The Brides of Rollrock Island (9 page)

Shivering, still bathed in upflowing magic, I went back to the fire and crossed myself with my bandage. Peace fell around me,
and I was alone at Crescent Corner with the sea and the moon- and starlight playing upon each other, and the seals sinking back to their rest. Slowly I hid my new self in my same old blouse and kirtle and boots, kicked over the embers and crushed the heat out of them. I walked, warm now and thick-shod, across the rocks and up the sandy path. At the top of the cliff I stood in the grass under the stilled stars that had so dithered and streaked above me before. I had been ugly once; I must remember that, remember how to be ugly again now that I knew I was beautiful, remember how to be ordinary now that I’d seen the wonders inside me.

I walked home through the unmagical night. I changed into my nightdress in the privy and went into the house, and my old life greeted me there, ready to box me straight back in, to pack me tight among my old chores and irritations. My new eyes looked around at the shadowy kitchen; it would never hold me again as it had. I was here, but I was no longer
trapped
here.

As I went along the hall, Mam grumped from behind her door. “What’ve you been so long for? Have you the squitters, or what?”

“I fell asleep there.” I shuffled onward as sleep-clumsily as I could pretend.

“A person could lie here
bursting
,” she said.

“You should have followed and knocked,” I said mildly, and caught back a laugh into my throat, at the thought of what her knocking would have led to.

I closed my door and put myself to bed. I did not want to sleep, to see the end of this night, to wake into the humdrum tomorrow and think it all a dream. But as I’d seen, lying beside the seal-man on the Crescent rocks, what did my wants count for? Nothing and
less than nothing. I watched the ceiling’s swirling shadows, happy to matter so little. When my thoughts ran down at last, with a sigh I wrapped my own arms around myself, and stroked my own damp hair as I sank to sleep.

Life went on as before. The feeling of the seal-man’s hands faded from my skin, and the sight of his face from my memory. One day after midsummer it struck me that life had gone on, for quite a time, without its usual monthly event, and that he had left me more than my torn virtue and my new peacefulness.

I looked coolly on this realization. The town would condemn me, and Mam would rant and rail, but I would still have this bab, half magical, entirely mine.

Now that I had admitted it, I felt the child growing inside me. But I did not become spectacularly ill, as both Grassy and Bee were now, as they had been for every bab, trying to outdo each other with their suffering. I did not have to sit about green with a puke bowl by me, fighting to keep food down. Sometimes a vague wisp of sickness floated through me, and once or twice the smell of fry-fat brought a lump to my throat; any but the weakest tea tasted foul to me, and the house sometimes had so close a fug that I must go and gasp on the step if I were not to faint away. But Mam did not notice these small discomforts, and no one else watched me closely enough to remark the difference.

And then the discomforts went away, and there was only the knowledge, the growing weight right deep down in me, the occasional
fluttering movement. I waited for someone to notice, for voices to snap and eyes to turn on me. But there had always been a lot of me, and I was not much larger, only firmer. The outward change was hardly to be remarked, beyond what Mam always carped about, beyond what men like Garter O’Day watched sidelong when they had the chance. The months went on, and the weather closed in, and I sat by the fire curiously unfrightened. I would go back in my mind to the night I had had with the seal-man, to the dark of the spring moon; I would listen to the movements of his child in me, and it would all make a sense of sorts. There was no need to tell it, to surrender it up for gossiping, to cheapen it so. Let people realize when they would; it was no concern of mine.

Deep in the winter when the ice knocked in the harbor and Potshead pulled in its elbows under the snow, Grassy and Bee both were brought to bed of their babs. Mam went up to stay with Grassy, so as to tend to them both without having to take that slippery hill every time, leaving me at home with doddering Dad trapped in his bed unable to speak, or possibly even to think. Then only, with the larder as full as it could be and no reason to venture from the house and be seen, out popped my belly, and for a few days I was clear as clear a mam-to-be. And no one came, and Dad did not care. And then, one afternoon while he slept, in my own room I paced back and forth, and held to the bedpost and exclaimed myself through the pains, and after not very long a labor, I brought forth the being that had swum and somersaulted in me these last months.

I wrapped it and lifted it and held it against my own heat.
It was corded to me still; I crouched over the chamber pot and waited for the followings to follow when they would. I stared at the bab’s face in a wondrous terror, as it pinched and frowned and then gasped up a breath. The shock of that, of having a life of its own, woke it, and it opened sticky eyelids. I thought it must be blind; I had never seen eyes of that smoky, stormy blue.

I unwrapped it to see if it was well formed, to count its fingers and toes, and I discovered that I held a boy child. There now, I thought. There’s two good men in your life. I covered him quickly, to stop any more of his warmth escaping.

