by Patrick Lane
He didn’t know what to do for the mother. Hers seemed a long grief, a sorrow that spanned centuries, a woe as long as life, the present one. What the woman had told him when he’d first looked at the baby was that she barely fed from her mother’s breasts. The baby shit thin gruel, vomited, fed, and vomited again, her body wasting away. He knew little to nothing about babies. He’d seen them in the war, sick and starving like their mothers. Their fathers were dead in battle, wounded and recuperating in some Allied encampment, or had drifted off and were lost. The mothers had been unlocked from concentration camps or were simply refugees from bombed-out towns and cities, all of them wanderers in the forests or along the roadsides. There were the German women and children in the camps after the war, the bad food the French gave them, the spare bits of bread, the rotten vegetables, potatoes weeping, soft onions covered in blue rust, the rapes, the murders. There were the girls with shaved heads beaten by women and men who hated them having consorted with German soldiers. There was hate and revenge, shame and desperation everywhere. And there was Marie’s baby, the one she would never explain, never say where it was except to say it was or had been a girl. Seeing Jaswant’s wife had brought Marie back once again. Art shook her away, the mystery of Marie’s baby girl more than he could bear. He waited there on the roadside until her presence faded away.
The one thing Art knew of women was they would do anything to keep their child alive. He’d seen mothers trade their bodies for a half cup of powdered milk, a can of Spam, a chunk of mouldy bread, a bit of chocolate. Soldiers—Canadian, American, Poles, Brits, whoever—used them while their child watched in stillness, a little one in a box or crib in the corner, not weeping, silent, having learned that crying placed everyone in danger.
Art pushed them all out of his head, the German prisoners in the camps at Rennes and Rivesaltes reaching through the wire, the ones the French slowly starved, and he couldn’t stand thinking of them all and drove the camps and cemeteries away. He drove Walcheren away too, drove away the guns, and the Dutch woman, her Canada, dank u, dank u, words slipping through his ears like the cry of a rat surrounded by a murder of crows in broken corn. She became the German mother on the road toward Rennes offering her ten-year-old child to anyone who would take her, anyone who might want her, all of them and none. He wanted them all gone from him, away. He didn’t want to be on the road listening to the mother’s song, didn’t want to be in a room in Paris with a woman bleeding milk, without words, without anything, her baby disappeared, given away, sent away, lost. He didn’t want to think of the war and what he’d seen, what he’d done.
He had come to see Gerda Dunkle’s baby with some kind of hope. There was a chance the penicillin would do some good. The real help was with the doctors down south in Kamloops, but this woman had no money to pay for doctors. If there had been any money then it was likely with the man who left her, the father of the baby, the one who promised he would return. And what good was such a vow? Men made such promises believing they would come back, but how frequent were their returns?
The child was sick and would die or not, no matter the medicine, no matter Art’s ministrations.
And then what?
A grave, where? Outside the fence at the deserted village church whose very earth was limbo? Limbo was everywhere. The altar was a limbo, the sacred cup and chalice limbos, the vestments and robes the stuff of limbo. There was no sanctuary, no place safe from harm.
He turned and looked up the road to where the track climbed to the dump. He thought slowly through the dwindling fog of opium and whisky that he would go to the dump after he gave the baby the medicine.
Joel had said he’d seen a truck leaving the village in the night.
Where would a truck go but to the dump? It was either that or up the canyon road to Avola or Blue River or south to Clearwater or Little Fort and who would have been going there near dawn, night fleeting? He went over it again, his mind soft, the complexities eluding him. Maybe it was McAllister’s truck, but why would he have gone to the dump unless it had something to do with Irene? And Joel said there were two of them, so one might have been Irene—or if not, then who? The only person Jim ever talked to was Ernie. Could it have been him in the truck?
The questions flew around inside his head liked crazed sparrows. Art placed his kit in the yellowed stalks of broken grass by the side of the road and rubbed his face with his hands. He felt for a moment that if he could just take his eyes out he could wash them clean in the sweat of his hands. If he could do that then he might be able to see things clearly and so make sense out of the day and the night before, the night to come, the days and nights going on till they didn’t anymore.
