A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

At the side of the bed stood the unsteady washstand where a china cup with its handle broken off sat next to a tinned pitcher. He filled the cup halfway before slipping a hand beneath his wife’s neck and head, gently propping her up as he raised the cup to her lips. Sam took tiny sips with her parched lips and that pink tongue, a half dozen of them before her eyes rolled away from him and she started to pant.

Beside him Nettie Capron pushed Seamus back as Samantha gripped the bedsheet in both hands and started to groan. Her legs trembled beneath that grayed sheet.

He felt so damned helpless as the three women hovered close, attending his wife, while he could do nothing to take the pain, this excruciating travail, from her. In helplessness at her misery, he gasped, “I … I must get the post surgeon—”

“No, you won’t trouble him with this,” Elizabeth Burt corrected more sternly this time. “You best trust me in this: that man doesn’t know half of what any one of us knows about delivering your wife of this child, Mr. Donegan. Now—I’m warning you—don’t you dare get in the way, or we’ll have to ask you to leave. And that means the end to bothering us with any more of that fool talk about the post surgeon.”

“Get in the way?” he squeaked. “She … Sam asked for me—”

Elizabeth Burt moved down the opposite side of the bed, where she squatted on the edge of the tick, raising the sheet slightly so that she could peer beneath it without exposing Sam’s legs. Donegan thought that most strange—wondering how these women figured he had put Sam with child if he hadn’t seen her legs, indeed every last delicious inch of her! The woman’s eyes came up to look at the others, then rested on his.

“It won’t be long now,” she explained, grim-lipped, as her eyes gazed down at the woman in labor. “Samantha—this child of yours is about ready to make its entrance into the world.”

“S-seamus.”

He turned and went down on his knee again at her side, stroking the back of one of her sweaty hands. From the nearby washstand he retrieved a damp, folded towel and dabbed at the pearling beads of sweat that glimmered on her brow and cheeks.

“Give me a kiss, p-please,” she gasped as if her throat was raw.

Leaning down, he brushed her cheek with his mouth self-consciously. Good manners and upbringing allowed that a man might lightly kiss his wife there while in public.

“No,” Sam declared, tapping her dry lips with one finger. “Kiss me here.”

The Irishman swallowed hard, his eyes darting to the other women before he leaned over Sam once more and laid his mouth on hers. He felt the press of her hand at the back of his head, preventing him from pulling away.

She held his face close, whispering, “I wanted the … the feel of your l-l-l-lips—”

Then she wrenched her hands down and was gripping the sheets once more, gritting her teeth and growling as the next contraction welled over her.

“That’s good! That’s good, Samantha!” Elizabeth exclaimed, observing the progress there between Sam’s legs.

“Bear down. Go on and bear down, Samantha,” instructed Martha Luhn as she pressed up at Seamus’s elbow, taking the towel from his hand and dabbing it against the hollow at the base of Sam’s throat where the sweat had pooled.

He stepped back a step in that crush of women and their dutiful purpose. Then another step, for the first time noticing how drenched she was with this labor. Sam’s face flushed with her exertion … oh, how it stood out against the white of that loose camisole, damp, plastered to the skin across her chest and her arms as if she had just been caught out in a summer thundershower. It appeared these women had taken off her most everything else she had been wearing earlier that evening for dinner with Mackenzie … most all of it: dress and petticoats and bloomers—then draped that sheet over her legs as they began this long, agonizing process.

He suddenly wondered what time it was—feeling guilty for not knowing how long he had been down at the saloon. Drinking, sharing stories with other men, while these women had been up here with Sam.

She was his wife. He should have been here all along.

He watched as Sam gasped, then went back to panting, almost like a dog, her head bobbing in rhythm each time she exhaled in those short, rough gusts of wind. Drawing her knees up as far as she could just as the others reminded her to do in their calming voices, assisting Sam as she struggled in lowering her head as far as she could, as if she were cramping up. Sam began a low shriek—

To him the room felt suddenly very, very warm. Then he remembered he still had on his worn canvas and blanket mackinaw, sooted and smudged with the smoke of many fires, slick with wear and tattered at the elbows and wrists from long years’ wilderness service.

He pulled his arms from it, one at a time, and dropped it carelessly in a far corner.

“Oh, no—Mr. Donegan,” Nettie Capron said. “You put your coat back on. I’m afraid you can’t stay.”

“S-stay!” Samantha contradicted.