Arms Wide Open

by Patricia Harman

  In the middle of the sing, I get my birth bag and meet with Sue Ellen, a homebirth client, in the kitchen. Sue Ellen, a clear-eyed, wispy twenty-year-old from Delaware, pulls up her baggy thrift-store cashmere men’s sweater and shows me her rounding belly.

  I have her lie down on the stainless steel kitchen table and do an impromptu OB visit, measuring her fundus and checking the baby’s position. I even send her to the bathroom so I can check her urine for protein and glucose. Her boyfriend, Shawn, a former Green Beret, ten years her elder, has also been taking her for prenatal care to the new family doctor in town. “How much weight have you gained?”

  “Twenty pounds.”

  You wouldn’t know it by looking at her. There’s not an ounce of fat anywhere. I pull my fetoscope out of my bag and check the fetal heartbeat. Her belly and braless breasts are brown; you can tell she runs around on their farm without a shirt, like we all do.

  “Can you feel the baby move?”

  “Oh, all the time.” Sue Ellen smiles. I put my arm around her, help her down from the table, and we go back to the party.

  Wearing a long green feather as I fly . . . Everyone is still singing, song after song.

  Paul and Silas bound in jail. Had no money for to go their bail . . .

  Peace I ask of thee, oh river . . .

  Forty or so men and women in harmony . . . until the kids get cranky . . . and our voices give out . . . and again we form a human chain around the room.

  Amazing grace . . . Someone starts the closing song and our voices soar up out the high windows into the night. How sweet the sound . . .

  WILLOW

  “What?” Rachel asks. “What’s the matter?” Her almost-black eyes snap with concern.

  I put down the receiver unable to speak, my throat full of stones. Everyone around the oak table in the Long House stares. The light in the room has dimmed, as if someone turned down the kerosene lamp.

  Mara stops serving and her ladle clanks into the soup pot.

  “What?” Rachel asks again.

  “That was Fern. She called to tell us that Willow, Montana and Starlight’s baby, is dead.” Mica runs to me and puts his arms around my waist. He knows baby Willow from the Growing Tree. He knows what dead means. No one else moves.

  Then, all at once, an outburst of voices.

  “Fuck!”

  “How?”

  “No, it can’t be!”

  I join them at the table, flip my long skirt over the bench and push my soup back. My stomach is sick. Mica crawls up on me and I hold him tight. “It happened a few days after the co-op potluck. Some kind of infection. The baby threw up once, but Montana and Starlight thought she just had an upset stomach, you know, nothing worse.” The pea soup grows cold.

  “Starlight wiped up the vomit and changed the baby . . . ”

  Only days ago I’d bounced the cherub-faced infant. Only days ago, I’d held her warm body, in the little blue flowered pinafore, against me at the co-op potluck. Now she’s gone. I can’t comprehend it. I take a big breath and swallow hard.

  “Anyway, Starlight nursed the baby and put her in the crib across the room from their four-poster. Sometime in the night, Willow whimpered twice but went back to sleep and then, close to dawn, just as the sky was getting light, she made a strange noise.” I catch Tom and Stacy’s eyes. How many times have our babies stirred and we waited in the dark, hoping they would go back to sleep?

  “When Montana finally got up to light a lantern, he pulled back the covers and found the baby all mottled and blue.”

  “Like crib death?” Tom asks.

  “No, something weird. Spots all over and she wasn’t dead yet. More like blotches than a rash and she was hot and lethargic. When her eyes rolled back in her head, they knew something was terribly wrong. Montana got dressed and took off running for the nearest house with a telephone. Because of the mud, their truck was out at the end of the road, over a mile away.

  “Fern said it took an hour for the squad to get there and the baby was already dead, but the county coroner feels it wouldn’t have mattered. Willow’s blood cultures showed a rare type of meningitis. Even if they’d been able to get to the hospital, antibiotics couldn’t have saved her.”

  No one stirs. No one says anything. We’re immobilized with shock and sorrow. If a baby’s parents love her and breastfeed her and don’t let her swallow buttons or coins, she isn’t supposed to die. That’s how we think. She isn’t supposed to die. If you do what is right and love each other and think good thoughts, bad things don’t happen.

