That wrongness she’d felt on the roadside at the salt lake. Before Old Lady Salt had intervened. It was back. As if Malia had taken the steel knife to Calliope and not the cord.
It shouldn’t have felt like this.
She was screaming.
Her legs shuddered and gave out; she keeled to her side, curled into a seashell on the mattress. Her body went cold. She was dripping cold sweat. Had Old Lady Salt forsaken her after all? Had Bisabuela? She was dying this time. She was dying and there was no help.
Her first girl, covered in corn, wrapped in husks and a blanket.
Her corn girl.
Calliope rutted open, her body an earthquake-riveted landscape, a city fallen. She blacked out and came to, blacked out and came to, again and again, each time certain she had died. Nala, misshapen and fuzzy though she appeared through Calliope’s milky-filmed eyes, was crying, and the other women were instructing her to calm down, to move out of the way if she was going to cry instead of help. Malia was speaking rapidly in Zuni, pressing strips of cloth against Calliope’s pelvis and thighs, pulling them out blood-soaked, siren-bright red, then reapplying clean cloths and calling out orders. Someone was wrapping Calliope in large, damp towel-like cloths that smelled of patchouli, incense Bisabuela had burned in her home, what felt like a lifetime away. Malia reached inside of Calliope, her palms pressed together and cupped as forceps, and now her voice was calmer, quieter, rhythmic. She was praying. To whom Calliope didn’t know. Her mind was swirling charcoal and blinding white, ribbons of curling smoke and strobing lights.
She couldn’t push. Had no energy. Nothing left.
She felt Malia pulling.
A rigid, coldness from her birth canal.
Not a plum-packed head siphoning through Calliope.
Not a slippery fish.
Was her child dead?
There was no crying.
There were gasps.
The women’s faces were alarm bells.
Was her child dead? She couldn’t form the question into sounds. She blinked and blinked through the haze.
Malia was holding the silent weight.
She handed it to Wowo łashhi, who held it at a distance, chanting low and grief-stricken.
Malia reached back into Calliope.
Was there anything else?
She kneaded Calliope’s abdomen.
An umbilical cord attached to nothing came sliding out like a snake. This was followed by two separate placentas, fat as steaks, the afterbirth.
Wowo łashhi, show her to me, show me my child. Is she dead?
Malia was packing Calliope with cloths. The women were sprinkling cornmeal on the silence in Wowo łashhi’s hands. The age-furrowed grandmother turned toward Calliope.
The last image Calliope saw before her eyes tunneled and the world went dark—her child was not dead. Was not a child, was othered in stone, was petrified.
Her second girl was river-smooth, obsidian-shined. Basalt-heavy.
Her second daughter, black volcanic rock.
TWENTY-NINE
WATER JAR CHILD
Calliope dreamt she was bleeding out. She stood on a mound of desert shrub and wild grass covering a place she’d never been, a place the spirits called Hawikku Village.
Her ancient guides staunched her flow with corn husks woven into a blanket, which they wrapped around her, then led her down the red dirt path toward the stone shrines swept with cornmeal and turquoise and dedicated to the gods. The spirits surrounding her, their voices, a chorus. This place Coronado once occupied believing it the seventh city of gold, we have reclaimed.
Ice-wind battering her cheeks and face, she wrapped the corn blanket over her head as a rebozo. Beneath the mound, a pit house. Ancient ceremonial kiva. So too the Earth will reclaim. Broken pottery in colors of terracotta scattered the rock-lined trail encircling the mound.
In the place Calliope had bled, a trail of corn sprouted behind her. She picked the two tallest corn shoots then sat beside two large, smooth stone metates for grinding. From within her husk rebozo, she pulled a mano, shucked the corn, laid it on the altar, and with the mano in both hands, she began moving with the weight of her whole body, the strength of her shoulders and back pressing down through her arms, back and forth, shearing, until the corn became a fine yellow powder.
