Fig
Page 30
I come upon the cottonwoods, and through the circle of trees I can see the yellow glow of the kitchen. As I step forward a screech owl comes tearing out of the treetops and dips so low, I can feel the wind it makes from having wings, and flying. The bird screams at me as it ascends into the sky for one last hunt before the day.
* * * *
Neither Daddy nor Uncle Billy drinks the coffee I made for them. They are too busy, preoccupied. Daddy holds the lamp now because the job is suddenly important. I pour myself a cup of the coffee and it is black and hot and unsweetened. I’ve never had coffee before without milk and sugar, and the bitterness is jolting as it shivers through my bloodstream. I am waking up. As the caffeine electrifies my nervous system Uncle Billy gives Betty a shot that puts her to sleep.
I should have known what they had to do. What the directions meant: Come prepared. But I didn’t, and it isn’t until my uncle makes the long incision that I really do begin to understand. And this is not the neat and tidy procedure I’ve always told myself it was. This is not God carving Eve from a rib. It is not simple or easy like Daddy pulling out the lambs and life beginning as life continues. I keep telling myself, this is a sheep, in a barn with a vet. This is not Mama in a hospital, with a surgeon, where everything is clean and in perfect order.
Daddy shines the light on the hole Uncle Billy made, and the cut is big and wet. The hole yawns, filling with blood and other liquids that look like blood. The wet shines, and it sparkles like something precious in the harshness of the light. When Uncle Billy reaches into Betty, the gesture is not at all tender. He reaches into her the way he does to gut and clean a dead chicken. He goes deep, and the hole gapes wider to allow room for his big hands and his thick wrists. And I can hear the wetness. It must be hot and slippery inside, difficult to grip the lamb.
“There’s only one,” Uncle Billy says, and not only are his hands amputated by the wet red hole, but his forearms disappear as well. Her womb is an underworld, and it seems like he will never find the lamb, let alone get a hold on her, but then he does. He brings her head to the surface, and I can see her. Her eyes are closed and she is peaceful. She is still dreaming. I think of Mama and all the reasons she used to list why natural childbirth is better. The drugs administered to the mothers pass into the bodies of the babies; I don’t remember being born, but I do remember being drugged, just before I was pulled into this life by the hands of a stranger.
Uncle Billy has the head, and then he doesn’t. She slips back in, under, and this is when my soul vacates my body. It feels like rubber bands—really big and really long—my spirit is being pulled out of me, and from the tugging the rubber bands are growing longer and longer. I don’t know what is pulling them or where the other end might end, but now I know where the soul attaches to a body. It attaches to the spot below my ribs where the meat of me is soft and unprotected. Where there are no ribs or other bone. Leashed by the invisible rubber heaviness, I rise into the rafters. The sky is a milky blue, with the incredible brightness of early morning, and I realize it is the body that can hear and feel and taste and smell—all a soul can do is see.
I can’t hear the birdsong that always accompanies the dawn, or the rooster who must be crowing. I can’t hear the insistent bleating of the sheep all around or the suckling of the anxious offspring who didn’t have to be cut out. The world is mute. It mouths the words to me—a silent film, there is no narrator, no subtitles to tell the story. I have no mouth to taste the aftertaste of coffee, or nose to smell the ripe ammonia of the barn. I am senseless, except I can still see, but if I was to continue to rise any higher? To flap my arms into wings and let the rubber bands stretch until they broke? There would be nothing left to see but the nothing shade of blue above waiting for us all.
Uncle Billy takes the head again, and this time he does not let go. I study the expression on my face as he tries to find a way to handle all four of the long lamb legs. Some are tangled, others stuck inside impossible caverns. The spindly legs point in nonsensical directions like the straw man in The Wizard of Oz pointing all the ways at once Dorothy could choose to go. The expression on my face is no expression. My face is blank. Eyes wide and open, I can see myself: I’m wearing pinstriped Oshkosh overalls over my nightgown, and my feet are stuffed into a pair of black galoshes. I’ve got Daddy’s large Cornell sweatshirt zipped up, and the gray hood hides my big ears and short hair.
