Nickel Mountain (11 page)

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Henry said. His voice was quiet, so quiet it surprised him. It was like a woman's voice. The old man looked at him, and Henry could hear the noise of the starlings half-a-mile up the mountain.

The corners of Doc's mouth twitched back. “Now, you listen here. Somebody was gonna bring it up sooner or later, whether it's the truth or not, and there's people could be a lot meaner about it than me. You get use to hearing it, boy, get use to it. It's for your own good; you take my advice.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Henry said again, a whisper this time. He leaned toward the car and touched the door handle. He felt sweat prickling. The dog appeared beside the diner, ears lifted, watching.

Doc Cathey counted out his money with his thumb clamped down so hard on the bills that they almost tore as he pulled each dollar free. Henry took the money and didn't count it. The old man switched on the ignition and ground on the starter button. A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I'm just trying to help out,” he said. “You know that. Don't be a damn mule.” Henry didn't say a word, and after a minute the old man rammed the car into gear and out onto the highway, spattering gravel. The dust he stirred up hung in the air, mixing with the smells of gasoline and exhaust fumes; then, very slowly, it settled.

Henry went in, moving automatically, looking up the highway toward the hill. In the sticky heat of the diner he rang up the price of the old man's gas, not looking at the register, bent over it but not looking at it, and then, knowing what he was going to do and knowing he would have to fix it, he closed his two hands around the age-dry sides of the cash drawer and bent the wood outward until it split and broke away. Change fell out and hit the floor and rolled, ringing. His chest burned white hot. After a minute Callie came up and stood behind him, not speaking at first. He pulled at his lip. She said, “Have you gone crazy or something?” She waited. “Henry, go take a nap or something. You act like you've gone crazy.” She spoke slowly and evenly, keeping back from him.

“Callie,” he said. His voice cracked. He thought for a split-second of his father's voice.

They looked at each other, and then she looked out at the pumps, or past them. Her lips were puffy from the dryness of August. “I can manage out here. Go on.” She didn't come any nearer. That afternoon Henry went hunting. He shot three crows, and it took him till after dark.)

He pulled out of his bathrobe and slippers and crawled into bed and snapped off the bedlamp. He lay there awake, or lay there believing he was awake, breathing shallowly. Two hours later, at seven, the labor pains started, and Callie said, “Henry!” She shook him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that she had been up for some time. She was dressed up as if for church, even wearing her hat.

It was the twenty-ninth of December and the road to Slater was ice-packed and banked by gray drifts. The sky over the mountains was as gray as the snow, and there wasn't so much as a sparrow moving on a telephone wire, and not a trace of wind. Black telephone poles stood out sharply against the gray all around them, pole after pole, a series winding downward as if forever. He was conscious of them as he passed them; even when he thought about other things, his body registered the rhythm of the telephone poles going by.

Callie looked at her watch once or twice on the way, timing the pains. She sat too close to the rattling door.

“Holding up all right?” he said.

“ 'Course I am, Henry. You?”

His right hand let go of the steering wheel as he shrugged. “I'm fine. Jim dandy.” He laughed. It was so cold in the car that their breath made steam. He pulled at the toggled wire heater control and the heater fan clanked into motion.

The tamaracks up on the mountains were bare, like dead pines. This year—every year—the bareness looked final. He let his hand fall to the seat between them, and after a minute, as if she'd thought it over first, Callie touched his fingers. Her hand was warm. The warmth surprised him, seemed out of place, mysterious.

The road curved sharply and they reached the bridge into town.

2

The waiting room at the hospital was small and cluttered—coffee cups, floor ash trays, magazines. It was like the lobby of a cheap hotel. The wall paint was dark with age, and up on the wall over the magazine table a stuffed owl stood staring on a hickory limb.

The woman at the desk said, “I'm sorry, but, just as I've told you, we have to collect when the patient enters.” She looked them over.

Henry pulled at the fingers of one hand. He leaned forward and said, “I'll have to go home for the damn money then. But you've got to let my wife in right now. She's in labor.”

“Don't cuss, Henry,” Callie said. She smiled at the woman.

The woman at the desk said, “It's a hospital rule. I'm sorry.” She was big-jawed and had colorless, close-set eyes.

