Walk Two Moons - Quia



23

THE BADLANDS

GRAMPS SAID, "HOW’S YOUR SNAKE LEG, GOOSEberry?" He was worried about Gram, but less about her leg than her raspy breathing. "We'll stop /in the Badlands, okay?" Gram merely nodded.

The closer we got to the Badlands, the more wicked were the whispers in the air: Slow down, slow, slow, slow. "Maybe we shouldn't go to the Badlands," I suggested.

“What? Not go? Of course we should go," Gramps said. "We're almost there. It's a national treasure."

My mother must have traveled on this road. What was she thinking about when she saw that sign? Or that one? When she reached this spot in the road?

My mother did not drive. She was terrified of cars. "I don't like all that speed," she said. "I like to be in control of where I'm going and how fast I'm going." When she said she was going all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, on a bus, my father and I were astonished.

I could not imagine why she had chosen Idaho. I thought perhaps she had opened an atlas and pointed a finger at any old spot, but later I learned that she had a cousin in Lewiston, Idaho. "I haven't seen her for fifteen years," my mother said, "and that's good because she'll tell me what I'm really like."

"I could tell you that, Sugar," my father said. "N 0, I mean before I was a wife and a mother. I mean underneath, where I am Chanhassen."

After driving for so long through the flat South Dakota prairie, it was a shock to come upon the Badlands. It was as if someone had ironed out all the rest of South Dakota and smooshed all the hills and valleys and rocks into this spot. Right smack in the middle of flat- plains were jagged peaks and steep gorges. Above was the high blue sky and below were the pink and purple and black rocks. You can stand right on the edge of the gorges and see down, down into the most treacherous ravines, lined with sharp, rough outcroppings. You expect to see human skeletons dangling here and there.

Gram tried to say, "Huzza, huzza," but she could not breathe well. "Huz-huz-" she rasped. Gramps placed a blanket on the ground so that she could sit and look.

My mother sent two postcards from the Badlands. One of them said, "Salamanca is my left arm. I miss my left arm."

I told Gram and Gramps a story that my mother had told me about the high sky, which looked higher here than anywhere else I had been. Long ago, the sky was so low that you might bump your head on it if you were not careful, and so low that people sometimes disappeared right up into it. People got a little fed up with this, so they made long poles, and one day they all raised their poles and pushed. They pushed the sky as high as they could.

"And lookee there," Gramps said. "They pushed so good, the sky stayed put."

While I - was telling this story, a pregnant woman stood nearby, dabbing at her face with a tissue. "That woman. looks world-weary," Gramps said. He asked her if she would like to rest on our blanket.

"I'll go look around," I said. Pregnant women frightened me.

When my mother first told me she was pregnant, she added, "At last! We really are going to fill this house up with children." At first I didn't like the idea. What was wrong with having just me? My mother, father, and I were our own little unit.

As the baby grew inside her, my mother let me listen to its heartbeat and feel it kicking against her, and I started looking forward to seeing this baby. I hoped it would be a girl, and I would have a sister. Together, my father, my mother, and I decorated the nursery. We painted it sparkling white and hung yellow curtains. My father stripped an old dresser and repainted it. People gave us the tiniest baby clothes. We washed and folded each shirt, each jumpsuit, each sleeper. We bought fresh new cloth diapers because my mother liked to see diapers hanging on the line outside.

The one thing we could not do was settle on a name. Nothing seemed quite right. Nothing was perfect enough for this baby. My father seemed more worried about this than my mother. "Something will come to us," my mother said. "The perfect name will arrive in the air one day."

Three weeks before the baby was due, I was out in the woods beyond the farthest field. My father was in town on errands; my mother was scrubbing the floors. She said that scrubbing the floors made her back feel better. My father didn't like her to do this, but she insisted. My mother was not a fragile, sickly woman. It was normal for her to do this sort of thing.

In the woods, I climbed an oak, singing my mother's song: Oh, don't fall in love with a sailor boy, a sailor boy, a sailor boy-I climbed higher and higher. Don't fall in love with a sailor boy -

Then the branch I stepped on snapped, and I grabbed out at another, but it was dead and came away in my hands. I fell down, down, as if I were in slow motion. I saw leaves. I knew I was falling.

