Fig (11 page)

It was just a matter of time.

My father squats down beside us, chewing on a blade of grass. He uses a flashlight to show me where Matilda is, but as soon as the first piglet begins to come, we don't need the light anymore.

The gilt lies on her side like nothing is happening. Like she's still asleep. But then the piglet slides out, feet first. The head gets stuck inside the mother, and just when I think he'll never come he does. He sniffs his mother's tail, and then he tries to stand. He falls, but on his second try he makes it to all fours. He tries to walk away, into the woods, but he can't. He is still attached to his mother by the spiral of blue umbilical cord—a leash to keep him near. The cord stretches, and as the firstborn strains toward the woods, another is born.

This one also tries to run away.

Matilda has delivered six baby pigs by the time the roosters have stopped calling in the new day. The babies come covered in wet cobwebs that Mama calls the afterbirth. The black-and-white newborns wobble, and soon are sticky with mud and dead grass.

“It's good for them to eat the dirt,” Mama says. “It's full of iron.”

They root around, clumsy and unstable, except for the one who never moves at all—the only baby who doesn't try to run away.

Daddy starts to build a temporary fence to keep the other pigs away from Matilda. Mama rearranges her body and my body—she is growing restless. She wraps the shawl around my shoulders before she stands, and she tells me she's going to walk back to the house to make breakfast. She takes long strides across the pasture, her white nightgown parting the Johnsongrass, and it isn't long before I can't see her anymore.

I stay to watch Matilda and her babies.

It gets hot and I let the shawl slip off my shoulders. Kicking off my galoshes, I wiggle my toes, which are tiny and white compared with the dark bristle of the gilt and the deep black of the torn-up pasture. All the living piglets have nursed, and Matilda has licked them clean, cut them loose, and consumed their placentas by the time Mama returns with a small bucket of boiled potatoes and the picnic basket. She dumps the potatoes on the ground, and the mother pig eats without getting up.

Mama has a thermos of milky sweet coffee and, wrapped inside paper towels, toasted English muffins with butter and chokecherry jam. She has two red-and-white sticks of peppermint candy that we use as straws to suck the juice from swollen oranges.

And this is when I make my decision: Today, when I go back into the house, I am going to march up the stairs and go straight to my bedroom. I'm going to mark the square for today on my unicorn calendar. I will make a big black X and this X will mark the day Mama got all the way better. But for now I sit with Mama in the shade, and we don't talk. We sit and eat and watch instead.

I'm ready not to understand everything I see.

When Matilda has finished eating her potatoes, she shakes the nursing piglets off her body by standing for the first time since she gave birth. Her babies try to latch on again, but she pushes them away with her snout. Then Matilda approaches the dead piglet, and the others fall back. Matilda sniffs the small, still body before she picks it up with her mouth. And this is when Mama catches her breath. She clenches her pale hands into fists that turn whiter because she's squeezing herself way too hard, and I know what she is thinking: Mama thinks Matilda is going to eat her baby.

The mother pig carries the stillborn to the edge of the woods where the wild raspberries grow thick. Matilda places the baby on the ground. Using her front hooves and snout, she begins to tear at the earth while the stillborn waits. Matilda finishes, and returns to her dead baby to nuzzle it toward the hole. And then I can't see the baby anymore, cradled now by a shallow grave. As Matilda covers her stillborn with a blanket of brown-black soil, Mama begins to cry, but that doesn't mean she's acting crazy. She is having a normal reaction to something sad.

Mama leans forward, uncurls her hands, and presses them against the earth, palms down. So I do the same.

It feels like how praying looks.

I stretch my fingers as far as they will go and push my palms against the cold dirt. I am trying to feel all the bodies buried below, but Mama gives up almost right away. She leans back, and then she's standing, shielding her eyes with dirty hands. She watches Daddy work.

I remain very still and will stay like this even after Mama drifts away and Daddy has finished building the fence. I will stay, bent forward, palms down.

I am trying to feel my dead relatives. Daddy's father is buried in the cemetery behind the Sacred Heart of Mary, and even though his body is far away, this earth is connected to his earth. Mama's parents turned to ash, but with my hands pressed against the ground, I still feel connected to them somehow. Connected to all the people I never got to know.