  Finally (this is Tom), “Will there be a service?”

  “Fern says no.” Orion, in his wooden high chair, is banging his spoon on the tray. I pick him up and hold his fragile life against me.

  “Montana and Starlight are packing up and leaving for California tomorrow, going out west to be with their families for a while.”

  There’s nothing more to say. Tom stands to push a log in the fire. Rachel begins to scrape plates. No one has finished dinner.

  Outside, the first snow begins. Stacy pulls out his Autoharp. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. I will never forget you. I will never forsake you.

  The flakes, like gravel, drop straight down. Soon the pine trees are covered, every twig and branch, but there’s no dancing in the forest with outstretched arms this night. Willow is dead.

  Winter

  CHAPTER 4

  Healing

  “How hot is he?” It’s Dr. Dan Schorr on the phone, the hippie physician from the little town of Otto, thirty miles away. “Do you have any Children’s Tylenol?”

  Orion is sick. His little body clings to me, almost trembles, makes me, too, feel hot and sick. When I try to put him to the breast, he whines and turns his head. His cry is high and pitiful. I remember when Mica and Stacy had the flu on the homestead in Minnesota. Mica wouldn’t eat and was listless, but this is worse. I also remember baby Willow.

  Outside, snow again falls, blows sideways in big thick flakes like scraps of paper. The pines in front of the Long House are already plastered and there’s eight inches on the ground from before. Mara, putting up the colored paper chains she and Mica made, watches me over her shoulder. She knows I wouldn’t be calling a doctor unless I was really worried. She also knows we have thirty-three dollars in the money jar, not enough to pay for a hospital admission.

  “I just took a rectal temperature, it’s 104. We don’t have any Tylenol, maybe some aspirin.”

  Dan interrupts. “No aspirin.” He has a slight German accent. The practitioner grew up in Connecticut but studied medicine in Frankfurt. He’s a Patch Adams sort of doc, practicing out of his farmhouse.

  “You don’t give aspirin”—aspireen is how he says it—“to babies. It could cause Reye’s syndrome, but you need to get the fever down somehow. Try bathing him every two hours in tepid water. Take his temperature again between baths and call me if it’s still above 101.”

  “OK . . . OK . . .” I’m writing this down.

  “Don’t let him get dehydrated or he’ll have to go into the hospital for an IV.” I give my report to Tom and he tromps through the snow, a quarter mile to the well, for two more buckets of water, then a quarter mile back. I want to ask my husband, “Will our baby die?” but I can’t say the words. I want him to tell me I’m being ridiculous. “Don’t talk like that, Patsy! Don’t think like that.”

  In the Long House, Mara, Rachel, and I settle down to bathing Orion in a big tin tub. By sunset, Orion’s temp is down to 100 degrees, but he’s whimpering in a quivery, thin wail and trembling all over. “Shit,” Tom says. “What’s wrong with him? It looks like pre-seizure activity to me, but what do I know? I’ve never seen a seizure before.”

  At seven thirty, when the fever starts to go up again, Tom picks up the phone. “W
e’ve got to do something.” He dials Dan Schorr.

  “Dan? It’s Tom Harman. I’m sorry to bother you. The baby’s fever went down when we started the baths, but it’s back up to 103 and he won’t nurse. Do you think we should take him to Roane General Hospital? The snow’s a foot deep here and still coming down. We don’t have snowshoes, but we could do it.” I’m standing next to him with my head on his shoulder, trying to hear what Dan says. Tom tilts the receiver toward me.

  “No, don’t go to the hospital,” our physician friend tells us. “You don’t have insurance. You don’t need to take the baby out either; the cold might make him worse. I’ll come to you.”

  Two hours later, a call, “Halloooo!” comes from the trees above the cabin and Tom and Dr. Dan, followed by Stacy and Laurel, stomp in. Tom had walked out to Steele Hollow Road to meet Dan and had stopped at the Little House on his way back, to give our friends an update.

  On a peg near the door, the family physician hangs his cowboy hat and rough sheepskin jacket. He sets his small black leather valise, the kind Doc Holliday on Maverick carried, on the oak table.

