While I am poking at the cooking meat, he busies himself with the rabbit skins, scraping every last trace of red meat from them. He leaves them spread out, flesh side up, on the floor. “I’ll have to build new stretchers,” he comments, as much to himself as me. I can almost feel him remembering another life-style, another life. Another woman? The baby in my belly stirs reassuringly. Not likely.
The rest of the day is spent settling in. He makes several trips to fetch wood, and I build up the fire and manage to dry most of my clothes. When he goes that evening to check his snares, I insist he wear my denim jacket, the only garment I have big enough to contain his shoulders. It looks peculiarly right on him, and I know he is grateful for the warmth it provides, although he would never have asked to use it on his own.
After our evening meal, he settles down to cut the old leather garment from the bottom of the first trunk into long slender strips. These he knots into a rope of sorts, and relaces the old wooden bedstead with it. “Tomorrow,” he promises me as he pulls it tight, “I’ll bring up young cedar boughs. I think I can make them into a mattress of sorts. Not as soft as a straw tick, but a lot better than the floor.”
He rises stiffly from where he has been crouching, and comes to help me tidy things up. There is little to do, really. The pot to wipe out, the fire to bank. Then, attentive as any handmaid, he helps me out of my clothes, clucking over how tight they’ve become. “Somehow, I’ll have to come up with something else for you to wear,” he says worriedly. “Something warm and loose.”
“It will be fine,” I tell him as we walk back toward the pool.
He grins. “You’re only saying that because you think I can’t contrive it. I’ll surprise you yet, my lady.”
I have no doubt that he will. We soak together, washing each other companionably. Neither of us speaks of last night’s excesses, or makes any move to repeat them. Instead, he towels me off with a T-shirt and escorts me to the blankets. I lie propped on one elbow, watching him sort the things from the second trunk. Some he hangs on pegs on the walls; others he repacks in the trunk. When he comes to the woman’s box, he pauses, stirs the trinkets with a long, brown finger. He glances my way, almost apprehensively.
“I don’t think I want to know,” I tell him, and he smiles a smile that is both wistful and grateful. He carefully fits the lid back on the box, rewraps it in the paper, and sets it back in the trunk.
“The women of my other lives,” he tells me as he comes to blow out the lamp and slip into my bed. “One and all, they would have approved of you. One and all.” He touches me softly in the darkness, a hand cradling my swollen breast as if he weighed ripe fruit, fingers spreading as he strokes my belly that lies between us. I have to lean far forward over my stomach to kiss him. “You’re a wonder,” he tells me. “A miracle and a wonder.” He pulls me gently over to pillow my head on his shoulder, so my belly rests against him. He places his hand atop the mound of his child possessively. And we sleep.
The days that pass now go like the steady drips of water from the icicles that form at our cave mouth. Each day brings changes as Pan makes every effort to make me comfortable, but the basic routine remains the same. By daylight, he ranges. In the early evening, he brings food and firewood, enough to last until the next evening. There is little variety to the food, mostly meat. He supplements it with nuts stolen from squirrels’ caches, frozen berries from thorny tangles, pine nuts, barks for brewing teas. It is adequate, but little more. In the evenings, he kindles the small lamp, and amazes me with the skills of his hands. He makes fresh handles for his tools. He builds a new table, pegging it all together. He builds stretchers for the hides and cures them into leather. From his hands come all manner of small comforts that soften the cave from a shelter to a home. As often as not, he seeks to entertain as much as to be practical. He makes me tops and whistles and jumping jacks, my clothes pegs have faces, the handle of my ladle is as ornate as a carved column. And so pass our evenings.
