by Amy Spurway
By the time we make it to the trailer, my contractions are coming with barely a breather between them. The tea is made. Willy is pacing, Char is dancing, and Allie has already boiled a pot of water and torn up a bedsheet because that’s what they do on TV.
“All right, I better check your micker-twicker,” Peggy says as she and Wendy ease me onto the bed.
“Jesus, it’s a vagina!” I shriek. “And it is ripping in two right now!”
“Char, Allie, come grab a leg,” Peggy says, low and calm, as if there aren’t hundreds of frantic, panicked, lime-green light shards slashing and piercing the expansive ash-coloured cloud that looms above us.
“She’s not havin’ it right here? Right now?” Willy props himself up against the wall in the hallway, a soup of fire-engine red and delicate cream swirling around him.
“This child’s not waiting.” Peggy has flecks of a carefully guided gold now tingeing her neon panic. “Bossy and impatient already. Wonder where that comes from?”
My spine instinctively curls around my screaming centre. Sensations I never dreamed of now come to nightmarish life in places I didn’t know existed. There is moaning. There is screaming. There is farting. The real miracle of childbirth is how nobody ever breathes a word about how revolting and surreal and hellish it all is, until it’s too late.
Wendy coaxes breath into and out of my body. Peggy tells me when to push, when to back off, when to bear down. I obey.
“Willy, get over here,” Peggy barks. “Your child is about to come into the world. A baby deserves to be greeted by its father.”
Tears stream down Allie’s face. Char starts singing “Stairway to Heaven,” and for once, she gets all the words right.
This must be what some kinds of dying feel like. A mind-numbing, time-freezing, soul-cleaving agony that crushes you into a ragged ball of hurt. Then — in a rush of release that defies all prediction, all expectation, all logic — it is over. The pain. The fear. Every single misgiving you’ve ever had about anyone or anything. Gone. The messy horror of what you’ve just endured, wiped clean from your soul. Until something different starts, as if all the elements that broke apart and dissolved in the dying have come back together in a form that you couldn’t have fathomed until you woke from the tyranny of pain. And you find yourself surrounded by ungodly beauty. This must be what some kinds of reincarnation feel like.
July twenty-third, right at the stroke of midnight, my baby girl is born. And maybe I am reborn then, too.
Before I even hear her take her first screamy breath, I see what my daughter brings with her into this world. A slew of iridescent orbs cascade from between my trembling thighs, filling the room like I just gave birth to a cosmic bubble blowing machine instead of a tiny human miracle. Seconds later, a waxy infant is laid across my chest, still tethered to my insides by a stubborn placental slab. Her eyes are puffed shut. Her skin is thin, there’s crust in the crevices of her arms, her legs, her neck. Her head is lumpy and hairless. She promptly poops all over me. I kiss her slimy, crusty, bald head and tell her she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“She smells like a pine tree,” Peggy says, wiping gobs of snot and tears with the back of her bloated hand. “As blessings do.”
Somewhere farther down the Middle Rear Road, an ambulance rips along, sirens wailing. Out in the woods behind my trailer, the Time rips along too, and as word of my baby’s birth spreads, people plan the food they’ll bring and the hours they’ll spend planted on my land until it’s safe from Spenser Mining Inc.’s harm. And from the kitchen, I can hear Peggy muttering about the smell that came quick on the heels of pine tree. The lingering scent of baby powder, of the chaos yet to come. But me? All I can see are the rainbow bubbles around my daughter’s head. And then I hear Mama’s voice singing softly, sweetly,
There was liquor on the barroom floor,
And the bar was closed for the night.
When out of his hole came a little black mouse,
and he sat in the pale moonlight . . .
EPILOGUE
The Swan Song
It is with heavy hearts that we announce the sudden but peaceful passing of Stacey Theresa “Crow” Fortune, age 39, on August 8. Crow passed away at home, in her sleep. She is survived by her precious baby daughter, Raven Jewel Fortune, her husband Willy “Mr. Crow Fortune” Matthews, best friends Allie Walker and Char MacIsaac, a number of aunts and uncles, and her father, Brother Gyaltso Smart Alec Spenser. She was predeceased by several relations, including her much adored maternal grandmother, Lucy, and her dearly missed mother, Effie, who loved Crow more than life itself.
