The Gathering Storm Read online

  Papa’s face clouded at my burst of anger. He closed the door and bolted it as a woman in the yard glanced up and noticed them. “Loralei, Judah Blood has warned us all from the first. He has never been wrong.”

  “But what about Jessica? The baby! Jessica can’t travel until the baby is born. And some time after. How will she…? I mean, if only we had a car.” The memory of the comfortable old Fiat seemed like a distant dream. “But where can we go?”

  “The coast. Dunkirk. We’ll rest here as long as we’re able. For Jessica.”

  As if on cue, Gina darted up the stairs. “Grandpa!” she shouted. Her voice echoed in the rafters, disturbing the sacred hush. “Auntie Loralei! Come quickly! Mama says for me to fetch you back, Auntie Loralei. She says the water broke. The pains have started. The baby!”

  For the next sixteen hours Jessica lay on a cot in the dimly lit crypt of the chapel. It seemed there was little progress in her labor.

  The space was cool and quiet. Papa had long ago sent the trio of girls upstairs. He hung back on the landing—an errand boy following my instructions.

  Mama’s medical bag was at my feet, but I did not know what was needed to deliver a baby. Disinfectant and cotton gauze and bandages? Everything seemed useless in this situation.

  I regretted now I hadn’t taken the Red Cross instruction when Mama had done it two years ago. But who could have known?

  A kettle of thin broth had been sent over from the caretaker’s cottage. A bit of bread. Hot tea and honey. I spoon-fed my sister, changed the towels, and kept the bedding dry, but I did not know what else to do; how to help.

  At first we chatted between contractions, but as the hours dragged on, our conversation became terse and focused on strength and enduring the pain.

  How pale Jessica was, I thought, as I held her hand. Alabaster skin seemed almost the color of the linens.

  Jessica closed her eyes. “Another one.” She panted through the rising agony.

  How far apart were the contractions now? I squinted at my wristwatch and timed the viselike grip of the muscles by the sweep of the second hand. Placing my hand on Jessica’s abdomen, I felt it tighten and then slowly release.

  Jessica exhaled as the pain lessened. “Close now. But not like with Gina. Two minutes maybe. Minute and a half. Really close, Lora. And now so hard. Oh! I’m going to need…”

  “What, darling girl?”

  “Help.”

  “Yes.” I called to my father. “Papa, go outside, into the camp. A doctor.”

  “I’ve done that,” he replied miserably. “There’s no one. All medics at the front.”

  I snapped, “Then someone…a nurse. Midwife. Papa, hurry.” As I spoke the next contraction slammed down so fiercely it knocked the breath from Jessica.

  Papa’s footsteps clattered up the steps and out. The door swung closed behind him.

  “Oh!” Jessica cried. “Oh, Lora!” Gritting her teeth, she softly called, “William…where is William?”

  “Breathe. Take a breath.”

  “Need a doctor. Not easy like…with Gina!” Her brow furrowed, and her lips parted.

  “Jesus!” I prayed and dabbed perspiration from Jessica’s brow.

  Four more sets followed—each more violent and closer together.

  “Where is Papa?” I stood and looked about.

  Jessica groaned. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I’ve got to see what’s keeping him.”

  “No! Lora, it’s…okay. There. A minute to rest. Just don’t…leave me.”

  I changed the towel beneath Jessica’s hips. It was bright red. Was this normal? Or was my sister slowly bleeding to death?

  I knelt down beside Jessica and kissed her fingertips and prayed, Lord, I don’t know what to do. How to help. Just me and You, Jesus. Help me.

  At that instant the clamor of footsteps sounded on the steps. Men’s voices, Papa’s and someone else’s, echoed in the stairwell.

  “How far apart?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe two minutes,” Papa answered.

  “We’re here,” I called, knowing I sounded foolish. “Papa? Did you find—”

  Papa answered, “Captain Judah. He’s trained as a medic. Delivered babies. He can help!”

  Judah rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands—artist’s hands. He finished up with disinfectant and blotted them dry. He said to Papa, “Better if you’re not here, friend.”

  “I’ll be praying.” Papa nodded and quickly retreated up the stairs.

