Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  Jefferson sat for he knew not how long, rubbing the hound’s ears and reciting lines to it and to the other dogs on the plaza. Finally, a woman came out into the street from a house down the way, wearing a robe and calling out for the hound. When she saw Jefferson and asked what he was doing outside so late, and discovered that he planned to sleep on the bench, she insisted that he and the pup come home and sleep on her couch, and in the morning he could have a warm shower and breakfast.

  30

  What happened that day in the forest between Dolores Hidalgo and San Miguel de Allende? Like a dream, it began and ended on a road he never traveled again, with people who never again crossed his path. He was almost one hundred percent sure it had been real.

  The incident began with a slim young girl whose magnetic eyes made it impossible for Jefferson to say no. He had to follow her.

  He had stopped alongside the two-lane highway. A stretch of broad hills sloped away easily, clothed with shin-high grass punctuated here and there by the most interesting trees. He’d watched the trees pass by in his periphery for several miles before deciding to stop and take a closer look. Later he’d looked them up—Mexican piñons, a species related to the piñons in northern New Mexico, slow-growing conifers with sap-heavy bark, each with a distinct and forlorn asymmetry of twisted arms and knotted stubs. They looked out of place on the Mexican hillside, and he imagined them as exiles from the Holy Land. He’d never been to Palestine, but he’d been close enough, and these trees breathed a Middle Eastern breath to him.

  On that day one particular piñon twenty feet off the road inspired him to stop and park. He walked the short distance uphill and pressed his palms against its gnarled trunk, breathing in the resinous scent which reminded him of jasmine tea. Raising his chin, he studied the branches—a few of them seemed to beg for pruning, but he resisted their call—and their geometric dissections of the sky. And then he decided to climb. His hands grasping the lowest branches, he’d placed his left foot in a natural foothold, gripped, and had pulled himself up when he felt a sharp tug on the back of his shirt and a small but imperious voice.

  “Ayúdeme!”

  Help me. Jefferson’s mind traveled back to Spanish class, to a word he’d had no need to remember until that moment. He turned to find a slight girl standing just below him. She wore a thin cotton shift that fell loosely over her shoulders to her knobby knees. On her feet, a pair of rubber clogs, much too large.

  “Por favor, mister. Ayúdeme!”

  She motioned frantically, her breath short and shallow. “Pronto! Pronto!” she gasped and then turned, running up the hillside through the tall grass toward denser forest. Jefferson watched her run, the pup alongside her, unsure what to do. Should he follow? He felt the tug of the child’s innocence. Could he leave the motorbike on the side of the road?

  At the end of twenty yards she stopped and turned to see Jefferson still standing beside the tree. Even at that distance the child’s brown eyes commanded him. What was he waiting for? She flapped her arms and jumped up and down, yelling, “Pronto! Pronto! Pronto!” And as she did so, Remedios yipped a similar injunction. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

  After pulling the motorbike behind a bush, where he left it with a silent prayer that it would be there when he returned, Jefferson sprinted up the hill after the child and the pup, who by that time were far ahead, across the open hillside and running into the denser, flatter pine forest. In less than five minutes they’d come to a clearing, low grasses surrounded by mixed pines and cedars. The place had the feeling of a hollow, though it was not clear if the land was actually lower there or if the taller trees made it seem as if it were.

  A hundred yards before they arrived at their destination Jefferson could hear low groans of pain, and dread grew within him. He had heard the sound of pain so many times in the war zone, he didn’t know if he could face that sound—and the suffering person who inevitably came with it—again. A constable of ravens sat overhead in the tallest of the surrounding pines, and these gave him some comfort. Esco had always told him that people who feared ravens simply did not understand the species.

  All he knew to expect was the damage done by gunfire or explosion, but what he came upon instead was the girl’s mother in the midst of childbirth.

