When I awake, I am covered by the still-damp blanket. It is much the worse for its dip in the river, but at least it traps some of my body heat. I don’t want to move, I feel achy and nauseous. But I force myself up and into my dank clothing. The jeans are still wet at the belt line and in the crotch, but the shirt is almost dry. My socks are still hopelessly soggy. Barefoot, I go looking for the faun.
He has made his fire on flat rocks by the river, from dry bits of driftwood. Several small fish are baking on stones by the fire. As I come up behind him, he is poking them with a bit of stick. His hair is still wet, and my denim shirt is across his shoulders. When I touch him, he leaps wildly. “Pan,” I say soothingly, and for a moment he looks at me as if he does not know me. His face is more haggard than I have ever seen it. “Are vou all right?”
“I’m … I am remembering. Reaching way back. If we go downstream, quite a ways, five or six miles, the river should fork. It used to be very easy to cross it there. Of course, that was a long time ago …”
His words trail off again, and for an instant, someone I don’t know looks at me out of his eyes. Evaluating me. He starts to nod, and suddenly he is Pan, my Pan again. It is an unsettling experience.
“Hungry?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I say frankly. “You know, lately all I do is eat and sleep. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t feel like I’m pulling my share.”
“Sure you are,” he says, and smiles maddeningly. His eyes are warm with some secret. I refuse to be baited.
We eat the fish, him crunching them merrily, me picking through endless tiny bones for the flaky white meat. We drink from the canteen, for the river water is too thick with silt to be palatable.
Afterward, I go to him and, standing before him, put his hands on my hips. I am inches from him. His eyes search my face. “Aren’t you too tired?” he asks softly. For answer, I reach and kiss him. I need him. Not for horniness, but for closeness. We go back to the spread clothing, and he draws me down on the damp blanket. His lovemaking is peculiar this time; his kisses barely touch me, he puts no weight upon me, penetrates me only enough to bring me satisfaction. It is a teasing, delicate way to touch, but the very tenuousness of our joining makes the climax surprisingly explosive. He collapses beside me rather than atop me. Together we stare up at a limitless expanse of blue sky.
“It’s going to get cold tonight,” he says suddenly.
“This time of year, it usually does,” I concur.
“I’ve remembered a place for us.” He pauses, then goes on apologetically, “It’s still a long ways from here.”
“Across the river,” I say.
“I’m afraid so. And days beyond that, too.”
“No big deal,” I say casually, dreading it. “Shall we get moving again? We can get to your downstream ford with daylight to spare. I don’t want to cross it in the twilight.”
He shakes his head lazily. “No. Let’s let things dry out, rest for a while.” He rolls suddenly to face me. “Evelyn, if I lose you, I lose everything. Everything.” He speaks quietly, but the words are so intense it is like a shout.
“Don’t worry. You won’t lose me.” I speak casually, but the words stir a deep uneasiness in me.
“Promise me you’ll be more careful,” he demands.
“I’ll be okay,” I try to put him off.
“Promise me,” he presses. The words are like a noose tightening around my neck. “Please,” he adds, and the word cuts me. There should never be “pleases” between us.
“I give you my word I’ll be careful,” I compromise.
For a long moment we are both silent, both uncomfortable. The weight of a promise given hangs between us. It doesn’t feel natural for me to be this important to him, for him to care so much. I feel as if I don’t completely belong to myself anymore. Like I’ve given him a part of me to control and watch over. My heart squeezes when I wonder if I ever made Tom feel this way. If the times when he put me aside, fended me off, were because I was too unbearably close. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s happiness.
“Hey,” he says later, softly. I turn to him. After staring at the sky, my eyes are dazzled, I can barely make out his features.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says, and grins. But it makes it better. I get up and turn the damp clothing, shaking it out loose to try and speed the drying process. But it is late afternoon before the clothes are dry enough to fold and put back into the pack. They are still not dry through, and I resolve to spread them out again during our noon pause tomorrow.
