wave of contractions came, then another on top of it and before long, she was bearing down to push. She pushed so hard that the baby flew out of her, landing in between her legs, shocking both Jeanie and Greta. But the crash of the landing made the baby begin to wail immediately.

“It’s a girl,” Greta said. She handed the baby to Jeanie. “Let me get the scissors.”

“A girl?” Jeanie watched the baby’s face curl into any number of angry faces, crying so hard that Jeanie was afraid she’d cut off her own airway. She cooed at the baby, pulling the bed covers over top of them both. She was so small, legs twig-like, skin transparent, sounding more animal than child. This baby was definitely early, at least two months, yet she was mighty and seeing the baby fight, angered by her rude entrance into the world, reassured Jeanie.

Jeanie leaned forward, looking past her knees to Greta.

“What’s wrong?” Pain shot through her belly. Greta looked up from between Jeanie’s legs, eyes wide, and though Jeanie could feel her lips moving, she knew she was forming words, she couldn’t hear her words leaving her mouth. Jeanie thought she was begging for Greta to help her, but Greta faded to an outline of a person and then darkness shut over Jeanie’s consciousness, blacking out her world.

Jeanie woke and the room was moody with candles from the Thanksgiving table flickering from various spots in Templeton’s house. Jeanie shot up in the bed. Her hand flew to her stomach to find it remarkably flat.

“Greta? My baby? I need to hold her. My head’s foggy, what did you give me?”

Greta sat in the chair next to Jeanie, still as stone. “It’s early hours of the day after Thanksgiving. Three a.m., around about, I imagine.”

Jeanie looked around the room. “Where’s my baby?”

“She’s over there in the cradle. We’ve wrapped her tight. There’s just a matter of time, now.”

Jeanie felt Greta’s words settle into her skin, chilling her. Jeanie would not allow her daughter to die simply because she was born too early. “Bring her to me,” Jeanie said.

Greta held her position.

“Get her,” Jeanie said.

Greta rose slowly and plodded to the center of the room where the baby had been nestled into a wooden box near the stove, to keep warm.

Greta turned with the baby in her arms. In the darkness, her clear-blue eyes were bathed in wetness and silent tears saturated her entire face as though Jeanie were supplying the sobs and Greta the tears.

Greta sat on the bed beside Jeanie, settling the baby into Jeanie’s body. Jeanie stilled.

Greta stood and slid back onto the wood chair beside the lounge where Jeanie lay, examining her miniature baby. In Jeanie’s mind, she calculated her weight, the size of a healthy hen. Three pounds or so. Her perfectly formed face, legs with no fat to speak of, each blue vein visible. Jeanie traced them, causing the infant to flinch. The cold air from being uncovered wakened her. She nearly growled at Jeanie, squalling like a bird of prey, angry to have been roused.

Jeanie smiled down on her. Good, be mad. And live. Better to live, fueled by anger, than to not live at all. Jeanie shifted the blankets to the side and put the baby to her breast. She sucked for a moment then her eyes flew open and she stopped as though choking.

“Well, you
are
a fighter. An early bird. A woman with a plan,” Jeanie said. “You’ll fit in just fine.”

Jeanie wrapped her back up knowing that it could take a day for her milk to come in, that the baby would be fine. She looked up at Greta whose brow was wrinkled, more so than usual.

“Don’t doubt her, Greta. She’s going to live. I know it might sound crazy but she will.”

“I didn’t say anything about crazy,” Greta said. She rocked back and forth.

“I’ll make her live. I can do that, you know. I am that strong. I have enough will for both of us, all of us.”

Greta nodded then looked into her lap.

Jeanie knew it wasn’t fair to say things like that, to somehow imply that Greta hadn’t been in the position of forcing her child to live.

“I’m sorry. I just need, this baby has to—”

Greta put the palm of her hand over Jeanie’s forehead, then the back of her hand. “Shhh, now you just rest. You’ve been fitful, you should rest, that’s your only concern.”

Jeanie nodded, feeling fevered. “I know. But I can’t lose one, Greta. I’m strong, I believe I can make my children live, but I know
I
can’t live without one of them. That much I know.” Jeanie kicked off her covers, drenched in sweat.

Greta nodded and went to the stove. There, she took several rocks that she had warmed over the cook-stove and wrapped them in a woolen blanket. She tucked the blanketed rocks beside the baby.

“Here, for when the sweats force you to throw the blankets, the rocks should keep her body temperature stable. And you’ll need some laudanum for just one night, for the pain,” Greta added.

Jeanie hesitated, then nodded. She knew she would have to, as she had with her other births.

“Just half the dose. I don’t want to sleep for long. Just enough to get my strength back.”

Her teeth chattered. Greta gave her the medicine. She wiped Jeanie’s brow and smiled down on her as Jeanie imagined she must have done so lovingly to all her children. And that was the final image Jeanie saw before falling into a deep sleep, grateful to her bones that she had met Greta Zurchenko.