  Upstairs on our elevated two-by-four bed, Dr. Dan, a balding thirty-five-year old with a dishwater ponytail, begins his examination. Tom, Ben, and Stacy stand at the edge of the kerosene lamplight like the three bearded wise men. Mara sits cross-legged on the blue patchwork quilt, holding Mica. Then Rachel and Laurel, their eyes dark with worry, creep into the room. No one speaks. Our beautiful baby lies flaccid, his eyes glazed and vacant, his cheeks red with fever, his temp now back up to 104. I’m waiting for the blotches. One red spot and we’re out of here. I don’t care what Dan says. I’ll carry Orion all the way to town through the snow by myself.

  The doc shakes his head, replacing his otoscope and stethoscope in the black leather bag. “Without blood work I can’t be sure, but his tympanic membranes look like crap, so I’m betting it’s an ear infection. I brought along some pediatric antibiotics and Tylenol.” The doc gets out a dropper and persistently feeds Orion some syrupy red stuff. There’s no sound in the room but the baby’s whimper.

  “Maybe we should say a prayer . . . or something . . .” Mara offers. The group moves spontaneously toward the bed, eager to do anything. It’s not that we all believe the same way, but whatever plea we can put out to the Great Spirit can only help. For ten minutes we sit in a tight circle, each person resting a hand on our baby. Mica watches with round, blue eyes and holds one of his brother’s little bare feet. We can’t stop thinking of Willow, how she whimpered in the night and a few hours later was dead.

  By dawn Orion stops trembling. The fever is gone. He’s nursing and pulling my hair. Whether it was prayer or the cherry-flavored penicillin, we’ll never know. I favor prayer, love that floats up in the air, does a slow dance with the stars, and comes down with the cool breath of heaven.

  Winter Solstice

  “Fourteen hundred of us were arrested at the last demonstration of the Clamshell Alliance against nuclear power,” Colin rattles on as we parade through the woods, dressed in parkas, knit caps, and scarves. His orator’s voice rings through the trees. He came with a friend, a young blond guy from Vermont, for the winter solstice celebration. It’s the first time we’ve seen him in more than six months.

  On the top of the rise, we stand for a moment to admire the sun, resting over the last row of hills like a Christmas orange, then head toward the center of the horseshoe-curved ridge where Stacy and Tom have built a bonfire. On this longest night of the year, Anne Margaret, our new neighbor, and her six-year-old son, Joshua, have joined us too. The little boys run on ahead, one stocky and brown, one thin and pale with white wispy hair. We are excited to have another kid around for homeschool. Benny troops along behind, with Orion, bundled up like a mummy.

  Colin never wavers in his commitment to nonviolent resistance, but lately I wobble. The loss of Willow, the soft pink baby in the blue flowered dress, has sobered me, made me review my priorities, torn me from the revolutionary barricades down to cold earth.

  Anne Margaret sits hunched near the bonfire like a gargoyle, the hood of her wool cape over her head. The lanky hard-faced woman, who recently purchased the adjoining farm, is another Peacemaker that Colin, like the Pied Piper, seduced. Our neighbor has a difficult road ahead, a single mother in rural West Virginia, white with a black child, trying to make a go of it on the land by herself.

  I park myself on the log next to her, shoulder to shoulder. “How’s it going?” I ask, taking Orion from Benny. Anne Margaret reaches over and touches the baby’s cheek with one finger. She rests it there for a second, while Orion gives her a one-toothed grin, then drops her hand back into her lap. The thirty-four-year-old’s forehead is perpetually creased.

  “I’m OK, but my roof’s leaking again; I thought I fixed it.”

  “Maybe we could come over. Make a workday of it.”

  “No thanks. I can do it.”

  I take a deep breath. She’s so independent, never wants help.

  The sun wavers, trembling behind the black silhouettes of trees. We reach for each other’s hands. Thank you for this beautiful world and for the blessings of these friends. I put my heart out to the universe. Help me be a good mother, be kind and fearless. And keep us safe. Keep us all, safe.

  I know this is not a reasonable prayer. The world is not safe. Baby Willow was not safe. Baby Willow is dead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Snow Fight

  “So, do you want to go with me?” Mara asks. “We could bum a ride to Highway 50 and then hitch to New England. I’d like to get into some action again but Ben’s not into it . . .”

