It is only the beginning. My body battles itself, uterine muscles straining to push a child out through a cervix that is not dilated enough yet. Long after my mind has surrendered, the struggle goes on. I become no more than a tormented observer. There is nothing I can do for myself, and little he can do to ease me. From time to time he brings me sips of cool water. At one point I become aware that he is gently wiping my face with a dampened towel. I shift, I try different positions, on my side, on my back, and once I even try to stand or crouch, as if gravity can help me birth this child. But I don’t have the strength for that, my shaking legs give out on me, and I sprawl over onto the blankets he has spread beside me.
Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. I pass into a sort of waking nightmare. In between contractions, I have flashes of memory, vivid as hallucinations. I have long since closed my eyes to the cave and the faun, I am alone in this anyway. There is only me, and the baby struggling inside me. I can feel his movements growing ever feebler, but I cannot find a way to tell Pan this. In truth I do not even think of telling him, it seems to have nothing to do with him. There is only the child and myself, trapped in this body that will no longer hold both of us. Something has to give.
And so the contractions squeeze me, robbing me of breath and thoughts. Screams give way to hoarse cries, and finally to a simple gasping as the muscles drive the air from my body. And in between, the vivid images that have nothing to do with this labor. A memory of yellow birch leaves with delicately serrated edges outlined against an impossibly blue Fairbanks autumn sky. Four blue robin’s eggs in a nest. The way Rinky’s choke chain felt in winter when he came in, icy cold against my hands in contrast to the ever-warm fur of his throat. Teddy laughing up at the Christmas tree when I plug it in. Tom trying to get the wood stove going with too much newspaper and too little kindling. My mother smiling as she cuts through the cap of a mushroom to show me the white flesh inside. The sudden smell of wisteria blossoms in a long-lost summer.
My water breaks in a gush against my thighs, and I can only think, it’s taken this long, and I’m only that far? But the smell of the amniotic fluid is like a catalyst for the satyr. He comes to crouch between my legs. He puts his hands on my raised knees, steadying them without restraining me. “Not much longer,” he tries to tell me. We both know he is lying.
But his hands on my knees give me something to buck against, and I start to lift my upper body, curling with each contraction. It seems I struggle against him for hours. He leaves me only once, to go to light the lantern and bring it back. It is my only measure of how much time has passed. He sets it a good distance away from me, for fear we will overturn it, and resumes his post. During the next contraction, he lifts a cautious hand, but does not touch me. “I think I saw something,” he whispers. I don’t dare believe him.
But on the next contraction, I feel the head moving down the channel, I know it will be soon. He seems so still within me that I know sudden fear, and push as hard as I dare, adding my will to the failing strength of my muscles.
“I do see him!” the satyr yelps, and so his child is born, in the next seven contractions. The head emerges, and turns and Pan reaches to support him, I feel his fingers brush my flesh. Then the shoulders are sliding out, and suddenly I can take no more, and heedless of tearing or pain, I curl my body and push, push violently, even past the contraction, expelling this tiny foreigner from my body. Pan catches him and lifts him down to rest on the blanket between my legs.
“He’s born,” I gasp.
“Yes,” says his father.
And we both listen to the awful silence. It stretches long, and I am too cowardly to ask. It lasts past the contraction that ejects the placenta in a liverish mass. I see Pan dip his head to sever the cord with his white teeth. I am too exhausted to feel, but the tears sting my eyes. I know without being told, without having to see it for myself. It’s all, all of it, been for nothing. But I have to hold him, however briefly.
“Give him to me,” I beg him, and the satyr lifts his child, delicate goat legs adangle, and sets him in the crook of my arm.
“He’s beautiful,” says his father, and the sudden snuffling the baby makes as he scents me is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. He is beautiful and perfect and alive, so lively. But silent, as so many things born into the wild must be. No lively wailing for this woodland child, to betray his new life to lurking predators. I clutch him to me, slippery yet with my own blood. My hands are shaking, I am so cold suddenly after my long sweaty exertions, but I am grinning, grinning like a fool as I shiver and shake with the child in my arms.
