by Lynne Hinton
I never considered the splendor or the shield of the mountains until I left them. And the first five years I was married and away I did not sleep an entire night. I didn’t understand for the longest time why I was restless. But then I realized that I felt exposed, uncovered. I would get up and check all the locks on windows and doors even though O.T. said they had never had a theft or break-in as long as he was alive. I couldn’t help it because I felt bare without the presence of the hills around me. Unprotected and loosed in a way that kept me off center. I missed the boundaries of the Smokies, the edge of the peaks, the mounds of earth that separated me from whatever might bring harm. That’s what I grew up thinking was on the other side.
I remembered, of course, all the things my mother had told me. I knew the stories of families hiding in the caves, fighting mountain lions and bears for food, the smallpox and pellagra and pneumonia that haunted the bands of displaced Indians trying to find a resting place for their ancestors’ spirits, a home for themselves. I knew about the rampages and the thefts and the burnings.
I knew then and I know now that evil festered even within the protected place. That Shelly Threehawks was raped by the white deputies. That Lapis Gulley beat his wife and children, leaving marks on them that could not be denied. That the preacher lied to obtain land for his own house and farm. And that when my father was a boy he was forced to ride and break a horse that everyone knew was not meant to be kept. He was thrown then, knocked in the head, and made blind. That the Cherokee watered the evergreens with their tears.
But in spite of all that I knew then, all that I defined as truth, I grew up believing that evil was what happened beyond the green and sturdy summit. That bad things could not find their way across the rocky elevation. I believed that the hills were a fortress defending goodness and that what you did not name could never be called into existence.
Even today, more than fifty years since my leaving, snow reminds me of the mountains, which remind me of my childhood, which reminds me of the false but deeply regarded notion I held that harm and turpitude lie on the other side of what I cannot see. For a very long time I lived with that magical way of thinking and convinced myself that as long as I did not bear witness to betrayal or malice or vice, then I could pretend it would never reach me. As long as I never came face-to-face with trouble, it would not find me. And as long as I hid from the things that hurt me, I could hide from hurt.
I realize now, however, more than half a century beyond those sheltering mountains, that the most damaging belief that I brought with me from the years I lived in the shadow of the hills was thinking that as long as I did not lay open my heart and uncover the grief that collected there, as long as I did not share it, pour it out and bathe in it, as long as it was never discussed, it would not disturb the heart of anyone else. If it remained concealed, I believed, my sorrow could not harm the one I loved. It was a false belief.
I did not make it to Sunhaven the following day because of the weather. I called the nurses’ station but the phones were not working. I could not stay connected long enough to have someone go to O.T.’s room and see if the woman was there.
The next day the roads were still icy so I had to wait another day before I could go. By then it was too late. Karen had asked the woman too many questions and scared her off. When I arrived early that third morning she appeared to be staying away.
If O.T. knew about her and missed her, he never let on. He never called out for her or spoke of her sudden disappearance. He did not seem distressed or anxious. It wasn’t long after the storm, however, that his condition worsened and he became mostly unresponsive. They reinserted the feeding tube and moved him to the floor where higher-need patients resided. The top floor, the last stop on the way to heaven, one of the nursing assistants had said on the phone to a friend when she thought no one else could hear her.
I knew by the slowing of his breath, the blank stare from deep within his eyes, the unwillingness to participate in even the smallest gestures of life, that he would not last until spring. Having lived with my father after my mother passed, I knew all too well the decision one makes to die. And just as I could not alter the events of our past, I could not change what he was deciding to do.
There was no hill to hide behind. Death was marching toward us like clouds of snow being pushed across the horizon. And I would not take his choice away.
6
I think about Emma and wonder whether she chose not to be born. If she had a prophetic moment there in the warm dark pool inside my womb, envisioning herself in my arms, as my child, that she decided, seeing what she saw, knowing what she knew, that it was not what she wanted to do. Or if she was still in the hands of some other world that called her back because she was not ready or because she was too ready or that something was wrong with me.
“Failure to thrive” is how they define it when a baby, a born baby, chooses not to seek nourishment. It is not an uncommon experience. And I sometimes wonder if Emma just failed to thrive a little sooner than the others.I wonder if it was only some undetected pregnancy disorder or if my baby decided not to be mine.
“Fetal demise” is what they called it. That’s the medical terminology, what was written on my chart. That’s the name the experts give the experience of a baby born dead. And I guess that definition makes it easier for the doctors and nurses to deal with paperwork and the tedious cavities in their own hearts. I never asked who came up with such a term, only what it meant when I signed the forms to be released.
“It means your baby died,” the young woman said, her eyes down and studying the words on the clipboard instead of focusing on me.
“Oh,” I replied, remembering the word demise was also used in a court case Mr. Witherspoon was involved in after his father passed. It had meant that part of the farm had been transferred by lease. “Or maybe she was just loaned out for a while,” I added.
The discharge nurse glanced up then and awkwardly handed me my copy.
