by Lauren Groff
Where’s Felipe? whispers Flannery, and Imogene, who lives in Family Quonset One, makes big eyes.
Leif and Erik hold Bit up to the window so he can see, though there is not much there: the world across the Quad swirls with yellow and gray, the last of the snow on the ground reflects the fire, the shadows of people dart with buckets.
Dylan sidles over. He is younger than Bit but taller.
It went boom, he says softly. Back where Ricky and Felipe and Maria live. And then Maria had the fire wings.
Shut up, Dylan, says Coltrane, who pushes his little brother and runs up the spiral staircase to where the hammocks are strung.
Dylan’s eyes well up. He comes even closer to Bit.
She did too have the fire wings, he whispers, his voice full of sleep. Also she had hair of fire, Bit. And also a head full of fire, too.
Bit stares so long at the burning Quonset that the world blotches in his eyes. The other kids have gone to sleep. The Pregnant Ladies are at the kitchen table, trying to swallow their sobs with glasses of water or cups of chamomile tea.
Outside, he sees people going slowly back to where they live. Some of the people who lived in the burnt-up Quonset go into Hans and Fritz’s lean-to because those two men are away with Handy; the Pregnant Ladies go back to the Henhouse. Only a few Arcadians remain outside, watching the twisted metal and the embers within. In the dully gleaming dark, Bit recognizes his parents leaning into one another, tall Hannah, tall Abe, her braids on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. Bit shuts his eyes and blindly feels his way into Jincy’s sleeping bag, to keep his parents standing there together.
In the morning, Ricky and Maria and Felipe are gone.
Bit overhears Astrid telling the older kids that the baby had died. She cries, pursing her mouth up over her terrible yellow teeth, the way the horse the Amish bring for harvest draws his lips over a carrot.
Burnt up? says Molly, who cries and cries. Her sister, Fiona, begins to wail into her hands so that only her vast white forehead is visible.
A burnt baby. Bit pictures one of the marshmallows from before Astrid’s war against sugar, crumpled and black on the edge of the bonfire.
No, Astrid says. From smoke. In his sleep. Small blessings. Maria is burnt, but she will be home soon. Ricky is with her in the hospital.
Leif says, angrily, Handy should know about this. If Handy knows, he’ll come home and make it better. My dad can fix it.
Astrid does her funny in-breath that means a yes. Assent on the intake, Hannah calls it. I called Handy in Austin, Astrid says, kissing Leif. In Texas. He told me to tell you he loves us all and he is sending vibes into the ether. He wanted to come home, but Maria and Ricky said no, don’t return early, we need the cash from the concerts. Besides, they’re not ready yet to have the memorial. We’ll have a service for Felipe in the spring.
I want my dad, says Leif; and his big boy’s face crumples and he begins to cry.
Astrid pulls him to her, pulls all of her children, Erik and Leif, froggy Helle, hyper Ike, to her, and says into their matching white-blond hair, Well, that’s another story, indeed.
In the morning, Bit runs to the stream trickling in the woods. Yellow jags of ice edge the water. Bit kneels on the ice and puts his head in the stream, and the cold is enough to rip the breath from him, a relief.
Handy sends a letter, express. Astrid calls a meeting in the Octagonal Barn, and they gather in the late afternoon to hear Hiero read it aloud. Handy says greetings to all his beautiful beatniks. He is devastated by the news, and feels profoundly for the Free People keeping the faith at the Homeplace. He urges them to remember that suffering is what tempers the steel in the human soul, and when one suffers in community, the community grows stronger.
Hiero’s voice shakes when he reads: Pain, when given its proper place in the human heart, can be a door that leads to a feeling of oneness with the Universe. This is a path to deeper empathy.
Soon enough, Handy tells them, they will all be together. Try to be strong and we will bear the impossible weight of our sorrow in communion. Namaste.
Namaste, they say, and the women cry, holding one another. The babies goggle at their mothers and pat their faces.
After one week, Maria returns from the hospital, her head and arms wrapped like gifts in white bandages. Ricky and she seem to be carrying one another wherever they walk.
