Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  Sally Bell had instincts. She hid in the bushes with her sister’s heart in her hands, and when the murderers left she lived on berries and roots, slept naked in hollow trees, and outlived that horror by eighty years. The Lone Woman had instincts. She left her people to save her child, and when she found her child was gone, she lived on alone. The sow had instincts. She came for water with her shoats, and fought the bullets until it was time to die.

  Surely I have instincts, too.

  And it comes to me: We must leave this house. If Eva is to survive, we must leave this place where she is stuck. If Eva is to be a mother, we must find some other way for her to give birth.

  There is an urgency to that thought so compelling that I speak before I have a chance to question it. “Listen, Eva—do you think you can walk?”

  “What?”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Why?”

  “I want us to go for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “To the stump,” I answer before I can think. Instead of the incredulity or outrage or indifference I had braced myself to expect, she looks at me with a tiny flicker of interest.

  “To the stump?” she echoes.

  “Maybe it will help. Do you think you can walk?”

  “I’ll try,” she says, responding to the certainty in my voice, to the relief of action, as she struggles to rise off her mattress.

  I fill the pack with quilts, blankets, and food, fill a bucket with ashes at whose heart glows a handful of coals. Somehow I manage to dress us warmly, to lace our shoes. And off we go, stopping in the opened doorway for Eva to bend over the clench of her belly.

  As I rub her back, standing in the doorway, looking out at the green-grey forest, I am clutched by a contraction of my own—a contraction of fear. Why am I making my sister hike through the wet woods after having been in labor for almost two days? Am I doing this just to speed up the inevitable, just to get her dying done with?

  One step at a time, we cross the clearing. We pass through the ring of rotten tulips and then we’re in the forest, walking upstream beside the creek. Eva leans against me, waddling unlike the ballerina she once was, and yet using all her dancer’s stamina to take each next step. Sometimes she stops, clutches at me while a contraction sweeps over her.

  We reach the hillside we must climb, pause for another contraction, and then head up. And up.

  And up. And stop. And on. And up, counting progress a step at a time.

  My arm turns numb in her grip. My back aches beneath the pack. Our faces are wet with tears or sweat or mist, and still we climb. At least it’s something. At least we’re doing something.

  But halfway up the slope, she says, “I can’t.” She looks around wildly, desperately, then fastens her gaze on me, speaks as intently as though she were explaining the world’s greatest truth. “I can’t.”

  “It’s not much farther,” I answer.

  “I can’t,” she says. “It’s not the hill. It’s this. I can’t get it out. I can’t get out óf it. I can’t do this.”

  She sobs and then begins to scream, her head thrown back to the grey sky. Her face looks like a mask, a bit of nameless flesh wrapped around eternal pain. She is a creature no longer my sister, screaming while we cling to the hill. All around us the forest waits, listens, absorbs our little struggle.

  “I can’t. I can’t,” she cries. “I can’t.”

  I grab her heaving shoulders, force her to face me, and say, in a voice horrible with desperation, “What else are you going to do?”

  For a moment, Eva returns, looks at me from those anonymous eyes, while I growl again, “What else are you going to do?” Then I soften, plead, “Just climb the hill. You don’t have to have the baby. But just please, please climb this hill.”

  She shuffles forward. Halts. Clings to me, rocking with the effort, then shuffles another step, her feet plowing up furrows in the steep compost of needles, leaves, and last year’s acorns.

  And so we travel, step by awful step—up and up. When we get to the steepest part, I go behind her, push her up, first with my hands against her shoulder blades, and then at the very steepest, with my hands pressing up on her buttocks so that I can feel the bones of her pelvis through the flesh beneath her skirts, pushing her up, up, an inch, a centimeter at a time.

  When she gasps, “Here it comes,” we stop, brace ourselves, let her contraction wash over us, until I realize that I, too, am shuddering with its force. I, too, am breathing deep as an ocean. I, too, am moaning, growling, rolling the pain out into the indifferent forest.

