f r o m ___ C r y i n g _ W o m a n _
C a n y o n__________
by Lisa Norris__________
PROLOGUE: 1972Jessie
I don't know if it was my bad blood or if I was just mean-hearted and selfish. All I know is the river began to fill my waking thoughts after Rainbow was born. It glittered when I closed my eyes, roaring over rocks like there was high water when the cabin was quiet at night. We lived on a slope north of Hinkom in the Western United States. Though the creek behind the house at the bottom of our narrow canyon held but a trickle, often the river sound started from there. Until I'd look out the window and "see" the canyon filling up. I'd imagine putting Rainbow in a basket like they'd done to Moses; me, I'd just ride my body--the cow-titted, slack-stomached body that would eventually drag me down anyhow.
Rainbow's father and I lived in a trailer on Buck Mountain. It had one bedroom, one bathroom, and a wood stove in its middle. We'd made it comfortable with pillows, a futon, and a low table where we ate like Orientals. After Rainbow was born we added a pine rocking chair. The chair made it look like a giant, not a baby, had moved in, but I put it in the middle of the room anyway so I could see out while I nursed the baby. I'd gaze at the walls with photographs my partner had taken, my dried flowers and hand-woven baskets, and the mountain backdrop I saw through my windows, sometimes dotted with deer.
Despite all these good things, the river started coming into my days, light reflecting so badly from its surface I could hardly see to walk through the house. Rainbow would wake up crying, and I'd have to steer like a blind woman, feeling my way along the walls to her crib. When I finally got to the baby I'd hold onto her like she was a piece of driftwood that would keep me from going under. Finally I'd wrestle her and myself into the wooden rocker, my thick ankles bending and straightening, pushing my big body back and forth. I'd think about hiking the ten miles up the creek bed to the end of the canyon, as I used to do before Rainbow was born. The ache of my muscles had been a thing that defined me. And the sky, nearly always blue in that rainless desert, opened up the top of my head so I felt there was nothing in the world but me and the rim rock and all it contained. When I saw my own arms swinging through the clear air and heard the sound of my breathing mingled with the high peen of the hawk, I knew my place.
Sitting on a lava rock one evening before Rainbow was born, my pelvis aching from the load it carried, I scanned the rock walls with my binoculars. Dusk had already settled into the canyon, turning the stone so golden it seemed lit up from inside. At first I thought the ears on the slope belonged to a coyote--something we heard every night and often saw trotting across the back slope. But then I saw the long, feline tail, the flattened face and under an overhanging rock, the opening to a cavern. What surprised me even more than the fact of a cougar was the conscious face looking into my own.
Whatever special sensors Rainbow had, I didn't--just as the cougar on the rim rock had a way of seeing that I could not comprehend. As long as I was hiking through the canyon thinking of what was far in the distance, everything was all right. But seeing the cougar seeing me prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. Now I was prey, something could feed on me, I had begun to diminish.
Rainbow was as quick to arrive as a snake is to strike. I'd walked a hundred yards from the trailer, heading for the canyon, when I felt the first pain. Stan hiked just ahead of me, camera in hand. I watched his brown ponytail bounce on his broad shoulders, the fabric of his flannel shirt pulled tight across his back, his torso shaped like a funnel. I called out to him, and he turned, focused, and took my picture. He'd been talking for weeks about the new series, "Woman in Labor," I would help him to create. When the lens came down, though, he let the camera dangle from his neck and ran up the path. His face calmed me down--the familiar terrain of high cheekbones, curved nose and forehead clear as unweathered rock.
We climbed back up the hill and sat me down. The first few pains had been mild, no more than my monthly discomfort, or--as I explained it to Stan--how he might feel if he had to take a crap. It was the water trickling between my legs that made me think something was going to happen. Then the invisible steel threads that started at my back and worked their way around to my middle.
"I'll help you to the bed," said Stan, but I couldn't move. We had no phone, so he ran in and got on the radio and put out a call for the midwife, then came back out with towels and blankets and put a pillow under my head.
"Remember," he told me, "they said not to push."
