Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

It made sense to me. I had no visual memory of a mother, and could not recall any events that included her, outside of the helicopter trip she declined to take. But I could remember a sense of her that was strong and ferociously loving. Almost a violence of love. It was the one thing I’d had, I suppose, that Hallie never knew. As the two of us grew up quietly in the dispassionate shadow of Doc Homer’s care and feeding, I tried to preserve that motherly love as best I could, and pass it on. But I couldn’t get it right. I was so young.

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway-the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that tap into an invisible vein of nurture and bear radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada -the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you’d run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check.

Hallie and I had a favorite besada in the old Domingos orchard, and one cold day on the way home from school we tucked wisps of our hair into its bark. Secretly. We’d hidden in the schoolyard to snip the ends off our braids and tie them up together with a pink thread unraveled from my coat button. If Doc Homer found out, he would construct some punishment to cure us of superstition. We agreed with him in principle-we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

I stopped suddenly in the center of the road, in the moon’s bright light, with shadow trickling downhill from my heels like the water witcher’s wellspring finally struck open. I’d found the right path. The road angled up out of the orchards toward the top of the canyon. The steepness of the climb felt right. I would come back in daylight and go the rest of the way to Doc Homer’s, past the old helicopter landing pad up in the alfalfa field. Those fields would surely be abandoned now, like half the cropland in Arizona, salted to death by years of bad irrigation. I didn’t want to go up there now and see it all under moonlight, the white soil gleaming like a boneyard. It was too much.

I turned back down the road feeling the familiar, blunt pressure of old grief. Even the people who knew me well didn’t know my years in Grace were peculiarly bracketed by death: I’d lost a mother and I’d lost a child.

I was fifteen years old, two years younger than my own child would be now. I didn’t think of it in those terms: losing a baby. At first it was nothing like a baby I held inside me, only a small impossible secret. Slowly it grew to a force as strong and untouchable as thunder. I would be loved absolutely. But even in the last months I never quite pictured the whole infant I might have someday held in my arms; that picture came later. The human fact of it was gone before I knew it. But evidently that word “lost” was somewhere in my mind because I’ve had thousands of dreams of losing-of literally misplacing-a baby.

In one of the dreams I run along the creek bank looking among the boulders. They are large and white, and the creek is flooded, just roaring, and I know I’ve left a baby out there. I thrash my way through mesquite thickets, stopping often to listen, hearing nothing but the roar of the water. I feel frantic until finally I see her in the middle of the water bobbing like a Cortland apple, little and red and bright. I wade in and pull her out and she lies naked there on the bank without so much as a surname, her umbilicus tied with a man’s black shoelace such as my father might wear. I see her and think, “It’s a miracle she’s survived.”

That thought is the truest part of the dream. Really there would be nothing new or surprising about a baby being born in secret and put into a creek. But to pull one out, that would be a surprise. A newborn has no fat yet; it wouldn’t float. It would sink like a stone.

Loyd Peregrina was an Apache. He took me out four times. Our football team was called the Apaches, but Loyd was also a real Apache, and the kind of handsome you could see coming down the road like bad news. When he first asked me, I thought he’d made a mistake, or a joke, and I looked to see who was watching. Nobody was. Four Saturdays in a row, for exactly one lunar month: the odds of getting pregnant out of that were predictable, but I was unfathomably naïve. I was a motherless girl. I’d learned the words puberty and menarche from the Encyclopædia Britannica. The rest I learned from girls in the schoolyard who weren’t even talking to me when they said what they did.

Loyd wouldn’t remember. For me it was the isolated remarkable event of a tenuous life but for Loyd-with his misspelled name and devil eyes-it was one in a hundred, he was a senior and ran around with everybody. Also he was such a drinker in those days that I was frankly surprised to hear he was still alive. He never knew what he’d spawned, much less when it died. Even Hallie didn’t. It’s the first time I understood that even with a sister I could be alone. At night I lay feeling my limbs, seeing what Hallie still saw, which was nothing near the truth, and I felt myself growing distant and stolid. I was the woman downtown buttoning her child’s jacket, her teeth like a third hand clamped on a folded grocery list, as preoccupied as God. Someone important and similar to others. I was lured and terrified. I couldn’t help but think sometimes of escape: the thing inside me turning to blood of its own accord, its bones liquefying, leaking out. And then one evening my savage wish was granted.

I never did tell Hallie. I kept quiet, first to protect her from the knowledge of terrible things, and later to protect myself from that rock-solid element she came to own. That moral advantage.

It divided me from the people I knew, then and later, but in broader human terms I don’t pretend that it sets me apart in any great way. A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn’t happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.

Emelina was up with the chickens. I heard her out in the courtyard pulling honeysuckle vines away from the old brick barbecue pit. They came out with a peculiar zipping sound, like threads from a seam in rotten cloth. “You can see we haven’t been festive for a while,” she said. She was organizing what she called a “little fiesta” for the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. It was a family tradition; they roasted a whole goat. (Not John Tucker’s.)

I found a broom and pitched in, sweeping up the pieces of a broken flowerpot I’d come to think of as part of the décor. Emelina asked, in the carefully offhand way a good mother would ask, if I’d been up to the school yet. I’d received numerous calls about a teachers’ meeting.

“I know about the meeting, but I haven’t gone up there yet,” I confessed. School would begin the following Tuesday. I needed to get organized and see what kind of shape the labs were in, but I kept putting it off, on grounds of terror. I hadn’t actually taught school before. When Emelina wrote me about the opening at Grace High School it had seemed sensible to apply. While Carlo slept I’d sat up in bed with my legal pad and a small reading light, feigning competence, attempting to organize the problem areas of my life into manageable categories: I had no real attachment to selling lottery tickets at 7-Eleven; Doc Homer was going off the deep end; Carlo was Carlo; Hallie would be leaving at summer’s end, and without a destination for myself I’d be marooned. Grace was something. If I got this job I could spend ten months in Grace seeing about Doc Homer, possibly without his noticing. I reasoned that I wasn’t qualified and didn’t have a chance of being hired, and so I felt bold enough to apply.