Buck held up his hands. “I ain’t done nothin’.” Twisting his lips into a smile, he slunk away.

Hazel looked at Evangeline. “Put him out of your mind.”

She tried. But it was hard to dismiss the menace of that smile.

Time passed slowly. The pain became more intense: a searing clamp. Evangeline could barely stand.

“I think she’s ready,” Hazel told the surgeon.

He nodded. “Bring her down.”

Hazel guided Evangeline down the ladder to the tween deck. Behind a screen in the surgeon’s office, she helped her into a cotton shift. When she was finished, Hazel stood in a corner of the room, making no move to leave. The surgeon didn’t say a word.

Evangeline was delirious, bathed in sweat.

Dr. Dunne began asking Hazel to help in small ways. Hand me a wet cloth. Mop her brow. She brought him a basin filled with water and a bar of lye soap, and after he washed his hands, she gave him a towel to dry them. When she noticed Evangeline tugging at the red cord around her neck, Hazel unfastened the necklace and placed it on a shelf.

After two hours it became clear that the birthing process was stalled. Evangeline wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “What’s happening?”

“Breech.” Dr. Dunne sat back on his stool and rubbed his forehead with his arm.

“Breech?”

Hazel stepped forward. “Your baby is special,” she told her. “Feet first.” To the surgeon, she said, “May I help? I know how to do it. The turning.”

He sighed, then lifted his arms from the elbows as if to say, Come on, then.

Hazel spread her fingers out on Evangeline’s stomach, feeling all the way around it.

Evangeline gazed at her with alarm. “Is the baby in trouble?”

She felt Hazel’s cool hand over hers. “You’ll both be grand. Just listen to my voice. Breathe in.”

She breathed in.

“Now out.”

She breathed out.

Hazel stroked her hair. “Move toward the pain. Think of it as . . . a lantern guidin’ your way.”

The surgeon sat back on his stool, observing.

Surrendering to Hazel’s demands, Evangeline breathed when she told her to, pushed when she told her to, followed the pain as if it were a lantern along a winding path. She began to sense the contractions before they happened, as they gathered force within her, and rode each wave of pain to its crest, the agony so intense that at a certain point it became a kind of euphoria. Rain drummed on the deck above their heads, muting her cries. She felt Hazel’s small hands inside her, shifting, turning, coaxing the baby down. She no longer knew whether she was screaming or silent, writhing or still. And then . . . and then . . . a release. An emptying.

A baby’s piercing cry.

She lifted her head.

Time flattened. Widened. Her senses returned. She smelled the fishy odor of the whale oil in the lamps, the muttony candle wax, the iron sweetness of her own blood. She gazed up at the wide beams in the ceiling, nailed in place by long iron spikes. Heard the soft patter of rain on the deck, the last remnants of the storm.