The Ancients sang her on as she worked. When the Earth has had enough, she will shake her troubles off. She will shake her troublemakers off. She scooped this and mashed it into the butter of her hands. Rolled it into a ball, flattened it again. Shaped and shaped until the corn grew into a child, who sprang from the stone of her hands, laughing.
For she was finished, and sank into the earth, solid, hardened, at peace. And as her corn-made child ran from the mound to the grass below, the spirits intoned. The Earth has all the power she needs.
When she decides to use her power, you will know.
* * * *
She awoke groaning, guttural and mammalian, rooted to the bed.
The pain was primal.
It had not diminished but intensified.
The women had not left Malia’s room; they surrounded Calliope’s mattress on the floor. She’d been redressed and could feel the cloths, cool and fragrant with herbs, between her thighs. Still, the cloths stung against the knifelike pain of her perineum. In her palm, Malia crushed a plant Calliope did not recognize, poured it into warm water, held it to Calliope’s mouth and helped her drink it. Like a child, the liquid spilled down her chin and landed on her chest, but she could feel relief almost immediately, a warming of her skin, a releasing of her leg and thigh muscles. Her uterus felt hard, like a pear. She reached down and touched her belly, the rigid mound softened, not flat but gelatinous, empty.
She searched the room. When she spoke, her voice was ragged, hoarse from screaming. “Where are my twins?”
Malia spoke in Zuni to another woman kneeling beside Calliope, and at Malia’s bidding she arose to an adjacent room where Calliope could hear children’s laughter. She listened for Eunjoo’s voice, the girl no longer at the dining table as she was during the birth, but Calliope could not make out the girl’s birdlike chirping amidst the other children’s. How long had Calliope been unconscious? Time hadn’t felt like itself since the light on the bridge, but it seemed even more pliable, more strange since she’d first gone into labor in earnest—pain had rendered time wobbly, set it wavering.
The woman (an aunt or cousin of Chance’s) came back from the adjacent room, Nala beside her, carrying a large wooden object that reminded Calliope at first of a boat, like Noah’s ark. Nala turned it around; she held Calliope’s first twin, her corn girl, wrapped in an intricately woven blanket and strapped to a pinewood cradleboard with suede cords, a kind of face guard made of green cedar sticks protruding in a semicircle, half haloing her face, her neck cushioned by a smaller blanket. The infant lay faceup, her head flat against the board. Cornmeal flakes dusted her forehead, reminding Calliope of Lenten ashes. The corn girl cried softy, a cat’s whining mewl. She was hungry. Calliope’s pelvis clenched, her nipples hardened into berries and stung, as the milk swelled her breasts. She reached for her corn girl, searching for Andres and Phoenix in the baby’s face, a shock of dark hair beneath the blanket enshrouding her head. Grief dropped as quickly as the milk, and the child latched. “Her twin?”
Nala’s eyes flashed, briefly. Malia’s eyes reproached her. Calliope’s stomach lurched at the silent exchange between the women.
“We’ve buried her to protect her, E’lashdok’i. It’s the Zuni way.” Malia’s voice was heavy, but soothing, steady. No hint of the quick anger she’d shown Nala. The silver around Malia’s face gave her a holy aura. “If the baby is stillborn or dies before the fourth day of life, it is buried inside the threshold where all step on the earth grave. This allows the soul of the infant to rest while the mother can
become pregnant again.” She pressed a cloth against Calliope’s face. “If we’d waited, you might have grown gravely worse or turned infertile. Or illness might have cursed this living one.”
Calliope’s salt tears washed down her chest to the corn girl. “And this cradleboard?”
“Belongs to our family. It was Chance’s, now it’s his daughter’s.”
Calliope swallowed the lump in her throat, closed her eyes, tears still flowing.
Perhaps Malia mistook her shame for confusion, for she continued, “We pass the cradleboards on as heirlooms. Unless a child dies in it; then it is burned to keep the child from evil spirits. The spirits are as free at birth time as at death time. When these occur at the same time, the spirits are even stronger. We have to remain watchful.”
“Where’s Eunjoo?”
“With the other children. We took them out once we realized what had happened.”
