From outside the pen, Ogan began to whine. He sank slowly to the ground, but kept his head high and his ears up while his eyes fixed on the tall, rock-strewn hill. A knot of four men, their clothes and faces covered in black coal dust, wove slowly down, a litter stretched between them. They leaned in toward their load, their free arms reaching out for balance. Bridget knew the only person they could be bringing to the croft was Uncle Rowan.
Grandma Teegan—not seeing the advancing procession—continued shaking salt onto her palm until Bridget tugged her sleeve and pointed. The tin salt cup hesitated in the air, then fell to the ground, making the sheep flinch and scatter a couple of steps back. Grandma Teegan’s old hands grabbed and lifted her skirts off her ankles. She ran toward the stretcher, leaving the pen gate wide, running crookedly, a half-hobble of old knees and hips.
Bridget bent between the sheep, pushed back heads and bodies as big as herself, and picked up the cup. The men scuttled their load through the narrow door of the croft and lifted Rowan onto his bed. They removed their soft leather derbies, held them to their chests. A small cave-in, they said, only Rowan was injured. “Not dead. Just a bad blow to the noggin. He’ll have a right-good story to tell and a scar to prove it.”
Neighbors came. A doctor by mule. He ran his hands up and down Rowan’s bruised body. He washed and applied salve and bandaged the red slash that parted Rowan’s hair and ran down the side of his forehead. He lifted Rowan’s eyelids and for what seemed a long time, held a candle flame there.
Through all the commotion, Bridget huddled in a corner still clutching the shiny salt cup. His body was like a wet footprint drying on a warm rock, shrinking in from the outer edges. A dark rim growing around him. Fear kept her mute.
When the doctor left, Grandma Teegan peeled Bridget’s fingers off the cup and drew her into her arms. “Rowan will be all right,” she said. “He’ll fight death. For us, he’ll fight death.”
For three days Grandma Teegan rolled drops of mutton broth off a spoon and through Rowan’s dry and busted lips. She changed his head dressings morning and night and oiled the long gash with a poultice of mutton fat and herbs. Bridget stayed close, held the dressings as Grandma Teegan worked, but she kept her eyes from the shadow around him. At night, they slept with Rowan’s curtain pulled open in case he woke and mumbled, and they needed to remind him to fight death.
On the fourth day, Grandma Teegan smiled, saying his eyelids had fluttered. “He’s healing.” She admired how the swelling was leaving his lip and even the gash was closing and turning pink. She told Bridget to nap in his bed, staying close while she drove her hungry sheep to a nearby pasture. “Only a few hours. If he wakes . . .” her voice hesitating, “bring two pans. Beat them as you run. I’ll hear you.”
Rowan hadn’t needed anything. She lay beside him, crying to the ceiling. Maybe the space she saw wasn’t real. She hadn’t told Grandma Teegan for fear knowing about the space would crawl over Grandma Teegan and break all her bones.
“You’re fighting death,” Bridget whispered to him. She drifted off to sleep, and in the drifting she smiled at how he reached over and tucked the quilt they shared tighter under her chin.
When she woke, he lay just as he had. His body telling her he’d not moved. Not moved one inch to tuck the blanket tighter around her. He lay still as sheep after Grandma Teegan used her short knife on their throats.
Wind rose around her, filled her head with rushing and whirling. She needed Rowan to take her down to the sea and show her the flash of selkies she couldn’t see alone. She needed him because when he held her, and she closed her eyes, he was Mum and Pappy both.
She couldn’t move, only her eyes peeked sideways. His lips didn’t look dead. She stared at them until finally one of her shaking fingers rose and touched them. Her fingertip went twice over the pink seam of healed flesh—a place where he’d gotten well.
Had he died through his lips? Everything that was Rowan folding up like a butterfly’s wings and sliding out with his breath?
Only when she heard the small flock of hurried and disgruntled sheep bleating at being ushered back into the yard could she pull away and run through the door and out into Grandma Teegan’s skirts.
