by Wren, M. K.
For most of the night she huddled by the fire, maintaining that pitiful island of light and warmth because darkness was intolerable. Yorick came to her with his ears back, his liquid brown eyes crescented with white, and she welcomed him in her arms, watched the moon move across the sky through gossamer clouds.
Yorick was at her side when she stood on the bank and watched the moon sink golden into the mass of clouds at the horizon. He was at her side when the last stars disappeared and the sky began to shed a soft, vague light.
And he remained at her side when she went to the beach and began gathering driftwood. The tide was high at dawn, and she had to stack the wood near the bank. As the tide ebbed she stacked it farther down the sand, and at midmorning she brought Epona to the beach and, with her help and the rope, pulled small logs to the place she had chosen well below the high-tide line and arranged them in a rectangle five by eight feet. On this foundation she laid the smaller pieces of wood she had gathered, building them to a height of a yard. She stopped then to rest, to get a drink and wash her tear-swollen face in the creek. Then she searched the woods for dead pine and spruce branches, cut armloads of dead fern fronds. When this tinder was added to the stacked wood, she returned to the campsite. The sun was at zenith, the tide at full ebb.
She knelt by Rachel’s body and touched her hand.
This husk that had once been Rachel Morrow—how small it was, not a hint of beauty in it. It didn’t make sense.
Mary zipped the sleeping bag around the body, then dragged it to the beach. It took a long time, but she didn’t count the passage of time in any way now except in the change of the tide and the incremental return of the sea across the sand.
When at length she had placed the body on the mound of wood, she picked up a pine branch crusted with pitch from an old scar, used a match to light it, and when it was burning well, walked slowly around the pyre, igniting the dry tinder. The fitful wind combed through the crackling flames.
She looked down at her hands and was surprised that they weren’t as translucent as the opaline smoke that billowed up from the pyre; she was surprised that her flesh didn’t waver like the air above the flames. Her hands remained solid, opaque, and she pressed them to her body.
Rachel would never see this child that would be her heir.
Mary looked out at the sea, at the tourmaline green light behind the breakers, at the creamy froth cast up with every wave. She’s yours now.
Finally she reached down to stroke Yorick’s head.
“Come on, Yorick. Let’s go home.”
I acknowledge the Furies.
I believe in them, I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.
—THEODORE DREISER, LETTER TO GRANT RICHARDS (1911)
Perhaps my dynamite plants will put an end to war sooner than your congresses. On the day two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations will recoil in horror.
—ALFRED NOBEL TO BERTHA VON SUTTNER,
PEACE CONGRESS SWITZERLAND, 1892
Today the wind veers south, the clouds are thickening, but the storm front seems stalled. I imagine it as a trailing spiral on a weather satellite picture on television. Once we took such miracles for granted.
The possibility of becoming a victim of murder, or divine justice, makes me exceedingly wary. Yet when I consider Miriam’s options—and I spent long hours of a restless night considering them— they seem few. At least, they are fewer now that I’m aware of the possibility and intend to avoid being alone in dangerous places.
I’ve considered the option of poison. Bernadette grows a number of plants that are poisonous as well as medicinal, but how would Miriam administer a poison to me? We eat out of communal dishes, and she’s never been so solicitous as to offer me a cup of tea or anything of that sort, and forewarned as I am now, I’d never accept such an offering.
Of course, I sleep alone. She could easily slip out of the basement after the children and Esther are asleep. The children sleep the sound sleep of all children, and Miriam has often teased Esther about her deep, snoring sleep. “The house could fall down, and you’d never know it.” There are no locks on the doors to my room. Miriam might smother an old woman with a pillow and claim she died of natural causes. Except that this old woman may be a bit stiff and slow, but still quite capable of struggling and making noise, and Jerry’s bedroom is only a few feet away. Besides, Shadow always sleeps at the foot of my bed. She would certainly raise an alarm.
Yet I’m not comforted by these considerations. I’ve seen the way Miriam looks at me. The banked fire still burns behind her eyes. She hasn’t surrendered.
She can’t. She has made fallacies the basis of her perception of the world, and if their falseness is demonstrated, her system of perception will shatter like a house built of fine threads of glass. I am the one who stands outside her fragile temple of dark, spiderweb glass with a hammer in hand.
For the family, this day—Tuesday, the fourth of May—is again business as usual, although the tension is stultifying. The children are irritable, the younger ones prone to fits of temper or tears. The adults find inanimate objects on which to vent their frustration: the threads that break, the pot that boils over, the saw that sticks in the cut. I go about my business as usual, too, trying to avoid the adults yet remain close enough so that a cry for help could be heard.
But as the day grinds on I wonder if I could look to the others for help if I needed it. Today it is even more obvious that they blame me for this schism. Especially Jerry. Only pride stops him from backing down on his decision to let me continue teaching the children.
After the midday meal I go out on the deck to wait for Stephen, grateful that the impending rain hasn’t yet arrived. The wind blows erratically, but it’s not so strong that the sun can’t overcome its chill. I don’t know where the various members of the family are, or what they’re doing. Usually we discuss such matters during meals. We didn’t today.
