Narration

Transcript

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for every member By Kathleen Windsor Prologue, 16 44 The small room was warm and moist. Furious blasts of thunder made the windowpanes rattle and lightning seem to streak through the room itself. No one had dare see what each was thinking. That this storm, violent even for mid March, must be an evil omen. As was customary for lying in chamber, the room had been largely cleared of its furniture. Now there remained only the bed, with its tall head and foot boards and linen side curtains, half a dozen low stools and the midwife spur stool, which had armrests and a slanting back and cut out seat. Beside the fireplace was a table with a pewter water basin on it, brown court and knife bottles, anointment jars and a pile of soft white cloths. Near the head of the bed was a very old hooded cradle, still empty. The village women, all perfectly silent, stood close about the bed, watching what was happening there with tense, anxious faces, sympathetic anguish, pity apprehension or the expressions they showed as their eyes shifted from the tiny red baby lying beside the woman who had just given at birth to the sweating midwife, bending down and working with her hands beneath the spread blankets. One of the women pregnant herself, leans over the child, her eyes frightened and troubled. And then, all at once, the baby guest gave us knees and opening its mouth began to yell. The women's side relieved, Sarah, the midwife said softly. The pregnant woman looked up. They exchanged some words in low, murmuring voices, and then, as a midwife, went to the fireplace and sat down to bathe the child from a basin full of former red wine. The others slid her hands beneath the blankets and with firm, gentle movements, began to need the mother's abdomen. There was a look of strain, anxiety on her face that amounted almost to horror, but it vanished swiftly as a woman on the bed slowly opened her eyes and looked at her. Her face was drawn and haggard, with a strange nougat nous of prolonged suffering, and her Eiseley sunk in dark sockets. Onley, her light blond hair flung in a rumpled mass about her head, seems still alive as she spoke. Her voice, too, was thin and flat, scarcely above a whisper. Sarah, Sarah, is that I be be crying