“Write them a check, Henry,” Callie said.

Henry wet his lips. He looked at the woman and hunted through his pockets for the checkbook he never carried with him, then took the blank check the woman slid across the desktop and filled it out. She held it up to look at it. She was suspicious, but she said: “Through the double doors and turn right and straight down the hall to the end. Mr. Soames, you wait here if you like.”

Callie smiled at her again, politely, looking through her.

For fifteen minutes Henry sat with his hands clasped together, leaning forward under the stuffed owl, and every now and then he turned his head to look for the doctor, but he didn't come. A young nurse came up, with her square head slung forward and down like a bull's but her mouth was gentle, and led him to the labor room and opened the door for him. Henry went in. It was a drab green room with two beds, one of them empty, and shelves along one side of the room, with bedpans, washpans, colored bottles, towels, sealed gray bags. At the far end of the room there was a window, and he could look out and see dirty snow and a street and old houses and a dark, thick pine.

“You all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Has the doctor come?”

“Not yet.” He pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down.

“It's all right,” she said. “He'll come.” Henry slid his hand under hers and she patted it and looked out the window.

He held her fingers, feeling the warmth, and after an hour he got up and got the dominoes out of her suitcase and dumped them on the bedside table. Henry still held her hand as they played. Every five or six minutes she looked away and shut her eyes, and Henry stared at the dominoes, feeling out as if with his hands their gray, cracked surfaces and yellowing dots. They'd belonged to his mother and father. A car started up on the street right outside the window and then another one farther down, and a boy carrying a box moved past on the sidewalk, running four steps, sliding, running four steps, sliding; then two men passed in long coats. Directly across the street an old woman backed out of her front door dragging a faded Christmas tree with bits of tinsel still clinging to the branches. The doctor didn't come. A nurse came and took Callie's pulse and put her hand on Callie's stomach, then left. The pains were sharper now but not closer together. Henry stacked the dominoes neatly and put them away in their battered white tiebox and fastened the rubber band. Sweat prickled under his arms.

“You all right?” he said.

She nodded.

At eleven o'clock the doctor came in and examined her.

When he came out to the hallway where Henry stood waiting he didn't say how she was. He put his hand on Henry's arm, smiling, looking at Henry's forehead, and said, still holding onto the arm: “You had your breakfast yet?”

Henry nodded without thinking. “How long will it be?”

The man tipped his head down, the smile still there, and he looked as if he were thinking it over. But he was studying the pattern in the floor, moving his gaze tile by tile down the hall. “No telling,” he said. “It's a beautiful day for it.” He waved toward the windows at the end of the hall. Sunlight streamed through the diamond-shaped panes and gleamed on the brown and white tiles and on the leaves of wilting plants in the planter by the desk.

Henry kept from moving, because of the hand on his arm. He said, “Will it be today, then, you think?”

“It'll come,” the doctor said. “Don't worry yourself. It's all right, I've been through it too.” He winked slowly, the way a woman would, and gripped Henry's arm more tightly, then left, walking with his toes pointing outward, his head tilted to one side and back. Henry went in again. He stood heavily, balanced on his heels, his fingertips in his tight hip pockets, watching a pain take her. Then he sat down by the bed. “Poor Callie,” he said. She frowned and met his eyes as though he were a stranger, then turned her face away.

He looked for a long time at the side of her face, the line of her jaw, and he felt somehow uneasy, guilty, the way he felt on the long afternoons when he sat in the diner watching cars and trucks and buses pass on the highway, glittering in the sunlight, not stopping. He would feel uneasy, for some reason guilty, as though it were his fault they didn't pull in, but then evening would come, suppertime, and somebody would come—truckers, or somebody like George Loomis, who would talk about things he'd seen in the Service—he had spells when he came sometimes four, five times a week, maybe because he lived all alone in that big old house—or Lou Millet would come, with gossip—or sometimes Willard Freund. But not Willard any more. Henry locked his fingers together and looked at the floor. Callie pretended to sleep.

At seven that night Doc Cathey came in with coffee and sandwiches. “Henry, you look worse'n her,” he said. He opened his eyes wider, as if it helped him focus, and the loose red netting on the whites made Henry look down. “I bet you ain't eaten a bite all day long.”

