Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  Eva ate all of her breakfast rice this morning. Out in the garden, she offered to mix the cement while I gathered rock to wedge around the post in the final hole. But when I bent to lift it into place, something seemed to give in my lower back. I lurched forward onto my knees while my muscles screamed and twisted.

  “What is it?” asked Eva, bending beside me. “My back, it hurts.”

  “Lie down,” she said, with an authority I had not heard since she last danced. “On your back. Flat. Bend your knees. You want the whole spine to touch the ground. You’ve got to rest it before you do any more damage. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to lift with your back?”

  I lay still until my muscles quit their spasms. But when I tried to sit they clenched again and I had to wince in pain.

  “Lie back,” Eva commanded. “It takes a while. But if you rest now, you’ll probably be able to dance—I mean work—tomorrow.”

  “We were almost done,” I groaned, “and the lettuce is beginning to sprout.”

  “I’ll finish it,” she said. “The deer can grow their own damn lettuce.”

  So while I lay with my spine pressed against the soil, Eva set the final fence post and wrestled a ring of chicken wire around the extended garden.

  “We can stretch and tack it tomorrow,” she said when she had finished. “It’s makeshift,” she added with a satisfaction that sounded like our father’s, “but I think it’ll keep the animals out for one night. Come on, Nell. We’ve got to put you to bed.”

  Next morning my back felt fine. But Eva insisted on giving me a massage before we went out to the garden.

  “If we don’t take care of it now, it’ll plague you for a long time. I know,” she said, pushing me down on my mattress with an imperiousness that delighted me.

  I lifted off my nightshirt and then lay still, marveling at how quickly her hands found sore spots I had not even been aware of. I sighed and relaxed into her ministrations, giving the remnants of my pain up to her fingers. Her hands felt so capable, so intelligent and caring, and I luxuriated not only in their touch, but also in what it implied, that the sister I loved so much still existed, might finally be returning.

  “There,” she said at last. “How’s that?”

  I moaned my pleasure, and she moved away, leaving me lying on my mattress, eyes closed, arms outstretched, a puddle of happy flesh preparing for the day ahead, anticipating the needs of the garden that had absorbed my attention since I pulled the first handful of weeds.

  “Ready or not,” I said when my plans had crescendoed and it seemed I could no longer lie still, “here I come!”

  I pushed myself up from my mattress and was looking for a tee shirt when I caught sight of Eva.

  She was sitting at her place by the table, and silent tears were rolling down her face, the first tears I had seen her cry since I found her bruised and weeping in the yard.

  “Oh, Eva,” I said. “What is it?”

  She shook her head as if to shake away her crying, but when the tears continued to course down her face, she answered, “I get so scared, I can’t stop it. It’s like black waves, and I’m a little cork. I bob to the surface and think I’ll do okay, and then another wave comes and I’m drowning again.”

  I went to her, bent over her, pressed my naked arms around her. She sat motionless, her face glazed with tears. Then suddenly she turned, sobbing wildly, and buried her face against my chest. She cried until my breasts were slick with tears, while I held her, rocked her back and forth in my arms.

  “My turn,” I whispered, when her crying had finally begun to wane. She tried to laugh a protest between her sobs, but I took her hand, pulled her from her chair, and led her to her mattress.

  “Lie down,” I said. “Let’s see if I learned anything.”

  I winced when my blistered palms first met her skin. At the touch of my hands, she began to weep even harder. “It’s okay,” I told her. “You can cry now, all you need.”

  At first I simply stroked my sister’s back. See, my hands said, here is Eva’s neck, here are the curves of her ribs, these are her sad shoulders, and the lovely vertebrae of her spine, here is the tender bowl of muscle that is the small of her back. Then, starting just below her occipital bone, I massaged the strong trapezii that run down her neck and across her shoulders, rolling them like ropes between my fingers, the symmetry of my hands matching the symmetry of her back. Over and over I pinched and eased and soothed those clenched muscles while she wept into the sheet on which she lay. I forgot about my oozing blisters, forgot even about the garden waiting outdoors, and concentrated entirely on how my hands were speaking to her shoulders.

  Gradually I teased and rubbed and urged the pent-up sorrows from her shoulders. Finally I felt those muscles begin to ease, to loosen so imperceptibly I would have thought it was my imagination if it weren’t for the fact that her crying, too, began to quiet. She sighed, and my hands began forays down her back, across her ribs, along her spine.

  When it seemed she had relaxed back into herself, I dug deeper, pushing and kneading and squeezing the horrible memories and new habits the rest of her body harbored. She shuddered and winced, stiffened and struggled, and each time finally gave way, yielding even more profoundly as her muscles discovered there was no need to cling to all that pain.

  Slowly my sister softened, grew passive and spent, until at last every muscle in her back was loose, and when I lifted her arm, her hand flopped limply. For the first time since the rape, her flesh was not afraid, and I felt a joy rise in me, through my hands, up my arms, swelling my heart because it seemed it was in my power to help my sister heal.

