Vale nods. Curls into a ball on the floor. Stills her body. Slows her breath. Holds still there.
PART IV
House
Lena
MAY 21, 1957
Baby B—
A girl-child. That’s what slips from between my legs. Slips—how quickly we use that word! How easily it slides off our tongues. And you do—slip—after eight hours on my hands and knees, of mouth to the moist armpit of the earth—moss, leaves, ash, dirt—beside the outhouse and north of the trash pit. I don’t have time to run down the hill. No way to call for help. I say, Here baby. A car slamming into my abdomen, time and time again. Ripping my dress off my shoulders. Weeping. Sweating. Swearing like a sailor. You goddamn bloody cunt of a god, and also, Here baby. Here baby. Here baby, come.
Otie hopping around in the leaves, frantic, warbling his throat-call of danger. The radio playing quietly in the cabin: Patti Page, ridiculously jaunty. Me thinking of all those heifers in the barn I’d seen, their arching backs and quaking legs. Their low bellows. Thinking, sure, we were born for this, but I’ve seen too many stillborns to count. Plenty of heifers who didn’t survive: bled to death or gave up on the trying. Thinking, goddamn cunt of a god. Thinking, Lex, goddamn you, this is what it costs me. Not you. Costs you nothing but pleasure. Your live dick and quaking back, but this—this—this! Goddamnit—is what it costs me and women everywhere.
And then another wave, and I’m on the ground, cheek pressed to dank earth, teeth clenching, arms shaking, spit rising from deep in my throat, thinking, Breathe, breathe, open, breathe, and Come baby, oh god, dear baby, come. Otie—hello. I’m okay. Oh, god.
And then he finds me.
Lex.
“Lena,” he whispers, putting his hand on my back, saying into my ear, eyes wide, “Hold on. I’ll be right back, with help.” Turning and running, and then my sister, strong and loyal-as-an-ox sister, Hazel, who has done this before, who has helped hundreds of times with the cows in the barn, is beside me. Those strong, capable hands. Breathe. She commands. Body smelling of flour, of butter, of barn. She says: Lex. Truck. Soon. But there is no soon. There is my back, rising, arcing. There is a sound escaping my lips. And my sister’s astonished gasp, a gush of water and gush of blood, and my hand reaching down and oh, there, the wet soft bulge of a skull, and then you are in my arms, there in the dirt, blue-green-eyed, blood-smeared, blue-limbed, breathing.
And I am breathing, too. Good Lord. I am alive. And I am breathing. And you are breathing, too.
“Bring her to your breast,” my sister commands, and I do. You leaf-flecked squalling thing. My sister takes off her sweater and rubs down your bloody face and limbs, covers you. Brings a blanket and covers me. A girl. A daughter. “Hold her there, until she gets it,” my sister says, and I do, this bird mouth, open wide, reaching, craven, baby bird eyes, brown or blue or green, I can’t tell, and then you’re there, latched, sucking.
Otie watches us from a nearby tree. Heartbeat in your little neck. Heartbeat in your bare blue shoulder. Heartbeat to the right of your visible eye. Translucent skin. Sucking. Oh, B. We are alive! Tears on my cheeks. Blood and shit on my thigh. We are alive. You and me. And you are fine: leaf-flecked, blood-speckled, perfect. I put my face against your girl scalp, still bloodied and blue and unbearably tender. “Bonnie,” I whisper. Bonnie for beautiful, for the Bonnie month of May, for the tune my mother sang: my Bonnie lies over the ocean. “Bonnie May Starkweather,” I say out loud, baby girl I bring to my chest again when you lose your latch, pulling my blood-smeared shirt away from your face, my whole body shaking, your little body against mine.
Lena
MAY 21, 1957
There is blood. Lots of it. Too much of it. There is a truck, bullying its way up the old logging road to the cabin, bullying its way back down. They bring Lena and the baby to Hazel’s house. Lex carries her to an upstairs bedroom full of bright-painted pine and curtainless windows. “It’s okay,” he whispers, his body smelling like fear—animal. She holds on, puts her face against his chest, holds still in that familiar wool, the well-loved pocket below his clavicle.
Somehow there is her girl-child, suckling, and then Hazel takes her from Lena’s arms, and her girl-child is gone.
Hazel says, “Sleep, Lena. You need the rest.”