We move back from the river and into the forest again for the night. Pan makes one of his small hot fires while I make us a bed of cedar needles and dry grasses. I think of the great apes building their bowers each night, and wonder if we are so different at all. He brings fish for us again, and after we eat, he sits by the fire, whittling. I stare at the flames and do not pay much attention to him until he rises and comes to sit behind me.
“Be still,” he tells me when I try to turn and face him. I obey, turning back to the fire, and feel his light touch on my hair. In a moment, something snags in it, and he tugs hard.
“Ouch!” I complain, and reach back to where his hands struggle. “What are you doing?”
He lets his hands drop away, and my fingers brush against a wooden comb snagged in my hair. I pluck it loose and look at it. This is what he has been carving these past few days. The teeth are wide and smooth, the back bears a tracery of vine on it. I have never seen work so fine and intricate. “I had a plastic one already,” I tell him, not at all what I mean to say.
He only smiles as if I have thanked him endlessly and says simply, “Wood is better.”
I bring my hair forward over my shoulder and go to work on it. It is strange to think that I have not bothered with it for several days. Twigs and moss and seeds are in it, and one small patch of sap. I struggle with it for a while, but do not resist when he reaches to take the comb from my hands. Gently he pulls my hair back, and starts to work on it, from the draggled ends up. He is clumsy at it, but I endure the small tuggings for the sake of his touch on me. But after a few minutes, I start to feel uncomfortable with it. Selfish. Guilty that he is paying attention to me. I feel I should be the one to pay attention to him while he sits and basks. “In every relationship,” I once heard my mother say, “there is the one who does the loving, and the one who is loved.” Always before, I have been the loving one. I don’t know how to sit still and accept his attention.
So I shift and turn, taking the comb from his hand. “Let me finish it,” I say, and ignore his puzzled look. I finish my grooming rapidly, tugging out the snarls he was picking at so carefully. I start to braid it up to keep it out of my way, but he puts a restraining hand on my shoulder.
“Leave it loose,” he asks me softly.
I shrug and let it hang. I set the comb aside and reach for him. I rub his neck and shoulders, searching for tension I don’t find. He half closes his eyes with pleasure, then opens them again to tell me, “You’re doing this to keep me from touching you.”
“Maybe,” I said grudgingly. I move around behind him and my fingers work down his spinal column to where it vanishes into coarse goat hair, and then down to the base of his tail. His body never ceases to fascinate me. My hands travel up his back again.
“Did you ever think that it might give me great pleasure to touch you? That for me, touching you might even be as pleasant as being touched by you?”
“No,” I say flatly. It is both an answer and a denial. My conditioning, I realize, goes deeper than I think. It would be vanity to think such a thing, and vanity is a sin. It would also be conceited and selfish, and that is rude. Strange. Sooner can I copulate with the goatman than admit that he can love me. Or that he can love touching me. Irrational tears sting my eyes. I feel cheated that I cannot believe anyone would ever really love me. I immediately suspect I am feeling sorry for myself, and that makes me angry
.
“Ouch!” complains the satyr, for I have let my anger flow through my hands, and have squeezed his shoulder muscles harder than I meant to. He turns to me, and I know the firelight reflects off the water in my eyes.
“Dummy,” he says, and there is such love in the word that I nearly sob. Instead, I pull back from him.
“It’s not you,” I hear myself saying, idiotically. “It’s me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I hug myself and rock like an injured child. Why do I feel so bad?
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” he tells me gravely, and pulls me back into his arms. For a while he just holds me, the warmth of the fire on my face, the warmth of his body down my back. Then we go to our bed together. He holds me until sleep slips me from his grip.
I dream of Fairbanks. It is a mixed dream, of planting the garden, of fixing the car. I keep looking for Tom as I do these tasks, but he is never around. Somehow this doesn’t bother me. I waddle from the garden to the cabin, for I am immensely pregnant. When I go into our bedroom, the old double bed is gone, replaced by a fragrant pile of pine needles and boughs. I am very tired, so I lie down on the bed. Then I hear Tom’s footsteps in the kitchen. I don’t call to him, for I know he will soon come into the bedroom, bringing me a plate of crackers and a few slivers of cheese. He knows it helps my morning sickness if I eat a few crackers before I get up. So I wait, and the footsteps keep getting closer, but they never come into the room.
