Maiden from the Sea

by Nellie P. Strowbridge

  The water bear is as strong as I am weak, she thought, her sense of terror as cold as ice. The beast came after her in loping, long strokes, lapping the distance between her and her short, weak steps as she ran, her legs wobbling so much she feared losing her balance. She gasped for breath, overpowered by the realization that she and the baby inside her would be dragged piece by piece into the warm belly of this huge creature. She slipped and fell, her fur-clad feet sliding into a blue-tinted crevice. She turned in fear, letting out a moan as the bear stopped suddenly. She saw why. It had spied the dark snout of a seal coming up for air through a hole in the ice.

  Relief was short-lived. A tremor surged through her body as she realized that her domicile was open to wild creatures on land and on sea that could lunge through the cave and take her and her unborn child. She quickly got to her feet and ran for shore, making furrows through the snow on the beach. Wind that had lain dormant now came like a howl through the trees. Its ghostly presence followed her, its coldness pressed into her back as sharp as treenails. She dragged herself back to the cave, ripping her knee on a black sculp of rock. A red trail bled through her woollen leggings. It followed her on the snow as she limped inside the cave that now had the look of a shark’s open mouth. Icicles hung down from the roof like teeth and clumped on the ground. A long howl of wind squeezed into the cave, stretched itself along the floor sweeping dirt like a broom. It drew back as if it had changed its mind about being in a confined area.

  Genevieve lay panting, catching her breath as she exposed her bleeding knee and stared at the gash. She got up and limped across the cave to where she had laid dry moss gathered for her blood days, which hadn’t come for a long time. Now she thought of her blood as coursing through the veins of her unborn bébé. She spread the moss over her knee and tightened it with a piece of rawhide to stop the flow of blood. A terrible thought crossed her mind and she hurried outside, hoping the scent of her blood had not attracted the wild beast. She looked around to make sure the bear was nowhere in sight. Then she quickly covered the trail of blood. If only Nasook had seen the bear. She smiled as she visualized him running with his spear, it singing through the air, the bear falling. There would be smiles and shouts. After the bear was skinned and cleaned, she and Nasook would share the meat. “And each other,” she whispered.

  She shook her head to clear it and stood staring across the sea’s frozen mouth, snowflakes blending with the seascape. She imagined Luke and his father coming, their voices like music she could dance to after the winter’s long silence, but it was a long time until spring, a long time to wait. She was tempted to lie down in snow, and indent it with the curve and heat of her body. She would drift in peace while wispy snowflakes fell slowly, covering her, taking her out of misery. She was thinking this when she felt a faint flutter. Her tears fell then, flowing as freely as blood had flowed from her knee. How could I have forgotten my bébé cradled inside me, the promise of her birth? She is being rocked to shore like a ship in stormy waters.

  * * * *

  As days drifted into months, Genevieve often lay beside the fire, its heat and wavering flames helping her survive. To lessen her solitude, she opened her garments and placed her hand on her belly to feel life quickening inside—a life all its own. She used to think babies were formed from the head and gradually grew a neck, shoulders, body, arms, and legs. Then she had glimpsed a bluish, gurried baby, one a French scullery maid had lost before it was ready to be born. Madame Laurier had scolded her for reaching too far, claiming that the baby’s cord of life had collared and choked a healthy child.

  Genevieve banished the image of the mute, swollen creature. Her baby would bellow life. She imagined its sounds echoing across a monstrous sea of ice, cracking it and, from high in the sky, a feather tumbling into her hand from the breast of a white bird. She would take it and tickle her baby’s face into a smile, holding the tiny body to the softness of her own, cushioning her for a time against the harshness likely to follow.

  Genevieve sank into sleep. Glass-faced, whitewashed boxes tapered at each end hold dried everlasting flowers above ground that holds boxes of babies beneath it. The word smallpox howls through northerly winds . . . Emma reaches her hand to touch one glass box framed by pine strips. A man named George takes her hand, calls her dear. Her young face is covered in white scabs.