Shaking, as if the still air was a gale, Grandma Teegan knelt down to her. With eyes red and brimming, Grandma Teegan kissed each of Bridget’s cheeks. She untied the scarf from beneath her own chin and used it to wipe Bridget’s face.
Seeing her grandmother’s tears and how the old face looked terrible and collapsed, the lips and cheeks trembling, made Bridget’s sobbing loud. Grandma Teegan already knew about Rowan. She’d come as soon as she felt his going. Or had Rowan gone out over the hills and banged pans and sent her home? Spirits always visited the living before they left for the next world.
At Rowan’s bedside, Grandma Teegan folded down, sinking to her knees, her body dropping slack, her head landing on Rowan’s chest. She looked crippled and broken. Her words were broken, too, and she sobbed in a combination of her old tongue and baby-shushing sounds.
Finally, her fingers moved, sliding up Rowan’s chest to his cheek and the gash on his temple to touch his hair. Gently, as though he might only be sleeping. The way she often soothed Bridget back to sleep when the nightmares came. Brushing Rowan’s hair back off the wound. Then harder, pushing back his hair with the flat of her palm, trying to make his hair obey, insisting at least on that.
With each stroke of his hair, the pitch in her cries increased until Bridget could no longer stifle her own. Just as she was about to cry, “Grandma Teegan, don’t do that,” it happened. Grandma Teegan’s hand clenched, her head lifted, and her lips pressed into a line. She struck Rowan in the chest. “Ye didn’t fight! Look at this.” She stood, both hands trembling like her face. “The blankets still smooth. Ye didn’t fight death.”
Bridget stared at her uncle’s lips. She wanted to turn small as a moth and bring her wings together like praying hands and slip through the slot of them.
Now she was in Chief ’s barn and he had a ship. She wiped her face on her sleeve again, wet to her elbow now, and walked back around.
Chief leaned over sheets of paper the size of newsprint. “Hey,” he said as she came to his side. He lifted her chin, looked into her eyes, then nodded as though the two of them had an understanding.
She managed to nod back.
He let her chin go and rapped a finger on the paper he’d been studying. Lines went every direction—some curved, some straight—and they looked all drawn one on top of the other. He trailed a brown finger along a curved mark and she saw words she could read but didn’t understand: side keelson, side sparing, stringer plate.
“What do we do next?” he asked.
We?
“Why don’t you climb in,” he said. He looked different without his floppy hat. Tonight, he wore a single braid like her. The end was black and white, but the rest, like the hair on top of his head, was white and shone in the lantern light. He pointed to a flight of stairs in the corner of the barn. “Go on.”
The only way in the ship was up those stairs and across several narrow planks leading to a ladder going down into the ship. “I can’t walk across those boards. I’ll fall.”
“I’ll catch you.”
She wanted to stay right there, standing beside him, where he kept her upright, as much as if his arms were wrapped around her.
“Go on.”
She felt too shaky to resist. She climbed the stairs and looked out over the planks bridging the distance to the ladder. They looked as if they hung in space. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Nera, Nera. With outstretched arms, she started across, one slow step at a time. She couldn’t look away from her wobbly walking to see if Chief followed along under her, but she knew he watched. Watched her walk overhead in the clothes of the son he’d lost.
When she’d gotten close enough, she reached out and gripped the top of the ladder. Relief flashed over her. She was Nera. “I’m going into the sh
ip now.”
The body of the boat smelled of new wood and hope. She trailed her fingers over ribs, believing Rowan stood with her now. Their sea was make-believe, but make-believe seas took you to more places. Like a labyrinth, they went nowhere and everywhere at once.
“I love your ship,” she shouted.
“It’s an ark.”
She sat down on a long board running like a curved pew. She knew about arks. They saved things. They weren’t built to sail and get from place to place. Arks were built for waiting out storms, for staying right there and keeping dry until the rain stopped and the sun shone again.