What had happened? Calliope had given birth to a dead baby? She could have sworn it looked like … but that was crazy. “I need to see my other child.”
Malia stared at Calliope almost suspiciously. Like she was sizing her up.
Calliope pressed again, her voice cracking, “Please.”
Malia’s forehead furrowed into a grimace, her lips pressed. “That would be unsafe, E’lashdok’i. Unwise.”
The lump in Calliope’s throat flowered, choking her. She wasn’t Zuni. This wasn’t her family. These were not her beliefs. How could she accept what she didn’t understand? No. She had to see her baby. Even dead, it was still hers. She opened her mouth to dispute, the corn girl suckling at her breast. These women had saved her. Without them, both she and Calliope might have died, certainly would have died. These women were Chance’s family. He’d risked their ire and punishment for Calliope and this corn girl. She closed her mouth. She’d wait for Chance, ask him what could be done. She had to see her other twin.
She steadied her breath. “Where’s Chance?”
Malia’s shoulders and arms tensed, her hands grasped together. The elongated disc of her face briefly scrunched, softer, in pain, then was stoic again. “The father is not part of the birth process, E’lashdok’i. He’ll be here once your ceremony is resumed. We had to halt everything for your health. But you are restored, look. Your milk is flowing, your cheeks and face no longer sallow. You will survive.”
“See, Good Luck Mother,” Nala said, stroking Calliope’s hair away from her face.
Calliope contained the rueful laughter she felt gurgling at her throat. She and her corn girl were a sham. Her second twin was … what? Dead? What had she seen before she’d blacked out? Blackness. Basalt. Her other daughter was … a rock. They’d buried. And wouldn’t show her. She said nothing.
Malia continued. “Your own e’lashdok’i should not be on her cradleboard yet. We had to make do. She should be lying beside you on a bed of warm sand for the first four days. On the fourth day, her Wash Mother will wash her again with cornmeal, blessing and sealing her from the dark spirits, then give her names to her.”
“Names?”
“Zuni and Spanish.”
“Oh.” Calliope wanted to keep calling her corn girl. It felt wrong to name her, let alone give her a Zuni name. “How long was I unconscious?”
“Night and morning.”
The corn girl finished breastfeeding and Malia washed Calliope with water poured from a gourd while she stood, gingerly, the water falling to mats on the floor. She was still dressed. Nala placed a clean dress over the wet one, and Calliope slipped out of the wet dress, which Nala tossed into the stove. During this ceremony the other women removed the mattress she’d birthed on and prepared a new bed in its place. The new bed was a layer of hot stones covered by a layer of sand, then by warm blankets.
She lay down on the heat and her corn girl, free of her cradleboard, was given to her.
Malia still appeared troubled. As she spoke her hands fluttered to her neck, like birds searching for a perch. “Now we will call Chance.”
* * * *
He stood in the doorway, haggard and weary. The corn girl was nursing again, but Calliope didn’t bother to cover herself. No one instructed her to, even with all their modesty customs, and she worried it would break the illusion of intimacy. She was supposed to be his wife after all.
His face eased when he saw her and the corn girl, but then he glanced around the room, searching for the other twin. Her eyes stung with tears. He walked toward her, knelt down and began to kiss her forehead, his lips cool against her skin, warm from the rocks and sand. He didn’t need to ask What happened? She wiped her eyes, whispered, “Necesito hablar contigo. Solo.” She couldn’t ask the other women to leave; she didn’t know her place in the unspoken hierarchy. But he could.
His mother’s hands still clenched, her expression still pained, she nodded at her son and spoke authoritatively to the women what Calliope understood as leave the parents and their e’lashdok’i (which she had gathered meant daughter).
Before Nala left the room, she whispered to Chance. Calliope heard: Brujería. Too late.
Calliope didn’t know which question to ask first.
They both asked at once, “What happened?”
She smiled at their mutual concern for the other. The ruts pressed into his leather skin, worry lines—something had gone wrong. With Mara? His talk with the Elders? His wavy black hair usually fallen across his shoulders was tied back in a tight ponytail, his shoulders and arms were tense, his jaw tight. He sighed.
