She didn’t say anything. I changed my mind and decided to pull the broken leg out of the creek after all. She might lose it from freezing.
“If it gets to hurting too much, put it back in the water.”
Maurey nodded.
I touched her shoulder, then scrambled up the steep bank. Maurey’s voice came small and frightened. “Sam?”
“What, hon?”
“Thanks.”
It would have been faster if I’d gone back up the far bank for my left shoe. By the time I reached the ranch, my foot bled like Maurey’s leg. The cowdog Simon chased me the last thirty feet up to the ranch house, so knocking on the door was out.
I blew into a room with Buddy and Hank squared off at a linoleum table, both cradling cups of coffee. Petey shoved trucks off kindling next to the wood stove.
“Maurey fell, she’s hurt.” I bent over and held my knees.
Hank recovered first. “Where?”
“Up the creek, a quarter mile, a half mile, I don’t know. Her leg’s broke and her crotch is bleeding.”
Buddy was on his feet and moving, gathering rope, sheets, his knife, something from under the sink. Hank ran to his truck and brought back a hatchet. If you ever have an emergency, have it around cowboys.
“Exactly where is she?” Buddy asked.
“She fell off a log over the creek, past the third beaver dam.”
“The warm springs?”
I nodded. “Maurey said you didn’t know about it.”
“How bad’s the bleeding?”
“Not much blood, but lots of clear stuff.”
Hank glanced at Buddy. “She broke her water.”
Buddy’s bushy head went up and down. “Sounds like a tear in the placenta. Watch Petey while we’re gone.” He threw some towels in a day pack and they left.
Lydia did thirty-nine hours of labor before I was born. “It was Nazi torture,” she told me. “Ninety-seven degrees and Deep South humidity. Contractions for days. The nurses hated me for being young and rich. I turned into a cat, spitting on them whenever they touched me.”
“Nurses are supposed to be compassionate.”
Lydia made a forceful “
“Sounds like a confrontation.”
“I screamed for eight hours. They tied my arms down but I bit the iron-cunt in the shoulder blade. The Negro orderly slapped me till I let go.”
Lydia said the doctor gassed her about three centimeters too soon just to shut her up, then he and Caspar went out for barbecue and one of the nurses delivered me.
“That slimey-balled doctor charged full price for delivery and he wasn’t even there. He was off licking his fingers with Daddy.”
“But after all that agony, look what you have now,” I said.
“What?”
“Me, aren’t I worth it?”
“Sam, nobody is worth giving birth.”
Shannon was born at 1:45 the next morning. I’ll never figure where Maurey came up with the name Shannon, but it’s pretty and Shannon herself is beautiful as sunshine.
Buddy and I sat on bruised peach-colored plastic chairs in the waiting room playing Chinese checkers. The nurses hadn’t known exactly what stance to take where I was concerned. Little girls had had babies in the Jackson hospital before, only not with little-boy fathers doing the pace thing outside with the little girl’s father, especially little-boy fathers wearing no shirt and only one shoe. Someone found an orderly smock-looking shirt small enough to more or less fit, but I ended up taking off my right shoe and sock so my feet would match. The left foot was a cut and bruised mess that no one offered to fix. I guess if you aren’t a patient they don’t worry with you.
About midnight, one of the nurses brought out a box of toys they kept for kids getting their tonsils out. I’d read both lobby
The interesting thing about Chinese checkers was watching Buddy handle the marbles. He was so big, and his fingers were even bigger and rougher proportionally than Buddy, it was hard to picture him being concerned with something small as a marble. The man needed large concepts—stallions, freedom, wilderness—not trivialities. Although he did play a mean Chinese checkers. Once I explained the rules, the man was unstoppable.
At first, Buddy hadn’t wanted me at the hospital. He and Hank carried Maurey into the ranch house with her leg in a splint and a wad of towels between her thighs. She was drained white, silent, smiling weakly when she looked at me but not looking at me much.
The plan was for Hank to take Petey to Aunt What’s-Her-Name’s while Buddy drove Maurey to Jackson in the Chevelle. Good thing Annabel was in the nuthouse or they’d of had to cram Maurey into a truck cab.
After they fit her in the backseat, I hopped in to hold her steady on the dirt road.
Buddy said, “You go to town with Hank.”
“I’m staying.”
He stared at me for about five seconds, which made me jumpy, so I tucked a Hudson Bay blanket around Maurey’s waist and good leg and pretended it was a done deal and staring at me with black-bead eyes didn’t matter.
Finally, he said, “Okay.” Maurey didn’t indicate what she wanted from me. She was going into shock.
Halfway between GroVont and Jackson, moving eighty miles an hour, Buddy said, “When I was your age I wouldn’t have passed it up either.”
I glanced at his beard in the rearview mirror. “I love her, Mr. Pierce.”
He swallowed. “I had to be a father; it was my job.”
“She understands.”
Maurey’s hand squeezed mine real hard as another spasm came on. Sweat trickled from her hairline, down her face, and disappeared behind her neck. Her blue eyes stared up at the ceiling. I tried to count between blinks, but gave up at forty-five.
The first twenty minutes at the hospital were frenzied with efficient people running in and out of the emergency room. A man hooked Maurey up to a bag of blood while a woman gave her a pain shot in the rear. When it came time to set her leg, the doctor kicked me out. I said, “No, Maurey needs me,” but the doctor growled like a big dog so I left.
After that, we’re talking seven hours of vacuum time, waiting on the outside, climbing walls on the inside. Buddy talked to me some. He told me about the army and art school and Annabel crying every minute of the drive to the hospital in Salt Lake.
“I can’t comprehend anyone that I love,” Buddy said.
“I know what you mean.”
It’s amazing what people will say in crises—even cowboys.
Sitting in that stupid puke-colored chair, staring at “Humor in Uniform” for an hour without getting any of the jokes, I made a conscious effort to think like a person who doesn’t put himself at the head of the universe.
Caspar had control and he had a right to control. He took the stern-hand-on-a-naughty-child approach because Lydia and I had done nothing but screw up since before I was born. Let’s face the truth here: to a person of Caspar’s generation, knocking up a thirteen-year-old is irresponsible behavior no matter how much love is
