Whisper (3 page)

The goat's milk didn't work. When I first gave it to her, she gulped it greedily, swallowed and demanded more, but when it settled into her stomach, she started to cry and then cried for hours. I burped her against my shoulder, walked her back and forth, felt my own tears joining hers, and then remembered my mother's lullaby.

Nathanael was asleep in our only camping chair. His head rested against the flimsy fabric; his mouth was wide open, and he emitted a loud, rumbling snore every few seconds.

Mornings in our camp were for lessons. Nathanael, who had lived in the village until he was twenty, taught us how to read, how to do math, how to utilize the plants around us. He had lived in the city for three years. When we asked him why, he told us he had been “searching.”

I set the baby on a bed of layered blankets in my hut and propped her up like a warm sack of flour so that she could still burp if she needed to. Then I opened the violin case. Her crying came in hiccups and shivers, her face a deep, bruised red. I fit the instrument against my shoulder and under my chin as Nathanael had shown me. I held the bow in my right hand and eased it over the strings. I listened for the notes Nathanael had taught me. The sound was so harsh and creaky, the baby hiccupped her crying to a stop and opened her eyes. I tried again.

The noise the violin made was no better than my own voice, but I had heard the music from the radio. I knew what the violin was capable of creating. I slowed down, took a deep breath, tried not to let the baby's renewed cries make me so shaky. I whispered the lyrics in my mind and fumbled my way through the tune, pressing my left fingers to the strings and drawing the bow with my right. After a few minutes of fumbling, the song became recognizable.

Corinna, Corinna

time for the baby to eat.

Milk in the morning

at noon ripened wheat

at night soft dates,

acorns from the trees,

dandelion fluff

on the quiet evening breeze.

I listened to the notes and pictured my mother holding me, rocking me, caressing my head with her hand. She would tuck my black hair behind my ears and smooth the strands over my head. I remembered the feel of her palms, rough and calloused but also beautiful and loving. I remembered the sound of her voice, so deep, full and true. The violin began to take on those tones as I played the simple tune over and over. When I felt the warm notes winging around the hut, I opened my eyes.

The baby was asleep. So was Eva. She had crept in while I was playing and now lay in front of the door, her left hand under her cheek, her swollen right hand wrapped in a white cloth and clutched against her chest.

I played the lullaby again.

The baby's sharp, desperate cries startled me awake four times in the night, my hands trembling from lack of sleep. I dripped more water into her mouth; I held her against my shoulder and patted the gas from her stomach. This child would not be another mound in the graveyard, not if I could find something to fill her, something that could replace mother's milk.

The third time she woke me up, when the moon had already crossed the opening between the trees above our huts, I heard a keening so sad and mournful I wanted to cry along with the baby. I wrapped her tightly against my chest and walked silently through the woods, down the path to the creek, the sad song pushing against my nose, making it drip.

He didn't hear me when I padded up behind him. The baby was quiet now, satisfied with the sound of my heart, and I squatted on my heels where I could see him, a shadow on the branch over the swimming hole. Nathanael was like a grasshopper, his arms bent at the elbows, his knees angled out, his feet hooked around each other under the branch.

He played a song as lonely and sad as an owl at night. My throat tightened, and I sat in the mud of the path. This was the song of a broken heart, and I suddenly understood Nathanael a little better. I'd always thought that he hated the village we were from, hated the city, and chose to live with us because it was his best option. But Nathanael had had other options, and they must have vanished.

When he pulled the bow over the strings one last time, the lingering notes floating across the water like the dragonflies, I opened my eyes, stood and slipped back down the path. I knew now that Nathanael had known love and it had disappeared like dew on the grass. Nathanael had told us so little about himself that I'd always thought of him as our father, single, satisfied.

I heard him creep into my hut, replace the violin in its case and drop the deerskin door back into place. I slept after that, for a few hours anyway, until the baby's piercing cries woke me again. I slept with an ache now, an ache that food could not fill.

In the morning, Eva climbed up the great pine by our camp. There was a large macaw's nest in an open cavity halfway up the trunk. Eva believed there were babies in that opening. Jeremia refused to let her climb the tree because he remembered me at seven, when I'd climbed up for no reason other than because I could and had become stuck. I'd stayed up in that tree all day long. Rosa, my mentor at the time, had stood below the pine, her arms across her chest, refusing to let anyone help me down.

“You got up there, you get down. You won't always have someone to rescue you, you know.”

She'd gone to bed at dark, and Jeremia had climbed the tree, showing me the best places to put my feet and how to slide down the trunk when branches were scarce.

But Eva was not me. She was loud, courageous, willing to touch porcupines with her bare hands. She acted while I preferred to listen. When I woke up in the morning, tired from a broken night of shuddering cries, Eva already held tightly to the trunk of the tree, her webbed feet clutched against either side, a towel in one of her hands. The opening with the nest was inches above her head.

