The candles flickered warm orange light against the brown leaves of the longhouse, and their wax whitened hard on the crossbeams, the dirt floor, and the wood stumps. The moon rose bright above Nemonpare and splintered through the cracks in the thatch.
“Call my mother,” I told Michi. “Tell her I need her now.”
I was sitting upright in the birthing hammock. My womb squeezed and burned, and my lower back throbbed. My cervix surrendered to the cruel bony creak of some mysterious force contained within my own body.
My mother had been listening through the clapboard walls of the small tin-roof hut where she slept in a tangle of mosquito nets and thin blankets with my father on the wood floor. She arrived silently before Michi could even speak a word. She had forgotten to put her dentures in her mouth and her lips looked different without her teeth.
“It is time,” she whispered.
“How can I help?” Michi asked.
His eyes were glassy from exhaustion. I felt something akin to hatred for him, suddenly: a raw, biting rage that soured my throat. The contractions had begun when the sun scorched high. My mother had told me that early in labor a woman must ignore the pain, must carry on with her activities until it is insufferable, until lightning bolts flash through her body.
So in the afternoon, Michi and I had taken the canoe upriver to harvest nontoka fruits in the palm swamps. We had idled in the shade of a miwago tree at a bend in the river, casting fishing lines into the swirling eddies. We had strung a net across the mouth of a small creek so that I could drink fish broth in the morning after our baby was born.
Michi had carried a small journal and a pen in his back pocket. He had watched my nose scrunch in pain. He had logged the minutes between each contraction in his crinkled pages, which were stained with fish guts, fruit oils, and dried mud. I didn’t tell him that my body didn’t care about the minutes, that our daughter’s journey couldn’t be tracked by measures of time. But now that the pain whipped brightly in the depths of night, I felt intense rage at his little notebook, at his tired eyes, at his helpless question: rage that he did not have to suffer what I was suffering.
My mother brought a small pot of plants to boil on the fire. She lifted my dress up to my neck and had me kneel at the embers. She chanted and swatted a branch of nettle leaves on my lower back that prickled and pierced my skin, softened my muscles, and heated my spine.
My eyes were shut tightly. Teardrops trembled on my lips. Animals were rooting their snouts in the ash of the fire beside me.
“Get them out of here.” I shuddered. Michi hissed fiercely at our pet peccary and our hunting dog, Yawe, shooing them out of the longhouse with a menacing stick. The scarlet macaw squawked coarsely and then flew through the smoke and flickering candles onto the rope of the birthing hammock.
I drank tea that was warm and silky and bitter. Mom cut a single thread at the heart of the hammock with a small knife, unraveling the weave with her fingers. Then she tied off the frayed palm-thread so that a perfectly round, child-sized hole appeared at the hammock’s center.
I sat upright now, in the birthing hammock. I swatted the scarlet macaw away from me. My daughter’s head pressed unrelentingly against the cavernous, arching, bloody walls that were opening inside me.
“I am thirsty,” I moaned, starting to gasp. My eyes burned violently at Michi. “Make me lemon water!”
“Lemon water?” he asked, scanning the longhouse for an empty gourd.
“Make me lemon water!” I shouted, clenching my teeth.
My bones were breaking inside me. The thorny branches of the lemon tree shuddered and bent behind the longhouse. Michi’s flashlight bounced chaotically through the moonlight and the thatch walls.
“I’m going to die,” I whispered to Mom. My body had surrendered to some cruel, lurching instinct, to some aching spirit expanding inside me. “I can’t . . . I can’t anymore . . .”
I heard the clank of a spoon in a metal gourd. Michi was swirling sugar and squeezed lemons in water.
“Just give me the water!” I shouted.
I was dripping warm liquids onto the earth. My throat was as dry as smoke. I gulped the sweet, tangy water, shoved the gourd back into Michi’s hands, then clasped the hammock rope, pushing at the throbbing center of the universe inside me.
Mom wrapped her arms around my chest tightly. I felt her breathing on my neck. Michi watched, motionless, holding the half-filled gourd of lemon water.
“She’s coming, she’s coming,” Mom whispered. Her embrace was boa-tight around my chest. My body wanted to cave forward. She held me upright. “Push again, push hard.”
My vagina stung with hallucinogenic pain. My body had become a brutal sacred passage. I felt my daughter’s head pressing against the walls of my entire being.
“She’s coming. Get her, get the baby,” Mom whispered, urgently, to Michi.
The clank of a metal gourd against a wood stump. The spilling of lemon water on the ground. Michi’s knees thudding on the leaves and blankets beneath the birthing hole. His knuckles pressed against my savage, tender numbness. I felt a tugging, and a pull. Bright flashes of lightning sprayed my brain; then, a sudden swelling, a bursting flood. Finally, an empty throbbing, a ferocious release. A stillness like no other stillness, a stillness that sparkled like stars and swirled like rainbows.
“Suck her nose,” my mom whispered harshly.
