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  After a long time I saw Avery get up from his sleeping bag and go over and start poking around in the fire. Then Malcolm came out from the tent and joined him and I decided to go on down. I wanted to climb farther up and maybe build a lean-to out of vines but I decided they’d get mad at me, so I started back down the path to the camp.

  Chapter

  21

  Eight and a half months later I woke up in the surgical recovery room of the Dunleith General Hospital and it was over. I woke up screaming for my baby. “Where’s my baby? I had a baby inside of me. A great big baby. I saw it on the X ray. Where is it? Why don’t they show it to me? Give me my baby. Granny, make them give it to me.” My father was outside a glass window and there were tubes and wires and I was going to die of thirst. “Give me a drink of water. Make them give me some water. I have to have some water and I want my baby. I want to see my baby. Somebody better bring my baby to me.” I tried to meet my father’s eyes. I screamed louder. Surely he could hear me. Then a second nurse came in and laid a piece of wet gauze across my lips and lifted my arm and gave me a shot. Then the terrible thirst disappeared and the terrible backache that had lasted for days and I slept and woke again in the late afternoon. This time I was more cunning. I decided to beg. “Please let me see my baby. I only want to look at him. Let me look at him. He’s dead, isn’t he? There’s something wrong with him. If he was okay, you would let me see him. Put a piece of wet cloth on my lips. I won’t suck the water out. I swear I won’t. Please give me some water. Is my father here? Where did my father go? Where is Doctor Freer? Is he coming to take care of me?” The light passed away from the high windows of the room. It seemed I had been on that bed for several days. It seemed so many hours had gone by. Why didn’t my father return and save me? Where had my grandmother gone? Why wouldn’t they give me any water?

  I drifted down into a dark sleep and nurses came and put wet cloths on my lips and when they turned away I would suck the moisture out.

  Malcolm and I had come back to Dunleith in June to wait for the baby to arrive. He was supposed to come in August, but he couldn’t wait. One Sunday in July he began to be born. Upside down and one foot first, my body began to push him out into the world. We were at a picnic on Finley Island and my mother and my sister-in-law took me to the hospital. At eight o’clock that night Doctor Freer called in a surgeon and they rolled me into an operating room and put me to sleep on sodium pentothal and cut him from my womb and put him in an incubator.

  They had asked me if they could. After hours of pain, Doctor Freer had come into the room and said, “Rhoda, we’re going to have to take the baby. We’re going to do a cesarean section.”

  “Does that mean I’m going to sleep? Does it mean it will stop hurting me?”

  “Yes. In a few moments you’ll be asleep.”

  “Good. I don’t care. Do anything you want to do.”

  Then, what seemed an eternity later, I was alone in a gray room begging for water. By the time that night came I was sure the baby was dead. If the baby was alive they would have let me see him, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they? Then my mother was beside the bed and they moved me onto a stretcher and rolled me through the halls and Malcolm appeared and took my hand and kissed me and they lifted me onto a bed and someone tucked the sheets around my legs. Then a huge black woman appeared in the door with a tiny little bundle in her hand. She held it out to me. She put it into my arms and I looked down into the face of my first son. A little boy, so beautiful and perfect that forever afterward the thought of him could break my heart. A little five-pound preemie with a face so beautiful and perfect, with black eyes and golden hair, with such perfect little feet and hands, that I trembled with joy to touch him and I put him to my breast and let him suck. My milk came in very quickly. It seemed there was always milk for him and he knew how to suck it out. Later, with the others, I would have to coax and teach them, but not with this first perfect little boy. He knew what he wanted and he got it. He would suck fiercely at one breast, then at the other, and lie in my arms so quietly I was not certain he was breathing. He ate and slept, ate and slept.

  “I didn’t know anything could be so beautiful,” I said to him. “How could you be so beautiful? Aren’t you glad we lived? We almost died, Little Malcolm. We almost died, you and me, but we didn’t, did we? We wouldn’t die. We wouldn’t let anything destroy us.” I whispered to him as he fed. I was overwhelmed with tenderness and a strange terrible unknown joy.

