Stillbird

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

When Charles thought he was sending his daughter to the safety of the next world, he was halfway there himself and his cold hand missed its mark. She bled slightly from the wound on the neck, but the cold water soon stopped the blood. The river itself, which had taken her grandmother, rejected her young spirit and carried her to the safety of John Banks’s arms, for he was waiting for a miracle that morning. Seeing her pale body floating obediently downriver, he assumed she had passed on and was overjoyed when he pulled her out and she came to, slowly, sluggishly, but very much alive. He sang a lot of loud praises to the Lord that morning, while the confused and terrified child watched him, wondering in the back of her mind where her father was and if he was coming to get her. John Banks had not seen her father’s body, which had been washed down a different fork of the river and disappeared, so he couldn’t answer her questions and he was in no mood to ponder earthly questions anyway and thought she was asking about the great father, the one holy father, who art in heaven, so what John Banks had to say to Mary made no sense to her. She was so cold and glad to have him wrap her in a blanket and when he helped her up into his wagon, she thought he might take her home where she would wait for her father, and she told him as best she could where she was from, although it was hard, because she didn’t know where she was. But none of that mattered to John Banks, for by the time he helped her into his wagon, he had noticed that she was with child and when he asked her about the father of her child, she had said only that she had not been with anyone. Then it all became clear as day to John Banks, who had been praying for a miracle for years now, trying to work his power on domestic animals, curing the livestock of local farmers and getting paid for it when, by accident, a calf or a goat recovered from its illness and took off beneath his ordinary hands. He preached too and gathered a few desperate followers, who supported him with their gifts of cash, or food, or a place to sleep for the night as he traveled around and around the country, always coming back to the county of his birth, his miraculous birth, to hear his family tell it.

  But his birth was the last miracle his family was willing to believe in, and he knew they would never believe this one, no, two: the death and resurrection and the virgin birth. He had with him the pure child chosen by God to deliver unto the people the son of God, a second time as, of course, the Bible predicted time and time again. That night by the firelight he looked through his worn little Bible and read passage after passage to Mary, whose very name portended the great event, but she didn’t think much of it, didn’t see it at first and kept asking about her father and when he would return her to him. “Your father isn’t ready to receive you just yet, little girl. You have great and important work to do here on earth first,” an answer that thoroughly puzzled Mary. She began to panic then and wanted him to leave her to find her own way home, and John reassured her then that he was taking her to her father but first she had to give birth to the child she carried, and then she could return to her father whenever she wanted to and she realized that he was right, for her father had gotten angry at her when he realized she carried a child within her, and she agreed it was best to wait and was grateful to John Banks, who offered to take care of her during her pregnancy.

  The first thing they did was travel to a town far from where John Banks’s family would be likely to find them, and he began to tell the story of finding the girl in the river and bringing her back to life and how she carried God’s own child within her, and some folks thought he was crazy, but others were convinced, because John Banks could talk himself into a veritable fever and be very convincing to those folks inclined to believe in such things. “He’s the real thing,” they would say, not fully understanding what kind of reality they were talking about. And folks were poor then, dirt poor, hopelessly poor, and a miracle of some kind was what each and every one of his followers needed badly, some kind of miracle, any kind of miracle. So John Banks came to them at exactly the right time with just exactly the right promise. They, one or two, then ten and twenty, rallied around him, waiting for this miracle, because by the time John Banks reached them, they had nothing to lose and might just as well believe in his promise as someone else’s. They’d believed the promises of politicians and look where that had gotten them, and they had believed the promises of their hearts when they had needed to hope that they could somehow make a life out of the land, the bedrock, the barren, rocky land, the beautiful, fickle land that they had acquired so easily but kept at their peril, afraid to venture forth to greener pastures, until there were no greener pastures to venture forth to, and look where that had gotten them, so why not believe the promise of this preacher with his young innocent virgin, why not? And some went further than that and believed it with fervor, with joyous piety, because it was true, it was true and it was a sin not to believe in the truth, hadn’t they always been told?

