Marilou Is Everywhere Page 15

  “I’m glad,” I said. And I was. Maybe I was just as much her real daughter as Jude was. I realized she must have been saying these things to Jude for years and years. Poor Jude, I thought. Even Jude, who came right out from her body, seemed not entirely real to Bernadette. I had felt not entirely real my whole life. By the transitive property, maybe I had found my real mother.

  “I’m too much swamp thunder to have a real human baby.”

  “Redondo Beach,” I said.

  “I used to sing there,” she said.

  “Scary place. But I hear the flowers are beautiful.”

  “Redondo Beach,” she said. “I used to sing there.” The sky was already choked with blue. It would flee when I wasn’t looking. The barn lights flared a pure white like no other time of the year and reminded me of the overheads in the school gym. It seemed like lit-up fluoride. I had not been to school in a long time.

  “What did you sing? In Redondo Beach?” I felt like all of my threads had been combed out and I was happy to go to sleep soon. I was not really paying attention. But Bernadette picked up her spoon with a fist wrapped around it. She brought it up to her shoulder. The muscles trembled. The handle, once she threw it, hit on the sticking-up bone of my wrist. It clattered over the edge. Mondo jumped.

  “I’m so damn tired of telling you everything. Why don’t you just go away?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It was ‘La Bamba.’ For the last time, my god.” Then she stood up and slapped me, square on the cheek.

  I didn’t want to cry over it, but I was tasting the metal in my mouth, which meant that I would. They were paper, hot sand, the tears. I levered my head to hide them, but she saw and searched up into my face.

  “Baby? Hey, baby? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. I should never. OK?” She pulled my hand to her chest and clamped on her heart, which was fluttering. “You feel how sorry I am?”

  I didn’t want to flinch but my nerves were all plucked up. She noticed. Her eyes went flat, and she slapped me again, and wailed. She stood away from the table and left the chair scudding backward. I thought she was going up to the bathroom to run cool water on her face, so I started clearing the table. But then I heard a rip in the air, and another. Bernadette cried out, or grunted, some sound with a lot of effort behind it. From the sound, I thought she was pulling down shelves from the wall.

  But what I found: Bernadette had pulled her shift down over her shoulders and braced her left hand by the bathroom mirror so she could swat this little leather whip at her back. The tip must have been weighted. It sounded high-pitched and serious. Her back was bright red with raised welts like what I remembered from giving myself eraser burns in school. It’s funny, how you realize a mystery the moment you solve it: The welts on Bernadette’s arms, the welts Jude had said were just color guard hazing. And of course, the day when she caught me smoking. She wouldn’t look at me, though I was sure she could see me over her shoulder in the mirror. I approached, and put my hand, careful and slow but very heavy, upon her right shoulder.

  “Hey, Bernadette,” I said. “Can I see that?”

  She handed it to me. Her jaw hung slack.

  “Thank you,” I said. I marched off to hide it. And trusted she’d pull herself together.

  I got rid of the dinner dishes. I poured all the hot dog soup into a bowl for Mondo, but he had too much sense to eat food that had been slapped over. Instead he pressed his nose into the backs of my knees while I washed out the saucepan. Why didn’t I go home? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I thought this was home, always, eventually. I thought home always turned into this.

  XVII

  All the goats were inside except for one. Panda Jane lay down and got back up. She was usually so friendly with me I had to watch I didn’t trip on her. Some stuff was coming out of her butt, under her tail. There was a long string of it, milky-sick like snot. Some brown and red threads were in it, and I had of course to realize that it must be an emergency, because it was blood. It had snowed all the failing night before and was not done yet. The yard and goat pens looked strange, like the ground had been turned to glass underneath.

  It could be anyone has the arm of salvation within them. It is an extra arm, the arm of salvation, and not like the bony scrabble of the flesh. It comes from the chest. It leans out and opens. The hand holds on to things, mostly people. It holds on the cleft of the ribs.