The house she left so many years ago. The house that called its Abenaki neighbors niggers and Gypsies. The house that scoured Lena’s dresses and forever tried to tame the tangles in her hair.
But she cannot sleep without Bonnie. “My child,” she says into that white room, those white walls, but Hazel does not come. Lex does not come. Lena tries to rise out of the bed, but her body will not move. Streaks of shooting pain between her thighs. Breasts that leak and spurt and weep.
Hazel
DECEMBER 6, 2011
The room spins—blue-green ships, pale lemons.
They bring her down to the house, set her and the baby up in a bed upstairs, but Lena’s not well enough to care for the child. She has a fever, an infection somewhere. Is weak, has lost too much blood. Hazel has done this for years with cows in the barn; brought them warm water and rubbed down their teats. Helped them heal. Hazel takes the baby from Lena. The baby screeches and Hazel fills a bottle with formula, the stuff the doctor delivered, puts it between Bonnie’s lips until she stills.
Lena weeps, rages, in her room at the top of the stairs. “Bring me my child!” she calls out, her voice weak, cracking.
“Shh,” Hazel says to her sister. “You’re not well. What you need is rest.” Hazel brings the baby to Lena every morning but does not let her nurse.
“Let me,” Lena implores, crying, but Hazel pulls the child away. Lena’s breasts swell, engorge, grow hot to the touch.
“Squeeze them with your fingers,” Hazel says. “They’ll dry up.”
The doctor, on the telephone, says best not to nurse. He says: hot water compresses. Aspirin.
Lena’s brow grows beads of sweat. Her fever rises. Her shirts are soaked from spurting milk, her breasts red, rock-hard, burning.
Hazel brings the baby to her crib. Gives her the bottle. Wraps her in thick cotton. Puts her on her stomach and slips out the door.
“I’M SORRY, LENA,” HAZEL WHISPERS, LOOKING AROUND frantically. Reaching her arm out into the room. But no, she’s confused again. This is not Lena, walking toward her.
This is Deb. Handing her a cup of something too sweet. A straw. Placing it between Hazel’s lips.
She closes her eyes. Sucks in.
A disease of the brain. That’s what Deb tells her she has. And now she’s in the living room in a hospital bed, and Deb is here all the time. Sometimes a woman she doesn’t know. Sometimes Vale.
She closes her eyes. It makes the breathing easier and eases the pain, which seems to be from nowhere and yet everywhere. What is the name of the disease they tell her she has? All she remembers is one in a million.
One in a million. She and Lena are girls, picking wild blackberries on a hillside. They are singing. The church songs they knew then. Lena in a pale-blue gingham dress, covered in stains, a hole by her left knee. That knee covered in scabs. Those legs running out ahead: a ball of fire, or sun-stricken light, wild hair in flames, that hair Hazel tried to brush that morning. Lena throws her arms into the air and runs and does not stop running.
“Lena!” Hazel calls out, but it’s no use.
Hazel saw her giving birth. Lex tearing down the path like something was after him, face ghost pale. And then Hazel was running, too. Hazel thought then: dead. My sister will be dead. Just like all those heifers. And then Lena reared up, like a horse, like a lion, and made her hands into fists and raised her neck and bared her teeth, and it was girl-Lena again, that feral child, swearing, spitting, and then the head of a baby. Crowning. The wet, bloody orb of a child’s head, coming into this world.
Hazel wiped the baby down, brought her to Lena, there in the dirt, saying, “Let her drink.”
And she did. Li
ps to her rising breast. Bare cheek against bare skin. There in the dappled light. Her sister’s fingers on the girl’s crusted skull, and then the next wave of contractions, as she pushed the placenta out: magenta, still half-alive, that pulsing thing in the dirt and leaves.
“Lena,” she calls out now. “Take the baby.”
But it’s Deb leaning closer, brushing her hair back from her face. “Hazel? Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
“Where am I?”
“Your living room. Here. I made some soup. Full of fall vegetables.”
She brings a spoon to Hazel’s lips. Warm soup. Cool hands. It slides down Hazel’s throat and settles in her stomach. Vegetables—tomatoes, potatoes, squash. Just like when she was a girl, a young woman, a wife, a mother. Vegetables from the garden, always.
Vale
DECEMBER 12, 2011
Hazel is sleeping. So often sleeping these days.
