“Shucks, you can’t believe everything them city doctors say, Jo. He’s healthy as can be.”
“His body’s all right.”
“He’ll turn out good,” Bart repeated heartily. “You see if he don’t.”
She did not answer. The road was deep with dust. The sunset was flaming out of orange dust.
Bart cleared his throat. “Need rain,” he remarked. “Good growing weather for the corn, though.”
“Yes,” she said.
The house was just around the turn. They were there.
Now they were at the kitchen door. Bart’s mother was at the stove, frying potatoes.
“Supper’s ready,” she said, without turning her head.
“I’ll be down soon — don’t wait,” she answered. She carried Paul upstairs and washed him and fed him and laid him in his crib. He was tired and fell into effortless sleep. She fetched the small oil lamp from the box she used as a table and stood looking at him. These must be her moments of dreaming now, these moments at night when he was fast asleep. She could dream that he was like any other child. He had had a day of play, shouting, calling, chattering, crying, carrying out his busy little-boy plans, and now at the end of the day he was tired out. As his body grew she could pretend he was going to school, that he played baseball and rode a horse. When a young man’s body lay asleep, she could dream he was going to college. Her imagination flew in agony down the years. This was the waiting pain. Now it was come — now it could no longer be put away. It was here. It would go with her night and day as long as she lived, walk with her wherever she went, wait in her awake or if she slept. It seemed now she would never sleep again.
She opened a drawer to put away Paul’s cap. There lay the song she had begun to write on the day before he was born. The opening lines were there, the gay and triumphant beginning. But she had not known the ending. Today she knew. She took the paper and tore it into bits and went to the window and let them fly out into the deepening dark. Then she blew out the light and groped her way down the stairs.
At the table the food was dry in her mouth. She kept taking gulps of water to force it down. She must eat, of course. She must live now, as long as Paul lived. And his body had a long life to live.
“What did the doctor say?”
She looked up at Bart’s mother out of solitary deeps of pain. The question came from a long way.
“He said Paul will never be like other children.”
Over and over her life long she must be ready to say that. Wherever she went, people would say, “What is the matter with your baby?” After a while they would say, “What is the matter with your little boy?” They would say, “What is the matter with that young man?” Steadily, over and over, she must be ready to repeat, “He will never be like other children are — never as other young men are.” She must not flinch.
“Pass the bread,” Bart said. “I don’t take any stock in it.”
Sam passed the bread.
“It doesn’t pay to listen to doctors,” he said cheerfully. “I had a doctor tell me once I had a bone felon. But it was no more’n a boil.”
“I wish I hadn’t told you about Aunt Em’s girl,” said Bart’s mother fretfully. “Now you’ll get notions. They’re not one bit the same. Em’s girl was sickly from the time she got her fall. Paul’s different in every way. He’s just like Bart. Bart was an awful healthy baby. I said he’d talk when he got good and ready and he did. And Paul will, too.”
“Get some more milk,” Bart’s father interrupted. “I have to get done early tonight. There’s a meeting over at the church — a missionary from Africa’s talking. The parson wants a crowd and spoke to me as superintendent. Sam, get your good clothes on and go, too. You’d better go, Minna. He’s got lantern slides.”
“I haven’t planned,” she exclaimed in distress. “You ought to have told me sooner, so I could plan the work after supper.”
“I’ll do everything,” said Joan.
“Wouldn’t you like to go though, maybe, Joan?” Bart’s mother, about to agree, paused. “It would be interesting — your sister a missionary and all. I’ll stay with Paul.”
“I’m very tired,” said Joan.
“Then maybe—” Bart’s mother said, unwillingly pleased. Then she said quickly, “It isn’t that I just want to see the pictures. I feel I ought to take an interest in the work the church is doing in heathen lands.”
“Yes,” said Joan. She turned to Bart. “Why don’t you go, too, Bart? You’d like the pictures.”
“Don’t know but I will,” said Bart.
So the house was emptied. There was only Paul and herself. The silence was complete. There was no sound of breathing or of footsteps. She washed the dishes and swept the crumbs away and set the table for breakfast and covered the table with the cloth. Then she bathed herself and brushed her hair and put on her nightgown. It was, she thought, as though she were laying herself down to die by her own hand. But she could not die, for Paul was alive. In the darkness she went to his crib and listened. He was breathing steadily, soundly. She felt his hand. It was warm and lax. She had done everything she could think of to do. She went and laid herself down in her bed and let agony fall upon her, unchecked at last.
But how could one live in agony day and night while a year passed, and then another and another? She would sleep a little and wake in the morning stifled, as one might wake in a dense smoke, or under a heavy weight. Before she was well awake, dragging her mind upward out of sleep, she knew something was wrong — terror waited. Then she was awake and there the terror was, fresh and sharp and new with the morning.
When she forgot, as sometimes she could forget, for a moment, for a moment of sunlight through shining leaves, for a moment of the phlox bed glowing under the noon sun, for a moment of dewy madonna lilies freshly blooming at twilight, the beauty of mists stealing up the hills from the valleys under the moon, the terror was there, new again, to be realized again and again. Better never to forget it than to have that continual new realization. “Oh, how lovely the hills are today under the moving shadows of the clouds! — Yes, but Paul will never be like other children.”
And there was no edge so desperately keen as when he himself made her forget, the close dearness of the nape of his neck when his fair hair began to curl against the white skin, the lovely roundness of his body in the tub. She could laugh with her passionate tenderness, adoring his loveliness, forgetting for a moment’s adoration, and feel her heart dissolve again in the eternal agony.
She longed to see other children. She plied Rose with questions of David. But Rose wrote unhappily that she was going to have another child. “I have so little time for the work now,” she wrote.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Joan cried aloud to herself, fierce with envy. She thought of going to Netta, and shrank from it. Meeting Fanny under the oak tree beyond the bend of the road, she begged her, “Bring little Frank with you next time. I want to see him again. It’s been so long.”
“Surely,” said Fanny. She had put on flesh in the past two years, and looked like a great dark poppy in a ruffled dress of scarlet lawn.
And the next week Joan could hardly listen to her for looking at the boy. There was some trouble. Fanny was in trouble, quarreling with her husband. She took pleasure in trouble and quarreling.
“Darling,” said Joan to the little boy, kneeling in the dust to him, “you’ve grown so big. Are you going to go to school?”
The child stared at her, charmed, his great black eyes soft and fathomless.