Bit sits under the table as Marilyn and Hannah drink St.-John’s-wort tea. They talk about the oil embargo, about Marilyn’s webbed feet, about thalidomide babies, born with flippers. Bit thinks of a wee newborn flapping underwater, like the beaver that lived in the stream behind the Family Quonsets and gave them all giardia one spring.
He goes back to his book, the story of the fisherman and his wife. The women forget about him. They begin to murmur.
I don’t know how much longer I can handle it, Hannah says. This isn’t what I signed up for, this isn’t a better life, this isn’t anything but poverty and hard work and not enough money to buy the kids winter boots.
I know, says Marilyn.
Hannah’s voice goes muffled when she says, . . . want . . . out. She makes a sound that doesn’t seem human. Bit watches her legs worriedly, afraid she is sick.
Marilyn’s voice, softer than ever. Hang in there. We move into Arcadia House in less than a month. We’ll all live together, and everything will be better. You can make it.
I can’t, Hannah says. Fucking Handy . . .
You can, says Marilyn, and her voice sounds like a door closing, and Bit knows that there exist things even outspoken Hannah isn’t allowed to say.
A taste of Saucy Sally’s poppyseed cake, the way Leif can swing Bit by the legs so the world spins deliriously past, the feel of running on the last crust of snow when the others fall through, that softness at the end of a branch that is the whisper of a bud. He adds to the list in his head. Raspberry jam on just-baked bread. The smell of the pocket of Titus’s waxed coat, pipe tobacco and lint and cedar. The four blond heads of Handy’s kids around a letter. The feel of fresh plaster. He sits by his mother and comes up with these fragments and tries to beam them into her head. Once or twice, he is sure he succeeds. She sighs sweetly in her sleep when he remembers the smell of a newborn’s crown or the downy feel of her own soft cheek upon his.
The Kid Herd is at the stream. The footbridge is not safe: it wobbles, its ends dunked in the wild runoff. White suckers churn upstream, their many bluish bellies transformed into a single pulsing one. Bit stares down, the stick gone heavy in his hand. Toothwort bobs on the bank.
Do it! shouts Leif, who has turned into a dancing goblin. He is hysterical with violence.
Bit, calls Jincy over the roar, and Bit looks up at her. Her curls are wilder than usual. There has been a charcoal smear on her cheek for a week. It’s wrong to kill, she shouts, close to tears.
The others stand, a mass, uncertain, waiting to see what he will do. Helle has begun to wail, though her eyes bulge with anticipation. Bit looks at his friends. Cole and Dylan, side by side, make the same face Sweetie makes when one of the kids hurts another. Jincy covers her mouth with a hand.
He thinks of a fish body wriggling on the stick, of a mass of blood.
Bit grips the stick that Leif whittled with Abe’s pearl-handled blade. He pulls it behind his head and hurls it into the stream. It bounces back at him and smacks him above the eye. The pain is terrible, like swallowing a brick of ice. Leif and Erik and Ike and Fiona shriek and dance, Helle wails, Jincy says, No, no, no, no, no. Molly, who thinks she’s a horse, who has made them call her Secretariat since last summer, even though Secretariat is a boy, whinnies and throws her mane and stomps her foot. In fury, Bit grabs the stick and chucks it as hard as he can toward the bank, where it grazes Muffin’s knee.
Muffin’s face goes red behind her glasses, and she screams. She claws up the muddy bank and runs off through the forest, over the fields.
Now you’re in trouble, says Fiona, her voice humid with
excitement. Her bangs are slicked with sweat and her forehead gleams. She runs off. The others follow, the boys whooping like Indians through the afternoon dapple. Helle stays for a second to scream IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouBitStone, then she, too, scurries off. Her round little body falls behind her brothers’, and she ruins a patch of early spring beauty flowers as she goes. She pumps her arms and tiny corncob legs to catch them but they move off without her, as ever.
Alone, Bit is seized with grief. He comes down tentatively to the edge of the brook and tries to leap to the shore, but his boot fills with water. His shocked foot inside the boot feels the way his stomach feels inside his body.
