Arcadia (8 page)

Astrid carries him into the Henhouse, and only now, in its warmth, does he know how cold he has been. It smells like chamomile and yarrow and lavender, other herbs that hang from the rafters in the kitchen. Someone moans above, and Flannery lopes downstairs naked, with a basin in her arms, her belly vast, her face panicky. She is one of the teenagers who have been showing up every few weeks, petrified but knowing, as they somehow do, that the midwives take care of the Pregnant Ladies who come to them.

Oh, thank God you’re back, she breathes. Marilyn was called off to Amos the Amish’s daughter, and Midge had to go take a nail out of D’Angelo’s foot.

Astrid looks down, and touches Bit’s head, and says, You’ll stay here, in the kitchen, with Flan? We can have our talk after Eden’s baby is born, yes? And Bit nods, though he knows he won’t say a word. Astrid strips off all her clothing and washes herself for a long time with soap and water so hot it steams. When she goes upstairs, she is nude, also.

Flannery puts on a bathrobe and makes a face at Bit. So what’s your story, she says. You’re the retarded one, right? He shakes his head, but she snorts, and gives him a piece of apple cake, and goes off to lie down on the couch. Jesus, she says. I’m
definitely
not looking to get this little bastard out of me if it’s gonna be like that. She points, finger trembling, skyward.

In a moment, she is asleep and breathing heavily. Bit goes upstairs.

The room is murky where Eden is lying on her back. At first, he can see only the gleam of her coppery hair, then a lady’s swollen bottom and a great upswell of flesh. Astrid is astride her and rubs her belly with something glossy, breathing with her. You must remember, she says, it is a rush, it is good energy, it is the energy it takes to get this baby into the world. There is no pain here. Do not push. All in its own time.

Eden grimaces and gives a low whine, and seems to release something, and Astrid says, Good, good.

Astrid puts two long white fingers into Eden’s folds and feels around. They are bloody when she takes them out. She nods and grunts.

The coil begins to wind again in Eden. Her feet clench. In the middle of the grip, she opens her eyes and sees Bit there at the door and locks her eyes into him, and Bit locks back, pushing the way she pushes at him. Then she relaxes again, and lolls her head back, and Astrid coos, and Eden picks up her head and winks at Bit. Hey, she says. Thanks for that one, Monkey.

Astrid turns. You! she says, Ridley Sorrel Stone! But before she can shoo Bit away, Eden says, No, no. He was helpful, Astrid. I want him here, okay? He’s good at this.

Astrid goes to the doorway and calls to Flannery, who takes Bit downstairs, grumbling, and scrubs him until he hurts. He is naked when he climbs back up, and shivers in the chill. He burrows into the bed with Eden and rests his head against her shoulder. She smells like chicory and fatigue and onions; she is vast and hot. He puts his hands on her forehead and smoothes out the wrinkles there.

The light dies in the windows. People come in and out, among them Abe, worried. He tries to talk to Bit. But Bit is concentrating. People leave. Astrid changes the sheets by rolling both of them over. Someone gives Bit a piece of warm bread with applebutter, but he doesn’t care to eat. He stays with Eden. He sleeps when she naps between waves, and wakens when she surfaces in pain.

Something suddenly shifts in Astrid: she becomes quick, efficient. Flannery rubs Eden’s shoulders. New light kindles in the panes of glass and grows. It is somehow day. Astrid makes coaxing noises, and Eden gives high moans, which Astrid tries to make her lower. Marilyn comes in, fresh and smiling and bearing two quilts and a mince pie, her voice spinning over of the miracle of the Amish baby she just delivered, fat and blue-eyed and rosy as a piglet. Eden shouts, and Marilyn screws up her lips and goes away.

Eden manages to eat some porridge, which comes up. She drinks some tea. She grips Bit’s tiny arms, and he won’t feel the steel in her hands until later, when Hannah will take him to the Showerhouse and cry at the purple on his skin, touching the bruises gently with her fingers, as if to brush them away.

Eden’s body is a fist as she pushes. Bit hears voices saying, Good, sweetheart, so good, the head is here, it’s wonderful, one more, Eden. But Eden gazes into Bit’s face, her canines catch on her lower lip; and in sudden overwhelm, the smell of shit. Then there’s a breaking, a slippage, and in Astrid’s hands there’s a bloody, waxy, frantic beauty, a creature that wags its tiny arms and begins to squawk like a seagull. Eden and Bit rest against one another and watch through half-closed eyes.

