Victoria Bylin - Of Men And Angels

“Oh, no! It’s starting again!”

“Breathe easy, Charlotte. Easy…”

“I can’t!”

A moan rose from the gorge and snaked around him.

“Try to pant,” the angel crooned. “Like this…hhhhh…hhhhh…hhhhh…”

It was the sound of sex, of life being formed, of need and desperation, and he recalled the pleasured cry of the last woman he’d bedded. He didn’t know her name, but he remembered her breasts, the taste of her, and he felt himself going soft inside. He had to get away from Charlotte and the angel before he did something stupid. Grimacing, he nudged his horse into a faster walk.

The trail twisted around a boulder rimmed with goldenrod, then cut straight across a hard slope. A dry mud slide blocked the way, as if a huge hand had pushed the trail into the mountainside. Tugging his hat low, he nudged the bay with his knees. The horse shimmied nervously, sending ripples of apprehension through Jake’s thighs and up his spine.

The heat of the day pressed against him, and the stench of bad meat was unmistakable. His stomach nearly heaved, and he squinted into the gorge where pale green sage made a fence along the streambed. His gaze followed the trickle of water down the ravine to the graceful curve of a red stagecoach. The front wheel spun as if set in motion by an invisible hand, and someone had draped women’s clothing over the rocks and bushes.

The bay splayed his forelegs and balked.

“Whoa, boy,” Jake said softly.

He’d just won the horse in a card game, and the animal’s distrust was mutual. The bay was likely to buck, but Jake took a chance and nudged him forward until he had a wider view of the gorge. The women were nowhere in sight, but he saw three dead mules tangled in the harness. The fourth was lying on its side, braying like a forgotten pet. Sensing the presence of the bay, it raised its head and snorted before falling back against the sand.

“For He is our God,

And we are the people of his pasture,

And the shee-eeee-eeep of his hand…”

The singing was closer now, as resonant as a howling wind, and his stomach clenched. He wanted a drink. He wanted to block out the rotting mules, the women, the god-awful singing. Suffocated by dust and sweet sage, he dug his heels into the bay, bracing himself as the animal coiled and lurched over the slick of dry mud.

The crust collapsed beneath its hooves, and Jake fought for balance as the horse jerked its head and pedaled backward.

“Breathe, Charlotte! Don’t squish up your face. Breathe like me…hhhh…hhhh…hhhh…”

The voice was clearer now, and as the sagebrush thinned to a veil of green lace, Jake saw the angel. She was less than ten yards from him, on her knees in front of the other woman’s sprawled legs, splattered with blood and birth water. Her hair was the color of Arbuckle’s coffee, and it fell over her shoulders in a tangle. Her blouse was torn at the shoulder, and he could see a hot pink crescent where the sun had burned her skin.

Trails of sweat streaked her dusty face. The high collar of her blouse was loose and gaping, and he saw the curve of her breasts as she laid her hand on the birthing woman’s belly, leaned down and peered between her legs.

Pushing back the woman’s dark blue skirt, she said, “Don’t push, Charlotte.”

“I’ve got to!”

“It’s too soon. You’ll tear.”

Jake cringed. The woman moaned, and the mix of grunting and agony turned into a wail. Her pain was terrible to hear. The bearing down of her hips and the writhing of her belly was the most horrible thing he had ever seen.

“Breathe, Charlotte!”

But the birthing woman was beyond understanding. Instead of listening to the angel, she curled her spine, grabbed her knees and screamed. A bullet to the head would have been an act of kindness, and yet he couldn’t look away.

There was no singing now, only the blue skirt and streaks of bright red blood on the petticoat spread beneath her hips. His gaze traveled from her thighs to her belly, and then to her ashen face. He had never seen a baby being born but he’d seen a few men die, and Charlotte plainly needed more help than any man or woman could give.

Her face registered shock and stark fear. “My baby! Oh God, my baby!”

For a man who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything, he was dangerously close to tears. He prodded the bay with his heels, but the animal refused to budge, giving an angry chuff that carried through the gorge.

The angel raised her face toward the blistering blue sky. Her eyes locked on him, and for one painful second she stared at him with fierce brown eyes.

“Go away! Go away, you son of a—” Her lips locked together, as if she had never spoken a curse word in her life. He nearly laughed at the stupidity of it. She needed help. If not now, then later when she had to get to a town.

Jake wasn’t enough of a gentleman to feel honor-bound to stay, but he was enough of a rebel to pick a fight. He held the bay at the top of the trail. At this point he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Alex! Help me—” Charlotte grabbed her bare knees and grunted like a crazed animal.

“It’s coming! The baby’s coming!” The angel touched Charlotte’s belly as a low cry poured from the woman’s throat. Weeping and laughing, she said, “I see the head. Push, Charlotte! Push.”

Jake held his breath.

“Charlotte! You can do it! Push!”

The torture went on for a small eternity, until the baby squirted out of the womb and landed in the angel’s hands. Covered with blood and a waxy white cream, it seemed small and gray in the vastness of the plateau, and far too quiet to be alive. The angel reached into the baby’s rosebud mouth and cleared away the mucus. She held it upside down and slapped its bottom, and still there was no sound.