  I stepped aside as the man with the green eyes looking out from a tin face came close. He placed one hand on Jessica’s belly and the other on her forehead as the next contraction began.

  Closing his eyes, Judah counted, wordlessly moving his lips.

  Jessica made a soft sound, the humming of a suppressed scream.

  “Feel the urge to push?” Judah asked.

  Jessica nodded rapidly. “So much.”

  He said gently, “I think I know what’s happened here. There now. It will be all right. Everything. You’ll see.” He directed his attention to me. “You’re going to be the midwife. I’ll talk you through it. How long has she been like this?”

  “About an hour,” I guessed.

  “How long now, total? The labor?”

  “Sixteen hours,” I replied, wiping tears away with the back of my hand.

  Judah leaned close to Jessica and asked gently, “All right. Lots of pain in your back?”

  “Terrible.” Jessica’s glazed eyes looked up at him with gratitude. “You know?”

  His head moved in a small gesture of assurance. “I know. Your baby is posterior. Face up. Sunny side up, you see. Instead of shooting down the sled hill facedown as is proper, he’s going to come out on his back and looking up into my…face.”

  No sooner had he spoken those words than another contraction seized Jessica. Desperate, she grasped my forearms.

  Judah whispered to me, “Hold on to her…tight. The cervix is engorged with blood. Normally would be effaced, but…all right, then. Good contraction.” He ordered me, “Wash your hands.” I did so. He continued, “Your hands are small, but strong. You’re going to try to open the cervix, force it open with your fingers, over the baby’s head…like an elastic band.”

  I followed every command, finding the tight circle of the opening of the womb and between contractions spreading it open with my fingers.

  I wept silently as a low growl of agony, like that of a wounded animal, erupted from Jessica. Her fingers, claw-like, dug into the cot. She cried out, “Don’t, please! No more!”

  Judah’s voice was compassionate but unrelenting. “There…I know it’s painful. But Lora must. Must!” His eyes radiated deep concern from behind his mask.

  Jessica gasped, “I’m sorry…sorry. I—I—”

  “Go ahead,” Judah instructed. “I know it hurts! Yell if you want.”

  Though he had given her permission, she did not scream. Her eyes locked on my face. The look bonded us. I felt the baby’s head descend into the birth canal.

  I spoke in a whisper, “So sorry…hold on. We’ve got to open the way so we can move him down!” The contraction eased. The rapid breath of my sister was the only sound in the crypt.

  Judah asked me, “Is it open? Is his head through?”

  “I think so.”

  “All right, then. Jessica, I will tell you when to push. Lora, be ready. When I give the word, I’ll lift her up and support her back. Jessica’s going to sit up and bear down. Push, Jessica!”

  Jessica cried, “Here! Another one…”

  Judah’s eyes narrowed. His chin was up as he gauged the moments and the strength of Jessica’s contraction. “Now! Push now! That’s it. Push. Push. Push! Good girl. He’s on the move.”

  I saw the baby crown and then emerge into the light. His face was indeed facing upward. I sobbed as Jessica gritted her teeth and bore down with every fiber of her being. Breath exploded from her. With a long groan she fell back into Judah�
�s arms.

  Jessica managed to say, “Oh, the lights. Turn on…so dark.”

  I searched Judah’s placid face for some sign of emotion. His full lips were pressed tight together. Eyes blinked rapidly. He said, “Stay with us, now. Jessica, stay with me!” Like a lifeguard bearing up a drowning person, his voice seemed to pull her back to consciousness. “Once more…”

  “Oh! No!”

  “You can…”

  “Please, God! Jesus!”

  “Come on, here it is.” His tone was urgent. “Loralei, ready? Now, Jessica, give it everything. Push! That’s it! There. Loralei, help her. I see his head, his shoulders. All right. Push. Push. Push!”

  Jessica threw her head back. Her face turned bright red. “Oh, Jesus, help me!” Tendons in the side of her neck stood out.

  I choked, “Help her, Jesus!”

  Jessica cried loudly, “I’m…breaking!”

  Then Judah, at her head, shouted, “Yes! Here he is. Hello, little one!”

  I cried, “It’s a boy, Jessica. You have a baby boy!” I stroked the baby.