And I will stay like this until I feel their bodies pushing back.

*  *  *  *

Back in my bedroom, I select the black Magic Marker from the pile of markers in my desk drawer. The one that smells like licorice.

The unicorn calendar is on the wall in front of me, and I take the marker and I draw an X.

The X is big and black—a railroad crossing, it marks the spot. Like a cobweb, the X reaches into each corner of the white square for March 21, 1983, and I stand here admiring the geometry. I don't leave until the scent of licorice finally disappears. Then I follow the scent of spring—the hint of lilac, overpowered by the deep musk of freshly turned fields, and the smell of animals being born everywhere in Douglas County. Their numbers cancel out the one who didn't make it.

I wander past Mama's herb and flower gardens, untended now, and yet I find the unruliness beautiful—the wild nature of the flowers and the weeds in the otherwise domesticated space. I pass these gardens where the dandelions are just poking through and the bindweed is beginning to spiral away, out of control. And I walk through the orchard, where the apple blossoms, two weeks early, are white and delicate, their centers dotted with sticky yellow stamen hearts.

I pass through the bramble of wild raspberry where the buds are still tight and green and the new thorns haven't yet formed, still harmless. And here I stand, in the cold shade of tall trees, watching the farmer's ditch rush forth. Barely contained by the bosom of the mossy banks, this water washes everything away. I watch this rushing water, and I can only imagine the rising levels of the Silver River. But as much as I'd like to go see, there are still rules—said and not said—about where I'm allowed and not allowed to go.

*  *  *  *

Uncle Billy was the one who answered the ad for a used tractor in Missouri, and today he and Daddy are driving down there to buy it. “We'll be gone for one night and two days,” my father says.

My uncle arrives at eight thirty in the morning with a box of doughnuts, and Mama smiles at me. “Just this once,” she says.

I choose a glazed doughnut, but Mama surprises me by picking one with chocolate frosting and cream filling. She keeps smiling at me as she licks her fingers between sticky bites, and when she's done the chocolate on her teeth turns her into a fairy-tale witch. Uncle Billy eats three doughnuts in a row without looking at what they are and washes them down with two tall glasses of cold milk. Daddy dunks his powdered doughnut into a cup of coffee as he studies the road map on the table, and when he's done there are still half a dozen left.

Grabbing the box of doughnuts, Uncle Billy says, “These are for the new mother.” And he winks at me. “Not only does Matilda deserve a treat, they'll sweeten up her meat. Ancient family secret—so, Fig, don't forget.”

“You're so full of crap,” Daddy says, standing up and folding the map into a neat rectangle. “Our family never raised pigs till now.” No one mentions that I never eat the meat I am served.

When Uncle Billy comes back from the pigsty, he and Daddy climb into my father's Dodge Ram and drive away, with Mama and me waving good-bye from the front porch. The redbud is in blossom, as is the bush honeysuckle trying to strangle the ditch along the driveway. We watch the dust settle, and we still have most of the day before Gran comes to stay with us. I'm hoping Mama will want to take a walk with me to pick the early spring wildflowers, the yellow fawn lilies, the violets, and the spiderwort, and maybe even press them between sheets of wax paper using the encyclopedia, but when I ask her she says she needs to get the house ready for my grandmother.

*  *  *  *

For dinner, Gran brings Chinese takeout from Lawrence in paper cartons, with plasticware, fortune cookies, and those paper placemats with the red-and-white illustrations of the Chinese zodiac. Mama tells me what sign I am.

I am a tiger.

The picture shows the profile of a tiger walking. Instead of black and orange, the stripes are red and white. Mama says she's a tiger too.

Gran stands before the kitchen sink, waiting for the dishwater to fill. With her back to us, she says, “That figures. Two peas in a pod, and no room for anyone else.”

I read the description for tiger:
You are sensitive, emotional, and capable of great love. However, you have a tendency to get carried away and be stubborn about what you think is right; often seen as a “hothead” or rebel. Your sign shows you would be excellent as a boss, an explorer, a racecar driver, or a matador.