  So John Banks and Mary Queen of Scots traveled around the countryside together, and little by little it dawned on Mary what this John Banks fellow was up to, and at first it frightened her but then it intrigued her, and she did like all the attention and awe. People gave them money, for what, she couldn’t rightly tell, and John Banks bought her beautiful ready-made dresses, dresses with high necks trimmed in lace and long sleeves with lace trim and empire waists that left room for the baby growing inside her, but still gave her figure an elegant line. He brought her flowers to put in her long blonde hair, fine, baby fine hair she had, and he admired her hair, her skin, her eyes, but he never laid a hand on her, never suggested anything indecent, for he truly believed that Mary carried the son of God in her womb, and he perceived her, plain girl that she was, a great beauty because she was blessed with grace and that was the true beauty of woman, to be beloved of God. He would talk like that for hours and get carried away with the music of his words, and Mary would get carried away too, listening as it if to music, not making any particular sense of what he said, but soothed to hear him say it. He told her once it wasn’t sense that people looked for in a preacher but rhythm, and that was why words sung had more impact than words spoken, but when he, John Banks, spoke the words of his heart, it was like singing, and surely Mary had to agree with that. And Mary did agree with that and she would sway, enraptured, when John Banks preached to his followers, and the followers who would clap and chant amen would see her in that state of otherworldly grace, and they knew that she, Mary Queen of Scots, was the real thing, too. They didn’t call her that of course, no sense in offending the Irish, the English, the Italians, the Germans among the followers. John Banks was impressed with the name her mother had chosen to give her, but advised her that from now on it was best she be called simply Mary, the universal Mary, the Mary that all the followers could adopt as their own.

  And they did. All through the cold winter, Mary and John Banks were the guests of farmers and miners who fed them their best and stoked up the fires, using more wood than they should have to show hospitality to the holy travelers. All had their stories of hard times and Mary listened with sympathy, but helpless, and John Banks didn’t really listen, waiting for their stories to end so he could preach to them, stoke the emotional fires that would keep him warm in their hearts and make them generous. John Banks preached from habit, not always feeling God in him, but pretending he felt God in him, so he would be ready when the time came; so in that way John Banks really did have faith. And he really honestly believed that Mary was his miracle. Sometimes she said things that made him think this was just another young girl in trouble, but he stifled his misgivings and forged on spreading the good news, because the people needed good news, not least of all himself; he needed good news as much as anyone. And the home brew helped keep the fires stoked too. John and his followers always drank a lot of the home brewed wine and brandy that made them feel festive. He let it be known as well that he didn’t believe God frowned on moonshiners as much as some would have them think, because…and then he would pull out his Bible and quote all the places he had marked that spoke o
f the fruit of the vine, taking the fruit of the vine to cover moonshine as well as the wine fermenting behind the wood stoves of his followers’ sitting rooms.

  Mary never stopped praying for her father and missing him, but she came to see John Banks as a father too, although he was younger than her father and seemed to be on the verge of drunk almost all of the time. She half expected him to come to her in the night, but he never did and she began to sleep easier after the first couple of months. She even said something to him on a couple of occasions that should have clued him in, but by then he was too euphoric, or drunk, or both to put two and two together about her father and her son.

  Around Christmas time John Banks talked about going to visit his Auntie Ada and debated whether or not to take Mary with him. He knew without even thinking about it that his Auntie Ada would assume the girl was his lover and the baby was his, and nothing he could say from his heart or the Bible would change her mind. So John Banks found a place to leave Mary for Christmas while he went back home to spend a couple days with his aunt, who had raised him and his father. The folks who put Mary up were kind and tried to include her in the family celebration, confused as to how exactly she should figure into it, being she was the mother of the second Christ, or would be giving birth to the second coming, or however it went, they really needed John Banks to explain it to them, how this was supposed to be happening. Mary was more confused than they were and forlorn and lonely, spending her first Christmas away from home. But she comforted herself with the thought that in a few months she would have her own child, who she would take everywhere with her, wherever she had to travel, and would never be lonely again. At 13, she looked forward to a companion as much or more than to a son. No one ever discussed the possibility that the child could be a girl. Later, when she was tallying Christmases, she would tell her son that that Christmas was their first Christmas together.