There are few events to mark one day as different from another. There is the triumphant day he kills a deer, and lugs it, a quarter at a time, up to the cave. It is fat, rich meat, and we feast on it. Some of it he smokes, and some he jerks, and some he simply keeps outside where the glacier now nearly overhangs the cave mouth. The deer hide becomes a part of our bedding, while the rabbit skins become slippers for me. He shows me how to strip the deer sinew into thread. I sew the pelts he takes, mostly rabbit, into a loose sort of gown for myself. Before many days pass, it is almost the only garment I can wear with any comfort. My T-shirts and panties no longer meet over my belly. I wear my rabbit robe fur side in, for the coarse hides otherwise chafe my swollen belly. Socks and rabbit booties complete my outfit. I dare not imagine what I look like. My hair is past my shoulders now, and he revels in combing it for me. I try not to think of what Tom would say if he could see me now, for the thought is oddly painful still. My mind still veers from thoughts of Tom and Teddy. There is healing still to do there, but the time is not yet.
Or so I tell myself, almost every day. When the satyr is gone, the hours are long. There are no books to read, no soaps to watch, no phone to dial, no one to call. I can busy my hands with sewing and woodwork, but my mind still chatters to itself. I play long fantasies of what-if. What-if I had never left Fairbanks, what-if the faun and I had come together this way years ago? What-if I had never married Tom? Those are the easy ones. But what-if I had stood up to Tom’s parents from the very beginning, had never assumed the role they fashioned for me? What-if I had told Tom, well, it was nice visiting, but I’ve got to get back to my home and job, you just come along when you’re ready, dear? These are where they get harder, for in these what-ifs, Teddy does not die. He goes back to Fairbanks with me, and right now we are sitting snug in the cabin together, reading our storybooks, playing with Lego, cutting cookies to decorate with raisins and red sugar. These are the what-ifs that can make me pace and weep, and wrap my arms about the unborn child in my belly as if to take some comfort from him.
Only once does Pan catch me so. I will never know what makes him break his routine, but he comes home in early afternoon, comes in soundlessly to stand beside me. I am breathing raggedly, all but cried out, when he puts his arms around me from behind. I do not startle, but turn to his embrace, hide my face on his chest. “I miss him so terribly,” I say as he strokes my hair.
“So do I,” he says, and that is all. He does not tell me that I will soon have another child to busy me, he does not tell me that Teddy is in heaven with God, he does not attempt to quell my grief in any way. He only holds me and grieves with me. And late that evening, as I am drowsing beneath our blankets, he sets aside the leather he has been softening with tallow, wipes his hands down his hairy thighs, and takes up his pipes.
“If you don’t want to hear this, stop me,” he says, and lifts them to his lips. His back is to me, and he sits cross-legged before the fire, as I would swear his legs would never bend, but they do. He watches the flames as he plays, and it takes me a while to recognize his song. Then I close my eyes against the sting of tears.
I don’t think he can separate the elements. I don’t think he perceives them as separate things. So the stream and the saplings, the moss, the frogs, and Teddy are all played as one entity. An image of my child, but filtered through the faun’s perceptions. He lingers on the round-calved bare brown legs, on the wet pink toes at first, as if these foreign parts are all important in understanding the boy. I watch Teddy as through a screen of foliage, glimpse him in bits. I hear bits of my own song wind through his, and a deep subdued cadence that briefly echoes Tom before Teddy’s song suddenly emerges, distinct and whole. I hear him not as Teddy my child, but as Teddy the satyr’s friend. The song is as much Pan’s delight in this small human creature as it is Teddy in the forest. Their boats go whirling down the sparkling stream, they pelt each other with oak balls, they doze like lizards in the sun. The pipes stop abruptly. My faun drops them beside him and suddenly leans hi
s face forward into his hands. It is some moments before he speaks, and when he does, his voice is calm with a sort of deadness. “I think that’s all I’ll play just now,” is all he says.
He blows out the light quickly, and comes to me in the dark like a small child fleeing nightmares. He is shivering as he burrows in beside me. I kiss the dampness on his cheek and then set his hands atop my stomach. His son kicks and squirms reassuringly beneath his touch. It is the only comfort I can offer him or myself.
And so the days go. Winter lies white on the valley below. Some days I stand and peer out, learning to mark the passage, white on white, of the rabbits. Occasionally I spot deer on the flanks of other mountains, and once I think I see a cross-country skier. I slip quickly back into the cave, heart pounding, disconcerted at just how alien a figure he appeared in my landscape.
