Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  She counted, listening to Melody’s shallow breathing.

  “Can you sit on the end of the bed for a minute?” Colleen asked. Melody wore one of Keith’s T-shirts. Colleen checked that she was dilated. Melody trembled through the next contraction.

  “It’s time, hon,” Colleen said.

  She waited for Melody to squat down on the shower liner, then crouched behind her. She hooked her arms under Melody’s armpits, straining to help hold her up, and hugged Melody’s back to her chest.

  “Okay, you ready to push for me?” The room narrowed around them. “Okay, Melody. Here we go. One, two, three—”

  Melody’s slick skin slid against hers, spatter of blood on the shower liner, the smells. Currents of worry ran through Colleen—all the things she knew could go wrong with a breech baby. She drilled through them, pushing away her own sadness. She was here, holding Melody up, her sweat-stuck shirt pressed to Melody’s back, but she was also standing in the doorway. Melody’s baby would be here, she was pushing him out into the world, and after Colleen had cleared his airways and swaddled him and laid his pink form against Melody’s bare breast, she would go home, empty and exhausted and alone. She tried to root herself to her body, holding tighter, coaching Melody to push—push—her own back aching.

  Sweat dripped down Colleen’s face. She pulled a clean towel from the stack and wiped the sweat out of Melody’s eyes, one arm still hooked under Melody’s, holding her up.

  “Okay, hon, another one. Come on, another big push—”

  Melody’s body heaved. She groaned. “I can’t do it,” she panted.

  “You have to,” Colleen said.

  “I can’t,” she wailed.

  “You can. Come on, I’m going to push with you.” She wiped sweat from Melody’s neck. “Okay? Another big push. Come on, push. Push!”

  Colleen felt the clench of Melody’s body against hers and yelled, matching Melody’s pitch.

  “There we go, good girl. Another one, let’s go.”

  She checked her watch: quarter after two. Melody panted.

  “Big push, come on, one, two, three—”

  At last, Melody screamed and a foot appeared.

  “Keith!” Colleen called.

  He appeared, drowsy, shaking his head to clear it. He saw the legs dangling and lunged.

  “Don’t touch him!” Colleen yelled, thrusting out her arm to block him. “You touch him, he’ll gasp all that fluid in. You come in here.” They traded places again. “Okay, Melody, honey, another big push. There we go!”

  Melody screamed. The baby’s bottom appeared.

  “It’s a little boy!” Colleen announced, tears streaming down Melody’s face. “He’s a little acrobat. Big push. Good. Again.” Colleen crouched down, getting into position. “One, two, three, push!” And then the baby was in her hands. “Oh God,” she said.

  Melody sank down onto her butt, trembling from the pain. Colleen tilted the baby, pure muscle memory, her attention fixed not on clearing his airways, but on the missing top of his skull, the small, misshapen mound of exposed brain. She felt his little animal heart fluttering, but he wouldn’t cry. His pink face was scrunched and perfect up to the eyebrows. She wiped his nose and mouth, rubbed him. She should cut the cord first, but there might not be time.

  “Take her shirt off!” she ordered Keith, the baby’s heartbeat faint but unmistakable, a flicker compared to the thud of her own, as she laid him against Melody’s damp chest.

  * * *

  She was hosing her dirty clothes off in the driveway when Rich came home, Chub playing with Scout out back.

  “What happened?” Rich asked, water splattering the rocks around her bloodstained pants. She walked over and turned the spigot off, as though she could twist off the tap of her emotions with it.

  “Melody had her baby,” Colleen said.

  “Is she okay?” Rich asked.

  Colleen shook her head. “He.”

  He waited, like he sensed there was more. If she told him now, she would come apart. She needed to wait until Chub went to bed. She followed Rich inside. He set his keys in the burl bowl. He’d carved it for her years ago, after she lost their second one. Each time, he’d made something: new kitchen cabinets, a checker set, the carved sign for the front door— HOME IS WHERE THE IS. He’d compressed each loss down into something physical, contained, something he could finish and set aside. After holding that little baby boy today, she wanted to hurl the bowl against the wall. She’d watched him die and there wasn’t a darn thing she could do about it except clean up the mess, try to make Melody comfortable, sit in the truck in the school parking lot afterward and sob. How could she ever make Rich understand how much that birth had felt like giving birth herself, how losing that baby had been like losing her own again?