  It was a bad day. All day we’d been fighting about what time of winter it was. Bernadette would say it was cold today, but we were lucky we’d had such a warm winter. But we hadn’t, at all. The pipes froze four times and eventually I rigged up a lawn chair over a bucket instead of using the toilet. We had some long snows when the delivery boy from Bell’s Grocery couldn’t get through. Things were getting so unreliable. We ate crackers and drank broth.

  Bernadette had her feet laid out on the table and was flexing her toes. One of the brand-new barn kittens marched over her stomach and fell off the other side. Outside, Panda Jane was still off by herself yelling.

  “I think something is wrong with her. With Panda Jane.”

  “Sweetie, I looked at her yesterday.”

  “You should see her right now.”

  We stood at the side window. Panda Jane had her forehooves up on a tree stump. She was staring up into the sky, like she was waiting for instructions.

  “She’s stargazing,” Bernadette said. “They do it when they’re about to kid.” She lay across the couch and drummed her fingers on her chest bones, on the kitten.

  “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “Something? About what?”

  “About Panda Jane.”

  “Oh, sweetie. All the goats died. They all died. The fire took them away.”

  I called Doctor Vic, the veterinarian. Bernadette had his home number written on the back of a phone bill. He sounded like he was talking from the bottom of a well.

  “Yep?”

  “Hello. I’m calling from Bernadette’s. I’ve got a pregnant goat here that is having its baby,” I said.

  “Yeah, and what?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Bernie’s delivered a shit ton of goats. She knows what she’s doing.” As he said this, Bernadette was blowing an eiderdown feather up and up into the air like a child.

  “Please,” I said. “She can’t do it right now.”

  “Who is this anyway?”

  “This is—Jude.” I couldn’t break the spell, not with Bernadette sitting right there in front of me.

  “That is not a thing to be joking about,” he said. “Whoever you are.”

  “Please, I don’t know about goats. Please just help me.”

  “I don’t truck with pranksters. Now bye.”

  My boots were still wet from earlier when I had been out shoveling the drive and digging out the pickup. My socks were dark around the toes, but I’d picked up a confetti of straw and rock salt walking around in the kitchen with the cord springing and winding around the chairs. In all the prairie movies I had ever seen, you had to boil a tub of water whenever something was being born. If no one would help me, I was determined to handle things myself. I started a pan going over the back burner and held my hands over it, watched the first heat shimmer up and roll over the surface.

  “Get me those blankets from upstairs,” I said to Bernadette. She had her eyes closed with the feather between them.

  “Oh, the princess shall have blankets, many blankets may she have,” she said.

  “Not for me. The goat’s having a baby right now. Like, right this second.”

  She heaved away and went up the stairs with her long skirt trailing after her, huffing like a teenager.

  The panic was all in my hands, which was good, because I could send them out away from me to do tasks and not thi
nk and not let the worry cramp up into my stomach where it could make me dizzy, trail against the walls, feel hollow, or retch. I started coffee also. The sky was getting blue already. That long light was coming through the sky, the last we would see for the night, although it was barely really four in the afternoon.

  The goats lived in a little lean-to. It was really just a woodshed with some walls tacked on. The space was shallow, maybe four foot wide. They were threaded together in long lines for warmth but hardly any space to move. The air smelled like dust and jam. Panda Jane was not there, though she had been in the corner when I had checked them before and broke the ice on their water troughs.

  Snow blew off the roof in a fierce glittering wave and settled again over the trees. I was grateful it was deep at least, so I could follow her tracks, although I heard her soon enough yelling out in the middle of the hawthorn waste. I hadn’t brought a light with me. I thought it would do to see the slim light off the snow blaring up from the ground. We were moon people, we had been moon people all along, we could see in the dark like a spell.

  The mucus plug had fallen down through the snow because it had still been warm when she dropped it. I had to scan all sideways with my hands flatted to find it. She didn’t want me near her. She lay down and got up again, lay down and got up. The hawthorn scrub made a low dark room where I couldn’t get at her at all. It would have to be good enough. She yelled in bursts like a siren, then got tired out, got up, and squatted out a little pee.

  Inside, Bernadette had forgotten about the blankets. When I called out for her, she came a few steps down the stairs and leaned her head across to see me.