I am nothing but a face without an expression stuck inside a lot of clothing. I don’t like looking at myself like this; it is worse than any mirror. I look at Daddy instead. He looks tired the way he always does, his jaw set hard and in need of a shave, and he holds the lamp the way he does everything in life: with determination.
Uncle Billy tosses the lamb into the straw the way he’d cast off a jacket because he got too warm. He focuses on the empty hole that is the body of the mother. The crater is impossible—a sinkhole, and I know he can’t make her live again. This was why I was ordered to get the Ziploc bag of frozen sheep colostrum and set it under the heat lamp to defrost. And the heat lamp is not only here to melt colostrum, it is here to mimic the warmth of a missing mother.
Daddy yells for me to hold the lamp, and I do, but only my body reacts. The rest of me still hovers somewhere above, watching: My body has two arms, and these arms hold the light on the lamb while my father buries her with straw. He buries her with straw, and then he rubs the straw all over her with his cold hands. He rubs hard, and his touch is heavy. He has to move her body to teach her to move it on her own. He brushes away the straw to see if she is moving.
Daddy covers her with straw again and rubs even harder than before. As he forces life into the lamb I see how he is creating her just as much, if not more, than her mother ever did. When my father lifts his hands from her body once more to look, I snap back into my body like a whip recoiling.
I am drenched in sound. I am drowning in the sound of crying sheep and impatient hooves; and life is deafening. Uncle Billy curses the dead mother while Daddy coos to the baby in her bed of straw. There is the nagging sound of everyone, and every animal around: breathing, and my own breath, nagging. Inside, there is the sound of my heart: It is no longer ticking but it is beating. It beats hard like someone knocking on a door.
The blood smells like copper. Then it smells like cold steak on the hot surface of a cast-iron skillet. There is also the sweetness of the straw—the sugary scent of early rot—and the sourness of the coffee on my breath, the need to brush my teeth. I’m shaking, but I don’t feel cold. The sense of touch is the last to return. When it comes, I find myself uncomfortable: My clothes are scratchy, I need to pee, and the muscles in my neck are burning ropes.
The lamb pulls herself up, front legs followed by hind legs. She is wobbly, and then she is steady, just like that. She goes right for Daddy to nuzzle him. She wants his body heat, his milk, and his love, and I know what this is called.
This is called imprinting.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE LAST SUPPER
epilogue: n. 1. A short poem or speech spoken directly to the audience at the end of a play 2. A short section at the end of a literary or dramatic work , often discussing the future of its characters; an afterword.
April 11, Easter Sunday, 1993
There are all kinds of tricks to get a ewe to take on an orphaned lamb, and Billy has tried them all in the course of his career. If a ewe has a stillborn, you can skin it and wrap the skin around the orphan to make the mother think the living lamb is hers. The orphaned lamb can also be rubbed in the afterbirth of another lamb and presented to the ewe, and again, she will think it’s her own, that she had twins, or triplets, depending.
In extreme cases, you can make the ewe think she’s giving birth when she’s not. If the orphan lamb is presented right away, the ewe will believe it belongs to her. Sometimes a ewe will take an orphan without any tricks; more often, she will not, and sometimes rejection is violent.
We don’t try any of these
methods. Instead, Daddy gives the motherless lamb to me and Blue to nurse and care for. I name her Esther because today is Easter. I give her a baby bottle full of colostrum we take from other mothers and save for situations like this, and then I give her milk. As Daddy watches he tells me I was once wet nursed too.
“We needed the money,” he says, “so we decided to sell the land where your grandparent’s house had been—we just didn’t expect it to sell so fast. You were just a newborn, and it seemed easiest for you to stay with me while Annie went to take care of the loose ends in Connecticut. It was only for a day or two, but you refused to take a bottle, so I called one of the women from the home-birth group and she came and stayed with us until your mama came home.”
I feel weird knowing I had such an intimate exchange with someone I wouldn’t recognize today. I wonder how it made Mama feel.
