by Jean Hegland
Labor difficulties. Postpartum hemorrhage. Do you want your sister to bleed to death because you can’t pull the trigger?
Brain and nerve damage in the neonate. Do you want that baby girl to be born harmed?
Do you want to have to sit in this tree for another night?
I gripped the oak with my knees and thighs. I took three long breaths and tried to remember everything I thought I knew about firing a gun. I waited until the rifle stopped wavering and then aimed down at the center of the sow’s back. It seemed impossible, but I had decided that if only I could sever her spine then maybe she wouldn’t run off with my bullet inside her. I took another breath, and held it. I exhaled and squeezed the trigger so slowly I never knew when to flinch.
Everything exploded into noise. The gun roared, though for a stupid second I thought I hadn’t fired it because in my excitement I never felt it kick. Birds I hadn’t been aware of burst from their roosts in neighboring trees. Leaves and twigs rained down around me. Below me the earth was boiling. The shoats had vanished, and I watched, horrified, as the old sow thrashed and squealed.
Once I had seen some kids tie a scarf around a cat’s middle, and I remember watching with a sick fascination as the cat struggled to walk while its hind legs pitched and staggered drunkenly out of its control. Beneath me the sow was doing a similar thing. Unable to stand, she twisted and kicked, her forelegs scrabbling to pull her body along while her hind legs lurched uselessly.
I did it! I thought, as I tried to run another bullet into the chamber, but my hands shook so hard the first one dropped like an acorn into the mud. Finally I fumbled another from my pocket, rammed it into the gun, and shot again. I missed. I tried again, and hit her shoulder. Clinging to my tree, elated and appalled by what I had caused, I watched as the sow battled the bullets, snorting and growling and tossing mud, all the energy of her self unleashed, flung wild into the world.
“Die, die. Please die,” I begged out loud. In the midst of her throes, she heard the foreign sound of my voice. She looked up, and her nearsighted eyes seemed to meet mine.
“Please die,” I pleaded. “My sister is going to have a baby.”
She grunted, tried to heave herself out of the wallow one more time, but her front legs collapsed under her. She stumbled into the mud and lay there, panting, suddenly enormously patient. I shot again and this time hit her where I aimed—in the back of the head. She stiffened with the impact of that final bullet and then slumped through herself, into the earth, out of her life.
Weeping and shivering, I tumbled out of the tree, skinning my hands, twisting my legs. When I got to the ground, my muscles screamed and trembled from adrenaline and lack of circulation, and I almost fainted. I rocked against the tree where I had passed the night, unable to take my eyes from the heap of muddy flesh I’d created. I felt a surge, a roar of power, felt enormous, awed, and proud, convinced—for a moment at least—that my kill had been something more than a novice’s dumb luck.
When I could finally stand, I walked over to her, bent to meet the creature whose life I had taken. I saw the torn flesh, the blood on the earth and, sure and hard as the backfire of his rifle, the image of my father lying in the mud his blood had made came back to me. I gagged and retched. Bits of dried apple rehydrated in bile tore their way up from my gut, left their burning trail in my throat.
I threw up until there was nothing left, and then I slumped in the mud and wept. I wept for my father and for my mother and for Eva and her unborn daughter and myself. I wept for Sally Bell and the Lone Woman—those women who had long since lost the sister and child I was trying to save. I wept for this sow and her shoats. I wept from exhaustion and excitement, and I wept because I knew that when I stopped, somehow I had to turn that heap of muscle and gristle into meat.
Dressing, the encyclopedia calls it, though it’s much more like undressing, and, as usual, the encyclopedia says almost nothing about how it is actually done. But I knew that somehow I had to stick a knife in her, open her up, drain out her blood, rake out her insides, tear off her hide, hack off her head and legs, cut her flesh from her bones. And I knew I couldn’t wait too long or the meat would be rancid and rigor mortis would set in.
You shot her. You owe her a home in your belly. She deserves to live again in you, and Eva, and Eva’s daughter.
