Noy Holland: What begins with bird

It is a game they two have been playing, I guess, passing the time from the airport.

“It’s like walking through frozen beer—” that is George’s, and he laughs, and water pools as he walks in his footsteps and slops across the porch. He tips his hat.

“Hello, rabbit.” He kisses me. “Hello, mother. Made it.”

The trick must be in knowing who to be afraid of, what.

Our spotted dog, pent up, neglected, pokes her nose around the corner, suffers a paroxysm of joy — somebody fresh to love.

“So how is it in Mississippi?” I ask.

“Nice. Very nice. Flowers and such. But cold at night. Mercy.”

She shakes the wet from her head, teasing, at the dog who quivers and blinks at her feet. “So where is he? Where’s that baby?” She throws her hair back. “C’mere, young’n. Come here.”

Somebody fresh to love; somebody new to harvest.

I am watchful, and sick in my heart to see the boy calmed in his own father’s arms. What use, to see it coming? Bed down one yellow afternoon when the tide is in your favor and you begin the long moving away. Months pass; joints soften, slip; veins give, the blood in you doubles and quickens.

And yet this was not the feel of it — not of quickening, not to me, but of paths begun to silt and pinch, to slow, and, slowing, close. My neck swelled; my lungs rode up.

I fell into myself calmly, besotted and sufficient.

I was sufficient and am no longer, will not be again. Any mother knows.

The body remembers, seems to insist — there was something it meant to do — to lose him, to birth him. To finish what it had begun.

I wake, and find the boy beside me in the ripening bed, my bed. I keep him near me, the nightlight on, the barn beyond the window gone tossing out to sea. I drag the sheets back. His eyes are sprung open. His skin is twisted on him, rubbery and slick. He is not mine, is not the real baby. There is one yet still to be born.

There is everything still to go through again — my belly a stained translucence, the doctors in their starched blues.

Stupid, I know, to think it, want it. But even now, these weeks gone past, the small hard snaps of milk in his chest — witch’s milk — dissolved; his lazy eye, the slackened lid, begun to draw up and quicken, so soon: I would go through it all all over again: the idiot howling, blood sliding from me in hot strings. Hours of this and then nothing, the needle pressed into the spine. The limp pale drape someone hung at my chest to keep me from seeing.

His little face had tipped up, watchful.

Somebody whistled somewhere in the greenish bright and quiet and someone was asking, Ready? They’ve already begun .

I felt nothing but that they moved me, crudely, my sloppy haunch, hardly mine — the drape seemed to hang to mark the place where my body detached at the sockets.

I listened: this was his being born.

This was the sound of a hand wedged in, and then the small bent head popped free, quick as a tooth you are losing. This that I felt backed into my throat was the body shoved into the cage of my ribs, brief, and how surprising: the rest had seemed so distant: a ditch cut into a distant slab, spongy and geologic, marsh, a bowl of softened bone. Then the baby, the bawling sight of him; then the staples driven in.

Nothing lasts, but nothing is finished either. The brain boils and cools, same as many things, heals with the slickness of scars. Nothing’s lost; no grief, unspoken, forgotten.

Yet we hold our tongues. Not a word, these years, about it. Hardly a word between us, even then, my sister and me, the very day, those hours, the long before and after in the back seat to Atlanta, after Phoenix, Daddy driving, after Mother, I think it pleased him, the look of it, his girls, his new wife neatly beside him. He wanted to stop and look at things: Chickamauga, Antietam, the cannons in a row.

Of course I think of it — how it must be, might have been, for Sister, closing in on Atlanta. In the morning, plain tea. The righteous out in the early heat, their foetuses wrinkling in jars. Our father moved to her to take her arm to steady her along. She seemed to straighten: he had noticed her being brave. Had she seen the fluted columns, he wanted to know, the Corinthian scrolling above? She looked up, we all did, and listened, he spoke so little, and spoke of Sherman that day as though they were friends, as though we had him to thank for it, my father, that the building still stood, Georgian and grandly columned, spared — handsome, I remember thinking it then, he was as handsome as when we were girls.

We needed so little from him. To be spoken to, to be steadied, that was extra, that was gravy. Because here already was bounty, I thought, her own crisis, here was her chance to be Daddy’s, to be brave, to be seen being brave, being ready.

Here was her act of love.

The worse the march the better. The righteous who strained at the roped-off yard, rattled their jars, a child on a hip, how lucky — something more to endure. Half a year’s neglect endured, the wiggy pitching months of it, and now, this late, late as it was, the danger, the night’s long labor ahead. The toddlers in the leggy grass, writhing, moaning, Mommy .

The day a blaze, the early heat. The bodies yawing sweetly in their lettered jars.

They did not hurry. They were solemn, the two of them, processional: a girl on her father’s arm. There was something of a lilt and quickening, something graceful — vaguely — supple, fierce, something punitive and bridal in the way she moved to the door.

She had worn her heels, our mother’s pearls. She had worn the dress our mother used to dress for parties in.

I held my tongue; this much was easy. I began for a time to feel it too, a queer sort of pride in myself: I had gone to Phoenix and fetched her home and here we all were with him, quietly, soberly walking. To what, walking to what, it seemed all at once not to matter. What mattered was that we were doing as our father asked. He made it easy, provided; he gave us our instructions.

I flew out. The desert bloomed. I was to fetch her home.

I withheld him, the threat of him, the name in my mouth, to try her. But nothing else I could think of in the days I spent in Phoenix, not love — I trotted out every homily I had heard of the family romance, sacrifice, devotion, the kindness of a kindhearted man (my mouth: I was moving between lovers, snorting junk in the sumac behind the corner store) — her own unreadiness, it did not move her, and not the ghoulish stories I knew of babies grown in wrong-the ones who lasted, babblers, maimed, stood up, shipped out to Mississippi.

My god, the lavishness of her Mississippi. Any outrage I could think to relate was an insult, a pittance against it. But I did not know so then. Mississippi was years to come — bodies dropping in the viney woods, hula hula , somebody new: a curdling, lunatic glee. We held our ground, the field in bloom, the gate swung shut behind us.

A gate swings shut behind you, going in, if you go, coming out.

They came to us over the open field, toothy, threnodic, multiplying as they moved.

“The baby’s fine,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.”

I said, “That baby grows in you.”

We roomed for days in a motel in Phoenix, a dry wind scratching the door.

I said, “I was in the airport. I was on my way here to you.”

It was something I had heard in the Ladies’, talk of the boy, women tipping toward the mirror to slide their lipstick on. I said I had seen the boy, coming to her, his hand in his mother’s skirt, a blinker of flesh hung over one eye, eyebrow to nose, the skin crusted and thick and frilled — I went on, I could feel my voice rising — his eye yellow in its socket, wild, what I saw of it, who saw nothing, and the flap as brown as potato, gouged, stiff hair hatching from it.