Nathanael had explained to Eva that baby birds weren't born in late summer; they're born in the spring and should be out of the nest, flying on their own, by this time, but Eva, hands clenched into stubborn fists, didn't believe him.

“What about the fox?” she said. “Look at her puppies.”

We didn't know what to say to that. We didn't understand why the puppies were still running about, half the size of their mother, and why they followed her, not daring to hunt on their own.

“There is a baby bird in that nest that can't get out. I'm going to rescue it.”

I stood below the tree, my thoughts muddled from lack of sleep, the baby quiet against my chest, smudges of black beneath her eyes where healthy brown skin should have been. Nathanael milked the goat by his hut and turned the radio on. Sometimes the stations came through clearly, and sometimes they came through garbled. Today was a mix; I caught much of what was said but didn't understand the words. “Due to high interest rates, high unemployment and a low economic report, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ dropped last night. A recovery is hoped…” Nathanael hummed along as though it were music, but I focused on Eva up in the branches.

She was cautious and inched her way up the trunk with the ease and confidence of a sloth. She reached her hand into the hole, the towel draped over her shoulder. When she began to remove her hand from the opening, peeps and squawks filtered down from the nest, and I saw the mother macaw hovering above Eva, shrieking and nervously flapping her wings.

Eva began to sing, a sweet, light call. She crept forward again, the mother bird squawking and fluttering near her head. Eva ignored the mother, ignored the wings that flapped in panic, and pulled a green splash of color from the nest, wrapping it quickly in the towel. She tucked the towel into her shirt and began her retreat. The mother macaw, green and red against the sky, a flower in motion, screamed and cried. Her shrill call reminded me of the baby's, so desperate and scared. Mothers should protect their babies, threaten those who would take them away and cry in desperation. Why had all of our mothers surrendered us, given us away to this forest home instead of flapping their wings and calling for help?

The sun was high in the sky by the time Eva reached the ground. Her short black hair clung in sweaty clumps to the back of her neck, and her limbs trembled. She set the towel down and shook out her arms and legs, wiping the sweat from her eyes. Huddled in the brown cloth was a macaw, hardly a baby anymore, green and pink with a red tuft above its beak. The bird looked perfect, its beak thick, gray and pointed, its eyes pink and wary.

Eva placed both hands around the bird so it could not flutter or peck. The macaw squawked, and the mother answered in shrill fear from a branch near our heads.

“Look,” Eva said. She held the bird with only one hand and slid a finger under the bird's wing. The feathers opened, puffed, ready for flight, but the wing was miniature, a tiny, perfect replica that had failed to grow along with the bird. Eva lifted the wing on the other side, also miniature.

“I'm keeping her.”

Eva carried the baby against her chest and walked with jutted chin to her hut, closed the deerskin door and shut the mother out. The terrified mother perched on the roof of Eva's hut and called to her baby all day. I watched that mother and wondered what she would have done when her new babies came the next year. Would she have kept the older baby or pushed it out of the nest to make room for the perfectly formed new ones?

Three

Jeremia returned after a few days. He went to the city sometimes, to crouch in alleyways, to understand what people did who lived outside our little camp and were an accepted part of the world. Sometimes he watched the people in our old village. He saw his father, observed his family. He loved and hated them with a fierceness that scared me. He never spoke to them or revealed himself, but he referred to them by name.

He ran into my hut while I played the violin, shimmied over the dirt floor, leaped across the blankets that made up my bed and danced in front of the stack of books on my rock and wood shelf, all the while wagging his butt and waving his one hand in the air. He opened his mouth and pretended to sing. He grabbed me around the waist and twirled me around. Then he was out the door. No one asked him where he went or why, and no one accused him of abandoning us and shirking his chores. Abandonment was nothing new and we all knew that it was better for Jeremia to understand himself—understand the rest of the world—than for him to stay and torment us with his moodiness.

Nathanael cooked rice for supper. He mashed some of the rice until it was mush and then added water. He stirred the pale substance, and when I looked at it, I could almost believe it was milk. I sat on a log by the fire and dripped bits of rice milk into the baby's throat. She gulped eagerly.

I waited for the gas to start, her stomach to clench, her crying to begin. Already I was prepared for a sleepless night of shrieks, shuddering and fussiness. Even though we'd fed her goat's milk for days, she'd never become accustomed to it.

Instead, she watched me, her eyes round and dark, her face solemn, as if examining my distorted features was the key to understanding herself. She was content and calm, not squirming and crying, so I unwrapped her from her cotton clothing and cleaned her with warm water.

Jeremia and Eva laughed. They laughed until tears dripped muddy streaks down their cheeks because the baby's tummy was so full and round, her limbs so thin and small, that she looked like a frog, a
rana
, and that is how she got her name. Ranita. Little Frog. I liked it. It fit her.