Lasher

Eighteen

THE BRIGHT FLUORESCENT lights of the station made an island in the dark swampland. The little phone booth was no more than a fold of plastic around a single chrome phone. The tiny square numbers were now a blur. She could no longer make them out, no matter what she did.

Again came the busy signal. “Please try to cut in again,” she asked the operator. “I have to reach Mayfair and Mayfair. There is more than one line. Please try for me. Say it is an emergency call from Rowan Mayfair.”

“Ma’am, they will not accept the interrupt. They are getting requests for interrupts from all over.”

The driver had climbed back up in his cab. She heard the engine start. She made a motion for him to wait, and hastily gave the operator the house number. “This is my home, punch it in for me, please. I can’t…can’t read the numbers.”

The pain came again, the tight wire of wraparound pain, so like a menstrual cramp, yet far worse than any she’d ever experienced.

“Michael, please answer. Michael, please…”

On and on it rang.

“Ma’am, we’ve rung twenty times.”

“Listen, I have to reach somebody. Do this for me. Keep calling. Tell them…”

Some official objection was coming back. But the huge jarring noise of the truck’s diesel engines obliterated everything. Smoke came out of the little pipe at the front of the cab.

When she turned around, the receiver slipped out of her fingers and banged against the plastic enclosure. The driver appeared to be beckoning for her to come.

Mother, help me. Where is Father?

We are all right, Emaleth. Be still, be quiet. Be patient with me.

She stepped forward, one moment sure of the ground and the distance, and all points of reference, and the next minute plunging to the asphalt Her knees struck with a fierce pain, and she felt herself going over. Mother, I am frightened.

“Hang on, baby girl,” she said. “Hang on.” She had her hands out on the ground to steady herself. Only her knees had been hurt. Two men were running towards her from the office of the filling station, and the truck driver had come down and around to help her.

“Are you OK, lady?” he said.

“Yes, let’s go,” she said. She looked up in the man’s face. “We have to hurry!” The truth was-if they hadn’t been pulling her up, she couldn’t have risen. She leant on the truck driver’s arm. The sky beyond the swamps was purple.

“Couldn’t get them?”

“No,” she said, “but we have to push on.”

“Lady, I have to make my stop in St. Martinville. No way around it, I have to pick up…”

“I understand. I’ll call from there again. Just drive, please. Go. Take us away from here.”

Here. The isolated gas station on the swamp’s edge, the sky purple overhead, the stars peeping through and a great bright moon rising.

He lilted her with considerable ease and set her down on the seat, then came around, released the emergency brake and let the big truck creak and wheeze before he slammed the door and pressed on the accelerator. They were turning back to the marginless road.

“We still in Texas?”

“No, ma’am. Louisiana. I sure wish you’d let me take you to the doctor.”

“I’ll be all right.”

Just as she said it the pain again clamped tight, and made her nearly cry out. She felt the sharp jab from within.

Emaleth, for the love of God and Mother.

But Mother, it gets smaller and smaller. Mother. I’m frightened. Where is Father? Can I be born into the world without Father?

Not yet, Emaleth. She sighed. She turned her head to the road. The big truck was racing along now at ninety on the narrow road with its battered shoulders and ditches, and the purple sky darkened above as the trees closed in and grew higher. The headlamps made a bright path ahead. The driver whistled to himself.

“Mind if I play the radio, ma’am?”

“Please do,” she said.

There came another jab. The smooth dark voices of the Judds came out of the little grill. She smiled. Devil’s music. Another jab, and she pitched forward, steadying herself on the dashboard. Then she realized she had never put on the seat belt. Terrible, and she a mother carrying a child.

Mother…

I’m here, Emaleth.

The time is coming.

That can’t be yet. Stay quiet. Wait until we are both certain.

But another circle of pain wrapped tight around her middle. It pressed white-hot against the small of her back. And there came another jab and a soundless sense of something breaking. Fluid leaked between her legs. She felt the wetness and at the same time the blood seemed to drain from her face. That awful lightheaded feeling-you’re going to pass out.

“Stop the truck now here,” she said.

At first he didn’t understand.

“You need help, lady?”

“No. Stop the truck. See those lights? Stop there. That’s where I’m going. Stop the truck!” She flashed her eyes on him. She saw the intimidation, the fear, yet he eased into the stop.

“Do you know who lives back up in there?”

“Course I do.” She opened the door, and got out, stumbling over the step. Her dress was soaked. No doubt the seat behind her was wet, and now in the glare of oncoming lights he could see it. Poor man. How disgusting it must all seem to him. That she had lost control of her bladder, when that wasn’t it at all.

“Go on, now, thanks.” She slammed the cab door. But she heard him hollering from inside.

“Ma’am, your purse. Here. No, no, that’s OK, you already give me plenty money.”

The truck wouldn’t move on. She cut across the ditch, hurriedly, and climbed up into the high grass on the other side, and passed into the dense bank of trees, into the soft relentless chorus of the tree frogs. Up ahead she saw light, and she moved towards it, at last hearing the sound of the truck drive away and vanish within seconds in the silence.