“What?” Michi’s voice was urgent and bewildered.
I opened my eyes to see my daughter. She lay beneath me on a folded blanket. Her body was pink and long. Her tiny fingers were clenched. Her eyes struggled to see.
“Suck on her nose!” I hissed at Michi. “She wants to breathe!”
His eyes were raw with worry. He sucked on her nose, kneeling over her, his elbows on the earth. I collapsed forward and heard my daughter gasp her first breath, then wail her first cry. I gazed at her in the flickering candlelight through the threads of the birthing hammock. A humming song rose in my throat, a sobbing melody that only a mother could ever make.
“Rub your nipples in circles,” my mother whispered, lifting my body upright in the hammock. “Breathing, singing, rub your nipples in circles.”
Mom had birthed thirteen children. I had seen her many times in this motherly trance of surrender, caressing her nipples for the placenta to drop. I felt the heavy sack slipping down through the pulsing numbness, then heard the joyful whine of a dog.
“Get out of here!” Michi hissed sharply.
“Ponemopa,” my mom whispered to me, then to my daughter. “I love you. I am near to you.”
Her voice trembled. Her face was brighter than I had ever remembered. She held the umbilical cord in her palms, reading the sacred lines that connect a mother to child. “Your next child will be a boy,” she said. Then she brought Michi’s hand onto my leg and began to weep amidst the crackle of embers and the flapping of the old macaw’s wings. “Ponemopa,” she cried, gazing into my eyes. I broke into tears, tasted salt on my lips. Mom had finally found the courage to love me after all these years of cold.
I awoke late in the morning to the squeaking of Michi’s rubber boots at the entrance to the longhouse. He was sopping wet. He carried a woven-palm bag of fish over his shoulder. His tired face was beaming with joy.
“Are you awake? Is she asleep?” he whispered, hanging the fish on a nail in the crossbeam above the fire.
I inhaled my daughter’s sweet breath. “Uuuu,” I whispered.
“There was an anaconda trapped in the net,” Michi exclaimed. “It was crazy.”
I sat up suddenly. My vagina was throbbing and burning.
“You didn’t touch it, did you?” I asked. My voice was harsh.
“Yes! I was in the water with Emontay. The anaconda was thrashing in the net.”
“You touched it?”
“Yeah, it was about to rip the whole net! So we—”
“You don’t understand anything,” I interrupted fiercely.
The words hurt him. His shoulders slumped.
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t want to hurt him. My spirit became tender, suddenly. I realized that I hadn’t told him anything about the fragile moments after birth, about our daughter’s vulnerable spirit, about the rules that our ancestors had discovered over thousands of years, the things that keep a newborn safe during her first moon.
“The parents of a newborn can’t touch snakes for the first moon,” I said. My voice was calm now.
He knelt down and his cheeks held worry.
“I didn’t know that,” he whispered. “No one told me. Your brother . . .”
“My brother has no children,” I said. “He doesn’t know.”
“What will happen?”
“If a parent touches a snake in the first moon, the newborn will squirm in her sleep,” I said. “Her spirit will be uneasy and her body will writhe.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
I lay back down beside Daime. My back couldn’t hold me up any longer.
“What else do I need to know?”
My eyes were closed now. I heard Michi rustling for his notebook and his pen. Sleep was washing over me again.
“You mustn’t blow on candles or fire,” I said, fading away. “Or our daughter will get rashes on her neck and chest.”
The scribble of his pen on paper.
“No worms or spiders.” I was beginning to dream. “No wringing wet clothes. No peccary or tapir meat for many days. Squirrel monkeys are good for milk . . .” A troupe of mischievous-eyed monkeys was now leaping in the branches of my mind.
I fell deeply asleep. The days passed. Michi went into the woods each morning with Dad and Emontay. They hunted squirrel monkeys and wild turkeys and toucans. They speared fish in the pebble creeks. Mom gathered fragrant leaves – wayusa, achiote, wild garlic – to bathe my daughter with. My sisters harvested bundles of sweet plantains from the garden. The milk rose and my breasts filled and my nipples turned raw and my heart swelled like a river.
Then, one morning, my dad surprised me.
“Can I hold my granddaughter now?” he asked. He was sitting in a hammock. He cradled Daime in his arms.
I crouched at the fire, flipping over the fish that smoked on the rack. My spirit was tranquil. My heart was content to be home, to live simply in the village. For nearly a moon, I hadn’t even thought about the Ceibo Alliance, about my life in Amisacho. The forest had rinsed away the stresses of leadership, wiped all the threats from my mind.
“I’ve been thinking about how the oil companies razed the forests where old man Delfín used to hunt wild peccary,” Dad said, rocking Daime gently.
“And?”
“Can the Ceibo Alliance help us show the cowori how our people live in the forest?”
“What do you mean?”
“Delfín was right: the cowori don’t know anything about the forest, they only think about turning it into money. Maybe we can show them how much life is in our territory. If they can see what we see, maybe they won’t destroy it.”