Jeanie awoke to sunlight bathing her so fully she was sweating from its directness. Where was she? She jerked up to her elbow then fell back on the bedstead, dizzy. She was still tucked inside Templeton’s home. She looked down to see she was wearing her nightgown. Frank must have gone for it at some point. The baby! The thought startled her. She realized only then that her daughter had been nestled beside her, under the nightgown, against her skin.

One breath caught on the next as Jeanie skinned the blanket off by kicking her feet. She wrestled with the buttons of her nightgown and she felt lightheaded, fearing she would find her baby stiff having had her last breath stolen by the very nest Greta thought might have helped with the baby’s body temperature.

Jeanie gripped the baby under her arms, her body so small Jeanie’s fingers knitted together across her back. “Breathe, breathe,” she said. The baby was warm and pliable, though Jeanie could see no visible signs she was inhaling. Her egg-shaped head, bowed slightly at her neck, bore none of its weight no matter how small, her face as tranquil as a mother could want her baby to be. Jeanie held her face to her ear to hear her breathe. Nothing. Jeanie’s staccato panting was all she could hear. She laid the baby across her legs and as still as wood, she sat, waiting to see a tiny rise in her chest.

And there it was, a small rise in the chest and an accompanying wail.

“Is that what
I
sounded like, Mama?” Katherine came into the room, watching the series of events that led to the baby’s bellowing.

Jeanie felt her breasts tighten, fill with pain, making her want to feed the baby. She would try again. She settled her onto her breast and she took a few sucks before choking and turning from Jeanie with an expression of pure piss and salt and the angst of a cantankerous old man.

“You sounded much different,” Jeanie said. She smiled at Katherine while shushing the baby and rubbing her back. “This little girl wasn’t quite ready to be born. I suspect her insides aren’t fully grown or she wouldn’t sound so funny, like a puppy that lost its mother.”

Katherine nodded at her mother but didn’t go closer to her.

“Could you get me the cleanest cup you can find, Katherine? We’re going to have to be creative because it appears something’s not right with her eating from the breast.”

Katherine rocked on her feet as though about to follow her mother’s directions then she stopped.

“Katherine?” Jeanie said.

“Father and Ruthie and everyone, really, said we’re to just make the baby as comfortable as possible. That there’s no way a girl born, they suspect, two months early could survive such an inauspicious start. There’s simply no way.”

Jeanie rolled those words in her mind, waited for anger to swell because of them, but all she felt was calm certainty, like she had when the children survived the fire. Sometimes a mother just knows.

Jeanie jerked her head toward the kitchen. “You go on and bring me that clean cup. It has to be absolutely clean so there’s no chance of passing infection, and bring it to me and you’ll sit with me and learn to care for your sister because I’m going to need your help and as sure as I’d enlist an army to ensure your health, we’ll do the same for your sister. She won’t die, you needn’t worry. There’ll be no dying here, we’re not dying people.”

Katherine’s lips split into a quick smile then she darted into the kitchen and came back with a stack of tin cups. “Here, Mr. Templeton bought these in Yankton. He didn’t need to use them yesterday, they’re brand new, but I rinsed this one to be extra sure. They’re pristine, Mama, in the prairie sense, anyway. He asks about you every fifteen minutes or so. He and James take turns reporting to Father.” Katherine handed Jeanie the cleanest looking one.

“Now, that’s my girl,” Jeanie said, wrapping the baby in a blanket. When the infant was curled inside the bundle, Jeanie held her up toward Katherine.

“Hold your sister. I need to expel some milk into this cup and we’ll feed her. What
should
we call her? We’ll drip the milk into her mouth with our fingers. When I was a girl there was a piglet, a teeny bugger, and Mr. Samuels fed that creature with his finger, dripping the milk from his finger right into the piglet’s mouth. I think that’s exactly what we’ll do with this one. What
should
we call her?”

Katherine recoiled at the sight of her mother squeezing her breast like a cow’s udder then she patted her sister’s head, smoothing the thin hair back from her forehead like Jeanie would have done.

“Mama?”

Jeanie yanked at her breast. “Yes, dear Katherine.”

“Last night, while you were tossing, pained, under the laudanum, you said your life was a pie—”

“A pie!”

“Yes, you said the pie was cut so that merely a sliver, a hair’s breath contained joy and contentment, that the rest of it was utterly awful. No part of the pie offered any sort of thing you wanted in your belly.”

Jeanie squinted. “That’s gibberish, Katherine. Don’t tell me you’re worried.”

“It’s just so different than anything I’d ever heard you say, you don’t look for trouble. You see good in all things, solutions to all problems, yet in the midst of your delirium, you sounded so articulate, with this metaphor, as though you’d contemplated it before.”

Jeanie looked at the ceiling, trying to remember, knowing she could have very well said those things, because she had felt that her life had shifted to represent those exact proportions of happiness and displeasure. Jeanie shook her head, not wanting to show her daughter weakness, to allow anything but positive thoughts into her daughter’s mind, because although Jeanie was suffering from a sudden shift of mind-set, she didn’t want her daughter feeling the same.