He is incredible. His face is Pan’s face, but with a soft unfinished look. There is already a thatch of curls on his head. They do not cover the bony whorls that are the forerunners of his horns. He is already nuzzling and lipping after my breast, and I set him to it. I try to cradle his sleek little legs, but he kicks out fiercely, tiny pink hooves and all. Already he is stretching and limbering those muscles. I end up with him more tucked under one arm than cradled on his back. Already I know that he dislikes being held with his legs folded, and that he is uncomfortable nursing on his back. But we will adapt to each other, we two.
Then Pan is back suddenly, tucking a dry blanket around us both. Belatedly I realize that the one beneath us is soaked through. “Can you move?” he asks me anxiously.
“I don’t know,” I reply, but I find I can rise. He is right beside me, supporting the baby worriedly with one arm and putting the other around my shoulders. We totter the length of the cave to where the bed is made up with the fur coverlet, and he eases me down under it. I feel no self-consciousness as he folds a towel between my legs to catch the flow of blood before he tucks a blanket around us both. He kisses us both, and then goes to tidy up. The baby has never relinquished the nipple. Now he does, grunting with displeasure that as of yet there is very little milk. I transfer him to the other breast, feel him suckle and then doze off, the nipple still in his mouth.
I listen wearily to the sounds of Pan washing out the blankets and then hanging them on a makeshift line strung across the cave. It will take them at least two days to dry, I think irritably. Then he is back, bringing the lantern and its yellow circle of light. He sets it on the floor by our bed, muting its glow, and crouches beside me. He looks tousled and exhausted, as awful as I feel. He sets a gentle hand on his son’s head in a benediction, but removes it when the baby snorts irritably. His eyes are full of wonder and tears. He turns his eyes to mine, and for a long time there is nothing we need to say. I feel sleep creeping up on me. The baby is warm against me, my belly is loose and empty. I am alone in my body again.
I am almost asleep when he says, “I have to know. What was it like, bearing my child?”
I search for a simile, but can find nothing that is both dignified and accurate. I am too tired to edit my thoughts. “Imagine,” I say. “Imagine shitting a ten-pound octopus. Head first.”
He is still giggling as I spiral down into sleep.
TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
And baby makes three.
And total chaos out of what was our orderly lives. His waking and sleeping becomes our only clock. Time is not measured in days or weeks, but in the wonders of each new thing he does.
In odd ways, he is more animal than child, and strangely, this makes him easier to care for. He needs no diapering, for he instinctively does not soil his resting place. His waste is inoffensively pelleted anyway, easy to sweep out of the way and over the lip of the cliff face. He does not cry, nor make much sound of any kind. His skin darkens for the first few days of his life, as if he is a developing photograph, until he is nearly as dark as his father. Camouflage, I realize, as important as his silence. A pink-skinned bawling baby could not lie hidden among leaves and brush. As he stretches his hind legs and practices vigorous kicks, I realize how much longer he is than a human child, and wonder at how he ever folded up to fit inside me. He nurses vigorously and often, looking a
ll the while up into my face with intelligent, wondering eyes. Between feedings, he usually sleeps. At least, so he does for the first week.
Pan assures me this is normal. It does not stop him, however, from waking his son simply to hold him and look down into his face. And when the baby dozes off again, he does not put him down, but continues to hold him, as if he is too great a marvel to set aside. It is good we have smoked and dried meat, for he is reluctant to leave and hunt. We vary the meat with the loot from the trapper’s cabin, and it seems like a week-long celebration of the birth, as I taste food long absent from my diet.
But after the first week, things change even more rapidly. Pan has warned me, but I am still unprepared for how quickly this infant masters his body. His neck has never been as weak and wobbly as a human infant’s. From the moment of his birth, his back has seemed stronger, his ability to control his own body greater. On the ninth day after his birth, I awaken to find the baby, under his father’s watchful eyes, making a concerted effort to stand. His small fists grip his father’s fingers as he strives to bring his goat legs under his body, and then to drive his weight up. Pan has put down hides on the hard cave floor, to cushion any falls. I remain in our bed, watching quietly.