I rose, stood over her for a moment, and gingerly picked up a hind leg in my fingertips, gritting my teeth against the feel of stiff hair, cold mud, the residual life-warmth. I tugged tentatively at the leg, but her body wouldn’t budge. I grabbed it, cringing, and then grabbed the other leg with my other hand and yanked. Her haunches shifted a few inches.
It took a long time, but slowly, grunting and straining, tugging first at one end and then the other, I dragged her up out of the mud and tried to prop her so her throat and belly were facing downhill. It was hard work, but by the time I was through wrestling with her I was almost used to the feel and smell of her. Slowly she was becoming an object.
I grabbed her snout and forced her head back. Gingerly I pushed the knife blade against her throat, but as usual my resolve to do a thing didn’t mean it could easily be done. I jabbed and hacked, until finally the knife tore into her jugular and thick red blood drained down the slope I had dragged her up, back into the wallow, into that mush of mud and vomit.
I began to work the knife down her belly. I smashed her breastbone apart with the hatchet, and as I drew the knife between the still-swollen teats, her entrails pushed through the hole I was making, flopped out onto the forest floor, heavy and reeking. I hacked a circle around her anus, reached into that sticky, stinking, intimate warmth, grabbed the large intestine, and lifted the long rope of it out.
There’s nothing I can’t do now, I thought as I sorted through the warm and iridescent entrails for her heart and liver—my first gifts to Eva and her daughter.
All day I labored, separating skin from flesh, flesh from bone, dividing the sow into meat—a few chunks for boiling and frying, a mountain of strips for drying and smoking. I stopped only to drink water, to sharpen the knife, or to take off my jacket when the sun warmed the forest.
One shoulder and most of her back and loin were ruined by bullets, but even so we have kept busy for days preserving her flesh. Already the hunter’s moon she died under has waned to a crescent—and the color has returned to Eva’s cheeks.
I nap at the stump in a patch of pale sunlight, dream I am buried in the earth up to my neck, my arms and legs like taproots tapering to a web of finer roots until at last there is no clear demarcation between those root hairs and the soil itself. As I look out over the earth, my skull expands as though I were absorbing the above-ground world and the sky itself through my eye sockets. My head grows until it is a shell encompassing the whole of the earth. I wake softly, with a sense of infinite calm.
The maple leaves have all fallen, and the days are still clear. We’re still eating sow jerky, and I have managed to make a kind of runny soap from lard and ashes and a sort of smoky light from a bowlful of sow fat with a silk wick.
Sometimes I feel as though I were bearing her feral old soul along with my own. Sometimes at dusk, when Eva and I come down off the hill and reenter the house to sleep, I find myself looking around these rooms with a sort of sideways terror. I have to remind myself, That’s just a door. Those are only walls. They can’t hurt you. And sometimes when I wake in the morning, my first thought is panic—I’ve got to get outside.
Last night I woke to the sound of the winter’s first rain. I lay in the moonless darkness, listening to the soft wash of water against the window. I remembered how, when the rains began last year, Eva and I were putting together puzzles and eating canned soup and waiting for someone to save us, and I felt a flood of compassion for those scared girls. It seemed only a distant irony that this was the autumn Eva was to join a ballet company, the autumn I should have entered Harvard, that one of these uncharted autumn days was the day I turned eighteen.
Thi
s morning I went into the pantry—just to stand there, surrounded on all sides by our half-year’s collaboration with soil and water and sunshine. In that close, windowless room, I looked at the food we had canned, at the pumpkins and potatoes piled on the floor, the strings of dried fruit and beans hanging from the ceiling, the bundles and jars of roots and leaves and barks and flowers I had gathered, all labeled with notes about where I found them, about what they might ease or cause or cure. I thought of the bags of seeds out in the workshop, all dried and sorted and waiting for spring, and of the barrels in the stump, heavy with acorns and berries and sow jerky, and I felt as though I had passed the Achievement Tests, after all.
