New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  One Christmastime, when he was about six, Andy overheard his father tell Uncle Andrew, just home for the holidays, that Uncle Peach, “sleeping one off in his front yard,” had frozen several of his toes, which had then needed to be amputated.

  “Toes!” Uncle Andrew said, laughing his big laugh. “Anybody can spare a few toes. He better be glad he didn’t freeze his pecker off.” In the midst of his sadness and exasperation Wheeler also laughed, and they went away, leaving Andy, whom they had not noticed, with a possibility he had never considered before.

  Andy had gone with his father to visit Uncle Peach after the surgery. Uncle Peach was sitting by the drum stove in his bare little house with his foot wrapped in a soiled white bandage. He was talking in his old, slow voice about the hospital in Louisville, which he pronounced “Louis-ville,” Uncle Peach had enjoyed his stay in the hospital. He had admired the nurses. “Damn pretty, some of ’em,” he said to Wheeler.

  And then, studying Andy, he said, “This boy’ll be looking at ’em, ’fore you know it.”

  When Uncle Peach died in Andy’s seventh year, Andy overheard his father and mother saying what a story it had been. His father said with regret and sorrow and amusement and, instead of indignation, perhaps relief, for Uncle Peach had died sober in his sleep in bed at home: “Like Jehoram, poor fellow, he has departed without being desired.” Wheeler was capable of feeling some things simply, but he never spoke of Uncle Peach with unmixed feelings.

  And then when they were all in Wheeler’s car, driving home from the graveyard on the hill outside Port William where they had laid Uncle Peach to rest, they were silent until Wheeler said, “Well!”

  He let the silence come back, and then he said, “The preacher takes a very happy view of Uncle Peach’s prospects hereafter.”

  Wheeler was lining out a text that would be clearly printed in his son’s memory, where it would gather commentary for a long time.

  Nobody was talking except Wheeler. Andy understood that his mother wasn’t saying anything because she felt that the continuation of Uncle Peach’s story hereafter was none of her business, and his grandfather wasn’t saying anything because he didn’t want it to be his business, and his grandmother wasn’t saying anything because it was her business. It came to Andy then, for the first time, that his father was still a relatively young man.

  The preacher had said Uncle Peach was going to Heaven, or was there already, because his soul had been saved when he gave his life to Jesus and was baptized at the age of twelve. His baptism, so many years ago, in another century, was still in force. Andy imagined that baptism had left on Uncle Peach’s soul a mark like a vaccination scar to show that he had been saved. When he got to Heaven, he was to be let in.

  Andy had stood in church beside his mother, had heard her singing with the others,

  While I draw this fleeting breath,

  When mine eyes shall close in death,

  When I rise to worlds unknown,

  And behold Thee on Thy throne,

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee,

  and he had thought, “She? She will?” And so he knew that in the soul’s bewildering geography there was a Rock of Ages. In his mind it looked like the Rock of Gibraltar, cleft like a cow’s foot, and you could hide in the cleft and be all right.

  But from other songs they sang he knew that this geography had a shore, too, from which the dead departed to cross a wide river, and another shore beyond the river, a beautiful shore, that was Heaven. He had seen in his mind a picture of people on the far shore waving to people coming across who were waving back. They were calling one another’s names and they were happy. The picture meant that in Heaven, love would last as long as it wanted to and have as much room as it needed.

  But Wheeler wasn’t finished. He was always concerned with fittingness, which was maybe a kind of honesty. Those were words he used: fitting and honest. He was always trying to get the scattered pieces to fit together in a pattern that made sense. He wanted to find the right words and to say things right. Right was another of his words. His effort often made him impatient. This also Andy took in and remembered.

  “If Uncle Peach is in Heaven,” Wheeler said, “and Lord knows I hope that’s where he is, then grace has lifted a mighty burden, and the preacher ought to have said so.”

  And then he said, as if determined in his impatience to capture every straying piece, “And as an earthly burden, it wasn’t lifted just by grace”—meaning it was a burden he too had borne. Even at the time, Andy caught that.

