Nahoonkara

by Peter Grandbois

  “And rub the baby under the blanket,” she yells after me. “Up toward the heart.”

  Henry runs passed me on the stairs, unaware I carry his child in my arms.

  My feet break through the frozen snow, as I run behind the house. My only thought is to be near the river, and that’s where I stop. I adjust the blanket around the baby and gaze down into its chiseled-shut eyes. Not knowing what to do, I prod it under the arms with my finger.

  The owl calls again from above. I search the branches over my head and see nothing. And then all at once two large, golden eyes that become my world entire. Not now! I shout to the owl. I’m needed here. I force myself out of the owl’s eyes until I see it whole. And there in the owl’s beak is a field mouse, freshly killed.

  “Baby,” I say, turning my gaze to the being in my arms, for I still do not know if it’s a boy or a girl. “It’s time to enter this world.” And then I wiggle my hand beneath the blanket and begin massaging the baby with two fingers, pushing the blood upward.

  The owl fixes me with its gaze.

  I forget the way Mother’s skull pushed out from her face.

  I forget the dark absence of Father’s gray eyes.

  I forget the sound of my own voice.

  Only the music floating through the rafters, vibrating the near-perfect web. And the spider, waiting.

  The baby cries out.

  I return only to see Elizabeth’s face contort with the pain of the second set of contractions.

  “Oh God,” she says. “I can’t make it through another one.”

  “This second birth is not as bad,” Jess replies. “You’ll make it.” And sure enough with a few small pushes this round, bloody bag squishes out onto the bed, the cord attached to it still pulsing with life. It looks to me like a horse’s stomach I saw once when One-Eared Louie had to put down Sam, his best workhorse. One-Eared Louie prided himself on wasting nothing, and he took me aside that day and showed me the horse’s viscera as he gutted it and dried the meat.

  But then Jess takes the afterbirth up in her hands and gently places it in a bucket filled with fresh water and begins to scrub it clean, only her actions are more like a caress, a holy sacrament than any type of scrubbing. She washes away the blood, and from my position at the foot of the bed I can already see the shimmering whiteness beneath.

  Jess takes it from the water and holds it as if it were a baby, then brings it to the bed and sits beside Elizabeth, who gestures me to sit alongside her. I hand the baby to Henry, who takes it awkwardly. Jess holds the afterbirth before us so we can get a good look, then proceeds to tell us of the tree of life, the blue vein running from the cord up through the center of it, a vein stronger and clearer than any vein of silver ore Henry ever found in the mountain.

  It starts with the pulsing cord, and I reach out and take it in my hand, right there at the base, to see if the pulsing life running through it is real. I feel it as I feel my own beating heart, wondering at the force that drives it. It’s then Jess takes my hand in hers and guides my finger as it traces the pulse to its source. I follow the trunk through its infinite branches, and I feel the pulses as if they were singing in the branches of my brain. Outlined before me, the tree stands greater than any elm or oak I’ve ever seen.

  TOAD

  Killian | Wisconsin

  The toad is about four inches long and the color of dirt that has not seen rain. When I’m not standing beside Catherine’s bed, watching her breathe, I’m down behind the shed studying the spots and swirls of brick red on the toad’s back. The almost orange stripe down the middle. The dark throat that scares me the way it puffs out, reminding me of Catherine’s breathing. It’s there in the same place every day, and every day it looks the same.

  When I stare at the colors, the patterns of spots, of warts long enough, things start shifting. My head spins until I feel as if I’m rising above the world. I gaze down at the shed, the apple tree and the elms that line the road, the fields beyond and smile at how funny it seems, the way everything curves and bends, how the colors stretch out before me.

  My arms stretch to the ground, and I rub the toad’s back with the tip of my finger. The cool wetness of its skin, the way my finger just glides over it, even over the spots, makes me happy. Now Catherine’s sick. She can’t get out of bed and run her fingers along its cool back.

  When I let go of the toad, it hops away. I dive after it, catch its back leg as it tries to get away. Holding the toad tightly, I run into the shed, to the corner where Father piles the old coffee cans. Gently, I set the toad on the ground in the musty dark of the shed and quickly cover it with a can. “Can’t get away now,” I tell it, then go in to see Catherine to tell her that the toad is safe, waiting for her beneath the can.