He crouches for a while on the side of the brook, watching the frantic push of fish. He sends out mute apologies, waits for the great King Fish to surface, its stern face leathery and terrible, to open its vast mouth and curse him. Or eat him. Or maybe, he thinks with a pulse, to send him off on his search to find the thing that will save his mother. He holds his breath until he feels faint and, when nothing happens, moves up the bank to sit among the fiddleheads, their bald skulls rearing shyly from the dirt. The wind blows cold from the top of the trees, brushing down, and the parched leaves chatter under it. In the hollows to the north of some trunks, he dips his fist into small pockets of snow.
He sits long enough for a squirrel to emerge and almost run over his foot. A hawk swoops over the stream and snatches at something and rises again as if riding a pendulum.
For a few breaths he forgets himself in the swim of nature around him. Its rhythm is so different from Bit’s human own, both more nervous and more patient. He sees a bug that is smaller than a period on a page. He sees the sky, bigger than all that’s in his head. An overwhelm from two directions, vast and tiny, together.
From behind him, footsteps. He hears them when they are still far away. They thunder the ground. He knows from his Grimm that it is probably a giant come to eat him, but he can’t find the energy to fight. Bit bends his head and waits for the great hand, the teeth. Instead, he smells something fleshy and feminine, blood and pus and sweat and rose soap. Astrid. She sits beside him and he waits for her to yell.
She doesn’t. She just sits. When he dares, he lifts his head to look at her. She studies her feet, unshod and luxuriating in the cold mud. She smiles down at him. I love spring mud in the toes, she says. Makes me think of home. Norway, you know.
He takes off his own shoes and wallows his toes in the mud.
After some time, Astrid claps him on a thigh and stands. She scoops him up. So light, little Bit, she says. You are maybe twenty pounds? I’m sure I have delivered a new baby almost as heavy as you. You are a marvel.
They come out of the forest onto the Sugarbush path, then up into the Sheep’s Meadow. Already, flowers spread on the ground like small open mouths, purple bells, white stars with golden hearts.
He rests his head on her shoulder, and she says, Not to worry. You will grow. And one day things will not be so confusing. This I can promise you.
When they come into Ersatz Arcadia, she says one last thing into his ear. She says, Don’t think that nobody knows you are not talking, that nobody worries about the words that are stuck in you. But you take your time. When you can, you will tell me the story of everything you feel and I will do everything to make it better. This I also promise you, she says, and Astrid’s face is kind as a field of dandelions.
Astrid carries him into the Henhouse, and only now, in its warmth, does he know how cold he has been. It smells like chamomile and yarrow and lavender, other herbs that hang from the rafters in the kitchen. Someone moans above, and Flannery lopes downstairs naked, with a basin in her arms, her belly vast, her face panicky. She is one of the teenagers who have been showing up every few weeks, petrified but knowing, as they somehow do, that the midwives take care of the Pregnant Ladies who come to them.
Oh, thank God you’re back, she breathes. Marilyn was called off to Amos the Amish’s daughter, and Midge had to go take a nail out of D’Angelo’s foot.
Astrid looks down, and touches Bit’s head, and says, You’ll stay here, in the kitchen, with Flan? We can have our talk after Eden’s baby is born, yes? And Bit nods, though he knows he won’t say a word. Astrid strips off all her clothing and washes herself for a long time with soap and water so hot it steams. When she goes upstairs, she is nude, also.
Flannery puts on a bathrobe and makes a face at Bit. So what’s your story, she says. You’re the retarded one, right? He shakes his head, but she snorts, and gives him a piece of apple cake, and goes off to lie down on the couch. Jesus, she says. I’m definitely not looking to get this little bastard out of me if it’s gonna be like that. She points, finger trembling, skyward.
In a moment, she is asleep and breathing heavily. Bit goes upstairs.
The room is murky where Eden is lying on her back. At first, he can see only the gleam of her coppery hair, then a lady’s swollen bottom and a great upswell of flesh. Astrid is astride her and rubs her belly with something glossy, breathing with her. You must remember, she says, it is a rush, it is good energy, it is the energy it takes to get this baby into the world. There is no pain here. Do not push. All in its own time.
Eden grimaces and gives a low whine, and seems to release something, and Astrid says, Good, good.
Astrid puts two long white fingers into Eden’s folds and feels around. They are bloody when she takes them out. She nods and grunts.
