The Hinterlands by Robert Morgan Page B

of chestnut and hickory logs, and I prayed the pegs wouldn’t give way.
    The painter seemed to be walking back and forth on the roof, like he was trying to find a place to get inside. First one end of the roof would shake under the weight, and then the other. Splinters fell off the ceiling. He walked along the comb and then along the edges. For a while I didn’t hear nothing, and thought he might have jumped off. But then they was a scratching and growling around the chimney, and I saw what my problem was going to be. That painter was trying to come down the stick and clay chimney. He could tear it apart with one swipe of his paw. It was just pieces of wood with clay stuck over them on the inside. That devil was poking his head down the chimney and getting smoke in his face. That would make him mad and he’d slap at the wood. Bits of clay was falling down the chimney, pieces he was knocking off.
    I’d have to keep the fire going all night, so that painter wouldn’t come down. Your Grandpa had split a great pile of wood out behind the cabin, and thought he’d carried in plenty. I wished I’d carried in the rest before dark. I’d piddled away the afternoon shelling beans and sewing up the edges of a baby wrapping cut down from a wore-out blanket.
    It was the time of the longest nights of the year. It would be seven in the morning before they was any light. I looked around the cabin for what they was to burn. Biggest thing was the bench itself, two big planks Realus had hewed, and the stumps they was pegged to. The boards was too long to fit in the fireplace, but I could feed them in, the way they used to do with a Yule log.
    They was a cradle your Grandpa had made for the baby from poplar wood. He had sawed out the boards and smoothed them with a piece of glass. That could be burned, much as I would hate to. Your Grandpa had also made a kind of ladder up to the loftwith pegs stuck in the logs opposite the chimney. I could pull them steps out and burn them.
    I figured all together I could keep the fire going two or three hours beyond midnight, maybe four hours if the chestnut in the bench burned slow. If the painter knocked the chimney down and put out the fire I was a goner anyway.
    A pain wrenched through me and it was worser than before. It was the biggest pain I had ever felt, and it seemed to hit me all over. I think I hollered without knowing it, till afterwards I felt it in my throat where the groan come out. But a birth pain is a different pain. It’s like something you’re straining to get rid of, like you’re awful constipated and it’s hurting and it’s going to take you a long painful time.
    I grabbed hold of the bedpost and I held on till the flood swept through me. That seemed to help a little, just to grip something hard as I could. By then I was beginning to sweat. Pain will heat you up like fire in your flesh.
    I’d heard tell they made Indian women walk before they had a baby. Now white women don’t do that. White women lay in bed and chew a rag when the hurt comes. And they take laudanum sometimes to soothe the pain. I’d heard Indian women walk back and forth along a stream when the baby is coming. That somehow speeds it up or makes it easier. I figured my case was like an Indian’s. I didn’t have no other help, so I might as well try their method.
    I walked to the fireplace and back to the wall beside the bed. It was exactly five steps and a turn. If I walked around the cabin I had to step over the bench, and that was too hard with the weight in my belly. It was five steps toward the light, and a turn. Then five steps in the dark toward the candle and shadowy wall. I was pacing like the painter on the roof. I would stop and hear the padof feet up there. It was like we was playing some kind of game. Then I started again and counted off my trips across and back. I got up to ten before the pain hit again.
    Every time the pains got worser.