  That afternoon I lie beside Catherine, curl against her on the bed. Uncle Robert and Uncle Frank are busy in town, and Mother is resting, so Catherine and I are alone. She smells different this afternoon. I wonder if it’s like the shift in the color of the sky, the result of staring at the spots on the toad too long. I don’t like the smell; it reminds me of when Eli buried me in the leaves we’d raked last month. It’d rained the day before and the leaves smelled like the back of the cellar. When I cried, Eli sat on the pile and wouldn’t let me out.

  I want to tell Catherine that I don’t like the smell. I want to ask her if she can please go back to the way she used to be. Mother says Catherine always smells like moonlight, but that’s not it at all—she smells like Catherine, and that’s what I want her to be. But I don’t ask her to try to go back, because she needs all her strength, and I wouldn’t want her to strain herself doing something that’s no use. Her body’s changing, and she can only watch and wait. So, I tell her about the toad, that it’s waiting for her, too.

  Later, I go back to check on the toad. I’m going to bring it to Catherine, so she can touch it. But when I lift the coffee can, the toad looks strange under the lamplight, not right at all. I squat down before it, peering in close at the dried out husk on the ground. I touch it, hesitantly at first, but then I push at it with my finger, try and get it to move. The spots of red, the orange stripe are gone, all turned to a gray mud.

  “That’s not my toad,” I cry, and I back away.

  I want to tell Catherine. But Mother sits upon Catherine’s bed, and Catherine is holding her. She has long arms that wrap all the way around, keeping Mother warm. Catherine’s lips are pressed to Mother’s ear, as if she’s whispering something to her, as if her whisper is a kiss. She shimmers in the light, and I wonder if this is where my toad’s colors went. Then, Catherine is gone, and I run out the door to follow her until she’s lost through the tops of the trees.

  I don’t come back at all that day. At night, I sleep along the riverbank, staring at the moon and the stars. The way they move in the sky. But no matter how much they move, I can still find my favorites, the ones Uncle Frank named after the whale that ate him, or the bear that held him in its cave, or the great oak that swallowed him whole only to belch him out the next day. Like the stories, Uncle Frank never changes; he comes out of whatever gobbled him up looking and smelling the same as he was when he went in.

  The next day I make my way home, stopping on the front porch to study the movement of the clouds as they pass over. There are noises inside the house—murmuring voices—and I don’t want to listen. I only want to watch and wait like Catherine does. So, that’s where Mother finds me, wrapping her arms about me in the same way Catherine held her. Saturdays fresh bread and cinnamon; Sundays incense from church; Mondays lye from washing the clothes; Tuesdays ammonia and bleaching powder from cleaning; Wednesdays pears and peaches; Thursdays raspberries, which she picks for Friday’s pies—and the smell of dandelions—which is always a mystery; Fridays chickens for the one night of the week the tavern offers a home cooked meal, and it takes until halfway through Saturday’s baking to get rid of the smell.

  I inhale her, but where I expect to smell raspberries, I smell again the cellar sm
ell of musty leaves. Mother takes me by the hand and leads me inside where the family is gathered along with lots of people from the town: Judge Salt, Doctor Apfelbech, Mr. and Mrs. Kepsky, the schoolteacher, Miss Hull, Bert Allar, Mr. and Mrs. Lukowicz, Jake, and many others.

  There’s a pine box in our living room where the Christmas tree used to be, the same tree Catherine and I trimmed with popcorn and candles. I let go of mother’s hand and look inside the box. I want to touch the thing that lies there, run my hand along its skin, but they tell me to keep my hands away. They tell me it’s Catherine, that’s what they say, my family and the townspeople who come to visit, who stand for a while in front of the box, then turn to each other with torn faces and long arms to hold. No, she doesn’t smell like moonlight. She doesn’t smell like Father’s furs either. I don’t know what it is that remains behind, and I never was able to follow Catherine past the elms. She simply faded away. So, I reach inside the box anyway, stretching my arm so I can run my finger along the bridge of her nose, then over her lips and down her neck. She doesn’t feel the same either.