In the meadow the fresh green of winter is just beginning to appear through the mat of golden grass. In the woods, tiny green shoots rise like sparks up through the wet, black leaves, and the patient spores of mushrooms are suddenly fruiting. In the clearing, the redwood fence post Eva and I set up at the far end of the garden is sprouting new fronds.
Each day brings gifts. Yesterday we found a fresh patch of sheep’s sorrel to add to our dried sow soup. Today I noticed what looked like bright beads spilled on the path to the stump—madrone berries. I gathered a few in my hand, and a sort of thanksgiving passed through my mind before I nibbled a berry. It was bland and faintly sweet—dry yellow flesh around a core of dark seeds.
Yesterday it was so wet we stayed indoors, left the forest to its own damp self, and sat close to the warm stove, drowsing and listening to the winter rain, the wind-dashed drops broadcast like seeds against the walls and windows. I had made Eva a cup of raspberry leaf tea as a pregnancy tonic, and between sips she amused herself by balancing the mug on her gigantic belly and watching as the baby’s kicking threatened to knock the tea to the floor.
I was pounding a batch of acorn meal by the stove when all of a sudden the whole house began to shake. From the blocked-off utility room there came a creaking and snapping and crashing that seemed to go on forever. Eva’s tea mug fell to the floor and I leapt to my feet. There was a moment of silence, followed by another loud crack, another series of crashes, and then everything was quiet.
Eva gave me a look of terror and pleading. “What should we do?” she begged.
“Hide,” I whispered.
“Where?” she asked, and I didn’t know what to tell her, for in that moment I understood that whatever corner or closet she hid in would only end up being her trap when he finally broke through the door.
“Wait by the front door,” I whispered. “I’ll see what’s out back, and if I yell, you run off into the woods.”
She nodded and begged, “Be careful,” as I grabbed the gun and snuck towards the kitchen.
As soon as I entered it, I could see something was wrong. Daylight was filtering through the window in the door to the utility room. Slowly I eased towards it, the rifle aimed at the spot in the window where I expected a face to appear. It seemed to take forever to creep along the counter, to edge past the dusty refrigerator and stove. When I finally reached the door, I crouched below the window, waiting.
I started to feel dizzy and my legs began to ache, but nothing happened. Flinching beneath the weight of the silence, I raised myself up to peek out the window. What I saw was such a shock that for a moment I could make no sense of it—I looked out on rubble. The washing machine had fallen through the back door and the dryer was lying on its side next to the toppled freezer. The floor tilted sharply towards the ground, and the roof sagged between the twisted beams. Rain was falling in the gap between the wreckage and the kitchen door.
How could he have done that? I thought stupidly. Someone must be with him.
But still no one appeared, and when I went outside to look for tracks, I could find nothing but raccoon and possum prints. The utility room had simply collapsed, the rotting timbers finally pulled down by the weight of the cast-iron sink, the empty freezer, the useless washing machine, the dead dryer.
Our parents’ house is falling down around us.
Again the moon grows full. There has been a break in the rain, but the weather is so cold and Eva so enormously big that we stay close to home, close to the stove and the pantry and our warm mattresses. Eva dozes and drinks the teas I steep for her. She knits odd little gowns from the silks our mother left, while I scan the encyclopedia for the dreams it contains, and write by the light of the round moon and the open stove, my pen scratching its tiny markings onto these last sheets of paper.
This afternoon I read: The oldest use of the word “virgin” meant not the physiological condition of chastity, but the psychologicalstate of belonging to no man, of belonging to oneself To be virginal did not mean to be inviolate, but rather to be true to nature and instinct, just as the virgin forest is not barren or unfertilized, but instead is unexploited by man.
Children born out of wedlock were at one time referred to as “virgin-born.”