I knew that she was dead when I woke up that morning. And even though there were no specific details that I could tell the doctor over the phone when I called with my concern, I knew it. It could only be described as feeling like part of myself had drifted away.
Certainly, there were physical changes. My breathing was different. My appetite had lessened. The lower back pain and the heartburn were gone. But mostly there was just the sense that something, somebody apart from me who was still of me and who, for more than half a year, had been living off what I took in, what I ate and drank and touched, surviving off my blood and my body, existing off my hopes, my breath, my will to live, that this somebody had now gone and had left me to myself.
I knew without ever having an exam or medical verification that Emma and the perpetual state of motherhood were no more. And though I was still as round and full as I had been just a few hours before when she kicked me so hard my knees buckled under me and I fell on a kitchen chair, I was now empty of life, void inside.
I left home without O.T. and drove myself to the hospital. I should have waited for him to return from Raleigh; he asked me to. I could have stayed and received some comfort from the other person affected by this loss. I could have shared that long bitter moment of disappointment; but I didn’t. I walked out of the house, the bed made, the dishes washed, my overnight bag packed, the morning sun bright and promising, and drove to Mercy Hospital completely and undoubtedly alone.
I remember that a light frost had spread across the tops of trees, along the fields of forgotten gardens. I remember faces, people walking on the side of the road, waving hello and good-bye to one another, children riding on bicycles, to school, I suppose. And I remember how it seemed as if everyone standing or moving along the street where I drove noticed me as I headed toward town, a pregnant woman with a dead child.
I worried that if I lingered too long at an intersection or turned my head to acknowledge the curious stares, I would create some mass display of pity, some unnecessary situation of be
ing assisted. So I drove in pretense that nothing was out of sorts. That everything I was doing—driving myself to the hospital, my belly too big to fit beneath the steering wheel, bearing the knowledge that my unborn baby was dead, choosing to make this journey by myself—was normal. I drove ahead, death frozen beneath my ribs, as if everything was as it should have been.
Once I got to the hospital and began to consider what would happen next, I assumed there would be an operation. I just figured they’d put me to sleep and take her out, cut me like she was twisted or I was too small, a cesarean section. Go to sleep eight and a half months pregnant, wake up sliced and childless. I mean, I wasn’t the most clear I had ever been, but I do remember thinking, It’s over, it is at least over.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t close to being over.
How does a mother describe what it is like passing death through her body? How could I, in a lifetime or beyond, ever tell somebody else what it is like to stretch and tear and shatter inside just to let that which is already dead out into the air and expectation of life? How can a woman string the words together to let another know how it feels to do what is natural in a state of unnaturalness? To bring forth one’s dead child and then to keep on living?
I have learned from my marriage to a combat soldier damaged in war that there are things that cannot be spoken. Things so terrible they cannot be named. And on my own battlefield I cried and begged and prayed for mercy—to die, to be wrong, to be delivered of all of myself, dead and dying. But I labored on without relief. Nurses stayed near but would not touch me, as if this death coming from inside me was contagious; I might infect their own mother dreams.
A doctor stood between my legs, the mind of a technician, the heart of a man who will never know. And I went from trying to keep her inside me to trying to get her out; and it seemed as if I were being split, broken, and pulled in two. Finally, when the doctor could no longer bear the wailing and the screaming, the agony of one more unproductive hour, he reached inside me with his clean and uncompromising hands and took her from me. Then he walked away, he and the nurses and my baby, leaving me opened and alone, having given birth to the only part of myself that I truly loved.
The next day I got up from the bed, my clothes neatly packed in my suitcase, a few papers in my hand, a blanket carelessly wrapped around me, and drove myself home.
7
I was in the house packing when O.T. walked in and thought somebody had broken in and robbed us. After rushing from Raleigh to be there during the delivery and staying with me through most of the night, he had left my room the next morning to go to the farm to cut a sow loose that had gotten tangled in a barbed-wire fence. He thought I would stay at the hospital until supper time anyway; but since I had driven myself there in the first place, stone-eyed and cool, again I would choose not to wait. I knew I could get myself home.
Even with the disapproving glances of the staff, a hasty phone call to the doctor, the whisper from an orderly to a custodian, an attempt to seat me in a wheelchair, I walked up the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door. Just as if nothing had happened. Just like I had gone to the hospital only to visit a friend.
When O.T. came in and saw what I was doing, he did not have a word to say. I still imagine that it was the best thing he ever did in our entire marriage. He left me to myself, a self that at that point and for a long time afterward was not enough to share.
He only stared as I took my belongings and placed them in the car. He did not try to stop me or even ask what I was doing or where I was going. He sat and watched, eyes so full of anguish and despair I asked him to turn away. He dropped his face in his hands but did not cry. I finished packing and then walked away, leaving him there with nothing, just as the hospital staff had left me in the delivery room without any measure of sympathy or hope. I drove out the driveway and onto the street without even speaking a good-bye. I never considered his pain.
