The Language of Paradise: A Novel (40 page)

Yes, she has had a false pain, and in a few minutes there’ll be another, and she will wake Gideon then and tell him he must get Mama in the morning. Calm and prepared.

The fire is only embers, but she gives it a poke and lowers herself into the rocking chair. Soon she’ll be nursing the baby in this very chair—a soothing thought. If they won’t let her sing, is humming permitted? Will the rhythm of rocking be enough of a lullaby? Five minutes must have passed by now. She wishes for the dependable click of the hall clock; here Gideon’s pocket watch is their only timepiece. Thoughts of home bring a powerful yearning for Mama. Sophy wants her with a pure infant’s need—would wail for her open-mouthed if she could. Mama said she would be here to bear it with her. How angry she’d be if she knew her hoyden daughter had danced . . .
Just like you to jog the little one loose before its time
. . . but all the while she’d bustle about, doing what needed to be done . . .

Pain yanks her spine straight, the cramp sharper now and more insistent, a poker through her innards. This time she screams.

“What? What is it?” Gideon starts up from his nest of covers and gropes for the lamp. She notes through her pangs that he looks comically like other men, his face bristling with two day’s growth of whiskers and hair standing up all over his head.

“Oh, no,” he says. “Please God, not now, not tonight. We’re not ready.”

GIDEON WILL FIND
that great swatches of the night are lost to memory. He is accustomed to residing in the interludes between events, those hushed, dimly lit receiving rooms where he can gather his thoughts. This night is all activity, from the moment he wakes to Sophy’s cry to the relentlessly approaching consummation.

He rushes into the parlor, shouting for help. Leander comes running, wide awake and hoisting up his trousers. “She is early,” he says, “but not so early that we should be alarmed.” He claps Gideon on the back, as if the two of them are about to embark on a long-anticipated adventure.

His manner changes when he goes to Sophy. He kneels before her and folds her hands in his. “Now you mustn’t be frightened,” he tells her. “Every soul that walks in the world has entered by this route. Think of that!” He glances at her bare feet, and, without hesitating, takes them in his hands and rubs them vigorously. “Blue with cold,” he says to Gideon. “Fetch some woolen stockings, would you?” Sophy accepts his attentions without protest; even, Gideon observes, with a kind of mute gratitude. He has longed for this; yet, for the first time since the three of them began to live together, he feels a needle of jealousy—of whom or what he isn’t sure. A new etiquette prevails tonight, and for this, too, he isn’t ready.

Lem is roused with difficulty from the mat near the kitchen hearth. The plan is for him to fetch Dr. Craddock while Leander collects Mrs. Hedge and Micah. Sophy is seized with another cramp, and all pretense of calm goes.

“For God’s sake, what if it happens while you’re gone?” Gideon says, near to weeping. “How will I know what to do?”

In the end, Lem is dispatched into the night swaddled in Leander’s scarves, with only a lantern to guide him. He is to walk first to the Hedges, and with family in tow, take the horse and wagon to the doctor’s, all returning together. “It’s a better plan,” Leander declares, seeing him off. “Simpler. The sun will be up in an hour or two—though you know this land so well you could find your way blindfold, couldn’t you, Lem?” The boy blinks and screws up his forehead, as if pondering the nature of the compliment.

By the time dawn arrives, bringing a blush to the blanched landscape, Sophy’s pains are coming every six minutes. No one tells you it is a kind of possession, Gideon thinks. Sophy is no longer Sophy. Her face is blotched with tears and sweat, however often they sponge her. Her hair hangs. She is too hot, then chilled to the bone; hungry, but can’t swallow more than a spoonful of broth. The respites aren’t long enough to relieve her. No sooner does one siege end than she lives in dread of the next, her mouth contorted and her eyes pleading for help he can’t give. She cries out for Fanny and begs her to hurry. She goes from bed to rocking chair and back to bed, as if she could escape her misery, and weeps when it grips her again.

Leander takes him aside. “Walk with her. I don’t hold with all this lying about, it does no one any good. While you walk, talk to her. Remind her of some tender moment in your courtship. Tell her she is young and healthy, and won’t remember a thing when she holds the baby in her arms.”

“How can you be so sure?” Gideon says with some bitterness. Leander’s confidence is beginning to grate on him. “It’s not as if you’ve had experience.”

