Galloway made no reply but gazed intently at Cheney's heavy black physician's bag as Pemberton led the doctor into the house.
Serena sat on the bed edge. Her face was pale, gray eyes seemingly focused on something far away, her shallow breaths such as one might use while holding something fragile or dangerous. Serena's peignoir lay open, the dark-blue silk rippling back to reveal her rounded belly.
"Lie down on your side," Doctor Cheney said, and took a stethoscope from his bag. The doctor pressed the instrument to Serena's stomach, listening attentively a few moments. He nodded to himself and lifted the bright-steel bell from Serena's skin, freed the stethoscope's prongs so the instrument hung around his neck.
"All is well, madam," Doctor Cheney said. "It's normal for women to be susceptible to minor, sometimes even nonexistent pains, especially when with child. What you're feeling is probably a mild gastrointestinal upset, or to put it less delicately, excessive gas."
"Mrs. Pemberton is no malingerer," Pemberton said as Serena slowly raised herself to a sitting position.
Doctor Cheney placed the stethoscope back in his physician's bag, pinched its metal snap closed.
"I don't mean to imply such. The mind is its own place, as the poet tells us, and has its own peculiar reality. What one feels one feels."
Pemberton watched Cheney flatten his hand as if preparing to pat his patient on the shoulder, but the physican wisely reconsidered and let the hand remain by his side.
"I assure you that she will be better by tomorrow," Doctor Cheney said when they stepped back out on the porch.
"Is there anything that will help until then?" Pemberton asked, nodding at Galloway sitting on the steps. "Galloway can go to the commissary, to town if necessary."
"Yes," Doctor Cheney said, addressing Galloway. "Go to the commissary and fetch your mistress a bag of peppermints. I find they do wonders when my stomach is sour."
Serena stayed in bed all day. She insisted Pemberton go to the office, but he did so only when she agreed to have Galloway stay in the front room. When Pemberton returned to check on her at noon and then later in the evening, Serena told him she felt better. But she remained pale. They went to bed early, and as they settled into sleep Serena pressed her back and hips into Pemberton's chest and groin, took his right hand and placed it on the undercurve of her stomach as if to help hold the baby in place. Music filtered up from the dining hall porch. Pemberton drifted to sleep as a worker sang of a woman named Mary who walked the wild moors.
The next morning Pemberton was awakened by Serena sitting up in the bed, the covers pushed back to her feet, left hand pressed between her legs. When Pemberton asked what was wrong, Serena did not speak. Instead, she raised the hand to him as if making a vow, her fingers and palm slick with blood. Pemberton jerked on pants and boots, a shirt he didn't bother to button. He wrapped Serena in the peignoir and lifted her into his arms, snatching a towel from the rack as he passed the bathroom. The train was about to make an early run to the saw mill and men had collected around the tracks. Pemberton yelled at several loitering workers to uncouple all the cars from the Shay except for the coach. Mud holes pocked the ground, but Pemberton stumbled right through them as men scurried to separate the cars and the fireman frantically shoveled coal into the tender. Campbell rushed from the office and helped get Serena into the coach and lain lengthways on a seat. Pemberton told Campbell to call the hospital and have a doctor and ambulance waiting at the depot, then to drive Pemberton's Packard there. Campbell left the coach car and Pemberton and Serena were alone amidst the shouts of workers and the Shay engine's gathering racket.
Pemberton sat on the seat edge and pressed a towel against Serena's groin to try and stanch the bleeding. Serena's eyes were closed, her face fading to the pallor of marble as the engineer placed his hand on the reverser, knocked off the brakes and opened the throttle. Pemberton listened to the train make what seemed its endless gradations toward motion, steam entering the throttle valve into the admission pipes and into the cylinders before the push of the pistons against the rod, and the rod turning the crankshaft and then the line shaft turning through the universal joints and the pinion gears meshing with the bull gears. Only then the wheels ever so slowly coming alive.
Pemberton closed his eyes and imagined the engine's meshing metal akin to the inner workings of a clock, bringing back time that had been suspended since he'd seen the blood on Serena's hand. When the train gained a steady rhythm, Pemberton opened his eyes and looked out the window, and it was as if the train crossed the bottom of a deep clear lake. Everything behind appeared slowed by the density of water-Campbell entering the office to call the hospital, workers coming out of the dining hall to watch the engine and coach car pull away, Galloway emerging from the stable, his stubbed arm flopping uselessly as he ran after the train.
The Shay began its ascent up McClure Ridge, the valley falling away behind them. Once over the summit, the train gained speed, dense woods now surrounding the tracks. Pemberton remembered what Serena had once said about only the present being real. Nothing is but what is now, he told himself as he held Serena's wrist, felt her pulse fluttering weakly beneath the skin. As the train crossed the declining mountains toward Waynesville, Pemberton pressed his lips against the limp wrist. Stay alive, he whispered, as though speaking to what blood remained in her veins.
By the time the train pulled into the depot, the towel was saturated. Serena hadn't made a sound the whole way. Saving her strength to stay alive, Pemberton believed, but now she'd lapsed into unconsciousness. Two attendants in white carried Serena off the train and into the waiting ambulance. Pemberton and the hospital doctor got in as well. The doctor, a man in his early eighties, lifted the soggy towel and cursed.
"Why in God's name wasn't she brought sooner," the doctor said, and pressed the towel back between Serena's legs. "She's going to need blood, a lot of it and fast. What's her blood type?"
Pemberton did not know and Serena was past telling anyone.
"Same as mine," Pemberton said.
Once in the hospital emergency room, Pemberton and Serena lay side by side on metal gurneys, thin feather pillows cushioning their heads. The doctor rolled up Pemberton's sleeve and shunted his forearm with the needle, then did the same to Serena. They were connected by three feet of rubber hose, the olive-shaped pump blooming in the tubing's center. The doctor squeezed the pump. Satisfied, he motioned for the nurse to take it and stand in the narrow space between the gurneys.
"Every thirty seconds," the doctor told her, "any faster and the vein can collapse."
The doctor stepped around the gurney to minister to Serena as the nurse squeezed the rubber pump, checked the wall clock until half a minute passed, and squeezed again.
Pemberton raised his shunted arm and gripped the nurse's wrist with his hand.
"I'll pump the blood."
"I don't think…"