  Everyone who came to see him said he was the most beautiful child they had ever seen. “That’s the prettiest baby I ever saw,” my mother said, and Aunt Celeste, and Aunt Roberta, and even old Doctor Freer, who should have retired years before, was jealous of the surgeon he had called in to do the operation and took the stitches out himself a few days later. He would come into my room every morning on his rounds and sit beside the bed and watch the baby. It was out of fashion to breast feed babies in 1957 but Doctor Freer had insisted I do it because he was so small. “You must feed him at your breast,” he kept telling me. “I don’t know why the women have stopped doing this. It’s the best food for him. We can’t take a chance on him losing weight.”

  “Isn’t he wonderful?” I would say every morning. “Isn’t he the prettiest baby you’ve ever seen?”

  “He’s a fine healthy boy. You gave us a scare, Rhoda. You sure gave us a scare.”

  “He’s gained three ounces. He’s gaining every day. He’s getting bigger. When can we go home?”

  “Wait until Saturday. You can go home then.” He patted my hair, patted the baby’s matching hair. “I almost tried to deliver him but it would have caused you too much pain. It might have broken his leg. You’re a fine healthy girl, a strong girl. The Mannings all are tough. I knew you’d make it.” He bent over me to watch the baby nurse. The smell of A&D ointment was everywhere. In a fury of mothering I rubbed it on my nipples by the handfuls. In all probability the baby was drinking about a fifty-fifty mixture of breast milk and A&D ointment. “Be sure and clean that ointment off before you feed him,” Doctor Freer said. “Did the nurse show you how?”

  “I do. They showed me.”

  “What does his father think of him?”

  “He likes him. He won’t pick him up though. He’s afraid to pick him up.”

  “He’ll get braver. When you get him home.”

  “Well, I don’t care. Dudley picked him up. He went into the nursery. Did you hear about that?”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yeah. He has two girls now. He wants a boy so much.”

  “Did you name him yet?”

  “He’s named Malcolm, of course. He’s named for his father. We always name boys for their fathers.” I bent down to the baby. Touched his hand, touched his cheek.

  “Don’t wake him up. Let him sleep.” Doctor Freer kissed my cheek, kissed the baby’s head, kissed my hand. “I’m proud of you, Rhoda. You’re a fine girl. A brave girl.”

  “I just wanted to go to sleep. I didn’t care what you did if you put me to sleep. I love you for taking care of me. For saving us. I really love you. I really do.”

  “I have to go and make my rounds. I’ll stop back in tomorrow. Be sure and wash the ointment off.”

  “I will. I do.” He left the room and left me there. The sun came in the windows onto baskets of flowers. Everyone had sent me flowers. And I had given birth to a boy. An heir. A grandson for my father. I sank back into the pillows. The only thing wrong was the way Malcolm was acting. He only came to the hospital late in the afternoon after he got through working. He was working for my father on a road job and he would go home and bathe and dress and not get to the hospital until almost seven o’clock. Then he would only stay a little while and he wouldn’t touch the baby. “He sure is little, isn’t he?” he kept saying. “He sure is small.”

  “He’s beautiful,” I would answer. “He’s perfect. He’s the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  And every night after he
kissed me gingerly on the cheek and left the room and went away I would turn over into the pillow and cry for a long time. My stomach hurt at night and I was still fat and my husband didn’t even want to kiss me.

  Chapter

  22

  The day after I got home from the hospital we had a real fight. I was set up in my mother’s bedroom with the baby crib beside me and a nurse at my beck and call. My parents had moved into the guest room until I was “on my feet.” It was a Saturday morning and Malcolm was standing at the foot of my bed buttoning his shirt. Charles William and Irise had just called from Arizona where they were spending a second summer at Taliesin. Charles William had told me a joke on the phone and I was repeating it to Malcolm. “Poontang,” I said, laughing uproariously at the punch line.

  “Don’t say that,” Malcolm said. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “What’s wrong? You didn’t think it’s funny?”

  “I don’t think it’s very attractive for a woman to say words like that. Especially when you have a baby.” He finished buttoning his shirt and began to adjust his belt. His body was perfect. His body looked like a Greek god. He wasn’t lying in a bed with his stomach hurting all night every night and fat all over the sides of his waist.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “Why are you getting so dressed up?”