“On the contrary, dear boy,” Leander says. “I had a wife once, in another life, another age. I know enough not to panic when there’s no cause.”

But he turns to the window, where he has stationed himself this last half hour, watching the snow turn from gray to pink, and drums his knuckles on the sill.

GIDEON WRAPS HIS ARM
about Sophy, and steers her slowly around the bedroom. She will not help him, she makes herself a dead weight, and he feels, in spite of himself, a trace of resentment. Do all women carry on so? It is not easy, under the circumstances, to make conversation. The blankness of his mind recalls the night of the Reverend’s accident—the last time he was asked to talk a person through pain. If a stream of Hebrew were to gush from him now, it wouldn’t be the least efficacious. But he does have a useful thought, though only one.

“Come, let’s get away from this room,” he tells her. “Let’s go to the glasshouse and watch the day come in. The day our child will be born.”

They walk into the pale, watery light of early morning. Baptismal, it seems to Gideon: the stains of last night’s festivities tenderly washed away, all things made new. But Sophy is looking at the candlesticks clotted with wax, the greenery sagging from its string or fallen to the floor during their exertions.

“This place will never be the same to me,” she says, very low.

“Why do you say that?”

As if he didn’t know what last night’s revels portended. Her paintings stacked in a corner, her easel propped against the wall. Soon her sanctuary will be a laboratory, he and Leander observing the infant and noting each advance of its consciousness, while she—what role had he assigned her? In his visions of their communal life she has been on the periphery, caring for the child’s physical needs and running the house, perhaps painting in her spare time. A well-trained servant, essential but invisible. He must find a way to draw her in, as Leander told him long ago. To honor her as she deserves. She is his wife, after all—his beloved Sophy. And the fact is, servants can be treacherous: prone to gossip, disloyal. Smiling to your face while plotting mutiny in their hearts.

Sophy gasps and clutches her back, and Gideon banishes those thoughts, ashamed of his own perfidy. First get the child born, and he will make it up to her. He is about to dredge up a memory of their early days in the study when he glimpses in the distance a bulky figure trudging toward them, stamping a neat seam of footprints across the snow. In the intensity of his relief, Gideon doesn’t think to question why Lem is still on foot, why he is alone.

He has carried the message all the way from the village, determined to deliver it intact, but his face is too stiff, his lips won’t form the words. Leander leads him to the kitchen fireplace and puts a steaming bowl of broth in his hands, unwinding his exotic wrappings while he drinks; the boy had balked at wearing “lady clothes,” even from his master, but had shed his pride along the way. With each swallow Lem makes a mewing sound in his throat, equal parts pleasure and pain. He upends the bowl over his face to catch the last drops.

“Doctor says Missus Reverend is poorly and he will come in the hour meantime ask Missus Teague failing that a neighbor.” He pauses for breath. “I went to Missus Teague’s, but she were at another birthing.”

Sophy begins to whimper softly. Gideon can tell from the slackness of her body that she is at the end of her strength, and he has none to give her. People call on God at such times, but he has spent too many months constructing his own house and never once deferred to the Builder. It would be like crying out to a stranger. He looks to Leander, more out of habit than hope. His friend looks back, dull-eyed. Lem’s news has drained the vitality out of him: his flesh hangs from his long bones.

Lem gapes at them. He is still clutching the bowl, which no one has had the presence of mind to refill. He seems dimly mystified by his reception. Gideon can almost see the thought winding its slow, impeded way through his head like a funeral procession in a snowstorm.
Did I get the message wrong?

Leander has perhaps read the same thought. He pats the boy’s shoulder. “You did well, Lem—everything that was asked of you. You’re a good, faithful fellow. Now, you stay by the fire until you’re warm, and go to the larder and find yourself something to eat. We must all keep our strength up.”

This small show of comfort restores Leander to himself. He puts an arm around Gideon and Sophy. “We’re able and intelligent, are we not? We’ll see it through together. These medical men have convinced us they’re indispensable, but the fact is, women have been giving birth for centuries without doctors. I’m told the Polynesians are so relaxed they have no pain. Out pops the little one, and it’s back to pounding taro root for dinner . . .”