His little son looks up into his face so trustingly as he grips each of Pan’s forefingers. His eyes are a very deep blue, already starting to darken to brown. He rests most of his weight on his grip, while his goat legs shift restlessly under him. His tiny hooves splay wide, and all his joints seem to give too much as he fights to get his legs under his weight. For an instant he achieves it, and pushes up on his small pink hooves, and staggers a step as he grips his father’s fingers. Pan’s face breaks from his intent seriousness to a warm smile. The baby opens his mouth in a silent laugh. And then his weight sags again as he oversteps, and has to catch himself, with a bob and a bow, on his grip. Patiently he begins again to maneuver his feet under him.
I have not made a sound, but somehow Pan knows I am awake and watching him. “It won’t be long now,” he says, speaking softly so as not to startle the child.
I arise, moving carefully, and come to sit on the floor beside them. I am still stretched and saggy, achy and creaky, but surprisingly that seems to be the extent of my complaints. There is much less pain than I suffered when healing from the incision and stitching the doctor did on me when Teddy was born. I feel only overtired, as if I have hiked too far. But it is a good kind of weariness.
Watching Pan with his son, I feel mildly jealous. When Teddy was this small, he was mine entirely. Oh, Tom was a dutiful father, changing diapers and holding his son whenever he was asked. But he never had the possessiveness that Pan has. There is a look on his face whenever he holds his son, a hard shine of triumph. Whatever else he may do in his life, he has accomplished this; his line, his memories, his life, will go on. Another link has been forged in the chain. The intensity with which he looks into the baby’s face seems to awaken in those wide eyes an answering fire. I feel excluded when he is with the child like this, as if they are communicating on levels I will never share.
The moment the baby sees me, a different kind of light comes into his eyes. He lets go of his father’s fingers and takes two staggering steps, to fall into my arms. Heedless of his tumble, he is already plucking eagerly at the front of my shirt as I arrange him in my lap. He clutches at my swollen breasts through the fabric of my shirt as I struggle with the buttons. I free myself from his pinching grip and bare a breast, only to have him butt against me and then abruptly seize the nipple. He sucks strongly. I feel the aching rush of milk into my breasts and then the relief as he draws it out. My uterus contracts almost in rhythm with his sucking, still shrinking back to normal size. As always, it strikes me as a strange bodily connection. Milk from my other breast leaks freely and runs down my chest. Pan grins sympathetically as he hands me a towel to mop up the flow.
“You know,” I say between gritted teeth, “you always think of a mother’s breasts as being soft. Mine are rock hard when they’re full of milk.” Already the baby’s eager suckling has taken down the pressure and weight of my left breast. Despite his protests and wriggling, I switch him to the other side, breathe a sigh of relief as he resumes nursing and the pressure on that breast eases also. I look up to find Pan staring admiringly at my breasts. “I don’t know why I’m producing so much milk. There’s enough here for triplets,” I complain embarrassedly. But secretly I am as pleased as he is at how well my body is coping with this child, at the plenty I can provide for him. There is a sense of richness in being all he needs.
Pan moves around behind me, so I can lean back into his arms. I rest in his embrace as his child suckles. The baby’s eyes are wide as his gaze wanders from my face to his father’s and back again. He has the same disconcerting gaze that Teddy had as an infant, a look that makes me want to turn my head and look behind me, to see what he is staring through me to see. I look deep into his eyes and ask Pan, “How much does he know, right now? I mean, when does he start remembering?”
Pan speaks softly, right by my ear. “Right now? Only about as much as a human child. Oh, he’s stronger and has better physical control. But that’s what these early days are mostly given to: getting control of his body. In a few more weeks, when he’s tripping around here, he’ll start remembering the basic things. You know, fire’s hot, water is to drink, that sort of thing. But right now, everything is so new that he knows little more than that when he is in your arms, he’s warm and safe and has plenty to eat. That’s all he knows,” Pan croons as he leans past me to run a finger down his son’s cheek. “But it’s enough for now and for all time.”
