Woman Who Loved the Moon (24 page)

The older man scowled and then seemed to change his mind. He said, “Since you’ve done it, it’s done.” And went back into the room he’d come out of. On its door was a piece of board with a word chalked on it, like the markers. It said:
Library.

“He is my father,” Jonathan said. “He is sick, and tired. Mostly he sleeps and reads. But he likes to think that he is still master of the house, and we let him think so.”

Corinna asked, “Who else lives here?”

“Me,” said Jonathan, “and Kathy. And my brother Simon.”

We heard, then, from back inside the house, a wailing call, a woman’s voice. Jonathan tensed. “That’s Kathy,” he said.

“Take us there,” said Elspeth.

They had her trussed up in the old way, lying flat on the bed, with sheet strips hanging limp and ready for her to pull upon. She was breathing in raggedy chops. When we came in, she scrabbled for a sheet to cover herself, as if there were something to be ashamed of in being ready to give birth! It made me angry, but I pushed the anger out. It is not a useful tool to deal with fear. She was looking at us with wild eyes, as if her fear and Jonathan’s fear for her had driven her a little mad.

I sat down on the chair by the bed. “Hello,” I said. I took her hand. It was cold, despite the heat of the room. She gripped my fingers as if she would tear them off.

“Can you help me?”

“We came to help you,” I said. “Jonathan brought us. My name is Jubilee. That is Elspeth. The tall woman is Ruth, and the short one is Corinna.”

“She is small, too,” said Kathy.

“Yes,” said Elspeth, over my shoulder, “and so am I small, but I have three children.” I tried to get up to give Elspeth my seat, but Kathleen kept hold of my fingers so tightly—”You sit, Jubilee,” Elspeth said. “You are doing fine.” I was pleased. I have seen births before, of course, even difficult ones. But this was different. Elspeth was really saying to me:
I trust you not to make a mistake.
That is a real compliment from one’s mother.

Just then Kathleen gripped my hand so painfully that I wanted to yell, too. Her fingers were thin as twigs—but strong! “It hurts!” she cried.

“Let me see,” Elspeth said. I moved my chair. She drew the covering away, and put her head between Kathy’s drawn- up legs. Then she straightened up and laid a hand gently on the woman’s belly. Kathleen moaned—from fear, I think, not because it hurt. Why should it? “Your pains just started, right?”

“Yes,” said Kathleen.

“Are they close together?”

“N-no.”

“Good,” said Elspeth. “Very good. I don’t think this is going to be as hard as you think.”

Jonathan came up to the bed. “You hear that, Kathy?” he said.

I let Jonathan have my seat (and Kathy’s hand). Her contractions were coming about every ten minutes, but I knew they could go on for hours like that. She didn’t know how to breathe; she was breathing with her neck and shoulders rigid and her belly tense. And she kept looking at Jonathan with this loving- guilty glance, as if she was ashamed of what was happening to her.

There was a sudden noise outside the door of the room, and it opened, hard, banging back against the wall. Kathleen shrank into the bed. A man walked in. Like Jonathan, he had red hair; it was the thing I noticed about him first of all. He looked at Kathy, and then at us, and then at Jonathan, who stood up.

“Hello, Simon,” he said.

“Who let
them
in here?”

“Papa said they could come,” said Jonathan.

The other man made a brushing motion with one hand. “Papa can barely see to piss,” he said. “You brought them.”

“Yes.”

Simon clenched a fist and stepped forward. Jonathan didn’t even put up his hands. The blow caught him on the side of the face and sent him back against the wall.

I saw Corinna move close to Elspeth.

“You ask me,” said Simon. He turned toward the bed. I could smell his sweat. “Kathleen,” he said. “You want them here?”

“Yes, Simon. Please.” He stared at her. Her hands were twisting the sheet. Her breasts were bare. She didn’t cover them up.