  Dreams drifted . . . tumbled away.

  Genevieve lay rattling with fever, breathing as if her insides were all in a snarl, tangled in fish twine. Soon she was back in dreams. Nasook is smiling at her, putting a drink to her lips—wrapping her in skins. He leaves and dark-skinned children find her—stab at her with alder rods. She shouts for them to leave her alone; they laugh and skip away. Joe’s face is above hers. His cruel, heavy voice taunts: “Press down on her belly and break the egg inside before it grows into a savage child.” He warns Luke not to have anything to do with an Indian-lover. Luke pushes his father away from Genevieve, but he does not stop a woman in doeskins who cuts into her, bringing out a bloodied baby, taking the screaming child away while Genevieve’s empty hands reach out, stretch to the point of pain.

  Genevieve awoke to a kick from the baby. Her hands curved on the hard mound of her belly with its sudden movements. “I am afraid,” she murmured, “afraid of how to get you out of me.” In Madame Laurier’s maison there had been whispers that a woman had to push the baby out of her body the way she let out her water, but Genevieve had never seen it happen to anyone. Sometimes she stared at her navel while she washed her body, wondering if maybe it could be unbuttoned for such a purpose.

  At the cave’s opening, the wind often reached long fingers to scrape her face with icy nails. Her fingers stiffened like icicles, and she folded them into the palms of her hands—two angry fists against winter. The wind’s howls and moans sounded in her ears, as if there were wolves outside, running in packs, but leaving no footprints on the hard snow. She wanted to believe that these wild animals would not venture out from the woods. Still, she wondered what she would do if they surprised her. Snow was tossed about as if by an angry beast ready to grab her, swallow her in its cold, toothed mouth. Once the dead of winter set in, she loathed to venture outside, easily forgetting the winter world of awesome beauty, sparkling snow crystals in sunlight. The fire seemed to own her, pulling her toward it, tight to it sometimes until it heated her face like a hot summer sun.

  One day, a slant of orange, warm light entered the cave. Genevieve got up slowly and went outside where the sun, a flaming ball above the hills, scattered orange rays in all directions, reaching toward her in a golden light. Ice candles hanging from cliffs shimmered in gold. The wind, warm, playful, and as wet as a hog’s nose, touched her face. Little birds fluttered like leaves through the embroidery of tree branches.

  The promise of spring stirred the air as warm, westerly winds swept through the cove, rain cutting holes in the snow as if hot stars had fallen. Brown earth showed through the rotting snow. Soon, the ground became a sodden landscape under heavy rain. Genevieve imagined the sun drawing plants and flowers up through the soil, and leaves opening from dark places inside tree limbs like a fan. She imagined spring putting on its supple, green coat with a faery dance of tiny, white, ray flowers under a warm wind—all for her. Here in a world without houses and people, with a cliff cave for her bed and the sea at her feet, she felt good to be her own mistress.

  * * * *

  One morning a quick movement in through the trees caught her eye and she gasped in fear. She was not the mistress of this little world. Red men had come to walk on these cliffs without a worry until the white man came with cruel force to claim land and sea treasures. Now the red men and white men were not far away.

  Her breath escaped in relief. It was only a black crow. She wished it had been Nasook. A feeling of tenderness swelled in her. In this precarious world, he had become a part of her through their child. Though his body had answered hers,
she had not conquered his heart. It had raced against hers as they lay spent with love. Afterwards she had wondered about his feelings. She wished for words on his lips that she could take into her ears, and heart, and mind with joy.