The coil begins to wind again in Eden. Her feet clench. In the middle of the grip, she opens her eyes and sees Bit there at the door and locks her eyes into him, and Bit locks back, pushing the way she pushes at him. Then she relaxes again, and lolls her head back, and Astrid coos, and Eden picks up her head and winks at Bit. Hey, she says. Thanks for that one, Monkey.
Astrid turns. You! she says, Ridley Sorrel Stone! But before she can shoo Bit away, Eden says, No, no. He was helpful, Astrid. I want him here, okay? He’s good at this.
Astrid goes to the doorway and calls to Flannery, who takes Bit downstairs, grumbling, and scrubs him until he hurts. He is naked when he climbs back up, and shivers in the chill. He burrows into the bed with Eden and rests his head against her shoulder. She smells like chicory and fatigue and onions; she is vast and hot. He puts his hands on her forehead and smoothes out the wrinkles there.
The light dies in the windows. People come in and out, among them Abe, worried. He tries to talk to Bit. But Bit is concentrating. People leave. Astrid changes the sheets by rolling both of them over. Someone gives Bit a piece of warm bread with applebutter, but he doesn’t care to eat. He stays with Eden. He sleeps when she naps between waves, and wakens when she surfaces in pain.
Something suddenly shifts in Astrid: she becomes quick, efficient. Flannery rubs Eden’s shoulders. New light kindles in the panes of glass and grows. It is somehow day. Astrid makes coaxing noises, and Eden gives high moans, which Astrid tries to make her lower. Marilyn comes in, fresh and smiling and bearing two quilts and a mince pie, her voice spinning over of the miracle of the Amish baby she just delivered, fat and blue-eyed and rosy as a piglet. Eden shouts, and Marilyn screws up her lips and goes away.
Eden manages to eat some porridge, which comes up. She drinks some tea. She grips Bit’s tiny arms, and he won’t feel the steel in her hands until later, when Hannah will take him to the Showerhouse and cry at the purple on his skin, touching the bruises gently with her fingers, as if to brush them away.
Eden’s body is a fist as she pushes. Bit hears voices saying, Good, sweetheart, so good, the head is here, it’s wonderful, one more, Eden. But Eden gazes into Bit’s face, her canines catch on her lower lip; and in sudden overwhelm, the smell of shit. Then there’s a breaking, a slippage, and in Astrid’s hands there’s a bloody, waxy, frantic beauty, a creature that wags its tiny arms and begins to squawk like a seagull. Eden and Bit rest against one another and watch through half-closed eyes.
Eden lifts her arms up for the baby, which Marilyn has already washed and
wrapped in a blanket. Astrid guides the tiny mouth to Eden’s fist-size nipple, and shows the baby how to latch on. It grunts and snorts, the most urgent thing Bit has ever seen.
Bathed in the dim early morning light, in sweat, in exhaustion, Eden swims in the last thrashes of pain. She holds her baby and looks down into the ancient face. Bit takes everything he feels now and buries it deep in him, a secret shining place to visit in his quietness, the best place he has ever known.
The women come for Hannah. They come into the Bread Truck while Abe is still there, before the sun has risen. They bring the spring cold in the pockets of their clothing. Their breath steams in the warmth of the Bread Truck. Up, up, they say, and Hannah stands. Magnificent women, the women of Arcadia, all legs and thin hands, bandannas, white throats, cracks at the edges of their eyes where the sun has creased their skin. They seat Hannah at the table, brush out her hair, braid it up again tightly. They warm water and strip her. Bit’s mother’s body is thin, her bones show, and they wipe her down with hot cloths. Slowly, her smell is thinned with Astrid’s rose soap. Her skin, her hair, her sleep, is watered until, at last, what is her own disappears.
The women take her away.
Abe is distracted during supper, oat groats with soy-sauce, fresh bean curd. Hannah hasn’t been back since the women took her. Bit is free to think his thoughts, and he thinks of how he will go into the forest, soon, to help his mother. He wishes for someone to tell him what to look for, and he hopes that it won’t be someone too frightening or ugly. He listens to the wind in the pines, but it doesn’t talk to him the way it talks to boys in his stories.