  “Hey, come on,” I said. “You better get your boots on. I don’t know what to do but I need help.”

  Bernadette had been wearing a fanny pack around the house. It was simplest to get all her things that way, the things she was always asking for. I didn’t understand it. The salt shaker, a quartz crystal, a blackened quarter, a torn-up king from a playing card are what she had in there. In thinking, she’d let her fingers droop into the pouch and run over the things she carried as if their edges might help her to remember what was going on.

  “But the birth man already came, sugar. He’s been and gone, and took all the little lambies to heaven.”

  I walked out of her vision and put my forehead against the pebbled white run of the refrigerator. If I counted fifteen I could try again. This was the way it worked the best sometimes, when I couldn’t get her to agree. She still forgot, but was less embarrassed around me. Since I’d been living full time in the house, I got to be a part of the scenery that she would revise and tint with good lights.

  I turned back around the corner. She had sat at the top of the stairs with her knees widing out her skirt between them, a valley. She took out her things from the fanny pack and rested them there, put them back in an order I would never make sense of.

  “Come on, Mom. I want to show you the moon! Put your boots on. The moon is really, really beautiful tonight.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “I’ve fallen for the old ‘come see the moon’ trick. Never again, my dear.”

  I grabbed the keys to the truck and pulled it up to the copse where Panda Jane had hidden herself so I could run the headlights in there to see. I didn’t really know how to drive, but my hand slid the gear shift around like it had become an expert without me. I crawled in and tore up marks in the mud. Panda Jane had her hooves back up on the stump, straining her head up. She panted and looked at the moon. Nothing was coming out of her except a clear globe of stuff. It looked like a water balloon with veins on the outside. I still had the mucus plug in my pocket. All the slime had rubbed off. It looked like a small, clear cake of soap but there were red streaks in it. I pushed it around in my palm. The blood looked wrong.

  The headlights blinked as the truck shifted up and down in its idle. Some foam was crusting her lips. It seemed like she had been trying a long time.

  I didn’t know much about animals. Some girls raised up calves from a bottle and like that, and would probably know what to do. We Stoats are not known for husbandry, though. We never had anything stranger than a dog, except for the brief, doomed chickens which Blond You and Black You eventually terrorized into extinction.

  In a back corner, between books on macrobiotic cookery and Vedic chanting, I found a volume called Raising Milk Goats the Modern Way. The pages were tea color and stiff from being shut for so long, and Jude had once drawn big scribble-faced cats across the table of contents. The birthing chapter was surprisingly casual. “Goats have been reproducing without human help for millennia!” it correctly claimed. And yet it also included many grim drawings of a person pulling limp baby goats out of their mothers.

  Bernadette had draped herself across the captain’s chair by the wood stove and was passing her dreaming hand through the place where heat lines shimmered. She had put on a Nina Simone record.

  “Don’t you sometimes think all the good ones are dead?” she said. “Because I do. I really, really do.” She sounded drunk—it was a drunk idea even if she wasn’t slurring. But I had no time for that. I started running the tap and then pulled my arm through the sweatshirt sleeve. The water steamed. I didn’t feel anything but bright where I ran the soap over my elbow and shoulder. It was a useful feeling, satisfying in spite of the crisis.

  “That’s a funny way to take a bath, baby. À la carte.”

  “Panda Jane is kidding right now. If you’d care to join me. I really, really need your help.”

  “You’re kidding. Ha! Ha.” Just like that, she was peeling an orange.

  Outside, I clamped the book open under my knee and bent my jaw open to hold the flashlight in my teeth. I flipped to the picture that looked like the way Panda Jane was standing and read: “If breech birth is suspected, manually observe the orientation of the skull before pulling (by leg or shoulder).” I hesitated. Panda Jane was still yelling. But she was already hurting, I reasoned. I only hoped I didn’t hurt her more.

  I put my hand up in her a ways and was shocked to find it had wrapped itself on a skull. I thought I could feel the kid’s eyes shivering in the sockets.