When Stephen finally arrives, Diamond and Pepper have inveigled Shadow into a game of tag. We watch them for a while, and I savor the pleasure of finding something to laugh about. But Stephen seems to curb his laughter as if he thinks it wouldn’t be appropriate. At length, the dogs take a break to lie panting in the grass, and Stephen settles back in his chair with the faint frown that has become habitual lately.
I ask, “How are you, Stephen?”
I think he knows I’m asking about more than his physical state, but he doesn’t want to, or can’t, go beyond that. “I’m fine, Mary.” He calls up a smile that at first is automatic, but when I hold his gaze with a questioning look, the smile leaves his mouth, finally manifests itself in his eyes. “Are you all right, Mary? I mean . . . well, it’s been . . .”
“It’s been tense, to say the least. I’m fine, too. I worked on the Chronicle last night. I only wish my poor hands could write as fast as my mind remembers.” As I speak I reach into my pocket and take out one of the diaries, but I don’t open it.
Stephen watches me, then he draws one knee up, clasps his hands around it. “What did you do after . . . after Rachel passed on?”
Those damned euphemisms. He learned them from the adults, who live entrenched in euphemisms. But I see in his eyes a cast of grief and take satisfaction in it. Not for making him grieve—and it isn’t personal grief, not intense enough to cause him real pain—but because it is a response to Rachel’s death. If her death has affected him, it is because her life has meaning for him.
I look out at the sea, slubbed with whitecaps. “After Rachel died . . . well, I came home. I don’t remember anything about the trip. I just remember one day I was standing at the east gate. When I went in, the dogs and goats came out to greet me. They were all healthy, and I was amazed at that. But Rachel had only been gone about ten days. I was the one who’d been gone so long. Of course, Shadow wasn’t he
re. I knew she wouldn’t be, and it seemed so strange that nothing else had changed. I kept expecting . . .”
He finishes that for me, nearly whispering: “Rachel.”
“Yes. I wandered around, checking the bam, the garden, the orchard. And finally the house. It took an act of will to enter this house. In every room I met Rachel’s absence, even in the trail of blood on the floor from the backdoor to the bathroom.”
“That must’ve been a hard time for you.”
Hard? I want to laugh at the pitiful inadequacy of that word. But he doesn’t know a better way to express it. Nor do I. “Stephen, did I ever tell you the story of the Buddha and the mustard seed?”
He shakes his head, eyeing me curiously. He has some idea who the Buddha was, although he knows very little about Buddhism. Not yet.
I begin, “Well, it seems a woman came to Siddartha, the Buddha, and told him her child had died and begged him to restore the child to life. The Buddha said he would—if she brought him a mustard seed from a house where no one had died or grieved a death. Of course, she couldn’t find such a house, and that was his point. Grief is inescapable.”
Stephen ponders that. “But Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”
“Oh, indeed. After poor Lazarus was four days dead. At least, Jesus raised Lazarus according to John. Odd that none of the other gospels mention this astounding event.”
His eyes go to black slits. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. But you can check it yourself.” No doubt Miriam won’t balk at his wasting candles in order to read the Bible.
“That’s . . . strange.” Then with a sigh: “But how did you stand it? The grief, I mean, when you were all alone here.”
I hesitate, finally shrug. “I don’t know how, but for the first month I think what kept me going was my baby. I had to consider its future, which meant my future, and that meant planting the garden and taking care of the animals, all the things necessary to living. And I decided the first night that I couldn’t avoid memories of Rachel. This place is still steeped in her. I had to face the memories. I began by studying every object she had used or loved. I went to her favorite places, like the tree or the tide pools at the foot of the Knob. I looked at her paintings and drawings. And I started a notebook. I wrote down everything I could remember her saying. I mean, everything I thought significant. It was particularly painful, the notebook, but a strange thing happened after about a month. I found I was writing my thoughts, too. They all melded into one, and I couldn’t be sure where her ideas left off and mine began. It was a revelation and a catharsis. And about that time I sealed the first book since my return. Rachel had worked on the books while I was gone, but there were still over two thousand left. When I finished sealing that first book, I felt . . . almost whole again.”
“Do you still have your notebook?”
“It’s in the vault, Stephen. Maybe to future generations I’ll be famous as Rachel’s Boswell.”
“Her what?”
I laugh. “He was a famous biographer. We’ll get to Boswell and Dr. Johnson later.”
He pauses, then asks, “Would you mind telling me about your baby?”
The question is a natural one, and having gone this far with my story, I can’t stop now. Yet I don’t want to live through the answer to this question again. I’ve always spoken freely to these people about Rachel, but I’ve never talked about the baby. I’m not sure why. Perhaps if I had, Jerry wouldn’t feel so betrayed now.
I look at Stephen, whose smooth, young brow is lined with concern, and I tell him, “The child came prematurely, a month short of term.”
He pulls in a deep breath, his eyes focused inward on a point in memory. “Like Rebecca. But she was so sick before her baby came. Were you sick?”
