ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part One, Chapter 19: The Baby’s Coming!
It’s early morning, a Thursday, the nineteenth of October. Stomach pain awakens me.
I head for the kitchen, thinking I’m hungry, but a sudden severe cramp sends me diving to the dining-room floor. I roll about, trying to escape the pain, and call out for Ernie, still in bed. He comes into the room, takes one look at me on the floor, and calls Doc Morgan’s office. “The baby’s coming,” he tells the secretary. “Tell the doc to meet us at the hospital.”
“It’s Dr. Morgan’s day off,” she tells him. “I’ll notify his substitute. It may take a while.”
“I don’t even have a bag packed, Ernie. The baby’s not due for another two weeks.”
“Tell that to the baby.”
We get into the Fiat. Halfway to the hospital, I feel a delicious warmth between my legs, like a thermal bath. It relaxes me. Ernie looks down at my feet. “Your water just broke.” He speeds up.
At the hospital, Ernie roars past the admission’s clerk. “I don’t have time for your paperwork. My wife’s having a baby!”
I’m wheeled to the delivery room. “The baby’s crowning,” a nurse says. “Where’s the doctor?”
One injection stops the baby and stops my pain.
It’s after eleven when Doc Morgan’s back-up finally arrives. Ernie, dressed in green scrubs, is somewhere behind my left shoulder. He watches our baby slip into the light. A nurse takes our baby to a side table where cleaning, weighing, and measuring take place. I hear the baby cry.
Our baby is placed in my arms.
“He looks like Winston Churchill,” Ernie says. “Maybe we’ll name him Churchill. I had a great-uncle named Churchill.”
“I don’t know, Ernie. What will his friends call him? Church? Hill? Will he like the name Churchill?”
Two days later, when a secretary comes around for the third time for information to put down on our baby’s birth certificate, I finally have the information she seeks. “His first name is Joshua, and his middle name is Woodson.” Joshua, because I like the soft sound of j, like a hush, like a whisper, like a lullaby. And Woodson, because it’s the middle name of Joshua’s father and grandfather and the first name of Joshua’s great grandfather.
We take Joshua home. Merlin comes out to sniff him. Ernie, exhausted, sinks to the daybed.
I settle Joshua into his fish-shaped tub — we don’t have a bed for him yet — and place the tub in the center of our big bed. Then I head to the kitchen. I’ve been gone three days. Dishes are stacked in the sink.
