own discomfort, hearing the unconscious words of encouragement stream from her mouth, even as she was swept along in the slipstream. Behind her Sophia had lifted Margery’s cotton dress, and positioned the oil lamp so that she could look at the most intimate parts of her, but Margery didn’t seem to care. She just kept moaning, her body rocking from side to side, as if she could shake off the pain, her hands grasping stickily for Alice’s own.
“I got your water,” came Deputy Dulles’s voice. And when Margery began to yell, he said, “I’m going to unlock the door and just push the jug inside. Okay? I’ve sent for the doctor, just in case. Oh, dear Lord, what in God’s— You know what? I’m just— I’ll leave it outside. I— Oh, dear God—”
“Can we have some fresh water in here too, please, sir? Drinking water?”
“I—I’ll leave it outside the door. Going to trust you girls not to go anywhere.”
“You got nothing to concern yourself with, sir, believe me.”
Sophia was a whirlwind, laying out her mama’s steel instruments, placing them carefully on the clean folded cotton square. She kept one hand on Margery at all times, as one might a horse, reassuring, cooing, encouraging. She peered underneath her, positioned herself.
“Okay, I think she’s coming. Alice, you hold on now.”
After that everything became a blur. As the sun rose, forcing fingers of blue light through the narrow bars, Alice remembered the events as if on a ship in high seas: the rocking of the floor beneath them, Margery’s body, thrown one way and then another by the force of her labors, the scents of blood and sweat and bodies pressed together, the noise, the noise, the noise. Margery hanging on to her, her face pleading, afraid, begging them to help me, help me, her own rising panic. And underneath it all Sophia, calm and reassuring one moment, bullying and fierce the next. Yes, you can, Margery. C’mon, girl. You got to push now! Push harder!
Alice had feared for a dreadful moment that here, in the heat and the dark and the animal sounds, with this sense that they were on their own, locked into this journey, the three of them, she might faint. She was frightened of the uncharted depths of Margery’s pain, afraid to see this woman who had always been so strong, so capable, reduced to a crying, wounded animal. Women died doing this, didn’t they? How could Margery not, in such agony? But just as the room swam, she caught Sophia’s fierce expression, saw Margery’s furrowed brow, her eyes swimming with tears of despair—I can’t!—and she gritted her teeth and leaned forward so that Margery’s forehead was pressed against her own.
“Yes, you can, Marge. You’re so close now. You listen to Sophia. You can do this.”
And then suddenly as Margery’s wail reached an unbearable pitch—a sound that was like the end of the world and all its agonies compressed, thin, drawn out, unendurable—there was a shout and a noise like a fish landing on a slab and Sophia was suddenly gripping this wet, purple creature in her arms, her face illuminated and her apron bloodied as the baby’s hands lifted blindly, grappling with the air for something to hold on to.
“She’s here!”
And Margery turned her head, the tendrils of hair stuck to her cheeks, the survivor of some terrible, solitary battle, and on her face was an expression Alice had never seen before, and her voice was a soft keening, like cattle in a shed, nuzzling a calf, “Oh, baby, oh, my baby!” And as the tiny girl let out a thin, lusty cry, the world shifted, and they were suddenly laughing and crying and clutching at each other, and the men in the cells, whom Alice had not known were there, were exclaiming in heartfelt tones, “Thank the Lord! Praise Jesus!” And in the darkness and the filth and the blood and mess, as Sophia wiped the baby, wrapped her in the clean cotton sheet and handed her to the trembling Margery, Alice sat back and wiped her eyes with her sweating, bloodied hands and thought she had never been anywhere so glorious in all her born days.
* * *
• • •
She was, Sven said that evening, as they toasted him in the library, the most beautiful child who had ever been born. Her eyes the darkest, her hair the thickest, her tiny nose and perfect limbs unparalleled in history. Nobody felt inclined to disagree. Fred had brought