  Judah gathered him up and began to work on him, willing him to live. “Sometimes it takes awhile for these little ones to breathe. Come on. Come on, there. It’s not all that bad. Breathe for me, now. Handsome boy, take a breath!”

  Suddenly the arches of the crypt reverberated with the thin mewling cry of a newborn. Judah tied off the cord and handed me scissors. “Lora, it is for you to do. You and all the ancient matriarchs who stand beside you. Cut the cord.”

  Trembling violently, Jessica lay back as I cut the umbilical cord. She looked to Judah for help.

  “She’s in shock.” Judah’s voice registered new concern. “Take your nephew. There you go.” He placed the angry infant in my arms and went to work on Jessica.

  I wrapped the baby in a towel and held him close, rocking him gently as I sang the song Mama had made up for me when she rocked me to sleep. “Sugar cookie moon’s way up in the sky…” It was nonsense, but somehow the song made me feel like my mother was very near.

  Judah’s words echoed in the vaulted ceiling of the chamber where, tonight, life had overcome death. “That’s it, Jessica. You’re going to be fine. What a brave girl you are. Walk all this way through a battle line and have a baby too. Strong. Most women couldn’t do what you’ve just done. Brave girl.”

  He turned to me. “The great cloud of witnesses watches over you.”

  Through chattering teeth Jessica managed to speak. “We’re…from…Texas.”

  From the platform of the cross I surveyed the wriggling knots of refugees. Families clustered around headstones, like the Hebrew children in their wilderness wanderings gathered beside tribal standards. It struck me that many of these fleeing the Nazi onslaught were Jews—once again forced to escape oppression; once again on a desperate search for a Promised Land of peace and safety.

  Papa stood beside me, studying the crowds. “How many do you think?” he asked. Now that Jessica’s baby had been safely brought into an unsafe world, there was time for other considerations.

  Perhaps it helped Papa’s emotions to review what could be done when facing so many things that were out of his control. “How many refugees?”

  I had already been considering that very question. “More than a thousand, I think. Twelve thousand headstones.” I paused to allow a shudder to exit my neck and fingertips. “Those are easily numbered. I’m glad the living are harder to count. So many women and children and older men, who should be home with their grandchildren. Oh, Papa, I don’t like this picture!”

  He put his arm around me. “Focus on the needs of the living. That’s our duty, and our freedom from anxiety.” Squaring his own shoulders he said, “Nearer two thousand, I should think. And what is their greatest need?”

  “Food?” I ventured. “Blankets?”

  “Organization,” Papa said firmly. “See that family guarding the hundred-pound sack of rice? They have no pot to cook it in. And over there, those folks? A prosperous burgher and his family, from Brussels, perhaps. They seem to have brought an entire kitchen’s cookware but have no stove on which to use it.” He rubbed his hands together with anticipation. “Loaves and fishes,” he said, pleased at his own metaphor. “Now, where can we build outdoor ovens?”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” interjected the Tin Nose member named Sergeant Mickey Walker. “Captain Blood said I was to help you. Lieutenant Howard and Private Kadle is already setting up cookpits on the far side of our cottage. What help was you needin’ from me, sir?”

  “Excellent, Sergeant, excellent,” Papa said. “Loralei, you circulate through the families. Locate all the largest kettles you can. Explain where they are wanted. Sergeant, you and I will round up supplies for soup. Along the way we’ll detail able-bodied men and young women to bring buckets of fresh water. Clear enough?”

  “Right you are, sir,” Walker returned.

  I noted, “But Papa, won’t some of them try to hoard their supplies just for their own families?”

  The Irish sergeant aimed his painted mask in my direction. Walker’s remaining eye twinkled as he said, “Just you leave that to me. When it’s me as makes a request, very few has the boldness to disagree, if you take my meanin’.”

  Within an hour large cauldrons of stewing rice and beans were simmering. Chunks of bread, torn from loaves toted from Brussels and Maastricht and Namur and Waterloo, were being shared from hand to hand down the waiting rows of refugees.

  _____________________

  2 John Milton, Paradise Lost.

  13

  So Papa had done it; he had pulled it off. Robert Bittick, the miracle worker! He had created order out of the chaos of Tyne Cott.