Sophy rebukes him with a groan that ends in a howl. It takes both of them to get her back to the bedroom; again Gideon wonders at her resistance, but now he thinks, She is contending, but not with us. He smooths the bedclothes and plumps her pillows; it seems easier for her to recline than lie flat. When she is settled, he stretches out beside her on top of the covers, resting his back against the oak headboard. He doesn’t dare get too comfortable; in spite of his agitation, he is swimming in fatigue. Somewhere in the background Leander is feeding the fire, muttering to himself about soap and string. A moment of oblivion, all his faculties shutting down. Sophy pulls at his hand.

“He won’t wait,” she says, her voice high and thin, as if she’s given up arguing. “He is coming now.”

THE TIME IT TAKES
will forever be a blur. It seems to Gideon that they are in the bed for hours, Sophy straining, alternately wringing his hand and pulling at the sheet that Leander tied to the bedpost. Even in extremity, he is struck by the strangeness of the process, the primitivism of it. If everyone in the world enters by one route, then his own mother—his cool, contained, brittle mother—must have writhed like this, reduced to her animal self. The Bible calls it a punishment, but what if Eve had resisted the fruit? Would the child have slid out effortlessly from the gate of life, singing hymns?

Leander is talking to Sophy, telling her softly what he is about to do. “Now I am just going to reach under your gown and see if I can feel the head. No need to be ashamed, we are all cut in the same pattern, and Gideon is right here. I’ll be as gentle as I can, and you will let me know if I’m hurting you.”

Sophy is beyond resistance. She cries out only once, when his fingers intrude. Leander keeps up a constant patter. Is his hand too cold? Can she be patient a moment longer? Yes, the head seems to be right where it should be, positioned correctly, as far as he can tell. The baby is waiting at the door and they have only to escort it over the threshold.

He directs Gideon to drape a quilt over the back of the rocking chair. “You will sit in this good, strong chair, and Sophia will sit in your lap, and you will put your arms around her and give her your support. Our ancestors were wise enough to let Mother Earth be a midwife, and we will do the same.”

Gideon locks his arms under Sophy’s bosom, clasps her hips between his thighs. Sensing her absorption, he has kept his distance these last weeks, telling himself it was for her own sake. Now there is no distance. When the pain takes her, her head rears back against his shoulder, her fingers dig into his knees, he feels her convulsive effort in his own body. The sound she makes comes from a deeper place. Gideon hears the anguish in it and wonders if the child is crying with her.

Leander sets the hearth stool before them and sits, his legs forking out on either side of Sophy. Without a word, he lifts her garments above her knees, peers under, reaches in. “Now bear down,” he commands.

“I am,” she moans. “I can’t bear down any harder, I’ll split in two.”

“Nonsense, you’re made for this. Give me one more push, and roar when you do it—like a Red Indian on the warpath. Open your lungs.”

Sophy howls. She hasn’t another one of those in her, Gideon thinks, holding her fast; already she sounds like a lost soul. She is so limp afterward that he wonders if she’s gone, but Leander cries from beneath her skirts, “And here’s the head! Gently now as we bring him in,
er kommt, er kommt
, little by little, that’s the way.”

It looks like some creature of the deep, crushed and slippery, covered in blood and slime. Gideon remembers the streak of red on Sophy’s cheek the night it was conceived, and thinks, this is the child I deserve. Leander holds it up, still attached to the cord, and lays it on its side on Sophy’s belly, and, forgetting himself, proclaims, full of triumph, “We have got our little man!” The creature, having been announced, bawls. Not until later will Gideon reflect that the covenant of silence has already been broken.

Dr. Craddock staggers in half-frozen in time to deliver the afterbirth. Sophy has sustained some tearing, and must be kept quiet and recumbent for the first few days, and cushioned from any undue shock, but “all in all,” he informs them, “better than I expected, a mercy under the circumstances.” He congratulates Leander on the neat tying of the navel-string, and Gideon on his fine son.

Sophy, fresh from her own extremity, begs to know how Mama is. “We’re doing all we can,” Craddock assures her. “She’s resting now, and so must you.” He promises to give Fanny the good news about the baby on his way home.

He would be stopping there in any case, he tells Gideon and Leander, taking them aside. “Pneumonia. Mrs. Hedge is a strong woman, but if she’s ill enough to let me treat her, she’s very ill indeed. I’ve told the boys not to leave her unattended.”