Nikki Ervice
Egg
That summer, everything was pregnant. When my old mare wasn’t huffing through the pasture to graze, she made herself as still as possible in the golden heat, legs wide and braced. Around the balloon of her abdomen, her tail twitched, too short to ward off the flies that accumulated at her eyes, tangled in her lashes and forelock. I wiped repellent over the soft vellum of her face, but there were too many. Biting fly eggs bloomed over the surface of the trough water, exploding first into maggots, then an airborne hunger that could smell the mare’s sweetness beneath the chemicals. She wept delicate rivulets of blood and pus from where they burrowed into her.
My neighbor, Linda, waddled back and forth in front of her picture windows. Her husband, Luke, was gone for weeks at a time on a commercial fishing boat, and often I would bring her half of what I’d cooked for dinner. Linda balanced her plate on the ledge of her belly while we ate on her porch.
She was olive-skinned and poreless, like a stone tumbled smooth on the beach. My body was built for labor, my arms levers and my hands Swiss Army knives, an array of dextrous tools. Often, when I was working alone in the house or in the field, I would forget how I appeared to the world. Only in contrast to Linda did I remember the broad planes of my face and the muddy smattering of freckles near my hairline, the deep-set eyes too close to the bridge of my nose. My skin refused to tan and fought the sun with livid, red burns. Next to her I felt ugly and splintered, a tree trunk cracked open by the wind, pink and rough and exposed. I couldn’t tell if she was older or younger than me. I never asked. Most of the time I couldn’t remember my own age, anyway. Wasn’t sure what it even had to do with me.
Far from any real towns, the Alaskan coast afforded us a portion of anonymity and self-sufficiency, yet we were tethered to our neighbors in a way that only necessity inspires. Out there on the island there were no services for garbage removal, nobody to plow you out when you were snowed in besides your neighbors. Late that spring, when Linda was in her second trimester, I siphoned gas out of my pickup for her husband in the middle of the night. He had forgotten to fill his boat in town and they needed to get to the hospital. I could see Linda silhouetted in the window, looking out, her hand on the crest of her stomach. I put a cut-off hose into the gas tank and sucked, creating a vacuum that the fuel raced to fill.
You can’t siphon gas that way without getting a mouthful, and I spluttered and choked.
“Thanks,” Luke said. “She’s having these contractions and it’s way too early. Doc told us we should come into town and have them look after her if this ever happened. Besides, we need milk.” He searched my face for approval. I nodded. The plastic gas can was almost full. We stood over it, shifting from foot to foot in the cold.
My horses and cows took to pregnancy unflinchingly, expelled their young standing up after brief and quiet labors. They made the process seem pedestrian, their babies sure-footed after only an hour of being alive. In humans, the whole thing looked obscene, possessive: the way Luke hovered over Linda, whose fluttering mouth couldn’t contain her nervousness. The way she walked as if her insides had been carved out to make room for his DNA. There were so many feelings, so much fear of pain. Horses and cows live without anticipation of pain, following instincts that humans have lost.
When I got my period each month, I could never make peace with the blood, the invasion that was taking place inside of me. Carrying a baby felt improbable if not impossible; I felt as fertile as a fence post, or a tractor. When I got drunk accidentally on Linda’s porch and told her this, she laughed and said, “Just you wait.” Wait for what? There wasn’t a man for thirty miles in either direction who wasn’t inextricable from his wife or girlfriend. Besides, I was a non-entity. During the day the sun and wind whipped through me. At night I read novels, and other people’s thoughts passed through my head. I was only human when confronted by others. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a city, your image refracting off of strangers all day.
I was born on this island and I’d probably die on this island and there were days where death felt closer than not. Alaska is always reminding you that you’re small and lucky to be alive. The sea is slack one moment and cruel the next. The trees are jagged, patiently waiting out your lifespan. All I ever knew of my mother was a neat little grave at the top of the hill and a memory that I probably made up of a woman washing her hair over a steel tub on the floor of our cabin, pouring water over the slope of her head with a plastic cup. At least she was accounted for, tucked beneath the hem where the island met the sky. My father went missing in a kayak some ten years ago, when a light chop on the bay turned into a steely gale. His kayak washed up on the south shore of the island, overturned and unscathed, but he didn’t. Men had a habit of disappearing around here. Sometimes I thought there might be a whirlpool of them, all inert and frozen in time, eddying out there in the middle of the bay. Whenever I saw a flurry of gulls diving for food on the horizon, I would think, “There they are.”