  “The fish are back early,” Rich said. “I thought I’d walk up.” He let his words linger, an invitation.

  “Take Chub,” she said.

  RICH

  They crouched on the bank, about level with their intake pipe, staring into the water, Damnation Creek clear enough to read the date on a sunk wish penny, cold enough to freeze the air in their lungs to powder.

  “There’s one!” Chub yelled, stumbling backward into Rich. “There’s another!” Chub scrambled into Rich’s arms.

  Rich laughed. “They’re not going to get you.”

  Chub was breathless, watching the coho muscle upstream, twelve inches around and as long as house cats, their jaws grown huge with their ocean teeth. When Rich was a boy, this run had been so strong it turned the creek red, made of salmon, not water.

  “Where are they going?” Chub asked, though Rich had explained the spawning on the walk up.

  “They’re coming home from the ocean to lay their eggs before they die,” Rich explained, careful not to scare him. “Their bodies will fertilize the soil, help the trees grow tall. They’re coming back to die in the place they were made, where their parents were made, and their parents before them.”

  “But how do they know?” Chub asked, feeling brave enough to stand a little apart now.

  Rich shrugged. “They learned their creeks. Same as you.”

  “Can we catch one?” Chub asked.

  “No. You have to have a license. Yuroks can fish them, but only a mile up from the river”—Rich lifted his chin at the fish—“these guys have made it too far already, look at them.”

  “Three, four, five. There’s too many!” Chub ran along the bank, the way Rich had as a boy, the first salmon he’d netted so heavy and strong, it might have yanked him in and drowned him if Lark hadn’t grabbed on. “They’re fast!” Chub trudged back, out of breath, and flopped down beside Rich to rest. “I wish Mom came with us,” Chub said.

  “Mom’s seen them before,” Rich said.

  “I just wish,” Chub said.

  “Me too, Grahamcracker. Me too.”

  September 12 COLLEEN

  The old tires leading up to Robley and Elyse’s front door were planted with irises, some dead, some blooming lush as hothouse flowers, here at the bottom of the narrow, shady gulch, a few doors up from Melody Larson. Keith had taken Melody down to stay with his mom in Eureka, so she wouldn’t be alone.

  Colleen lifted the tuna casserole off the seat beside her and shoved the truck door closed with her hip. Rain speckled the tinfoil tented over top. A child’s wagon sat on the porch. Last time she’d left the deviled eggs on the mat, but now Robley came out to meet her, shutting the front door behind him. His face was red and chapped from working on open water.

  “How is she?” Colleen asked, coming up under the overhang.

  Robley shrugged.

  Colleen had pressed on Melody Larson’s abdomen to help deliver the afterbirth. By the time it dropped into the bucket with a wet smack, the baby had already stopped breathing. Tomorrow she would go to the graveside service.

  “Doctor said she was perfect,” Robley said. “From her toes to her eyebrows. Just no brain to tell her to breathe
.”

  It took Colleen a moment to understand. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” She looked down the road toward the Larson place. She wondered if someone had told Robley about Melody’s baby, its missing cap of skull, if maybe he and Keith had stood out on the porch and drunk a beer together. A terrible thing for two neighbors to have in common.

  Robley scrunched up his nose, as though to keep himself from tearing up. He toed a rusty nail head sticking up from the porch. “Elyse kept telling me I needed to fix these, that the baby would get hurt. I figured I had time, you know? It’d be a while before she was crawling around.” Robley sucked air in his nose, turned his ear toward the door, listening for Elyse. “You seen Daniel Bywater is back? You know he’s a doctor now? PhD. Went to college and everything.”

  Colleen felt her face redden, but Robley didn’t seem to notice.

  “His mom’s pretty sick, I guess,” Robley said. “He came out to the house. He thinks it might have something to do with the stuff they’re spraying. It’s true, when they use the helicopters, especially in springtime, when the season starts up, it’s pretty bad. You taste it when you run the faucet.” Robley shook his head. “I don’t know. He seemed like kind of a nutcase. Had some petition to stop Sanderson from spraying.” Robley snorted. “As if anybody ever stopped Sanderson from doing exactly what the hell they want.”

