Lydia Netzer: Shine Shine Shine

Only during the dark totality of the eclipse did the pushing really work for this woman, about to give birth. She lay in a government hospital of one hundred beds. For hours she had fought with the idea of letting out the baby. Outside, the shadow of Rung Tlang lay over the jumble of Hakha village, getting sharper and sharper. The sun boiled down to a crescent, a sliver, a curved row of pretty beads. Outside, people were distressed. The pipe-smoking women looked up. Men in cone hats stopped tilling the poppies. The sun’s corona flared and swept around the black disk of moon, like a mermaid’s long hair.

Deep in the umbra of the moon, she was able to bear down. After the sun was hidden, it took only a couple of good pushes for the hard little head to emerge. Her fierce cervix wrapped around that head like a fist around an egg. Then the head shot through. Shoulders were extracted. The baby came out. The midwife bundled her quickly, dropped her on her mother’s chest, and ran to the window.

But the moon had already begun to slide, and the sun was tearing through the valleys on its other side. As it had retreated, so it came back on, hot as ever, and everyone had to stop looking up, or they would go blind. Life resumed, and the person who had not been a mother was now a mother, with her bald baby in her arms.

“She has no hair,” the midwife said. “No eyelashes. She’s a very special baby.”

In the morning, before the eclipse, Emma Butcher had been fine with living out the rest of her life in Burma. She would keep her body going, breathe, smile, and eventually die. Later, after the baby, she was no longer okay with staying in Burma. She rose up from that bed a mother, and ready to fight for the rest of her days. What does it matter for a woman to give up her self, and live quietly, with the choices she has made? But when the woman becomes a mother, she can no longer participate in the slow rot. Because no one’s going to rot the child. And anyone who tries will suffer the mother’s consequences.

In the evening, the father burst into the hospital room carrying a roughly potted Persian Shield. He had torn the plant up out of the jungle by the beach, and brought it to the mountains, to cheer her up. The plant was small and had no bloom on it, but its wide purple leaves spread flat under the dim hospital bulb. He put it down at the dark window. He had something exciting to say, very exciting, and his armpits were both beading up with the strain of getting here, to see his new baby. He had the embarrassing enthusiasm of an older man who finally gets to be a father. “I’ve got the perfect name,” he said. “The baby’s name will be Ann. Isn’t it perfect?” Reaching out his pink hands for her, he came close.

The new mother looked at her husband and his potted plant. He wore a black linen shirt unbuttoned over a shining chest, and a ridiculous fishing hat. Her baby slept in her bed, between her body and her arm, wrapped in a long orange cloth. Its lashless eyes closed like the eyes on a statue of a saint, which can have no hair or eyelashes either. Her white-blond hair fell around them both like a metal curtain, smooth as polished rock. Her level blue eyes stared, her lips spread in a beatific smile. She had exchanged her bloody gown for a gauzy wrap, the color of burnt salmon. She lay like a long slim knife in the bed. At the top of the knife was her beautiful head, chiseled out of bone. She was as serene as a pool in a cave.

She let her husband pick up the baby and hold it in his arms. She watched him hold it up to the light and look deeply into its face and droop his sagging cheeks next to its nose. She looked at him and saw that he was old. She wondered what exactly she had done to herself, marrying such an old man, and having his child here in the hotness of Burma. Had it been a dark and tousled baby, mewing loudly, or a ginger thing squawking, she would not have felt the same heartbeat in her throat. When she saw him holding her strange baby with his sweating paws, she knew she had to take her baby back to America, where she could be real. Burma was a dream, their mission an escape. Her baby would engage, would fire up like a rocket, and would burn in this world. She would not drift in the murmured prayers of her father. She would not languish in the jungle. The Buddhist nurses had left her, so that when she could get up, she could leave. She could leave all the way. She could rethink old decisions. Having a baby makes you do that.

But instead they took her back to the small cottage at the bottom of the big mountain, and they kept house together. Turns out, it was hard to leave Burma. Turns out, she had been stuck the whole time. She named her baby Sunny because of the eclipse. The father had to relent. After all, he had not been there when the baby was coming. He had been down on the coast, collecting specimens. So the baby’s name was Sunny Butcher.

WHEN SUNNY TURNED TWO, they were still in Burma, and she had not grown any hair. She was still nursing, and still sleeping in her mother’s arms. Her mother braided sun hats for her out of fabric, out of reeds, and out of yarn. They hired a nurse, Nu, who helped Emma take care of the baby and with the house. Sunny walked around in a tiny head wrap, with her round belly protruding from a saffron kimono. Her features stayed elfin, her shoulders and limbs fragile, but her head was enormous. She was a strange-looking child. The local Chin people smiled and nodded to her. To them she looked like one of the monks who kept coming to convert them back to Buddhism. The men reached out to her with two hands. The women would not touch her garments. Although the Chin mostly worshipped the Christian God, they adhered to their native traditions.

The father had wanted to name the baby Ann because of Ann Judson, one of the first missionaries to penetrate Burma. Ann Judson was the victim of many fevers and eventually died of one. In her day, the locals censured Christian missionaries by locking their feet in fetters and raising them up until only their shoulders were touching the ground. What with the mosquitoes attacking, this was a difficult punishment to endure. That was before the British took over Burma, which was before the Communists took over. A whole lot of Christians had come to Burma, and to the Chin province, over that century.

The last missionary to arrive was Sunny’s father, with his beautiful wife. When they first established themselves in Hakha, Emma was twenty-three and Bob was forty. They built a pretty wooden church next to the industrial housing complex. Christians had been meeting in buildings around Burma for over a hundred and fifty years. Their church was just one more church. A single round fan at the back of the sanctuary moved air through the congregation. The wife sat in pew one with her knees pressed together and off to the side. She wore American-style ladies’ hats and craved crisp untropical fruit. Her husband struggled to teach her the language, insisted on speaking Chin at the dinner table, over the rice and vegetables.

One year after their arrival, all the missionaries were thrown out of Burma. Burma was purged of foreigners altogether, both of the missionary and commercial variety. Men in gray uniforms from the other side of the mountains knocked on the Butchers’ door and put them out of their house. They left everything, running immediately to India, where Bob sat in the kitchen of his missionary friends, broadcasting a radio show in Chin. He did not use the term “counterrevolutionary.” Emma worried, would they have to go back home? She could live in Burma with her enthusiastic husband, but could she live in America with him? Could she be a pastor’s wife, and hold Bible study meetings in her house? She prayed that she would be allowed to stay in Asia. It seemed easier.