Two

In the morning, Jeremia was gone. His time had been approaching. He disappeared in cycles, like the moon, and then reappeared. I knew that in two years, when he turned nineteen, he wouldn’t come back. He would vanish like the four rejects before him, not one of them returning to our little camp in the woods. They went to more civilized places where the trees grew crooked in their search for sun and where the crickets couldn’t be heard. They journeyed through the forest, traversed the creeks and joined hundreds, thousands, of people gathered in places with no birds. Nathanael said the city was an unforgiving concrete slab, full of so much noise that it was hard to hear yourself. He said the air was toxic and a smell—dark and evil—caused sickness like the tendrils of ivy, touching and choking everything.

I didn’t understand what, in that cold world of square buildings, unnatural light and illness, was so wonderful and so precious that the other rejects would abandon the only home they’d ever known. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever make that choice. It wasn’t bad, living in our camp, just isolated.

That first morning after the baby arrived, Nathanael and Eva were sitting together on the log when I stumbled from my hut, the sun already above my head. The baby, strapped to my chest, had woken me every time I fell asleep, and during the night when I had looked through my window, the moon had seemed not to move at all. Old cloth diapers, yellowed and worn with age—saved from when I first came to the camp, from when Jeremia first came to the camp and even from those before Jeremia—had been tossed haphazardly in front of my hut and required washing. The baby needed something more substantial than water. She slept and woke, slept and woke.

Eva hiccupped and sniff led through tears. At first I thought it was because Jeremia was gone, but then I saw her hand. Porcupine barbs were thrust deep into her palm. Nathanael shakily twisted them out with his thumb and first finger. When he saw me, he moved over, and I sat next to Eva. She was trying so hard to be brave, her chubby cheeks red and mottled from tears and held breath. She bit down on her lower lip and looked at me through watery eyes. Her webbed hands were red and swollen.

I twisted each barb and then removed it with a quick yank. She jerked every time I pulled one out, but she didn’t run away nor did she hide her hand.

“Jeremia left because of me,” she said.

“No.”

“Yes. He told me only stupid people touch porcupines, and I’m the stupidest person he’s ever met.” Eva was a creature of the forest. She sang with the birds, jumped with the grasshoppers, fed squirrels from her hands. It made sense that she would try to touch a porcupine. Nathanael sat on the other side of Eva and put his arm around her shoulders.

I pulled the last barb from her hand and then poured water over the wounds. The blood and water mingled, dripping from the webbing between her fingers in dark-red rivulets.

“Jeremia is like a cat, Eva,” Nathanael said. “He is moody and angry. He needs to be alone for a while.”

“Why is he so angry?” Eva asked.

“Jeremia is the only boy ever rejected. Even disfigured boys aren’t rejected, but his parents already had four sons, and when he was born with only one arm and couldn’t do the same amount of farmwork as his brothers, they decided they didn’t need him.”

“My parents didn’t want me either,” Eva said, her sore hand held in her good one. “And Whisper’s dad tried to drown her. We’re all the same…aren’t we? That’s what you always told us.”

“Yes,” Nathanael said, “and no. You two are girls. Jeremia is the only boy. He feels it more—this abandonment. Boys are precious and respected—to be rejected means—”

“That the boy is like a girl,” Eva said, smearing the water around on her face, leaving smudges of mud. “I don’t see what’s so special about being a boy. They smell worse than girls. They fart and burp.”

Nathanael looked to the sky and laughed. It was a good sound, but he woke the baby, who wailed that nasal, throaty cry that made my throat tighten. I wondered if a mixture of goat’s milk and water would help her sleep.

I fed the baby a bit of water, strapped her to my chest with the cloth and walked around the fire pit. Her eyes drooped, her mouth opened, her breath slowed. Nathanael took her from me, laid her in the camping chair and handed me the violin. I held it to my shoulder and Nathanael’s fingers pushed against my own, showing me how to create a different note by applying pressure to the strings. I moved the bow with my right hand and changed the positioning of my left-hand fingers. I could do this. It was tricky, but I could do it.