“I’m finding a place, Emaleth, a soft dry place. Be quiet, and be patient.”

Mother, I cannot. I must come out.

She had come through the trees into a clearing. The lights she’d seen lay way far away to the right. She did not care about them. It was the great grassy place that lay ahead, and a beautiful oak, immense in size and leaning tragically on its long arms as if reaching out to the woods beyond in a futile effort to join with it.

The oak broke her heart suddenly, its giant knuckled branches, its great sweeps of dark moss, and in the soft glowing starry night, the sky was so bright behind it.

It’s beautiful, please, Emaleth. Emaleth, if I die, go to Michael. Once again, she registered the vision of Michael’s face, the numbers of the house, numbers of the phone-data for the tiny mind inside her, which knew what she knew.

Mother, I cannot be born if you die. Mother, I need you. I need Father.

The tree was so distinct, massive and graceful. Some lovely vision came to her of the forests of olden times when trees like this must have been the temples. She saw a green field, hills covered with forest.

Donnelaith, Mother. Father said I was to go to Donnelaith, that we were to meet there.

“No, darling,” she said aloud, reaching out for the trunk of the tree and then falling against its dark, good-smelling rough surface. Like stone it felt, no hint that it was alive, not here at the craggy base where the roots were like rocks, only up and out there where the small branches moved in the wind. “Go to Michael, Emaleth. Tell him everything. Go to Michael.”

It hurts, Mother, it hurts.

“Remember, Emaleth, go to Michael.”

Mother, do not die. You must help me be born. You must give me your eyes and the milk, lest I be small and useless.

She wandered out from the trunk, to where the grass was soft and silken under her feet, between a pair of the great sprawling elbow branches.

Dark and sweet here.

I’m going to die, darling.

No, Mother. I’m coming now. Help me!

It was dark and sweet here, with heaps of leaves and moss like a bower. She lay on her back, her body pulsing with one shock of pain after another. Moss above, soft moss hanging down, and the moon snagged up there, and so beautiful.

She felt the fluid gush, warm against her thighs, and then the worst of the pain, and something soft and wet stroking her. She lifted her own hand, unable to coordinate, unable to reach down.

Dear God, was the child reaching out from the womb? Was the child’s hand against her thigh? The darkness above closed in as if the branches had closed, and then the moon shone bright again, making the moss gray for an instant. She let her head roll to the side. Stars falling down in the purple sky. This is heaven.

“I made an error, a terrible terrible error,” she said. “The sin was vanity. Tell Michael this.”

The pain widened; she knew the causes of this, the mouth of the womb wrenched open. She screamed, she couldn’t help it, and she felt nothing but the pain grow worse and worse and then suddenly it stopped. Slipping back into ache and sickness, she struggled to see the branches again, struggled to lift her hands to help Emaleth, but she could not do it.

A great warm heaviness lay on her thighs. It lay on her belly. She felt the warm wet touch on her breast.

“Mother, help me!”

In the vague sweet darkness, she saw the small head rising above her, like the head of nun, its long wet hair so sleek, like a nun’s veil, the head rising and rising.

“Mother, see me. Help me! Lest I be small and useless!”

The face loomed above hers, the great blue eyes peering down into her own, and the wet hand suddenly closing on her breast, making the milk squirt from the nipple.

“Are you my baby girl?” she cried. “Ah, the scent of Father. Are you my baby girl?”

There was the burning smell, the smell of the night he was born, the smell of something heated and dangerous and chemical, but nothing glowed in the dark. She felt the arms encircling her, the wet hair on her stomach, the mouth on her breast and then that delicious suckling, that wondrous suckling, sending the pleasure all through her.

The pain was gone. So beautifully and wholly gone. The darkness of the night seemed to enfold her, and lock her down to the fallen leaves, to the bed of moss, beneath the delicious weight of the woman who lay on top of her.

“Emaleth!”

Yes, Mother. The milk is good. The milk is fine. I am born, Mother.

I want to die. I want you to die. Both of us now. Die.

But there was no longer much to worry about. She was floating and Emaleth drank the milk in deep hearty gulps and there wasn’t anything now that she could do. She could not even feel her own arms and legs. She could feel nothing but this suckling and then when she tried to say…it was gone, whatever it had been; I want to open my eyes. I want to see the stars again.

“They are so beautiful, Mother. They could guide me to Donnelaith if the great sea didn’t lie between us.”

She wanted to say, No, not Donnelaith, and to say Michael’s name again, but then she couldn’t quite follow it, couldn’t quite remember who Michael was, or why she had wanted to say that.

“Mother, don’t leave me!”

Her eyes opened for one precious second, yes, see, and there was the purple sky and a tall willowy figure standing over her. It could not have been her child, no, not this, not this woman rising out of the dark like some grotesque growth from the warm, verdant earth, something monstrous and…

“No, Mother. No. I am beautiful. Mother, please, please, don’t leave me.”