But I felt Rainbow knocking on my entryway, jamming herself against my door like she couldn't wait to get out. My body was the car I sometimes dreamed speeding down the hill; I pounded my foot against the floor, but there were no brakes. I panted, trying to hold her back, but that made me dizzy. When I paused just for a moment, to take a deep breath, Rainbow took advantage.
Stan caught her in a towel. I looked at him the way you do when you finally get to the top of a mountain you've been climbing with a thirty-five pound pack and suddenly see the view--more vivid for the climb, for the adrenaline pumping through your system and the blood rushing to your face.
He put Rainbow on my chest and got to work trying to stop the bleeding between my legs. The steel threads I thought would cease with Rainbow's entry still had me around the middle. Yet I knew I had birthed a baby girl. She was covered with mucous and blood, wrapped in one of the old white towels I had once taken from a motel; her eyes were wide open. She didn't look like anyone I knew. She was something else, something Other like the cougar. Then darkness--the midwife said later the shock of such a rapid delivery and sudden blood loss--closed over my head like that river.
Rainbow cries. Her voice pulls me up from a dark, shallow place where I've floated since the last feeding. My breasts don't leak; it's all I can do to keep the milk flowing. I drink big glasses of water. Drink, nurse and pee, drink, nurse and pee like an overused faucet. I lift the glass now from the bedside stand--a stump from an aspen tree Stan felled. Rainbow's cries get louder and faster. If she gets too hysterical she won't take the nipple. I struggle to my feet, put her to my breast. In the house in the dark there's no sound except Rainbow sucking. The pain from my pinched nipple is something I try to get above--I feel a burning down my arms and legs; a cramping like the cramping of childbirth. I think of something else: the river still and yet in motion, the river taking me with its deep, fast currents to a place beyond pain. I'm washed onto a shore where I lay face down on the warm sand, the sun soaking into my back. There's sand in my mouth, my hair. Let me be something with a body all its own--not shared.
In the morning dark Stan dresses. Rainbow wakes, and he looks down at her and laughs the deep, satisfied laugh of a man in love. My body aches. My breasts burn. My throat feels swollen. But she cries and Stan lays her on my chest, where my fingers fumble to help her eat again. Stan pulls on his big work boots--Forest Service job today; he checks the ski trails for windfalls and makes sure the directional signs are clear. He strokes the baby's cheek with a finger. Presses his lips to my forehead.
Alone with Rainbow, I cry all day.
Stan takes her when he comes home, but he can't take her away. I never want to hit her or hold a pillow over her face, but when she cries I want to sink deeper into sleep, pretend I'm dreaming the distant cries, someone's faraway peacock.
I lie awake in front of the wood stove. Rainbow, alone in her crib upstairs, yowls. I don't know how long I've been here. It's nearly dark. Stan pushes open the front door, looks at me without speaking, then rushes to the crib in the bedroom. Rainbow's cries soften as she settles into her daddy. He could put her down. He should put her down and hold me. I'm the one who needs care. Instead he stands above me, so close I could touch his boots. I think he will kick me. I think he will take the big steel toe of his boot and break my ribs.
Instead he goes to town with the baby and returns with bottles and formula. He gets up with Rainbow in the wee hours of the morning. He rocks her. He falls asleep with her in his arms. I lie in bed alone. Closing my eyes, I try to see his face the way I used to, through the eyes of love. But it seems my daughter does that now--there's no need for me.
The walls are lined with Stan's black-and-whites--high desert scenes with strange lava rock formations, flat-topped buttes or massing clouds. Some nudes of me hang in the bedroom. I poke my head out the door of a cave, my ass-length hair arranged for modesty. I sit astride a rock like some Lady Godiva without a horse. He's taken pictures of me, too, as Rainbow developed, and these are arranged in our bedroom like the drawings for animated cartoons, each pose exactly the same with the stomach getting bigger and bigger. At the end of the progression is the one photo he took as I began my labor with Rainbow. As he snapped the picture I felt the first big contraction start at my spine and pull tight as a rope inside. I clutched my hands to my stomach and opened my mouth. The wind blew my hair out to either side of my body, like wings about to carry me off.
Lisa Norris is an English Department instructor and Writing Program consultant at Virginia Tech. Her previous work has appeared in the old Blue Penny Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review, Primavera, Grand Tour, and other places.
All contents copyright © 1997, The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.