I awaken. But not quite. I can feel the sunlight dappling my eyelids, but I don’t open them. The dream wasn’t right. Tom never brought me plates of crackers in bed. I used to keep a box of saltines on the nightstand. My whole pregnancy with Teddy made Tom nervous, as if I had some sort of giant parasite in my body and it might be contagious. One night when I moved over so my swollen belly was against his back, Teddy kicked him right through my body wall. Tom had jumped as if electrocuted. I had laughed, delighted, but Tom had declared, “I hate that! It feels icky. Squashy. How can you stand it?” “It’s our baby,” I had told him, and at the time it hadn’t bothered me. Now it does, suddenly, and I am a little surprised to find it could still hurt so.
I stretch slowly, hearing pine boughs rustle beneath me. A familiar wave of nonspecific nausea goes through me. Lie still, I tell myself, and it will pass. Have a cracker.
Then I open my eyes to the dark branches of spruce trees against a blue sky. Too much contrast, they’re almost black. I know what my dream was really telling me. Wake up, conscious mind, and pick up on what you already know. You’re pregnant.
It’s all there. A little achy, a little puffy. The feed-and-sleep syndrome. I try to worry about it and instead find my hand flat on my belly, a foolish smile breaking over my face. And that seems the ultimate confirmation, for I went through my first pregnancy in a blur of bovine contentment. Even Tom had bragged to his friends that I was so mellow while I was pregnant, he could get away with anything. Pumped up with female hormones, I had wanted nothing more than to eat and rest and grow a child. I look back over my behavior over the last few days and nod to myself at how blindly I have been following Pan, how trustingly I have put my life in his hands. Even so.
So how far along am I? I don’t know. I’ve lost track of the days since I returned to the forest, but I know I have not bled on any of them. Another thought stops me dead. Whose baby? Tom’s? The faun’s?
Neither answer is acceptable.
I don’t want to have Tom’s baby growing in me. Not when he doesn’t love me anymore. Even if we had not parted, I would not want a child this soon, not right on the heels of Teddy’s death. It would be a betrayal, somehow. Like saying, well, that kid’s dead, better get busy and replace him. Just whip up a new one in the old womb, only take me nine months or so.
My belly is flat beneath my sheltering hand. Maybe I’m not pregnant, I tell myself. Maybe it’s just the dream and your own imagination. I’m probably being silly. But I am not convinced. I check my breasts, find the nipples tender to the touch. Too much lovemaking, I tell myself. That’s all. I can’t be pregnant. Not with Tom’s child.
How about the goatman’s?
My mind shys away from such an idea. I don’t want to imagine myself calving some hooved thing in a field somewhere. A hairy little body, half child, half goat, growing inside mine? What would I do with it? Where would I keep it, how would it go to school? It would have no place in my world. A freak. Worse, what if it looked like me, with no signs of its satyr father? What would I tell him as he grew up? Don’t fall in love with a woman, you’ll give her goat children? And if it’s a girl?
And what if it’s neither, not human nor faun, but some combination of the two? Goat feet on human legs, or a human child, goat-furred on its lower body?
I am on my feet suddenly, and I am stuffing my things into my bag. I move in a sort of frenzy as I gather jeans left slung over branches in the hopes of drying them a bit more. I thrust them into the bag, any old way, I just have to get out of here, I have to get away from this place and this idea. I know that I will carry my pregnancy with me wherever I go, but somehow I think it will be different if I am alone. Problems are always easier to solve if you are alone.
I am moving, leaving the campsite, when I become aware of him. As always, it is his scent that precedes him. And as always, it attracts me, but this time I fight it. I breast through it as if it were deep water, push myself on, back into the forest. He will be at the campsite now, I think, as I push a branch out of my way. I hear his voice, not a call, but a question, “Evelyn?” behind me. Clear as a bird’s call, without being loud. I push on.
