She nodded, her cheeks reddening. Keeping his eyes averted, he stripped off her sodden clothes, tossed them on the floor, covered her with soft, thick quilts. He banked a fire, setting the room to a rosy glow. When she napped between contractions, he sheltered his horse in the barn, and retrieved his knapsack. She was sleeping fitfully when he returned. He changed into dry clothes, laying his wet ones on the back of a chair in front of the fire to dry, and then hung hers on the armoire.
The woman woke screaming loud enough to make his ears bleed.
“I need a doctor!”
Zachary exhaled. There was no time to find a doctor. Birthing was foreign territory to him. Other than foals being born, he’d only witnessed one human birth by an Indian woman.
“I’m going to help you.” When he rolled the quilt up over her abdomen, exposing her legs, she pushed the blanket back down.
“It’s not proper.” She pressed her head back into the pillow with another breathtaking contraction.
How soft and vulnerable. He swept her bedraggled mop of dark honeyed wet hair from her forehead. When her pain passed, and it was only for a minute, she closed her eyes, breathing deep, seemingly unwilling to engage with life outside her body.
“When you get a birthing pain, I want you to look into my eyes, focus, breathe, melt the pain, be a cougar.” He whispered assurances to keep her going. Outside the storm raged, spewing its wrath, the windows shaking with the incessant crack of thunder. In the hallway, a clock chimed for the eleventh time. Ten hours? Eleven hours? How long did babies take to come into the world? What if something was wrong?
In between pains, she opened her eyes and stared at him. “Don’t leave me.”
Her eyes were the deepest ocean, so fearful and uncertain. The violet hue carried his emotional currents, and before he could breathe, he drowned.
He knelt, took her hand. “Never.”
She possessed a refined, ethereal beauty. Her features were flawless, the nose straight and gracefully boned. Her stomach tightened again. When would her agony subside? Nothing could be more brutal for a woman.
He shoved up his sleeves, lifted the blanket again. No protest this time. She was in too much pain. He lifted her knees, saw the crown of the babe’s head. The woman held her breath.
“Push, Ma’am, Push.”
She lay exhausted. Faint and sweating and shrieking.
When her baby slipped out into his hands, the sound of the infant’s lusty cry was a pickaxe to the wall of cynicism he’d built around his heart.
“You have a girl, Ma’am.” He beamed, holding the baby up. “A beautiful baby girl.” He grabbed a silk ribbon from the dresser and yanked a knife from his soggy boot, cutting and tying the umbilical cord.
He lay the squalling baby on her chest. The woman shook her head. Didn’t she know what to do?
He looked her directly in the eyes. “The babe’s hungry.”
“I cannot. I cannot get connected to the baby.”
“You’re the mother. Of course, you can.”
“You don’t understand?—”
No husband.She was going to give the baby up for adoption. “You can’t let her starve until you get a wetnurse.”
Her violet eyes teared. “I don’t know how.”
She didn’t know how? Every woman had seen a baby suckle. Was she that sheltered? He rubbed the back of his neck. Her voice was not midwestern. Cultured. Aristocratic. She dropped the “r” sounds, the “aw” sounds thickening. Like when she said town, it sounded like “tawn” and proper was “prawper”. Northeastern.
He cleared his throat and swooped the baby into his left arm. “If I may?” He lowered the quilt exposing one of her full breasts. She gasped, yanking the cover up to her chin. “Miss, I’ve seen your most intimate parts.”
She nodded, and he lay the howling infant next to her engorged breast where milk dripped. The woman averted her eyes as he rubbed the nipple back and forth across the babe’s lips. The baby latched on and quieted except for loud suckling sounds. The room seemed to be eternally suspended as if his whole life had suddenly become ensnared in that moment.
The storm abated. With the dawn, glorious blazing colors of pinks, purples and blues streamed in radiant quartered patterns across mother and child. Zachary inhaled. The immeasurable weight of a new and fragile life rose a startling and stark contrast to where he’d existed in twilight, a half-life of anger and shadow.
Caressing her newborn with undisguised pride, the woman smiled. She was a flower opening, blossoming for her own joy. Her mouth trembled as she reached up to touch his face with tentative fingers. “Thank you. Perhaps…somehow, I can keep her.”
“You’ll be like a cougar, Ma’am, protecting your daughter.”
