How Loveta Got Her Baby Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t hear themselves. He was thrown down by the force of the surge and he was barrel-rolled over the fossils in the rage of water that now came up to Henry’s boots before it sucked back again. There was Aaron Stoodley flopped on the rocks. He looked dead. The chainsaw was gone. Without further thought, and later he wondered where that courage came from, Henry Fiander found himself in mid-air jumping towards the body, and Eunice was there too and they grabbed Aaron Stoodley by the collar and pulled him back up to the edge of the grass. He was a dead weight, water soaked through his clothes. He lay there blue and started to shake but he was alive. He moved his lips a bit but they couldn’t hear what he said.
    Maybe it was still “Baghdad.”
    Then the two of them took their dry coats off and piled them up on Aaron Stoodley to warm him up. That made it cold for them, but Eunice moved in tight to Henry, and to keep warm, she put her arm around his shoulders.
    â€œCold,” she said.
    He put his arm around her too, he lay it there as light as a feather, and then it was, right then, that it occurred to Henry that this was by far the best disaster he’d ever had. Even though, almost for sure, the reason Eunice Cluett was tucked in there the way she was, was because she lost her coat, because of the weather, because Aaron Stoodley was lying there half-way between the living and the dead. She was not there because she was in any way attracted or bonded to him for any reason, for any reason that would hold up for any longer than this one instant in time, this abnormal hypersituation that could never happen again even in another million years.
    But he didn’t ask why she did what she did. He just held onto her while he could, and the wind picked up again so that Eunice had to turn her face inwards, towards his neck, where her lips lay, where he could feel every warm breath she took.
    Then Eunice broke off the hold she had. She pulled her head back from his shoulder and she looked at him with her blue eyes directly into his face. She held that look for a long long time and then, despite the cold, she stood up and grabbed her bag of tools and slid on back down to where the fossils were. This time she stayed up real high. There was a lull in the waves and the weather, the kind of lull that always happens when you’re there long enough, and she took advantage of it. She took out one of those shiny chisels of hers, and a hammer, and around one of those animals, or plants, it was hard to tell which, she chipped away for maybe ten minutes, real careful and slow. The edges broke and cracked some, but when the piece came away, it was perfect.
    She gave it to Aaron Stoodley when he woke up.
    â€œThere,” she said, “we got it.”
    Then they all went home.
    It turned out that none of them made any money at all, not even from that one chipped-out fossil. It never got anywhere near Paris, France. Instead, Aaron Stoodley put it up at home, on the mantle next to the picture of the Pope, a picture that someone— it must have been Aaron—had, one time in the past, taken out of its silver frame and, with a magic marker, replaced the usual ivory-white raiments with the exact replica of a knitted sweater, all in bright yellow. That particular Pope, the one with the yellow sweater, he looked good. He looked warm. The chipped-out fossil lay beside him on the mantle as though it were a simple home decoration.
    Aaron, Henry, Eunice, none of them were interested in selling it. It had way too much sentimental value. It was a personal souvenir of the time Aaron Stoodley floated out onto the ocean like a wood chip and came back alive, of the time Eunice was still a single mother, of the time that Henry and Eunice sat shivering with their arms around each other.
    Henry got home that night and remembered, amazed, that he’d asked her out to the Legion dance. She’d given no indication she’d