“They can stay,” he said. “For the baby—they can stay.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Jonathan waited until Simon left before he moved. Then he came and sat in the chair by the bed and reached for Kathleen’s hand. “We shall have to go away,” he said. “When the baby is born, Kathy, we’ll go away.”

Kathleen tensed, and then cried out softly, as a contraction came and went. “Not now,” she said. “Not now.”

Jonathan was little help, but we couldn’t tell him to get out. Elspeth let me sit with Kathleen, talk to her, rub her back, and show her a little about breathing. Her water broke, and it made her feel better. The contractions began to come faster, and that made her feel better, too. “I just don’t want it to last too long,” she said. She tried to breathe like I told her, what we call sea breathing, long and steady, rising with the contraction. “Hours and hours, they say. I can stand anything as long as it doesn’t last too long.” Every once in a while Elspeth came to look at her and reassure her. “Please,” Kathy said to her, “keep him out.”

“Who?” Elspeth asked.

“Simon. Keep him out.”

Jonathan looked hard at her. Then he looked away, at the floor.

She was in labor for about twenty four hours. We stayed, of course. She gripped my hand, and talked to me. “We’re all alone. The old man’s crazy, writing his words all over the walls. No one comes here anymore... Jonathan visited Ephesus. I’ve never been there. We farm. There’s no one here to talk to. Who will the baby play with here? All alone...” Jonathan sat in the room and grew paler and paler. Every so often Elspeth sent him out to get himself or one of us water or food.

Around four in the morning, I went out for a breath of air. Simon was there. He saw me and came over to me. “She’s all right.” It was not a question but a demand. “And the baby?”

“Still coming. Everything seems fine.” I tried to sound sure, as Elspeth always sounds sure, even when she is saying “I don’t know.”

“It’s too long.”

“Not for a first labor.”

“Is my brother in there now?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He turned and made for the house. I followed him.

He went right into Kathy’s room. She was wet with sweat and some tears, but she had learned that it made it worse to fight the pain and was trying to ride it out. Jonathan was not there. Simon bent over her. She put up a hand to thrust him off. “Get out of here!” she said with lovely fierceness. “I don’t need you now.”

“Bitch,” he said to her, “the baby’s mine. You can say it now. He’s mine.”

She slowly shook her head from side to side. “No,” she said. “It’s Jonathan’s.”

“Jonathan was away in September,” he said. “All month.”

“It’s early,” she said. “Eight months. Happens all the time.”

“You can’t know that,” he said angrily. “You’re just saying it.”

“I’ll say it,” she said. “And say it and say it and say it.” A contraction came. She breathed it down. They were coming every three minutes now. “Get out.”

I thought he would hit her. But then he whirled and left the room, nearly knocking Elspeth down. Jonathan was just outside the doorway and moved aside to give him room.

At last the baby began to move fast. I always imagine it as a little worm, pushing and shoving down the birth canal, even though I know that’s not what happens at all. As the head crowned, Kathy screamed, a wide open-throated yell of triumph. The baby slid into Elspeth’s hands. I was ready with the bath. In the warm water Elspeth stroked him, and he smiled, and we brought him to Kathy so she could see that luminous ecstatic smile of the newborn. Jonathan, who had been almost fainting, pulled himself together and came to look. “A boy,” he said. “I must tell Papa.”

Kathy said, “I want to wash.” We brought her a towel and a clean sheet. She wiped the sweat from her face and neck and breasts, and held out her arms for her son—and Simon came in.

“Let me see him.”

Jonathan stood in his way. “Simon,” he said, “go away. Leave us with our son.”

Simon laughed at him. “
Your
son,” he said, with contempt. “Mine, Jonny. Who do you think kept Kathy sheltered from the cold, September, while you were away buying supplies in Ephesus? Papa?”

Jonathan’s face worked like a child’s. “It doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “Kathy’s
my
wife.”

Simon stepped up to him and pushed him. “
You
go,” he said. “Go keep Papa company, him and his books. He’ll be all that’s left, when winter comes. Kathy and I’ll be gone.”