She remained sitting. She didn’t move until her head dropped and the jarring woke her. The barn was quiet; Chief no longer hammering or sawing. Most of the lanterns were out, but the lights guiding her way back across the planks still burned.
Crossing the second time was easier. She reached Chief ’s side, not brushing against him, but standing close enough to feel his warmth.
“Why are you building an ark?”
His craggy face looked more weathered in the lantern light. “My boy learned about an ark in school. He came home wanting us to build one. Never quit asking.” He sighed and looked at the massive shell. “I didn’t take the time. Chores, crops, a war in the South I thought needed me.”
“Pete said your wood was for coffins.”
His dark eyes, the reflection of lantern light in each, held hers. “Everything’s a coffin or an ark.” He nodded at sections of new lumber waiting to be used. “Depends on what you do with the pieces. Grief ’s stoppered your ears at the moment. But a time will come when you’ll look around and decide what you’ll build: coffins or arks.”
Effie opened her eyes. She’d not slept well even with Pete sleeping beside her. Morning streamed through the window and struck Mae’s mustard-colored dress. The rag hung on a rusty nail, limp and faded with its tattered lace collar. Looking as ruined as had been Mae’s life. Effie stared at the dress and thought of Mae as an eight-year-old, dreaming of a new one. A little girl with no idea of the bargain she was making. This dress had been Mae’s ‘visiting dress.’ Effie’s stomach fluttered at the thought. Mae had worn it to meet her new neighbor, hoping to find a friend. Someone who, like herself, was also river people. Someone she thought would accept her. Maybe a woman to sit with her while she delivered her baby.
Pete had saved the dress, hung it like a picture. Was harboring it like a companion. The rest of Thayer’s house, three whole rooms—if Pete’s alcove could be called a room—had no pictures or any other memento of his mother.
Effie looked over at him and slid slowly from the bed in her battered slip, trying not to wake him. She’d glanced at Mae’s dress many mornings and not let her mind linger. Why this morning was she unable to look away? But it wasn’t just today. All week she’d been staring at the dress. In the nearly four and a half months she’d lived there, she’d tried to keep her thoughts only on what needed to be done next. What to cook for Thayer and Pete? What clothes did they need washed? Which one would motion her to their bed for the night?
Pete stirred, though his eyes didn’t open. A boy’s smooth skin but for his hairy upper lip and chin. He looked part Skeet and part Jury.
Her gut moved again, a strangely physical—rather than emotional—stirring. More definite this time. She looked down at herself. Her pelvic bones no longer jutted against the slip’s paper-thin fabric. She’d put on weight, three squares a day, eating as if she needed to make up for the winter’s near starvation.
The small motion in her stomach came again. For a long minute, she wondered at the strange movement. Had she imagined it? One hand lifted, shaking its way to her belly’s slight roundness and fanning across. Her breath caught. Impossible. She reached for a bedpost, steadied herself with one hand. Then needed to grasp with both. The slow slippage began, that sinking-away sensation of sliding down the dark and mossy walls of a well. Her mind clawing to grab onto anything that made sense and could stop her fall.
Was she pregnant? She couldn’t be. She was barren. She had over a year’s worth of proof. Lying with Jury, then Rev. Jackdaw. His constant cursing her for her barrenness. No, she couldn’t be pregnant. Women knew, there were signs.
Signs. Her knees began to tremble. She’d been at Thayer’s no more than a month when she woke mornings and had to run outside to puke. Dutchman’s breeches had been in bloom. April finished in a haze, her hand still painful and demanding her attention—though Thayer was generous with his whiskey. Pouring for her throughout the day. She puked because of her ache for Homeplace and Johnny, and the sick of her loneliness. She puked with the shame of leaving Bridget alone at the lodge, and she’d puked with the humiliation of hiding at Thayer’s. Consumed by how low she’d fallen and believing herself too undeserving of a child, she’d not even considered the possibility of being pregnant. She’d not bled the last several months at the lodge and had not bled once at Thayer’s. Her body hadn’t seemed to change in any way. If Ma or Granny had been there, women who knew . . . but how could she have known?