When I came to, I was on the ground with my face pressed into the dirt. My right leg was twisted beneath me and when I tried to move, it felt as if sharp needles were shooting all up and down my leg. I tried to drag myself across the ground, but the needles shot up to my brain and made everything black. There was a walloping buzzing in my head. .

I must have passed out again, because the next time I opened my eyes, the woods were darker and the air was cooler. I heard my mother calling. Her voice was distant and faint, coming, I thought, from near the barn. I answered, but my voice was caught in my chest.

My mother found me and carried me back through the woods, across the fields, and down the long hill to the house. She called my grandparents to come take us to the hospital. It took forever just to get a cast, and by the time we got home we were all exhausted. My father felt awful that he had been away and fussed over both of us constantly.

The baby came that night. I heard my father telephoning the doctor. "She won't make it," he said. "It's happening now, right now."

On my new crutches, I tottered down' the hall. My mother was sunk into the pillow, sweating and groaning. "Something's wrong," she said to my father. She saw me standing there and said, "You shouldn't watch. I don't think r m very good at this."

In the hallway outside her room, I lowered myself to the floor. The doctor came. My mother screamed just once, one long, mournful wail, and then it was quiet.

When the doctor carried the baby out of the room, I asked to see it. It had a pale, bluish tinge and there were marks on its neck where the umbilical chord had strangled it. "It might have been dead for hours," the doctor told my father. "I just can't say exactly."

“Was it a boy or a girl?" I asked.

The doctor whispered his answer, "A girl."

I asked if I could touch her. She was still a little warm from being inside my mother. She looked so sweet and peaceful, all curled up, and I wanted to hold her, but the doctor said that was not a good idea. I thought maybe if I held her she would wake up.

My father looked shaken, but he didn't seem concerned about the baby anymore. He kept going in and touching my mother. He said to me, "It wasn't your fault, Sal-it wasn't because she carried you. You mustn't think that."

I didn't believe him. I hobbled into my mother's room and crawled up on the bed beside her. She was staring at the ceiling.

"Let me hold it," she said.

"Hold what?"

"The baby," she said. Her voice was odd and silly.

My father came in and she asked him for the baby. He leaned down and said, "I wish-l wish-"

"The baby," she said.

"It didn't make it," he said.

"I'll hold the baby," she said.

"It didn't make it," he repeated.

“It can't be dead," she said in that same singsong voice. “It was alive just a minute ago."

I slept beside her until I heard her calling my father. When he turned on the light, I saw the blood spread out all across the bed. It had soaked the sheets and the blanket; it had soaked into the white plaster of my cast.

An ambulance came and took her and my father away. Gram and Gramps came to stay with me. Gram took all the sheets and boiled them. She scrubbed the blood from my cast as best she could, but a dark pink stain remained.

My father came home from the hospital briefly the next day. 'We should name the baby anyway," . he said. “Do you have any suggestions?"

The name came to me from the air. “Tulip," I said.

My father smiled. “Your mother will like that. We'll bury the baby in the little cemetery near the aspen grove - where the tulips come up every spring."

My mother had two operations in the next two days. She wouldn't stop bleeding. Later, my mother said, “They took out all my equipment." She would not have any more babies.

I sat on the edge of a gorge in the Badlands, looking back at Gram and Gramps and the pregnant woman on the blanket. I pretended that it was my mother sitting there and she would still have the baby and everything would be the way it was supposed to be. And then I tried to imagine my mother sitting here on her trip out to Lewiston, Idaho. Did all the people on the bus get out and walk around with her or did she sit by herself, like I was doing? Did she sit here in this spot and did she see that pink spire? Was she thinking about me?

I picked up a flat stone and sailed it across the gorge where it hit the far wall and plummeted down, down, careening off the jagged outcroppings. My mother once told me the Blackfoot story of Napi, the Old Man who created men and women. To decide if these new people should live forever or die, Napi selected a stone. "If the stone floats," he said, "you will live forever. If it sinks, you will die." Napi dropped the stone into the water. It sank. People die.

"Why did Napi use a stone?" I asked. 'Why not a leaf?"

My mother shrugged. "If you had been there, you could have made the rock float," she said.

She was referring to my habit of skipping stones across the water.

I picked up another rock and sailed it across the gorge, and this one, too, hit the opposite wall and fell down and down and down. It was not a river. It was a hole. What did I expect?

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