  The woman lay on a quilt atop a bed of pine needles. Draped on low branches hung a few articles of clothing—a few small dresses that must have been the child’s and a few larger ones, obviously the woman’s. Two mugs, a saucepan, and two spoons perched on a circle of rocks around the charred remains of a campfire. So this was their home. Scattered around the base of the tree were a vinyl suitcase, a plastic doll dressed in denim, some blankets, and one large chopping knife on a wooden block.

  The child took her place next to her mother, bent down, and whispered something into her ear. Then she stared with scared eyes at Jefferson. The woman had paused between two waves of pain, and Jefferson leaned down to try to talk to her.

  “Are you okay? Do you need help?” he said, feeling a little stupid; it was plain that the child would not have come running if all was well. He also imagined that the woman spoke no English.

  “Por favor,” the child said, the only thing she knew to say as she held her mother’s hand.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Jefferson said, feeling his breath fall away. “I’m not a doctor—I have no idea what to do.”

  The woman arched backward with a terrifying scream that sent the girl into a fit of panicky babbling and tears. Once her pain had eased, Jefferson knelt down beside the two. He touched the mother’s arm and then that of the girl. “I don’t know what to do,” he repeated, shaking his head, but then, seeing the fear in the woman’s eyes, he changed his tone. “It’s gonna be okay, okay? It’s okay—I’ll do my best, okay?”

  He knew that though the woman’s cries came from her mouth, and though her bulging belly was the location of her baby, neither of these were where the action was about to take place. He knew that if he was going to help this woman deliver this baby, he was going to have to kneel between her legs. His eyes were going to have to be wide open, his hands ready to touch and calm and cajole and hold. There was no time to ponder as the young girl begged him with her eyes and the woman clutched his wrists and the unseen baby made its inevitable way nearer to them all in the quiet hollow of that solitary wood.

  He spoke to them to calm himself, to organize his thoughts in a time of stress, even though he knew they could not understand his words.

  “I’m just going to move down here and see what I can see,” he said, sliding between the woman’s legs and lifting the blanket that covered her. At first he saw all the expected sights: knees, feet, skin. But when he forced his eyes down to below the woman’s belly, he was momentarily confused.

  “Wow. Okay. I think I can see the baby’s head,” he said. “That must be what that is—WOW,” he said again, trying to appear calm, trying to mask his bewilderment. It was too much to ask of a young man with very little experience with women, to help deliver a baby. For an odd moment Jefferson tried to think if ever in his wildest dreams he had imagined this contortion of hips and vagina and vulva and anus. And there was definitely a small, wet head jammed in, like a cork, between all those lips and folds and wrinkles. He thought again that really, he was not the man for this job.

  The young girl was at his side now, kneeling down with him and grasping her mother’s ankles. The mother spoke a few quick words to her daughter and then looked at Jefferson again with pleading eyes, as if to remind him that this life is for the living. It did not matter what he had done or not done prior to this moment. This right here, this now, was all that mattered. A scattered line came to him in the moment, one that he could not place, and he began to chant it now as the woman set her jaw and attempted to gain purchase in the task at hand.

  The best moments of life, she thirsted for those.

  The best moments of life, she thirsted for those.

  The best moments of life, she thir
sted for those.

  He chanted the line over and over as he rubbed the woman’s stomach and patted the young girl on the head. He chanted because he did not know what else to do, because life had caught him unprepared. His need to make it to Mexico City, his memory of all those killed nearby in combat, all those lost limbs and all that blood, coagulated with the longtime sorrow of all he’d never had, and still, the baby made its way toward the light and air and the touch of its own mother’s skin.

  He tried to pray, but he could not. It had been so long since he had spoken directly to God. He tried to remember scenes from TV shows and movies dealing with childbirth, but nothing he could recall was helpful. The woman screamed and thrashed her knees from side to side, and there seemed nothing to do but hold her. He closed his eyes.