  So did his grandmother. She said one syllable then that Andy never forgot, and that later he would know had at least four meanings: that his father would have done better to be quiet, that she too had borne that earthly burden and would forever bear it, that Uncle Peach had borne it himself and was loved and forgiven at least by her, and that it was past time to hush.

  She said, “Hmh!”

  Wendell Berry was born in 1934 and has belonged all his life to the place where he still lives. He has been married since 1957 to Tanya Amyx Berry. They have two children and five grandchildren. His most recent books are Andy Catlett: Early Travels (a novel), Leavings (poems), and Imagination in Place (essays).

  For me, the question of how something of mine got written is always embarrassing, because I am never sure. By now, I have known a lot of people, have a lot of memories of my own, and have a lot of memories of other people’s memories. I also have a collection of imaginings. All I’m pretty sure of is that you can’t make a story either by thinking it up or by remembering. If you live long enough, sometimes, somehow, you will see how the single thread of a story may connect—as here, the childhood of Peach Wheeler to that of Wheeler Catlett to that of Andy Catlett. The question of how things hang together is fascinating. To be able to imagine one possible way is a privilege and a pleasure.

  Megan Mayhew Bergman

  THE COW THAT MILKED HERSELF

  (from New South)

  First, he showed me his kidney. This, Wood said, is the cranial pole. He pointed to the C-shaped edge of his organ.

  My turn, I said.

  He moved the ultrasound probe to my belly, rolling the small tip across my hardening stomach.

  I think we cleaned this after the Rottweiler, he said. He squinted at the probe.

  Don’t drop it, he said, handing me the probe while he dimmed the exam room lights and warmed the transmission gel. Twenty thousand dollars.

  We were sitting in the veterinary clinic after hours, Wood still in his white coat, stethoscope around his neck. I was seated on a steel table, the metal cold against the backs of my knees. Wood had missed my last OB/GYN appointments and wanted to see the fetus for himself.

  I was lonely at my OB appointments, but there were dogs with shattered elbows, cats with failing livers, cows with mastitis. Crying women in the waiting rooms cradling arthritic shih tzus, one-eyed ferrets. Malamutes with slipped discs, terriers with severe allergies to carpet cleaner. I believed they needed him more than I did.

  He pressed the probe into my abdomen.

  Here is the gestational sac, he said. And this flash here—this is the heart.

  We were speechless then, watching the beginnings of our child thrive onscreen. Two freshly neutered Labradors whined from their cages outside.

  Every week there was a patient at the clinic Wood forbade me from seeing. Last week it had been a cancer-stricken lemur, a golden-crowned sifaka who was the last of his kind in captivity. He had been gentle with his keeper, raising his bony arm so she could stroke his side, a gesture that seemed to comfort him.

  This week it was Cerulean, a tripod Rottweiler.

  Too hard on the heart strings, Wood said, knowing I’d be unable to resist.

  Take me to see her, I said.

  She’s not pretty, he said. She’s been self-mutilating. Down there.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  Cerulean had come in that morning with a deaf man. Woo
d was an ultrasound specialist, and they had hoped he would be able to reveal a tumor or kidney stones—something specific.

  You don’t want it to be behavioral, Wood said. Always harder to treat the mind than the body.

  But they had found nothing. Her scan was clean.

  No mineralization, no masses, Wood said.

  Cerulean sat on the concrete floor and leaned against the cinder-block wall. Her black fur shone in the fluorescent lights. Her ears were small. I could not bring myself to look at her eyes. She had mussed the towels into piles. Her feet made me want to cry, the pads of her three remaining paws plump and worn.

  At three months I just looked fat. Like I had four sandwiches instead of one, I told my mother. I could cup my belly in one hand, swing my forearm underneath the slight mound the book said should be the size of a grapefruit. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word womb.

  Wood came home in his white coat, smelling of formaldehyde and anal glands. He asked “what’s for dinner” but did not listen for the answer. Instead, he stuck his head inside the refrigerator.

  How was your appointment? he asked, peeling off his white coat, pulling off his left shoe with the heel of his right.