A wake and funeral are to be held at Crow’s home, under the direction of Wendy MacDermid, and burial will take place on the family land, up the Middle Rear Road. A tart cherry tree is to be planted on the edge of the property to mark the place where her body will be laid to rest, and visitors are welcome to come sit, sing, laugh, caw, and cry in the shade of Crow’s tree any time. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Crann Na Beatha Memory Forest Trust Fund. As per Crow’s wishes, we share the following piece she wrote shortly before her death. Because that one always needed to have the last word, now didn’t she. This is Crow Fortune’s Swan Song:
If you are reading this, it is because I did exactly what I came here to do. Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause, please, for the one and only Crow Fortune! She did it! She died! Just like she said she would do.
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a good death, but if there is, I hope I had one. Hope I didn’t make too much of a mess, or cause too much of a scene, or wreck anybody’s good time, and if I did, I’m sorry. Because even though I apparently succeeded in doing exactly what I came here to do, and even though it’s no secret that none of us will be getting out of this life alive, there’s still a tinge of failure that comes with the whole dying deal. There was no divine intervention from the benevolent Universe, no last-minute miracle of a happy ending, no grand triumph of righteous fate over snivelling misfortune. Just me, my quick blip of a weird, sad story, the end. The biggest failure of my whole life, this dying thing. And just look at what I’ve left behind: my old friends, my new family. A people and a place I didn’t realize I needed until far too late. But better late than never, I suppose.
As I sit here drinking my too strong, too sweet cup of Mama’s Stovetop Sludge, my eyes flitting back and forth between the small, lumpy, bald head of my newborn baby and the massive, smooth arc of orange in the sky that heralds the failing of daylight, I can’t help but think about what will happen when I’m gone. Is Willy gonna be able to properly manage this kid’s mop if she’s cursed with the cruel genetics of my bird’s nest hair? Will Papa Gyaltso go turning the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” into some sort of preachy Buddhist lesson, and will Nanny Peggy teach little Raven Jewel how to curse right? Dear God, what if my daughter gets all her fashion tips and dance moves from Char, and her coping mechanisms from Allie? These are the details I instinctively fret about whenever I find myself shrouded in a cloud of dark, quiet inevitability. Watching. Waiting. Oh death, you sneaky bastard, you.
And then there’s the bigger, more grandiose questions about what will happen when I’m gone. Where am I going? Anywhere? Nowhere? Somewhere? Somewhere good? Will there be tea and squares and laughing and crying and swearing there, because if there isn’t, well then I don’t want to go. Not that I’ll have a choice. When my body is tucked into the earth inside a cozy burial pod, with a tenacious little tree being fuelled by the leftovers of my existence, will the flickers of energy that steered my flesh and bones through the world simply evaporate? Will they too be absorbed by the earth and the tree and the land I loved? Or will my gaudy spirit hitch a ride on the saltwater wind, and swirl away to a place where there’s nothing but golden light and good memories, and the sound of Mama gently whispering, Get your bony arse out of bed, before I kick it out.
When I showed up here, with all my assorted sins and shames neatly pack
ed in a classy bag of big-city smug, the people of this place had every right to drag me by the scruff of my neck down to the fire hall, with an angry mob awaiting to pelt me with lobster shells and fiddle bows and beer caps and various tartans. They could have revoked my Caper Papers on the spot for talking like such a filthy traitor. For making like I was somehow better than everyone and everything here just because I ran away to bury my accent, my fuck-ups, my roots. But they didn’t. Every piece of this place conspired to hold me together, even as I fell apart. To remind me who I am, and why.
Unfortunately, knowing damn well that I was going to die didn’t turn me into some peace-pissing, bliss-barfing, gratitude-grabbing beacon of spiritual guru greatness. Pity. I could have done some good with that. Whipped up some wicked brochures and built one hell of an empire. Maybe turned the whole goddamn island into a world-class New Age spiritual tourist attraction. Oh well. Maybe next life, if believing in such a thing suits me. Which, in the hard moments, it does.
If nothing else, maybe all this brought me to peaceful grips with my life. It made me think and say and do all the stupid, shitty things I thought and said and did, because that’s what people do when they’re living. Even when they’re dying. It made me notice that there are shades of beauty in the strangest places. In the strangest people, too. It made me stop looking for truth, and start seeing meaning.