  I want to give her something, to put something under her pillow the way Uncle Frank does sometimes, when he wants to surprise us. But the only thing I have is the stub of my pencil from school. So I slide that under her pillow when no one is looking.

  I step outside. The sky is blue again, the sun yellow. I decide I like the other colors better, the ones that came after staring at the toad, the ones Catherine seemed to take on after she flew from her bed; they seemed more real.

  THE CAMP

  Narrator | Colorado

  Silas Cordley stumbled half-groggy with sleep through the sun-bled pines. The wood sap stuck to his hand, and he tried to suck it off. And in this way, he walked smack into a web hanging between the branches of the diseased lodgepole that shaded Fitch Wise’s tent. He jumped back, swatting at the web. “Goddamn it!” he said, brushing the strands from his shoulder. He imagined the spider crawling up his neck and arched his head back to see. Behind him, the preacher, Wilbert Marshall, sat on a large rock watching him. They stared at each other without saying anything. Wilbert took a long swig from his bottle.

  “Shut up,” Silas said, finally.

  Wilbert tucked the bottle in his jacket, pulling the jacket tight about him. His gaze fixed on Silas.

  Silas turned toward the tent, crouching lower than he needed to beneath the branches of the pine. “Fitch, you lazy Englishman, wake up!” he shouted.

  “Look at me,” Wilbert mumbled to himself.

  Silas ignored him.

  “It’s come to me now,” Wilbert went on.

  “Shut up!” Silas shouted over his shoulder, then knelt before the tent. “Fitch, wake up. You missed breakfast, and I need your help working the long tom.”

  “I ain’t real,” Wilbert said. “We ain’t none of us more than a shadow blown over the dirt.”

  Silas turned his attention to the drunk preacher who sat on the rock scratching himself. “Why don’t you tell it to Fitch,” Silas said. “You’re making my head hurt.” A faint tickle climbed his neck, worked its way into his hair, not the spider but its ghost. “Goddamn it!” he said again, brushing at his neck, running his hands through his hair. Then, he pulled back the tent flap and peered inside.

  “Lord, part the heavens and come down. Touch the mountains until they pour forth smoke,” Wilbert shouted, standing now upon the rock. “Send Your lightning, Your arrows, so that I might feel what it means to be alive.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Silas shouted, closing the tent flap. “Son of a bitch!”

  Will Markey tried to break up the fight, but Big Jim Leek had been eyeing Fitch’s tent for a long time and Tom Thomas, or Double Tom as they liked to call him, jumped the claim before Fitch’s body had even been removed, placing his things inside, tossing those of Fitch’s out, at least the ones he didn’t want.

  Big Jim thought he’d use his size to intimidate Double Tom, who was short but stocky. When Double Tom emerged from the tent to go for the last of his supplies, Big Jim simply stood in his way.

  By the time Will Markey arrived, the other miners had circled the two men, some cheering for Big Jim (who was a hard worker and thus had earned the miner’s respect, but also simply because they were afraid of him), and some choosing the underdog (who though he often appeared mean-spirited had proven his heart on many occasions when a miner needed tobacco or was temporarily short of food). It was the greedy speed with which Double Tom had taken over Fitch’s tent, working against his otherwise generous reputation, that had the miners talking while the two men fought. And Double Tom had taken a pretty fair beating, though like a badger he kept coming back for more, when Will Markey stood between the two, blowing great clouds of smoke from his goose-bone pipe.

  “I’m not living by the shit hole any more,” Double Tom said, wiping his mouth with his shirt in a vain attempt to make himself appear more civilized. “This camp stinks straight to hell, and I’ve had to live by the patch of dirt you all call a toilet for too long.” A few miners nodded, as if in agreement, while others whose tents were farther away set their jaws hard, thinking Double Tom was a whiner and that any man should be able to put up with a little bad smell. Will Markey puffed on his pipe, thinking of the judgment he would proclaim.

  “I’m not staying where I am, Will,” Double Tom pleaded.