  “I’m going to play golf with Dudley. I’m not dressed up. These are the only clothes I have.”

  “You’re going to play golf? I only got home yesterday. I haven’t even seen you. You’re going to go off and leave me here?”

  “I’m only going to play golf, Rhoda. I’ve been working sixteen hours a day on a road job, for God’s sake. This is my day off.”

  “Your day off. I’m lying in this bed and you won’t even stay here and keep me company. My God, I can’t believe it. You haven’t even picked up the baby yet. Jesus Christ.” I kicked off the covers and started getting up. It still hurt to go from sitting to standing but I was so mad now it didn’t matter. “Then I’m going somewhere too. I’m sick and tired of staying in this goddamn bed all day taking care of a baby.”

  “Rhoda.” It was my mother, hurrying into the room with the cook, Fannin, right behind her. “Rhoda, are you all right? Is something wrong? Is anything wrong with you?”

  “I want to go somewhere. Where are my clothes? I want my clothes. I want to go somewhere. I want to go to the beauty parlor.” I was starting to cry. All of a sudden I decided I was the ugliest person in the world. Fat all over the sides of my waist and milk dripping out of my nipples and my goddamn stomach hurting all the time. Malcolm was backing out of the room.

  “Oh, honey,” Fannin said and came around and held me in her arms. She wrestled me back into the bed and the nurse was right behind her. “I got you a little quail under glass that Mrs. Waits sent up from Aberdeen and your momma made you a devil’s food cake. Come on, honey, get back in the bed. You’ll curdle your milk getting upset like that.”

  “She’s right,” the nurse said. “We’re not out of the woods yet with this tiny baby. Get back in the bed, Rhoda.”

  “You can go somewhere tomorrow,” Malcolm said. He was to the door. He was leaving. “I’ll take you somewhere in the car tomorrow. I promise that I will.” Then he was gone and Momma and Fannin and the nurse got me back underneath the covers and Fannin brought up a tray with the quail and some ice cream and mashed potatoes and the cake. “It’s a shame it’s Saturday,” she said. “We got to wait till Monday to see some more of the story.”

  “I can’t wait to see what happens next,” I answered. We were talking about As the World Turns. Fannin and I had been watching it together all summer. “Ellen found out where her baby is. Did you know that? I saw it Thursday in the hospital. They have a TV in the lounge and they took me down in a wheelchair and let me see it.”

  “Yeah, I saw it yesterday when she went over to hide outside their house and look at it.”

  “You all were watching in the kitchen?”

  “We sure were. On that little television set your daddy got from Sears.”

  “That was so sad when she saw them carry it in the door. I was crying like a baby. God, it was sad. I think she’ll steal it back though. I’d steal it if it was mine. If anybody tried to take my baby, I’d kill them. I’d stab them in the heart.”

  “Why don’t she tell her daddy? Her daddy works at the same hospital.”

  “They can’t. They don’t want anyone to know. They think it’s a disgrace because she wasn’t married.”

  “She ought to tell her daddy.”

  “She ought to go over there and grab her baby and take it home. If it was Lisa’s, nobody would keep it from her.”

  “You’re right about that. That Lisa don’t let anybody mess with her.”

  “I wish it was on on Saturday. I wish they had it every day.”

  “So do I. Well, I guess you can read some magazines. Set over there and eat while I make this bed up for you. Then you can get back in and I’ll get you some magazines.” She moved my tray to a card table and helped me over to it. Then she pulled the covers off the bed and made it up with blue sheets and a pale blue satin blanket cover with lace on the edges. She fluffed up the pillows and tucked me back in and brought me a stack of Good Housekeeping and Redbook and Better Homes and Gardens magazines. Then she closed the blinds and drew the curtains. The nurse had gone to sleep in a reclining chair. The baby had slept through everything. “You get you a little sleep now,” Fannin said. “That baby’ll be waking pretty soon. You sleep so you can make some milk. Sweet little baby, sweet little ole boy.” She closed the last curtain and pulled the switch on the ceiling fan to slow it down. “You rest now, Rhoda. You too high-strung this morning for your own good. You got lots of time to be on your feet. All you got to do now is rest up so you can feed this baby.”

