The head was all the way out now and Jeebee was still supporting it, kneeling and sitting on his heels so as to keep himself and the baby below Merry and the stool top. Suddenly, the lower shoulder emerged at last, and with that, everything suddenly began to move quickly.
Jeebee tried to keep the baby from coming too fast, but it came swiftly, nonetheless, now that the difficult parts of it were past the narrowest part of the opening passage.
Almost immediately it seemed he held the baby in both hands. He continued to sit on his heels, making sure he held the baby below Merry’s body and watching the umbilical cord to see if it was still pulsing.
It was. But as he watched, the pulsing gradually slowed and ceased.
Cradling the tiny naked figure in his left arm with his hand still half enclosing and supporting the head, he reached blindly back behind him to the foot of the bed and got one of the sterilized, boiled, still-damp cloths off the pile he had left there. With it, he gently cleaned the baby’s nose and mouth of mucus.
This was the point at which the books had called for suction to completely clear the nose and mouth of the newborn. But they had nothing of rubber or other elastic to make one. Jeebee put his mouth over the tiny nose and mouth and sucked gently. He felt only a touch on his tongue to tell him anything had come out. He spat sideways onto the plastic sheet.
As soon as the baby was able to breathe he took in a deep breath and uttered a tiny, immediate wail of a cry. Softly, with the cloth, Jeebee continued cleaning the rest of the little face. As soon as the baby’s eyes were uncovered they flashed about, incredibly blue.
With the flash of the eyes, something expanded powerfully in Jeebee, a silent explosion of emotion that he would have not believed possible, a connection of himself with this child of his he was holding.
He had identified his earlier feeling of protection with the moment he had been ready to kill Wolf to protect the food he had found. He changed his mind now. What he felt at this moment in protectiveness toward the infant in his hands was much greater. It faced outward, like an armed wall against the world and anything that might threaten his child.
He continued, wiping clean the little body.
It had been, on emergence from Merry, a plainly blue color, beneath a thin white covering that looked like nothing so much as cream cheese. It was a boy, Jeebee noticed for the first time. Now, unexpectedly, rapidly, it began—and this was the second miracle—to turn pink. Jeebee, cautiously supporting the baby with both hands now again, lifted him and laid him on Merry’s chest. Her arms came up wearily but immediately to enfold it, and to direct its head toward her left breast, which was closest. Immediately, instinctively, the baby found her nipple with his mouth and began to nurse.
For his first moment of relaxation from tension, as he watched the two of them, Jeebee began to realize that he was reeling from fatigue and emotional backwash from his emotional experience just now, which he suddenly realized had been foretold in the childbirth books. It had been his moment of instinctive bonding with his son. Now it would never leave him.
Jeebee stayed, kneeling where he was by the birthing stool, caught for a moment in a half daze, mesmerized by the timeless picture of Merry feeding her child. Then his sense of urgency jerked him out of the daze suddenly. There was still work for him to do. He looked at the bed now and located the scissors he had boiled, before he had laid them there on one of the boiled cloths; and next to them an adjoining cloth supporting two clean strips of rawhide cord, almost small enough to be fish line.
With one of these he tied off the cord about an inch from Merry’s skin, and then tied the other cord about an inch and a half beyond that. Then using the scissors from a sewing box they had found at the ranch house, he cut between the two ties and the baby was free.
He rose unsteadily, suddenly aware that he could hardly stand on his cramped leg muscles after having sat in a kneeling position so long. Blood flowed back into his legs.
Gently, he picked up Merry with the baby from the birthing stool and laid them both, just as they were, on the clean sheet he had exposed in that moment in which he had stripped the stained top one and the plastic sheet after Merry’s water had burst.
Merry accepted the move without seeming to notice it. She was half sitting up now, with double pillows between her and the head of the bed to support her back. She was still having mild contractions, and every so often, a small flow of red-stained fluid that Jeebee remembered was called lochia drained onto the sheet beneath her.
It had been in preparation for this that Jeebee had sandwiched several layers of plastic between alternate layer of sheets so that when the sheet became too dampened, he could clear it away down to another, dry one.
A moment later, as he watched, the afterbirth, slippery with blood, emerged. He wrapped it in plastic and put it aside on a high, overhead shelf, to be taken out later.
The baby stopped nursing and closed his eyes. Merry, who had been watching him, let her head loll back against the pillows with a sigh of happiness. Her baby was alternately feeding and staring about, his blue eyes flickering here and there, then closing as he seemed to doze for a short while, then waking to search for the nipple again and feed some more.
With one of the boiled cloths dampened in warm water, he cleaned the rest of the baby and wrapped him in the warmest and softest cloth he could find. Then he wrapped both the baby and Merry in their softest blanket.
He turned away to start to clean up. Little whimpering noises of the kind Wolf would make in certain social situations made him spin back. He had forgotten all about Wolf being there.
To his surprise, Wolf was slowly approaching Merry and the baby in the bed, in his most submissive and ingratiating of postures. His head was held low, his ears were back, his tail wagging, wolf-style, and he was making the little whimpering sounds of reassurance and promise of the best of all possible intentions.
Merry, totally exhausted but fully alert, snarled at him with surprising strength and intensity. The snarl was so reflexive and real that it startled Jeebee. He did not have to be a wolf himself to read it very clearly. Merry was a mother and Wolf was not going to get any closer to her baby.
Wolf stopped immediately and Jeebee, suddenly coming to his senses, woke up and moved toward him to throw him out, bodily, if necessary.
But Wolf was gone through the door before he had fully taken the first step toward him. This time, however, he did not leave with any show of temper, but rather with a quick self-effacement that was almost magical in its speed.
“Take him,” Merry said, lifting the baby from her body. “Would you bring me that chamber pot? My teeth are floating.”
Jeebee moved to take the baby from her.
“Carefully!” Merry’s voice was almost as sharp as when she had snarled at Wolf. Jeebee felt a momentary flicker of indignation, which was gone as quickly as it came, as he moved over to accept the baby into his arms. He had handled the baby carefully enough before Merry ever held him, he thought. But the thought remained unuttered.
“Oh,” said Merry, getting out of bed slowly and painfully. “And will you get me some food, now? I’m starving! And I want a large cup of water—and maybe five more after that.”
The chamber pot was handy, the cup and the water were available. Merry got back under the covers and took the baby back again. He had woken when he was passed to Jeebee, and when he came back to his mother he searched once more for her breast. Then she sighed happily, again. A very, very deep sigh.
Jeebee was busy bringing her sandwiches made by putting a slice of cold cooked beef between two slices of cheese. They had been hoarding some of the cheese against this moment. Merry bit into it voraciously.