She let go of the bedpost and flattened both hands on her stomach, moved them across. She bit her lip and struggled not to scream. She’d wanted a child for so long. Now God would punish her with one. God mocked her, damnationed her while she still walked the earth.
Pete stirred, opened his eyes and glanced at her through half sleep. The horror on her face caught him and his eyes cleared and lowered to her trembling hands clutching at her stomach. “You sick again?”
Shock and disbelief and shame. She was to blame for not conceiving earlier and to blame for doing so now. She watched Pete rise, pull on his pants, and look out the window as if unable to face her and searching for direction.
“A baby,” she breathed.
He turned, stared. His Adam’s apple fell and slowly rose. “I have chores. You fixing eggs?”
Her mind, just as his had, caught on the handhold of a task. Her condition would settle over them bit by bit. “I’ll make eggs.” That was the thing needing done next. She would fix eggs.
Pete hurried out, and she faced Mae’s dress again. She and Mae were the same now, women without souls. She slipped it over her head.
Bridget looked out over the lodge. Whenever she stepped back inside after hours with Jake or Chief, it was as if the place had waited for her and let out a gentle sigh at her return. She’d taken down Effie’s curtains, and the dangling spoons and combs reflected light as they moved back and forth. One wall held finds from along the river and road. Nothing stolen. Pink and white stones—smaller than wild plums—a ribbon, a small red tobacco tin, pieces of colored glass. When the sun hit the wall, the wall came alive. Larger river rocks, those too heavy for a mud glue, lined the windowsills and replaced Johnny’s marbles.
She slept in Effie’s bed now and in the corner she had used for sleeping, stones looped and wound around and made a labyrinth. It wasn’t much larger than the tabletop, but she walked it, stepping ahead only a few inches at a time. The labyrinth grew as she moved, becoming as large as her imagination made it. The walk as deep.
The last week of working on the ark that went nowhere and everywhere had also made her better with tools. The nails in her boxes were flat to the surface without any hammerhead indentations in the wood, no splintered edges, and the sides were even. Building also helped her feel better about Mum and Pappy’s deaths.
Cora didn’t like her spending any time alone. Even if it was mostly just to sleep in the lodge. But Chief told Cora she “fussed.” Though Bridget wasn’t sure he liked it either. Both of them fussed. She liked sleeping there amongst the trees and with the river and Jake just outside the door. She liked being alone when the sadness came and she had to stretch out over Old Mag and cry.
Motion outside a front window caught her attention. Heat waving up off the sand made the air thick and smeary. She could squint a certain way and see rainbows. She stepped closer to the glass, her palms suddenly prickly. A ghost with
slumped shoulders in a yellow, ill-fitting dress moved down the slope. The ghost of Mae Thayer? But with hair white as snow. A green bundle. A quilt with red, jagged slashes. Effie!
Bridget felt both pulled and pushed to the door. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go and yet, this was Effie. Effie had come back to her. She ran out and up the slope until they met and fell into each other’s arms. Bridget carried the bundle and they descended together, their arms around each other, their hips banging.
“Your hair is white.”
“He lied,” Effie said when they’d climbed the stairs and stepped into the lodge.
Except for Effie’s white hair, she looked better. More like she’d looked the first time Bridget saw her at the clothesline at Homeplace. Her face was softer and bones weren’t sticking out from beneath the dress’s shoulders. She was pretty again. But she wore Mae’s dress.
Effie watched her. “I’m not barren,” she said. “Rev. Jackdaw is.” She crossed the room and dropped into the rocker. Her pale eyes, flooded with tears, pleaded. “It’s him barren.”
Bridget wasn’t sure where to stand. By a patched wall so Effie could see she’d kept up her chores? By the hanging combs or spoons so Effie could see she’d stolen them?
“Where’d you get that dress?”
Effie wiped a crippled-looking hand beneath her dripping nose. “I couldn’t stay. I’m carrying a baby.”
River People Page 28