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"Mr Hart, please!" I run after him and pull on the sleeve of his neatly patched work shirt "Thereyou, your wife is very weak and ill If she has another seizure, she may not make it"
Hart steps out on the porch, slaroans
"Maynard, listen to her," the older lady says "Kitty needs help"
"Miss Patience!" soirl is holding her sister’s head, and the shakes and rigors have started again We wo Kitty’s lionia opening, and now she’s bleeding fro the life fluid out of her, and she’s not breathing either If she doesn’t stop seizing, she’ll expire right now
For two, maybe three minutes, we hold Kitty while Mr Hart stands expressionless at the bedrooone so down on the Hope River, ain I feel for her pulse, but it’s too fast to count She opens her eyes one last time, sees her husband in the doorway, reaches out to hi All our hearts stop
Wos in the flies," I say out loud as a big one buzzes around my head The birth s else The blood s but s hard and try not to think about it
"What’s your name, honey?" I ask the albino
"Birdy," she answers "Kitty is irl blows her nose on the hem of her skirt Birdy and Kitty, I think The parents must have had a sense of huone to Heaven now Why don’t you sit and hold your sister’s head while we clean her up" Birdy does what I say, lifts Kitty’s head into her lap and strokes her long hair, which I notice now is yellow-blond and straight like a Norwegian’s She hu under her breath and presses the dead woain
Where is Bitsy when I need her? I wonder again Hoill I describe this scene to her? Maybe I shouldn’t She ht not want to coreen, I learn, is Mr Hart’s sister, Edna, who scrubs on her hands and knees without speaking While she wrings out her rag in the galvanized bucket again and again, her tears drip into the crimson water The short round wohbor who drove me to this hellhole
The other women cry while they work, but not me My sobs are tamped down like clay at the bottoht this before Life is too hard You are born, and you diethat’s the sum of it In between you love someone or you don’t, and if you are lucky you leave behind so up and sitting at the kitchen table with strong coffee in chipped cups, the sun is going down and Maynard comes back to the house with red eyes He takes off his shirt at the sink and washes his face and his ar with neighbors and kin," explains the aunt "Kitty wouldn’t have wanted a big to-do, and we can’t afford to have her embalmed We’ll have the reverend bury her here, the fellow from Clover Botto I probably won’t
"Thank you for co" Maynard turns to me "I don’t have money to pay you"
"I knowit’s okay I’hbor oes back out the screened door, and I watch as he crosses to the barn, then leaves with a shovel over his shoulder Is he going back to the fields? No, he’s starting Kitty’s grave He needs to bend and sweat and curse Dig a hole Where will Mr Hart sleep tonight? I wonder Will he lie down beside his dead wife, take the lifeless baby that’s wrapped in a pink blanket and place it over his heart?
Edna, his sister, watches hiraveyard yonder, all our relations This is Maynard’s second wife The first is already up there, died of pneuo He’s not a bad man," she explains "He loved Kitty, just had too o back to the bedrooood-bye to the dead wohtdress The floorboards are still stained red and alill be
34
Thunder
The ride home in the dark with Mr Moon is cheerless There’s still no rain, and the air is so thick, I can taste it Twice I think I hear thunder, and once I see lightning out of the corner of my eye, but neither of us speaks or ht, the goldenrod and tall joe-pye weed in the roadside ditches look covered with frost, but it’s only thick dust laid down by the buggies and Model Ts As we turn up Salt Lick, I break the silence
"Drop me at Daniel Hester’s, the vet You knohere that is? Another mile up ahead He’ll drive me the rest of the way ho For all I know, Hester could be out casting the leg of a da to a sick mare
Bitsy won’t be hoo to sleep twisted around the nightmare of this terrible delivery Mr Moon followshis cart around in the drive We raise our hands in silent, sad salute
On the wooden bridge, the soft trickle of the creek below startlesFro Hester stands in the lantern light pedaling the grindstone, sharpening his garden tools Suddenly I’ here? What will I say?
"A woman died today because I didn’t kno to save her"? "A mother and her baby died needlessly because her impoverished and prideful husband didn’t call ic place, too hard, too hard for Patience Murphy"?