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After the second sweat, Stillbird felt dizzy and faint, and the three women had to catch and hold her as she struggled to reach the bank of the river, and they helped lay her down there to rest.
When she was strong enough to sit and walk, the woman who had stayed to watch over her whispered in a distant way, “we’ll do this one more time after your moon and then you will be ready to marry,” and Stillbird told her she had not bled for two moons now, and she told her about the rape, in a distant voice, as if neither woman was even there, as if this were happening to someone else in another place and time, in a tale perhaps, and she was waiting to hear the end. The older woman said nothing for a long time, then only, “we’ll see,” and then she left quietly while Stillbird paid attention to other voices inside herself, voices that told her there would be no marriage, she would remain alone, give birth alone. She tried to calm herself, tried to be not afraid, and soon she was calm and not afraid. She did not notice the old woman leave, for she was so used to her solitude.
All through the winter Stillbird worked hard to keep warm, getting up early enough to watch the dawn and give herself spiritual strength for the day and then walking miles gathering wood that was dry enough and small enough for her fire. She had made a sled from the sweat lodge skins and poles that the women left behind, and well it was blessed, her sled, for on it she carried fuel to survive an unusually harsh winter. Sometimes she thought she heard footsteps and would stand still listening, not admitting that she hoped it was the mysterious young man who had once wanted to make her his wife. She only thought that on the coldest days, or days when her bones ached, and she felt old before her years, in need of some human warmth, some soft human voice to say nothing in particular, just make a soothing sound, the feel of warm, strong arms around her chilled and aching body when the night should have been over long ago, but lasted longer and longer, damper and colder, until the solstice brought slightly shorter nights, slightly longer days and within days, the appearance of tiny, tentative buds, if she looked very, very carefully. Then her spirits lifted and she chastised herself for even thinking of marriage. She was fine alone, she preferred her solitude and her freedom. Of course that would all change when the child was born, but that would not happen until mid-summer and she thanked all the gods for that; that her child would have a head start on the cold of another winter. For now she took her life one day at a time, treasuring each exquisite dawn, grateful for the abundance of wood and the deep penetration of the warmth of the fire. It was only during those hours before the dawn, when the fire died and her soul seemed to die with it, despairing in the dark, that she fell prey to fears she felt keenly but could not understand. She prayed to sleep through those hours, and when she couldn’t, she prayed to remain calm and be not afraid, to remember that each night those hours passed and left her still alive and well, alone and free, the same from one day to the next.
So, she survived the worst of winter and stopped to see who made the sounds in the forest, hoping not for the sight of the man, but for the sight of a deer. She practiced with the bow and arrows she had found on her front porch one day so she could have meat. She also, often, found wood. At first these gifts had given her the hope, the idea, that her suitor was still courting, but once she saw the three women bringing the wood on their sled and she knew that the elders were looking after her, even though there was no longer any intention of bringing her back within the society of her people anytime soon. Perhaps never, and if ever, it would remain to be seen after her baby was born. Perhaps they would wait for a sign and the sign would come with the child or through the child. This Stillbird knew and accepted.
Though she had never seen his face, and never known him at all, Stillbird felt a vague resentment for the young man who dared to love her without knowing her and dared to discard her when he learned just one thing about her, as if her worth as a woman was measured by her victimization by another man. And she wondered if this high and mighty suitor would have done the same deed, the rape; if he perhaps had not raped some other woman, some other place and time. She caught herself hating a man she could not visualize and thinking less of Abel, whom she hated to visualize. His face in her mind made her afraid and she fought the urge to forgive, to feel sorry for him, and reminded herself that no man, not Abel, not the young unknown, unseen suitor, not even Jamie would have felt sorry for her in her grief. She was better off with the mist and the dawn in the morning, the woods during the day and the moon and stars at night, the sound of rain on her roof, the cry of the owl that nested close by, the footfalls of the deer that occasionally showed themselves and, less often, sacrificed themselves for her to eat. She became a good hunter and gatherer. When spring came and the elders left seeds and tools at her door, another hint that she was expected to continue fending for herself, she set to work to clear a garden.
As Stillbird vigorously broke ground she recalled early days of childhood when she had loved her father and felt so proud to see the way he looked at her beautiful mother. They were so loving and tender together, just the three of them, and her father never hinted in any way that he was not thoroughly pleased with her. But then her mother had the first of three miscarriages, late enough along in the pregnancy that her father could see it was a boy they had lost, and he seemed to grieve as much over that fact as he did over losing their child. It was brief and subtle, but even at the age of four, she felt a pang so sharp she remembered it vividly and with a keen anger even now, twenty years later. Her father treated her mother then even more tenderly, comforting her for her loss, and this seemed appropriate for a while, but after several weeks, she wanted to shout at them and remind them that they still had her, and it hurt that she had to remind them of the joy they used to feel when they watched her play. Perhaps she was expected to be a grown-up already, someone to be relied upon to care for younger children. She became more thoughtful then, did not often smile, and then, after neglecting her in their grief, they had the gall to chide her for not being cheerful.
After the second miscarriage her father grew distant, and after the third, he hardly paid attention to either his wife or his daughter, except when he was irritated with them for some silly little thing. Then her mother died in her last attempt to give her husband a son, and if Stillbird remembered being angry before that time, she had to sit down and cry right there in the garden over the hurt and anger she felt when her father remarried a young woman not four full moons after her own mother was gone. She was twelve then and finally a woman herself, and fully aware of her father’s selfishness, and she vowed she would never marry a man so careless of her feelings and her person. Her father had been young and sweet once, she remembered it, and that memory made her suspicious of the young men who courted her so sweetly.
What drew her to Jamie was his difference, plain and simple. He was so foreign she trusted him to be somehow better than the men she compared to her father. And then he said to her one day that he wanted to care for her and her alone forever; didn’t want children…she made him repeat it because she never heard of a man that didn’t want a little replica of himself, and he explained that she would be his child, so of course she said yes, she would marry him, and it had delighted her that her father felt the hurt and the anger that she had lived with all those years. She could see it in his eyes that he felt her choice to be a rejection of himself, and she gloried in her revenge until he died a year later and she realized the pettiness of revenge in the face of the irrevocability of death. But there was that woman and her two sons to mourn him, and she felt a kind of sad wisdom more than grief when they brought her the news. And it was the sad part of wisdom that hit her when Jamie lay dying of the same disease that took her father, and she realized that it was Jamie who had been the child and wanted no competition for her attention. She didn’t blame him. She knew he had believed what he told her when he said it and probably believed it until he closed his eyes, his hand in hers, t
hat last forever time.
So Stillbird sat in the garden, grasping a handful of earth in her hands, wringing her hands, holding herself and burying her face in her skirt, crying and crying, loudly, vigorously, until she was tired and then she put it away, tired enough to sleep well that night.
Abel wanted to run and comfort her but he knew he had to wait until the baby was born. He followed her life with confidence now that the other man was out of it, and even the three old women came seldom to Stillbird’s cabin, and then, only when she was away. Abel didn’t understand them, but her isolation suited him fine, and he spent his nights thinking of all the kind things he would do for her and how grateful to him she would be, how loving and grateful.