Waltzing In Ragtime (22 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: Waltzing In Ragtime
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“You’ll thank him for it later, Mrs. Amadeo,” Vita said in a soothing voice, “when you don’t count a torn bottom among your miseries.” Then her hand probed the woman’s bulge. “Still high,” she said with concern.
Annie Smithers nodded, though her eyes stayed intent on her grandson’s hands.
“Good, Matthew. Steady now.”
Mrs. Amadeo gave out a powerful groan and fluid exploded forth, soaking Matthew’s shirt. He blinked, but didn’t flinch.
“Tell her to stop, breathe easy,” Annie Smithers commanded Olana.
“Andantel”
sprang from her lips, as she remembered the vocal guidelines of her sheet music.
“Andante tranquillo!”
Olana locked her eyes on the woman’s and blew out soft, long breaths. Mrs. Amadeo followed her example until her time was past. Then she laughed suddenly, and reached up to touch Olana’s face.
“Musica sito?
”
Olana giggled.
“
Bene,
” the woman approved.
Matthew gave Olana a cocked smile. “What are you two chatting about?” he asked. Before she could tell him that she was translating this birth into a concert, something he saw in Mrs. Amadeo’s face made him attend back to his work.
“All the strength you can muster, Ma’am,” he urged. “But slow.”
“Allargando,”
Olana translated.
Olana heard another splash, then saw Matthew Hart holding up a purple, squirming baby boy.
“
Che bellezza!”
his mother sang out.
Matthew Hart stared at the infant between his hands. His voice had a misty quality Olana had never heard before. “What does she say, ’Lana?”
“She says this is wonderful.”
“You got that right, ma’am.” He smiled at Mrs. Amadeo as she held out her arms for her son. Then she closed her eyes in pain, and leaned back into the pillows, groaning.
“Mrs. Amadeo, it’s over. Look at your baby,” Vita said softly. The woman kept panting, straining. “Olana, tell her that — oh, my Lord,” she looked between Mrs. Amadeo’s breasts. “Matthew,” she called, “there’s another.”
“What?”
Olana found the wiggling baby boy suddenly thrust into her arms.
Let it be the head, he thought, but Matthew Hart had his spectacles on, and had attended enough births to know better. The second child was coming buttocks first. With the woman’s next pain the tiny round bottom emerged. The legs squeezed out from under it. Matthew looked to his grandmother. She smiled at him, at the tiny half child in his hands — purple, warm, perfect.
To help ease the waiting he slid his fingers between the baby’s legs.
“Girl.”
“Bambina,”
Olana translated.
Mrs. Amadeo grunted hard and the child slipped out to her neck.
“Good, that’s fine, Ma’am,” Matthew Hart said softly, as he checked the child’s intact, pulsing chord. It’s all right, he told the panic rising up his throat, she doesn’t have to breathe yet, she’s getting what she needs through the chord. Yet as he heard the child’s brother sputter and nuzzle in Olana’s arms, he prayed fervently to whatever forces were making the room glow red, to whatever was making so many people so silent it seemed the house was holding its breath. You’re straddling two worlds, child. Come out.
Mrs. Amadeo moaned. The baby started, her tiny arms and legs stiffening, reaching into the air around her. No, his mind cried out, don’t try to breathe yet. “Gran —” he called, and felt her cloth wipe the sweat from his eyes.
“Clear the way to her nose,” Annie Smithers advised softly.
He willed his stiff fingers to move, to go inside the woman and make a breathing passage for her daughter. But they felt broken again, crushed under Cal Carson’s boot, though they had long since healed.
“Go on, Matthew.”
He transferred the child to his left hand, and with his right, began.
“Ah!” Mrs. Amadeo sighed out her pain.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered and went deeper, found the tiny mouth, nose. A sound. Dark, red. The baby was choking. He looked up.
“Push. Push hard with the next one, Miss Amadeo,” he urged with more calm than he felt. What he felt was another woman dying in his hands, sliding out of his reach, this one before she was even born. Damn. Damn them all to hell. He couldn’t breathe. The muscles around his middle constricted. Then he heard Olana’s voice.