Mama reads the description over my shoulder. “Racecar,” she says. “That's a palindrome, but it's not as good as ‘Madam I am Adam.' I do love a good palindrome.”

“What in the world is a palindrome?” Gran asks, but doesn't turn to look at us.

“It's a word or phrase spelled the same backward as it is forward,” Mama says.

“In other words, nonsense,” Gran says, and ties an apron around her waist. She stuffs her hands into the pink rubber gloves she brought to the farm along with her leather suitcase and her leather bible.

“No,” Mama says, winking at me. “ ‘Nonsense' is
not
a palindrome.”

Last night, I heard Mama talking to Daddy in their bedroom. I crouched outside their door and watched through the keyhole. Mama was crying. “I don't need a babysitter,” she kept saying, and the more she said it, the more the
s
in “babysitter” hissed. She told Daddy we'd be fine without my grandmother watching over, but Daddy didn't say anything. He just stood at the window staring at the open Kansas sky through the old wavy glass.

“Mom,” I say.

I blurt it out the way people do when they are interrupting. Mom is easy, but it takes Mama a second to understand. I think she thought I was suddenly calling her something new, which makes sense, because everyone treats her different now.

“That's right,” Mama says. “Both ‘mom'
and
‘dad' are palindromes.”

I think about this, and it makes perfect sense; there's something reliable about the backward being the same as the forward.

Gran shakes her head, setting a plate to dry in the dish rack. It's upside down, and I can't see the two lovebirds in the sky. Whenever I help Mama wash the dishes, she tells me the story behind the Blue Willow—how the birds are the souls of two lovers who committed suicide because they were forbidden in life to be together. I didn't know what suicide was until Mama tried to kill herself.

At first, I think Mama is looking at the plate too—thinking what I'm thinking, but then I see she's not. She's studying Gran instead. She watches Gran wash another plate, and as she does, Mama's face softens. Grabbing a dish towel, Mama goes to stand beside her mother-in-law and begins to dry the dishes by hand, which is something Mama never does. She always leaves them to drip-dry on the rack.

I take my Chinese zodiac placemat upstairs to my room. In the window seat, I do the math. I figure out what sign Daddy is. A dog:
A dog will never let you down. Honest and faithful to those they love, dogs are plagued by constant worry.
But then I realize Mama is wrong. She's right about us being the same sign, only we're not tigers. We are rabbits.

We are shy. We avoid adventure. We prefer to stay at home.

I decide Mama must be right. She said something about the years being different in China than they are here. I try not to get too confused. I ignore the tiny caption under every sign where the years are written.

If it's 1983 in China like it is here, then right now it's the Year of the Pig.

I fold the placemat and stick it under my mattress with my baby teeth and the
Alice in Wonderland
calendar that Mama gave me on my seventh birthday. I'm collecting things that are important, and this is where I can keep them safe—these souvenirs, these things to keep me from forgetting. Someday, they will help me tell the story of my life.

*  *  *  *

It's dusk when Daddy and Uncle Billy pull into the driveway. The trailer is hitched to the back of the truck with the green tractor secured to it by way of rope and sturdy metal clips. Mama is right there by the passenger-side door where Daddy's sitting, and through the open window he looks at her like he can't breathe.

The second he steps out, she throws her arms around his neck.

Over Daddy's shoulder, I see the way Mama looks to make sure my grandmother is watching. Mama leans back, away from Daddy, but she's still clutching his arms, and this keeps her from falling. She looks at Daddy like he's been gone forever, like the lovers in the movies Mama always says are terrible but watches anyway. Then she straightens herself out and frames his face with her hands and kisses him in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Her kissing sounds wet, and it looks like she is trying to eat my father's face.

Maybe I should have waited a little longer to mark the calendar, to X the spot for the day my mother got better.

Uncle Billy clears his throat, and I realize he's standing behind Gran and me. He puts his arms around us, cupping our shoulders with his hands. The light from the barn turns on like it does every evening at dusk, and in the dirt, our shadow turns the three of us into one—a lumpy person with two arms and six legs. We are almost a spider or an octopus and I am almost eight and nineteen minus eight is eleven, as in eleven more years to go.