I gasped and rocked there and held him fast against me; if I could have, I would have taken him back in through my bosom, and carried him about there warm and next to my heart. This was not the child I had planned, as separate from me as a badge or a brooch. I wanted to hide him, to keep him from harm; no one yet was aware of him, and I wished that no one ever need be. Must I let Potshead at him, as they’d gone at me? Must Mam pass her judgments on his tiny head, and my sisters gape and prod at him, weigh him in their practiced arms, hope aloud that he would grow up handsomer than I had? Could he not grow entirely himself, unharassed and unshaped by their scorn? How could I watch as they pressed and pummeled him, as he shrank under their blows, and grew extra flesh, as I had, thinking to protect himself but only offering them an easier mark? How could I engineer for him to find his own shape—small, slender and fragile as it might be, or wild and fierce and rude? Already I could feel his purposeful working inside the cloth, his feet bracing against my arm. His face knew nothing and yet he was discovering already how to breathe,
how to yawn—and sneeze!—how to surrender to sleep, one hand resting its little warmth against his cheek.

Dad made his noises in the other room, needing me. I woke from the spell of the bab, rose and laid him in the hollow of the bed. I pinned cloths around myself and dropped my skirts to cover my drizzled legs. And I went out to Dad; it was toileting he wanted, and my new body went slowly about the tasks of that. I was glad to care for him, and to have tended him so long; now no one was better equipped than I to serve that bright tiny being in the other room, so helpless, so entirely mine to help.

If it had not been winter, and if I’d not been so ugly and friendless, I would not have been able to keep the bab hidden. But no one visited, except Mam once or twice, to fetch more sewing things and to leave me laundry that she could not manage up at Grassy’s in such volume. She only cared whether Dad was clean and quiet and taking food, and the house in good order; whatever else I did was my own business. And my boy, while Mam visited, was whisper-quiet, or the squeak he uttered was straightaway followed by a cat’s outside the window, and my secret stayed close.

My son did not flourish, though. I could not think where the milk went in him. I fed and fed him and he took and took of me, but the work of breathing, and of filling breech-cloths and of grasping the air and his own face and my finger, seemed to consume all that he drained from me, and leave none for growing. He slept well, he cried little, he grew to see me and to smile and
make movements of joy when I came to him. He learned to lift his head on his narrow stalk of a neck, and catch my eye and laugh at my congratulations. I bathed and wrapped and carried him about and sang to him; I encouraged his every little move or murmur. But he stayed small. First he shrank a little, then he grew back to what he had been at his birth, but he did not grow much beyond that. He would be round-bellied with milk when I put him down to sleep, and slender as ever when next I picked him up.

One day I dared the hill myself, leaving my boy sleeping milk-sodden in the house, and Dad, the other great bab, full of dinner in the next room. I visited both sisters, and neither was pleased to see me, and Mam bristled when I walked into Bee’s.

“You have shrunk to nothing, girl! Have you forgotten how to cook? I hope your dad’s in better flesh, or I’ll have something to say, I will.”

I saw both babs, Bee’s girl and Grassy’s boy. Great pale lumps they were, flushing with rage and distress. Their hands could tear your ear off, or your lip, or whatever they took a hold of, they were so strong. But mostly their
weight
impressed me; my arms ached after only a few minutes holding them.

I tottered and slithered back down the hill, my ears ringing with the racket of those houses, the older children fighting to be heard and the sisters and Mam hectoring and the cries of those two monstrous babs.

I went past sleeping Dad to my room. My little one lay there small and saintly, with his ghost of black hair on his pale brow, mauve shadows painted around his eyes with the kindest and most delicate brush. He was
nothing
on the bed compared to
the babs I had just seen and held. Even awake, even laughing to see me, he was not half as alive as they, and he was not half their size.

“Fairy child!” I crouched beside the bed, and watched him sleep. Everything about him was delicate, and very nearly transparent, where Gladys and—what was his name?—Horace, where Gladys and Horace had been solid as clay. Like cream forced into sausage skins, they were. My boy was finely made, far and away finer than them. I stood and picked him up, and sat with him on the bed, searching his lax lovely face, the creases of his tiny mauve hands. He was fine, and foreign, and he did not belong here. I held him close, not crushing, not waking him, letting him sleep, and I suffered. I had never felt such feelings before. I would do anything for him; I would do anything. Anything that was asked of me, that would increase his happiness or health, I would do, and willingly. So I told myself, rocking him, the winter sky white at the window.

The spring thaw began. Mam stayed away uphill. My little one—I called him Little Prince, and sometimes Ean, hardly a name at all, not much more than a smear of sound—grew older, but no larger, and now he seemed to be in pain, squirming and struggling in his wrappings. He began to cry, not lustily like Horace and babs of that make, but softly, as if each bleat were forced out and he were apologizing for this little noise he made.

Some nights I was sure people in other houses must hear him
crying, though his voice was so soft. I took him out and away, and round about the cold country we would go, the sog of it and the snow patches, the black earth splashed with the white of the moon, the sea turning in its sleep. Always by the time I reached Crescent Corner he was stiller, and one night as I walked back and forth with him at peace in my arms, on the very rocks where we had made him that spring night, I wondered if there were a way to take something of the Crescent back with us to the house, to put by him, to ease him when we could not come here.