Daddy makes a nest in the kitchen where Blue and I can sleep with the lamb. It’s either here or in the barn. Esther sleeps a lot, but when she’s awake she is nothing but energy and spindly legs slipping across the kitchen tile.
We can’t leave Esther alone, so Gran comes to the farm for Easter supper. She comes early to clean before she cooks the feast. She doesn’t like Esther or Blue in the kitchen, and I don’t help matters by falling asleep and not always minding the lamb when I should. Esther slips out of my arms to nibble on Gran’s skirt while Blue tries to pull her away. I startle awake to the barking and bleating and Gran looking angry. Billy comes inside and tells me to go take a nap. He promises to watch Esther, assuring Gran he will do this outside and out of her way.
Half-asleep, I stumble up to my room, and Blue follows close behind.
* * * *
While I’m sleeping, Gran transforms the dining room, and coming downstairs is like walking into someone else’s house. She instructed Uncle Billy to stretch the table out as long as it will go; after the four of us sit down, there will still be room for eight more people. The table trespasses into the living room area.
Gran draped the table with hundreds of crocheted stars, and Daddy tells me she made the tablecloth herself. “It was for her hope chest,” Daddy says. I touch the hem, surprised. I didn’t know my grandmother was capable of such beauty. Looking like crowns and scepters both, my arrangements of dried poppies stand at either end of the table; each contained in its own narrow vase, they will flank our meal.
Gran insists that we sit while she brings in the food; she wants to serve us. Every time Gran either comes in or returns to the kitchen, I peek through the door to check on Esther, who is sound asleep next to Blue, the two of them wrapped in old wool blankets.
“She’s all tuckered out,” Uncle Billy says. “She did nothing but eat and play while you two were sleeping.” He winks at me. “She won’t be waking up anytime soon,” he says.
Daddy sits at the head of the table, and Gran will sit opposite. Uncle Billy and I sit across from each other. It is strange to have so much table spreading out on either side of me—as if there are still people coming or there’s company I can’t see.
We might be a million miles away from one another, but there is magic in the presentation: The way the candles warm the otherwise dark room—their light makes everything else fall away, and we are left with only our faces, the crocheted stars, the green poppy pods, and the food.
Usually the old candelabras sit on the mantel over in the living room collecting dust as Christina crawls back home in the painting above, but tonight they are centered on the table and Christina has disappeared, either swallowed by shadows or somehow safe inside her house at last. The warm candlelight wavers and turns the silverware into gold, and this is alchemy. As Gran sits down, it’s not just the rest of the room that floats away, but the entire world.
Gran puts her napkin in her lap and looks around, and she is smiling a smile I’ve never seen her smile before, except in the photographs taken back when she was still young. She is the statue of Mother Mary. She watches over a garden of roses, ashes, thyme, and memories. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? This is the smile of a mother, but it soon disappears.
“I almost asked your father to lead us in a prayer,” she explains, looking down at her plate. I’m worried she might cry, which I have never seen her do.
Daddy pretends he misunderstood. “I’d be happy to,” he says, even though we all know who she really meant when she said “your father.” Gran looks up, and her eyes sparkle despite her cataracts, and the mother smile resurfaces. Uncle Billy winks at me as Daddy begins.
My father says the prayer like it’s something he says every day: “Dear Lord.” Only he doesn’t say “Lord” again. I close my eyes like Gran and Billy do, but I steal glances at my father as he continues. I can’t tell if his eyes are open or closed; he might just be looking down. It is strange to hear him talk this much after such a long silence.
“Spring has always been my favorite season,” he says, “when everything is so full of potential, and bursting with new life.”
I think about Betty and the last time I saw her. With her face covered by a gunnysack, she was nothing more than a large hole. She died before my uncle even had a chance to stitch her shut. I feel sad. Like Mama, I will never see her again.