  For a moment, he seemed lighter. Colleen knew there were times when you forgot, even just for a few seconds, and the grief lifted.

  “Makes you wonder, though. Did you see Elyse’s irises, out by the road?” Robley asked.

  Colleen turned to look.

  “Truck came by spraying the shoulder weeds, and it drifted down. Gail Porter, down the way, all her bees died.” The windows began to rattle quietly in their frames, a loaded log truck swinging around the bend. Robley waited for it to pass. “I ain’t afraid of those sprays,” he said, the truck’s vibration fading, squeal of its wet brakes in the distance. “But what if? What if there’s a whole raft of shit they’re not telling us?” The aroma of cooked tuna rose off the pan. “Here, I can take that off your hands,” he said, accepting the casserole. “Elyse hasn’t been outside in a week. I go to work and I come back three days later and it’s like she hasn’t moved.”

  “That’s normal,” Colleen said, her own sadness rising in her chest. “It can last a while, especially when—it’s a big loss.”

  “Thanks for this.” Robley raised the casserole in his hands. “And for driving her down to the clinic that time, when I was working. I never thanked you for that.”

  And then Robley was gone and Colleen was back in the truck, trundling down the driveway, past the irises standing dead in their planters, past Melody Larson’s empty single-wide, past the rusting white bee boxes in Gail Porter’s yard.

  September 17 CHUB

  Uncle Eugene chopped wood, his chest so white compared to the rest of him it looked like he was wearing an undershirt made of his own pale skin. The longhaired mama cat meowed in the chicken-wire cat pen, udders dragging in the dirt.

  “Where’s her kittens?” Chub asked Wyatt. The new kittens had been squirmy and warm. Chub had wanted to open a little door in his chest and shove one inside.

  Wyatt smeared a mosquito up his arm. “She ate them.”

  Aunt Enid’s cackle rang out from the bonfire around back, where Agnes and the girls were racing leaf boats.

  Wyatt tromped across the road, whacking dead ferns out of his way.

  “How do you know she ate them?” Chub asked. He was pretty sure Wyatt was lying, but Wyatt was ten. He could knock Chub to the ground and pin him until his heart frogged in his throat.

  Wyatt shrugged. “Who cares? She’ll have more. Cats are sluts.”

  The creek was backed up, still as a pond. Chub wasn’t supposed to go in water unless an adult was watching, but Wyatt waded across to the other side.

  Chub found a stick, cracked bark off it in satisfying hunks as he walked, and ran the silky wood under his nose. When he looked up, he stood at the edge of a road that held the creek pond back. He crossed to Wyatt’s side, perfectly dry. Wyatt fought his way out of the reeds. Cattails stood dead, water covered in algae. Chub dipped his stick in and lifted a hairy slime tail. It smelled like rotten eggs. He flung the algae and it whapped Wyatt’s chest.

  Wyatt shrank back, clawing it off.

  “You’re dead!”

  Chub stepped in the water, his boot filling.

  “I’m going to kill you!” Wyatt yelled.

  Chub ran. His wet sock squelched in his boot. He heard Wyatt crashing through the brush behind him. He grabbed ferns and they opened like a curtain, revealing a water balloon with a curled pink baby inside. Wyatt spun Chub around, knocking him onto his back, and landed, heavy and panting, on his chest.

  “Get off!” Chub bucked.

  Wyatt dug his fingernails into Chub’s pinned wrists, looming over him. His freckles looked scary. Then Wyatt spotted the balloon. He poked it. Liquid inside sloshed the baby around.

  “Stop!” Chub yelled, surprised by his own voice. He rolled, breaking Wyatt’s hold, and sprang up.

  Wyatt wagged his finger like he was going to wipe it on Chub’s face.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t,” Wyatt mimicked. “It’s just a deer, retard. Look at its legs.”

  Chub peered closer. A tiny baby deer. He touched the sack: it felt slick, like a Jell-O mold in the refrigerator—irresistible and terrifying in its wobbliness.

  “Come on.” Wyatt grabbed the thing and led the way back to Fort Eugene. The nanny goat with the black ear lay on her side in the yard, bleating, covered in sores.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Chub asked.

