JEWEL by BRET LOTT

once, me wanting it out more each time that pain came. But each time there was Cathe ral at the foot of the bed, her saying, “You just breathe now. Go on and breathe, ” her eyes focused between my legs, my knees up, the thin sheets wet with my sweat and heavy as wool blankets. It was only October, the day had been as warm as any the last month, trees and vines and kudzu only in the last few days losing the deep and sturdy green they’d held all summer to the dull wax sheen that signaled fall was coming on. Annie’d spent the morning and early afternoon beside me, while I made breakfast for the crew, dinner for the boys and Billie Jean once they came home from school. And then I’d felt the first one come, the first pain that started at the top, just below my breasts, and shivered slowly down me, that first small push telling me God’d already decided this would be the day. And I’d sent Burton.
    But now was the time, I told myself, those pains on me for eight I hours straight, the word Push heavy in my head. I closed my eyes, bit down hard on my bottom lip, the pain and blood taste there only a small and welcome distraction to what I felt below my heart. I let go my belly, reached for the headboard, held on tight.
    “Oh no, no, Miss Jewel, ” Cathe ral said, and I heard her move from where she sat, felt her rough hands touch my cheek, my chin, brush back my hair. “You can’t do this now. Yo’ body ain’t be ready for this now.
    All in the Lord’s good time.” She paused, and I felt her hand in my hair, her touch comfort. Slowly the pain eased, and I pictured in my head a lone tree somewhere, a young sycamore bent to a heavy wind, that wind easing, green branches lifting up to blue sky.
    “This baby just be borning different from the others, ” she whispered, and I opened my eyes. She was looking at her hand, her eyes wet, half-closed. “I will stand upon my watch, ” she said, “and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.” Her forehead, I could see even through the haze of this long in labor, was wet with sweat, and I wondered what she knew and wouldn’t say.
    I opened my mouth, formed the words my head stirred up, wanted spoken, but my eyes closed, and I felt the room begin to tumble, felt the center of it, my belly, become some fire wouldn’t go out. I dug my nails deeper, trying to hold on, keep the bed from spinning me off the face of the earth, but I disappeared.
    I came to at the sound of whispers, voices swimming up, my mother whispering in another room, and my grandmother whispering, too, and my father and his father, Jacob Chandler as well, all of them whispering words I couldn’t make out, verses from the Bible that seemed somehow to fit. Someone held my eyes closed, a heavy hand tight on my lids, but I managed them open, blinked at the light from the lamp next to the bed.
    I tried to move my arms but couldn’t, the weight of our quilts now on me, pressing on my chest, my legs, my belly and I remembered I was here to bear a child still in me, the mound below me no smaller, no wails through the room of a child letting the world know it was here, ready to start in on the fight every life becomes. There was only me here, the door to the bedroom shut, behind it those whispers.
    “Cathe ral, ” I called out, my voice far away from me, not even of me but mine for the name it called out.
    The door opened, and Cathe ral, silhouetted by the light from the hall, moved toward me. Here was her hand on my head again, in my hair, that familiar comfort, and I closed my eyes.
    She whispered, “Now, Miss Jewel, it near on to four o’clock in the morning, and you still not ready to have this baby be born.” She touched the backs of her cool fingers to my cheek. “So we been at this for too long now, and Mr. Leston and me, we both think you best be taken into the hospital now.”
    I opened my eyes to her. “The hospital? ” I