My fingers fluttered over the strings, pushed here, pushed there. At first a nasal twang screeched from the instrument, but if I pulled the bow just so and held it down, a sweetness rolled from the strings, and I could feel the music pouring out of me. I smiled at Nathanael.

“Yes,” he said and looked at me with eyes narrowed, weighing and assessing. I put down the violin, picked up the baby and sang her a simple lullaby, one my mother had sung to me. Soon I would play it for her on the violin.

The goat’s milk didn’t work. When I first gave it to her, she gulped it greedily, swallowed and demanded more, but when it settled into her stomach, she started to cry and then cried for hours. I burped her against my shoulder, walked her back and forth, felt my own tears joining hers, and then remembered my mother’s lullaby.

Nathanael was asleep in our only camping chair. His head rested against the flimsy fabric; his mouth was wide open, and he emitted a loud, rumbling snore every few seconds.

Mornings in our camp were for lessons. Nathanael, who had lived in the village until he was twenty, taught us how to read, how to do math, how to utilize the plants around us. He had lived in the city for three years. When we asked him why, he told us he had been “searching.”

I set the baby on a bed of layered blankets in my hut and propped her up like a warm sack of flour so that she could still burp if she needed to. Then I opened the violin case. Her crying came in hiccups and shivers, her face a deep, bruised red. I fit the instrument against my shoulder and under my chin as Nathanael had shown me. I held the bow in my right hand and eased it over the strings. I listened for the notes Nathanael had taught me. The sound was so harsh and creaky, the baby hiccupped her crying to a stop and opened her eyes. I tried again.

The noise the violin made was no better than my own voice, but I had heard the music from the radio. I knew what the violin was capable of creating. I slowed down, took a deep breath, tried not to let the baby’s renewed cries make me so shaky. I whispered the lyrics in my mind and fumbled my way through the tune, pressing my left fingers to the strings and drawing the bow with my right. After a few minutes of fumbling, the song became recognizable.

Corinna, Corinna

time for the baby to eat.

Milk in the morning

at noon ripened wheat

at night soft dates,

acorns from the trees,

dandelion fluff

on the quiet evening breeze.

I listened to the notes and pictured my mother holding me, rocking me, caressing my head with her hand. She would tuck my black hair behind my ears and smooth the strands over my head. I remembered the feel of her palms, rough and calloused but also beautiful and loving. I remembered the sound of her voice, so deep, full and true. The violin began to take on those tones as I played the simple tune over and over. When I felt the warm notes winging around the hut, I opened my eyes.

The baby was asleep. So was Eva. She had crept in while I was playing and now lay in front of the door, her left hand under her cheek, her swollen right hand wrapped in a white cloth and clutched against her chest.

I played the lullaby again.

The baby’s sharp, desperate cries startled me awake four times in the night, my hands trembling from lack of sleep. I dripped more water into her mouth; I held her against my shoulder and patted the gas from her stomach. This child would not be another mound in the graveyard, not if I could find something to fill her, something that could replace mother’s milk.

The third time she woke me up, when the moon had already crossed the opening between the trees above our huts, I heard a keening so sad and mournful I wanted to cry along with the baby. I wrapped her tightly against my chest and walked silently through the woods, down the path to the creek, the sad song pushing against my nose, making it drip.

He didn’t hear me when I padded up behind him. The baby was quiet now, satisfied with the sound of my heart, and I squatted on my heels where I could see him, a shadow on the branch over the swimming hole. Nathanael was like a grasshopper, his arms bent at the elbows, his knees angled out, his feet hooked around each other under the branch.

He played a song as lonely and sad as an owl at night. My throat tightened, and I sat in the mud of the path. This was the song of a broken heart, and I suddenly understood Nathanael a little better. I’d always thought that he hated the village we were from, hated the city, and chose to live with us because it was his best option. But Nathanael had had other options, and they must have vanished.

When he pulled the bow over the strings one last time, the lingering notes floating across the water like the dragonflies, I opened my eyes, stood and slipped back down the path. I knew now that Nathanael had known love and it had disappeared like dew on the grass. Nathanael had told us so little about himself that I’d always thought of him as our father, single, satisfied.