  Somehow we reach the flat. Eva sinks to the ground, and I fall beside her, holding her, rocking her in my arms, muttering praise and thanks and blessings to all the things beyond and within us that allowed us to reach this place. When I finally raise my head to look around, I see the dank forest, the rain-dark sky, the roofed stump filled with barrels, and for a moment I know I am crazy.

  But we can’t go back. I claw down panic, raise Eva to her feet, edge her on—step by baby step—towards the stump. I remember that old game we used to play. Nellie, you may take two steps forward.

  Mother, may I?

  Yes, you may.

  Yes, you must. What else are you going to do?

  The light has all but gone by the time Eva reaches the stump. She leans against it, while I remove the plywood door and wrestle the barrels outside to make room for us. She crawls in, her belly almost dragging the ground. I spread out quilts for her to lie on, and because she is shivering uncontrollably, I cover her with all the blankets I have brought. Then I rush to find dry wood in the failing light.

  I pour the coals from the bucket into the fire pit, try to start a fire. Eva watches dully. Finally a spark ignites, licks up the precious tidbits of paper, and I settle back on my haunches to add bulk to the flames.

  “It’s good here,” says Eva through chattering teeth, the first words she has spoken about anything beyond herself for days. I look, and she is right. The fire sparks starward, and shadows the folds and twists of the stump at whose heart we rest. We can smell the clean scents of oak and bay smoke, of humus and charred redwood and the damp night. The moon is just past full, and tonight it seems there is nothing in these woods that would want to harm us. Instead, I think I feel a new benevolence abroad, as if the forest had finally grown sympathetic, as if—huddled inside the stump—we finally mattered.

  Eva doubles with the blow of another contraction, her hand reaches blindly for mine, grasps it until I’m sure the bones will crack.

  “I thought I was used to them by now,” she gasps. She whimpers, “They can’t get worse.

  “But they do.

  Thick and hard and fast, they buffet her like storm gales, leaving her only seconds to gather herself before the next blast. She doesn’t scream, but she groans and the sounds she makes are beyond the pain and work of labor, beyond human—or even animal—life. They are the sounds that move the earth, the sounds that give voice to the deep, violent fissures in the bark of the redwoods. They are the sounds of splitting cells, of bonding atoms, the sounds of the waxing moon and the forming stars.

  “Drink,” I tell her, holding a cup of water to her mouth. She takes a trembling sip, then says, “I have to pee.”

  I help her outside, help her to lift her skirts. I support her as she squats, but nothing comes except a contraction. Then I hear another sound, a grunt deep in her throat that makes her eyes narrow with internal effort.

  When it’s over, she says, “I pushed.”

  It is amazing how closely hope hovers above despair. I thought I had given up hours ago, but a fresh elation charges through me and I think, Maybe my sister will not die.

  I have no idea how long she pushed. Several times the fire burnt low, and I had to leave her to tend to it. At some point, I helped her to lean back against the inner wall of the stump, and when I looked between her legs, I could see, by the dancing light of the fire, her vulva bulging. She pushed again, and I saw her
labia part and a slick bit of head peek out.

  When the contraction receded, the head disappeared, but with the next one, I lifted one of her hands, guided it down between her legs so she could feel that other flesh, and an ecstasy passed over her face whose traces endured even through the next contractions. I gave her sips of water, held her hands, added my own growls of encouragement to her grunts, and slowly her vulva stretched thinner and thinner, and slowly that head inched out.

  Suddenly her eyes widened in surprise. She pushed again, and the head crowned—its body still inside her, its flattened face like a deity from another time. She pushed again, and it slithered towards me. I caught it awkwardly, more to keep myself from being hit than to protect what I was catching. It was hot and wet and slippery and still as death. For a stunned second, I stared at its naked face. It seemed complete exactly as it was, and I felt an odd reluctance at the thought of coaxing it into life.

  But just as I was beginning to try to recall the pages in the encyclopedia about reviving a stillbirth, it drew a breath. And then another. It opened its eyes and looked at the fire, the stump, the predawn sky. Eva sank back, tears falling down her cheeks. I laid the little thing on her chest, bundling all the covers around them.