  The four Tin Men cooked rice soup in giant washpots over an open fire.

  The long line of hungry, hopeless exiles formed.

  Gina, Judith, Susan, and I stood behind narrow tables made from sawhorses and boards. We wielded ladles, sloshing soup into tin cups and bowls held in trembling hands. Eager half smiles of wonder peered into the depths of plain grub and saw visions of the future, the possibility of life.

  Susan, the smallest, handed out thin white wheat wafers.

  Papa cajoled the snaking line, “Enough for everyone. That’s it, plenty to eat. Plenty!”

  It was a miracle of a kind. A cheerful wake, held in a graveyard, for the corpse of life as it used to be. Dead. Nothing of the old ordinary life endured. Toss the handful of earth into the deep grave heaped with things and stuff and worries. It all came down to this, didn’t it? Really?

  I sang a silent song as I watched Judah and Frank Howard lift a simmering kettle from the open fire and carry it toward the soup line. My heart hummed, Nothing is the same. Fling away what you were holding onto so tightly yesterday. Smashed china on the kitchen floor. Does it matter now? Springtime was waiting for you to notice it had come. You only read the paper and worried about what you would lose.

  A glimmer of the red poppies remained. I could see the crimson color, once so bright. Tonight in the sky there would be stars I had forgotten to look at. Tonight I would remember to see them.

  Behind me in the camp, young women laughed together. Spoons clanked on metal bowls and someone played a gypsy tune on the violin. It was as though someone had arranged it all. But who? Who arranged a giant picnic for strangers living among the dead?

  Papa looked at Judah as he drew near and then at me. He said to neither but to both of us: “The oldest suffering has met the newest, and finally the tree bears fruit.”

  I understood what he meant. Judah’s suffering was a lone pain. His loneliness was born of other men’s fears that the face behind the mask could be their own.

  Judah’s green eyes were alive, happy, behind the fixed apparition that concealed his true self. Judah’s living vision drank me in. In his long savoring of me, I saw him smile.

  “We don’t know what to do with ourselves,” Judah said, “we Tin Men. We’ve been talking to the headstones so long.
To hear real voices talking back, we don’t know what to do with ourselves.”

  Mickey Walker called across to Frank Howard, “Bring me a bowl, will you, Frank? I think this might be edible the way they’re all after eatin’ it.”

  A single light illuminated the crypt, casting my shadow against the ceiling. There was a work table and a large pattern laid out with a jigsaw puzzle of a half-completed stained-glass window. A man’s navy blue sweater was on the back of a wooden chair. The name, Judah Blood, was written in indelible ink on the laundry mark.

  “He’s the artist. He created the windows,” I remarked.

  “Judah?” Jessica breathed. With my nursing and the captain’s watchful care, my sister was slowly recovering her strength.

  “Yes. Papa told me. And I saw a glass-cutting tool in his vest pocket. It’s him.”

  “He’s a miracle worker. I don’t think I could’ve made it if he hadn’t…”

  “Don’t say such a thing.” I squeezed my eyes tight. The image of Judah’s eyes, burning with emotion behind an emotionless mask, made me ashamed.

  But ashamed of what? That I had not seen his soul when first we met? That I had only looked at the outward appearance? That I had never quite understood that a real human being lived inside the painted shell?

  I exhaled slowly as the image of Jessica’s agony replayed in my mind. Who was Judah Blood—that he knew how to design and create windows worthy of the Vatican or the great cathedrals of the world? What sort of fellow worked alone on fragile glass in the bowels of a war memorial chapel in the heart of a battlefield? Who was he before? What had he done in his life before the war that made him able to help a woman deliver her baby?

  I did not mention these questions aloud, but they gleamed in the front of my brain like a searchlight seeking a secret road home.

  Jessica ran her thumb over the baby’s downy hair. “I can tell you this, Loralei. The man knew what he was doing. More even than Doctor Coffel in Brussels. He knew. And I think he saved my life and the baby’s life too.”

  “You would have been okay,” I argued, though the reality of what might have happened was a powerful what-if. “I don’t want to think about it, okay?”