Surprisingly, the baby smiles, a toothless grin that lets milk trickle freely from the corners of his mouth.
“Are you going to name him?” I ask shyly.
He folds me a little closer in his arms. “He and I are solitary creatures. When he is older, and on his own, he will have no more use for a name than I do. I never had one, you know, until you started calling me Pan. And that sound is like an echo of an echo down the years, a name given to one of us, sometime back then, and shared by all of us since. But”—his breath tickles my ear—“I know you are tired of calling him baby or child. So name him. Give him something now, from you, to carry to the end of his days.”
I take a breath, hesitating. He has a name already, the name I have been calling him in my mind, since the first morning I looked down into his face. “Avery,” I whisper, looking into his deep gaze. And am rewarded with another toothless smile.
“Of the elves?” Pan asks, slightly perplexed.
“I’ve always loved the name. But it isn’t one you can give to a child that must go to school and endure the teasing of other children. But it’s a fine name for a boy who lives in the forest.”
“Avery,” Pan says, trying it on his tongue. “Avery. There’s an echo of you in that. Evelyn Sylvia. Avery. I like it. I have a son named Avery.” His finger reaches again, traces his son’s features, and then trails up the mound of my breast. “Do you know, this is the most beautiful I have ever seen you? And I think this will be the most perfect moment in my life, no matter how long I live.”
His words make a little shiver down my spine.
The season rounds the corner and we do not even notice it, so engrossed are we in Avery. The soft tack, tack, tack of his hooves follows me throughout the cave as he takes a great interest in everything I do. His father’s arrival is always greeted with a sudden clattering rush as he scampers to be the first to touch him. He is amazingly spry and surefooted. His round baby belly thrusts out in front of his tiny legs, and it seems it should overbalance him, but his smooth-skinned back is arrow-straight, and his chubby little arms swing a counterbalance.
He is a quiet child, and makes no speech sounds at all. But this does not mean he isn’t active. Whatever work is done, his small hands find their way into it. Pan horrifies me one evening by giving an exasperated sigh as Avery’s fingers once more grip the pie
ce of wood he is shaping. “Brat!” he tells his son, and rises to go to the chest against the wall. He returns with an extra knife, which he calmly hands to Avery along with a chunk of wood.
“He’ll cut himself,” I exclaim, but Pan shakes his head.
“No. He just needs to find out that he can’t do it quite yet,” he tells me. Sure enough, Avery sits down with his block of wood and knife. Chubby little fingers cannot quite close around the handle of the knife, and when he presses it to the wood, the blade has no force behind it. After a few frustrated minutes, he sets it down, to come and lean against me and tug at my shirtfront. I sit down cross-legged and back straight on the floor so he can lean against me like a punk leaning on a lamppost while he nurses. I circle him with my arm. His tail flicks eagerly while he suckles, just like a lamb’s, and his hooves shift restlessly. He watches my face with calm intelligent eyes.
“He’s already remembering things like how to carve wood?” I ask Pan.
He shrugs, still busy with his task. “Not really. More like the shadow of a shadow. He thinks he knows something about what I’m doing, it’s like an itch at the back of his mind, so he has to put his hands on it and try it. He’ll be doing a lot of things like that. Sort of fumbling his way along, and then one day, a few years from now, he’ll pick up the knife and put it to the wood and remember how it’s done. Or how to shape pipes. Or how to talk with words. Or”—he glances up at me and smiles—“just what it is that makes women so dizzyingly wonderful.”
Pan is right. As the weeks progress, Avery continues to grow at a prodigious rate. As my milk is his sole food, I find myself eating twice as much as I ordinarily would. His growth and abilities parallel that of a calf or chimp of two months more than that of a human child. Hoof and hand, he is agile. He begins to do things, spontaneously. To feed the fire, to make himself a nest of blankets when he is chilled, to play in the water of the pool and the shallow trickling stream that spills from it. To venture out onto the rocks at the mouth of the cave.
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