“No. I don’t know what happened, Stephen. I only know that one afternoon I started feeling—well, just crampy and uncomfortable, but I didn’t think much about it, not till the contractions started. I was milking the goats, and the pain doubled me over. But it didn’t last long, and I finished the milking and carried the pails to the house. That was when the next contraction hit.”
“What did you do?”
I shake my head at that, because I can remember my state of mind, remember I didn’t know what to do. I’d read the books available at Amarna on first aid and physiology, but I still had a rather vague idea of what was supposed to happen in childbirth.
“Well, I wandered around the house talking to myself like a madwoman. I kept hoping it was a false labor. But finally . . .” And I remember that moment of fatalistic calm. “I knew this was the real thing, and it was coming too soon. That frightened me, but I had no choice in the matter, so I prepared for the birth. I bathed myself, built a fire in my room and laid in plenty of wood, put a kettle of water on the stove, and brought in a basin to wash the baby in and a sharp knife to cut the umbilical. I covered the bed and the floor at the foot of the bed with clean sheets, and I brought in enough candles to light me through the night. All this between contractions, of course. And I filled a syringe with morphine and put it on the table by the bed.”
His breath catches at the word morphine, but he says nothing, and I go on. “Actually it was an easy labor and only lasted about eight hours. Toward the end I squatted on the floor as women have since—well, probably since before we were homo sapiens. All through my labor, I kept telling myself a child bom only a month prematurely could live. I knew it would be touch and go, but . . .”
I remember with mordant clarity the culmination of labor, remember squatting naked in that warm room in candlelight, remember the overwhelming urge to bear down, to force the baby into the world, whatever the cost in pain, remember the exultant emotional surge that accompanied it. And finally the baby’s head appeared, then its body came out into my hands. . . .
It was perfect, my child, gauzed with a creamy coating, still covered with fine, silky hair. It would have lost that in the last month. Incomplete, yet still perfect. And so small. It couldn’t have weighed more than four pounds, and it filled my two hands easily. The umbilical cord was twisted like a slick rope around its right arm, and the tiny hand seemed to grasp it. The tiny, perfect, lifeless hand.
Poor little creature, what agonies did you endure? And your mother was oblivious, never guessing your death throes, helpless to offer succor even if she had known you were dying. . . .
“It never occurred to me, Stephen, even at the beginning of my labor, that the child . . . was already dead.”
His eyes close, but he isn’t surprised. Unlike Jerry, he had no reason to believe my child had lived.
But at the time of its birth I had no reason to believe it had died.
And I remember holding that mote of failed life and crying out with the clawing agony of this new grief, remember my cries echoing on nothing. That was what was left to me. Nothing. I had at that moment tested the depths of desolation, and I would never sink deeper.
Stephen’s voice reaches through to me. “Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry.”
My eyes are hot with tears, and it takes me a moment to realize I’ve been remembering a grief thirty years old. “Thank you, Stephen.”
“The baby—was it a boy or a girl?”
Why is that always the first question asked about a newborn child? But what else can one ask? What is more essential to its identity at that point—except, is it alive or dead?
“It was a boy.”
“Oh.” That comes out on a sigh, as if the fact that the child was male made its death even more of a loss. But Stephen is the product of a patriarchal society, although his attitudes, shaped by the necessities of his isolated life, are less rigid than those of his predecessors. I’ve often wondered what human history might have been if men had never discovered the connection between copulation and conception.
For a long time Stephen is silent, s
tudying me, and at length he says, “I don’t know how you kept going after that.”
I look seaward, remember the second pyre I built, a smaller one for the child I never named. “I’m not sure how I did, either, Stephen, and a great deal of the next year is lost to me. But ultimately . . . I suppose I felt a duty to go on living. For one thing, there were the animals to consider. Mostly, there were the books. I had to finish what Rachel had begun. And time does heal grief. Finally. At least, it covers the raw wound with scar tissue. So, I went on living, with all the work and disappointment and even occasional joy that entails. And I worked on the books. But I was in no hurry about that, and I read most of them before I sealed them. In fact, it took nearly twelve years to finish the job. I remember the day when I put the last books in the vault and snapped the padlock shut. I had such mixed feelings at that moment. There was an emptiness, as if I’d used up all the purpose in my life. Then there was the conviction that Rachel and I had created nothing more than a crypt, that we’d buried the books like so many embalmed corpses, and they’d never be discovered and resurrected. But at the same time I felt . . . a link with the future and the past, as if I held the broken ends of a singing cord, one in each hand.” Stephen is rapt, and what I see in his eyes gives me hope. He’s beginning to understand.
Then I shrug. “Other than that, I simply lived, and I was lucky— I stayed healthy, except for occasional colds and a few teeth I had to extract myself. And, of course, the menopause. The design of the reproductive system in the human female leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and saw how old I was getting, and I began to have a little arthritis and other symptoms of the decline of various systems. The winters were the hardest times—the nights are so long at this latitude—but I think I held on to my sanity, and I accomplished what I had to do.”
He looks at me with amazement, perhaps even admiration. “Did you ever wonder if anybody might come here someday?”