Vale sits in the chair on the far side of the room under a lamp, No Word for Time in her hands. She reads: “The essential poetics of the Algonquin might be called ‘poetry in motion,’ or becoming one’s own medium of expression.” Poetry in motion: Vale looks at her leather boots, her red dress from the thrift store, the poppies on her right arm. All these material things: clothes, Lena’s green hat, the green mottled chair on which she sits now, the texture of the plaster walls—they speak to her, affect the way she breathes, affect her ability to feel at peace in the world. “Everything that really matters is enacted,” Pritchard writes, and Vale thinks of Lena’s life up there on the hill—the simplicity of it, the bottles stuffed with feathers, the skulls on her windowsill, the philosophical statement of her living. A physical turning away from power lines and the machinery of want. A turning toward: trees, woods, animals, stars.
What are Vale’s poetics saying? And Bonnie’s? Crystals. Patti Smith. Bowl full of rosaries. Vale reaches into her sweater pocket and pulls out the blue rosary that’s lived there since her trip to her mother’s apartment. She slips it over her neck. Fingers the beads, one by one.
She looks out the window and sees it has started to rain. A December rain, bringing down the last of the oak leaves, streaming down the fields and ditches where there should be snow.
THERE ARE FOOTSTEPS ON THE PORCH, THE FRONT DOOR opening, and Deb’s freckled, sun-weathered face entering. “Hey there,” she says, grinning and peeling off her raincoat, pulling a bottle of tequila out from under her sweater.
Vale nods toward the bottle. “You’re not messing around.”
“No, I’m not,” Deb says, glancing at Hazel in the living room. “Are you?”
“No,” Vale says, rising from her chair, going to the cupboard for cups.
There are no shot glasses in this house—they pour the Patrón into half-pint canning jars. For how many years did Hazel fill them with raspberry, blackberry, blueberry jam? And how many years now since she has? The garden moved, at some invisible point, from the farmhouse to the hippie cabin on the hill. What a strange cultural transformation, Vale thinks, bringing the cups to the table.
“To winter,” Deb says, raising her glass.
“To would-be winter,” Vale says, raising hers.
Deb sits down at the table. “Tell me about the book you’re reading.”
And so Vale tells Deb about No Word for Time and embodiment. About the slippery nature of time—past and present. About how, according to Pritchard, the past is in the present and the future, too. Vale tells Deb she can’t stop thinking about Marie, her great-great-grandmother. Of what was not passed down—how to braid sweetgrass, the medicine that exists outside our back door, a way of belonging to the world.
“Shadow stories, these ancestors of ours,” Deb says. “Blueprints for how to be in the world.”
Vale nods, taking a sip of her tequila. “Yes. But what happens when we lose those stories? When the story lines are severed?” She pictures Bonnie’s face at that river, holding Vale’s chubby body against hers, laughing. Bonnie—who never held Lena’s notebooks. Never saw Marie’s photo. How might her life have been different if she knew what Vale knows? How might it not have been any different at all?
Deb reaches across the table and puts her hand on Vale’s. “Vale, you are one tough motherfucker.”
Vale smiles. “Thank you. Hey, Deb.” A warm heat in her chest from the tequila.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me stories from the commune.”
Deb tips her head back and moans. “Farther Heaven! How long ago that life seems!” She tells Vale about Ginny hanging artwork from the rafters of the barn, about the girl Opal, hungry all winter, her thin bones, about Bird and her radicalism, the rafters in her attic room, its candles and frozen jars of water. She tells her of the time Randy, drunk on home brew, dragged a keg and a chainsaw up into a pine tree, then cut off the branches below him. Of the time Ginny leapt over a bonfire, catching her dress on fire. Of the snow-pissing contests they held in the dead of winter. “Easy for men to write their names in the snow. Harder for us women.”
Vale smiles. Pours some more tequila for them both, looks up at the rough-hewn rafters. “Sounds like the punk anarchists of Pittsburgh and New Orleans, only more hopeful. Not a bad way to come of age.”
“Hopeful, yes,” Deb says. “But we were also on the tail end of a god-awful war. No radical change comes during good times.”
