The Yellow Wood

by The Yellow Wood (v5. 0) (epub)

  Emily won’t hold her baby, won’t touch her, won’t look at her. Earl and the other kids are keeping Bella alive, though she won’t live long no matter what they do. Emily spends her time in bed or, at most, sitting up in a chair in the dim bedroom. She speaks very little, eats less, may not be sleeping at all.

  I hold Bella every chance I get. I can’t get enough of her.

  A baby shares this place with me. She changes shape as I look at her, tear my gaze away, helplessly look back. Wide eyes with no light in them, or, more precisely, with an unnatural light. Mouth working. Pale strangled cry. Skull like clay that does not harden, ready at any given moment to ooze between my fingers.

  Out of the gloom around me dozens of containers emerge, bottles and bags and boxes, and in each of them floats the disembodied head of this one baby girl. She wants something of me, and plainly she is entitled, but I have nothing to spare.

  For me this loamy scent is primal, because I haven’t lived for a very long time in a place damp enough to be loamy. It scares me that I don’t wish Martin were here.

  There’s a rock overhang, but it gives no external sign of creating and then sheltering an inhabitable space. I tiptoe closer, crouch, peer, and see him at once, hear him lightly breathing.

  Though we’re facing each other head-on and not three feet apart, he doesn’t acknowledge me. Knees drawn up and elbows splayed, he looks like a praying mantis, and I’m surprised he can still sit like that at his age—I’m not sure I could. He may in fact be praying, which doesn’t seem as out of character as I’d have thought; his hands are clasped at his chest.

  Then he raises his hands and tilts back his head, and light from somewhere glints on the bottle from which he’s about to drink. I lunge at him, falling short and scraping my shoulder and howling, “Daddy! No! Not yet!”

  Chapter 8

  Alexandra’s interference takes me entirely by surprise—as though further evidence were required that I am failing, in every sense of the word. I should have seen it coming. Not so long ago, I would have.

  Trance shattered, pulse shot wild and thin, body and soul set to quivering, I nevertheless manage not to drop the flask or spill its contents. For all the time and effort spent on this concoction, all the retrieving and decoding of notes, all the gathering and scavenging, all the planting and tending and harvesting, all the meticulous measuring and re-measuring, I cannot be sure I have done everything correctly, or, even if so, that it will have the intended effect. Still, I would not like to waste it.

  In a caricature of what in contemporary American parlance is called an enabler, she wrests the flask away from me and empties it between us. The ground, always nearly saturated here, refuses to accept this additional moisture, causing a small pool to form. We will both get our feet wet and catch our death.

  “How dare you?” I mean to shout, but my voice is reedy and I must pause for breath after just those three syllables. When I can, I add, “Who do you think you are?”

  “Who do you think you are?” Among my least favourite of his many catchphrases—right up there with “Alexandra, pay attention,” and “Alexandra, slow down,” and “the Kove family will bring good into this world”—it especially infuriates me here and now.

  “I’m your daughter! I’m your daughter, goddammit, and you can’t do this to me! Not yet!” Not yet? What am I saying?

  “Emily?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You know perfectly well who I am. Sandi. Your daughter Sandi.”

  “I have no daughter named Sandi.”

  “Alexandra, all right? Your daughter Alexandra.”

  “My daughter Alexandra has been gone for many years.”

  “Stop it, Daddy! You know who I am!”

  Now I do know who she is, but what has become the pretence of confusion may be useful a while longer. With rather more aversion than I actually feel, I recoil from her touch, and am gratified and stricken by the look on her face.

  From somewhere there is music, a romantic would say from the wood itself. But if there is such a thing as music of the spheres, if the earth can be said to sing and this yellow wood among all others to harmonize, it is only because of the limitations of human language and perception. This is Vaughn, no more or less. It must be Vaughn, although in my experience he has not made quite this sort of music. I believe it is a harp. The image of burly, dishevelled Vaughn lugging a harp through the wood strikes me as comical.

  “Don’t laugh at me!”