The very woods themselves seem to have turned upon me. Blackberry tangles thwart my path, fallen logs delay me. My mind assembles pieces of information, and hands them to me. What did I think the constant lovemaking was about, if not an attempt to impregnate me? Did I honestly think he could find me that desirable? And he knows, he knows he has succeeded, that is what is behind all his sudden tenderness and solicitude. What did he say yesterday? “You nearly drowned us all!” Not both of us. All.
The sweet words and moments of caring seem suddenly an insidious trap, his pungent body odor a sort of lure to bring me in. He has used me, I think, and anger rises in me, but not as strong as fear. I won’t be trapped again, I think, but at that very moment, I hear his voice again, soft as always, coming behind me. “Evelyn?”
I push on frantically through brush that catches at me, that slaps and tears at exposed skin and tangles about my feet. I know I cannot outrun him, but I try.
“Evelyn?” he calls again, and this time there is a note of fear along with the query. I break out of the brush, into a clearing. I bound across it like a hunted deer, running instinctively, not even watching for obstacles, but dodging or leaping over them as my body commands. And then I am back in the forest again, on a deer path, running.
I think I hear him behind me, but then the sounds fade. I don’t look back, I can’t, I don’t even look off to the side when I hear some large animal take flight. Then his scent hits me, coming from ahead of me, no, beside me, from all around me. I jerk to a halt, panting, trying to choose a new direction, but the smell of him is all around me, calming and warm, sweet as new milk. I cannot make a decision, not enveloped in that calm. I stand, sweating and shaking as he comes toward me on the path. When he reaches me, I pull back like a spooked horse, but he sets a calming hand on my shoulder, puts the other to my cheek. “Evelyn,” he says, locking eyes with me. “It’s all right, my love. There’s nothing to fear.”
I feel myself slipping into the depths of his eyes. His hands are steadying me, I want to open my arms and cling to him. His scent is all around me, wrapping me like an airy blanket.
“Stop it!” I say, and slap his hands away. For an instant his eyes hold only astonishment. Then something like a glint of amusement comes into them.
“All right,” he agrees, and steps back from me. I take deep steadying breaths of air that smell only of leaf mold and trees, o
f earth and plants. My head and mind clear. No panic, no fear, but no stupefying calm, either.
“I, uh,” he says. I look up and he is grinning, but abashedly. “I didn’t mean to do that. I mean,” he falters, seeing I am not returning his smile.
“I don’t believe you,” I say coldly. “You’ve been manipulating me.”
His face changes. “Just like you’ve been manipulating me.”
“I have not!”
“No? Do you think I’m immune to your pheromones? You think it’s easy for me not to touch you when your body is flaunting your fertility? Even now,” he says, and takes a step back from me. “You stand there, defying me, scolding me for my scent.” His face changes again, a foolish grin washing over his features. “How can I argue with you when your scent says, ‘Protect me, defend me, shelter me from all harm, for I am pregnant with your child.’ Do you think that’s fair? Do you think it’s not manipulating me?”
“That’s how you knew I was pregnant?” I ask him, forgetting my anger for an instant.
He nods, his smile becoming tender, his eyes soft.
“Stop it!” I command him. “Besides, it’s not like I’m controlling it.”
“But you are. You just aren’t aware of it. I am. I stand here, away from your scent, but every drift of it makes me want to calm you, to steady you, to protect the child you carry. Do you know how hard it is for me to resist that instinct, keep that inside? Do you even know what you’re asking of me?”
I am suddenly tired and confused. I don’t know who is manipulating who. I don’t care. I just want to sit down and rest. Some of it must show in my face, for sudden alarm widens his eyes, and he almost fells me with his calming musk. “I just,” I begin, and look for a place to sit down. There is a fallen log, mossed green and with a few ferns sprouting from it. I know his hand is on my arm, helping me to it, but suddenly I am grateful it is there. “I just don’t understand,” I wail suddenly, overcome by it all. “It isn’t fair. You never said anything. I didn’t even think about getting pregnant. I didn’t worry about it, it didn’t occur to me that I could. And now I am, and I don’t know what comes next.”
Cloven Hooves Page 29
