by Jean Hegland
Not even if I had to feed him on my blood.
Elderberry flowers, dogwood root, peppermint and strawberry leaves, mountain balm, blue-eyed grass, and yarrow to bring down fever; horsetail stems, wormwood and bay leaves to ease cramping; redwood sap, yerba buena and mugwort leaves for tonics; rose hips, coyote mint and chamomile for colic; fennel seeds, nettle, raspberry, and rosemary leaves, chamomile and red clover flowers to induce lactation.
I forage the pages of Native Plants of Northern California, gleaning what lore and hope I can. The plants I don’t already have in the pantry I search for in the forest, scouring the streambeds, the meadows, the ridgetops, gathering what I can in midwinter. Back in the stuffy house, I peel roots, crush leaves, boil water and steep herbs, and try not to remember my vast ignorance, try not to think of the experiment I am conducting.
“Drink this,” I say, lifting my sister from her mattress, holding the steaming cup for her while she takes docile sips, shudders and grimaces at the astringency, the harshness, the wildness. And sips again.
“This is for your fever, this is for your nipples, this will make your milk come in, this will make you strong,” I say, urging salves and poultices and infusions and decoctions, while I boil more water, steep more herbs, and pray to the forest to make her well.
When the baby wakes and snuffles for a nipple, I hold him to Eva’s hot breasts. But if she moans and pushes him away, or if he stiffens and wails his frustration, I scoop him back into my arms, lift my shirt, and fit my own nipple into his mouth. Then, sitting by the window where I once memorized the stages of mitosis, I watch him as he drinks from me, wondering at the strange alchemy of love and need and physiology that fills my breasts with milk, wondering at the fierceness of his tiny brow, at the perfect curves of his ears.
I gave my sister elderberry tea, blue-eyed grass, yarrow, and peppermint, and whether it was those herbs that cured her I suppose I will never know, but finally her fever broke. I gave her stewed fruit and acorn mush and sow jerky broth, and slowly she grew stronger, until finally, when the moon came full again, she could sit up by herself, clasp the hot cup in her own hands. I gave her raspberry leaf and nettle and fennel tea, and her milk came in until now her breasts are swollen to twice their normal size and when the baby cries, dark circles spread across the fronts of both our shirts.
Eva has named him Robert after our father, but I have taken to calling him Burl, and he is my constant companion. Hour after hour I cook and clean and care for him and for my sister, and slowly Eva grows stronger, and slowly my Burl grows fatter and more awake.
This morning, for a break from the house that has seemed to come to own me, I took Burl for a hike. Using two of his grandfather’s shirts to make a kind of pack, I tied him against my chest. Eva was sleeping when I left, and though I thought of waking her to tell her where we were going, in the end I decided she needed her sleep. I stoked the fire, took up my gathering basket, slipped out the door and across the clearing, and headed to my father’s grave.
It was a soft, damp day, a day of low grey skies. The forest was lush, moist—rotting back to bloom. Chanterelles appeared like lost balls among the scatter of wet leaves. The tender curls of bracken shoots unfurled from the dank ground, and I filled my basket as I walked.
Burl was good company. Most of the way he slept, neat and quiet as a cat, his body warm against my chest. But even when he was asleep, I was aware of his presence, and the forest seemed keener, fresher, more alive because he was in it with me.
When he woke, he was silent, one soft cheek pressed just below my collarbone, his head turned so he could look out at the world I carried him through. I began to murmur to him then, to tell him about the forest, about mushrooms and ferns, bears and boars, redwoods and oaks and madrone trees. I told him about his family, about his grandfather and grandmother, about Eva and Eli and me—a web of stories spinning round him, catching him already in their weave.
When we reached the grave, it was blanketed with damp leaves and smelled both fresh and old. I hunkered down next to that mound of earth and untied Burl and nursed him. I whispered to the sky, “You have a grandson.”
When we got home, Eva was sitting at the window, and she rose to meet us with a tight face.
