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Winter did not want to let go that year and there was one last cold spell and snowstorm after Stillbird had finished her spring planting. Fortunately the seeds were still hidden beneath the earth and wouldn’t send up tiny green shoots until the snow was rapidly melting in the sun and its moisture only gave them greater strength. Stillbird enjoyed the crispness of that last snow beneath the brilliant blue sky and walked miles every day sniffing the air and examining everything in her slow, serious way, so focused on the birds that took flight before her step, the buds that gave the trees a lacy look in the morning sunshine. Her pregnancy was finally showing, and she could feel the baby move inside her and sometimes even see her stomach jump here and there, and she laughed to imagine an elbow or knee poking out in some kind of fretful dance. “I want to get out”…“I want to get out,” she half screamed, half sang, feeling such a love and kinship for the baby inside her…“and how I want you out where I can see you and touch you,” she whispered back again and again, talking now to the one other human being that inhabited her world where she walked in beauty every day and exulted in it every night.
Spring was indeed a wonderful time. Dried out creek beds filled up with rushing streams that came up in the night and surprised Stillbird during her dawn walks. They would be gone again by mid-summer, but for the few weeks that they serenaded her, she would make daily pilgrimages to each spot, deeming it sacred and staying sometimes until dusk, just listening to the music of the water and watching the reflections of leaves and rocks and light on the current. She would put her hand down upon the surface of the moving water, letting it sculpt her hand with its own shapes, changing shapes constantly and quickly, mesmerizing the young mother, soothing the child inside her, she was sure. When the sun was strong and hot, she would undress and bathe in the icy water, feeling thereafter not only cleaner but stronger. She had no idea that Abel followed her on these sacred walks and watched her every move and watched her for hours when she didn’t move at all.
He knew before she did when the elders of her people came and left gifts for the coming child, and he knew before she did when soldiers and settlers came and massacred her people, all the men and the women and children, scarcely a hundred of them and then gone, everyone, without a trace but the added richness of the soil where the bodies were buried and the blood and the ash from the burned village seeped into the soil where white farmers would plant their crops until they themselves were overtaken by disaster, seemingly less violent but ultimately as catastrophic: those very farmers and their children run down by a civilization that raped the earth even as men continued to kill each other and rape women. Not even Abel could foresee these things. He felt nothing as he watched the fate of the village unfold, the cries of women reminded him of his mother, but he was too engrossed in what he had to do next…go see her, tell her and offer his protection once again and pray that she would be grateful and love him. He decided to wait until the baby was born. He knew she would be more willing then.
Stillbird was in her garden when the baby began to push out of her, thinning the plants, weeding out the wild things, caressing the earth the way she did as she squatted in the garden. It was squatting in the garden that she gave birth to a little boy and wrapped him in her long skirt to take him to the river to wash off the blood, her own blood, and take a good look at him and show him to the sun and the birds. It was a warm June day, but not too hot, and she and her child were healthy and strong and happy to be together finally. It was a good day, the best day of Stillbird’s life, and she would always remember it as if it were yesterday, and sometimes that vivid memory would warm her heart, and sometimes it would make her cry out long and loud in anger and betrayal, but on that day, she was content as the animals of the woods and sang softly to herself and her son. She was so young she thought that beginning was an ending, a happy ending.
The elders had left things for the baby, and Stillbird hoped that they would have observed that her child was born now and come back to see her face to face, with or without gifts, but with words of welcome home, because she knew she did not want to raise her son in isolation. She was ready now to end her solitude and give her son the gift of family and identity. Each day she waited to see them, listening carefully to the sounds she heard in the woods, but each day she heard only the birds, the deer, once a bobcat, once a bear. They came close to the house and watched and she watched them back from her porch, prepared to defend her child but not needing to, as the animals walked quietly away back into the woods.
She never left her cabin those first couple weeks of the baby’s life, nursing him whenever he cried, falling asleep with him at her breast, feeling peaceful but with just the edge of anxiety invading her mood as the days passed and the old women did not come for her. They never said they would, but Stillbird understood that they would and expected them, told herself they were testing her patience and tried to be patient and then began to worry again. “Where are they, where are they?” she would ask the infant who looked at her, raised his tiny arm to caress her breast as he nursed, gurgled, fell asleep. Each day Stillbird sang to her son less cheerfully, more fearfully, and softly, so she could hear the footsteps in the woods. And then he came. Abel appeared at her door and Stillbird couldn’t move, held her son closer to her breast as if to hide him, stared and kept her fear hidden, stared and waited to hear what the man would say.
III