Sometimes, desperation is all that a person has left. Sometimes, the very thought of being an outcast or loosing respect, is enough to even drive the purest hearts to deceive.
She woke from her quiet slumber with torturous pains rushing through her back. Her first thought was not of straining too long over her garden or over-working herself yesterday as she slaved tirelessly over her laundry. No, she knew these pains; the kind of pain that rips through your body with the only purpose of producing new life.
She has become acclimated to sensing the very moment these pains begin. This is the seventh time she has succumbed to the excruciating agony. Her body seems well adept at responding; like a machine well oiled, her every muscle knows it has a purpose and they all work in unison to function involuntarily of the mother’s will
She slowly pulled the covers back only to discover the sheets stained with blood. This time she was hoping the outcome would be different. She was so tired and weary of her body failing her. She rose to her feet with the weight of defeat pressing her mind back to the pillow. The pains pass, but she knows it isn’t over yet. She figures she has just enough time to walk down stairs and out the back door to the outhouse before the child would be expelled. She knows this because it seems to be a frequent occurrence; a pattern of behavior that her body could not change and God seems to allow with out her permission.
She has heard it said that, everyone put on earth has a purpose and is instilled with gifts and talents from their creator. She believes this, but slowly, over time, he heart has started to believe that her body is gifted in the brutal annihilation of her unborn babies.
Throughout her life she has been able to accomplish most of anything she set her mind to. For the past five years, however, she has grown to live with the knowledge that her body is broken; that no matter how hard and diligently she prays, no matter how tenderly she cares for her body, it will never produce life; at least a life that is born alive.
As she rounded the banister, at the bottom of the stairs, she was struck with fear. Her legs slowly began to feel as warming gelatin. She felt her midsection pulsate involuntarily. She tried to walk to the kitchen where it would be easier to clean a tiled floor, but her legs were not moving. Every effort she made caused her body to cramp. She fell to her knees heaving. She gave a deep animal like groan as her every muscle tightened and clinched and contracted with out her permission. She could not stop her body from rejecting its cargo.
This pain waned slowly and allowed her to regain control of her thoughts. She started to claw her way through the dinning room to the kitchen. She was so exhausted and scared she felt as if she could disappear from herself and leave behind the shell of her body to finish the agonizing job.
She pressed her hot throbbing cheek to the frigid tile of the kitchen floor and shut her swollen eyes. She watched intently as pictures of her life danced behind her languid eye lids. She saw her unborn child cradled in her arms and saw the tearful delight in her husband’s eyes as he reached down to kiss her in thankfulness. She saw her child as a beautiful faceless being, with dark silken hair and chubby ivory colored fingers, reaching up to caress her cheek and pull her nose in playful laughter.
He vision dissipated and was replaced by complete darkness. Her head began to pound. Every muscle in her back tightened and seemed to stretch like rubber bands pulling her to her knees. She knew this would be the last of the pains. Fluid began to ooze from her groin. The trickle of fluid was clear and sticky just like before, but with the next pain it became hued with red and pink strips of blood.
She slowly and tenderly removed her soiled underpants and raised her night dress to her armpits. Grabbing the edge of the kitchen table, she squatted in pain as her body pulled and squeezed her joints and muscles loose. Her mind became blank with thought as her body took over and with one more guttural push and throaty groan; her vagina swelled and opened its protective walls as it expelled the lifeless flesh it could no longer hold back.
She dared not look at what her brokenness had created. She had seen the creature before; unrecognizable life, mangled and deformed, covered in blood and sometimes covered in a fine white hair. Oh, but she needed to look. She needed her heart to see past the horror and upon this creation. She knew that her eyes were the window in which her heart would mend.
She lowered her gown and scooted back from her birthing place and looked down at what lay before her. It looked different from before. There were fingers and little purple toes on this one. The creator even had dark, wispy hair upon its head which was matted down with blood and fluid. The body was swollen and deformed, like a puzzle scattered in unworkable directions. The face was distorted. She could not make out lips or a nose and the little location where the child’s eyes should have been were blank. Lumps of hard flesh protruded at the sides of the child’s head; her child hadn’t any ears.
The life cord had formed itself around the head and stomach of the child in a long fibrous coil of rings and knots. Her mind filled with rage as she touched the murderous rope of flesh that was responsible for taking the life of her child and disfiguring its body and squelching its growth.
The floor above her lightly crackled with movement. Her heart began to race with fear. “I have been out of bed too long,” she thought. “No, I have made too much nose. He is coming to find the noise.”
Quickly she reached into the bottom of the Hoosier cabinet for an empty flour sack. In her desperation, she remembered to reach for two; one to collect the child and another to clean up the blood. The movement overhead shifted in creaking pops to the adjoining room. She quickly worked at the task before hr as though her hands had memorized the job. She didn’t have to give thought for her hands to function, the moved on their own memory.
