Whisper (2 page)

My mother wasn't coming.

She was abandoning me too. I had known it would happen. I had known that eventually she'd want to avoid the inconvenient trek to our home, like the parents of the others in our camp. For fifteen years she had walked the three days to the camp, loved me, sung to me, talked to me like a normal human being, called me Lydia, the name I'd been born with, and then walked the three days back. And because she had come for so many years, I'd grown weak, hopeful, accepting that this was the pattern of my life. I believed that she still loved me and that maybe someday she would take me home.

I clutched the bundle close to my chest and felt the rhythm of the baby's breathing against my neck. I leaned against the rough bark of a pine tree and tilted my head back. I gazed up, taking in the branches that arched over my head, obscuring the blue of the sky. The comfort of loving arms was gone. My own arms would have to do now.

Lose a mother, gain a sister.

“They won't attack me when I'm in the woods, will they?” asked the messenger as he slung his food pack over his shoulder and adjusted the brim of his cap. He looked around as if the woods were full of rejects, huffing and grunting, waiting to consume him. Nathanael said nothing.

He went to his hut and returned with one of Jeremia's sculptures, about the size of Eva, wrapped in palm leaves. He held it up while the messenger turned, bent over and held out his hands behind his back while Nathanael leaned the object into his hands. The messenger supported the weight, and Nathanael wrapped a thick cord around and under the sculpture, securing it to the man's back. This was how we paid our expenses. The messenger sold Jeremia's sculptures in the village or in the city and bought our supplies with the profits. Nathanael believed the messenger was pocketing any extra money. We had no idea how much Jeremia's sculptures sold for, but he carved more than enough to sustain our modest lifestyle.

The messenger grunted and began his plodding retreat from our forest home. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if waiting for us, the rejects, to ambush him.

When we were alone again, Nathanael sat on one of the logs by the fire pit and waited. I crept out from behind the tree. Jeremia and Eva tiptoed out from beside their hut. We stole forward on silent feet to Nathanael. I gently lowered the bundle to Nathanael's knees and then sat on the very edge of the log. Jeremia and Eva crouched at Nathanael's feet and touched the baby's head.

Nathanael told Eva to get a bowl of water and she ran nimbly to our creek, returning with a cup sloshing liquid over the edge. Nathanael dipped his pinky into the water. He slipped droplets onto the baby's mouth until the lips parted and she squeaked. Nathanael placed more water into her throat where it was sure to go down. If the water touched the slices in the skin between her nose and mouth, nothing would go down her throat and into her stomach. The baby swallowed again and again and then opened her eyes.

We looked at each other. She was beautiful, with her brown eyes and fresh smell. I didn't understand why her parents didn't want her, why Jeremia's didn't want him, why Eva's didn't want her, why my father had tried to kill me.

Nathanael held the baby with one hand and slid my birthday present onto my knees with the other. The case was cold, hard, unfeeling, so different from a mother's touch. I unlatched the clasps and opened the case.

“A violin,” Nathanael said. He had grown up in the village, traveled to the city and then chosen to come to our camp—on purpose, not because he had to. “What use is that to us? Maybe we can start the fire with it,” he said.

The instrument was warm to the touch, chestnut brown with streaks like golden sunlight radiating through it. I plucked each string with my first finger and listened to the sound. Twangy. High-pitched. Nasal. Like my voice.

“Here,” Nathanael said. He slid the baby into my lap and then pulled the violin out of my hand. He set the cup of water by my foot, and I began dipping my finger into it and dropping the water into her mouth. She swallowed, blinked, swallowed again. Jeremia slid his finger into her pink tightfisted palm, and her tiny hand hugged his narrow finger. Eva laughed.

Nathanael shuffled to his hut and threw aside the deerskin door. After a minute I heard the voices from the radio, one of two stations we could hear clearly. Usually, to save the batteries, we only listened to the news station and tried to understand what was happening in a world we'd never seen and would never be accepted into. But now Nathanael adjusted the knobs and I heard static, more static, and then—music. Nathanael turned up the volume and shuffled back out of his hut.

The music fit with the sounds around us—the wind, the birds, the crickets. Jeremia put his chin on my knee. He was in an affectionate mood, but his moods changed with the wind, and I'd learned to be cautious.

I'd never heard music like this before. It was the sound of the blue-black grosbeak, only sweeter and more painful. It was the sound of my loneliness, clear and nerve-tingling. As I listened to the music, my heart squeezed itself small, flattened into a straight line and compressed into nothingness: a tick, a flea, the point of a pencil.

“That's the sound a violin can make,” Nathanael said.

I looked down at the instrument in Nathanael's hand. He lifted it up, fit it beneath his chin and drew the long stick with hairs across the strings. His fingers pushed against the strings in various places and different notes emerged. His hands were stretched out long, the muscles taut, and when I looked at his face, I saw a tear make a snail's trail down his cheek. He abruptly placed the violin in the case and walked to his hut. The goat, Naya, bleated and followed him.

I understood why my mother had given it to me. The violin
was
me, nasal and foreign, but somewhere within its depths something beautiful resided. I looked at Jeremia. He looked at me. And on my lap, the new reject, the beautiful baby, closed her eyes, smiled and passed gas.

“You two must be related,” Jeremia said, squeezing my calf muscle.

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.