House of Earth (25 page)

“Yeah.” Tike took the joke to be serious. He held the paper of cotton under his nose and took a deep breath. “Whewww! God. Whatta lick! Ahhh. Anything go wrong? What's all that other stuff there? Everything okay, Blanche?” He pointed to the bed.

Blanche watched his finger shake and told him, “Yes. That is the afterbirth. Everything is all right. There will be some more come along in a bit. You put that chloroform down. It will make you float out through the ceiling.”

“I wish't I could,” Tike said in back of her.

“You should not feel that way. Don't be so depressed. Look. You are the proud father of a nice big healthy hale and hearty baby boy! See!” She fetched the baby up again between her hands and took away all of the excess organs
and tissues. With both hands she held the baby up as high as the umbilical cord would allow. Then she blew her breath into the face and patted the little purplish red rump with the palm of her right hand. Tike took a step closer to take it from her arms because he had never seen any child spanked in any such a way as this. As he moved near her, Blanche shoved him back away with her left elbow and blew her breath again. “Commy commy come on. Commy commy come on. Wakey wakey wake up. Wakey wakey wake up you. Here.
Tsssttt
. Timey timey for you to wake uppy. Blooooo!” And Tike heard her spank harder and louder against the wrinkled, scrawny-looking skin of the rump. “Bloooo. Blooo. Blooo!” Blanche made quick moves with the baby in the air above Ella May's stomach.

And something more than the heat and the cold and the hail and the rains of the gumbo plains shook in Tike Hamlin's soul as he stood there, insulted, hurt, afraid, nervous, proud, glad, miserable.

A noise came. A noise in the whole room. A noise from under the bed, in the closet, up the stairs, even down from the roost, from out the cans of cream, the disks of the separator, the tablecloth, out of the globe of the lamp, the sound came onto the air, through the sounds of the night winds outside, the creaking of snow and ice, the scrunch of crusted sleets, hard froze snow, a cry. It was a scattered and a broken, windblown, rattling yell. It was a woman drowned in water, a man drowned in hot oil. A dog that fell from a landslide
down the Cap Rock. A mama turkey shrieking at three of her babies caught in the mud ruts under truck wheels. The last death hiss, the only live sound of the leather lizard under a fallen rock. Noise of dry locusts on stems of bushes. High rattle of clouds of grasshoppers peeling off across the ranch. A yelping dog. Hungry coyote. The croak of a carp feeding with his fins out of water, the gasp of the buzzard shot through the head. A sound of new green things crashing up out of the spring ground. A dry wagon wheel, a barn door, the jingle of rusty spurs hung on the windmill post. The sound was a cry and the cry had all of these sounds and more and other sounds, all of the sounds, all of the hisses, barks, yelps, whoops, croaks, peeps, chirps, screams, whistles, moans, yells, and groans, all of these were mixed up in Tike's head as he listened to the screak of the bones of his temples and saw Blanche shake his baby there above that slick wall canyon. And out of the walls of the canyon the cry got itself together, and it got better organized and unionized and turned into something so wide, so high, so big, so loud, that it strained the boards of the shack. When it did dawn on Tike that all of this sounding was coming out from the mouth and the lungs, the belly, of his baby there in the air over that bed, then a feeling of such pride came over him that he felt like a blacksmith's anvil, and he heard in his soul a hundred hammers ring. And he heard his own hammer ring on every other anvil in the whole world. Proud. That is only a word, a sound made by the tricks of the tongue,
lips, teeth. And when Tike heard the baby twist its face into knots and scream out over Ella May, he felt like one of the folks that live happy on the earth.

The baby twisted its face into every shape, and Ella May smiled out through the fogs and mists of the chloroform. Blanche pinched the cord between her thumb and finger about halfway between Ella May's stomach and the baby's navel. She put the baby down on its back to scratch and to howl out against the opinions of the entire world. Tike did not feel like he was smiling inside himself, because what Blanche had done seemed to shovel a bucket of red-hot coals into the furnace of his brain. She worked swift as the running rabbit, and with both hands down against the sheet. The digested food inside the cord she pushed back toward Ella's stomach and an inch or so in the baby's direction, then held a finger tight under the cord, snipped it in two with one whack of her scissors. The ends that had been squeezed empty of foodstuffs she tied into knots exactly like the knot on a catgut fiddle string. Ella May's end of the cord moved back into the lips of her womb. Tike saw Blanche tie one more such knot close up to the baby's belly, then snip off a few of the extra inches with the scissors. She left a few inches hanging down from the navel. The empty cord bled a few drops of watery liquid around the rims, but to Tike the whole sight was a bloody wreck on a fast road.