  I made three-bean chili, I said, shooing the cat from the stove.

  I wiped buttered paw prints from the glass.

  Wood cracked open a beer.

  I was palpated today, I said. Like that thing you do to cows, when you feel for lumps in their abdomen.

  I can tell when a woman is pregnant by finding the ridge of her uterus, my OB had bragged. I touch a thousand tummies a year, for godssake.

  On the screen, the fetus had doubled over, then stretched, a sun salutation with no sun.

  I couldn’t help thinking, I told Wood, that the nub of his or her vestigial tail looked a lot like the end of a cocker spaniel.

  Incessant waggers, he said. Submissive urinators.

  Loving, I said. Warm on your lap.

  The picture of my fetus, taped to the kitchen cabinet, made my niece cry.

  I’m scared, too, I said.

  I meant it.

  The black-and-white photograph showed our child’s skull and vertebrae, eye sockets like moon craters.

  Later that evening, Wood rubbed my back, sutured the dress straps I had snapped with my swelling bosom. I could feel his breath on my scapula, his needle stitching cotton like skin.

  Friends came over for dinner that night bearing presents, pop-up books and sock monkeys. I put out a plate of crudités, noticed dog hair wound into the broccoli heads.

  Wood spoke of his upcoming conventions, the paper he’d coauthored on using ultrasound to monitor the morphology of female jaguar reproductive tracts. It was hard to trump frozen jaguar sperm.

  In captivity, the jaguar mother is capable of devouring her own cubs, he said.

  I blushed. I took this as a sign of Wood’s lack of faith in mothers.

  Here, Wood, I said. Open this package from your aunt. It isn’t just my baby, you know.

  Wood slipped his finger underneath the wrapping paper.

  A breast pump is an awful lot like a vacuum milking cup, my husband said, untangling the gifted contraption. He held the suction cups to his chest.

  Soon she will be the cow that milked herself, he said.

  Our friends howled.

  Cerulean came back to the clinic a week later for observation.

  She smells like pepperoni pizza, Wood said over the phone. I can’t explain it.

  I hated the thought of her on the cold cement floor, the cage bars in front of her view, the indignities of her mysterious sickness.

  Can I bring you lunch? I asked.

  I drove to the clinic with sandwiches and a bag of soft dog toys.

  What is this? Wood asked, holding a headless hedgehog.

  Let me put one in, I said.

  Wood placed one hand over his eyes and left me alone with Cerulean.

  Hi, I said.

  She looked at me from the corners of her eyes, shy and damaged. I sat on the floor and tucked my legs underneath my body. I wanted to massage lotion into her feet, stroke her back.

  Here, I said, handing her the hedgehog through the bars of the cage, then the stuffed cat.

  I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.

  Then—I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.

  Then—I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.

  Then—I feel very alone. I do not know what I’m capable of.

  My fetus grew arms, carried a yolk sac like a balloon.

  These, the OB had said, pointing to a white Cheerio on the screen, are the sex cells of your grandchildren.

  Tell them I’m sorry about all the weed I smoked in high school, I said. And that time . . . well, there were a lot of times.

  I wondered if I would fill the shoes of the mythical matriarch, if suddenly my pancakes would become legendary, my dresses tailored, my back rubs soothing.

  When I first told Wood I was pregnant, he had taken off his sweatshirt and placed the cockatiel he was administering medication to on the exam room counter.

  I think Nathan Scott Phillips pooped in my hood, he said.

  Wood’s cheeks were flushed. I touched his shoulder. It was a Saturday morning and I was helping him with his early morning rounds. I liked those mornings when the clinic was quiet and it was just the two of us feeding schnauzers and ferrets in between sips of coffee and exclamations about the morning paper.

  I am excited, he clarified, minutes later. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed the crown of my head.

  I wanted to be as interesting to Wood as a urinary bladder wall tumor, labwork. I wanted to be pored over, examined by his fingers, researched, discussed, diagnosed. I wanted to keep him up late, bring him in early.

  Cerulean likes the stuffed cat, Wood said on the way to our birthing class.