  He stops laughing but his whole body signifies contemptuous amusement as he manages in the cramped space of the cave—I can’t believe I’m in a cave—to turn his back on me. I swear there’s harp music close by. Could my crazy brother be playing a harp out here in the middle of nowhere? Does Daddy have a radio or a tape or CD player in here, maybe to create an atmosphere appropriate for killing himself or whatever other magic he likes to think he’s working? I swear Herpie or some less familiar snake is dangling from the ceiling, but then the serpentine shadow melds with the general gloom.

  These people are nuts. This is where I come from, and these people are fucking insane.

  “Oh, God,” she says contemptuously, “don’t tell me you wrote a suicide note.”

  I did, and folded it into a plain white envelope, and propped it against the small cairn of roundish rocks I built for this purpose just inside the entrance. Then I more or less forgot about it. Now that she mentions it, I think how inappropriate it would be for anyone to read this missive, since as it happens I am not going to die by my own hand today. She does not fight me for the paper; I reach it before she does and tuck it inside my jacket. Like the elixir she has so wantonly discarded, the letter may be of use to me at some near-future time, but only if there have been no previews to blunt its effect.

  “What a selfish thing to do,” she has the temerity to say to me. As if I were not her father. Or, as if, precisely because I am her father, she has much to say to me on the subject.

  Never in my life have I been selfish. Always, and to a fault, I have looked for opportunities to put others—the whole world of others—before my self. And before my children—had I been selfish, I would have put my own children first. Never having had children of her own, Alexandra would not understand this concept.

  “How the hell do you think everybody would feel if you killed yourself?” I did not teach her this indelicate manner of speaking. “How do you think I would feel?”

  “Relieved” comes to mind, and “purposeless,” but saying either would lead into a discussion both distracting and pointless. In order to protect both myself and her, I say nothing.

  She takes me by the shoulders. My daughter, this large woman, actually takes me by the shoulders. Her grasp causes pain in my shoulders, neck, back, hips. “You’re holding something back from me,” she snarls. “Something that’s mine. I’m not leaving,” she whispers, and shakes me, and leans close enough that I can hear her words, smell her coffee breath, see the creases of middle age at the corners of her mouth. “You hear me? I’m not leaving until you give me what’s mine. And neither are you.”

  I will not accede. I will pass along to her what I choose, at the time and in the form I choose. I am the parent, she the child; I am the sorcerer, she the apprentice. Neither of us has dared to forget what we are to each other.

  As a diversionary tactic, with enough truth in it to make it plausible, I say, “I want you to love Bella for both of us.” The infant’s name, my granddaughter’s name, burns my tongue.

  Stunned, I stare at him—not quite at his eyes, which make no pretence of meeting mine. His face is so frightful, and I realize with yet another shock wave, so dear to me that I don’t think I’ve ever before had the courage to look at it straight on. My father’s face is small. I could hold it in my hands. Grabbing him is wildly disrespectful and wildly intimate at the same time, intimacy with my father being by definition disrespectful. Thi
s contact with his thin flesh and brittle bone is too much for me, and I take my hands away. We both sit back. His face is in deep shadow now. With much more courage than it ought to take simply to talk to one’s father, I demand, “Just how does that work, Daddy? I’ve always wondered. Vaughn’s music and Will’s gardening and Emily’s kids and Galen’s causes and all the things you cursed and blessed me with—keeping in touch with your friends and family when you can’t be bothered, accepting and loving all kinds of people you can’t tolerate anywhere near you, writing, something now having to do with Bella—how do you put all that shit on us? Or in us, or whatever? And why does it absolve you to make us do what you can’t do?”

  He scoots around, an undignified motion that embarrasses me. His gaze is a searchlight, first on me but then swinging past to the cave opening. He scoots toward it on his butt; I can hardly stand to watch. I’m sure he’s going to bump his head, but he doesn’t.

  “I do not know why.” He tosses the words back like crumbs over his shoulder, more hunched than ever as he manoeuvres himself out of the cave. It’s an answer to only the second part of my question, and not really even that. I wish to hell he’d use contractions. “But it is the most I have ever been able to do. And it is something.”