  I stood still a moment. It seemed like a plain impossible thing. I wanted to just not exist. I had nothing. Children have no things they can say. So I leaned down into the dark where the roots were diving into the pale mud and the stars ticking away overhead, and maybe I prayed in my heart. I loved Panda Jane. I loved all the goats. I knew Bernadette loved them, too. And I was pretending to be Jude, who was good and brave, much more than myself. I was such a coward I couldn’t even see around the hurt. But I could try at least to do this right.

  I pushed past the skull this time, my hand starfishing. It felt like the inside of a mouth. I said every sweet thing to her. I said she was beautiful, I loved her. I cried into my collar and watched as her breathing got wet and the strain made her back leg shake. She was bearing down on the front legs hoisting into the stump and for nothing, for nothing. But then I caught the hard curve of a hoof and walked my fingers up to find the knee joint and the shoulder. Panda Jane gagged on her cries and resumed.

  I pulled on it just a little ways and felt nothing change. It wasn’t coming. I looked again in the book: “Be careful to work with the goat’s rhythms, not against. Nevertheless, it may be necessary to pull with some force,” it said. There were no other suggestions.

  I tried again. I pulled so hard I thought I would yank the leg clean off. Panda Jane was yelling unbroken. God, how she hated me. I felt the leg squirm in the fluids. My arm burned. I held around her hips to brace me. We were murdering each other. I pulled the murder out. She shouted it. We were busy alive in the blood of that moment that stretched out and took over the sky and was bigger than any I had known.

  When I fell back onto my butt I thought my hand must have slipped, but the baby goat was there in my lap, about the size of my boot and glossed
in yellow crud. I had crushed it or killed it, I was sure, but then its legs began slowly swimming. I put it down in my sweater, against my skin.

  Panda Jane had lain on her side, and a little leg hooked its way out. There was another one. I was delirious and overheated. My mouth tasted strange.

  But the second goat slipped out like nothing and Panda Jane licked at its yellow goo. Her placenta wobbled nearby like a moon drop.

  I got on my feet, then stepped up into the cab to turn the truck off. I rested a minute with my hands on the roof. My face was wet. I was crying. And I knew this also: I was a luxury of blood. That’s how it felt, how good. I moved them into the lean-to. It seemed wrong to leave them outside, but the book actually cautioned against bringing newborn goats into the house, so I knew I wasn’t the first to think this thought.

  “Happy birthday,” I said to the goats, or perhaps to the night, or perhaps to the things of the world in general.

  I hollered toward the house that Bernadette should come see. I saw her shadow move through the yellow light inside. But a big band record started up instead, and I watched her waltz alone. So I lay on my stomach and watched the goats. I named them: Butter and Dirtbike. But the cold seeped into my shoulders. And I felt a burn of cold in my chest. When I went inside, Bernadette had gone upstairs. The record spun on static. But her bottle was still on the table, and when I pulled on it, something clicked open in my chest. It felt like someone had just pulled a knot loose in my gut. I drank again and some gin ran from the corner of my mouth. I tipped some of it into a mug. It laughed as I poured it, and me, too, I laughed. Happy birthday. And sat again outside to drink it under the stars, which plowed across the scrub of the sky, watery and glorious.

  This one I heard from Melda, long after the whole business was over and I had returned, more or less, to my life. Melda’s mom, Darienne, worked in the Greene County Sheriff’s Office, and had seen the fake Jude incident herself. The fake Jude selected a People magazine from the cubby, and looked rather unremarkable at first. She had highlighted blond hair and a pink gloss on her lips. She didn’t remove her parka or unzip it, and from her purse she brought out little pony bottles of water and a bag of trail mix. It didn’t seem like this was her first time waiting for someone’s arraignment or bench warrant or whatever it was to get cleared up, so Darienne left her alone. With glum discipline, the woman removed a foot-long hoagie from her purse and dispatched it in swift, scarcely chewed bites, cutting her eyes up to the TV bolted to the ceiling, which typically played a PSA about getting your cholesterol checked. She sorted apart trail mix on the particleboard table, and with the raisins she formed a cross. She was humming something patriotic, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” maybe. She kept bothering the other waiting-room people, asking if they knew what an ego death is, and what are the signs.