He wanted to understand what had happened to Irene McAllister, where she had gone, and how she had gone, her with the legs so badly injured. It had been Jim who had taken her, who else? But where and why? To what end?
And he started walking again, the road ahead climbing beyond him past a rutted curve into the trees and then another quarter mile to the dump. As he stared at its vanishing he felt something brush at his shoulder and he turned to the touch thinking it a bird or animal, some wild thing wanting him to leave, and saw a woman staring up at him. She carried a baby in her arms. It was wrapped in a yellow cloth, the child’s legs sticking out like two small twigs, and, “Yes?” he asked, bewildered, for a moment not understanding where he was that a woman should have touched him, and, “Who? Who are you?”
“Raaka Kaur,” she said. “You know me. Jaswant’s wife.”
“Ah,” he said, suddenly knowing where he was. He was at the shack where the Sikhs lived. The woman held the baby enclosed in the scoop of cloth, the child who would not get better.
He looked up from the baby. “And you?” he asked, confused again. “What’s your name?”
“Raaka,” she repeated. “You know me.” And softly again, when he still looked bewildered, “I am Raaka, Jaswant’s wife.”
As he hesitated, she said, “Come.”
She picked up the first-aid kit and placed it in his hand, took his arm, and helped him down into the ditch and up the other side to the path that led to their cabin. “Be careful,” she said as he scrambled in the loose fall of gravel.
He followed her to the little porch where she sat him down on the sprung couch, his body sinking into the collapsed cushion, his knees at his chin as he stared at Gerda Dunkle.
The woman named Raaka slipped around his long legs to the screen door and went into the shack after placing the baby and the shawl in the other woman’s arms.
The baby was going to die. It can’t look like what it does and not, he thought. Maybe it was dead now and she was holding a lifeless child and thinking that made him want to flee. He struggled to get up, but when the woman smiled at him he sank back relieved, not quite knowing why.
Jaswant’s wife returned a moment later carrying a small black tray with a cup of yellow tea on it, bits of leaves and twigs swirling in a circle. She was about to offer it to Art when the mother got up from the couch and took the teacup from Raaka and gave it to Art.
“Thank you,” he said, awkward, the cup hot, burning the blisters on his fingertips. He set the cup beside him on a round of cedar at the corner of the couch and blew on his fingers. He couldn’t remember how they’d gotten burned, one of the blisters weeping pink blood.
The baby had swung out from her when she had leaned forward with her offering of the tea and then had swung gently back, her arm cradling it to her chest. The little legs had settled back into the cup of cloth. The woman saw him looking at the slight swelling where her child lay and said, “Her name is Beate. My baby. You remember. Beate is her name.”
When he looked into her eyes, she said, “It means blessed. It is a holy name.”
Not knowing what to say to that, he said, “Holy, yes. Babies, this one, your baby girl.”
“Please, can you help her?”
It was the same as when he’d seen her that first time. He lowered
his head to the question, unable to fully comprehend its meaning.
After a moment he turned to Raaka and quietly asked where Jaswant was.
“He is working at the mill,” said Raaka. “A special shift.”
He closed his eyes and saw the lean brown man working in the sawmill, shovelling sawdust and wood chips into a wheelbarrow and hand trucking it all to the flume that led up to the burner mouth.
He knew Jaswant was a hard worker and he was also a man who had taken onto himself the burden of a stranger, a woman with a sick child. Jaswant’s woman was named Raaka. They had taken Gerda and the baby into their home and now Raaka was asking him for help. He looked down at the floor and picked up the teacup, his one hand holding it and the other hanging from the end of his knee as if no longer a part of his body.
Jaswant’s wife touched his arm and Art raised himself up, a few drops of the tea spilling across his burned fingers. He tried to feel the pain and he did. “Yes?” he said.
“Medicine?” asked Gerda. Her eyes were pleading. “You have medicine for her?”
“Yes,” he said, remembering why he had come. “I have medicine. It might help. I don’t know.”