  I closed my eyes. The mahogany blades of the fan turned above me. The baby stirred in his crib, sighed, breathed. How large were the breaths he was taking? About the right size to fill a piece of bubble gum, I decided. I closed my eyes, imagining little bubble gum–sized breaths going in and out of his lungs. I slept awhile and woke up with him crying and picked him up and put him beside me in the bed and let him find a breast. The long pull started in my nipple and traveled all the way down to my vagina. It felt wonderful and he was wonderful and I patted his tiny head.

  I’ll get out of here before long, I told myself. I’ll get well and I’ll feel good and I’ll be myself again. It’s okay. I’m glad I had him. He’s so beautiful and perfect and now I have a son and Daddy has a grandson and even Dudley can’t give him that. Yes, it’s all right even if I have to be fat a few more days. As long as I NEVER NEVER NEVER do it again. If I get pregnant again I’ll stick a Coke bottle up my body and kill it. I’ll read that book again. What was it? An American Tragedy. All the ways to do it are in there but I didn’t read it closely enough. If I read it again I’ll figure out what it is you do. I think there’s something you can drink. Something you make out of vinegar or something and you drink it and it makes you start. I’ll ask Fannin. I bet Fannin knows. Someone knows. Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll just be so careful. I’ll always use the jelly and I’ll make him use a rubber and we’ll never take it off even if it doesn’t feel as good. He could make me come with his mouth if he wanted to. He could do it with his fingers. If he wasn’t so goddamn selfish all the time. He’s so mean. I can’t believe he went off with Dudley to play golf. I bet he’s out there with girls talking to them. Girls in bathing suits without any fat on their bodies. Well, I don’t care if he loves me or not. Who cares? He’s just a nobody. His daddy works in a hardware store. If it wasn’t for my father we would starve. Oh, God, now we have to go back to Atlanta and live in an apartment. Well, we’ll get a bigger one this time. I’ll tell Daddy to give us some more money. I want to go to sleep. I’ll just lie here beside my baby and I’ll sleep and tomorrow I can get up and ride my bike and start to get this goddamn fat off my waist.
r />   Chapter

  23

  It was three weeks later before I went on and said what I had been thinking about every day. It was the last of August. Almost time for Malcolm and me to pack up our baby and go back to Atlanta, Georgia, so he could finish school. It was late in the afternoon, a Saturday. My parents had gone to Aberdeen for the day and left us with the children. The baby was asleep in the crib. My little brothers were outside shooting baskets. Malcolm and I were entwined in each other’s arms. We had been making love for an hour with the fan slowly turning above the bed and the sweet hot August air blowing the curtains against the window frames. I had made him come twice and he had made me come three times and we were tired now. “This is it,” I said. “That’s the last baby I’ll ever have. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What? What do you mean? What are you saying now?”

  “That’s the only baby I’m ever going to have. If I get pregnant, I’ll have an abortion.”

  “No, you won’t.” He sat up in the bed. “Of course you won’t. What would make you say something like that?”

  “I can’t stand it. Every time we do it I think I’m going to get pregnant. It scares me to death. I’m not getting cut open again, Malcolm. I can’t stand it. There was blood everywhere. You’ve never seen so much blood. I keep dreaming about it.” He got out of bed and began to search for a cigarette. His body was so goddamn perfect. He could walk around a room naked and let anyone look at him from any angle. He found the cigarettes and lit one.

  “You say the goddamnedest things, Rhoda. Of course you won’t abort our child. It’s against the law. You could go to jail.”

  “People do it. There are ways. Hand me a cigarette, please.” He lit a second cigarette and handed it to me. “I mean it, Malcolm. If I get pregnant again I’ll have an abortion. I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand the idea of swelling up and dying. Why should I die? I’m only twenty-one years old, for God’s sake. What do you want? You’ve got a son. That’s all the goddamn babies I’m ever going to have.” I was out of bed now, looking for my clothes. I found a pair of underpants and pulled them on, then retrieved my shirt from the floor and shook it out. The baby began to cry. A small cry at first, then a scream. “Go see about him,” Malcolm said.