Vale nods. “To change,” she says, lifting her glass for a second time. Downing it. That fabulous sting. She closes her eyes and wonders if her generation has it in them to try and shift the world, here at this new crossroads. Not just war but honeybees, and drinking water, and oceans, and superstorms, and widespread famine. When will the hearts of her generation rise up in one communal scream? She thinks of Occupy, 350’s Keystone XL, the indigenous protestors trying to protect forests and rivers in Bolivia. Dots connecting across the globe.
Deb takes a sip from her jar. “All of that earnest hard work and love we put into that land, but we failed terribly. My God, we stank.” Deb guffaws. “Everyone left but Ginny. But you know”—she nods toward the window, the fields Hazel’s tended so fiercely—“sometimes not upping and leaving is the hardest thing to do, but it’s the real work, too.”
Vale nods and looks down at her hands, twirls the blue rosary.
“Oh, what an ass I am,” Deb says. “I’m sorry. Everyone is free. To stay. Or go. To own your past or shed it. You can do anything you want, you know, Vale. You don’t have to stay here.”
Vale looks into the living room where Hazel lies, her limbs curled inward. She imagines upping and leaving tomorrow—joining the protestors in New Orleans, New York, San Francisco. How easy it would be. She thinks of Neko’s wrists. Neko’s lips. Neko’s collarbones. She raises her empty glass to Deb’s. Thinks: We are the sum total of our relationships. Thinks: Near the sickness also lies the cure.
SHE ENTERS NEKO’S ROOM IN THE EARLY MORNING. Climbs into his bed. Wraps her cold arms around his warm body.
“Hello,” he says, turning, rising onto his elbows. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“I’m glad,” he says, putting his arms around her.
Vale puts her face against his chest. “Hey, Neko.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I bring you to my place?”
He climbs into the passenger seat, and Vale takes a circuitous route, not talking, sunshine beaming in through the windshield, the car passing River Road and Hogback Mountain, the boarded-up general store, Silver Creek and Sunset Lake, ice glistening across its surface. She winds her way back to the farm, crosses the bridge, and parks halfway up the driveway. She nods toward her camper sitting at the edge of the field.
“Home sweet home,” Neko says, squinting at it across the field. Vale nods.
She hasn’t brought anyone but Deb to this camper since she was sixteen. She feels strangely naked having him here: Lena’s hat perched on a hook by the door, her mother’s silk dress hanging from a nail on the wal
l, the owls she collected when she was sixteen, the pictures of Bonnie and Lena and Marie.
Neko takes his time looking around. He stares for a long time at the photographs.
“Coffee?” Vale asks, putting water on.
“Please,” Neko says, fingering the silk dress, the crude stitches running up its side.
Neko sits down in one of the two chairs and looks up at Vale. “You’re in here,” he says, smiling. “In this camper. In all these thing. You.”
Vale nods, pours the boiling water into their mugs, bring them to the table. “Sorry. No cream. No sugar.”
Neko holds the cup to his lips. “Perfect.”
He opens No Word for Time, skims through the pages.
“What a cultural vacuum we live in, eh?” he says after a few minutes. “We each have to go looking. Make sense of the world on our own. What a lot of work it turns out to be.”
Vale nods, thinks of her mother’s crystals, tarot cards, Native American mythology, newfound love of Jesus. All those years of looking in order to fill the hole of Eve’s banishment from the garden, she thinks. A culture based on division rather than interconnection. Isolation rather than belonging.
“How badly I want Marie to be Abenaki because of the ways in which that would make me feel I belong here,” Vale says. “That I have a right to these woods. You know?”
Neko nods. “Yes. But no need to be so hard on yourself. Or them. The ones who came and carved homes out of this hillside? They were poor, desperate, hungry, too. Survivors. Most of us do our best with what we have, no?”
His eyes are distant. Vale thinks: Iraq. The girl he pulled from the wreckage—Vale pictures her slender arms, her still, dark eyes.
Vale brings her head to Neko’s head. Rests it there. “Can I show you someplace else?”
THEY WALK UPHILL, ACROSS THE FIELD AND ALONG THE old logging road to Lena’s cabin. She doesn’t know why she’s bringing him here exactly. She wants to show him the way the cabin has grown into the hillside and land around it, burrowed, half-swallowed, yet still containing light. She’s been coming here often—near daily, before or after work. She has stocked the cabin with armloads of kindling, newspaper, matches, candles.
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