“What's th' loose end a-hangin' down like that for? Hey. Look. Blanche. Didn't ya mess somethin' up? Gosh damn a mighty. Kill a man in agony to stan' here an' watch sucha
sight. Hey. Do somethin'. Fix it. That loose bloody end there. Look.”

“Stand back. Don't breathe so close to the bed. That loose end will dry up and disappear in a few days and you won't even be able to see it. Stand back. Don't hold your hand over that bed. Germs.”

“Germs. God damn germs. 'At's all I heard outta you since you been here. Germs. Ain't no germ gonna keep me from a-takin' up for my own kid. Germs. Germs.” He backed away. “Hey. Ella. Lady. Hey. How d'ya feel? Lady?”

And through the lashes of her closed eyes Ella May looked still a few degrees dizzy on the chloroform. “Is it. A boy. Or. A girl?”

“A real nice big boy.” Blanche lifted the baby down between its mother's feet and rubbed oil onto its skin. “A big bounder, too.”

“Hold still, there, Grasshopper!” Tike spoke out. He stood a few feet, one or two, from the side of the bed and leaned over as far as Blanche would allow.

Ella's lips were hot, damp with a juice that covered her whole body with a look of healthy pinkness. “Boy? Who said a grasshopper?”

Blanche kept quiet and worked with the oil. Her caresses and rubs on his wary limbs made him coo and smile with vast satisfaction.

“I just called 'm a little grasshopper. He's a boy. Lady. Justa 'bout th' finest feller I've laid my two eyes on. Lissen to 'im coo. Watch that little ornery rapscallion smile when
Blanche, when a perty gal, rubs his stummick. Ya. Ha. Boy! Yepsir. He's a boy, all right, and he's all boy, too. Gosh, ya'd outghta get a look at 'im, Lady.” Tike had invented purely by accident some sort of a dance, a dance much like the one the early tribes now buried in the shale of the Cap Rock danced, possibly the world's simplest and one of its most graceful dances. A dance that is danced standing still. Tike's two feet were still, yet the rest of him danced on the floor and the door and at the mouths of rivers. The room danced together with him, and as he watched Ella May breathe and move slightly there on her bed, he saw that her face, her eyes, her thoughts, danced out past the shack. Tike had to stand still. He did not want to move any farther backward, and Blanche would not let him carry his germs any closer to the bed, so he swayed, moved, in every possible way that he could as he stood in his tracks.

“But. It couldn't be a grasshopper,” Ella May nearly whispered. “It just couldn't be.”

“Quit your worrying.” Blanche wrapped a white flannel blanket around the baby and laid him out on top of the covers. “Help me here to get this rubber sheet out from under her.”

The two of them removed the rubber sheet from beneath Ella May's hips, back, shoulders, legs, and feet, little by little, inch by inch. Lifting, bracing, holding Ella May so that the weight did not fall on the weak muscles of her body.

And as soon as the rubber sheet was rolled into a bundle, Blanche carried it to the door. Tike stole another step closer
while her back was turned and waved his hands in a dozen foolish fashions at the child and at Ella May. He made the new noises that had sounded in his ears at the baby's first cry. “Oggle ma google dee boogle ma stoofge. Iggle dee wiggle ma jiggle dum bittle. Unky de dunk. Unku de dunk. Blamm. Whammm. Singo blingo blango. Clunkity clink. Blinkety blink. Ha. Hey! Look! I'm a father! Heeeyy! You damn old blizzard out there a twistin' yer tail off, look! Yayhooo!” He pounded his fists against his chest until his undershirt was nearly in shreds, howling, “Yayhoo! I'm a god dern papa! Daddy! Fatherrr! Hey, Lady, I'm a fatherrr!”