But mostly the days are counted by the turning of the babe within me. He knobs a knee down my rib cage, rattling me like a boy rattles a stick along a picket fence. He butts and squirms and crowds me, and grows larger almost visibly. It distresses me that I cannot guess a due date, that I have no calendar to tell me when the child will emerge from my body and into my arms. Pan is no help, he can only shrug. He keeps no calendar finer than the seasons. “When it’s time, he’ll be born,” is all he can say, and looks perplexed that I would ask. As soon ask what day the river will thaw, or the first leaves unfurl. When the time is right, it will happen.
He seems very calm about it all. Possibly I would be, too, except that his hunting and trapping are taking him farther and farther afield each day. There comes a time when he does not return one afternoon, nor that evening. I lumber up and down the length of the cave and worry, wondering about lynxes and bears, avalanches and broken ice on frozen lakes. I sleep but fitfully, hoping to hear the tap of hoof on stone even as I pray he will not be so foolish as to try to make the climb in the dark. Morning finds me sandy-eyed and weepy, wondering if I am condemned to starve to death in a cave, or risk my life clambering down. I am sure some accident has befallen him. Once more my total dependency on him is brought home with shattering force. I pace and curse my foolishness in ever letting myself be put in such a position. My fears for him turn into a raging anger that he would endanger me and the child so, by putting me where I cannot fend for myself.
But by the time he does return, I have come full circle and can only think of him injured and freezing. He seems shocked at my yelp of greeting, and cannot seem to understand my terrors. I do manage to extract from him a promise that the next time he knows he will be gone overnight, he will let me know.
As the slow, snowy days wear on, the overnight absences become the rule rather than the exception. More and more, I am left on my own, to my own devices. I learn to whittle and carve, to play the pipes he makes for me, to busy myself in all sorts of ways. Our bed has a coverlet of fur patchwork now, and our table a full complement of wooden bowls and utensils. My hands acquire new calluses even as my belly acquires new stretch marks. My pregnancy is immense, and still I do not know when the child will come.
A thick snow is descending on our valley the morning he comes back after a four-day absence. He is wearing an old army surplus backpack that clanks when he sheds it by the entrance. A gallon can of kerosene is cradled in his arms. I know we have been getting low; I suspect this is what he went searching for. Snowflakes cluster thick on his hair and his skin is cold when I embrace him. His eyes are dancing when he steps back from me. “See what I’ve brought you,” he tells me. “While I go soak the cold from my bones.”
I drag the pack in by the fire, marveling at its weight. “Where did you get it?” I call back to him.
“Trapper’s cabin,” he replies.
“Oh,” I say, and think how a few months ago I would have thought him a thief. But somehow his attitude to property is contagious, and I now see it as he does, as simple as finding fruit under a tree or eggs under a hen. Taking what you need from the world.
I undo the straps from the pack, tumble its contents on the floor. In it are luxuries beyond measure. Fat cans of evaporated milk, red-and-white labeled cans of vegetable soup. Two towels. A plastic bag of raisins. These I tear open immediately, and chew on a handful as I continue sorting the treasure. A half-full sticky jar of honey. A bag of Oreo cookies. There is more, so much I can hardly comprehend it. All the wonders of white sugar and chemical preservatives. How I have missed them!
I take the bag of raisins with me, and go back to perch on the edge of the sulfur pool and watch him. He is soaking, lying back with only his head out of the water. He looks very tired. “You shouldn’t take chances like that,” I tell him, even as I munch the raisins.
“I’m careful,” he tells me. “And I make sure I create no ill will. I had two fine foxes in my snares, of small use to us. But I left them frozen by his door. The pelts will bring more than ever the food cost him.”
The words are hardly out of his mouth when the first spasm hits me. It is so unexpected, I cannot even make a sound. I am grateful that I am sitting down, for this would have felled me. When it passes, all I can do is pant. “Something’s wrong!” I manage to call out to him, and then almost immediately another flexing of muscle seizes my body. He is by me instantly, dripping warm water, eyes huge. He starts to put his hands on me, then draws back.