Eden lifts her arms up for the baby, which Marilyn has already washed and wrapped in a blanket. Astrid guides the tiny mouth to Eden’s fist-size nipple, and shows the baby how to latch on. It grunts and snorts, the most urgent thing Bit has ever seen.

Bathed in the dim early morning light, in sweat, in exhaustion, Eden swims in the last thrashes of pain. She holds her baby and looks down into the ancient face. Bit takes everything he feels now and buries it deep in him, a secret shining place to visit in his quietness, the best place he has ever known.

The women come for Hannah. They come into the Bread Truck while Abe is still there, before the sun has risen. They bring the spring cold in the pockets of their clothing. Their breath steams in the warmth of the Bread Truck. Up, up, they say, and Hannah stands. Magnificent women, the women of Arcadia, all legs and thin hands, bandannas, white throats, cracks at the edges of their eyes where the sun has creased their skin. They seat Hannah at the table, brush out her hair, braid it up again tightly. They warm water and strip her. Bit’s mother’s body is thin, her bones show, and they wipe her down with hot cloths. Slowly, her smell is thinned with Astrid’s rose soap. Her skin, her hair, her sleep, is watered until, at last, what is her own disappears.

The women take her away.

Abe is distracted during supper, oat groats with soy-sauce, fresh bean curd. Hannah hasn’t been back since the women took her. Bit is free to think his thoughts, and he thinks of how he will go into the forest, soon, to help his mother. He wishes for someone to tell him what to look for, and he hopes that it won’t be someone too frightening or ugly. He listens to the wind in the pines, but it doesn’t talk to him the way it talks to boys in his stories.

When all is cleared and clean in the Bread Truck, Abe deposits Bit at the Pink Piper to sleep in Cole’s hammock. He kisses him gravely and leaves.

The metal roof clicks with tiny icy snow. Astrid’s children breathe lightly. Sweetie’s boys snore and shift, Cole jabs at Bit with his heels. The pile of Family Quonset kids tangle together under the blankets.

Bit turns and sees Helle’s eyes are open, yellow, in the dim. Tadpole of Handy, he thinks, bulby and strange. She looks at Bit, her mouth swelling with information. She is nosy, a listener at doors, a tattletale.

She whispers, They’re making a Critique tonight. Of Hannah. Of your mom.

Bit hears Marilyn downstairs talking to someone, Saucy Sally it sounds like. He gets out of his hammock and creeps down the stairs. They’re smoking funny stuff out the window, even though Sally is pregnant. They gab, are not watchful. He goes out the door.

Ice glazes on the grass and his feet are bare, his legs cold under the thin pajamas. His soles burn until he can’t feel them anymore, and he must pump his arms to be sure he is still running. The wind smacks his face with a cold hand. When he longs to lie down in the sinister rows of the apple orchard, he thinks of Hannah and goes on.

Up the slate stairs to Arcadia House, up the stone porch. He can’t reach the doorknob, but he pushes and the vast door swings open.

A powerful stench: varnish and polyurethane and paint, beeswax and vinegar and sweat, sawdust and copper and cold nails. The stairs are finished but dark because there is no sky above them, only plaster and ceiling. The grand chandelier has been pieced together, and it hulks overhead in half shadow.

Over the still-tacky floorboards, to the stairs, curving up. Halfway there, he hears voices. Another corridor, paint sticky under his hand. Another stairway. The voices are louder. When he reaches the doorway to the back of the Proscenium, the voices are very loud.

He crouches and puts his eye to the crack. His feet come alive again, and he would cry with the pain if he didn’t first bite the inside of his cheek to blood.

From there he sees the silhouettes of bodies, some shiftings, the shadow of a hand that rises to a face, heads that move together then apart. Beyond, elevated on the stage, uplit by three kerosene lamps, there is Hannah.

She is tiny, shriveled, so distant from him. She is alone. Her hands are folded in her lap, and she looks down and nods. Someone, a man, says:
. . . mean, Hannah baby, we love you and want you to feel better, man, but it’s just such a drag, you’re like bringing down all our energy and we’ve got a shitload more work to do before Handy and them get back and we need all the energy we can get for the planting, you dig?

Hannah nods, nods, nods.

Now, someone else says in a calm cold voice, . . .
Mahayana, big boat, caring for everyone, but you’re manifesting pure Hinayana, small boat, taking care of yourself
. . . Hannah nods.

And someone, a woman, says,
Listen . . . when you’re good, there’s nobody better . . . in the fall know you had that accident . . . sad to lose a baby . . . over it by now?

