The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,72
was ready, past ripe.
The heaviness and the waiting did not sit well with me. On some of the last nights, I tossed and turned around my big belly. In my misery, I kicked Adam out of the bed. He tried to comfort or distract me, singing or reading, sometimes bringing up his beautiful harmonics. But even that worked only for a few hours—until the next time I woke up to pee. I sometimes used a chamber pot again, even though we had indoor plumbing. The bathroom seemed so cold and so far down the hall in the middle of the night.
On the morning of December 22, I woke with a start in the darkness. Adam took a sharp breath behind me, his arm around me, his hand cupping my belly. “This contraction woke you up.” My womb clenched hard as a rock and painful down through my legs.
“Yes. It hurts.”
Softly, he sang “Amazing Grace,” all verses once, then went through them a second time. Silence followed and no more pain. We listened, the two of us in the dark. Another five minutes passed before the next contraction.
All day long, painful, but erratic—twenty, maybe ten, sometimes five minutes apart—the contractions came. I boiled towels, sheets, and a single white shoelace as Granny Paynes had instructed, grateful for the automatic washer and wringer. Before dinner, Adam drove into town to warn her that my time approached. Otherwise, he stayed close by. We went through our normal routines. I ate well. Then, about nine o’clock, the pains came on hard and always right at the end of the second round of the song.
Suddenly, I was afraid to be alone. I didn’t want Adam to leave to fetch Granny Paynes. He dragged in Hobo, who seemed puzzled but stood patiently by the bed, his snout on the pillow next to me. I moaned my way through contractions, clutched handfuls of his hide, and curled up fetal around my own womb.
With each contraction, everything broke into a grainy blueness, then returned to its natural color and density when the pain released me. Then Adam was back with Granny Paynes and Hobo was gone.
Granny Paynes and Adam coaxed me out of bed. “Walk the baby out. You keep moving and it’ll come out easier. Walk it out. Sing it out,” she urged.
Into the kitchen, then into the parlor and back to the bedroom over and over we walked, with her and Adam singing “Amazing Grace.” His strong, soft baritone on one side and her rich, old alto on the other. “Sing through the pain, li’l momma. Sing.”
I tried, but my voice evaporated into a tuneless hiss. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but words were too much. Movement and even breath seemed too much. Pain obliterated everything.
At last, they led me back to the bedroom. Granny Paynes smoothed a clean oilcloth and a layer of towels across the bed. They helped me lie down. The pain grew until it overcame everything. The visual world narrowed to a single crack and everything else disappeared into the pain. I began to disappear, too. There was only pain.
Then, it felt like the hand of God reached inside me and pulled down. Abruptly, the pain changed direction. I was pushing. The pain gathered in the diffuse, overwhelming blueness and shot down to one sharp, blind-white spot between my legs. I screamed high and scared, grabbed Adam by his shirt, and pulled his face up to mine until there was nothing but his brown eyes. I thought I was dying.
Granny Paynes pushed herself between us and took my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Stop that screaming up in your nose. You are working now. Grunt. Low, low down in your throat.” She growled at me and patted my collarbone.
I growled back, low. The next wave of pain began, but I rode it, pushed behind it, not at its mercy, not drowning anymore. Again and again. I pushed and growled and grunted and pushed and growled. Granny Paynes knelt on the bed down between my legs. I felt her rubbing me, massaging my perineum between the pains. Then she held up three fingers. “Three more times,” she said. “Maybe two.”
I took “two” as a challenge and began pushing before the next contraction. After the second one, both she and Adam hunched between my legs, staring. I pushed again. I felt the slither of shoulders, hips, and feet. Then the first newborn bleat.