  We wept and laughed, then—far, far beyond words. Eva’s contractions returned, and for a horrifying moment I thought, twins, but then I remembered the placenta. She pushed again, and it slithered out, liver-purple and twined with veins.

  I remembered I was supposed to examine it, but in my daze I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be looking for. Of course the encyclopedia hadn’t said anything about how to cut the cord, so I made my own way, beginning with a tentative little slice, and then, when neither Eva nor the baby winced, doubling it over my knifeblade and yanking it in two.

  I built up the fire while Eva murmured to her baby, coaxed it to her breast, giggled as it groped and sputtered around her nipple. A thin smoke drifted through the clearing, filling the dawning air with its tang.

  The sun rose.

  I looked at the heap of blankets on Eva’s chest, and said, “Well, it’s bright enough to see now. Let’s just take a peek at her.”

  Eva stroked the top of its skull languidly with her fingertips. “It’s a boy.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a boy.”

  I felt myself stiffen. “How do you know?” She shrugged. “I’ve known for months.”

  “But it has to be a girl.”

  She laughed, bent her neck so she could gaze down at the bundle on her chest. “Nope. It’s a boy. A sweet, smart, strong, beautiful boy.”

  “You never told me.”

  “You never asked.”

  “Are you sure it’s a boy?”

  “I’ll bet you.”

  “You’ll bet me?”

  “I’ll bet you,” she answered joyously, “the gas. I’ll bet you the gas it’s a boy.”

  She eased the blankets back, and we peeked, and there, between its tiny, red, wrinkled thighs were a startlingly large set of testicles and the fat little worm of a penis.

  “A boy,” I said, the disappointment so sharp in my voice that Eva looked up to ask, “What’s wrong with a boy?”

  “Nothing, I guess. I was just hoping we could name it Gloria.”

  “Well, Gloria would be a pretty silly name for you, wouldn’t it, little one?” she crooned to the baby on her chest.

  All that work for a boy, I thought. Suddenly the penis stiffened and a quick shower of water sprayed from it.

  “He’s peeing,” said Eva in delight and amazement. “He baptized me.” She began giggling like an eight-year-old, giggling as if she were drunk on Grand Marnier, giggling so contagiously that I had to join her, to laugh with a relief that left me drained and cleaned.

  We laughed and the light grew stronger. We giggled until our grins ached and our stomachs felt weak and giddy, until tears blurred our eyes and ran in unchecked trails down our cheeks, and it seemed that if the baby was born and breathing and my sister had once more taken up residence behind her face, then nothing could ever go wrong again.

  We rested in the stump till noon, dozing and smiling and watching that rubbery-faced creature stare out at the world through its new eyes. But it was a chilly day, the fire took a lot of tending to keep the stump warm enough for a newborn, and I found myself wanting to hurry Eva and the baby back down to the house. I longed to build a dependable fire in the stove, fix hot food and chamomile tea, and sleep for days.

  I buried the placenta and umbilical cord in our new clearing, buried it so deep the pigs will never root it up. I tucked the blankets in a barrel, broke up the coals of the fire, took the baby in my arms, and then—step by step—I helped my sister down the hill.

  I woke last night to the sound of the window opening. The dark room spun while I tried to orient myself. For a frantic moment, I thought we had survived the past nine months only for the rapist to return. Then I heard Eva shuffling back to her mattress.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

  “Nothing. It’s just a little hot in here.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  I went to her and she was burning. Her face was slick, her body shook. I lit the lard lamp, got water for her to drink and a wet cloth to wipe her face and arms. Then I went into the pantry, stood among my collection of forest herbs, trying desperately to calculate or intuit which ones might help make her well.

  For a long time I sat beside her on her mattress, tendering her sips of strawberry leaf tea, and watching a cold light seep into the room so slowly it seemed I was only imagining the sun that it preceded. Fears and questions crystallized in the half-light like water freezing into blades and spikes of ice. Eva must have an infection, I thought—nothing else could make a fever come so fast, less than two days after she gave birth.

  But I had no idea how she got it.

  And I had no idea how to cure it.

