Free Against the Season by Jane Rule Page A

Amelia as she crossed the hall again.
    “What shall I do?” he asked.
    “Just what I said,” Amelia said. “Quietly and calmly.”
    “Is she all right?”
    “Yes, she’s all right. The sac’s broken, and that’s a little uncomfortable. That’s all. When you’ve got some clothes on, get a bath-mat and some towels and put them on the back seat of the car before you bring it round.”
    Back in the kitchen, Amelia found Kathy trying to clean up the floor.
    “Kathy, I told you to sit down. Now don’t be silly.”
    Amelia went to the phone and called the hospital. Then she tried to reach Rosemary at the unwed mothers’ home, but she and Agate had already left; so Amelia took a piece of kitchen note-paper and wrote a message to be left on the front door. Kathy sat, a fist in her mouth to keep herself quiet.
    “Can I put on another skirt?”
    “Of course.”
    Cole brought the car right to the bottom of the front steps and opened both the back and front doors. Then he stopped to tie his tennis shoes, his hands shaking, the tic in his cheek leaping. He was surprised to see Kathy coming through the front door the shape he’d grown accustomed to. He had half imagined that there in the kitchen she was slowly going down like a balloon while he tore on clothes and floundered downstairs in danger of his flying laces. He could see that she had been crying, and he suddenly felt sorry for her in a way that hadn’t occurred to him before in her gentle, slow-moving dullness. She must be frightened much more importantly than he was, who was only concerned about his own clumsiness. Without deciding to, he went up the stairs, put an arm around her waist, the other under her arm, helped her down the stairs and into the back seat, strewn with ill-matching towels. Amelia was tacking a note to Rosemary on the door. Cole returned for her, waiting two steps down for her hand on his shoulder. As soon as he felt that weight, he took a slow step down, then another, teetering a little as he always did when he couldn’t move at the pace his own balance dictated, but behind him Amelia was as steady as she was unbalancing. Once at the car, she helped herself in.
    “All right now?” she asked over her shoulder.
    “Yes, it’s stopped, I think,” Kathy said.
    “Now, once you’re there and they admit you, I’ll go on up to the waiting room, and, as soon as you’re settled, I’ll be right there.”
    “Oh, Miss A, you don’t have to …”
    “I’ll be right there.”
    “But you’re expecting Miss Hopwood and the new girl. You’re…”
    “I’ve left them a note. They can come any day.”
    “But who’s going to cook supper?”
    “There probably won’t be anyone home to eat it,” Amelia said.
    “I can cook,” Cole offered. “I make great scrambled eggs.”
    He was a careful, sometimes even slightly nervous driver for all that he loved the stock car races, and now that his intense moment of pity for Kathy had passed, he was aware of the pulsing nausea in his guts. He braked too hard at the edge of the street, and then the car stuttered slightly into the turn.
    “We’re not in any desperate hurry, Cole,” Amelia said, to reassure him. “There’s plenty of time.”
    “Is the baby all right in there without the water?” Kathy asked.
    “Oh yes,” Amelia said. “Just beginning to learn to live on dry land.”
    Dry land: but Cole saw it like something trapped in a collapsed balloon, a fish flipping, snapping itself in two, dashing itself against the rocky bone of pelvis. His own stomach lurched, and he remembered reading in anthropology about a tribe in which the men lay in bed, writhing in sympathetic labor, while the women delivered their babies squatting in the fields. And he felt stupidly frightened, ignorant of all the simple facts of life. Was Cousin A telling the truth? Was it all right? Or was it like a fish, dying in there, as he drove, on the fleshy shores of her womb? The images had the quality of