  I began caressing her softly then, my hands working as gently as breath across her back, telling her good-bye, that my work was done. I touched her the way I would touch a fledgling bird, treasuring and tendering what I could hardly believe had allowed itself to be held. But even as I stroked her to wean her from my touch, I could feel new tension enter her body. For if her flesh was now relaxed, it was also vulnerable and open to intrusion, and I could sense her fear that I might leave her.

  So I continued to stroke her, waiting for the time when her body would tell my hands it no longer needed their touch. I loved her so—my sweet, sweet sister—loved in her all else I had ever loved, loved all of her I knew and all I knew I could never reach, loved this dancer, this beautiful woman beneath my hands, sister with whom I had once peopled a forest, sister with whom I had suffered so many things, sister whom I could leave for neither love nor death.

  I love you, my hands said. Remember this is yours, they told her. This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept it yourself, claim it again—your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It’s all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it. Take it back.

  I ached with love for her. My hands trembled across her back. I wanted to save her life, wanted to call her soul back from the dark place where it crouched. I loved her so much, loved each swell and plane of her, each quirk and quickness, loved the eager way her lungs drew air, the way her spine arched as my hands floated the curve of her hips, wandered down the twin columns of her thighs to the hollows of her knees, and then retraced their path, to meet at that shadow where her legs converged.

  When she turned to face me, I could see she had returned at last. She was alive with a longing that so shook me that I quailed. But before I could pull away, she began, with fingers and palms and breath and tongue, to teach me more than I had just showed her about the sanctity and rapture of being flesh.

  We made love, my sister and I. Together we resurrected the joy of both our bodies. Together we remembered that not all force is violence, and when Eva, who had huddled into her shame and silence and pain, arched and opened, and cried out, I knew that something precious had been redeemed.

  We cuddled like babies until we slept, and later we woke and rose together from her mattress, dressed and d
rank water and went outside together to plant the new garden.

  It must be almost June by now, though that’s only the roughest of guesses. These days we spend all our time in the garden. In the grey dawn we drink our cups of white tea and eat our meager breakfast. By the time the sky has begun to blossom with color, we’re outdoors, shivering in the chill air as we open the gate with stiff fingers. We thin and weed while the sun rises, our breath coming in white puffs, our bodies loosening, warming into the work. Later, when our hands can stand the cold, we start to water. First we use a hose to siphon out the old claw-foot bathtub our father set up to collect water in after the electric pump quit. When the tub is empty, we begin our endless trips to the stream, carrying water to the garden a bucketful at a time.

  We’ve planted every seed we’ve got, every seed our father left us, even those unidentified ones that sifted down into the bottom of the box. We’re fertilizing every volunteer, pleading with every plant to live, to thrive, to blossom into food.

  Digging, weeding, watering, we work until the sun is above us. We stop for lunch and a rest, and then we work until the light begins to thicken and the cool air brings its swarms of mosquitoes. At night when I lie in bed, my muscles tremble and my calloused hands ache. I close my eyes, and I see dirt. But I have no dreams.

  We still glance towards the woods more often than we did before, and we don’t venture outside the clearing, beyond the withered ring of tulips. We still jump when a hawk calls or a jay squawks or a deer crashes through the forest. I carry the rifle with me wherever I go, and we still retreat indoors well before nightfall. Long before they’re ready to roost, we lure Bathsheba and Pinkie into their coop with garden thinnings. And once we are inside, we triple-check the boarded windows and move an elaborate assortment of furniture in front of the door before we begin to fix our dinner. But all that has begun to seem more like a ritual than a necessity for survival—I am almost certain the man who shattered our lives is not lingering in the forest, that we are safe at least until the next one wanders in.

  I worry about the seeds my father saved because they are the result of last year’s hybrids, and I worry about next year, when all the seeds we plant will be open-pollinated. I worry about when to plant and how to fertilize, and whether or not we’ll have enough water. I worry about low germination rates, and diseases and insects and accidents. But I haven’t wanted to be dead since the day I entered the garden.

  Eva still doesn’t dance. But she works as hard as I do, and sometimes she laughs in the morning when we greet the rows of new seedlings that have pushed through the earth while we slept.

  We have begun to hold hands for a moment before we eat, our faces bowed over our plates of food, and though I can’t really say what we mean by that gesture, we find we do not want to eat without first reaching for each other’s hands. That is the only time we touch.

  Eva threw up yesterday morning. My first reaction was stark horror as I thought of ptomaine poisoning, dysentery, cholera, Giardia, the flu that killed Eli’s mother. I insisted that we take her temperature. But it was normal, she didn’t have diarrhea, and she hadn’t eaten anything I hadn’t also eaten.

  “I’m okay,” she kept insisting, “just a little queasy.”

  Finally she sent me on to the garden without her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I just need a nap.” And when I came in at noon, she had fixed me lunch.

  But this morning she threw up again, and again I had to go to the garden without her. I watered the carrot sprouts, weeded the potatoes, and was splitting firewood, the ax raised above my head, when an explanation for her sickness popped into my mind, and my arms let the ax come tumbling down in stunned disbelief. It glanced against the upended log, and the log rolled off the chopping block onto my foot.

