Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “I know right where this baby of yours is, in the ground, waiting for this little red trowel.” She pulled a shovel out of a decrepit window box where more rosemary grew and dusted it off, also into our cups. “I can draw you up a map. I also know that little woman left something out which you will need to know, the old crone. Maybe she’s forgotten, being dry of womb herself—that’s why she wants all the eggs, hey?” Rosemary chuckled to herself.

  “Why should I believe you?” I said, bold, because it was all I had left, that child under the dirt. Because I desperately wanted that shovel, and map, and all she had to give me, but I was afraid of what the cost would be, afraid of being tricked, afraid she was making it too easy.

  Her face flushed like the ember of the cigarette butt before she put it out and burned my forehead.

  “Who, little lady, do you think I am? What, mamí, do you think I am good for? Damn this sad old world, damn all the men who brought me here, and their wives, for dying, for forgetting. Jesus, how it changes. Look at me. I am the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. No need to nod, it’s part of the package, part of the bargain, like your mama’s small feet are yours. Hips, tits, hair, my rosemary breath—look, I am a woman on either end of mothering, suspended. My breasts are always full of milk. Once they left offerings for me, the women when they had babies in them. They prayed and said Mary and said Jesus, sprinkled rosemary, knew my face as the part of them that would be forever taut and wholly giving, in that act of gestation. What do you think I want you for—my dinner?”

  “But why help me? What’s in it for you?” I asked, nervous.

  “You will bring my name back to your people. You will speak of me. You will tell them. You will tell them the way to me and my rosemary, so long as they bring a gift. A woman like me, I will die of being forgotten, of having nothing to suckle. Already almost have. I’ll let the cow step on my head soon enough if you don’t. It has been so long since a woman came all the way into my home and took what I could give. It’s been so long that anyone asked. This sad old land has much need of mothers. Of my mothering. But it’s nothing if it’s not asked for.” She paused, patted at her dark coiled hair. “And of course, there’s this business of your child… I have some interest there, you see, but of course I can tell you nothing of it at all. Might be a false hope. But no harm in trying, no? There’s just a token I need from you, to make sure you do it, you tell them, you repeat and repeat my name.”

  “What?”

  She gestured for me to lift the needle off my neck. Terror pricked through me.

  “No, my death, it’s there.”

  “Yes, precisely.”

  “You could snap it, any instant.”

  “But why would I, unless you forget to say it, my name, to them? Why, and you a new mother nursing a babe?”

  I gave it to her for that thought alone: the little one, at my breast, sleeping, sweet and warm, Sam stroking the crop of hair growing on that tiny head.

  She pushed the plastic cup to me. A barn swallow darted to my shoulder. I picked up the cup. At my lips. I trembled, thinking that she had already known about this child, that he might really be mine. Then I said, “What’s the second thing I need?”

  “A broom. A little one, made all of rosemary—branch and brush. When you dig up a baby from the earth, it’s the reverse of a grave, but you must still sweep it first, straightaway. And you must sweep the baby too, with that little broom, to get the earth off. If you don’t, she won’t know who her mother is—you or root or rock. And, hear me, mamí, you must sweep anything else you happen to dig, even if it’s just a stone, hear? Anything.”

  We drank. It was a shot of fire and blossom to my gut. My neck felt light. The place where she’d burned me pulsed. Licking the last of the liquor from her lips, Rosemary leaned near and drew a map on the palm of my hand with the fine, sharp tip of my compass needle, held delicately. A dark ink came out of it with each scratch. I feared it would snap, and I would drop dead, but she only kept on scratching out that topography, humming.

  The map has never washed from my hand, etched there with the needle of my death. The burn on my forehead has faded to a silver scar, the shape of a rosemary flower. I followed those directions on my palm back down the road, a little broom and a trowel in my basket. I began to feel light-hearted. It took me only a week to walk from Rosemary to the X on her map, in a little meadow with red alders and buckeyes flanking a stream at its edge.

