THE HOT FIRE

by James McKimmey

chapter seven

Alex Seymour moved tiredly up the steps of the farmhouse, his hands hanging like weights at his sides. He shuffled down the upstairs hallway and stopped in front of the closed door that led to Juny’s room. With great effort he lifted one of the dead-weight hands and slowly turned the knob. He opened the door and stood looking at Juny lying sound asleep. She was covered with a red quilt. She slept doubled, on her side, nail of her right thumb against her lower lip, so that she looked, in repose, exactly as she had when she was six years old.

He looked at her for several minutes, until his throat started to ache, then he closed the door and walked wearily to his own room. When he’d gotten into his narrow iron-framed bed, he lay looking at the ceiling, the ache in his throat growing worse.

Seeing Juny asleep that way made the time dissolve, and he found himself remembering a day exactly nineteen years, four months and five days ago: the day Juny had been born.

Somehow he had known that it was going to go wrong that day. Una, his wife, had not felt well during the pregnancy. The baby was coming late in life. He was forty-six. She was forty-one. She had not been frightened, as he had, but simply listless, unable to do very much at all, and apologetic because of it.

The heat on that July day had been immense, even when he arose at five that morning. Una, plump in face now that she was carrying the baby, got up with effort, even though he told her to remain in bed. She made coffee in the tall iron pot they’d had ever since they were married twelve years before, then sat down unable to fry the bacon and eggs. He’d done that for both of them – the first time he’d ever cooked anything since he’d met Una and given up what he’d thought would be a bachelorhood for life.

He’d patted her gently on the shoulder before he went on out to the fields. There he worked under a blazing Oklahoma sun until noon. When he came into the house, Una was on the floor of the kitchen, making a terrible sound. He carried her to the truck, but then he could not get the truck started.

He would never forget, later, trying to get that engine started. He had meant to have it worked on in town. But that cost money, and there was the expense of the baby coming up, so he had failed to do it. He had put his foot on the starter and listened to the grinding, panic welling up in him; then he would stop, fearful of running the battery down altogether. He would hear the chickens in the pen, a cow lowing, the hot wind coming over the fields with a dry rustling sound; and then Una beside him would make that terrible noise.

Finally the engine had turned over and he drove into town on a graveled road, dust beneath the gravel kicking up behind the truck in a gray cloud. The hospital had been converted from a large white frame house. He helped Una into the sunporch, and a tall nurse with a masculine face had led Una away. He kept wondering why they hadn’t gotten a stretcher for her, or at least a wheelchair.

Later he could not remember how long he had waited, just thinking about all the years he and Una had been together, working that small farm. He remembered the way she had always, before that morning, been up before him, putting out a solid, good breakfast. He remembered coming in at noontime and sitting down with her at the kitchen table and how, because of her Swedish heritage, she would always put a lump of sugar in her mouth and drink her coffee through it. He remembered how she looked at night when she took her hair out of its daytime bun and combed it out so that it fell to her waist, then brushed it proudly to a shining elegance. He remembered the nights they had spent making love and how, despite a severely Puritanical upbringing, she had never shown any reluctance about that. He had never been formally religious, but Una had always gone to church on Sundays, and he’d driven her into town so she could. During the time that he waited in the sunporch of that converted hospital, he tried to remember all of the religious things he’d heard Una say, the prayers before meals, the ones she said aloud at night. But he could remember none of them.

Finally the doctor, a large, paunchy man whose forehead bubbled with perspiration, came in and looked at him in a way that made Alex Seymour’s stomach turn over. The doctor told him directly that Una was dead. The baby was alive, but Una was not. He didn’t care about the baby, only about Una.

He’d sat there, blinking slowly. He tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn’t hold him, and the doctor caught him and eased him back on the seat. He sat there for perhaps another three minutes, saying nothing, then he nodded slowly and this time was able to stand up.

They told him that the baby was a healthy girl, that he could see it. But instead he walked out into the hot Oklahoma sunshine. Someone was calling after him, asking if he wanted to see Una; but he didn’t want to see something that was no longer Una. He just kept walking back to his truck. This time the truck started immediately. He drove back to the farm and took off his hat and sat down beside the kitchen table.