  That night she dreamed of Nasook coming to her, being with her. Someone else nudged in, became her. The pain takes Elizabeth Emma by surprise. She knows she must leave the stagehead and the table where codfish lie open, her hand dragging the entrails out of them. Her clear and moon-wide eyes are now gibbous under tears, like waning moons when pain squeezes her. Her privacy is suddenly invaded by her own unexpected cry. Her insides feel dragged down through her and out. Blood gushes, splatters. She hopes the fishermen will think the blood is from the codfish. She has to get herself up the steep lane—on legs failing her—do it with the eyes of the men at her back. For two months there has not been a stir. Still, she visualizes her baby every time she rocks the child’s sister. Just outside the door her body empties itself of death. Her mind and body seem to disappear into a dark abyss. Someone carries her inside the house. When she comes back to herself she is unable to comprehend that death came inside her and drove out the life of her baby, leaving her body a tomb holding decaying flesh. She has said nothing to anyone about her loss. The red angel-wing birthmark on her ankle looks red only because her skin is so white. The red wing is the signature of her life-sustaining angel who clots her flowing blood, so her life will not be lost with her miscarried baby.

  Genevieve’s disquieting dream was shattered by the kek, kek of seagulls.

  Chapter 8

  Searching for Food

  Just when genevieve thought spring had come, she went outside the cave one morning to find the air so cold its saturation of ice crystals stung her face. She stood motionless and stared at the ocean now bloated with ice driven by the sea and easterly winds. The restless sea groaned with the twisting and turning of uneven chunks of white, blue-hued floes reaching toward the horizon. Ice pans were piling into rafters, pinning each other tight against the beach. In the distance, dark escargot-like seals dotted ice floes. By afternoon, ice pans were rocking in a blue light. Seals had moved closer and were barking at gulls screeching above them.

  Genevieve saw a dark patch on the edge of a pan near the beach. She made a tentative step toward a large ice pan, steadying herself as she landed. She jumped from that pan to another in shaky jerks. She balanced herself to cast her net over the large seal. She thought about the seal meat Nasook had brought her, meat that had likely given her the nourishment needed to save her life. Now she could almost taste the rich seal meat. The seal snarled and she drew back, the ice pan wobbling beneath her. She was too unsteady to keep her balance. She was afraid, too, the seal would break her net. A ways out from shore she detected a snow baby. If the mammal had been close to shore she couldn’t be sure she would kill the whitecoat seal mewling for its mother. Then she thought of her baby depending on its mother, and she knew she would do whatever was necessary to save her child’s life. By the time she got the courage to walk across the pans, they were separating and moving away from shore, leaving gaping spaces. She could not imagine what it would be like to drift alone on an ice pan far out in the ocean under a cold night sky. The white seal, in a cradle its warm body had carved in the ice, was safe from her.

  Exhausted from her futile efforts, Genevieve made feeble steps back into the cave. The berries she had stored and the hardtack and fish the fishermen had left were gone. She curled up by the fire, sucking on a piece of ice. After sitting silently day after day, not letting out her voice, not connecting it to other human voices, feeling adrift from the world around her, she slipped into a sluggish sleep. Her baby’s movement nudged her awake. If my heart stops, she thought, my baby will be all alone inside me with no one to let her out into the world.

  She dragged herself to the cove marsh where her roaming fingers uncovered soft, fluid ripe berries. They spilled into her hand from a hollow of straw-like grass the autumn fire had passed over. She stuffed them into her mouth, spitting out pieces of grass and dry leaves. Berries broke under her white teeth, and she swallowed the juice and their skins. She gathered blueberries, blackberries, and red berries, ignoring the quarrelling voices of partridges and their beating wings.

  * * * *

  Then one morning she slipped outside the cave, where soft, warm air seeped through her skin into her bones, saturating them with a sense of well-being. Feeling as if she was breathed on by life itself, she drew spring air deep inside her and made her way to the berry marshes. Gulping berries, she wandered down to the beach, past hop clover, its pale green rosettes already creeping along the cliff path, and tiny blue irises pushing up leaves. A blue jay sat in a pool of fresh water. Startled by the stir of Genevieve’s feet on sand, it spread its dark wings and flew into the air, a sapphire cast showing under a bright sun. Genevieve tilted her head to watch, through the lacy branches of a tree, four small birds playing in the air, making straight lines, then dropping below each other and twirling. Sparrows tipped among thin shrubs.

