Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

I came and stood over the pile. “His bones,” I said.

The farmer was not looking at the bones. He saw matted old muscles, dry, chewed sinew. He saw rot. He saw a body feasted on by birds and worms.

The farmer fell to the ground. “He could have been my son.”

I picked up a long, thin bone. “He was my son,” I said. He was my baby, my real, true boy, and this was my chance to touch him one last time.

I went to the mattress and jumped. I jumped and I held the long leg bone. “You are my love,” I said to the bone. The mattress made sucking sounds as the grass that grew there was squashed under my feet. I said, “I absolutely remember who you are.”

“How can this happen? How can we go on? There is so much to lose,” the farmer said. And lose it you will, I thought. The process of living is to surrender what, for a few glimmering days or years, you have been allowed to hold. But there is no such place as gone. The next thought I had hit me hard: I hoped the baby died with a patched-up heart. Please, I thought. Let us be broken together. Years from now, when Solomon’s heart finally breaks and all the beautiful rivers of hope and sorrow have canyons to run in, he will be my son again. In some sea, under a fury of stars, far away from any named place, my sons and I will collide.

“How can we leave the baby?” the farmer asked.

“That is my baby, my son,” I said.

“But from now on, I love him. He is my son’s brother.” God, in his endless generosity, had found yet another thing for me to share.

I looked up at the heavens. The stars began and continued. The moon made a lazy attempt to exist. The story of my life, of the whole world, was encoded in those lights. They were the only things that had never left me. I gathered strength because my job as a mother was not over.

“Do you see those stars there? Those are the dog stars,” I said. “Solomon found them.”

The farmer puzzled at the shape, tried to make a dog of it. “What else?” he asked. He could not hide his relief that I was speaking to him kindly.

“That one is a cart. Over here is a fish.” He studied the sky.

“I can’t find anything,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if you see it or not. It’s there.”

“I have taken your son,” he said.

“I am letting you borrow him,” I answered.

“What will you have?” he asked. Everything that ever blew into my arms had blown back out again. But snow turned to blossoms. Beneath the apple tree, the shawl I survived under now warmed the rotted core of a fallen piece of a fruit, coaxing a green shoot.

“Your promise that you will be very kind to my son.”

“I promise.”

“Is there anything you need to know about being a father?”

The farmer thought about it. He said, “I don’t know anything about being a father.”

“Do you know what to do when Solomon gets sick?”

“No. But we’re calling him Johan. He is a Christian now.”

I took a sharp gasp. A new pain: a lost bit of healthy flesh, stabbed. Just keep being the mother, I said to myself. Let my arms grow so long I can wipe his tears from the other side of the earth. “When Johan, your son, gets sick, a cool cloth is the most important thing. And water to drink. But he’s going to tell you he’s dying even when he isn’t. If it’s winter, give him packed snow to suck on. If it’s summer, find him a place in the shade.”

“But what if he is dying?”

“You’ll have to learn the difference between when he’s dying and when he isn’t.”

“Is there anything more I can give you?” the farmer asked.

I listened to whatever made sound: the squish of the mattress, wet and unwell. The sound of the crying insects. The sound of my son’s bones rattling. The sound of the man and the heat of the man traveling across the baby’s leftovers.

“I have my life,” I said finally. Even this — life — felt weightless. Some invisible string must have kept me tethered. When I found it, I planned to cut it and let myself float away.

“I could give you more life,” he said. “Not because I love you.”

“I have more life than I need for just myself,” I said.

The farmer pulled up my dress. He did not smooth his hand over me, not even a gentle stroke. He did not come to me with any warm part of him, but one. I closed my eyes to the covered world. Nothing tried to be seen in that darkness, everything was happy to hide from me. I did not move my body away, or turn my head or say words that would have changed what happened. The farmer’s body was a body and my body was another body and the bones of my dead son rested against us both. The farmer wrestled himself in. His beard was full of dew, bright seeds, which dropped onto my face. His movements were simple and unadorned.

A flock of ravens crossed over the farmer and me but we saw nothing of the birds. The birds were the same as the sky that night. There was a sound of flying, but only for a second, and then a sound of calling back to the ones behind. The followers answered back, Yes , they said. We are all here together.

“For the baby,” the farmer said, when he had climbed back down and moved the scattered bones from under him.

The ravens went on. The ravens crossed over whatever was below but did not stop to rest there. Did not stop to acknowledge the world laid low around them.

From then on, the road was new to me. It took only hours this time, the walk an actual, measurable distance instead of an endless journey away. I kept trying to count the steps, knowing that there would be a final one, a total number. The place I walked through was a perfect reenactment of a real world. These bushes looked exactly like real bushes. All the details had been thought of — birds of different colors and size, needles spilling out from the skirts of pine trees. Only the air was wrong. It was thin and tinny, cheaply made. Too bad, I thought, they almost got it right.

In the afternoon the farmer said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” I answered.

“ Should I be sorry for what I did?” the farmer asked, wanting me, instead of being angry, to tell him how grateful I was.

“Life is not replaceable,” I told him. The proof was all around me: the made-up bluebird drinking from a puddle of newly melted snow, as if something that precious could be real. The real bird, mangy and cold, was hidden away somewhere.

The farmer’s voice went up, “Forgive the approximation. Life is life. I tried my hardest.”

I did not answer.

“No!” the farmer suddenly yelled. “Say thank you! Tell me thank you for saving your son! I’m doing everything I can think to do for you,” he growled. “You have our money and our passport and I’m even trying to give you a companion. I’m trying to make you a family.”

He pushed me into the tall trees along the road.

“You have done enough,” I said. “Please stop trying to help me.”

“We have to be grateful for what we can offer each other,” he said, deflating me. I punched his back and slammed my feet against his anklebones. I fought. I remember twisting beneath him, but he did not have to struggle hard. I was weak. I posed no threat to him. I was a source, that was all, a well for him to draw upon.

The sticks cracked with every push and the leaves broke into a thousand crushed squares and none of the birds watched us. The moment was quick and over.

“You don’t know what this does to me. I do not love you.”

I did not have enough matter in me to hate him with.

“I don’t mean any of this,” he said. “I have a family at home. A wife and a son,” he said. “I’m just trying to do what’s right.” I held my breath until my lungs prickled. I let out one long howl until my chest was sore and empty. The fake forest was mawkish around me. Greens too green, sky too crystalline to be possible. Not on a day like this. The poor rabbit burying his nose in the underbrush would surely starve by nightfall, finding nothing but pieces of wood someone had carved to look like seeds.