  The child screamed something he interpreted as “Baby’s coming!” and he nodded, believing it must be true. He repeated the words—Baby’s coming!—to the woman, and she nodded between screams and took a series of deep breaths, as if preparing for something really big. The child squeezed his wrists, and the woman closed her eyes and groaned in a new deep tone, a sound Jefferson would have guessed meant death rather than life. He did his best to separate himself from the dark pain of her voice and her eyes, and he focused instead on that little wet head emerging. It popped out a bit more—he could see a forehead and the beginnings of ears—and then popped back inside. Then there was a pause as the woman caught her breath. It seemed the bursts of pain were separated by about twenty seconds. The next screams brought the baby’s head completely out, half its purple neck too, and the child placed her small hands under the baby’s head and screamed in delight to her agonized mother. The next scream and push brought the first shoulder and Jefferson reached in and held the baby, waiting for what seemed like the certain end. With a final whoosh the second shoulder and all the rest of him—because he was a boy!—poured forth from the woman and into Jefferson’s arms.

  Almost as soon as the heavenly light had begun to soften, the young girl stood at Jefferson’s side with the big kitchen knife, gesturing to indicate that she would hold the baby and the cord if he would cut it, and so he did. Blood and wetness glistened upon every surface, on his fingers and hands and wrists and forearms and in his hair. There was a swath of blood across the thigh of his blue jeans—he noticed this later—but in the moment he was aware of a warm quiet and of a licorice scent and of the young girl’s humming. He swaddled the baby in a towel, and handed him to his mother, whose face had been transformed, after the savage screaming of moments earlier, into that of a dewy damsel. She could not have been more than twenty-three.

  The infant suckled, and the young girl arranged dandelions on her mother’s bedsheets, and the woman smiled and then dozed, smiled and then dozed. All seemed well and good. Motes of light sifted through the leaves of the surrounding trees, abiding spirits to christen the moment. For indeed there was a tangible holiness in that clearing beneath the pines, and he recognized it, a feeling he had sometimes had among the newly dead. Whether it was the presence of God or of some other heavenly being, he could not say; he did not know how or what to call it, but the presence was unmistakable, and it was good.

  By some mystery of nature or perhaps fate, mother and child and babe were healthy and whole. The infant’s skin glowed a vibrant red, and when he was not cooing like a baby rabbit at his mother’s breast, his lungs spewed the loud fury of hot, lively life.

  Jefferson sat with his back against a tall sturdy pine, his mind brimming. He fought with his brain, and tried to stop all the thinking. He could not explain the reason for his deep, steady breath, but he guessed it was good for him, this steadiness. He had not known it would be like this, helping to deliver a baby. Was that what he’d done? Had he helped deliver a baby? The process had had a natural momentum and seemed not to have required his help, but nonetheless, he had followed the call of the young girl into the woods, he had knelt between the legs of the shrieking woman, and with his own two hands Jefferson had welcomed the baby into the world. A host of heavenly beasts flew in abundant loops in the sky overhead, and the quiet was full of the music of the ages, while from the tops of the trees the ravens kept watch and waited and chanted silent blessings and prayers of thanksgiving. An easy breeze accompanied the night as it came upon them, full of the twinklings of distant galaxies and the mother moon.

  The three passed the night easily, and in the morning Jefferson prepared to leave.

  “Will you be okay?” he said to the woman, hoping his tone would convey some of his meaning. He touched her shoulder—he was close enough to see the perspiration above her lip—and then took several steps back to survey the scene. The young girl—yesterday’s sentinel—slept in the crook of her mother’s arm, and the babe suckled, and the woman smiled a weightless smile.

  “I’m leaving, okay?” he said. “Adiós?”

  She nodded.

  To turn and walk out of the hollow tore at Jefferson’s heart, but he did it anyway, never looking back as he walked down the hill, the pup at this side, past the large piñon he’d been about to climb when the child had first found him. He pulled the motorbike up from the hard ground and walked it back down to the two-lane highway. Remedios leaped into her basket, and he pulled out onto the road, heading southeast for the outskirts of San Miguel, and beyond, toward Querétaro.