Gerda lifted her hands. “It will make her better, please?”
Art leaned down and placed his teacup on the round of cedar. He asked her to give him the baby.
She leaned toward him, her body trembling under the band of yellow cloth as if under the fabric small animals were moving across her shoulders and down her thin arms.
“Beate will be better?” And then as if to herself, “She will, she will.”
“Give me the baby,” he said, and she did, unfolding the sack of cloth, the baby appearing feet first and then the whole child. He looked at the tiny girl, his mind clearing a little, and thought she was smaller than the last time he’d seen her. When had that been? A few days ago, a week?
As the mother placed Beate in his hands, the baby pulled her legs into her belly, almost disappearing between Art’s upraised knees. The tiny wrinkled face appeared between them, supplicant, a human thing.
He held the baby, thinking she couldn’t weigh more than four or five pounds. She settled in the crotch of his belly and thighs as he undid the buttons on her tiny shirt, one thin leg straightening, the baby’s mouth making a mewing sound, and then the leg returning to bend tight against her belly again. The baby’s ribs were narrow ripples on slow water. Her thin chest rose and fell, the great brown eyes staring through him, seeing something beyond him he knew was out there, something he didn’t understand. A thin whisper came from her mouth, a sound Art understood to be the kind of song a baby learns in its mother’s belly. It had a kind of meaning to it that he had lost, the child without the strength to make an outcry, only sing. She was as nothing in his huge hands as he took her up and held her close to his face.
“Beate,” he said, amazed at something so small and yet so human. “Your name is Beate.”
“You will heal her,” Gerda said, the tips of her fingers nesting against each other as she squatted down before him, a tent of prayer nestled against her lips. There was something in her voice, a terrible desire. She pushed her palms together, her hands blades of bone and skin.
“Hold her,” he said, giving the baby back, Gerda settling the baby into the yellow pouch. Art lifted himself out of the hole in the couch, teetering for a moment on the worn boards of the porch before opening his kit and taking out the envelope of penicillin and a tiny bottle of Aspirin.
He dripped a few drops of water from a glass Raaka held out and mixed into it the tiniest tip of penicillin with a few grains of Aspirin. They might help, he thought, it might be enough to give the mother hope, because he knew hope was what the mother had. It was him who was without it.
He pulled the pouch out from Gerda’s body, nestled the tip of the spoon to the baby’s lips, and gently pushed it into the hollow of her mouth. He gently massaged her sparrow throat, her huge eyes watching him. As she swallowed, Gerda brought her close again and pressed the baby to her chest.
He sat back down, perched on the edge of the couch, and gave Gerda the tip of a teaspoon of penicillin in a fold of paper and a few Aspirin. “You saw how much,” he said. “Don’t give her more than I did. It would kill her. Give what I showed you twice a day.”
“Yes,” she said, tears starting in her eyes as she gripped the paper and the pills.
“The medicine might not help her,” he said, “but it is all I know how to do. You need a real doctor, not me.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
He startled in fear at her terrible words, the same ones the woman in Holland had said to him. It took everything he had not to cry out. He felt the tears in his eyes and he closed them and turned away, his mouth twisted with a sob.
“It is all right,” Raaka said, her hand touching his shoulder.
He told himself he was in the north, at the western edge of the Cascade Mountains where a great river washed its silt south to the sea, and he stared down the road to the valley where the thin smoke from the burner wafted into the wind come down the canyon. He was not staring out at the sea on the Scheldt peninsula, he was not in Paris with a woman who would not tell him what had happened to her baby, who she was, what she’d done, and he was not lying on a mattress on the floor in the rooms that looked out on the alley behind Pender Street in Vancouver. He was not being ministered to by Li Wei. He was not.
He gathered himself together and thought of Molly Samuels and how she might know some way to help this woman and her child. He’d talk to Molly. She would know what else might be done.
“Thank you, thank you,” Gerda said.
Art nodded desperately.
Jaswant’s wife spoke into the quiet between them and said, “I thought at first it was you driving up here last night. I thought you were coming here.”
