Medora’s mother had made a bone-colored paste of aloe and oils from a wolf’s organs. Lu daubed it now thickly on Medora’s center as the others talked her through this with directions to breathe and blow, the pressure in her anus like a phantom defecation.
The hearth heat and stink of fluid hung strong even with the open windows and doors. The women sweated prodding out the boy. Medora wept and yelled and looked to her mother as the bottom pressure built and would not abate. She thrashed her hair in their laps, crying she could not do it—it had been hours and she could not.
Lu motioned for two women to stand and each took a leg behind the knee and pressed it back toward Medora. The pressure in her rent, Lu’s naked fingers pulling her wide and shouting the same word no one but the hag knew. When the child crowned, Medora’s cries cut through the village and the men outside knew it was soon.
The boy’s oblong head was exposed now, turtle-like, slimed in silent squall. The birth cord was noosed about the neck, his body lodged there, bloodied in partial freedom despite Medora’s pushing. Still crooning, Lu motioned for the razor while Medora bucked with her head back in her mother’s lap, her eyes crimped closed. Another woman readied the morphine needle and plunged it fast into her hip.
Lu lifted, pulled at the child’s head. With the razor she opened Medora one inch more. A rush of bright blood and Medora dropped limp into blackness while Lu pried a finger beneath the looped cord and stretched it away enough to cut through.
The child was unstuck now and with a pinkie Lu hooked into his mouth, trying to clear his airway. She then rinsed him there in the basin—his first cry a pule—as the others stanched Medora’s bleeding with car-wash sponges and tied off the cord. When the placenta slid loose, Lu instructed a woman to place it in the hearth to burn as an offering to ancestors. The others sewed Medora closed.
“This child is cursed already,” her mother said, and she and Lu looked to the hag in the corner but she was gone.
Lu attempted to latch the boy to Medora but his cries came wild now for lack of milk. On the sofa Lu sat and put the child to her own full breast—wet nurse and mother of eight, she was never dry—and the boy fed weakly first and then in greed.
At the front door a constellation of men’s faces, Slone’s uncertain between joy and dread. Lu waved him in, only him, and he stood over his son and could not believe his ample hair—he’d always thought babies bald. He went to Medora, unconscious on the rug. The women mending her looked up and waved him away in a gesture indicating all was well or would soon be. Medora’s mother would not look at him.
When they finished, Slone carefully lifted Medora and carried her to their bedroom, where two women wrapped her in towels and down covers, then stayed with her through the day and night. Her mother stood at the window as if waiting, wanting something, some force to fly in and halt her daughter’s woe. In the main room on the sofa Slone held his slumbering boy, this wrinkled elf he’d made, intoxicated by the taintless scent of his head, his breathing in the swaddle no different from that of a newborn pup.
“It almost killed her,” her mother said to Slone. “Almost killed the both of them.”
“She’s alive,” he said. “We’re all alive.”
An immense fire raged in a stone pit at the center of the village, revelers dancing around its forked girth. Yup’ik supplicants chanted, drummed in celebration, pleaded to gods and ancestors for this boy’s weal. They tossed bags of tobacco into the flame for sacrifice, drinking from carafes of gin and joyous in the freeze. Sled dogs yelped at the noise. The crouching clouds promised more snow but the villagers danced undeterred. Women brought frozen char and bricks of caribou sawed from a meat pole. They cooked over barrels and soon everyone ate with blessings and thanks.
Slone would hold his boy daily, at daybreak and after twelve-hour toil in the mine, while Medora slept recovering, indifferent to the child who spurned her breast. Lu remained there in their cabin during daylight; Medora’s mother and a Yup’ik woman stayed till dawn. Slone whispered to his wife but she would not whisper back. Some sinister force had seized her, a sorrow fed by fear—it responded to no balm he knew. Her appetite was gone, her voice distorted, and at night came the inscrutable mumbling of the half possessed, even as the child wailed from his room till the wet nurse fed him.
On his monthly rounds a young white doctor arrived from town to see Medora and the boy, to inspect the suture, take notes on a clipboard. With his good haircut and teeth, his city-bought clothes and boots, he was clearly not of this village. He left blue pain pills, syringes, more vials of morphine. He told Slone to give her one week more to rebound—some women, he said, spiral inside themselves postpartum.
“It will pass,” Medora heard him say to Slone. She did not have the voice to tell this doctor that some afflictions can’t pass.
What infected her was beyond all ransom, some warp in the fabric of things. As she lay for weeks in bed, turned to the ashen winter light at the window, she could not know what had been loosed within her, how her covenant with the world had been cut. Her mother and Slone and others seemed just dark streaks streaming in and out of rooms.
What she saw, she saw with fogged eyes—eyes somehow clouded over in distortion of all she knew. She saw peculiar eddies of dark and day. Sitting on the toilet was an agonizing effort, brushing her teeth and changing clothes impossible, the baby’s pules very far from her, this new prison without clues of any kind.
Morphine plugged the rip in her, blocked all visions of the vagrant who had come to her in warning. Slone refused to give the morphine at night but Lu gave it twice daily while the baby slept. It was the only time Medora could stop staring at such pain. Her entire past seemed to point at this fray.
The vagrant failed to go away. She constructed false memories of him in her girlhood, could see him there in pockets of her past. Every wanderer who’d ever come through Keelut now had his gaze, his gait, his reek of wood smoke. Every one of them was now a harbinger of this day. In her opiate dreams she could see herself—at five with pigtails, at eight with a ponytail, at ten with hair pruned to her chin—see herself in the hills above the village. Rushing through green and white, fleeing or pursuing, she could not be sure.
She knew she didn’t want sleep to stop. Waking brought a dullness, a deadening she grated against. The baby’s howl and Slone’s voice too seemed to emanate from some other cabin, from some other season in her mind.
The midnight impulses began then: standing naked at the window, motionless before a winter dark punctured by moon. Her hand on the glass as if trying to press through it.
Months tarried on in this manner before she began a partial exit from this place, that suspension between living and something else. The first day she was alone with her child she fought an urge to toss him into the fire. She was convinced that his birth meant the death of her.
IX
In the heated hangar at the mining camp, Slone packed his gear into the innkeeper’s truck. He checked to make sure the tire chains were tight, filled the tank with fuel from a can, then loaded the can into the hatch.
Medora’s red Blazer sat beside it, pocked and dulled beneath a solitary bulb dangling from a chain. Slone searched her truck, under the seats and floor mats, in the ashtray and glove box. Both back seats were folded down. He knew she’d slept here on her way to the mining camp and he ran his nose along the carpet, trying to smell hint of her.