  By noon Eva said she felt better, and she worked in the garden until dusk. But tonight I find myself watching her surreptitiously, sneaking glances at her belly, her breasts, sneaking glances at the encyclopedia: In addition to the physician’s tests for raised levels of chorionic gonadotropin, pregnancy is first recognized by the symptoms of nausea, swollen breasts, and missed menstrual periods.

  Not that, goes the voice inside my head in a dead-end prayer, a mantra of despair. Not that. After all we’ve been through, please, please, please—not that.

  Abortion, the encyclopedia says, is the spontaneous or induced expulsion from the uterus of the nonviable fetus. Purposeful abortion techniques have been practiced by almost all cultures, with or without social countenance.

  But I don’t need a definition or a vague sociological treatise. What I need are facts. Details. Directions.

  What I need is an abortion manual.

  There’s got to be a way. I think about it constantly. Bending under the sun, crawling across the earth between the frail green rows that sprout our future, I think about abortion.

  Eva keeps throwing up and saying she’s fine. Ever since she started dancing, her periods have been so irregular she may not have realized it yet herself.

  This morning we were pulling weeds, moving side by side down the rows of beans whose seed leaves were unfolding from the earth like pairs of wings. I had just finished breakfast, and Eva had again refused to eat.

  “No food,” she said, when I had offered her a hard-boiled egg just larger than an avocado seed, the first the hens had laid for months.

  But now she was crawling along beside me on the moist dirt, our paths separated by a line of tender plants. In a funny way it seemed almost holy, to be inching along on our knees, breathing on the plants, tending to them. The earth was cool, the sun warm, the birds were busy, and I realized with a sudden shock that for the first time since my being with Eli I had just had a moment of unabashed and easy happiness.

  “If all this grows,” I said, sweeping an arm around the expanded garden, “the two of us just may make it through next winter.”

  Eva had stopped, too. She rocked back on her haunches and said, “There’ll be three of us.”

  For a disconnected moment I thought she meant Eli was returning, and then I saw we were talking about that other thing, and I wanted to keep weeding. But she sat watching me, waiting for me to speak.

  “What do you mean?” I stammered.

  “There’s a baby coming.”

  “I’ve been afraid of that.”

  “Yes,” she said, working her hands into the soil, “there is. I wasn’t sure before. But now I am.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  She looked at me quizzically as she squeezed a handful of earth in her palm. “What can we do about it?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m not sure yet,” I answered, “but there’s got to be a way. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  “How to stop it.”

  “Stop it?” She opened her fist so that the clump of dirt lay on her palm, ridged and whorled with the pattern of her hand. “Why?”

  “But Eva—you can’t have it.”

  “Why not?” she asked, as if she had never spent all those years in her studio, fighting something as basic as gravity.

  “Are you kidding? How will we take care of it?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll find a way. Anyway,” she shrugged lightly, “it’s started. We can’t stop it.”

  “Of course we can. There are lots of ways. The encyclopedia doesn’t say much, but I think we can figure it out. There’s hot baths and hard exercise and maybe herbs. We could try the rest of the cough syrup.”

  “Do you know what you’re saying? There’s going to be a baby. You can’t just stop a baby.”

  “It’s not a baby yet. And you can stop it if you have to.”

  “Why would I have to?”

  “Eva,” I gasped. “You were raped.”

  She flinched and grabbed her abdomen as though she could protect it from those words.

  “That has nothing to do with it.�
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  “What?”

  “That has nothing to do with it.” “But Eva, it’s his baby.”

  “Whose?” she asked sharply, and for a second I swear she had no idea who I meant. Then she scoffed, “That man’s? Do you really think he could possibly make a baby?”

  She rocked forward onto her hands and knees, resumed her slow crawl beside the beans. “And even if that was when this started,” she said, as she drew a weed from her path, its roots like white veins in the sunshine. “Even if it did start then,” she repeated, lifting her eyes to hold mine, “how could this baby possibly be his?”

  “Well, genetics—”

  “Genetics!” She snapped the word out as though it were her rapist’s name. “Genetics. Did that ever make sense to you, Nell, that a woman could be pregnant and carry a baby inside her for nine months and then nurse it and care for it and change its diapers, and a man could claim it was half his?”

  “Our father changed our diapers.”

  “Then he earned his share in us. Besides,” she pulled another weed, her voice strong, gentle, and as sure as I had ever heard it, “how can this baby even be mine?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s its own person,” she answered triumphantly.

  So my sister is going to have a baby. Several times in the days between then and now, I’ve been swept by a worry so strong and cold it felt like getting caught in an ocean wave, tumbling in a wash of icy water and gritty sand, unable to breathe, fighting to find which way is up.

  Then the wave recedes, leaves me dry and standing on my feet, watering squashes, weeding tomatoes, staking up beans, making preparations for whatever future we may have left.

  Last night I dreamed that Eva and I were sitting on the ground beside the redwood stump where I first made love with Eli. A bear came shambling out of the forest towards us. Sick with fear, we watched it approach, saw the heave and shift of muscle beneath its dense fur. It loomed closer, and I noticed the bloated ticks ringing its eyes, the shocking length of its unsheathed yellow claws.