  31

  The bike raced along under Jefferson, carrying him onward as his mind replayed the birthing in the hollow. Those forty minutes had been intense, but something else was haunting him now. He felt he’d experienced that same intensity before; it was as if he’d seen those deafening rays of light and heard those blinding screams in another lifetime. Jefferson had never thought about it before, and even now, as he did so for the first time, he told himself it was impossible.

  Throughout his twenty-three years, similar flashes of memory had occasionally lit up Jefferson’s mind with wonder, but he had never been able to identify their source. When he was very young, they might have been set off by bright sunlight shining directly into his eyes, or by too much sugar, as his grandmother maintained. Later, after he’d been introduced to the concept, Jefferson thought it might be the Holy Spirit spreading comfort and insight. But now that he’d helped a woman give birth, Jefferson wondered if this flash of memory might have originated in his very own birth. Could anyone possibly remember his own birth?

  Esco had told him a few stories, enough to prove that he’d been born into the world just like every other baby. Much of her banter about his mom he’d tried to ignore, however. Once he reached fourth or fifth grade, when he emerged out of the haze of early childhood and had to face the fact that he did not have a mother’s hand in which to place field-trip permission forms, Jefferson decided that the less he knew about her, the better. And his birth? He’d never actually thought about his birth.

  Now he tried to remember enough of Esco’s stories to begin to piece them all together. His mother had been sixteen years old, a sophomore at Santa Fe High. Her name was Faith. She’d stayed in school until her stomach gave her away, and then she’d dropped out, saying she was done with books anyway and that she refused to be part of what she called the Preggers Club, the ten or so other Santa Fe High student moms who that particular year had waddled around the high school, and eventually brought their new babies to the on-site day care. His grandmother hadn’t known much about the boyfriend, Jefferson’s dad. Only that he was Lakota, like Esco’s husband, and that Faith had been crazy about him. Once, when Jefferson had begun to think about his mother’s choices, about the fact that she had chosen a life without him, he’d felt himself getting angry. Although he knew it wasn’t Esco’s fault, that Esco had not been the one to leave, he yelled at her anyway. “How could you have let her do that to me?” he yelled. “She left me! I was a tiny baby!”

  “She was so young, Jefferson. Not a bad person.” Then Esco gave him her I’m-serious look. “She couldn’t face what she had done, but I tell myself s
he’s out there somewhere, living a good life. And your father too. He must have been a good kid.” Her voice trailed off then, and she looked away for several minutes, way out the window toward the Jemez. When she faced Jefferson again, she was composed. “Each of us comes into this world with challenges,” she said, as if she were a trained therapist. “You should thank god she was smart enough to leave you behind with me as early as she did. Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

  That was the first and last time Jefferson had raised the topic of his mother’s personal merits. His perspective and that of his grandmother were too far apart, separated by too many circumstances. But he continued to think of his mother—Faith—just as anyone might. He wondered where she lived, whether she was in fact still alive at all, and which of her traits had whooshed with him through the birth canal and stuck to his very being. Was he a good reader because she had been a good reader? Was the 200 meters his best race because she had been a sprinter? Did she reject meat too? He thought about Esco long ago insisting that his mom had been a good person, and he wondered what specific examples she would give if asked.

  Low hills pulsed alive around him as he rode on. On that day his mind spun with the fact—an irrefutable fact—that his own mother had been pregnant with him for nine whole months, carrying him around in her young little belly until it was time to push him out between her legs and into the big, bright world. He’d traveled through the whoosh just as that tiny baby boy in the hollow had, the nearness of life delighting his own vivid face, his wide-open eyes, his strong, firm fists. And just like the woman in the hollow, Jefferson’s own mother had experienced the flash as he had nestled into her arms and suckled at her breast that very first time. He just knew it. It had been late in the night on November 18, 1986, and there must have been peace and love and thanksgiving, if only for a little while.