No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I wanted you to be with me . . . to share.”
“Do you feel like going to sleep? Are you tired?”
“No. I feel fine. I’m too excited to sleep.” Poor C, she thought, he isn’t prepared for what will happen.
“Oh. Well, maybe you should be. Maybe it’s not healthy not to be. Should I call a nurse?”
“No. It’s the best thing to be excited now—because I’m so happy.”
A nurse walked through the doors in the other direction, away from them.
And another nurse, a young nurse, not small, with telephone-black hair, came through the doors into the thirty-bed-capacity room carrying a bundle and looking down into it. She stood casually, resting on one leg, and looked across the ward, from bed to bed. Some of the others looked up from their lying or propped-up positions and then looked away uninterested. Her search carried her easily down one aisle and up the other, rocking her arms so naturally that her limbs seemed to swing in time to her heart, until she found the frail little woman with colorless eyes peering out of her covers like a frightened bird, her husband sitting beside her in a straight-backed chair looking like a passenger in a very fast car that had just taken off. First baby, she thought; people are so odd . . . such a simple thing, having a baby. But these people aren’t even holding on to each other. She needs comfort now. He should be more compassionate. They’re afraid to be kind. And she carried the bundle over to them.
“Mrs. Easter?” she said, in a voice that came sympathetically, automatically, from way down inside her, clear from nursing school.
The colorless eyes did not leave what she was carrying and there was no answer.
“He’ll probably be getting hungry about now,” she said. “He’s a handsome little devil.”
Still the two didn’t speak and she carefully laid the baby down on the bed between Cell’s spread legs. Then she left, feeling slighted, thinking, Stupid people!
Cell looked at it, and it moved. C looked at it and, as though it might be a butterfly bomb, got up from his chair and stalked around the bed, sliding one hand along the metal frame. Cell wiggled one of her feet, then the other, then both. The baby noticed neither. Later, C sat back down on the chair and lit a cigarette.
“No smoking,” snapped the woman in the next bed. C pinched off the lit end and put it in his pocket. Cell reached down toward the baby with an extended finger and touched its right hand.
Nothing happened. As though taking apart an intricate machine, she pulled the wrapping away. One of its legs moved. C came over closer.
“Aren’t the eyes open yet?” asked C.
The eyes! thought Cell; they will . . . oh, my God; but soon then the baby opened its eyes and looked—at least it seemed as if it looked. And then C touched it and it moved again. Then Cell touched it. After a while it opened its mouth and yawned. Then it made a noise and then it cried.
It’s a baby, thought Cell. It’s just a baby . . . look, C, it’s just a baby. “It’s wonderful,” she said, as though listening to the sound she wanted to say.
“It’s wonderful,” said C, trying this also, thinking, It’s alive, it’s something . . . something different from me. It’s all together.
“It’s wonderful,” they said together and began to laugh, tears running down the sides of their faces. “It’s wonderful.” The baby screamed—C coming over to the bed and being close to Cell— she finally picking up the baby, laughing and crying.
“Keep quiet,” snapped the woman in the next bed. “Don’t you know this is a hospital?” But the Easters did not hear her.
The nurse returned with a paper and wrote down numbers and words from the chart hanging on the bed. Cell was rocking the baby back and forth with the motion of her body, smiling, and C, absent-mindedly, not wanting to take his eyes away from his family, said,
“Glove.”
And she wrote it down.
SAM
Sam played mostly three-ball in the honky-tonks, barrooms, and all-night bus terminals with tables. Two fish in Clancy had brought him enough for three weeks in a Hilton, two new sets of clothes, two day drunks, the evening company of uncommonly attractive women, and cigarettes. It was not always so good. A sixteen-year-old kid in Gary had taken his car, and an old man whom he’d taken to be half blind took him for his playing cue in a nine-ball game. But mostly he lived from quarter to quarter, winning never more than two or three of them from each stranger that played him, and always wearing a white shirt and a wide green tie that fell down over his cue as he took aim and swung from the loosened knot around his neck, his square-blocked Stetson hanging on the coat rack. In this way he was undoubtedly to the hotel clerks, waitresses, and bartenders a neat, perhaps even proud bum. Sam, he would sign in the register.
“Sam what?”
“Just Sam.”
There was something about Sam that was silently violent, and because these two attributes conflicted so much, he seemed at the edges of his personality to be neither. He lived for involvement. But this was complicated by his nerves, and confused by his drive for freedom, and compounded by his love of tranquility. In any case, these involvements, which he willingly and willfully chose, invariably would defeat him, and each would be one of those all too good examples of self-destruction except that he was powerless over his own desires and couldn’t control them. So time and time again he would be caught up terribly in involvements of his own making.
“A man is what he does,” his father, Ansel Easter, had told him. “If he lays brick eight hours a day, then for that time he is a bricklayer. He’s nothing but a bricklayer if he does nothing else. He’s only a drunk so long as he’s been drinking. People that do nothing are close to being nothing except survivalists, and next to that are those that do one thing.” Actually, when he had told Sam that, C had also been there and had asked if a man could be a thinker, and Ansel had left the room and slammed the door back toward the brothers and against the doorjamb.
But Sam had listened and had even remembered that he’d given an entire sermon from the pulpit in explanation of the meaning, documented with such glaring examples of real sinners—those people who spend more time at finding fault in others than evildoers do evildoing, and so were very much against the way of the Lord—that everyone left the church feeling as though he too was one of the “parasites of the world . . . moral degenerates, spiritual demigods . . . ingrates.” It had been one of his good but not outstanding sermons; but Sam had remembered it, thinking that he might as well believe it was true, not so much out of reason but because he knew he was incapable of inactivity, his nerves continually attempting to unwind inside him, and doomed to do many things in order to keep them wound.
Auctioneer’s school had barely been enough for him to keep himself together, and he was relieved to be out and into the more complex world of opportunities, where he picked up work from town to town selling animals and farm machinery. Then back to Ontarion, and back again into Illinois. With the money from his father’s house he went to Chicago and by merely following the stock market from day to day and watching for the interrelatedness of companies he nearly doubled his money—every month sending back payment on the mortgage. Then he went to Quincy and sold in the neighborhoods and hired himself out as a speaker