Jonathan flailed at him like a windmill, all arms.

Kathy grabbed for the baby as Simon fell across the bed. Simon sprang up again and lunged for Jonathan. The baby started to howl. The two men struggled, panting, Simon cursing. Jonathan had his hands around Simon’s throat. Simon seized the oil lamp from the table and struck at Jonathan, once, twice—and the third time Corinna caught his arm and twisted the weapon away, very calmly, just as if it were practice.

Jonathan’s cheek was bleeding. Oil slithered across his throat and his shirt. He lurched and fell down suddenly, and just lay there. I could see a crease across his skull, where the metal base of the lamp had hit him.

Simon looked down at him. He looked young, and afraid, and dreadfully like Jonathan.

The door opened. The old man stood there. “Jonathan,” he said. He looked at Simon. His voice was very hard. “Go away,” he said.

Simon said hoarsely, “I’m going nowhere.”

The old man took a step. “You will go. This is my house. I built it, with my two hands. Now it is stained—” His voice fumbled with that word, then picked up cadence again. “You
will
go.” He pulled the door open with one hand. “Leave now.”

Simon might have fought or defied another man. But with all of us looking on, and the force suddenly back in his father’s voice, as it had not been for a long time, maybe, and his brother dead by his hand, he couldn’t. He walked through the door, and we heard him go down the hall.

The father knelt. He tried to turn the body. Blood and oil smeared his hands. He looked up at us, and then spoke directly to Ruth. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “would you help me bury my son?”

They dug a grave for him, back of the house. We waited. Later Ruth told me about it, crying a little in the circle of my arms. “He talked to me about the farm, and how much work needed to be done on it before the winter, and how hard it would be, now that he was alone. He didn’t mention Simon’s or Jonathan’s name, once.”

After they finished the burial, the old man disappeared for a while. I heard hammering. I went toward it. It was him—he was hammering a piece of wood onto the door of Kathy’s room, an old piece of wood chalked with a word.

The word was
Whore.

Kathy would not open her door to us. Ruth raged at Elspeth for leaving. “How can you leave her there? With a newborn baby, and that hideous old man?”

Elspeth would only say, “She has to make her own choices.”

We passed the old barn. For a moment I thought I saw someone standing in its doorway. We passed the last of the markers and went round a bend in the road—and Kathy was standing there, with the baby in her arms.

“Here!” she said. “Take him!”

Automatically Elspeth’s arms went out. I grabbed the corked jug just as Kathy let that go. It dropped into my hands.

“Ephesus will be better for him than Upper Misery,” she said. She pointed to the jug. “That’s milk.”

“Come with us,” urged Ruth. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Simon’s in the barn,” Kathy said. “Skulking there. The old man will forget his strength soon. Simon will come back. I used to be Jonathan’s wife—I’m still Simon’s whore.”

* * *

We took him with us, of course. We named him Nathan: it means “gift.” He is going to live with Josepha—she says she always has enough milk for two. Did I say that he had red hair?

But Ruth and I keep thinking about Kathy, alone in that house, with Simon and that old man. We have talked about it. Ruth has decided: She wants to be an amazon. So we will be able to travel anywhere, just the two of us by ourselves.

One day, after winter is over, we will take that road again, to come home.

Kathy had said to me: “I can stand anything, as long as it doesn’t last too long.”

She will come. I am sure of it. She will come.

The Circus That Disappeared

Theodore Sturgeon once said, in my hearing, “Everyone has a circus story.” I figured he ought to know. But
I
didn’t—until I saw a squib in the newspaper which informed me that a circus in Britain (not a large country, after all) had been missing, lock, stock, and elephant, for three days. My imagination started to churn. Later I read that they found it, but by then I didn’t want to know. After the story was published I got a letter from someone who had worked in a circus, praising me for having conveyed the authentic carnival flavor. I was very pleased, because I hadn’t been in or near a circus for 20 years. But I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.