“Where have you been?” she asked, reaching for Burl even before I could untie him from my chest.
“For a walk.”
“I woke up and no one was here.”
“I took Burl up to his grandfather’s grave,” I explained.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were asleep.”
“Wouldn’t you think that would be important to me, too—to take my son to my father’s grave?”
“We’ll go again when you’re stronger,” I promised.
“But it won’t be the first time,” she said, pressing Burl to her as though they had both endured an ordeal.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you have a good rest?”
“No.” She sat down and opened her blouse, and Burl began nursing obediently.
“Didn’t he cry for me?” she asked, stroking his flailing arm.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t. Burl didn’t cry at all.”
“His name isn’t Burl,” she said, pressing his head closer to her breast. “It’s Robert.”
The roof is leaking like a foundering boat. Every hour I have to climb the stairs to empty out the collection of tubs and pans that fill what used to be our bedrooms. In the meantime, I try to read the encyclopedia, but it’s empty, flavorless—a meaningless habit. I write a little, but I’m running out of paper, and my thoughts keep trailing off the page.
Life should be good, after all our trouble. But once again something has gone wrong, and though I can’t say exactly what it is, tonight I keep remembering the lumps of clay on my mother’s potter’s wheel. They seemed almost alive as they spun between her wet hands, and I remember watching raptly as she centered them and opened them and pulled them into mugs and bowls and vases, formed them to the shape of her desires.
But every living thing has desires of its own. She used to say that a good potter had to listen to the clay, and tonight I remember how the smallest bubble or bit of gravel, the tiniest slip of her hands, and the whole perfect pot would start to wobble. If even the slightest wobble went unnoticed or uncorrected, it would grow larger and larger, taking on its own violent life, out of control and so strong it would finally tear the pot apart—flinging wet shards of clay across the room.
Now if Eva is singing to Burl when I enter the room, her song trails off to silence. If I pick him up, she says, Leave him alone—he needs to sleep. If I change his diaper, Eva readjusts it. If I put a blanket on him, Eva takes it off.
Now when I try to nurse him, she takes him from my arms.
I’m writing this from the stump, writing by the little fire I’m trying to keep burning by myself. It chokes and flares. Smoke rises wildly, now pouring up into the rain, now filling the stump with its bitter plumes. Close and grey, the rain endures. Everything drips or recedes into itself. I’ve been here five nights, living on the acorns and berries and dried food we stockpiled last autumn, living on rainwater and rancor. We fought.
I left, moved out here, taking only a bucket of coals, more blankets and a packful of clothes, some herbs, some tools, and this stained and faded notebook. “Keep the rest,” I yelled at that witch who was once my sister. “You’ve already taken everything else that ever mattered.”
So this is how the story ends, and who knows how far back we would have to go to find the beginning. When Eva cried, “Leave my baby alone,” it was as though we had been fighting for years.
“He was hungry,” I said, looking from Burl at my breast to my sister rising off her mattress, her waking face already hard with rage.
“I can feed him,” she snapped.
“You were sleeping.”
“So wake me up.”
“You need your rest.”
“He doesn’t need two
mothers.”
“He did when you were sick.”
“I’m better now.”
“Why can’t we both—”
“Nell, he’s my baby.”
“Your baby,” I echoed, looking down at him as he drank from my breast, his milk-fat cheeks ballooning with his sucking, his tiny fingers stroking my chest. “Your baby?”
“I carried him for nine months, I gave birth to him. He needs me to nurse him.”
She crossed the space from her mattress to mine and snatched Burl away. His toothless gums scraped my nipple as she pulled him from my breast.
He began to scream and suddenly I was mean and blind with anguish. “Who kept you alive all these months so you could give birth to your baby? Who helped you with your labor? Who saved your baby’s life after you got sick? Who saved your life, too—if it comes to that?”
“So now you own me, too?”
