A Light in the Window

I was trudging along through a cold marsh. It was almost night, and I was straining my eyes and sweeping my hands out in front of me to find my way. I came to a clearing where there was a small cabin. There was a kerosene lamp in the window. As I approached, I almost stumbled over a huddled figure sitting on a tree stump a few yards away from the cabin. I caught the figure by the shoulder to break my fall and I felt the trembling under my hand. I came in close. It was a man with the hood of his filthy brown coat pulled up over his head. I couldn't make out the man's face, but I could see the mud and debris matted in his beard. I could see the mud on his hands and the dirt crusted around his fingernails as he balled one hand into a fist and crushed it with the other and then switched and crushed the other fist in his other hand, both of the hands shaking wildly until he brought them to his face and bit down on the knuckle of his thumb, the teeth showing in the dark.

The man didn't even seem to notice my hand resting on his shoulder. He didn't seem to notice me huddled in close to him, my breath steaming in the cold after the long slog through the marsh. I could hear him whimpering and gnashing and gnawing, and then his jaw would clench and he would go quiet and I could feel the tremors in his shoulder under my hand. Finally, he took a deep breath and sat up straighter, like he had resolved something and cleared his mind. He got up from the stump and started towards the door of the cabin. I slipped in behind him as he entered, still unnoticed. It was darker inside and the kerosene lamp provided the only light. The man's wife sat in a rocking chair across the room. The man grabbed the lamp off the window sill and brought it to the middle of the room and held it high. His wife didn't like the glare from the light and she turned away her head. There was an old shoebox lying on the floor under the shadow cast by the man's arm holding the lamp.

Then, from some unseen corner of the room, a doctor wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope came over and knelt there on the floor in front of the shoebox. He pulled back the lid, and I could see that there was a baby lying inside the shoebox on a blue quilt that had been folded and laid down beneath it. The baby's eyes were open and it didn't move, and I could see that it was dead, but the doctor proceeded to examine it and he placed the stethoscope against its chest to be sure. Everyone was quiet as the doctor worked, but the wife kept rocking her chair with a maddening regularity and she kept her head turned away and her face hard and her jaw set, as though she refused to see the truth of what was laid out in front of her.

The man explained to the doctor that the baby had been making this constant whining noise, like a whistling in the back of its throat. He said that his wife couldn't stand the noise. She couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. Her hair was prematurely turning grey, and she was pulling at the knots, and clumps of it were coming loose in her hands. They didn't know what was wrong with the baby. They couldn't get it to stop making this noise. Every breath the baby took, there was that noise, like a hard wind driving through the cracks in the walls. Finally, the man had made the bed for the baby in the shoebox, and he had laid the baby in the box, and then he had held his hand over the baby's mouth and nose and he had kept it there until the noise was gone.

The doctor lifted his head and he stared off at a nail in the wall that was level with his line of sight. He let out a long breath. He looked back down at the baby, and he opened the baby's mouth and reached two fingers down the baby's throat. He did all this as gently as he could, even though the baby was gone. He felt around carefully, turning his head slightly, like he was listening for something. He pulled back his hand and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. He explained to the couple that the baby had only had a small defect, a deviation at the back of the throat that had caused the whistling noise that they had heard. It could have been easily fixed with surgery. The doctor wiped the handkerchief across his forehead and slipped it back into his pocket.