  I have to leave early, he reminded me. Gall bladder infection in a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.

  The instructor wore fleece leggings and a purple spaghetti strap top.

  Some women, she said, hands cupped as if she was holding a beach ball, achieve orgasm during birth.

  I may have to poke out her third eye, I said.

  Wood did not understand my anxieties—miscarriage, autism, premature delivery.

  I wish it would come out like a goat, I told him. Sturdy, hooved, walking.

  Every spring we helped the veterinary school calve and foal. The meat goats bloated with twins, the petrified sheep with their petrified lambs, limp and gentle on the mud floor.

  You’ll do fine, he said, patting my stomach. Rugged stock.

  But I knew how I would do. I would take my maternity leave and he would come home for dinner at night, late. My milk would let down when the cat cried at the moon from the staircase window. I would wake up sticking to the sheets. I would love and complain with equal vigor.

  I’m sorry I missed the asexual revolution, I said. Aphids, bees, captive hammerhead sharks—they know they’re on their own. They don’t expect understanding.

  What the cape bee gains in martyrdom, she loses in genetic potential, Wood said.

  Self-reliance, I began.

  Take last week’s lemur, Wood said. His was the last of his kind. He needed others.

  I’d been thinking about nativity scenes. Camels leaning over the manger, like my cat nesting in the crib. The way Joseph pretended his hands were tied, that he wasn’t responsible in the first place.

  The birthing class instructor passed around a wooden bowl of mixed berries. Wood held up one hand in protest.

  In your last weeks of pregnancy, the instructor said to the class, the cervix softens like ripe fruit.

  These women don’t know much about birth, Wood whispered. I’d like to take the class on a field trip. I’d like to take these girls to a farm during calving season.

  This is different, I said. Your child will not be a ruminant.

  Remember, the instr
uctor said. It may take days to fall in love with your newborn.

  The next Saturday Cerulean’s cage was abandoned. The stuffed cat, overturned in the corner, was missing an eye.

  Don’t tell me how this ends, I said to Wood.

  Later, as the sun rose, Wood rolled me onto my side and warmed the transmission gel. The exam table was cold.

  He pressed the probe into the taut skin stretched across my womb like canvas. In the treatment room his fingers were deft and comforting. His eyes focused on the baby beneath my skin. I could feel his anticipation. It washed over me like love.

  The ultrasound excels at imaging the heart, Wood said. The heart is a fluid-filled organ.

  States away, a woman gave birth to octuplets like pups. Perhaps another arched her back in ecstasy as a head fourteen inches in diameter emerged from her cervix. An endangered lemur picked at her barren womb in the confines of the zoo hospital. Me, I watched a heart, small but fast, beat between the shadows of our daughter’s ribs. I hope you never break, I said, though I knew it would, again and again.

  With his finger, Wood traced the outline of our daughter’s organs on the screen.

  Tell me again about jaguar reproduction, I said.

  The baby gestates for a little over ninety days, Wood said. If her cubs are taken from her in the wild, the mother will chase them down for hours, roaring continuously.

  I would do that, too, I said. I promise.

  Megan Mayhew Bergman was born in Gaffney, South Carolina, and was raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. After thirty Carolina-bound years, she has recently moved to rural Vermont with her veterinarian husband, Bo, her daughter, Frasier, five dogs, four cats, two goats, and a horse. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Oxford American, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.

  When I began “The Cow That Milked Herself,” my father-in-law and mother-in-law were both veterinarians, and my husband was about to graduate from veterinary school. I was four or five months pregnant, and cancer was spreading aggressively through my mother-in-law’s body—so any time she got to “see” the baby was significant. One evening, as the business day was drawing to a close, the three vets whipped out the ultrasound machine usually reserved for bloated dogs and blocked cats, plopped me onto the examination table, and found my daughter’s heartbeat. The rest of the story reflects my pregnancy anxiety, or stolen bits of dinner table talk. (Ever tried to eat dinner with a table of veterinarians? Everything on your plate looks like something they see in a dog’s abdominal cavity.)