Only this stump is mine—though I share it with the forest. I spend my days sitting inside it, watching my fire, and trying not to think, not to remember. Instead I listen to the rain, watch the rain, smell the rain, feel its mists cling to my face. My breasts are huge and tight as fists. They bulge and strain with milk that no one needs. Veins thick as worms twist across them, and my nipples weep—a grief that stains and stiffens my shirt.
Burl was the one thing we had left—and Burl was the one thing my sister and I could not learn to share.
Porno women used California poppy to stop lactation, so I, too, steep dried pods in boiled stream water, swallow that acrid infusion. I squeeze sips of thin, sweet milk onto the damp earth, and then bind my breasts against my chest—anything to ease the ache and throb of them, anything to help my body forget his suck.
This is hibernation time, a slow, chill time of grey rain and green light. By day I walk, dream, notice where the plants grow that can feed or heal me. I pound acorn meal, wrap it in fern fronds, set it in the spring to leach. I chew a few dried berries, gnaw a strip of sow, sip poppy tea to stanch my milk. I gather wood, tend the fire, shake out my blankets, fix the roof. Sometimes it seems I hear voices speaking, neither harshly nor lovingly, but with the forest’s own tongue.
Other creatures come to the clearing. The deer browsing towards the stump nuzzles the breeze, stops at my scent, turns its elegant head to study me, and my heart opens and grows still. Last night a raccoon came to the rim of the fire’s light, met my eyes above the flames. It made a noise in its throat—a long chuckle halfway between a purr and a growl—and then it turned back to its business beneath the waning moon. This morning an old black sow entered my glade. For a moment she, too, met my gaze, and then she grunted, trotted off.
I spend hours studying my little fire, and sometimes a thought comes to me. Sometimes I remember those other sisters of mine, the Lone Woman and Sally Bell, each of us longing for the kin we have lost, each of us learning to inhabit the forest alone.
Sometimes I think of my mother and father, of the web that even now shapes who I am, how I endure.
You are your own person, my mother said.
Finally I think she may be right.
Sometimes I remember Eli, think of him inside me and the leaves of this place plastered to our naked skins. I remember his mocking laugh, the trembling tenderness of his hands, and I wonder who he was, wonder what he might become. I try to think of him in Boston—though it seems harder and harder to believe such a place exists. I try to imagine cars and streetlights and ringing phones, but those images are vague and muddled, and my longing for them lacks the ache and sting of real desire.
Sometimes I think I would like to see Eli again. But if he comes back now, he’ll have to find me here—by my own fire.
The wood burns its economical flame. I nibble a dried apricot, sip mugwort tea for dreaming, more poppy to stop my milk. I watch the fire, listen to the fog, muse more than I write. This writing is an old habit. I wonder if I won’t outgrow it even before I run out of paper. I wonder if it is still English that I am writing here.
I’m just a core, a kernel, a coal tucked in a bit of breathing flesh, listening to the rain. My life fills this place, no longer meager, no longer lost or stolen or waiting to begin.
I drink rain and it quenches an ancient thirst.
This is no interlude, no fugue state.
The moon wanes to the barest crescent. I grow content.
I fixed a stew of acorn mush and dried blackberries for breakfast yesterday morning. As I stirred the pot I remembered the berries drying in the late summer heat, the drone of flies and bees, the beads of blood on my arms from the brambles, the indelible juices on my fingers. I remembered the long days of gathering acorns, hour after hour of bending and crawling, until my back felt permanently stooped, my hands had been pricked by a million brittle oak leaves, and when I closed my eyes, I saw a sea of acorns.
The steam was warm and fragrant in the chill air. I was hungry and I could feel my stomach clenching like another strong muscle. But just as I was lifting the first spoonful to my mouth, I heard a voice say Wait.
For a wild moment I thought, Mother. I even stood to meet her, but outside the stump I saw only the familiar forest, heard only the incessant drip of rain. I breathed the moist, green-tinged air, and then, on an impulse I never tried to understand, I took the mush-pot and walked around the stump, pausing four times to spoon a pile of steaming food onto the wet earth.
