Random Winds Read Free

walked to the bedroom door, then turned back, hesitating.
    “Did she—did she see them?” he asked.
    “Not exactly,” the woman said. “Reverend here, he wouldn’t let her see.”
    “I’m grateful to you for that, Reverend,” Enoch told him.
    He stood looking at his wife. Her face lay in the crook of her arm. Her dark hair was loosened. He drew the blanket up softly over her shoulder. Currents of rational thought, which in this hour past had been stopped, began to flow again. So tender, a human body, a human life! Nothing more to it than a few pounds of fragile bone and soft tissue. Yes, and years of nurturing and thousands of hours of loving care. Wiped out, gone as if they had never been, like last year’s leaves! And the marvelous years of youth, the dignity of adulthood and learning—all these forfeited, all these now not to be—Oh, my children! A cry caught in his throat.
    “Doc?”
    The man of the house—Fairbanks, yes, yes of course, that was the name—came to the door.
    “Doc, have you got a minute? Me and my brother Harry was over to your place already. You know your pantry ell? Well, the roof is stove in where the maple fell on it. But we was thinking, if you can buy the material, Harry and me’ll fix it Harry owes you a bill, anyway. Did you know the branch breached at Lindsey Run? It flooded out for six miles downstream.”
    “Thank you,” Enoch said.
    “Think nothing of it, Doc. We all want to do what we can for you. Say, it’s a good thing you had your mare with you. The stable almost got drownded.”
    A mare. When my children
—Get out! He wanted to cry. Kind fool, get out and leave us!
    “I’ll go ask my wife to make some tea when your missus wakes up,” Fairbanks said.
    Jean opened her eyes. “I’m not asleep,” she whispered.
    Enoch knelt on the floor, laying his face against hers, his cold, wet cheek upon her wet cheek, and stayed there like that.
    “God’s will,” she whispered after a long time. “He wanted them home with Him.”
    God’s will that their babies should drown? Son of a minister he was, reared on the Bible, but he couldn’t believe that God the Creator, yes! And God the giver of righteous laws; but God who decrees the individual fate of every living creature on the planet and orders the death of a child? That was hogwash. Hogwash! Yet it gave her comfort.
    “Yes,” he murmured, “yes,” and with his free hand smoothed her hair.
    “I love you,” she said.
    I love you, she says, out of her blood and grief
. She reached up her arms to draw him near, but they fell back weakly. He understood that she wanted him to kiss her, and he bent down and pressed her lips.
    Then he said, “Jean, Jean, my girl, well start again. We’ll have to love each other so—And I’ll take care of you and Alice and me. We’re all that’s left.”
    “You’re not forgetting him, the new one?”
    “Him?”
    “The baby, the boy. You haven’t seen him?”
    “But I thought—”
    Mrs. Fairbanks, coming with the tea, overheard. “You thought it was a stillbirth? No, no, Doc. Look here.”
    She raised the window shade. A sad lavender light slid into the room from the quiet evening sky. On a table near the window lay a box, and in it one of the smallest babies Enoch had ever seen. Scarcely larger than a raw, young rabbit, he thought.
    “I bought a new pair of arctics on sale last week. Luckily, I still had the box,” Mrs. Fairbanks said.
    And Jean called out, “I want his name to be Martin!”
    “Not Thomas, after your father?”
    “That’ll be his middle name. I want him to be called Martin.”
    “Well, all right.” He looked at the child. Four pounds, if that. Nearer three and a half, he’d guess.
    “Poor Jean, poor lamb,” Mrs. Fairbanks whispered.
    “Likely she’ll be losing this one, too.”
    The baby fluttered. Its toy hands moved, and under the blanket its legs jerked weakly. Then it wailed, the doll’s face crumpling and reddening, the eyes opening as if