He saw panic in her eyes, but she choked it back and blew oh-so-gently into the baby’s mouth. He heard a cough, then mewling, and then a healthy wail. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and he blinked away his own.

“Alex…” The mother’s voice was weak.

“It’s a boy, Charlotte. He’s little but he’s perfect.” The angel set the baby on the mother’s belly. “We’ve got to get the afterbirth.”

From his vantage point on the trail, Jake saw the angel cut the cord with a knife. The afterbirth followed the baby, and fresh blood gushed from Charlotte’s womb. The angel’s eyes burned with fear. She reached for a cloth to stanch the bleeding, and in a minute it was soaked.

A cloud shifted. A dark shadow fell over the three of them. He saw Charlotte’s face relax. Her fingers stilled and her chest sank emptily against the sand. The only sign of life was the baby stirring on her belly, its mouth opening and closing like a blooming flower.

The angel pressed her hands to her cheeks and wept.

There wasn’t a thing Jake could have done to keep the woman alive, but he could dig her grave. Silently he climbed off the bay and led the horse into the ravine. The woman named Alex looked up at him.

“If you tend to the baby, I’ll see to the mother,” he said.

“Who are you?” Her voice was hoarse, and he could see every minute of the past twenty-four hours in her face. Something stirred in his gut, and an un-characteristic urge to be kind softened his eyes.

“My friends call me Jake.”

“I thought you were…” She shook her head. “I thought I imagined you.”

She looked as if she could still hear Charlotte’s moans, and he wondered if she would ever sing that hymn again. He looked at her eyes, red rimmed and inflamed with the dust and the sun, and somehow he knew she would sing it again this very day, just to make a point.

Brushing off her hands, she rose and smoothed her skirt. Jake tethered the bay to the stagecoach and inspected the mule writhing in the harness. If the animal could walk, perhaps the woman and baby could ride it.

“Whoa, boy,” he said, but the beast didn’t want anything to do with him. A broken foreleg told Jake all he had to know. He pulled his Colt .45 from its holster, cocked the hammer and put the animal out of its misery.

The angel gasped at the sudden blast. He expected her to be hysterical or sentimental about the animal, but she didn’t say a word and he had to admire her. She had been a fool to travel the Colorado Plateau alone, but she wasn’t softhearted about life.

Jake holstered the Colt and opened the driver’s boot. The mail was ruined, but the tools were in place and he took out the shovel. He wondered about the driver and man on shotgun, but the watermarks in the gorge made the facts plain. The two men had drowned in the flood.

Jabbing the shovel into the ground, Jake took a pair of leather gloves from his saddlebag and looked for a suitable grave site. He wasn’t about to bury Charlotte where a flash flood could steal the body, so with his black duster billowing behind him, he climbed over the cascade of rocks on the far side of the gorge.

The iron-rich plains stretched for a million miles, but just a few feet away he saw a sprig of desert paintbrush. It was the best he could do, and he started to dig. When the hole was deep, he collected rocks from the streambed and piled them nearby.

Two hours had passed when he wiped his hands on his pants and looked at the sky. The sun was lower now, as bright as orange fire, and above it, flat-bottomed clouds boiled into steamy gray peaks. Another storm was coming, he could smell it in the air.

He jabbed the shovel into the earth and strode down the rocky slope. The angel was holding the baby, crooning to it in that sweet voice of hers. It was bundled in something clean and white, and she had managed to dress the mother in a fashionable traveling suit.

Without a word, he brushed by the angel and scooped Charlotte into his arms, rocked back on his heels and rose to his full height.

He felt the angel’s gaze as he walked past her, and rocks skittered as she followed him. As gently as he could, he laid the dead woman to rest, picked up the shovel and replaced the dirt. He half expected the woman named Alex to pray or say a few words, but she settled for a mournful humming that made him think of birds in autumn and the wail of the wind.

Down in the valley, the valley so low,

Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.

One by one he piled jagged rocks on the loose earth. Alex didn’t flinch. The child mewled now and then, but her humming soothed him. It should have soothed Jake, too, but it didn’t. His head had started to pound, his back hurt, and his stomach was raw with bad whiskey.

A few hours ago he had been on his way to California, or maybe south to Mexico. He was alone by choice, and now he was stuck with a woman and a child. His life had taken a strange turn indeed.

He set the last rock on the grave with a thud and took off his gloves. Studying the angel’s profile, he said, “I’m done.”

She turned to him, and in her eyes he saw the haunted look of a person seeing time stop.

“I suppose you should say a few words,” she said.

His mouth twisted into a sneer, and he stared at her until she understood he had nothing to say. Bowing her head, she uttered a prayer that told him Charlotte was a stranger to her, this child an orphan, and the angel herself a woman who had more faith than common sense.

A determined amen came from her lips. The baby squirmed and, cocking her head as if the world had tilted on its axis, she looked at his face.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

He shrugged. Bruises were common in his life, like hangnails and stubbed toes. Bending down on one knee, he straightened a rock on the grave. “She had a bad time.”