Free Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx Page A

eternal. Another dawn came sticky with the return of heat and still her raw loins could not deliver the child. On the fourth afternoon, voiceless from calling for Archie, her mother, Tom Ackler, Tom Ackler’s cat, from screaming imprecations at all of them, at god, any god, then at the river ducks and the weasel, to any entity that might hear, the python relaxed its grip and slid off the bloody bed, leaving her spiraling down in plum-colored mist.
    It seemed late afternoon. She was glued to the bed and at the slightest movement felt a hot surge that she knew was blood. She got up on her elbows and saw the clotted child, stiff and grey, the barley-rope cord and the afterbirth. She did not weep but, filled with an ancient rage, got away from the tiny corpse, knelt on the floor ignoring the hot blood seeping from her and rolled the infant up in the stiffening sheet. It was a bulky mass, and she felt the loss of the sheet as another tragedy. When she tried to stand the blood poured, but she was driven to bury the child, to end the horror of the event. She crept to the cupboard, got a dish towel and rewrapped him in a smaller bundle. Her hand closed on the silver spoon, her mother’s wedding present, and she thrust it into the placket neck of her nightgown, the cool metal like balm.
    Clenching the knot of the dish towel in her teeth, she crawled out the door and toward the sandy soil near the river, where, still on hands and knees, still spouting blood, she dug a shallow hole with the silver spoon and laid the child in it, heaping it with sand and piling on whatever river stones were within reach. It took more than an hour to follow her blood trail back to the cabin, the twilight deep by the time she reached the doorstep.
    The bloody sheet lay bunched on the floor and the bare mattress showed a black stain like the map of South America. She lay on the floor, for the bed was miles away, a cliff only birds could reach. Everything seemed to swell and shrink, the twitching bed leg, a dank clout swooning over the edge of the dishpan, the wall itself bulging forward, the chair flying viciously—all pulsing with the rhythm of her hot pumping blood. Barrel Mountain, bringing darkness, squashed its bulk against the window and owls crashed through, wings like iron bars. Struggling through the syrup of subconsciousness in the last hour she heard the coyotes outside and knew what they were doing.
     
    As the September nights cooled, Archie got nervous, went into town as often as he could, called at the post office, but no one saw him come out with any letters or packages. Alonzo Lago sent Sink and Archie to check some distant draws ostensibly for old renegade cows too wily or a few mavericks too young to be caught in any roundup.
    “What’s eatin you?” said Sink as they rode out, but the kid shook his head. Half an hour later he opened his mouth as if he were going to say something, looked away from Sink and gave a half shrug.
    “Got somethin you want a say,” said Sink. “Chrissake say it. I got my head on backwards or what? You didn’t know we was goin a smudge brands? Goin a get all holy about it, are you?”
    Archie looked around.
    “I’m married,” he said. “She is havin a baby. Pretty soon.”
    “Well, I’m damned. How old are you?”
    “Seventeen. Old enough to do what’s got a be did. Anyway, how old are you ?”
    “Thirty-two. Old enough a be your daddy.” There was a half-hour silence, then Sink started again. “You know old Karok don’t keep married fellers. Finds out, he’ll fire you.”
    “He ain’t goin a find out from me. And it’s more money than I can git on the Little Weed. But I got a find a way Rose can let me know. About things.”
    “Well, I ain’t no wet nurse.”
    “I know that.”
    “Long as you know it.” Damn fool kid, he thought, his life already too complicated to live, and said aloud, “Me, I wouldn’t never git hitched to no fell-on-a-hatchet female.”
    The next week half the