Ella May only smiled back at him, then down at her boy in his blanket. She smiled alike at her two boys. The look on her face was the same for Tike as for the grasshopper. She felt freer, easier, lighter since the eighteen or so pounds of baby and his trimmings were now outside her stomach. The chloroform still cast banks of wild snow and summer whirlwinds across her mind. She felt a bit like Tike was taking just a pinch too much credit for the birth, but she felt so glad for him that she allowed him to steal the whole show. His actions refreshed her, caused her to take deeper breaths, to begin to move her feet and legs and to feel the good heat of her skin against the gray cotton blankets. The rubber sheet had been cold. Tike tried to play with the baby and to cover Ella May up at the same time, but Blanche put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Take your germs and stand back.”

“I guarantee you one thing right here and now,” Tike told the other three. “Just as quick as this cold weather
breaks, me an' this little grasshopper here is gonna plow up some rooty sod an' cut us out some big thick bricks an' build us a house of earth. An' it's gonna have walls so thick that they cain't no wind git in, an' cain't no varmints crawl in, an' cain't no weather of no kind git in, an they damn sure cain't no dern'd ole germs be a-bustin' in an' a-gittin' onto me an' a-keepin' me separated fr'm my wife an' my little grasshopper there. This is me tellin' yoooo, all of yooo!” And he waved his fists through the room.

Ella May's stomach moved up and down when she laughed.

Blanche thought that Tike was causing just a wee bit too much of an uproar in the room for this particular stage of the show, and she tossed her look about the room for some kind of a job for him. It had to be a job that would take him up into the roost and occupy his mind for the next several minutes, at least, to give her time to put the baby on the pillow at Ella May's side. Wait. What was it? Oh … Yes. “Tike.”

“It'll have walls, by God, and little hookworms, as thick as that there warsh bench over there. Mebbe thicker. My house is gonna be so thick that nothin' could ever run it down. An' no goddamn little ole measly germ's gonna even find him a sneak hole ta git in at!”

“Tike. Will you please quit pacing up and down the floor, please? You are shaking the bed too much.”

“My house won't shake. Won't shake no bed this time next year. You just come back out here an' stick yer head in on us an' you'll see. You can jump up an' down, hit th'
walls, bounce up against th' ceilin', do any damn thing ya wanta do, an' that there house'll just reach down and grab a hold of th' ole earth, an' say, Hell, you cain't shake no floor o' mine, no matter how hard ya pace up an' down it. See? I mean it. I'll buy that acre of Cap Rock land off from ole man Woodridge an' pay 'im his price fer it. I'll git th' money. I can git th' money. Don't you worry. Just don't you worry.” And he paced the floor so heavy that the house shook the bed even more.

“Go take your shovel and bury that afterbirth. I will give you a job pacing the yard outside, if you must pace.” Blanche worked about the bed. She fixed this, straightened that. Put this in place. “Hurry. It will stink up the house.”

“You don't believe that, do you? I mean about my house made out of earth? Huh? You don't think an ole down-an'-out sharecropper like me c'n make the riffle from an ole crappy shack like this into a nice dirt house with big thick walls, do ya?”

“I don't know, Tike.” Blanche felt like he was directing his words at the wrong person somehow. Yet she had gotten used to this business where her patients carried all of their troubles and hopes to her just because she had educated her hands to take a baby from the stomach of a woman. “Why should I know? I don't believe that anybody with any real nerve 'bout them, any real brains, would let themselves fall down so low as to live another minute in an old filthy mousetrap like this. But as to your dream house, your, what you call your house of earth, well, where it is going to come
up from, I do not know. I don't seem to be able to see right at this moment. Now if you will wait a minute while I put the baby right there at its mother's side and there, cover it up good, there like that, now, when you go out the door, open it and shut it very quickly, very quick, so as not to set up too much of a draft through the house. Hurry. And bundle yourself up really warm and good. And, Tike. Be sure to tell me how cold it is outside when you get back. There is the sheet, there by the door. Carry it with the ends tucked in good so as not to spill its contents in the yard. Easy with the door.” She bent over the baby and Ella May to shelter them from the cold draft of air that shot through the house for a second as Tike walked out.

“How do you like him?” Blanche lifted the boy up before Ella's eyes.