I wanted children more than anything; and when O.T. returned from having fought in Europe, closed up like an old wound, I staked my life and love more completely on this possibility than on the notion of creating a joyful marriage. I think I believed that having a child of my own would diminish my mother’s sadness, which I had inherited from her, make it less noticeable, let her finally die and pull herself and all of the ghosts away from me.
I thought that a child would deliver us from the unrelenting silence we had managed since O.T. had come home from the war. And I suppose the desire to nest and give birth kept me from lifting the veils that, over many years, I had carefully and purposely draped across my own heart.
O.T., honorably discharged, never spoke of what he had experienced during his time as a soldier. He never mentioned the places he had seen or the men with whom he lived; but just like I was forever scarred by the death of our baby, I knew he struggled with his demons. Late at night he would often leave our bed and I would find him outside, crouched near a tree or pacing behind the barn. I would call to him to come inside; and he would just move farther away, as if my voice was a command to march out into the fields.
Only occasionally would he mention his service in the armed forces, and when he did, the story was brief, the facts sketchy. Over a meal with his family he would casually comment about the chill of a European winter or how hunger can change a man. But if his brothers or friends wanted more details, he’d just switch to a different topic, his voice having grown distant and somber.
Unlike his family, I never asked what happened to him, how the battle years broke him, what he could not forget. I never offered him a place to release his burdens, slide open his heart. Since I remained closed regarding my own sorrow and grief, I never pushed my husband to talk about his.
O.T. did not seem to mind or be jealous of my obsession to have a child. Perhaps he too thought a baby could ease our disappointments. He accepted my desire without argument or recognition, right along with the house I wanted and built and the cool veneer that existed between me and his mother.
I think I loved O.T. even though I realize it was not passionately or with desperation. We were comfortable together, satisfied. And both of us knew, whether it was early in our marriage or much later, that we had what we had. In the beginning it was his mother who made sure of that. In the end it was simply our own method of measurement. We were what we had decided we were.
Mrs. Witherspoon headed off what she considered to be trouble when she noticed what was happening between me and Jolly while O.T. was away. She was subtle at first, only making sure we stayed busy and tired, that I would come in from the field and then have to babysit Dick or wash dishes. She made us focus on whatever crisis she discovered or invented; but then she took a fast and hard turn.
I never knew what she said to her son late one night, only that their voices were raised and sharp like arrows about to fall; but I soon understood after the community picnicand by the look on her face when she saw us walking up from the creek, clothes wet, feet bare, that she would not let things progress any further than they already had. The next day she was gone to town early, and she brought home with her Sally Pretlowe, the woman Jolly married three months later.
We were not naive or insensitive like she implied with her narrow glances and hypocritical prayers of confession that she prayed at the supper table. We knew nothing would come of what we were beginning to feel. We were both loyal to his brother and my husband and to the United States of America’s war efforts against Hitler in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific Islands.
We stifled the attraction, kept our distance in the isolated fields, pretending what we had was merely a relationship between a brother and a sister. And every night while we lay alone in our beds in rooms across the hall from each other, listening to the sounds of each other’s sleep, not tasting, not touching, not stepping over the lines, I willed it to be so.
I guess I was drawn to Jolly because he was the same age as I when O.T. brought me from the mountains. He was a teenager, caught beneath the sha
dow of a strong and honorable oldest son and pushed from his mother’s heart by a younger and more affectionate baby. He was solemn, spoke few words; and he reminded me of everyone I loved. There was nothing excessive about him. He lacked the confidence of O.T. and the tenderness of Dick. He was slow in everything he did, from math problems to fixing the engine of the tractor. He would disappear for hours at a time, down at the creek or out riding a horse.
He was awkward and yet easy to be with, unassuming and honest. And unlike O.T., who in the beginning seemed to regard me as some accomplished goal or some event he had planned, Jolly treated me like I was someone he could never have imagined. To my husband’s younger brother, I was a complete and unexpected surprise.
Sally, the young woman Mrs. Witherspoon brought home for her middle son, was keen to both her mother-in-law’s suspicions and her own intuitions about what was between me and Jolly. So that as soon as they were married and the war was over, she and Jolly moved to Alabama to work in her uncle’s ladder factory.
I have only seen them four or five times in over fifty years, his parents’ funerals and a wedding or two. I called when O.T. had a stroke. I thought it was the right thing to do. Sally answered the phone and was curt but appropriately sympathetic. She said that she would tell Jolly but that she wasn’t sure they would be able to come. She suffered terribly with arthritis in her hip. “Had to have been all those years standing on a concrete floor,” she added and then quickly mentioned a bridge game and said good-bye. Jolly never called; and I never made anything of it.
After O.T. returned from Europe and before Emma, I had forgotten what was between me and his younger brother. O.T. and I had to learn and relearn each other several times. He was burdened by a soldier’s sorrow and I, because I so desperately wanted a child, by the disappointment of a monthly period. For most of our marriage, these experiences defined who we were. And even though I didn’t really know him before the war—he came into my life and left so quickly—I knew that what happened during the years he was gone had changed O.T.