  His feet are out of the cave now; I don’t want to be imagining them sticking out like narrow little animals. Now his thin shanks—I can’t imagine anybody but my father having body parts called “shanks”—and knobby knees. Now his torso is silhouetted against the yellow-green light outside the cave. Now he’s out. With difficulty, he gets to his feet and hobbles off.

  Why does he presume I won’t just stay here and poke through his goddamn wizard’s lair? Maybe he knows I already have. More likely he thinks I don’t have the chutzpah. Or he has no more secrets worth finding. Or he’s smugly feathered this nest with them precisely for me to find and marvel at.

  It’s not easy for somebody my size to crawl, but I crawl out, stand, get my bearings, start off in the direction I think he’s gone. A movement ahead turns out to be a branch in a slight breeze. A movement underfoot turns out to be the snake to whom I find myself muttering, “Make yourself useful, why don’t you? Where’s Daddy?” I don’t expect a reply, and I don’t get one.

  This gets old fast. I think I’ll just go back to Bella’s house and hold that baby girl some more while I can.

  I let myself in Earl and Emily’s creaky back gate. A family congregation is on deck in my direct line of sight the minute I’m inside the yard. Not at all sure I’m welcome to join it, I almost retreat into the woods again. Gathered in the slanted afternoon shade are Earl and Emily and some or all of their children. Compulsively I make a mental list: Eddie, Elizabeth, Eve, Eileen, Eli, Erin, Evan. All their children but one. Where is Bella?

  Emily has her back to me and is surrounded by her family, but I can hear her crying. Many of the others are crying, too. Earl’s arms twine around as many of his family as he can reach. He can’t seem to reach Bella.

  There’s Vaughn, coming around the side of the house or maybe through it—from this vantage point I can’t tell what path he’s taken or blazed to get here. In greenish pants and a tan hooded sweatshirt, hair tangled like leaves, he brings to mind a wood sprite even though he’s big and bearded and not particularly light on his feet—except, I guess, in the mocking sense of the phrase my father’s generation would have used. Even more musical tools than usual increase his bulk, his clumsiness, and his noise level—single bells, rows of bells on straps, bells at his belt and cuffs and around the edge of his hood; castanets on fingertips and snare drums at waist and a cymbal under one arm; under the other arm a trumpet and some kind of long looping horn; a harmonica on an awkward frame around his neck; flutes and tiny dulcimers and other things to be blown into and plucked sticking like arrows out of the open pack on his back.

  And he’s lugging a full-size harp. He lumbers up the three steps to the deck and sets the harp down. It rocks slightly, strings and graceful frame patterning the yellow light, then settles into place. I move forward. Earl sees me and beckons with a gesture of his head. I move closer but not quite into the group.

  Vaughn turns to Emily and hesitates, then holds out his arms. Her weeping rises into a wail. Others join, even me. Emily goes to Vaughn and he gently takes from her a bundle I now see she is holding. I know, of course, what it is.

  For a long moment Vaughn holds the bundle awkwardly, tenderly, in the crook of his arm along with the horns, and then with heartbreaking care lays it at the base of the harp. He kneels, his attitude reverent. My skin prickles. Very carefully he unwraps the pale yellow blanket.

  I knew it was Bella, but I was not prepared for her. For how silent she is. For how perfect she looks, dappled and at this little distance. For the way my brother exposes her to both her parents’ protected yard and the wild yellow woods. Most fiercely I’m ambushed by my instant conviction that she is dead, and then by the slight movement, slight noise that tells me she is not.

  Quiet lamentation makes a canopy over all of us. Vaughn sits on a deck chair, which is not quite the right height, and rests his big hands one on each side of the web of harp strings. Then his fingers begin to move, and I close my eyes and hold my breath for the exquisite sorrow of the music. There is a while when the human sound of mourning obscures the sound of the harp. But then the music plunges and soars and takes us all with it.