Linda’s Luke disappeared for the first time in early June. That night, I brought her moose spaghetti and a bottle of Merlot I found behind some potatoes in the bottom of the pantry. There were little wrinkles around Linda’s eyes that I had never seen before, like her lids were working extra hard to keep them in their sockets. He was supposed to be home, had radioed from his boat that morning. “I’m sure he just got caught up drinking in town,” she said. Town was ten miles away by boat and we had no cell reception on our knoll of an island, and no landlines. We used VHF radios to communicate. My call sign was Cabin Point. Luke and Linda’s was Gray House. She had radioed over to the F/V Eliza Jean, and Luke’s captain said that they had been docked in the town harbor for hours. The thing about VHF is that nothing is private. Anyone who happened to be listening to Channel 4 could learn something about the guts of their relationship. I offered to drive her across the bay to see if Luke’s truck was at any of the bars, but she asked me to pour her some wine instead. Then she asked me if I would teach her how to use a rifle.
Linda had always wanted to shoot a moose but never learned how. I lined beer cans up on top of the fence and she pinged each one cleanly off the rail. The pregnant mare pricked her ears from the lower field but didn’t flinch at the noise. Linda had to plant her feet to brace against the light recoil from the .22.
“Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”
“Nope.”
Tak, tak. Each shot hit its mark. The cans disappeared into the dusk. Linda’s hair hung down her back in a thick black snake. The sky was purple and still and it was quiet enough to hear the perpetual groundswell on the glacial beach across the bay. All night it whispered, long after we had said goodnight, retreated to our houses and gone to sleep.
Luke was gone all Wednesday night and then the whole day after. His truck trundled up the drive Friday morning, ashamed, headlights off. Their blinds remained drawn for the next couple days. I didn’t even know they had blinds. Some of my chickens got loose in their driveway, and I had to herd them back to their coop. Neither of them came out to say anything as I crunched around in the gravel, the birds squawking at my feet. Their house remained a stoic gray face with lips tight and eyes glued shut. I felt like a child cut off from the secret adult world within their walls. I faded back into nothing. I was too tired to make dinner, so I ate leftover spaghetti straight from the fridge, all congealed together like bloody worms. I turned on the VHF just to hear the crackle of static, the potential for voices.
Sometime around eleven that night, a fisherman spotted a humpback whale in the bay and radioed his friend about it. She was feeding off the port side of Georgia May’s bow. Did The Destroyer see her? Yes. There. Ah. She fluked and went under. Maybe she’d come back up. The airwaves were expectant but silent for a long time.
Nah, that’s it. Goodnight, said the captain of Georgia May, who had a Russian accent. Goodnight, said the captain of The Destroyer. I could hear the hum of the diesel engine behind him. “Tell Sheila to pick up more Vienna sausages in town. We’re down to our last can.”
“Roger that. Over and out.”
Luke left again in late July. I was down slopping grain into the pregnant mare’s trough when I heard his truck peel out of the driveway, headed toward the dock. I heard the slap of their front door, and Linda was standing out on the porch with her hands on her hips, her belly jutting out like the snub nose of a shark, pointing toward the wake of Luke’s truck. I made sure to scuff my feet on the graveI so she would turn around and see me. I was wearing my heavy rubber boots and Carhartt overalls and she was in a long, diaphanous skirt that was every imaginable shade of blue.
“Fuck that fucker.”
“Amen,” I said, and immediately regretted it; Luke wasn’t so bad. He worked hard and had the long lashes of a doe. He drank a handle of whiskey every week, but who didn’t around here? He was Alaska handsome, which is to say desirable in his scarcity. Linda obviously loved him, and I had found that speaking against love was a specter that haunted you when allegiances shifted back, realigned star patterns that erased all ills.
Linda laughed and drew in her breath sharply.“Well, we might as well have a drink. One glass of wine won’t hurt the baby more than what he just had to listen to. He probably needs it more than I do.” So I went and brought back a bottle and we sat on her porch that was all silver, bleached by the sun and the wind, and Linda asked me if, since she was all alone now, I might help her raise the baby.
Linda and the mare went into labor on the same night in early August. I found the horse sweating on her side in a nest of hay and got her to her feet. The barn was quiet except for the low pull of her breathing and the whir and clunk of moths against the shop light that I had set up in the stall. Her foal slid out from the crease between her back legs, covered in a chrysalis of membrane that his sharp little hooves poked through and destroyed. She licked the afterbirth from his matted coat, and within an hour he was rooting at her to nurse. I was proud to foster the colt into the world, but I was also aware that I was an intruder, a fool watching a tableau of some divine mystery, enchanted and useless. I knew enough about birthing that if something had gone wrong I could help––right a twisted leg, palpate the foal, or turn him if need be. But nothing had gone wrong. I was only a witness.