  Meanwhile, the baby cried—a shrill, impersonal sound that went on so long it seemed eternal. I could find nothing to make it stop. Holding it didn’t help. Rocking it didn’t help. Walking with it and singing to it didn’t help. I swaddled it and set it in the drawer I had fixed for it, but still it screamed. I maneuvered it to Eva’s hot nipple, where it struggled to nurse and then pulled away to howl. Finally it dropped off—mid-scream—into a jumpy sleep, only to wake a few minutes later, crying.

  Eva stirred, and I wiped her face and held a mug of dogwood root tea to her cracked lips. As she sucked an uneven sip, she suddenly looked around wildly. “Where’s my baby?” she asked—although it was lying right beside me, bawling.

  “It’s here,” I soothed. “It’s doing fine,” I lied.

  She sank back down into her fever, muttering, “Lift that leg. Higher. Ankle straight. Head up. That’s right. Lift, lift, lift.” And then, wistfully, “Plié to arabesque, temps levé, sauté, three, four, and pirouette.”

  I rocked her baby, walked with it up and back the length of the sour room, changed the towel that was its diaper, and all the while it screamed. Wondering how I knew to do those things, I gave it wet rags to suck, offered it my finger. I tried to get it to swallow a little acorn mush, a drop of wood rose tea. I cooed to it, sang to it, finally bit my tongue to keep from screaming back at it.

  The house burned with Eva’s fever. It burned with the baby’s shrieks, and with my fear. The baby wouldn’t stop crying, and its wails were accusation, condemnation, a shrill reminder of my impotence, my ignorance. Its wails sent me spiraling down through helplessness to anger, and through that, to despair, and still it cried, its face hard and red, its eyes—from which no tears fell—squeezed shut.

  I tucked it back in its drawer, went outside for wood. When I returned it was still howling, and the tears it did not cry were coursing silently down Eva’s face.

  “Why is he crying?” she asked when she saw me.

  “I think it’s hungry,” I answered. “You don’t hav
e any milk yet.”

  “When will it come?” she begged.

  “Soon. It’s just supposed to take a little longer the first time.” As if there’ll he a second, I thought.

  She sighed and rolled fretfully across the bed.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  She answered, “Cold,” and I thought, I’m finally truly losing her.

  Still the baby shrieked, and the sound drilled a hole in my skull, needling out all thought but make it stop. Suddenly, made wild by helplessness, I swooped on it, snatched it up, my fingers tensed like claws, my arms aching to rip it from its screams, to do any desperate thing to stop that voice and its awful demands.

  But instead of shaking it or slapping it or dashing its head down against the corner of the stove, I sank onto my mattress. I was weeping myself and I clutched the wailing thing against me. It began to nuzzle and root against my chest and in a daze I gave it what it wanted, lifted my shirt to expose my own breast as though it had never crossed my mind to kill it. For a moment its heavy head wobbled frantically on the stem of its neck, and then it latched on to my nipple.

  It took my breath away. It was a shock as sudden and hard as sex, the way he sucked—like a little vacuum cleaner, I thought, giddy with relief that I hadn’t hurt him, with delight at the sudden silence. He sucked intently, his dark eyes open and unblinking, his mouth chomping away at my nipple as matter-of-factly as a turtle eating leaves. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and my next feeling was one of remorse for having tricked him with a milkless nipple. I braced myself for the dreadful moment when he would discover my breasts were even more useless than Eva’s.

  But whether he had given up hoping for food or he was too exhausted to care, he suckled for a long time at my empty breast, nursed as though comfort were more sustenance than milk. I bent over him, cradling his head in my palm, and watched as his eyes oozed slowly closed and his sucking diminished to an occasional chomp and then stopped altogether. Finally my nipple dribbled from his lax mouth, and he slept.

  He slept while the fire burned to coals in the stove and the winter light faded from the house. He slept in my arms until they ached as though they had been clinging to an oak tree all night. He slept for hours in my arms while I looked down at him, watched dreams cross his face like the shadows of clouds, and vowed I would not let him die.