I heard him creep into my hut, replace the violin in its case and drop the deerskin door back into place. I slept after that, for a few hours anyway, until the baby’s piercing cries woke me again. I slept with an ache now, an ache that food could not fill.

In the morning, Eva climbed up the great pine by our camp. There was a large macaw’s nest in an open cavity halfway up the trunk. Eva believed there were babies in that opening. Jeremia refused to let her climb the tree because he remembered me at seven, when I’d climbed up for no reason other than because I could and had become stuck. I’d stayed up in that tree all day long. Rosa, my mentor at the time, had stood below the pine, her arms across her chest, refusing to let anyone help me down.

“You got up there, you get down. You won’t always have someone to rescue you, you know.”

She’d gone to bed at dark, and Jeremia had climbed the tree, showing me the best places to put my feet and how to slide down the trunk when branches were scarce.

But Eva was not me. She was loud, courageous, willing to touch porcupines with her bare hands. She acted while I preferred to listen. When I woke up in the morning, tired from a broken night of shuddering cries, Eva already held tightly to the trunk of the tree, her webbed feet clutched against either side, a towel in one of her hands. The opening with the nest was inches above her head.

Nathanael had explained to Eva that baby birds weren’t born in late summer; they’re born in the spring and should be out of the nest, flying on their own, by this time, but Eva, hands clenched into stubborn fists, didn’t believe him.

“What about the fox?” she said. “Look at her puppies.”

We didn’t know what to say to that. We didn’t understand why the puppies were still running about, half the size of their mother, and why they followed her, not daring to hunt on their own.

“There is a baby bird in that nest that can’t get out. I’m going to rescue it.”

I stood below the tree, my thoughts muddled from lack of sleep, the baby quiet against my chest, smudges of black beneath her eyes where healthy brown skin should have been. Nathanael milked the goat by his hut and turned the radio on. Sometimes the stations came through clearly, and sometimes they came through garbled. Today was a mix; I caught much of what was said but didn’t understand the words. “Due to high interest rates, high unemployment and a low economic report, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ dropped last night. A recovery is hoped…” Nathanael hummed along as though it were music, but I focused on Eva up in the branches.

She was cautious and inched her way up the trunk with the ease and confidence of a sloth. She reached her hand into the hole, the towel draped over her shoulder. When she began to remove her hand from the opening, peeps and squawks filtered down from the nest, and I saw the mother macaw hovering above Eva, shrieking and nervously flapping her wings.

Eva began to sing, a sweet, light call. She crept forward again, the mother bird squawking and fluttering near her head. Eva ignored the mother, ignored the wings that flapped in panic, and pulled a green splash of color from the nest, wrapping it quickly in the towel. She tucked the towel into her shirt and began her retreat. The mother macaw, green and red against the sky, a flower in motion, screamed and cried. Her shrill call reminded me of the baby’s, so desperate and scared. Mothers should protect their babies, threaten those who would take them away and cry in desperation. Why had all of our mothers surrendered us, given us away to this forest home instead of flapping their wings and calling for help?

The sun was high in the sky by the time Eva reached the ground. Her short black hair clung in sweaty clumps to the back of her neck, and her limbs trembled. She set the towel down and shook out her arms and legs, wiping the sweat from her eyes. Huddled in the brown cloth was a macaw, hardly a baby anymore, green and pink with a red tuft above its beak. The bird looked perfect, its beak thick, gray and pointed, its eyes pink and wary.

Eva placed both hands around the bird so it could not flutter or peck. The macaw squawked, and the mother answered in shrill fear from a branch near our heads.

“Look,” Eva said. She held the bird with only one hand and slid a finger under the bird’s wing. The feathers opened, puffed, ready for flight, but the wing was miniature, a tiny, perfect replica that had failed to grow along with the bird. Eva lifted the wing on the other side, also miniature.

“I’m keeping her.”

Eva carried the baby against her chest and walked with jutted chin to her hut, closed the deerskin door and shut the mother out. The terrified mother perched on the roof of Eva’s hut and called to her baby all day. I watched that mother and wondered what she would have done when her new babies came the next year. Would she have kept the older baby or pushed it out of the nest to make room for the perfectly formed new ones?