  The meadow was big. A baby under it could take weeks to find, I thought, and how do you know a trowel won’t cut right through her like a root? I sat down. I felt cramps at my hips, like menstruation, only harsher. I felt warm there too, like that shot of liquor with Rosemary at her table in the salmon-pink shingled house. To the right of the X on my palm she had etched a tiny rock, a tiny bed of orange poppies. Dozens of poppies grew in the meadow through the grass. The rock on my hand looked very smooth, like the two knobs at the joint of a bone. I set down my basket. I began to search, pushing aside the tall grass and the orange flowers, scaring a vole, wondering at the scale of her map, if it was a pebble she’d drawn.

  When I found the rock, two-knobbed, smooth, covered in pale green lichens, it was as big as my hips, sticking up from the earth like half of it was wedged under at a diagonal. The poppies grew around it fiercely, a fiery bright orange. I brushed at the area with my rosemary broom, like she’d said, though it was thick with vegetation. It was not a little neat gravetop, like I’d imagined, bed-shaped, obviously the location of my child. Before I stuck the trowel in, I felt sick. Nausea and fear.

  I thought of Sam, and the baby covered in dirt, little rootlets at its feet. What if he couldn’t love it? What if he felt betrayed? What if the tooth in me, sharp and gnawing, didn’t go away? What if Rosemary snapped my needle, cleaning her white teeth with it, stroking her black coiled hair, before the baby was old enough to speak?

  I stuck the trowel hard in the dirt. It broke a deep crescent, six inches down. I’d never used a shovel. The silver efficiency of it in the packed ground felt like some extension of my hand. My hips cramped again, like blood and an egg moving.

  I dug for hours, until the bats started swooping and above them the soft stars. The trowel only removed small clods, and my hands were weak. After a few hours, I found that the rock beside the hole was a bone, big and deep, bigger than a cow’s or a horse’s by two times at least. I dug at its edges until I had pulled it free. I dusted it with the rosemary broom, got all the dirt off. Under the bone, the soil seemed softer, darker, like it had been turned. I dug up bone by bone with my hand trowel, thinking each one the white flesh of a baby. I dusted and swept them clean into the dark and the bats. The air around me smelled like rosemary from all that sweeping. I wondered if it was a joke: bones instead of a babe, death instead of life. I shook under the darkness, the sweat from digging cooling on my skin. My hole got wider and wider until it was almost four feet in diameter, and as deep.

  By morning the skin under my nails bled. My eyes saw strange shapes in the dirt under my hands—first just the woman Rosemary, reaching out her cigarette-burnt finger to my forehead and to my chin. Then egret women; the man with the top hat, the long pipe, the coyote’s tail, Niss drinking from egg shells like they were soup bowls, my own womb before my eyes, like looking at the womb of a cut-open doe, pink and red, taut, vulnerable as a fruit with the thinnest skin.

  By morning, the pile of bones beside the hole was bigger than me. I imagined some pure white cow from the time Rosemary spoke of, with dairies, centuries ago. A celestial cow with endless sweet white milk, suckling everybody, telling us all we were forgiven. I found no hooves. I found a big wheel white as the bones, and imagined some old cart and plough. Delirious, I daydreamed of milk, digging, digging those small scoops. I hit the corners of a ribcage. I dug and dug around those long ribs, big enough for me to lay my whole bed within. Huge. Dirt was thick between them. I was careful, wondering at their size. I’d had no water in nearly a day. My head
pulsed and swam.

  In that swimming, I saw a bundle inside those ribs the shape of a creature’s heart, a bulb, roots dangling from one end, wrapped in layers of skin like an onion husk. Under that skin I saw the silhouette of small shoulders, a small round head, clenched hands, curled toes. Nested in that ribcage like a rare lilac bulb. I screamed. All I can tell you is that I screamed and my body seemed to fill and then empty, fill and then empty, as I stared at that bundle, my fingers bleeding, my hair loose in its dark red tangles around my shoulders, my breasts aching all at once like they never had, leaking milk against the grey tatters of my dress, even through the grey tatters of my old sweater.

  I have never given birth to a child the normal way, out my body, between my legs, blood, placenta, contractions, umbilical cord and amniotic fluid. I have only dug one up from the ground, my own son, and I can tell you it took every piece of my body’s strength. When I pulled him up through a broken rib, sheathed like any seed, I ached everywhere a woman would ache, having just pushed a life out of her womb. And everywhere in the heart as well. The dirt all over us felt like our own blood, his and mine. And like any new mother, swept into the soft wrinkled skin of her child, touching the ten fingers and ten toes as I was, watching the little lungs fill like fluttering wings, helping to peel off that seed husk, I forgot everything else around me.