Tonight we’ve eaten well—acorn cakes, stewed dried blackberries, baked pumpkin, a bit of cress from the spot I’ve been cultivating by the creek. Eva dozes over her cup of mullein flower tea, the steam rising into her face like the rising of a dream.
I wonder what it’s like at the stump tonight. I wonder if the roof is tight, if the plywood door still holds. I wonder if anything has taken shelter there, nestled snug among our barrels of acorns and berries. I wonder what it would be like to be there now, listening to the rain and wind, smelling the night, the wet leaves and the earth, and the old char of the tree. I wonder what sorts of creatures would watch us from the forest, what spirits would hover above us, circle around us in the rain.
Why does that place seem safer, more alive, than this?
It has begun. I dread to think how it will end, though writing those words scares me—for what if they prove prophetic?
Last night Eva only nibbled at her acorn mush, and a little later she leapt from her chair, ran to the bathroom faster than I’ve seen her move in months. When she came out, her hands were pressing her womb.
“Feel this,” she said. I touched her stomach and it was hard as an oak trunk; it was a thing with a will of its own.
“A contraction?” I asked, as I felt it start to ease.
She nodded.
“The first?”
“The strongest. They’ve been coming and going all day. But I wasn’t sure what they were.”
“When was the last one?”
“A while ago. Before dinner.”
“How do you feel?”
“Okay. A little shaky.” She looked at me and asked, “Are you ready for this?”
No, I thought, and answered, “The question is, are you?”
“Yes. No. Maybe. Anyway, it’s coming,” she answered almost festively.
“What do you want to do now?”
“Go to bed, I guess. Try to rest.”
She settled down on her mattress, while I got out the encyclopedia, and tried to glean any last bits of knowledge, tried to memorize the words or pry them from the page.
She slept, and later so did I, lulled by the rain and warm stove. Just before dawn I woke. Eva was lying on her mattress, rocking back and forth and moaning to herself.
“Eva,” I rasped through my sleep-tightened throat. “How’s it going?”
“Okay, I think.”
“Still having contractions?”
“Yes.”
“What are they doing?”
“Growing stronger.”
“How far apart?”
She managed a laugh. “Got a stopwatch?”
I simmered some alder bark and pressed her to drink the decoction. I fixed acorn mush, though I was the only one who ate. Every now and then, Eva clutched her stomach, and I quit whatever I was doing to sit on the mattress beside her and rub her shoulders until the contraction was over.
The long day passed. I fed the fire and swept the floor and smoothed the sheets and steeped the teas that were supposed to facilitate Eva’s labor and calm my nerves, while she lay on her mattress,
enduring the contractions that neither quit nor came closer together. Finally, towards dusk, she raised her head off her pillow to ask the question I had been dreading, “How much longer?”
“It won’t be much longer. You’re doing fine.”
“Isn’t there anything else to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What does the encyclopedia say?”
“It says you’re doing fine.”
It says, The average length of labor for the primapara is sixteen to eighteen hours.
“Sweet Nellie,” Eva said, looking at me as though I were someone new. “It’s nice of you to do this.”
I shrugged, “What else are sisters for?”
But all I can do is rub her back, give her sips of tea and lie to her, tell her, You’re doing fine.
The encyclopedia claims the urge to push is instinctual. But Eva says nothing about pushing. She says nothing but, “Here it comes,” and nothing comes but another contraction.
After another night and day of labor, the house is hot and tight. It smells of suffering flesh and fills with Eva’s moans. Hour after hour she lies on her stale mattress, while I feed the fire and rub her back and wait, frantic and helpless.
Damn the encyclopedia.
Eva is dying, and the encyclopedia talks about instinct. Even now it drones on, measured, pedantic, aloof, flattening the world into facts—but withholding the knowledge I need to save my sister’s life. What does the encyclopedia know about instinct?
Instinct is older than paper, wilder than words. Instinct is wiser than any article about the three stages of delivery, any article about obstetrical interventions. But where do instincts come from? And how can I find them now, after living without them for so long?