“
Bene
,
Signora
—
energia,”
she urged. Her eyes were shinning as she nodded. “I think another one’s starting, Matthew,” she told him. The knot in his stomach eased. Olana was so beautiful, how could he have pointed his rifle at her? Her cheeks flushed pink as if she’d heard his thought.
Annie Smithers poured the almond oil over the taut skin of the mother’s perineum. It stretched more. A deep cry from Mrs. Amadeo and the chin, ears, the head. Free.
“Well, hello,” he said as if the baby had just knocked on the door. She opened her eyes wide, gazed into his soul, and defecated a tarry black in his hand. He threw back his head and laughed. Then the room filled with more quiet laughter, intensifying the glow, warming the new life among them.
Olana and Vita bundled Mrs. Amadeo with her children while
he tied and cut the chords, then waited for the afterbirths. They came forth soon after the infants began to suckle, and with only a little grunting effort from a mother distracted by her new children.
“Two trees of life,” Annie Smithers pronounced as Matthew’s hands explored the veined membranes that did indeed spiral forth like an ancient tree.
“Whole?” Annie asked him.
“Whole.”
“Long life,” she predicted for the twins.
“Long life,” he repeated. “Tell her, ’Lana.”
Olana didn’t answer. He raised his head and found her watching the babies at their mother’s breasts. Her eyes were as wide as Possum’s when she’d first seen the sea.
He finished his work, then drew Olana into a corner of the room. Her gown and hands were stained red from the little boy she’d held. He pulled down the damp towel from his shoulder and wiped her fingers.
“It’s going away,” she whispered.
“What is?”
“The glow. And the smell of roses.” He savored that look on her face, memorized the brilliance of her eyes, the winsome slant of the brows above them. “It was real, Matthew? The roses? The glow?”
“Red?”
“Yes.”
“It was red for me this time, too.”
“It’s too early for roses.”
He shrugged. “Always smells like roses at births Gran attends.”
Her hands pressed his through the cloth. He brought them to his lips. They were as soft as the babies were, and smelled of the heady brew of new life. They were both startled by the laughter and a torrent of Italian language behind them. He released her.
“What does she say?”
A high color came into Olana’s cheeks. “Isn’t it time her husband
and children came in?” she asked. “I would think they’d like to see —”
“That’s not what she’s saying.”
Mrs. Amadeo expanded her thoughts.
“I’m not getting it all,” Olana protested. “And she doesn’t understand … us, Matthew. She thinks —”
“Olana, what does she say?” he pressed.
“That I will make you fine children.”
“Oh.”
Her eyes went brighter still. With anger. “That’s all? ‘Oh?’ No laughter? Surely the notion amuses you. Taken for your wife again, a stupid, unwelcome Yankee?”
He grinned. “You can’t help being a Yankee. And you ain’t the rest.”
“That’s as close as you’ll get to an apology,” his mother advised from behind him. “He takes after his grandmother that way.”
Vita Hart knocked her son playfully on the side of his head. “Go tell that poor man to come in and meet his new children,” she commanded.
 
 
They all knelt around the hearth. The oldest two boys were already half a head over their father’s height. The youngest was a girl about six years old. There were four in between. The babies were going to have seven pairs of loving arms to hold them, besides those of their parents. A good time for twins in this family, Matthew judged.
Only Farrell, kneeling there among them, did not have a string of rosary beads gliding between his fingers. Matthew Hart watched the mouths moving in soundless devotion. Then he saw himself putting his wife’s rosary in her grave at the mission. She’d blended her Catholicism with the lore of her people. Perhaps he should have saved the beads for Possum. They finished the Hail Mary. Mr. Amadeo raised his head.
Matthew smiled. “They’re all fine.”
“All?”
Matthew touched Olana’s back. “You tell him.”
Olana held up two fingers. “
Due
,” she said,
“bambino, bambina.
”
That set off a gasp and a stream of questions from the man and his children. Olana kept nodding. Finally, Mr. Amadeo lifted her off her feet and smacked her cheek with a kiss. Farrell looked to Matthew and shook his hand.
“Always knew you were a doctor, Matty!”