  I dropped the trowel. I forgot the bones. I forgot the rosemary brush. I’d dusted every femur and rib with it, even the ribs that held my son, before I found him there. But in my arms, that baby filled me like the wingbeats of birds, and the sun through them. I could only reach my hands to slough off his husk, where all the dirt and roots clung, to peel him out, damp as a bulb, wrap him in the little rabbit-skin blanket I’d brought just for this moment, stroke his damp head, let him find the milk at my breast. It was hours, truly, before I remembered, before I looked at the rosemary broom and heard her say, “every root, mamí, every rock.” By then, my little son was clean and dry as a whistle at my breast, I sleepy and fed by his drinking and a handful of cold water from the stream.

  I did it anyway, in a panic. I brushed him. He cried because the rosemary was rough. It seemed silly, and I felt uneasy, remembering how it had to do with dirt, and roots, and maybe I’d been meant to sweep the little husk even before peeling it open, not his soft new flesh. The rosemary branches left thin red stripes on his skin. I wept when I saw them. I rubbed him with crushed wild plantain leaves from nearby and my own milk. I kissed the length of him, and he only cooed gently, unperturbed, smelling of rosemary.

  Before even my husband, I carried him to Niss like I once had those baskets of eggs. I came to her opened in every way, like a doe who has been eaten and transformed, even her bones—into needles, each one carved. No shoes, hair full of flowers and dirt, grown red to my waist, grey dress and grey sweater in rags, basket battered and with a new load—Poppy, named for the flowers growing where he was born. She was there on the porch, placid, knitting. She looked once at the baby drinking from my breast. She never spoke that time, though I think she knew, as she cracked a small duck egg over his head with a sad look in her eyes. He kept drinking and didn’t move a fist to wipe at the yolk.

  To this day his skin is faintly criss-crossed with delicate pink stripes from the rosemary brush. He is fourteen now. He can’t speak. Not to us. His mouth can’t make human sounds, his tongue can’t shape them. I love him no less than the moment I drew him from the ground and the milk leaked through my dress. He listens; he understands us, but he cannot replicate our speaking, our writing. His mind darts off. I see it in his eyes the color of dark soil and pale bone. They dart to the grasses moving in the wind, the nests of voles in those grasses, the spots where edible bulbs are forming before they ever show their faces above the soil. I see him speaking to the hermit thrushes and deep in the grass to the mariposa lily bulbs. I’ve crept up to listen only once. The sound scared me all the way through, because it was not human in the slightest. It was bird. It was a bulb-growing lullaby, creaking and minuscule. When he comes in I kiss his cheeks and he smiles at me like any boy. Sam sits by the creek with him for hours, with fishnets. They wait together, quiet, holding hands, amiable like a man and a tame creature, a fox that likes to sleep in your lap.

  Though he speaks only to the hazelnuts and the great horned owls, and in voices I will not listen to, I have found what it is I longed for, the yolk to fill my old green shell. I am at ease now. I do not weep or stare at the silhouettes of trees from the bedroom anymore. I do not weep at my blood every month. I have found that this single thing—to care for, to raise—is enough. My breasts have sagged from his fierce drinking. My hands are worn from stitching new diapers, worrying when he is off long in the marshes, smoothing at his red hair. At night, I think of his heart, not mine, and sleep with soft and gentle dreams.

  Every spring, I walk the women of my village to Rosemary. I walk them all the way to her salmon-colored home thronged with brambles. I suppose it is a pilgrimage of sorts. We bring her all the blue seaglass we can find from the beach. None of us want our husbands to come. We fear they will never leave again. Maybe one day we will not be jealous. She lets us each drink a whole cup of milk. She lets me run my hands along the neck of her cow. Sometimes when we first come upon her, she is so beautiful, she is so big, I wonder if she is a piece of the sky, calling down the clouds into cups, letting us look in and see that all things need succor, thick as cream.