It passes, a lifetime later. “This isn’t normal,” I wail when I can. “This can’t be right. I’m going to lose the baby, this doesn’t feel right at all. It’s not like the last time.”
“No,” he agrees, “it’s not normal. Not like you were having a child of your own. But I think it is how it is when you bear one of my kind.”
The thought is not reassuring. Nor is the fear in his face. “I don’t dare move you back to our bed. Lie still. I’ll bring blankets and such to you.”
He darts away as the third wave hits me. And that is what it is like, a wave of muscle contraction that seizes my whole torso and contorts it. That is all the pain of childbirth is, anyway. The pain of overworked muscles. I prattle to myself reassuringly. Not that bad, I tell myself. Just imagine making a fist. There is no strain to that. But imagine lifting your hand over your head, and making a fist as tight as you can, and holding it for a minute. Do it a hundred times. Imagine your hand doing it even when your mind is telling you that your muscles and nerves can’t do it anymore. That’s what your stomach feels like during childbirth. Endless muscular effort that you are powerless to stop. That’s how I was with Teddy, but I was strong and healthy. I never even screamed until the last three contractions.
But this is more like being run over by a steamroller, and on the next contraction, I wail out my breath like a dying teakettle. Pan is trying to put a cushion of blanket under my head, but I flail at him. “Don’t touch me,” I gasp when I can. “Don’t move me at all.”
He retreats, eyes huge and pained. He watches me as I convulse with the muscular effort, and covers his ears when I scream. The sudden onset of this labor has taken me completely by surprise. There is no easing into it, no gradual reduction of the minutes between each contraction, no slow building of the strength of each succeeding contraction. No, this is more like electroshock than any natural bodily process. I am already sweating and shaking, and I do not object when he ventures to cut my loose fur robe free of my body. I barely get my arms out of the sleeves before another tsunami of tightening ripples over my body.
This time, in addition to my belly tightening, I feel myself start to dilate, an aching, stretching sensation in my groin. It’s happening too fast, all of it. The human body is not made to take this. I imagine my flesh tearing, imagine bleeding to death here in this cave, or dying of some childbed infection or fever afterward. Suddenly I long for hospitals and white-gowned doctors and bright lights in my eyes. That was how it was when Teddy was born. Tom had insisted on a hospital. He had wanted to make sure it was done right, as if I were a tricky engine that needed a special type of overhaul. I clearly remember how competently the n
urses ran my labor, how coolly they inserted their fingers into me to measure degrees of dilation, how they listened to the baby’s heartbeat and took my blood-pressure and offered me sips of ice water. And later, the culmination, on my back on a hard bed, my bare feet up in cold metal stirrups as I stared up into a white light that was supposed to be angled so it wouldn’t bother me. As the nurse gently tied my feet to the supports with gauze, she explained how it was so I wouldn’t inadvertently kick out at the doctor during a contraction. And as she tied my wrists down to the gripping handles, so I wouldn’t flail around, I looked at Tom’s white face through the window of the delivery room and wondered. My knees were draped with a white sheet, so I couldn’t see a damn thing. Odd sort of modesty, don’t let the woman have to look at her own shaved pubis, don’t let her see the bloody little skull pushing its way out. Judging from the way Tom’s face looked, I wouldn’t have wanted to see what was happening. Trussed on a table like a Thanksgiving turkey, with the doctor so earnestly busy between my legs, extracting my baby as if it were a choice morsel of sage-and-onion stuffing. Nurses hovering, pumping up the blood pressure sleeve on my arm, telling me when to breathe and when to hold my breath, when to push and when not to push.
I blink, and I am back in a cave that smells of sulfur, and the only aid I have is a satyr that keeps circling me like a vulture watching a dying cow. “Help me!” I beg him, and see the sudden tears spring to his eyes.
“How?” he asks, and I have no answer. I reach a hand to him, and he comes to take it, holding it between both of his own. I clutch it as another contraction rages through me.
“Can you see him yet?” I ask desperately, thinking that if it hurts this bad, the baby must be born soon. He moves to where he can look down at me, then raises his eyes to meet mine. He shakes his head slowly.
Cloven Hooves Page 34