  I don’t see Daddy anywhere. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I find myself creeping forward. I’ll think later about why I don’t just leave and why I don’t just walk upright to join the group. I stand slightly outside, until Earl, of all people, takes my hand and pulls me in.

  The baby is naked in the warm shade. Her eyes are open, but utterly unfocused. The music ripples around her, around all of us. Emily sinks to the slatted surface of the deck, several arm lengths from her daughter. Bella’s open mouth is a tiny hole; misshapen by both present circumstance and the circumstances of her own little life, it looks both perfect and hideously deformed. Her walnut-sized fists open and close like any other infant’s, but much more rapidly, like trapped insects.

  Abruptly, I need to feel her heartbeat. I have to touch her. Whether she knows the difference or not, I can’t let either of us be alone while she dies. For I know that’s what we’re doing here; we’re attending her death, with Vaughn the unlikely midwife-in-reverse.

  I’ve fallen to my knees, too, and now I crawl between two of my nieces to the side of my niece who is leaving, at this very moment, in this very dappled place, in this company that can go with her only so far. Nobody stops me. Vaughn’s harp makes a web around us, drawing us together but not too tightly, not impermeably. Bella doesn’t know me, doesn’t care that I’m here.

  Lying beside her on the deck, I gather her to me. Nobody stops me. The keening soars. Someone’s voice has gone into singing, sorrowful and lovely. I cradle the baby to my chest and lay my face against her soft, baby-smelling, distorted skull, aware of the open fontanel that now will never close, aware of her heartbeat and my own. The exquisite passion of Vaughn’s music is almost unbearable, almost enough.

  “Alexandra,” my father says.

  “Alexandra,” I say, apparently aloud. “Alexandra, take her.”

  The damnable harp music stops, and Vaughn is looking at me like a man dispossessed. The funereal keening breaks up into disjointed curses and sobs. Earl advances on me. One of my sons, Will or Galen, puts a heavy hand on my shoulder, causing instant pain. Alexandra struggles to her feet with the baby precariously in her arms and says something to her sister, the mother of the child. I am escorted out of the yard and through the wood to my own house, where my son, Galen or Will, insists I sit down in my chair and stay there, himself sits on the couch to guard me. I have no objection. I have done all I can do.

  Chapter 9

  “It’s August, Sandi. You’ve been gone six weeks.”

  “And three days. I could
tell you how many hours.” Literally sick with homesickness, nauseous, head pounding, chest burning, I make sure to tell him, “I miss you. I miss the kids. I want to come home.” Swaddled against my chest, the baby Bella is silent, except for a whimpery breathing. Almost absently, I stroke her imperfectly shaped head.

  “So come on home then.” In his rich accent, it sounds like a song.

  “I can’t, Martin. There’s no way Emily can take care of this baby. She’s pretty much lost it. She hardly eats or sleeps. She can’t take care of the kids—a lot of the time she doesn’t seem to notice she has any. Earl tried to get the doctor to hospitalize her but they said she doesn’t qualify. Fucking insurance.”

  Another husband might object that Emily has Earl and several grown or nearly grown children and a local extended family to take care of her and Bella, and that there’s little reason to think my sticking around will be of help to her anyway. Another husband might remind me that he and our children need me at home, that I promised I’d be there when Tara got back from soccer camp and have reneged, that I’ve missed practically the entire summer with them. Might point out that nobody knows how long Bella will live, another day or another ten years, and surely I don’t plan to stay here indefinitely, or to bring her home with me, and anyway what do I know about taking care of an infant with such extreme needs? Would, ultimately, be quite within his rights and the logic of the situation to insist it’s crazy and presumptuous to think I have any responsibility in this matter. Hubris, really. Arrogant and dangerous.

  Says Martin, my husband, “What a good sister you are.” Another husband might intend sarcasm. His mild and pure sincerity unleashes my tears.

  “I don’t know about that.” I can hardly talk. “Right now I don’t feel much like a good sister. Or wife or mother or daughter.” Or aunt. Especially aunt. But I don’t say that. Why don’t I say that to Martin, from whom I have no secrets? Is there something secret, then, about my relationship with this little girl?