When the prayer closes, we all open our eyes. Billy joins Gran in “Amen” while Daddy and I refrain. I look at the platters of food spread before us. Steamed asparagus with butter, lemon juice, and ground pepper. Scalloped potatoes. Creamed pearl onions. A tossed salad: baby greens, chopped walnuts, currants, and poppy-seed dressing. And in the center—right in front of me, I see the roasted lamb, and the meat takes my breath away. Like everything else tonight, the wide-open hole has been transformed by my grandmother’s touch. It is no longer something wounded. It glistens in the candlelight. Seasoned with sprigs of fresh rosemary from the garden where my mother sleeps, the lamb is brown and tender, and it gives itself to the carving knife.
As Daddy cuts, I become aware of him watching me. I am in his peripheral vision. He imagines me saying no, and this is what everyone expects. They all hold their breath and cross their fingers.
“Fig ?” Daddy says, turning me into a question. He has finished slicing the lamb and hasn’t served anyone. He stands there, holding the serving fork midair. The same fork that helped the knife cut the lamb now holds a piece of meat, ready to be consumed.
I become more and more aware. I, too, am holding my breath, but I haven’t crossed my fingers, and I don’t feel the need to reach for my rosary. Instead, I let the air out, and I feel like I am melting. I look at Daddy and I smile a smile I have never smiled before. I feel the unfamiliar stretch of muscles in my face, and the way these muscles lift my shoulders, and how my lifted shoulders work to straighten my spine, and I grow taller.
Smiling, I look at my father and I nod. I nod, and then I speak. “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
* * * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I’d like to thank my parents, Tom and Enid Schantz. Thank you for raising me in a bookstore, for teaching me to read, and for always supporting my dream to write. While my father helped me with the novel, my mother (who was not a schizophrenic), edited the original short story, “The Sound of Crying Sheep,” from which the book was born; while she didn’t live to see me finish the book or to see it published, she did see the story win first place for a contest hosted by Third Coast magazine. This contest brings me to Brad Watson, the writer who judged the competition, and everyone at Third Coast, who I’d also like to thank: they not only hosted the award, they published me, and went on to nominate the story for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and for New Stories from the Midwest. I’d like to thank the editor of the latter, Jason Lee Brown, who accepted my story for inclusion in his anthology. When Jason invited me to be a panelist at the First Annual Midwest Small Press Festival, I finally got to feel like a real writer. Everyone I’ve listed so far helped give me the courage to turn “The Sound of Crying Sheep” into
my first novel.
I’d like to extend my gratitude to the following writing teachers I’ve had over the years. Molly LeClair and Suzanne Hudson, thank you for believing in me back when I was fresh off the streets and college still seemed utterly impossible; because of you two, I continued to write, and I now have a MFA despite having never graduated from high school or gotten my GED. Meg Gallagher, thank you for teaching me the art of public speaking; I think of you every time I give a reading. Bobbie Louise Hawkins, you taught me almost everything I know about good writing, but most of all, thank you for believing in Fig’s story from the beginning (before she even had a name). Joanna Ruocco, thank you for reading my manuscript, providing extensive feedback, introducing me to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and for truly going above and beyond the call of duty. Selah Saterstrom, you gave me the permission I needed to write a young girl from the point-of-view of first person in the present tense. Bhanu Kapil, you helped create the space for writing and for the writing to come. Keith Abbott, thank you for always checking in with me. Junior Burke, thank you for saying, “Sarah, I think it’s time for you to write a book.” Thank you to Indira Ganesan for magical realism, to Elizabeth Robinson for Leonora Carrington and Joseph Cornell, and finally, to Sara Veglahn, who reminded me to look outside the frame to find the real story. As a collection of teachers and mentors, you all compose the antithesis of my sixth-grade teacher who accused me of plagiarism and actually sent me to the principal’s office. So once more, thank you!
Other writers have also served as my teachers: They demonstrated all the ways to craft a story or form a sentence, and they provided imaginary worlds and the sanctuaries I was seeking. While many different texts influenced the writing of this book, I’d like to reserve this branch of acknowledgment for one writer and one writer alone: Zilpha Keatley Snyder. You were my absolute favorite author as a child, and like Fig, I read The Headless Cupid and got the idea to create my own Calendar of Ordeals. While I wasn’t trying to cure mental illness, my magical thinking still had everything to do with trying to survive my own painful adolescence, and in a way, it worked.