  “She’s sick.” Wyatt tromped up the steps.

  Chub struggled to pull off his muddy boots. His wet overalls rubbed, cold and stinking. Chub’s mom sat in the kitchen, shucking peanuts from their cardboard fingers. She wore her soft pink sweater. He wanted to press the cold tip of his nose into it.

  “Why are you wet?” She frowned.

  “What the hell is that?” Aunt Enid asked, catching sight of the deer baby in its balloon. “Wyatt John DeWitt. Take that outside right now.”

  “What is it?” Mavis and Gertrude asked.

  “Baby deer,” Wyatt said. “It’s dead.”

  “Why?”

  “It fell out before it was ready,” Aunt Enid said. “Wyatt, take it all the way up the hill. Don’t leave it in the yard, it’ll stink.”

  Chub’s dad and Uncle Eugene came in, shrugging off the chill.

  “One more week,” Uncle Eugene said. “The forestry board’ll send those jokers and their ‘human remains’ packing. And if they don’t, we will. You going to help beat the shit out of some hippies, Chub?”

  His mom tsked and held out Chub’s slicker.

  “I’m sorry. Did I say ‘shit’? I meant ‘crap.’ ” Uncle Eugene’s eyebrows danced.

  “What’s ‘remains’?” Chub asked, shoving an arm down a sleeve tunnel.

  “Bones,” Aunt Enid explained.

  “Enid,” his mom warned her.

  “What? He’ll find out sooner or later.”

  “Find out what?” Chub asked.

  “Nothing.” His mom smoothed his hair, smoothing the question right out of him.

  September 23 RICH

  Marsha had done Sanderson’s books for thirty years, right here under this burl clock, ticking just loud enough to get under your skin. Rich would be fit to be tied, cooped up inside all day.

  “Time for the big bucks,” Marsha said, slapping the voucher and a pen onto the counter. “You the last one?”

  “Eugene stopped off home,” Rich said.

  “Well.” Marsha eyed the clock, her purse already on the counter. “He’s got nine minutes.”

  Rich signed, slid the voucher back. Marsha yanked open the file-cabinet drawer, thumbing through the Gs.

  “Lot of Gundersens in here.”


  “I’m the live one.”

  “Big plans this weekend, Rich?” She pinched the check from his folder and slammed the drawer shut with her hip. “Come on. You can tell me.”

  It was Marsha’s routine, teasing the guys. If either of them were younger, it might have been called flirting. Marsha had two grown sons by different fathers but no husband. Jacob, the one she’d shot, was the only one she’d had no kids by. She’d spent a few weeks in jail, and men in town were still careful of her, though the judge had ruled it self-defense. After all, she’d only shot off Jacob’s pinkie. Plenty of guys had lost worse to the mill’s saws over the years.

  She pushed the check across. He reached around for his wallet.

  “Don’t forget these.” She heaved a stack of newspapers onto the counter. Marsha still saved the crosswords for Colleen, though she hadn’t helped out in the front office since before Chub was born.

  The first time he’d spoken to Colleen had been right here at this counter, their fingers accidentally brushing when she handed him his check. Cold hands, warm heart, he’d said. She’d turned beet red, grabbed a stack of folders, and disappeared down the hall.

  Wallflowers don’t need much sun, do they, Rich? Marsha had teased.

  Now Marsha thumbed through the drawer, refiling the voucher.

  “Merle around?” Rich asked, hoping it sounded casual.

  Marsha tipped her head down the hall. “Need something?”

  “If he’s got a minute.”

  Marsha reached for the phone. “You got Rich Gundersen out here.”

  Rich rotated his shoulder.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  He’d come into the front office once a week since he was fifteen, but in thirty-eight years, he’d never had a reason, good or bad, to venture past the counter, until now. He swallowed, insect buzz of fluorescents reverberating in the wood-paneled hall. A phone rang through an open door.

  “Yello,” he heard Merle answer.

  Framed black-and-whites lined the walls, loggers—arms crossed, wool pants stiff with paraffin, suspenders—standing on stumps as big as dance floors, faces a mix of pride and bashfulness at having their picture taken. Even then, they knew timber that size wouldn’t last forever.