The Northwoods Chronicles (4 page)

“Why?”

A puzzled look came across her face, and Pearce
was happy that whatever had happened to her brain had progressed to
the point where she forgot all about the UFO stuff. “C’mon, Regina,
let’s go get that baby out of your tummy, and then we’ll bring him
home.”

“Okay,” she said, but then a pain gripped her
and like a little wild animal, she started to scream, then slammed
out the front door and ran through the snow, screaming, toward
town.

Pearce chased her, and caught her a block away,
her tinfoil hat askew and caught in her hair. She was out of breath
and pain and fear showed feral in her eyes. “Honey? Honey, settle
down, now listen to me. I can make the pain stop, but we’ve got to
get into the car to do it.”

“No!” she started to yell and beat her fists
against him.

He held her tighter, trying to control her, but
her legs buckled the same time as she bit his arm, and he let
go.

Pearce looked at her on the ground, in the snow,
her little yellow cotton dress up over her skinny knees, tears
running down the sides of her face as she looked up at him, and he
didn’t know what to do.

Then Jimbo’s truck pulled over, and he jumped
out with his cell phone to his ear. He said, “Are you all right,
Pastor?”

It was all Pearce could do to keep from crying.
“She’s in labor.”

“Can you come over here, honey?” Jimbo said into
the phone, then he folded it and put it in his pocket. He squatted
down next to Regina, who shrank from him and turned to hug her
husband’s legs. “Hi, Mrs. Porter,” Jimbo said. “So you’re about to
have that baby, are you? Bet you’re excited.”

Regina sat up and started to bawl.

“Margie’s on her way over. You know she’s had
two sons, and she’ll help you, because she knows what to do.”

A contraction gripped Regina, and her face went
red. When it was over, she just said, “Get it out of me. Get it
away from me!”

“We need to go to the hospital, honey,” Pearce
said, and gave Jimbo a look he hoped would translate into taking
his side.

“That’s right, Mrs. Porter,” Jimbo said. “Babies
come out in hospitals.”

Margie came running across the street, shrugging
into her parka, and gasped when she saw Regina in her little cotton
dress on the ground in the freezing snow. “What’s going on?”

“Mrs. Porter’s going to have her baby,” Jimbo
said, “and she’s not quite up to it.”

“Give her your coat,” Margie demanded, then sat
down on the ground with Regina while Jimbo put his sheepskin Levi’s
jacket around her shoulders.

“Time for the hospital?” she asked.

“Don’t want to go,” Regina whined.

“They’ll stop it from hurting,” Margie said, and
Pearce was amazed at how easily everyone fell into communicating at
Regina’s level. Apparently he wasn’t as secretive with her
condition as he thought he’d been.

“Okay,” Regina said, then began to stand up.
Margie put one arm around her, and Pearce got on the other side of
her, and Regina began to shiver with the cold as they walked slowly
back to the house, toward the car. Pearce was just about to ask
Margie to go along for the ride, when Regina stopped, dead in her
tracks.

“Oh, no,” she said softly, and liquid trickled
out from between her legs into the snow.

“It’s okay,” Margie said, but Regina wasn’t
hearing her.

“Something’s happening,” she said, and, for a
moment, Pearce looked into her eyes and saw the woman he had
married.

“Let’s hurry,” he said to her, and she nodded.
They picked up the pace, and while Margie got Regina settled in the
front seat, Pearce grabbed the keys and his wallet.

“Can you go with us?” he asked her under his
breath.

“Can’t,” she said apologetically. “Diner. But
it’s not far. Take County Road M east four miles, turn north.
There’s a sign. It’s another ten miles. You’ll be there in no
time.”

“Thanks,” he said, then got in the car with his
silent wife, who was disentangling the foil from her hair. He
started the car and sprayed gravel as he fishtailed around and out
onto the county road, not even using his turn signal.

Four miles. He punched the trip meter so he’d
know, although he was certain he’d seen the blue marker sign. “You
okay?”

She didn’t answer. Pearce took a deep breath and
looked at her. She was calmly sitting, her backrest reclined a
little bit.

“Honey?”