He frowned. “I ain’t nothing of the kind. I get to catch babies every now and then, is all.”
“Catch babies, cure snakebite, and heal frostbite —”
Mr. Amadeo and his children surrounded them. “Go in, go see them,” Matthew urged.
But the small man locked Matthew Hart’s shoulders in an embrace first, then smacked his face with an only slightly less invigorating kiss than he’d bestowed on Olana.
“Damn,” the ranger groused as the crowd passed. “I thought letting you tell him would save me from that.”
Olana laughed. “It’s very continental.”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “It’s very mortifying.”
The room was empty. She came closer. He righted Possum’s little chair, knocked over in the rush.
“Matthew?”
“Hmmm?”
“I … don’t want to wash any of it off.”
He smiled. “I know. Maybe we should walk out on the beach? It’s stopped raining.”
“All right.”
 
 
Matthew had always done this part alone. He tried hard not to resent her presence. When they reached the sand Olana drew closer.
“Matthew, your hands are shaking.”
He looked down at them. “Always do, after. Gran says there’s no shame in it.” He laughed randomly. “Hope it won’t be twice as bad, that’s all.”
“You love her very much, don’t you?”
“Gran? Sure. I didn’t think I was worth anything when she started bringing me to her birthings. Let me into a world of women’s secrets. Told me I had a gift.”
“You do.”
“Naw. But I needed to think so then, until I got better at watching her. Doing what she does. Did. It must be hard on her not to be able to bring them in anymore.”
“She didn’t look to be suffering tonight.”
“No. How could any of us? Two, ’Lana. Two!”
The rush of pure joy that always followed the shaking began. He didn’t want to frighten her. But he didn’t want to miss it. He looked from her perplexed eyes to the stains on the ivory gown. Blood. Panic threatened his joy. The stains had to go.
Olana protected her middle as she backed away from him. “I can’t swim.”
“Now that’s a shame.”
He advanced, lifted her over his shoulder and bolted into the water. She laughed, pounding his back lightly. He spun around once then dropped her. Her flailing arms made a great splash.
Matthew left Olana standing, sputtering, the water swirling around her waist. He dove deep, swimming along the bottom. The height of the rush came like a great, crashing wave, fed by his own awe of how circumstances had come together so that he’d held those two new lives in his hands. Matthew Hart’s world, for a shining moment, had been in perfect order, and he knew enough to give thanks for it. He wished he didn’t have to breathe, and heard a tinkling laughter inside his head in response to the thought. Her laughter. Piercing his aching lungs, finding its mark where it always did, his heart.
Matthew let his own buoyancy carry him to the surface.
Moon-illuminated strands of seaweed and glistening sand caressed him as he rose. Like her fingers. Stop. The desolation always followed those memories.
He surfaced, dove again. Stay, he told himself. Stay here cold, deep. Then Olana’s cry came through to his ears. He’d forgotten her. Completely. He surfaced. She was standing where he’d left her in the water. Crying. Why was she crying? He swam to her side.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, his voice sounding strange, distant, even to him.
“I didn’t see you. For so long. Oh, Matthew, don’t do that!”
“I’m sorry,” he said as she shivered, wept, grew more beautiful.
He took her into his arms, held her close. Not the same. “Stop. Olana, stop, now.”
“I’m trying.” She choked, hiccoughed, sputtered like the newborn she’d held in her arms. Different. Full of airs, properties, this one. Not that powerful woman he’d loved, then killed.
“Bones in this water?” he teased, which only made Olana sputter more. Her sputtering turned lower, deeper. He licked salt the sea had left from her earlobes, chin, neck, and feasted on her soft moans of pleasure. Her fingers raked through his hair, flinging strands of seaweed back to the water. His hands found her, not obstructions to her, everywhere.
“Why, Miss Whittaker,” he said, “you’re quite corsetless this evening.”
She smiled wide. “How rude of you to notice.”
He thought he’d earned a slap at least, but he got only soft, deep laughter against his neck. “I missed you, Matthew,” she whispered.
He kissed her then, kissed her mouth like it was the first food he’d had in months.

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