  “I don’t see how I can. For one thing, I’m still breastfeeding. I’d have to pump milk and throw it away or take Orion with me, and it’s so cold; I can’t take a chance with him getting sick again . . . For another thing, Alexandra from the co-op is expecting soon. I can’t just cut out . . . Hey, no fair!” A clunk of snow whacks me on the side of the face and the cold fluff drifts down my neck.

  “Keep me out of it. Anyway, how come no one’s helping? Mara and I are shoveling like slaves while you guys kid around! We’re not done yet.” The day is cold and sunny. Trees clink with ice in the wind and there’s seven inches of new white stuff on the ground.

  Stacy, Ben, and Tom are chasing each other through the woods, while we women shovel the trail to the latrine. The overgrown boys hide behind trees, aiming snowballs for the head. If it weren’t for their pacifist beliefs, they would make good soldiers, tough, disciplined, surprisingly aggressive, able to suffer without complaint, wily, intelligent, and strong.

  “Tea time!” Rachel yells from the porch. “Come for tea and muffins.” We clomp down to the Long House, stomp our boots, brush snow off our backs, and shake our knit caps. “Whatcha makin’?” asks Ben, eyeing the mess of cut-up plastic tarp all over the floor.

  “Sleds,” Rachel answers. “One for each of us. After snack, we’ll go sledding on the other side of the ridge where there aren’t so many trees.”

  As the shadows of the bare maples and oaks stretch out across the snow, we trudge up the thirty-degree pasture slopes and whiz down on our plastic sleds, again and again. It’s like flying.

  Ben zooms past. “Race you, Tom!”

  These are the good days. There used to be more. I remember when there were nearly two-dozen of us making music in the full moonlight on the top of the ridge that first spring. Mara and I danced naked, leaping and hopping in the moon shadows . . . So many are gone; these last few I hold dear.

  The sun is just setting, golden, behind the West Virginia hills when Rachel urges everyone to come back to the Long House for dinner. I watch as Stacy, one arm around Mica and one fist raised in the air in the sign of the revolution, hurtles down the slope one last time. Mica’s hood falls back and his white hair blows against Stacy’s black beard.

 
CARLOS

  The last time I hitchhiked out of West Virginia was when I went to Austin to apprentice as a midwife over a year ago. It was a balmy spring day, the kind of morning you feel something good will happen. Redbud trees bloomed along the road and pink phlox swayed in the ditches. Our friend Louis had dropped us at the truck stop in Ripley on his way to Charleston to get a shipment of bricks for his kiln.

  Lori Moon Dog and I sat drinking tea in a booth with our backpacks stashed on the floor next to us. We were looking for a ride in a semi and had a sign laid before us on the Formica table that said GOING WEST. Mica was at home with Stacy and Tom. Orion was still, as they say, a twinkle in his father’s eye.

  A truck driver with a gap between his teeth and aviator glasses beckons us over to the counter, where he hunches over a slice of cream pie. “Where you headed?”

  “Texas. We’ll take anything going west,” Lori answers. She’s a short, tough grease monkey from Arizona, a longtime friend of Colin’s and a part-time resident on the farm.

  “Name’s Sorlie. I’m goin’ straight through to New Mexico.” He swipes his face with a paper napkin, grabs both our packs, and carries them out to his sixteen-wheeler. A Polaroid of his wife and daughter rests on the dash, along with a pack of Camels and a roach clip with feathers.

  Before we get to Dallas, our driver arranges for another trucker to wait for us at a rest stop. “Got a couple of beavers hitching to Austin. Copy?” he says into his CB. Lori and I can’t help it. We know he means hot babes, but we crack each other up by squinting and sticking our front teeth out like cartoon rodents.

  I’d learned about the Midwifery Collective, in Austin, a few months before when I attended a homebirth on a farm near Huntington. The mother was a transplant from Texas and introduced me to her friend, Annabelle, a midwife and wiry mother of three. I asked for an opportunity to apprentice with the collective and Annabelle generously offered me a room in her house in exchange for housekeeping duties.