“Mujer, the other twin didn’t make it?”
“They won’t tell me what happened to her.”
“My family?”
She nodded. “Before I blacked out, I caught a glimpse. Malia had to pull her out of me. I couldn’t push.” Her heart raced, the pin prickling of sweat against her skin, the heat from the rocks and sand becoming unbearable. They’d made it too hot. She kicked the blanket off her legs, like a recalcitrant child. She wanted to tell him what she’d seen, the other twin, what Wowo łashhi had been holding. “It didn’t make sense. I was delirious.”
He pressed his hand against her shoulder; his palm was work-hard and damp with sweat. She resisted the urge to pull away from the heat. “Nala said witchcraft, but it could have been anything. No one knows what causes such things. It wasn’t your fault.”
Wasn’t it? Wasn’t everything that had happened since the bridge somehow her fault?
“I don’t believe in witchcraft.” Her voice was flat though her stomach roiled, her face feverish.
“Tell me what you saw.”
She looked down at the corn girl still swaddled against her chest. On the ground beside them, the cradleboard. “They buried her.”
He followed her gaze. “My mother gave you mine.” His voice was soft, kind. Wistful. She couldn’t stop the tears. He held her face, wiped it gently with the pads of his thumbs. “It was my daughter’s. I’m glad it’s gone to yours.”
“You have to let me see my other girl. I have to see …”
“That she’s gone?”
“They buried her.”
The corn girl began to cry.
He reached for her. “May I?” His whole family had held her. They thought she was his. “What will you call her?”
She felt silly telling him what she’d been calling the corn girl. “Do you know where they buried her? They won’t tell me. Malia said it’s for my safety, and hers. Both girls.”
“We believe that.”
“Will you bring her to me?”
He sighed again, reached to sweep the hair from his face, but it was already pulled back in the ponytail. He touched the corn girl’s baby-fine hair instead, cooed at her, whispered something in Zuni.
Calliope smiled. “What are you telling her?”
“How beautiful she is. Like her mama.”
Calliop
e’s cheeks and neck burned. The blood rushed to her breasts, milk dampening her dress. She reached for the blanket, covering herself. He handed the corn girl back to Calliope.
“I’ll bring the other one to you, mujer. Only, I’m worried it’ll upset you, seeing her.”
“My baby died, Chance. I’m already beyond upset.”
He stood, went out the front, returned with a small shovel, pried back the wood that planked the doorway threshold, and began digging. Calliope turned away, stared instead at the corn girl, imagining a lifeless version of her—same black hair, honey-raw skin, bluish veins butterflying her forehead and cheeks and eyelids. She was holding her breath. She released it. Chance kept digging. Calliope considered telling him to stop.
A scraping sound. Metallic.
He was chanting as he’d done in the snow at the body of the Suuke, then pulled a bundle from the ground he brought to her, wrapped in a blanket identical to the corn girl’s. Calliope’s stomach coiled into a thick rope, knotted in her throat. The same cinching of space and air as in the hangar, her lungs compressing. But not with any machine or mythical creature. She was staring at her other daughter. What she’d seen in the black hole of her memory was real.
Though she knew what she’d been expecting to see, she was trembling, her voice shaking. “Where’s my real baby? What is this? What’d they do with her?”
Chance called out in Zuni and Malia rushed into the room. Had she been at the doorway listening the whole time? Had Calliope said anything to betray their lie? She wiped her eyes, turned from the volcanic rock in Chance’s hands. This had to have been some kind of strange ritual. This couldn’t be real. What had they done with her flesh-and-blood daughter? Why had they replaced her with a rock? It didn’t make sense. While Chance and his mother held a spirited conversation in Zuni, Malia’s hands flying to her face and in the air several times so it appeared as if she were signing or dancing, her hands little brown birds searching for a lost nest in the branches of a tree, Calliope stared at the corn girl. She wanted to go home.
Trinity Sight Page 23