  When John Banks came back to get her, he asked her when she expected the baby to be born, and Mary really didn’t have a clue, but the woman who was taking them in for a while speculated by the looks of her, that it would be a spring baby, coming out just about the same time as the calves and other farm animals, and they all agreed that was a good sign, very appropriate. Mary remembered back to her garden, how she had planted each thing in its turn and in circles of color and scent, and she missed having a garden and picking her supper fresh. Her hostess was only too glad to invite her to return then and partake of her garden, welcome to help plant it if she liked. But Mary said she’d be going home to her father then, and the woman looked at John Banks puzzled and sad, thinking Mary meant her father in heaven, and John Banks gestured that silence was the best response at that moment. Then her husband broke in and asked where the birthing would take place, and John Banks answered that the spot would be revealed in due time, and the plain farming man offered to let them build something up on the hill behind his house. That field got a lot of sun and it was high up and the followers could camp below and wait for the glorious event. And John Banks responded that God had spoken through his servant Elmer Baker, and the next day they visited a neighbor who had a sawmill and talked him into giving them some lumber, and while John Banks traveled through several counties to spread the word of where and when the great event was going to happen, the farmer and his neighbors built a barnlike structure with a chimney, where Mary could spend the rest of her pregnancy sitting by her own woodstove. Although it was high on the hill, there was a spring higher still and they piped the clear spring water down to a cistern by he cabin, as they had taken to calling it, and folks brought pitchers and tubs and quilts and a hand-hewn bed with a feather mattress, and every day someone came up the hill with food for Mary and then, when he came back, for John, who still slept in his wagon, away from Mary so everyone could see that he didn’t touch her that way. And so she lived like that, in a kind of shrine for the rest of the winter, until by late February, she was so big she could hardly walk, and then in March as the first spring flowers started to poke out from the snow, Mary went into labor.

  People had been gathering, making campsites all over the hill since the end of February, building fires to keep warm and making gifts for a child. One man carved puppets out of wood, a woman brought cans of pickles, another a cloth bag of dried flowers and spices. There were embroidered pillows and hand-crocheted, lace-trimmed linens, knitted baby blankets, mittens and booties, just like a baby shower, Mary thought. Everyone wanted to be a part of this, and it was strange, because Mary remembered that at home everyone always wanted to be part of any birth, any ordinary birth, for no birth was deemed ordinary. Everyone at home made gifts for the new babies and celebrated when the baby was born healthy and the mother lived, and mourned if one or the other or both died in the process. Birth was a miracle. Mary asked John Banks, wasn’t birth always a miracle anyway? And he pondered her question for a while and then just said that this was different, but Mary couldn’t really see that it was.

  People came with guitars and banjos and fiddles and every night there was music by the campfires. And some reporters came from newspapers around the state, and John Banks would talk to them but wouldn’t let them talk to Mary. Mary was just as glad not to talk to them, for she was getting worried her father would find out about what was going on and come and take her home and be angry that she was passing herself off as someone special, but then again, she knew he wouldn’t want her telling anyone that the child she carried was her father’s child, her earthly father’s child. So Mary kept quiet and let John Banks do all the lying, or was it lying? Certainly he knew more than she did. Sometimes she pretended it wasn’t happening, and sometimes she pretended she believed John Banks, and sometimes she pretended she didn’t know what to believe, but underneath it all, she wanted to go home and cried quietly in the cold pre-dawn hours, when the campfires glowed low to the ground and the music was but a faint reverberation in her head.

  Then one night she heard a voice, a loud clear voice, a man’s voice it sounded like, and the voice said, “Your father is dead,” and that was that. Mary knew it was true even though she didn’t know where the voice had come from. Now she knew she would never go home again and she would have to travel forever with John Banks all around the land lying to people and the thought scared her, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else she could go. She told John Banks about the voice, and his heart went cold.

  But John Banks put his best face on things, and walked out among the followers camped all over the hillside, more of them with each passing day, some believers, some gawkers, some attracted to a good time wherever a good time was to be had, and he preached to the followers, preparing them for the great event despite some dread he felt in his heart.

  When Mary’s labor began there were many midwives among the followers to assist her in the birth, and she needed help to be sure, for it was a long and painful labor beginning at dawn one day and not ending until dawn the next. The midwives took turns watching, encouraging and helping her and there were moments when they thought they might lose her or the baby, or both, and John Banks was already thinking about what he would say if such an event were to occur. But the baby was born alive to a weak but healthy young mother. Problem was, the baby had no arms.

