Stillbird

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

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  For three days and three nights the soft, light snow fell quietly and steadfastly, burying the earth, the cabin, the river and rocks. Abel never stopped rocking, soothed by the movement as his memories slowed and stopped. Charles went out walking in the fairy-tale whiteness, rainbows glittering off every tree, and he took his bow and arrows, not wishing to disturb the silence of that lovely white world, and he shot a deer and followed the path of red blood on the white snow, until he found the animal still running, but slower, and he shot a second time and brought her down. He hoisted the doe over his shoulders and stumbled back to the cabin with the food, but his father would not eat, and Charles cut and cooked the meat with a heavy heart and a slow hand. He tried to interest Abel in telling him more stories from Scotland, but Abel was done now with the stories, all of them, so Charles instead told Abel stories, reminding him of the old country and old people and searching his own memory for what his father had told him over the years. He tried to think of funny ones, but when he tried to laugh all alone, he found himself crying.

  “Remember, father, you told me that the ocean voyage from Scotland to New York took forty days and forty nights, and you felt like you were on Noah’s ark. But all the animals that had been brought on two by two were slaughtered four by four to feed the crew and the passengers. Sick of the stringy goat meat, you were, after forty days of it, you told me. Do you remember that?”

  But Abel sat still and quiet, as if the soft falling snow had buried his heart and his mind as it had buried the cabin. It was dark in the cabin with the windows all covered with snow and frost, even when the sun shone brightly outside, and Charles felt as if he lived inside a cave and walked out often into the bright day to remind himself he still lived at all.

  And then it stopped snowing and the sun worked on the mounds of snow that covered the world, melting it into lakes and puddles and streams. Where the earth was porous, the melted snow seeped down into it, and where it was bedrock, the melted snow washed down the rock into gullies and sinkholes, and the spring waters, hidden deep within the earth, rose up to meet the snow waters, and the little cabin seemed like a small ark to Charles, where he felt safe, but he was afraid for his mother, who had disappeared into the world of magic animals and forest and unpredictable waters that sank into the earth and rose again as floods upon its surface. Charles was afraid to go looking for her, but Abel, silently without a word of his intent, went out into the flood, steadily, thoughtlessly, plodding along the side of what had been the creek, finding his way by instinct and habit as surefooted as if in a trance, and indeed Charles thought he might be entranced. Charles tried to follow his father to protect him, but soon realized he couldn’t and his father didn’t need him.

  The water came in so suddenly with a rush, through the large front entrance of the cave, and Stillbird could not seek to escape in the face of its strength. She crept and climbed to another opening, knowing it would be a tight fit that would let her out in a large sinkhole in the woods. Once, while exploring, she had gotten into the cave that way, but had barely gotten out again because her body didn’t bend to conform to the innards of the cave at that end. She’d known terror that time. But the water caught up with her and washed her toward the tight sinkhole exit. She could see the rock formations of the cave spin by her by the light from the hole and she panicked as she was pushed closer to its harsh edges, fearing to be crushed. But the water washed her out of the cave, as her body and limbs were bent around outcroppings of rock and slid along the mud out into the deep and wide impression on the outside. She had forced herself to be calm and let her body and limbs float in the rush of water, but the water had filled her up inside and the pressure from within and without was painful, unbearable, worse than giving birth, and it occurred to her that perhaps this was what birth was like, and she realized that the earth that had nurtured her in the dark womb of the cave was now giving her up to another life.

  Stillbird exploded with pain and broke free and pushed her spirit bodyless and swam and flew into the trees, the clouds, hiding among them and looking down at the woman’s body that roiled around in the flooded sinkhole before being pushed again over rocks and tree roots and an old creek bed that was usually dried up, but now overflowed its banks and spilled over the deer paths and cowpaths that flanked it.

  Downstream the body tumbled, into the woods and toward Abel’s homestead.

  Stillbird slept the sleep of the newborn and woke again, startled by the cries of a woman in pain. But she was in a house now and as Stillbird looked closer, she saw this was not the woman she had been, but a stranger, a woman not her, but like her, who was struggling to give birth to a large boy child, who seemed to be dying in the process. There were people around her talking to her, trying to help her, but they didn’t see Stillbird, who drifted close to the woman’s ear and whispered, then, realizing only the woman could hear, shouted words of instruction and encouragement. Stillbird breathed in and out with the woman as she guided her, now breathe, now push…and the woman rallied and fought hard and pushed her baby out, and then, when the baby boy was washed and laid upon her breast to nurse, she looked around for the voice, moving only her eyes. She saw her husband and his relief and her sister and her relief, but she didn’t see the other, and she thought she must be gone, but then she heard the voice, and the voice said, “It’s all over now and you are fine. You can rest now.” “Forever?” asked the mother, no longer young, no longer strong, no longer brave. “Forever,” said the voice, and the woman followed that sweet voice to a rest she knew she’d earned, breathing in and letting it out slow and peaceful one last time as her baby nursed at her breast.

  When John Banks felt his mother’s milk stop coming, he began to howl, and his father and aunt came running to see what had happened and found Amelie Banks dead at last, and they lifted the baby from her breast, mixing their cries with his and with the soothing sounds people make to try to stop the cries of infants. They named the baby John and said he was a miracle baby, born at the very edge of death.