“I'm all right,” Henry said.

Doc Cathey ignored him, holding Callie's wrist, ignoring her, too, taking her pulse and watching the door as if he were afraid they'd run him out if they caught him. Callie compressed her lips and Doc Cathey glanced at her, then slid his hand under the bedclothes and onto her stomach. “She ain't moved it down much,” he said to the room in general. “Looks like what they call primary inertia, maybe stiff cervix.” He looked at Henry. “You told Costard she's a bleeder?”

Henry nodded. “He said he'd give her some kind of vitamin.”

Doc Cathey scowled and looked at the door again. “He will if he remembers. They don't know one damn patient from another. Eat your sandwiches, Henry.” He looked back at Callie and grunted. “You lie here and keep at it a while, girl. See Henry gets some sleep.”

He went to the door and stood there, hunchbacked, looking at the doorknob. “She's Rh negative too, ain't she? What's—” he paused “—the daddy?”

Callie said, “Henry's negative.”

Nobody spoke for a minute. Henry sucked in his loose upper lip and felt the quick light ticking of his heart. The old man didn't move. Henry said, “That's right.”

Callie leaned up on one elbow and said, “Anyway, it doesn't matter on the first one. The doctor said so.”

Doc Cathey peeked at her over the rims of his glasses, then at Henry. “May be,” he said. “That may be. They know everything, these fancy city doctors.” He shook his head. “You've thought up every complication I know of, you two.”

Callie asked, “How much longer you think it will be?”

“Lord knows. If your insides are froze up like I think, it'll take a good long while yet, maybe two days.”

Callie lay back again. She closed her eyes, and Henry leaned toward her, groping with one hand for the foot of the bed, watching her face. Her mouth was closed and her nostrils were narrow, as if she'd stopped breathing. After a minute she said, almost in a whisper: “It's the waiting that's so awful.” She opened her eyes and looked at Henry, then closed them again and moved her head from side to side on the pillow. Her lips tightened, then relaxed. Henry touched her foot.

Out in the hall Henry asked, “Will it pain her much?”

“Maybe a little,” the old man said. “Maybe a good deal.” He fiddled with his hearing aid and watched Henry out of the corner of his eye, with a smile like a grimace. “She'll get tired, and her insides'll likely rip all to hell.” Then he said, “Worried about her, ain't you?” He went on smiling and watching him. Henry closed his right hand and the nails bit into the palm.

“ 'Course I am. Anybody'd worry,” he said. “She's my wife.”

Doc Cathey pushed one hand down into his coat pocket and closed the other over Henry's arm. “ 'Course they would.” The queer smile was still there.

When Henry went back, Callie lay facing away from the door. She didn't say a word as he came in.

3

Callie slept and Henry stood at the window watching darkness settle in. Lights went on in the front room of the house across the street, and down at the end of the block the supermarket neon blazed pink and blue,
Miller's.
It began to snow again as he watched—big, light flakes that dropped onto branches and hung there as more flakes fell, mounding up. A boy passed on the sidewalk, pushing a bicycle, and four women got off the bus at the corner and came up the street slowly, carrying packages. None of them looked toward the hospital as they passed. Down on the supermarket parking lot there were cars and farm trucks parked, some of them with their taillights on, glowing like a few last scattered coals in a furnace. People moved around on the lot and inside the supermarket, on the other side of the full-length windows, and on the sidewalks beyond the lot—children, grown-ups, old people—a hundred or more in all. He pursed his lips. It was queer, now that he thought of it, how many people there were in the world, moving around, hurrying—in Slater, in Athensville, Utica, Albany, down in New York City—millions of 'em moving around, bent forward a little against the snow. He sipped the coffee Doc Cathey had brought and then he stood looking again, holding the cup in his two hands, feeling its warmth under his curled fingers. Millions and millions of people, he thought. Billions. His mind couldn't seem to get hold of it. Callie groaned and half-wakened, and he set down the cup and went to her and fitted his two hands around the small of her back and pressed in as Lou Millet had told him he'd done with his wife to ease the pain. She breathed deeply again; her breathing was the only sound in the room.