Dance the Eagle to Sleep (33 page)

She groaned and heaved to and fro on the bed. Shawn could not tell if she had listened. Briefly she wept, and he came and wiped her face and neck with a washrag dipped in water from the metal basin.

“Listen! Listen to me. I keep thinking I’m going to give birth to a weapon—a little tank. Or a monkey. I’m going to have a furry hedgehog that will lick itself and run off into the brush” She paused for a contraction. “People can’t live any more. There’s room for machines and a little room left for animals. I don’t have too much hope for animals. But a sort of hedgehog or a shrew or a weasel that eats insects to start it all again! To go a long ways back, past apes, past monkeys, past mammals altogether with their strutting snarling males and their nurturing suffering females. Back to a furry hedgehog that eats insects and lays eggs, and try it again!”

“People can be good. Think about the farm.” He wiped her forehead again. “Sure, kids brought hang-ups, but they weren’t at each other’s throats. It wasn’t what we did right that destroyed us.

But she only sobbed with pain and writhed on the bed.

“Ginny, hear now. You got to do that breath-thing right, you know, the way it tell in the book” Marcus came to the foot of the bed, smiling with pity. “Don’t you remember, in the mountains you go on how much you want to make a baby? You knew he was only half with you, but you got him to give you one, you know? Now you’re like a child that started down the big slide, and halfway down, that child is scared and wants to get off and starts clutching at the sides. Now it hurt you to be trying to hold back.”

“I don’t want to live in this world! Maybe you should cut me open. Take the baby and let me die! I thought I was stronger than I am.”

“Human beings aren’t naturally strong enough or nasty enough to live in this world,” Marcus said. “You got to remember how to breathe.”

Shawn wiped the lank wet hair off her forehead. “We have to get down out of here and find out who’s left. We have to start again open and slow. We have to keep at it for twenty years.”

“But we failed. Corey said we were the last generation. We tried and we lost” She tossed from side to side, hands scrabbling on the swell of her belly.

“While there are people, we haven’t lost. We were right and wrong, but the system is all wrong.”

“Come on, now, Ginny, you got to push. You come nine months of the way home, and now the baby wants out and you got to swing with it.” Marcus limped toward the edge of the bed and sat down on its edge. “It too late to stop. We all walked through the big fire, and we are changed inside and outside. Sometimes we have to swing with the big changes” He held up his good left hand. “Remember the exercises. Come on, stop playing stupid, girl. Come on, you got to help. We been waiting on you for months. Time to get moving. Time to push that baby out and teach him to walk and clear out of here. We can’t reach nobody but the mosquitoes and the rabbits up on this hill.”

So they sat on either side of the bed with her and did the counting and the breathing with her, and the sweat ran down them all. All night she labored, and sometimes she broke and wept and screamed, and they had to calm her back to the rhythms, back to going with her contractions instead of fighting them. But the baby did not come. Shawn was afraid and Marcus was afraid and they sweated their fear till the cabin smelled of a harsh animal reek. When their stares crossed, when Marcus’ dark eyes met Shawn’s, they pushed away from each other.

Shawn was afraid that she would die. Never would the thing be done. Nothing could be worth the suffering. She would die and leave them. She would become a pile of meat. Marcus and he would be left alone together, and they would commence fighting and biting on each other until they were dead of each other’s poisons like two rattlesnakes. To all their dead would be added more. He could not bear it.

He could not give her up. He gripped her hands and let her dig her nails into him until his palms bled and he found his own muscles straining to move the baby.

Finally two hours after dawn, the final contractions thrust out the slimy wet head and Marcus drew out the baby, red and iridescent and screaming with life, slapped it for good measure and cut and tied the cord. Ginny lay
in her blood, spent and torn. Shawn laid his cheek against her limp fallen hand and wept. Faintly her hand stirred to touch him. When he looked at her again, she was smiling. The baby wriggled damply against her belly, and she was staring and smiling.

Marcus quickly sped through the six baby books to make sure he had forgotten nothing he must do. Shawn felt useless and yet full of energy and light, a turned-on bulb, a ridiculous helium-taut balloon. The baby lived and she lived and it was day for Marcus and for him, it was day for all of them.

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Vida

Marge Piercy

ISBN: 978-1-60486-487-8
$20.00 416 pages

Originally published in 1979,
Vida
is Marge Piercy’s classic bookend to the Sixties.
Vida
is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters, and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the ‘60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement—a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of
Life
magazine—charismatic, passionate, and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing all too well the dangers.

As counterpoint to the underground ‘70s, Marge Piercy tells the extraordinary tale of the optimistic ‘60s, the thousands of people who were members of SAW (Students Against the War) and of the handful who formed a fierce group called the Little Red Wagon. Piercy’s characters make vivid and comprehensible the desperation, the courage, and the blind rage of a time when “action” could appear to some to be a more rational choice than the vote.

A new introduction by Marge Piercy situates the book, and the author, in the times from which they emerged.

“Real people inhabit its pages and real suspense carries the story along… ‘Vida’ of course means life and she personifies it.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“A fully controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at almost every page.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Marge Piercy tells us exactly how it was in the lofts of the Left as the 1960s turned into the ‘70s. This is the way everybody sounded. This is the way everybody behaved.
Vida
bears witness.”

— New York Times

“Very exciting. Marge Piercy’s characters are complex and very human.”

— Margaret Atwood

The Wild Girls

Ursula K. Le Guin

ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8
$12.00 112 pages