  “I just done what—”

  “Shut up!” Will Markey said. “You think you got a say in this? You think it matters how you came to this point? It don’t matter at all.”

  “What are you talking about, Will?” Double Tom said, spitting blood. A trickle of red saliva dribbled on his shirt. “I found it first.”

  “You think Fitch reckoned he had a say?” Will Markey asked. The men went silent. Even Double Tom wiped the toothless grin from his face. “Besides, we’ve got another problem,” Will Markey said. “One the rest of you brainless heathens failed to notice.”

  “What’s that, Will?” various voices from the crowd asked.

  “It seems Fitch here has been murdered, his head nearly lopped off in his sleep,” Will Markey took the goose-bone pipe from his mouth. “And my guess is that one of you did it.”

  The miners looked one to another, all except Wilbert Marshall who was now sleeping on the rock. Will Markey refilled his pipe and took his time lighting it.

  Silas Cordley stood silent in the center of the crowd, hoping another would give voice to his thoughts. Then that voice came. “But Will,” it said. “Fitch is already dead and gone. What good’s it going to do now to keep a man from working in the mine, especially when that man might be the one to find the mother lode? We’re all in this together, Will.”

  Will Markey kept on puffing, until, one by one, the men dispersed. Alone, he looked over the mess of Fitch’s things that Double Tom had tossed on the side of the tent, then, without so much as a glance in either direction, he bent down and pulled himself a good pair of working boots from the pile and walked away.

  THE LANGUAGE OF SELF

  Henry | Wisconsin

  I talked to his back. No matter if I started speaking to his front I would end speaking to his back. I soon learned that his back understood better than his front, that his back heard all it needed to from me. Still, I remember wondering if my words made sense, or if perhaps I was speaking a different language, one he couldn’t understand. Killian and Eli never went with him for that reason, at least that’s what Killian said. He said he couldn’t find the words, he said that when he spoke Father scarcely looked in his direction at all. Like them, I was going to give up, though I hated quitting anything. It’s not in me. But then I realized that Father was also trying to speak with me, and if I wanted his love I must learn his alphabet. And so I followed, ears attuned in ways only a child understands, to the subtle straightening that signaled approval, the droop that indicated disgust, or the curve in the spine that said to be quiet.

  I followed him out the door and down the line of elms in t
he kind of cold dark that only comes on an October morning when you are not quite yet expecting it, the kind of morning where the frost washes over everything, and you feel that the world as you know it has been buried, covered over. I remember wanting to stop and touch the hoarfrost on the grass, to marvel at the beauty of its crystalline structure, but not daring to for fear I would miss a telltale sign from his back.

  He stood so tall before me, my father. I spent the first hour watching him, the way his head draped in coonskin blotted out the sky. His back seemed so wide I could scarcely imagine learning the entirety of its language. I remember thinking there were simply too many words, too many rules for an eight-year-old to fathom.

  He kept his Springfield tucked tight under his arm, barrel pointed to the ground before him, so that learning the myriad positions of the rifle’s butt end beneath his arm was also part of my study of vocabulary. Held close and tight to his armpit meant it would be a long march to the hunting ground, and I best keep up for he would not wait. Held low and loose meant he was in good humor and, perhaps, I could stop for a moment to examine a glistening stone along the path or even an arrowhead under my foot. Once when I saw his rifle hanging in the crook of his arm I ventured to walk beside him for a spell. He turned to me, sparing a smile out of the left corner of his mouth. Frightened because I could not understand the particular diction of that smile, I fell in behind him once again.

  The first shot echoed as the bronze sun peered over the horizon, bringing little warmth. The pheasant dropped before it was twenty feet in the air. I jumped when it burst from the cattails and weeds before us along with two other birds. My breath caught as it thrust itself into the sun, all wings and neck. And then it was gone. Father took the bird by the neck, tied a noose around it and strung it to his belt. He asked if I wanted to see, but I kept my distance. The frosted ground seeped through my boots, creeping into my bones, and I remember having to hold myself to keep warm. I told my father I had to pee and went off behind a cottonwood. I stayed there as long as I thought it safe to remain, as long as I could before he came looking for me.