Mack said: “I’ll bring the buggy around to the front.”
A few minutes later they were on their way. Lizzie rode up front while they were in the town, but as soon as they passed the last house she lay down on the mattress.
Mack drove slowly, and this time there were no impatient sounds from behind him. When they had been traveling for about half an hour he said: “Are you asleep?”
There was no reply, and he assumed she was.
He glanced behind him from time to time. She was restless, shifting her position and muttering in her sleep.
They were driving along a deserted stretch two or three miles from the plantation when the stillness of the night was shattered by a scream.
It was Lizzie.
“What? What?” Mack called frantically as he hauled on the reins. Before the pony had stopped he was clambering into the back.
“Oh, Mack, it hurts!” she cried.
He put his arm around her shoulders and raised her a little. “What is it? Where does it hurt?”
“Oh, God, I think the baby is coming.”
“But it’s not due.…”
“Another two months.”
Mack knew little about such things but he guessed that the birth had been brought on by the stress of the medical emergency or the bumpy ride to Fredericksburg—or both.
“How long have we got?”
She groaned long and loud, then answered him. “Not long.”
“I thought it took hours.”
“I don’t know. I think the backache I had was labor pain. Maybe the baby has been on its way all this time.”
“Shall I drive on? We’ll be there in a quarter of an hour.”
“Too long. Stay where you are and hold me.”
Mack realized the mattress was wet and sticky. “What’s soaked the mattress?”
“My waters broke, I think. I wish my mother was here.”
Mack thought it was blood on the mattress but he did not say so.
She groaned again. When the pain passed she shivered. Mack covered her with his fur. “You can have your cloak back,” he said, and she smiled briefly before the next spasm took her.
When she could speak again she said: “You must take the baby when it comes out.”
“All right,” he said, but he was not sure what she meant.
“Get down between my legs,” she said.
He knelt at her feet and pushed up her skirts. Her underdrawers were soaked. Mack had undressed only two women, Annie and Cora, and neither of them had owned a pair of underdrawers, so he was not sure how they fastened, but he fumbled them off somehow. Lizzie lifted her legs and put her feet up against his shoulders to brace herself.
He stared at the patch of thick dark hair between her legs, and he was seized by a feeling of panic. How could a baby come through there? He had no idea how it happened. Then he told himself to be calm: this took place a thousand times a day all over the world. He did not need to understand it. The baby would come without his help.
“I’m frightened,” Lizzie said during a brief respite.
“I’ll look after you,” he said, and he stroked her legs, the only part of her he could reach.
The baby came very quickly.
Mack could not see much in the starlight, but as Lizzie gave a mighty groan something began to emerge from inside her. Mack put two trembling hands down there and felt a warm, slippery object pushing its way out. A moment later the baby’s head was in his hands. Lizzie seemed to rest for a few moments, then start again. He held the head with one hand and put the other under the tiny shoulders as they came into the world. A moment later the rest of the baby slid out.
He held it and stared at it: the closed eyes, the dark hair of its head, the miniature limbs. “It’s a girl,” he said.
“She must cry!” Lizzie said urgently.
Mack had heard of smacking a newborn baby to make it breathe. It was hard to do, but he knew he must. He turned her over in his hand and gave her bottom a sharp slap.
Nothing happened.
As he held the tiny chest in the palm of his big hand he realized something was dreadfully wrong. He could not feel a heartbeat.
Lizzie struggled to sit upright. “Give her to me!” she said.
Mack handed the baby over.
She took the baby and stared into her face. She put her lips to the baby’s as if kissing her, and then she blew into her mouth.
Mack willed the child to gasp air into her lungs and cry, but nothing happened.
“She’s dead,” Lizzie said. She held the baby to her bosom and drew the fur cloak around the naked body. “My baby’s dead.” She began to weep.
Mack put his arms around them both and held them while Lizzie cried her heart out.
32
AFTER HER BABY GIRL WAS BORN DEAD, LIZZIE LIVED in a world of gray colors, silent people, rain and mist. She let the household staff do as they pleased, realizing vaguely after a while that Mack had taken charge of them. She no longer patrolled the plantation every day: she left the tobacco fields to Lennox. Sometimes she visited Mrs. Thumson or Suzy Delahaye, for they were willing to talk about the baby as long as she liked; but she did not go to parties or balls. Every Sunday she attended church in Fredericksburg, and after the service she spent an hour or two in the graveyard, standing and looking at the tiny tombstone, thinking about what might have been.
She was quite sure it was all her fault. She had continued to ride horses until she was four or five months pregnant; she had not rested as much as people said she should; and she had ridden ten miles in the buggy, urging Mack to go faster and faster, on the night the baby was stillborn.
She was angry with Jay for being away from home that night; with Dr. Finch for refusing to come out for a slave girl; and with Mack for doing her bidding and driving fast. But most of all she was angry with herself. She loathed and despised herself for being an inadequate mother-to-be, for her impulsiveness and impatience and inability to listen to advice. If I were not like this, she thought, if I were a normal person, sensible and reasonable and cautious, I would have a little baby girl now.
She could not talk to Jay about it. At first he had been angry. He had railed at Lizzie, vowed to shoot Dr. Finch and threatened to have Mack flogged; but his rage had evaporated when he learned the baby had been a girl, and now he acted as if Lizzie had never been pregnant.
For a while she talked to Mack. The birth had brought them very close. He had wrapped her in his cloak and held her knees and tenderly handled the poor baby. At first he was a great comfort to her, but after a few weeks she sensed him becoming impatient. It was not his baby, she thought, and he could not truly share her grief. Nobody could. So she withdrew into herself.
One day three months after the birth she went to the nursery wing, still gleaming with fresh paint, and sat alone. She imagined a little girl there in a cradle, gurgling happily or crying to be fed, dressed in pretty white frocks and tiny knitted boots, suckling at her nipple or being bathed in a bowl. The vision was so intense that tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face, although she made no sound.
Mack came in while she was like that. Some debris had fallen down the chimney during a storm and he knelt at the fireplace and began to clear it up. He did not comment on her tears.
“I’m so unhappy,” she said.
He did not pause in his work. “This will not do you any good,” he replied in a hard voice.
“I expected more sympathy from you,” she said miserably.
“You can’t spend your life sitting in the nursery crying. Everyone dies sooner or later. The rest have to live on.”
“I don’t really want to. What have I got to live for?”
“Don’t be so damned pathetic, Lizzie—it’s not your nature.”