JEWEL by BRET LOTT Page B

truck parked before the house, the yard a white fire in the light cast by the headlights, and now other words came to me, the words I’d formed to ask Cathe ral, the ones I’d put together and readied to give her before I’d passed out in my room.
    “Cathe ral, ” I said as the boys eased me into the cab, Temple moving aside, Sepulcher settling me in the seat.
    She was there with the cloth again. “You save yo’ words, Miss Jewel.
    You save yo’ strength.”
    “Cathe ral, ” I whispered, the words old, ancient, though I’d not yet spoken them. I whispered, “Is this the hardship? Is this how He smiles?
    ” Her eyes met mine for an instant, hung there only as long as she used to let them, before she came to know her God. Then they were away from me, settled on the cloth she still held to my cheek. “You just pray, ” she whispered, “you just pray.”
    She closed the door, looked through the glass to Leston, nodded. He gave it the gas, and we were gone, and I was certain she hadn’t heard me answer her, hadn’t heard me say “I am” even before she’d So pulled the cloth from my cheek, my black prayer already resumed, Let it be the child.
    “Push! ” the doctor yelled, and it was as if the word were a birth itself, welcome and painful at once, me holding back as long as I had.
    There was no telling how long I’d been in the hospital, my mind gone now, all I knew the white of a room, the first hospital I’d ever been in, my legs apart and high in the air, strapped to metal bars poking out the end of the bed, sheets hiding everything everywhere. That was all I knew, and the faces of the last people I’d know on this earth, the doctor, all I could see of him above the sheets below me a flat forehead and thick spectacles low on his nose, eyes all careful concentration and focused between my legs, next to him a nurse, a woman older than me and smiling, a tooth or two missing in front, loose folds of skin beneath her chin, and one other nurse, a girl who seemed no older than my Billie Jean, hands the color of porcelain as she held on to one of my own.
    “Now push, darling, ” the younger one whispered, all of them here and ministering to me, I saw, as if I had no idea what to do.
    “Push, ” the older woman said. She nodded in what I figured was a motherly way, though I’d no idea how my mother might have urged me had she been here, me fast approaching her and the hereafter, if the Lord chose not to honor my steadfast prayer.
    I surrendered to the notion I was going to die here and now, the feeling in me some white wave, a peace that took on whatever might happen, me heading to meet my God. I finally pushed, pushed with everything I had in me, and then with even more. I pushed, not because they’d told me to, but because it was what my body’d led me to believe was right, what it knew to do.
    “Dammit, push! ” the doctor yelled, and the young nurse squeezed my hand harder. “Push, ” she whispered again.
    I pushed, my eyes squeezed tight to where I could see only swirling red circles and squares whirl and pop before me, a red quick going to white, and I thought I was at the gates of Heaven, readying for entrance, round my neck the millstone of my prayer for the death of this child.
    I pushed, and pushed, felt something, a power greater than me, pushing, too, the help of some force not of me at all, and I drove open my eyes, my teeth clenched, my jaw tight as it would ever be.
    It was the doctor, there beside me. He was pushing on me, mashing down on me, the fingers of his hands locked together, the palms at the top of my belly. He was mashing down on me, his moves quick and tough, as if he were kneading dough, and with each push down I felt air leaving me, felt the tear below me. “Now is the time, ” I heard him whisper, then yell again, “Push.”
    The older nurse was below the sheets now, her eyes the same iron as the doctor’s had been when he was down there. She licked her lips, ran the