“Scarlet!” she wailed, and I froze, terrified.
She held her hand out to me from the bed where they’d moved her around, and said my name again. I lurched forward, crawling on the bed to sit beside her. She grabbed my wrist and I grabbed hers, bound together, strong and linked.
“It hurts,” she sobbed against me. “No one says it hurts this much.”
“No,” one of the women told her, patting her knee. “They all forget once they have the babe. It’s a quick mess of pain for a lifelong joy, my girl.” She smiled. “Besides, the pains will get much, much worse. We’re still early on.”
The worst of the pain passed, and Bess curled against my chest, crying free. “Damn him,” she whispered. “Damn him for leaving me like this. Leaving me alone to do this.”
I squeezed her wrist harder. “You’re not alone. You have a whole family outside that door. And in,” I added, looking at our hands. “He left you with a whole damn family.”
She kept on crying, but she nodded, and I reckoned that were good enough.
“You’ve got a long while to go, Bess,” the woman near her knees told her. I reckoned she were the midwife. “Rest if you can between the pains. And you—” she said, nodding to me. “Don’t let go of her hand. When she needs to squeeze, she needs to squeeze hard.”
I nodded, like this were a solemn duty. It were, to me.
The midwife passed me cloths soaked in cool water, and I patted them on her neck, her forehead, cooling the sweat. She relaxed a little, tangled against me. “Hush,” I said to her. “Rest. I’m not leaving you.”
Bess nodded.
I never knew how long a birth could take. How much punishment it gave the mother. Bess labored for hours and hours, such pain that she screamed and cried and I were surprised there were still water in her to cry and sweat. The pains started with minutes between them and grew closer until it never broke, just kept coming and coming and coming. She cried and hurt so much that I cried with her. It weren’t my arm—though that were red and sore in her grasp—it were the strangeness of it.
Pain never meant much to me. It weren’t the beginning or the end—it were an ever-moving mark that never served a purpose, never bore a reason, never changed things except to make people more afraid.
But this pain—I cried with her and I cursed God for His cruelty. I thought He meant to take Bess from us—surely this amount of pain weren’t natural, weren’t expected, even though the midwife stayed calm throughout. I thought Bess were dying, and I were meant to hold her hand and watch because Death and I knew each other so well.
But then the baby started to come, and the pain started to mean something. Every push Bess gave became an inch closer to new life as the little one struggled to get out of her body.
The head came first, and it were a quick thing to pull it out once the shoulders appeared, like a strange and humbling magic, from Bess’s body. The midwife caught the baby in clean linen, toweling off blood and mess. She cleaned the face, and the tiny eyes didn’t open and the mouth didn’t move.
“Sarah?” Bess whined. “Sarah?”
“Hush,” the midwife said. Holding the baby in the linen, she swatted the rump.
And the tiny, perfect thing screamed. It screamed so loud and hard its lips trembled and shook.
The midwife laughed. “Bess, you have a beautiful, healthy baby girl.”
Bess burst into tears as the midwife passed the bundle up. There were a fleshy cord tying the two together, and the midwife motioned to me. “Perhaps you and your knives could be of service?” she asked.
Silent and wide-eyed, I moved forward, away from Bess, my body hot and sweaty where she’d been pressed against me. I drew one of my knives, burning it in the fire to make the wound clean. I felt utterly strange at having a weapon so close to a brand new thing, and the midwife showed me where to cut.
In a breath it were done, and the tether that bound the two of them together became something less easy to see, less easy to touch. But it were there nonetheless, as she stared at her daughter and her daughter quieted, looking back up at her through bare-open eyes.
I stood before them, lost, captivated, as the women cleaned and piled things to hide the blood and the muck and all the things that had come out of her that no one wanted the men to know about. She just stared at the little baby, and the midwife showed her how to feed her.
“Scarlet?” Bess asked soft.
Nodding, I stepped closer. “Will you bring her out? I don’t want the menfolk in here just yet.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice rough. Bess held her up a little but she weren’t strong, and I picked up the baby, holding her at arm’s length and staring at her as she stared back at me. The midwife laughed and took her from me, holding her like a loaf of bread I were meant to cradle.