Posted by Dusty on December 24, 1999 at 14:08:33:
(continued from part 3)
And then he was born. Early on an August afternoon when it was almost a
hundred degrees and there was a full moon we couldn't see in the cloudless
sky, he came. After twenty hours of labor, there was the blinding light of
the operating room, our son coming headfirst out of the incision, his
hazel eyes wide open and a nurse almost jumping back from the table.
I held my tiny son and he cried and I cried and his exhausted mom cried,
lying on the table, the surgeons still working on her behind a raised
blue sheet.
Later, as my wife began to recover in her room and our son played with his
grandmother and aunts and our baby boy slept in the hospital nursery,
a blue name tag attached to his clear plastic bassinet, I went outside
into the heat with my brother and father. We drove to a convenience store,
then to the river, two blocks from the hospital, its banks thick with trees.
We sat in the shade at the edge of a jogging path, my father in his
wheelchair, my brother and I sitting on a railroad tie. There was a
storm in the distance. The thunder was ominous-sounding, like the sound
of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene
in a play.
We could see the bright sunlight on the water through the trees, and we
drank beer and smoked our cigars. I began to speak, though I could not do
it without crying, for the word son was ringing through my blood,
his name already deep in my heart with his sister's, as if both had been
there since my own delivery nearly thirty years earlier.
With my son's birth, a love had opened up in me that forever left my small heart
behind the way a flood scatters sandbags. And now the walls of my
heart seemed to fall away completely and become a green field inside me.
Through tears I told my father and brother how much I felt, and that even
that faithless corner of my heart that worried about money, worried that
once this fence job was through nothing would follow--even that part of me
was assuaged. Because how can there be green fields inside us and no food
on our tables?
I glanced over at my father. I am his second child of six, and he looked
broad and handsome in the wheelchair that will be his legs the rest of his
life. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his eyes ringed and moist.
I saw pride and love in his eyes, pride and love for his two weeping sons.
I believe he still grieves the three broken marriages behind him and his
appearance on America's Most Wanted and knows the pain it caused us, his
children, and he knows all too well the challenges facing our own young
marriages. But sitting there then, his beard gray and white, I saw only
hope in his eyes, hope for all of us.
But hope is one-dimensional without resolve, and in the last few moments
I'd been picturing my baby boy still alone in the hospital nursery,
swaddled in his clear plastic bassinet, his mom recovering from surgery
while his dad smoked and drank down by the river. Yet, I knew I was doing
far more than that; I was communing with my father and only brother; I was
sinking back into the arms of all the manhood I would need and more; I was
celebrating the historic and ephemeral moment of my son's birth that was
already fading away and becoming something else, the first hours of infancy.
I stood, and as we drove back to the hospital, the hot August air blowing
in our faces, I thought of Adam, that fatherless boy who started coming
daily to the job site to work with me. And I imagined his father's spirit
fighting deep sky and rains and wind to be his breeze in the heat of a
small dirty yard; to hold Adam's upturned face in his airy hands, to gently
thumb a strand of hair from Adam's eye, his face--in that moment, as open
and vulnerable as a newborn's, I could hardly sit still.
I wanted to be in the hospital nursery cradling my baby son in my arms, his
entire body fitting from my elbow to palm; I
wanted to smell his new skin
and hair; I wanted to kiss his sleeping eyes and rock him and hold him to
my chest, his tiny ear and cheek pressed to where he could feel the beating
of his father's heart--my grateful, hopeful heart.
THE END