And Hannah’s hands clench at her skirt and her face contracts, then smoothes out, and still she nods.

Now a familiar voice, Titus’s. He roars. He says, . . .
fucking nuts, man, it’s like taking someone whose leg is broken and jumping on the fucking leg, we’re not doing anybody any favors here, I’ve been there, Hannah, I’ve been where you are, I’ve been down so low the black dog is at my neck, man, I know what it’s like so don’t listen to these hypocritical assholes
. . .

An uproar, voices shouting over Titus’s. Hannah looks out into the audience, finds a face to fix on, and stares at it. In this moment the whole of her is present. His mother, so wispy, so far away.

Bit can’t hold himself: he leaps up from where he is crouched and begins to run. Down the endless aisle, down past the people who sit on the benches, down past the folks sprawled on the floor, to the stairs, up. Out of the shadow and into the shallow pool of kerosene light, with Hannah alone in the center. He thrusts himself onto his mother’s lap and cradles her head in his arms. He can feel all the others’ eyes heavy on his back. For a long moment, nothing, silence.

Briefly, a wet warmth on his belly, his mother’s face pressing into him.

Briefly, her mouth moving against him, kissing him through his shirt.

Now, Abe is on the stage and lifting Bit, and Bit floats halfway down the aisle in Abe’s steely hands. Abe is whispering fiercely into his ear; Bit twists and fights to return to Hannah. In silence, Bit struggles, desperate, and when they go down the third-floor steps, down the curved entry stairs and out into the night, he hears what Abe is saying, . . .
I know, little one, I know you’re in pain, I know you’re holding it in, monkey
. . . Abe presses Bit against him and Bit hangs on to his father, his warmth, his one solid ground in the spinning awful world, his gravity. He presses against Abe and tries to push him away, tries to fly back toward Hannah, clutches his father; pushes him, clutches. Abe is saying . . .
don’t have to let it out yet
. . . It is only when they are halfway home, as Abe begins to trot over the hard ground, that Bit’s internal scream lurches and burbles and emerges in a sour rush of vomit.

In the night, he hears: Now or never, baby. I left a Bug outside, keys in the ignition.

A silence so long Bit almost sleeps. Then a whispered No.

Then you have to try. You have to begin to try. You have to. You have to.

His father’s voice is thick and shuddery, and it makes Bit go thick and shuddery inside.

A very long silence. Bit is almost asleep. Then it comes, soft, soft: I’ll try.

He wakes, gnawed. He breathes with Hannah until Abe gets up, feeds them, drops Bit off at the Pink Piper. Before he goes, Abe kneels before Bit and brushes the hair out of his eyes, and says, Whenever you want, you talk to me, okay?

All day long, Bit is being eaten inside. The nameless bad pushes in his legs, makes his shoulders ache. He longs to rip up the pillows and send the hammocks a-scattering over the Quad.

His silence isn’t working alone. He will need a Quest. And if he doesn’t go on his Quest soon to find the thing to save Hannah, he is afraid what he might do.

Sweetie tries to talk softly to him, but he runs away. The Kid Herd is quiet today. Dorotka takes time from starting the seeds in the solarium and now leads the kidlets into the forest to tell them about trees. He trails the other kids, stomps his boots. He must
do
. What? His longing twists and flicks in him.

The Kid Herd moves across the meadow and into the bitter woods. Bit lags five steps, ten steps behind.

Mud has dried into pocks and pits here. Pussy willows velvet the banks; other willows are awash with gold buds. Sweetie and Maria take the babies back to the Pink Piper with the wagons. Jincy and Muffin and Fiona roll down the tender-grassed slope. The boys stop smacking things with sticks to listen to Dorotka: Look, she urges them, Ulmaceae, elm. It has simple alternate leaves that are just coming out, look! It comes from Asia, originally. It seeds with a kind of samara, let’s see aha, aha, here’s one from last year.

She lifts a seed and it flutters down, a propeller.

She beams. They beam. Springtime, she says, a letter from a loved one.

Dorotka hugs the trunk, and one by one, the children do, too. They move deeper into the shadows. Dutchman’s-breeches! she calls. Look, miterwort. Look, hobblebush.

There is a crack in the gray sky and the sun sifts through, falls over the ground, powders the new buds. This is it, Bit understands with a great pulse in his throat where his words used to live. This is where his Quest begins. Bit crouches behind a rotten log where a fern grows in a bed of moss. He watches the others go. Soon, he cannot hear them at all.