Keeping out the cold

I nursed her there for three weeks.
The winter was starting to come in. A bold stand, by rags and papers at the window, was being fought. What little heat I could generate I gave to her. At night I lay so close to her I would awake in fear that I had crushed her frail limbs. But whatever energy spilled out of me, I didn’t waste.
Here lay a once proud and beautiful woman. At five feet and two inches she somehow managed to stand taller than many of the other women around. In her prime.
She lay in a once proud and beautiful home too. A place people liked to visit; a place that naturally created warmth.
Now the cabin creaked all night and the wind twisted at every piece of wood, every pane of glass, trying to turn the old house in on itself.
My wife lay, desperate. Some days she would call for me and ask to see the baby. Others she would just lie awake and look at the leaking roof, or the whistling window, or the rotting crib.
I kept the crib by the window, where the cold came in. She used to hold the baby and try and make it feed. She tried that for a number of days after she’d stopped bleeding, but the baby wasn’t hungry.
I told her: “He likes fish paste. Fish paste right off my finger. And honey too.” She would nod and pass the child back to me to feed. But the kid never really moved his lips and I’d just smother some jam or whatever I was eating on his lips and hope that it would kind of drip in or he‘d eat it while I wasn‘t looking.
The next time I would check in on him it would all be gone and I figured he must be eating it, he must like it. Then one day I saw the cat was up there on his chest, licking the food away from his face. The baby never moved. That was when I moved the crib over to the window.
One night in that third week, Debbie started bleeding again. I woke up with it stuck to my legs, and my legs stuck to the sheets. I was a little frantic. I threw the sheets back and woke Debbie up.
She asked me to bring her the baby. I wrapped it up pretty tight and put it on the pillow beside her. She rolled over to face it and just kept looking. I put on my pants and boots and stepped out into the storm.
I haven’t been back since.