“They’re coming for us,” she said, her voice
rising with hysteria.

There it was, the blue sign with the H for
Hospital. He turned, and stepped on the accelerator. The air seemed
to thin out and he took deep breaths to compensate.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No,
no!
Oh Pearce,
do you hear them? Oh my god, it’s so sad.”

Pearce slammed on the brakes and the car slid to
a stop on the shoulder of the road, just in time to watch Regina’s
belly deflate like a punctured basketball. “Honey?”

“Oh,” she said as if she were as mystified and
amazed as he at the sinking of her abdomen. It was the sighing “oh”
of an epiphany, of a disappointment, of an acceptance.

“Honey?”

She turned to look at him with eyes that were as
old as his, and no longer held childlike merriment. She took a
great, heaving breath, almost a sob, and let it out slowly.

“Are you okay?”

She caught another ragged breath, then said,
“Perhaps.”

“Do you need anything? I mean, what happened?”
He put his hand lightly on her stomach and felt only soft, giving
flesh whereas only a moment ago, it was hard and ripe. He felt
panic rising, but tempered it in the face of her unearthly calm.
Was the baby on the floor of the car? “Should we go to the
hospital?”

“That might be prudent,” she said, “although I
doubt that there is a real need.” She picked up the battered piece
of a tinfoil hat and began to unfold it and flatten it out on her
knee.

“Honey?” Pearce turned off the engine.

“Yes?”

“The baby?”

“Gone.” Another sobbing sigh, and this time a
few tears came with it. “Gone to be with the rest of them. And they
took something of me with it.”

No kidding, Pearce thought. What happened to the
child-woman he’d been dealing with for the past year?

Kidnapped,
he thought.
Snatched.
Mother and child together.
Exactly what Regina had been
afraid would happen.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

Or not, he thought. The disappointment Pearce
felt surpassed anything he had ever encountered. He wanted that
baby, he looked forward to having that baby in the house. We could
just start this car and keep on driving, he thought, because we
don’t have anything here, we don’t have any roots, we don’t have
any furniture, we don’t have any friends. We have Jimbo’s jacket,
but we can send that to him. Or keep it. We could just keep going
away from this damned place, and find ourselves a decent place, a
place where children don’t disappear and take their child-like
mothers with them. Let’s just keep going, he wanted to say to her,
let’s just be irresponsible for once and get out of here. To hell
with the church, to hell with White Pines Junction, to hell with
the dreams of home and family and a parish of our own. Let’s just
run and keep running until we fall down.

Or until we can find a place where we can
realize our dreams.

But instead, he started the car and turned it
back toward home. “We’ll have explaining to do,” he said.

“There is nothing to explain,” Regina said.
“There is no explanation.” She folded the aluminum foil into a tiny
square and set it on the dashboard. “I’m sure I ought to take a day
or two to rest, but then I’ll have to make a casserole for Sunday’s
potluck.”

Pearce had no answer for that. He not only
missed his baby, but he missed his wife. This sensible creature
next to him reminded him of the woman he had married, but not the
woman he had come to love. He pulled back into the driveway, ran
around the car to open the door and help her out. She took off the
soiled cotton dress and put on a sensible flannel nightie that had
languished in the bottom drawer of her dresser for over a year.
Then she got into bed and asked for a cup of hot tea.

When Pearce brought it to her, she took his hand
and kissed it. “Perhaps you ought to go fishing one of these days,”
she said. “Make a few friends in this community.”

With those few words, Pearce’s shattered dreams
began to reassemble. He remembered what it was like to have
friends, buddies, a congregation, the hope for his own church. A
proper clergy wife. Solid standing in the community. The family
part could wait for the next assignment. One of these days the
church would give them their own parish. Maybe the next one would
be the permanent one.

Whatever had just happened was not necessarily a
tragedy, he decided. Life is long enough for each of us to achieve
our dreams in time, isn’t it?

“Good idea,” he said. “Now you rest, and I’ll
check in on you a little later.” He kissed her cheek, then closed
the door quietly behind him. As he passed the tinfoiled room, he
wondered if she had been right about that, too.