He sat there for three hours, then he got up and went through the house. Una’s mark was everywhere. So he went out to the barn and sat down in the hay of a horse stall. It was dark when he finally stood up again and switched on the barn lights. He knew that he had an answer for what had happened that day.

He got his shotgun and returned to his truck, which started perfectly for him again. He drove back into town and parked a block down from the house where the doctor who had killed Una lived.

Silently, he waited behind a lilac bush. He figured that if the doctor were home, he would wait even until the next morning and get him when he stepped outside. If he were away, he would get him when he came in.

The doctor was away. He returned to his house at eleven-thirty that night. He drove up in his Ford and left the car in the driveway and cut across the grass just in front of the lilac bush where Alex Seymour was waiting.

Alex stepped out and pointed the gun at the doctor’s back and said, "I’m gonna kill you now."

The doctor turned around slowly and looked at Alex.

"Give you both barrels," Alex said. "One in the stomach, the other in the head when you’re goin’ down." He nodded. "So as you won’t die too slow with a belly full of buckshot. That’s kind of me, considering."

The doctor’s voice was clear and unwavering. "I didn’t kill her, Alex." His eyes were steady. "That’s what you’re blaming me for, isn’t it?"

"She’s dead, and you can’t argue that away."

"But I didn’t kill her."

"Who did? God? She was always tellin’ me God was kind and good. Would He kill her?" He shook his head. "Not hardly. Not Una, he wouldn’t."

"It was just the way it happened, Alex. I can explain it in medical terms, if you want me to. But it wouldn’t help anything. It was just that having the baby was too much for her."

Alex blinked once. "You tellin’ me the baby killed her?"

"Having it, that’s all."

"Same thing, isn’t it? You didn’t kill her, the baby killed her."

The doctor looked at him for a couple of minutes, then he said, "That’s not the way to look at it, Alex. If you’re going to look at it that way, you’ve got to keep going back. It took the two of you, didn’t it?"

Alex was silent, staring at the doctor in the light of a street lamp. "I killed her myself?"

"Nobody killed her, Alex. She just died. That’s all you can think about it. It’s the way of it."

Alex stood blinking, tears finally coming into his eyes. The doctor stepped over and pushed the gun barrel down. He put his hand gently on Alex’s shoulders. Alex shook his head, tears running down his lean cheeks. "Why?" he said in a hoarse voice. "Why is that the way of it?"

The doctor shrugged wearily. "If you had the answer to that, Alex, you’d have all the answers. But you haven’t. And neither have I." He patted Alex’s shoulder. "Go home, Alex. Try to meet it. You come back to the hospital soon and take a look at your daughter. I think you might like her."

Alex Seymour had gone to the hospital two weeks later and seen Juny for the first time. A nurse had handed her to him and he’d held the baby for perhaps two minutes. Then, later, he’d hired Mrs. Watkins to come over and he brought Juny home. Mrs. Watkins, who had nothing and was willing to do the job for pennies, watched over Juny while he was in the fields. He did the job at night.

But he never got over the loss of Una, and finally, as Juny was growing up, he decided to leave Oklahoma and all of the too-vivid memories. Juny was old enough that he didn’t need Mrs. Watkins any longer, so he come to La Cruz, where he now lay on his iron-framed bed, with the moonlight streaming in through a dusty window.

He was not going to sleep that night, he knew. He only wished that he could go into that pleasant, unencumbered state that Juny was now in down the hall in her room.

He stared at the ceiling and the ache in his throat remained. All he could think of now was how, when he’d gone back to the hospital and held Juny in his arms for the first time, he’d felt an almost overpowering desire to take hold of her feet and smash her head against the wall.

The thought terrified him, as the memory of it had all down through the years; it made him shudder now, as he lay in bed, because he’d grown to love Juny so desperately that at times he couldn’t seem to see lesser things at all.

 

Copyright© 1968 James McKimmey

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