I stoked my fire, sat cross-legged just inside the stump, watching the rain drip through the forest. My stomach felt tight and small, my lungs big and loose. My hands were quiet in my lap. I felt as if I were waiting, though I had no idea why, or for what. At times thoughts came to me—I should gather more wood, I should check the roof to see how it’s holding out, I should move the water bucket out into the rain, but they lacked force, remained ideas as passive—and passing—as the sky is grey, the rain is falling, I can feel the weight of my shirt on my back.
I was still sitting like that when darkness took the forest. The air thickened, the sky deepened, the woods closed in around me, until at last I could see only the final coals of my untended fire glowing like a heart’s secrets. I had to fight an impulse, the first real impulse I had had since I spooned my breakfast on the earth, to pluck one of those red jewels from its bed of ashes and pop it in my mouth.
Even more gradual than the fade of the sun’s light was the fade of that handful of coals, but finally they, too, were gone, so slowly that even though they had my whole attention I could never say when they were extinguished, leaving me in the absolute darkness of a moonless rainy night, until the coal inside me was the only fire left.
In the blackness just beyond me, the rain kept falling, masking whatever other noises those woods might contain. I sat emptied before the dead fire, watching the darkness. My face felt as though it were wrapped in velvet, and it seemed my cheeks and forehead had grown a thousand new eyes, though they, too, saw only blackness. After a time, I drowsed, still sitting cross-legged, my hands still lax in my lap.
I awoke to blackness, though the rain had ceased. A dozen different dreams rose off me like skittish angels. I woke hungry, thirsty, cold, stiff, and yet unwilling to break the spell of my sitting by rising to find food or water, unwilling even to shift my aching legs.
It was then that she came.
I thought I could sense her approach long before I heard her lumbering steps, long before I smelled her rankness. She sniffed the circumference of the stump, stopping to lap the four cold lumps of food. She paused at the doorway while I pressed my body against the back wall. She entered, circled like a weary dog, and lay down. I could feel her wet, rough fur, could smell the decay that hung on her breath. I thought, This is no dream.
It seemed I lay there for hours in a dark my eyes could not learn to adjust to, trapped by the bulk and will of a bear, listening to the drip of the forest, to my breathing and to hers.
I dreamed she bore me from the hot mystery of her womb, squeezing me down the tunnel of herself, until I
dropped, helpless and unresisting, to the earth. Blind and mewling, I scaled her huge body, rooting until the nipple filled my throat. Later, her tongue sought me out. Lick by insistent lick, she shaped the naked lump of me, molded my body and senses to fit the rough tug of her intention. Lick by lick, she birthed me yet again, and when she was finished, she shambled on, left me—alone and Nell-shaped—in Her forest.
I woke at dawn and she was gone. I crawled to the door of the stump, and when I stood, my muscles cramped, my joints cracked. I saw paw prints in the soft dead ashes of my fire, and it felt as though I were rising out of my broken body into a new flesh. I remembered the way a butterfly fresh from its chrysalis shivers and trembles as the blood fills its haggard wings. Stiff and cold and empty, I hobbled across the clearing.
And entered the forest.
Eva was waiting outside the stump when I returned, sitting beside a freshly kindled fire with Burl swaddled and sleeping in her lap. Next to her was a bedsheet bulging like a hobo’s bundle.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she answered.
I circled her fire, dropped an armload of sticks on my woodpile, and, because of the fluky smoke, sat down beside her, reached my hands towards the flames to warm them.
“How’s Burl?” I asked.
“He’s fine.”
“How are you?”
“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine. How are you?” “Fine, too.”
We were silent, and I watched Eva’s fire. The pile of blankets that was Burl twisted and stirred. Eva lifted him from her lap and handed him to me. I took him in my arms, felt his hot, slight weight, inhaled his smell. I pressed him against the bone between my breasts, and every cell of myself drank in his feel and scent. He began snuffling and rooting against my chest, and I shot a furtive glance at Eva.