Lately, that dream I had right before and after I came here — the one with the cackling birds, the hellish land, and the lone tree that would stalk, grab, and trap me — has come back. But it’s different now. I don’t wake up in the middle of it, sick and terrified. That dream doesn’t wake me up at all. And rather than squeeze me to death, the tree just picks me up from the dirt, and holds me tight in the mythic madness of its branches. From so high up, I can see every shimmer and shadow that plays between the water and the sky, and I swear I can hear all the people I’ve ever loved gathering, their voices calling and cawing in riotous tones like a pack of black, beady-eyed birds who’ve stumbled upon some sort of treasure.
I know now that I’m not in a nightmare. I’m home. Cradled in the strong, snarled arms of this glorious mess of a family tree. Smack dab in the middle of a story about a long line of lunatics and criminals. Right where I belong.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In its early days, this work was supported by the Toronto Arts Council, with funding from the City of Toronto. For that, I am deeply grateful.
This book owes its very existence, in part, to a complete stranger. An anonymous woman on a Parents of Multiple Births listserv many years ago responded to my overwhelmed new-twin-mom post with a story about a young woman who died suddenly, just after giving birth. It was intended to give me a glimpse of how fortunate I was, how much worse it could be. Instead, it gave me an existential crisis, a case of hypochondria, and ultimately, the story of Crow. So, random internet lady, wherever you are — thank you. Your message had an impact.
That existential crisis eventually led me to explore Buddhism, as a way to view life and death. I am deeply grateful for the teachings and writings of Pema Chödrön, and the practice of Tonglen, upon which Brother Gyaltso’s “Tree Meditation” in chapter eight is based.
I’d also like to acknowledge that my writing process for Crow had an eclectically kick-ass soundtrack, some of which is evident in the brief lyrical references throughout this book. Such songs include: “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zepplin; “Me and Bobby McGee” by Kris Kristofferson; “Luckenbach, Texas” by Waylon Jennings; “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson; “The Red-Headed Stranger” and “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” by Willie Nelson; “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Grandma’s Feather Bed,” and “Matthew” by John Denver; and those songs and artists not quoted but identified by name and song title in the text.
And now, for the people to whom I owe the biggest thanks my heart can muster:
To the team at Goose Lane Editions, especially publisher Susanne Alexander and editor Bethany Gibson, for their steadfast commitment to helping Crow’s voice and story take flight.
To Marjorie Simmins, for her guidance, and for seeing the “embarrassment of riches.”
To Cassandra Yonder, for sharing her insight with me as part of my research, and for her work at www.deathcaring.ca.
To Alex Pearson, for chasing the “Golden Hour” light for my photo.
To Lindsay, for the tea and the intellectual commiseration.
To Lila, for the love, the laughs, and the adventures.
To Jody, for the love, the laughs, the adventures, the body guarding, and the ass-kicking whenever I needed it.
To my brother, Neil, for keeping me grounded . . . or getting me grounded? Probably both.
To my dad, Fraser, for instilling in me a love of outlaw country music and songs that tell stories, for his sense of humour, and for seeing the potential for spontaneous combustion.
To my mother, Valerie, for being both my toughest critic and my biggest fan. For a life and a lineage filled with strength, stories, and weird sayings. For giving me a genuine love of words. Especially the curse-y ones.
To Nanny, whose fierce love still lives in my bones.
To my daughters, Coco, Neela, and Macie, for making my world bigger, brighter, and more beautiful than I ever could have imagined.
And finally, to my husband, Matthew, for making my tea every morning. For being in this life with me. For making me laugh when I need it most. For his patience, his intelligence, his perspective. For the boundless love and relentless faith that make all things possible.
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
— Meister Eckhart
Amy Spurway was born and raised on Cape Breton, where she landed her first writing and performing gigs with CBC Radio at age eleven. She holds a BA in English from the University of New Brunswick and a degree in Radio and TV Arts from Ryerson University. Her writing has appeared in Babble, Elephant Journal, Today’s Parent, and the Toronto Star. She lives in Dartmouth.
photo: Alex Pearson, A.S. Pearson Photography