Inside the shanty, Queenie’s soft groans come faster now, mindless of the midwife woman’s molasses-thick voice: “Now, Miz Foss, you gots to stop pushin’, and you gots to stop now. This ’ere child come out wrong sided, he ain’t gon’ be long fo’ this world, and you ain’t neither. That’s it now. You jus’ quieten down. Be easy.”
Queenie gives a low, wrenching sound that’s like a boot sucking out of thick bayou mud. She’s birthed the five of us with hardly more than a heavy breath, but it’s taking so much longer this time. I rub the sweaty chill off my arms and feel like something’s out there in the woods. Something evil. It looks our way. Why is it here? Did it come for Queenie?
I want to scamper down the gangplank and run along the shore and yell, “You git on now! You git away! You can’t have my mama!”
I’d do it. I’m not afraid there might be gators. But instead, I sit still as a killdeer bird on a nest. I listen to the midwife’s words. She’s loud enough, I might as well be in the shanty.
“Oh, lands! Oh, mercy. She got more’n one inside. She do!”
My daddy mutters something I can’t hear. His boot steps cross the floor, hesitate, cross again.
The midwife says, “Mista Foss, ain’t nothin’ I can do ’bout this. You don’t git this woman to a doctor quick, them babies ain’t gon’ set eyes on this world, and this be their mama’s dyin’ day too.”
Briny doesn’t answer right off. He pounds both fists hard against the wall so that Queenie’s picture frames rattle. Something slips loose, and there’s the clink of metal against wood, and I know what it is by where it falls and how it sounds. In my mind, I see the tin cross with the sad-looking man on top, and I want to run inside and grab it and kneel by the bed and whisper mysterious Polish words, the way Queenie does on stormy nights when Briny is away from the shantyboat, and the rainwater flows over the roof, and waves pound the hull.
But I don’t know the strange, sharp language Queenie learned from the family she left behind when she ran off to the river with Briny. The few Polish words I have would be a mouthful of nonsense if I strung them together. Even so, if I could grab Queenie’s cross in my hand just now, I’d say them to the tin man Queenie kisses when the storms come.
I’d try pretty near anything to help get the birthing over with and see Queenie smile again.
On the other side of the door, Briny’s boot scrapes the planks, and I hear the cross clatter over the floor. Briny looks out the cloudy window that came from the farmhouse he tore down to build the boat before I was ever born. With Briny’s mama on her deathbed and the crops droughted out for another year, the banker was gonna get the house anyway. Briny figured the river was the place to be. He was right too. Time the Depression hit, him and Queenie were living just fine on the water. Even the Depression can’t starve the river, he says every time he tells the story. The river’s got her own magic. She takes care of her people. Always will.
But tonight, that magic’s gone bad.
“Mista! You hear me talkin’ at you?” The midwife turns mean now. “I ain’t havin’ they blood on my hands. You git yo’ woman to the hospital. You do it now.”
Behind the glass, Briny’s face pulls tight. His eyes squeeze shut. He hammers a fist to his forehead, lets it fall against the wall. “The storm…”
“I don’ care if the devil hisself is dancin’ by, Mista Foss. Ain’t nothin’ I can do fo’ this gal. Nothin’. I ain’t gon’ have it on my hands, no, suh.”
“She’s never…had trouble…not with the others. She…”
Queenie screams high and loud, the sound whirling off into the night like a wildcat’s call.
“ ’Less’n you fo’got to tell me somethin’, she ain’t never had two babies at once befo’ neither.”
I shift to my feet, and take Fern around, and put her on the shanty porch with Gabion, who’s two, and Lark, who’s six. Camellia looks my way from where she’s staring in the front window. Closing the gate across the gangplank, I trap them all on the porch and tell Camellia not to let the little kids climb over. Camellia answers with a frown. At