  The one stray piece of this story, the piece that sometimes comes into my placid dreams, is the bones that covered and held my boy in the ground. I told Sam about them, their size, the night I returned, and we lay in bed naked together, all of us, in the summer heat. Poppy slept. I murmured about celestial cows, exhausted, and he kissed my forehead, and smoothed his hands over my breasts, and slept too. But the next day he told his father, who had come visiting with a brace of rabbits and a green glass bottle from the beach. He glared at my child with unease, lit a pipe in my kitchen and said, “You silly woman, don’t you know whose bones those were? And you left them? Addled.”

  I stared back at him, offended, cradling Poppy at my shoulder. I shook my head that I didn’t understand.

  “Lyoobov,” he whispered, like we might be overheard. Tears caught on the wrinkles around his eyes. “Lyoobov,” like a prayer. “From the Fall, the great dreaming beast. Didn’t you listen when you were a girl, when Bells, Perches and Boots came through?”

  I smiled to myself. I hadn’t, watching instead the cow, whose milk, Bells had seemed to intimate, was full of all their tales.

  Sam’s father made me lead all of us back to the spot. Poppy stayed the whole time in a wool pouch at my breast. It took us a week to walk there, a straight shot now that I knew the way. And that map, besides, would never leave my hand.

  I found the hole where I had loosely recovered the bones. The poppies were still bright, though a few had lost petals. Nothing was there. The hole was hollow and empty. Not a single vertebra.

  AND NOW, LITTLE CHILD, LITTLE POPPY WITH TWO MOTHERS, ONE human, one earth, now you have the beginning and the middle in your coffeepot. I, old Juniper, I will give you Anja at last, and you will decide for yourself if she is the end, or another beginning all over again.

  It is said, because she said it, that girl Anja who shed her hair at the end of every summer like her buckeye father, she said it right into my old and folded bark—she said that when she arrived she was pregnant with a baby, and its father was there beside her, partly carrying her, so cold and tired were they. His name was Martin. She murmured that name fondly here, round and round the rings of my body. I know many long things, see, because of all my windfall arms, dry and hot in the fires the People make, but also because that Anja, dear girl, she crawled in here and she whispered her secrets to me like to a grandma, like to the mama she missed. She tucked them into my berries and my berries into my folds, into the roundness of my rings and their own tellings, round like the round and round Road the People follow and h
ave followed, year by year, round the peak where the Last Glacier is perched. Their Road, they follow it like I follow around and around the rings of time that seem to begin as well as end in my very bark, my very dust-blue berries.

  I know many things because of my branches, burning, because of her whispered memories, and because of the ones who have my berries in their bellies and watch the passing of the world. For example, I know what the black-tailed hare children saw the night Anja and her Martin arrived, because they had eaten of my berries. These, their thoughts, are a memory floating in me like a scrap of smoke:

  In the snow on the mountaintop there is a woman pregnant, round belly about to pop. She smells like she has come all the way across the cracked land, the Valley once filled and drained yearly by two rivers bound up in tar. She smells, to we leverets who watch through the snow-covered sugar pines, like her feet have dragged through all the broken roads where once there was sickness and blood. It is not a good smell; we the leverets know the smell of danger, but it is only around her feet, where she has walked, and around his feet, her mate who is freckled like the nighttime gets freckled when there is no moon. He is the one who has put the baby in her. This we can smell very sweetly because we know much of such things. This knowing goes in with hare-mother milk, rich and heady, imparting no smell, so we may lay hidden for hours in the grasses, growing fast, drenched in the fertile sap of our mothers and the truth of Loving. This we smell about that little woman too, she who is tucked into a round hut, the kind the People use in winter.

  We like those bone houses. The People sing about the Moon and her very heady milk to the bodies of our brothers and sisters after they’ve been caught and snared with blood-red strings, spit and smattered with salt over the fire, strong back legs eaten while between their teeth the People whistle little wild-mint songs for the wild hare souls to take back to their mothers, their cousins, their mates, their yet to be born babies, saying: “we know your Names, we will tell you of the Moon when it is time for us to eat your body, and your bones will be made into small houses inside which we will dream and those dreams will soothe you like your mama-doe milk did when you lay in the grass of your birth.”