Well, he’d get his parish now that he had a
normal wife. And life would be simpler, and much more normal.

But that didn’t exactly mean better, did it?

A good topic for next Sunday’s sermon.

The old man parked his decrepit old Pinto
nose-in to the weeds. With stiff joints and arthritic fingers, he
gingerly but persistently unloaded the gear—pole, bait bucket,
lunch box, thermos, tackle—then slipped thin shoulders into a
flotation vest and zipped it up the front. Sadie Katherine knew
almost everybody who lived in Vargas County, but she didn’t know
this gent.

A chill wind blew across the lake. Sadie
Katherine organized her tackle and kept a worried eye on him as he
took small, shuffling, old-man steps down toward the dock, and she
wondered what the missus would do if he failed to return at sunset
with dinner in his creel.

Would they go hungry?

Or did they live in that beautiful new home on
the bluff? Maybe he kept that rusted Ford out of sentimentality,
its upholstery stained with fish odor, its sun-rotted visor poked
full of lures and flies, the bumper tied on with thirty-pound-test
line. Maybe the wife drove a nice, new Eldorado, white, with
climate control and no fish smell allowed, thankyouverymuch. Maybe
instead of fishing for survival, their freezer was stocked with
salmon and lamb and their meals were expertly cooked by a woman who
came every day to do the heavy cleaning.

Or did they live
behind
that big new
house on the bluff, in the shack with the bright blue tarp for a
roof and frozen mud for a floor in the winter?

The half-horsepower motor started, and he putted
gently away in his rowboat, still the master of his ship, the
captain of his fate, his wool hat firmly pulled down, earflaps
sensibly warding off his death of a cold.

Sly fox, Sadie Katherine thought. She bet he
knew all the secret holes in the big lake. She was tempted to turn
around, jump back into her boat and follow for a distance, but if
he were as sly as she gave him credit for, he’d never lead anyone
to his secrets. He’d rather putter around the lake, trying to throw
the interloper off his trail until the sun set and the fish lost
their appetites and then he and his wife would have no dinner. He
would come in, stand his pole in the corner of the shack and shrug
apologetically, the provider defeated. She would put away the
frying pan, desperately trying not to show her disappointment. With
nothing else to do, they would get into their small, hard bed and
hold each other, stomachs growling, and wonder at the whim of
fate.

Or would they dress up in nice, comfortable,
retired-folks clothes and order trout almandine with a fine white
wine at a restaurant in the city? Maybe they would then spend the
rest of the evening calling long-distance grandchildren and
laughing.

Sadie Katherine turned to watch him, and did so
just in time to see him and his boat slip into a sound-muffling
shroud of mist that she hadn’t noticed a minute ago.

The chill wind grew to gale warnings as evening
approached. The red ball of a sun set behind a horizon crusted
thick with mist, and the temperature dropped.

All night Sadie Katherine lay in bed next to
Doc, listening to the wind try to pry open her house and she
thought of a lonely rowboat with a half-horsepower outboard,
bobbing on a whitecapped lake in a raging spring storm.

At dawn, the wind drove rain, leaves, branches,
garbage and other debris horizontally as she drove back to the
lake. The Pinto was still there, its hatchback covered with wet
leaves and pine needles blown about by the wind.

Did he live alone? Was there no one else to
raise the alarm?

She drove to the big new house on the bluff, but
even as she went up there, she knew that was not where he lived.
She kept driving, around behind, to the shack.

The rain took a breather as she jumped out of
her car and ran to the door.

A tired young woman opened the door. She’d been
mopping up rainwater. A big-eyed toddler clung to her dress with
one hand, the thumb of his other solidly in his mouth.

A baby whimpered from a crib across the single
room.

They looked like something from the thirties,
something from Tobacco Road. Sadie Katherine didn’t know people
lived like this in White Pines Junction, and she wondered about
their circumstances.

“The old man . . . ,” Sadie Katherine said.

Her face flushed with what appeared to be hope.
“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know,” Sadie Katherine said. “He went
out in his boat last night and didn’t come back. I’m worried.”

“Oh,” she said, looking back at the water
dripping through the patchwork roof. “That don’t mean nothin’.”