With the extra flour sack, she gingerly scooped up her lifeless, disfigured child and placed it in the extra sack. Diligently she finished mopping up the gelatinous liquid and put the soiled in with the child. In hasty, panicked movements tossed the heavily stained sack into the compost bin on the back porch and shut the door behind her.
The sound of his socked feet scuffing across the wood floor caused her ears to throb with fear. Quickly her eyes scanned the area under the table. The soft ambiance gleaming from the single bulb suspended above the table seemed to conceal any reminder of what had taken place. Besides, if she could turn out the light before he rounded the corner, he would be temporarily blinded when he flipped the light back on. Swiftly, and with out too much thought she softly turned out the light and stepped out onto the back porch. She was thankful that the weather was turning cold. The porch was known to resonate with the harsh decomposing odor of table scraps and moth balls during the summer. Recently she had her husband move the composting bin onto the back porch to help keep the scavenging animals away. The local raccoons along with a growing number of hobos would not be as discerning when steeling garbage that took longer to rot in the winter.
She took great pride in the simplicity of her compost. She guarded it and allowed it slowly simmer into a nutrient rich concoction that yielded an abundant harvest of fruits and vegetables. She was known for the beauty of her garden and the luscious food it produced. She started thinking back to the church social that was held each July. With out fail, she was repeatedly asked to bring her famous strawberry and rhubarb pie. This year, however, she made four; one she donated for the social and the others to be used as payments for various help needed during harvest. The thought that her famous pies would bring satisfaction and delight to empty stomachs was as fulfilling to her as preparing the succulent pastries.
As her mind began to revile in the thoughtful comfort of pie making, she was jolted back to the prosaic reality of the night. Her spine seemed to quicken with panic, as if thousands of tiny needles were piercing her skin. She felt another trickle of fluid and placed her hand between her legs. As she had feared, the blood had started to flow again.
Immediately she wiped her blood stained fingers on her night dress and noiselessly turned the knob of the back door and walked secretively through the garden toward the out house. She paused momentarily in the shadowy confines of the arched rose trellis. Turning toward the illuminated kitchen window she saw the silhouette of her husband as he seemed to turn around to gaze out the kitchen window. Walking backwards as if allowing the shadows to engulf her presence, she became aware of all she had done.
How perplexingly her thoughts raced; only yesterday she had caressed her naked stomach in acceptance. Only yesterday, she had planed in her head how she would tell husband they were expecting, again. Now, her mind, stumbling with anxiety, discovered just how far her heart had plunged itself into deceit. None of this should have happened. All she needed to have done was to have told her husband that she was with child.
I was then that she realized how traitorously she had allowed her ambivalence to cloud her judgment. Never in her wildest imagination would she have thought herself capable of such calculating thoughts and actions.
She couldn’t face him. She couldn’t tell him what she had done, or deeper yet, tell him they had lost. For the past several years, not a holiday or birthday past without him reminding her of how much he would like to be a father. Every time, her heart would drop like rocks falling to the bottom of an empty well. She started to hate his optimistic desire to be a father. Did he not care that every miscarriage chipped away at her soul? Did he not notice her growing distain for making love? How could she fully enjoy a task that continually lead to the destruction of innocent life and repeatedly caused her heart to break?
Hot tears began to form in the corners of her brown eyes. She began grieving the loss of her child and the realization that her life would never again be the same. She knew that her actions crossed the line of all that was decent and right. She began to sob; not so much for the child as for all she stood to loose. With tears streaming warm, salty caverns down her cheeks, she turned and finished walking to the outhouse.
Reaching into the ice box he fished out a piece of ham and the glass of milk that hadn’t finished at dinner. As he turned to pull out a chair from the table, his woolen socks felt glued to the tile floor. Glancing down he was struck by the sickening discovery of standing in human blood. Panic began to fill his heart like water rushing into and empty well.
Starting to sit in his place at the table, he pulled out the chair only to discover his wife’s bloody underpants. It was in that moment that his mind woke up to the faint smell of sweat and blood. The sickening aroma was permeating the air around him.
He walked to the kitchen window and gazed sadly into the night. His thoughts were muddied with worry. He hoped the soiled underpants meant nothing. As he continued to gaze pensively into the night, he noticed movement coming from the rose arbor that arched over the entrance to the garden.
“I should have set a trap in the arbor,” he said as he presses his face onto the cool glass and squints his eye to improve his gaze. It was then that he saw his wife step out of the shadow of the rose arbor and turn slowly into the direction of the outhouse.
Something terrible happened, he could feel it; something that he wasn’t supposed to know about. Without another thought, he stepped out onto the back porch and placed his wife’s soiled underpants in a used potato sack, and shoved it down inside the leg of his old work boot.
Knowing his wife never gives a thought to his work boots, he knew those forgotten patties would be kept safe, at least until morning. He vowed in silent agony never to embarrass his wife with this secret knowledge of his. He knew that if he gave her time and feigned ignorance she would tell him why she left her underpants in the kitchen.
He finished his cup of mil and wiped the soggy crumbs from the corner of his lips and decided to head back to bed.
