I ease Belinda, who is half–doubled over, down onto the makeshift bed. “I’ll find some sheets and a blanket. Somewhere.”
“Is it her time?” one of the women behind us asks. I turn to her. She is Mam’s age but pale and thin.
“Yes.”
“Is it terrible out there?” a second woman says. She has a large bandage over one eye. “No one has time to tell us anything. All we saw was what happened to city hall.”
“Yes,” I say as I loosen the buttons on Belinda’s maternity shirtwaist. “’Tis terrible.”
“Do you know if Beale Street is all right?” says a woman whose arm is in a sling.
“What about King Street?” says another.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know those streets.”
“South of Mission. How are things south of Mission?” says the woman who looks to be Mam’s age.
“I came down Larkin from Polk. It got worse the farther south we came.” And then I add because I feel I should, “There are some fires now.”
The women are silent as they consider the state of things.
“Here,” the woman with the eye bandage says as she extends a bed pillow. “I don’t need two.”
“And you can have my top sheet,” says a second woman.
“And my blanket,” says a third. “I’m plenty warm without it.”
In less than a minute I have Belinda in bed, and while she is writhing in pain, at least she is in the company of women who have given what help they could.
“I don’t want to die,” Belinda says to me through clenched teeth. “I don’t want to die.”
“You shall not be dying today, Belinda,” I tell her, as I confidently as I can. “When we see the baby’s head, I’ll grab the first nurse I see and I’ll drag her over here, I swear to you.”
“It hurts!”
“I know, I know it does.”
I look down at Kat, who is sitting on the floor by the bed, staring at Belinda.
I scoot to sit close to her. “Bringing a baby into the world is hard work, love, but ’tis the way we all come. I came this way, so did you, so did Belinda. So did everybody in the pavilion. All right?”
She nods ever so slightly.
But I know the pains will get worse. And I wish I could take Kat away somewhere where she doesn’t have to see how incredibly hard it is to become a mother.
I encourage her to lie at the foot of Belinda’s mattress and rest, and she lies down for me, but her eyes do not close. I wonder what she is thinking. Is she thinking about her own mother, who is not dead after all? About her father, who, last she saw, lay in heap at the bottom of the stairs? About the baby she will be a sister to?
I can’t tell.
I can’t tell if she is thinking at all.
The rush of activity around us continues for the next hour. More mattresses are brought, and more wounded. And now the dead are being brought in, too. The pavilion has been turned into a morgue as well as a hospital. Whenever the doors are opened, a faint odor of smoke wafts inside.
At a little after eight in the morning, the earth starts to tremble again and everyone inside the pavilion gasps. Women scream; some men, too. Belinda gapes at me in utter dismay. Dread for her, for all of us, shoots through me like an arrow. Many who can get up off their mattresses rise and rush for the doors, but policemen stationed there won’t let them leave. In the end it doesn’t matter. The trembling doesn’t intensify and doesn’t last, and someone near our collection of mattresses says it was just an aftershock.
As we settle back down into our places, more and more wounded arrive—young children in their mothers’ arms, burned and bleeding, and men and women being carried in with broken bones protruding through their flesh. The sounds of misery are all around us and I can’t keep Kat from hearing them. I sing to her to attempt to drown them out. But there is no shushing the wails and cries and shouts.
Another hour passes and Belinda starts to make her way into the last stage of childbearing. Perhaps because she is only eight months along, or perhaps because there was blood in her water, everything seems to be moving along a little faster. I look for a nurse or doctor to help her, but I cannot find one before Belinda is crying out that the baby is coming.