“Me?”
Art thought for a moment of his sometimes coming up to the Sikh shacks with a bottle of whisky to drink with the men in their shacks higher up the road, but he never drove, he didn’t own a truck. And sometimes too he came to minister to the wounds of the men when they had drunk too much and fought. He asked Jaswant once what they fought about and he said they fought over the memory of their women or just over the thought of a woman, isolated as they were in their wretched shacks outside the village, lonely as they were.
“Last night?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“The sawyer,” she said. “My husband saw his truck. He said it was the sawyer. Mister Reiner was with him.”
Then not Irene, he thought.
* * *
—
PIECES OF ABANDONED MACHINERY lay half buried in gravel and yellow mud, struts of iron rearing out of the wreckage, the pitted rust the bars wore like diseased emblems of decay, shafts, arches, and housings, worn tractor treads and engine blocks, bald tires, patches peeling from their innards, truck boxes, hoods of cars, a twisted flume, a wringer washing machine, a steering wheel bent into curled wings, a child’s buggy without wheels perched on top of a Ford engine that was balanced atop a blasted cedar stump, the engine like an otherworldly space machine, below it the canopy of a frontend loader, a crushed hard hat hanging from a twisted strut. A blue blanket like a tattered flag hung tangled with a sheet of rotted canvas. Bush cable was wrapped around two twisted car axles with the wheels attached, the hubcaps long gone. Around the blue flag and mixed in with the detritus were discarded oil-soaked rags, ripped and patched clothing of all kinds, torn bits of sacking, rubber belts and pistons, shafts and transmissions, wheel hubs, engine blocks, cracked sinks and worn-out galvanized tubs and pails, tobacco cans, liquor bottles, and among it all cracked and broken sacks and boxes with scraped shoulder and leg joints sticking out, bits of desiccated sinew hanging from the scored skulls of dead beeves and horses, moose, deer, and bear, their many spines curved and twisted into fragile arabesques, their bodies torn apart by bears, random bones of all
kinds, ribs, legs, and tails, rotted vegetables and bits of pebbled fat and marrow seething under a hovering film of flies, wasps, and hornets, the insects searching among the effluvium of village, farm, and mill for anything they could eat or suckle on, the flies to lay eggs in discarded skull pans creating bundled nests of maggots feeding on soft brains, and rib cages half filled with earth where tunnels had been dug for the grey hexagonal nursery cells to hold the eggs of yellow jackets, the baskets of paper hanging from under the scapulas of moose where hornets sang their grubs to sleep, the crows and ravens above them in murderous dozens screaming along with the gulls their stories of feasts and famines.
All had been dumped in a rocky gulch between the mountain’s side and a long curved hillock of gravel left behind by a retreated glacier, a cut of open earth and stone, a catchment to hold whatever it was humans had no use for, a place for feral children to forage in for unimaginable treasures, a hole where men could discard what they had worn out and wasted, ruined machinery and tools, cracked sinks and crockery, an icebox without a door, a cupboard with one, a washing machine, a Western Flyer wagon without wheels, dented oil drums, cracked and broken things that could not be mended or fixed, a place of refusal, a depression to hold what could not be reclaimed, every kind of home for rats, mice, moles, snakes, shrews, beetles, and ants.
Art sat on the grey back of a cracked stone staring at a white dress caught on a timber whose flare bore blots of dark and crusted red, a dress that might have been worn for a wedding or a birth, a dress both fragile and rare and now the everyday ordinary uselessness of a thing gone past use with no meaning now to anyone, the blood upon it ineradicable except for the feasting of the flies that coursed in jagged circles around its emblazoned stain. He sat there above the dump and stared at the dress as three black bears worked the drop-off high above where garbage from the cookhouse had been dumped, hemp sacks torn open, their contents bulging, the bears tearing at sacks and ripped meat boxes that held stubs and chunks of tired bread, pork and steak bones, wilted vegetables, cans and bottles, broken crockery, the effluvia of what was left of the week’s eating at the cookhouse by the bunkhouse crew.