  The first midwife to know this was the one who had reached up inside Mary to feel if the baby’s head was in the right position. It didn’t feel right, the baby’s body, but the woman thought it couldn’t be what she thought and guided the baby out of the womb while the other women watched, holding their breath and letting it out all at once in unison. Then the baby was out and crying and fine in every way except that he didn’t have arms. The women all looked at each other to confirm what each had seen and couldn’t quite believe. Mary still didn’t know. A second woman washed the baby and laid him on his mother’s breast, quietly, not knowing what this could mean. The crowd was yelling, wanting to know if the baby was born, wanting to see the baby, yelling for the midwives to h
old the baby up for them to see. Some started running up the hill to get a closer look, others held back in awe now that the baby was certainly born, it had to be, yes? No? When? What was happening? Even John Banks had kept his distance during the birth. But now he ran up the hill ahead of the followers to see this child, whose coming he had preached about now for so many months.

  When John Banks saw the baby, he was speechless for the first time in his entire life, and just when words were most needed, words to explain this terrible turn of events, to turn the terrible into the awesome, the meaningful, the symbolic of something righteous. John Banks couldn’t speak and let the crowd take over, rumoring that the child had no arms, and this could not possibly be the son of God; this had to be the child of the devil. Mary had passed out in exhaustion when the baby finally came out and lay peacefully with him on her breast, hearing the crowd as though from a great distance. And then they were all around her, crying and yelling and cursing John Banks who had lied to them, had taken them in, had led them into devil worship, for this was so clearly the work of Satan, and the crowd might have stoned them, John Banks and Mary and the baby and the midwives, but a few among them managed to turn them away, down the hill, back to their homes.

  While the anger died down as the crowd dispersed, the midwives tried to comfort Mary, and Mary apologized to John Banks, who was too stunned to say much. One of the midwives talked about other such births she had witnessed and the others joined in to tell of their experiences, but neither Mary nor John Banks paid them much heed. The midwives stoked the fire and prepared some food and left them alone to ponder their future, now their followers had abandoned them. The man whose land they were living on came up the hill to tell them he didn’t believe in all that devil stuff, but that he didn’t feel safe in his community letting them stay there either. He was sorry for the girl, suspicious of the preacher. When he left, John Banks said his first words of the day. “The Lord will find a place for you,” he said, and it scared Mary that he said “you” instead of “us.” She felt herself about to be abandoned again and she didn’t know where she could go with her baby, the beautiful, sweet, but strange, baby with no arms.

  Mary named her son James because her father told her that he would have wanted to name her Jamie if she’d been born a boy, always hastening to add that he was glad she was a girl. The next day, John Banks went to talk to the farmer and ask if they could stay on the hill just a couple more days to give Mary time to recover from the long and difficult birth, and the farmer and his wife said of course, they wouldn’t drive the child away and hinted that they hoped and expected she would be recovered soon. So John Banks left her up on the hill with the baby and one of the midwives came back to help her, bringing food with her, and John Banks was gone three days and three nights, which made Mary afraid he had already abandoned her.

  But John Banks came back in a cheerful mood and told Mary, ah Mary Queen of Scots, such a wonderful name after all, that he had found a place for her and her baby James, but first he would baptize the baby, it was the least he could do.

  So they went to the river, the river that had taken Mary’s grandmother, had she but known it, and her father also, and given her to John Banks to save, for what, she wondered, and there they baptized the baby James.

  Then John Banks drove Mary and James to another town over another mountain, where a traveling carnival had set up. They went into a tent and watched a man and several beautiful young women perform tricks on a high wire, and Mary Queen of Scots was thrilled to see this, never having seen anything like it in her life, but she wondered why in the midst of their troubles, John Banks would want to go to the circus. He didn’t speak to her or look at her, so she sat quietly, enjoying the show with half her mind and half her heart and worrying about her future with the other half.

  When the show inside the tent was over, Mary had seen many things for the first time, including a striped tiger and an elephant, which balanced balls on its trunk and then lifted the beautiful girls up high above the audience to deposit them on their aerial platform. Then they walked around and looked at the sideshows, a man who was twice as tall as any normal man, a fat woman with a very real looking beard and a two-headed calf. Then Mary understood that John Banks had found a place for her and her baby with no arms.

  XII