  Genevieve pushed back her hood. She had never seen spring in an open place before. It had always come messed with the throng of people in the streets, some in clothes worn all winter, stinking from smoke and unwashed flesh. Animal dung, thawed and alighted on by buzzards, added to the stale smells.

  She stretched her hands to the warm breeze, and, as if invoking the god of zephyrs, pleaded, “Please don’t let the cold wind back to sweep spring and little birds out of sight.” She bent to the shoreline and slipped her hands into crystal clear waters under ribbons of kelp and fronds holding swollen polyps. She wiped away crawling lice and put a piece of kelp into her mouth, trying to let the salty seaweed slide down her throat without her tasting it. She stopped after one gulp, and waited to see if it would come back up. When it didn’t, she took her time eating ribbons of the kelp, letting its polyps burst under her teeth.

  She felt that winter had surely gone after its last back look, until one morning she walked outside the cave to bitter cold air. She stood shocked at the sight of loose pans dotting the sea. Little pans rocking on blue waters dipped to take on the sea’s blue and green hues.

  Nature’s last aftertaste of a season trying to overstay its time, she thought glumly. After a night’s deep frost, thin ice had settled against the beach. White birds, heads erect, strutted over the ice on long, thin legs.

  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing—fresh codfish, rounded, long and alive—in nish ice. They may have been driven over the sandbar by the sea of loose floes and got stuck. She could already taste the fresh fish and its nourishing liver as she threw out her net. She let out a moan when it caught in the silvery thin ice. She jerked the net until it let go. She threw it back out and caught five fish; one fell through an opening as she dragged the net across the ice. She had just gotten to shore when she saw a dark creature poke up through loose ice just out from the cove. She took quick steps back on creaking, clear sheets of ice the sea had tossed on the beach. They split under her feet. She grimaced at the dark creature spinning a whirlpool through slush ice. Water rose several feet into the air and she was glad she hadn’t been close enough to have been food for the shark. She scrambled over rocks poking up to form crystal bracelets and rushed toward the cave, holding her net of lively fish.

  * * * *

  By the next morning, winds had pulled the ice from the cove. An iceberg in the distance looked like a white speck in the sea—a nesting gull. It drifted closer like a floating island; still closer, it became a sailing ship, sails abroad like white fire under a quick flash of sunlight. Genevieve blinked, dazzled by its glimmers and green-blue shadows.

  She dreamed that night of a face in the iceberg, its eyes shadowed in the iceberg’s clefts. The iceberg melted and Luke, the Irish fisherman, stepped out of it and walked on water toward her, compelling her to move toward his outstretched hand. He smiled at her, and, in his
sturdy voice with the Irish brogue she found appealing, he asked: “Will yer be me oewn, Genny?”

  Genevieve surfaced in the morning as if to the voice of someone named Sarah calling, “Elizabeth.”

  Chapter 9

  An Unexpected Visit

  One morning, the sea’s light green waters lay bedded in fog. There was not the sound of a bird or any other living thing. It was as if there was no one in the world except Genevieve and the child inside her. She felt as invisible as when she was in the belly of nighttime sans moon and stars.

  Light seeped up through fog on the water’s edge. Above the hills, fog was lifting like torn wadding. She looked around at the quiet land, wishing she had the courage to walk in over the hills, unafraid of getting caught in a storm, caught in an Indian trap, eaten by wild animals. She thought about those people who could be sharing the place with her. Were they real, or was Nasook feeding her a bam—a tale? They could have been walking all around her and she would not have seen them in the thick fog.

  The fishermen had set turnips and parsnips in a patch of rich soil sloping up from the cliffs to feed them toward the end of the season when supplies of other vegetables were gone. Now, little turnips left in the ground from the year before were sending green leaves through the soil. Genevieve dug up the ground, sweating as she uncovered tiny marbles and thin fingers of parsnip. She closed her eyes and pushed them back into the soil among tiny blue irises, hoping she would have patience to let them get bigger. Mature parsnip leaves would give her new seed for next year’s parsnips.