I hadn’t known Linda was having contractions until I came up from the barn and saw her pacing back and forth in front of her windows. The house was all lit up, leaking amber... I stopped for a moment to watch, couched in dusk. Then I clambered up on the porch and opened her front door without knocking. I had always been invited in before. Linda had the wood stove going and her hair was slick and wet. She stopped pacing, gave me a smile and said, “Oh, hi!” as if this was any given Tuesday and I had popped over for a cup of tea, as if she didn’t want to let me in on the secret of her labor. As if she could avoid it herself.
“I think I should get you to the hospital.”
“My water hasn’t even broken. It’s just Braxton-Hicks. False contractions. This baby isn’t due for another week.”
The living room was hot with cedar and sweat. I noticed my .22 propped up in the corner.
“I think you’re ready for something bigger,” I said. “You’re too good with that thing already. We’ll put the baby in a backpack and take her moose hunting this fall.”
Our future ballooned in the hot cabin, pressing out on the windows and door till they creaked at the seams. Growing too large to be contained anymore.
* * *
August days were mild but the nights were cold, and since my open skiff didn’t have a house or even a shelter, I put a blue tarp over Linda to shield her from the wind that the boat generated. The tarp rattled and snapped as we skimmed over the swell. The lights of town grew closer and more defined. Every now and then, she groaned over the buzz of the outboard, gripping the tarp around her head and shoulders like a great cloak.
I hoped that my truck would start once we reached the harbor. I only used it every other week. The muffler and door panels were so rusty from sitting out in the salt air that I could crumble their edges with my fingers. You had to have two cars to live on an island. One for the island, to haul hay and groceries from the dock, and one for town, to haul hay and groceries to the harbor. You only needed one boat, though. And mine was fast and sleek. Dad welded it from sheets of aluminum a couple years before he disappeared. He wore the same black sweatshirt every day, pocked full of welding shrapnel. I always felt like the boat didn’t belong to me, even after a decade. Like one day I would be cruising across the bay and I would come upon him, bobbing like a buoy, and after I helped him aboard he would ask why I was running the motor at such a high RPM, and didn’t I know that I should clean the hull every month. And why didn’t I go looking for him when he had been out here all along?
I stayed in the putrid green waiting room at the hospital for six hours, until the sun cracked over the mountains and my mouth turned sour; I had to get back to the horses and chickens. I bought coffee from a machine in the hall and then nodded to the nurses in their station as the automatic doors exhaled me into the parking lot. I radioed Gray House on the boat ride back home, just to see what would happen. If Luke had sensed something wherever he was and returned. The airwaves crackled but nobody answered.
When I got back to the barn, the animals all turned to me expectantly. The new foal whickered, already accustomed to me after less than a day of life. I thought about Linda in the white cove of her hospital bed, eating ice chips from a plastic cup, the smooth muscles of her abdomen and bones of her hips shifting like tectonic plates. When the nurses had allowed me into her room to say goodbye, she looked far away, barely tethered to earth. Her eyes roved out the window toward the mountains and when I promised I’d be back she nodded and said, “Sure.”
Inside, my house was still and stale. I went to lie down in my bed for just a minute and must have dozed off. I dragged open my eyelids and was immediately guilty. The sun was low and mocking, all my responsibilities taking care of themselves while I slept.
Linda barely made it through the delivery. Luke’s baby almost killed her. I tried to make myself see it some other way, but I couldn’t. After hours of labor and a problem with the umbilical cord, she had a C-section and was cut open from hip to hip, all the way through the skin and fat and muscle, so that the vestiges of Luke could be excavated from her like a gob of precious ore. It was all over and done by the time I made it back to the hospital. Linda was in recovery, and though she had lost a good amount of blood, she was awake and happy to be alive, the nurses said. When Linda and the baby had recovered enough to travel, I borrowed a friend from town’s boat with a cabin, loaded the hold with diapers and formula and wipes and all sorts of postpartum paraphernalia, and brought them to the island. Linda looked small, worn. While we shot across the bay, she looked toward the gulf, offering me the back of her head. I looked for the break in the landmass that signified home.
The baby was named Hamlin and I didn’t ask why. It sounded ancient, passed down for generations, and I assumed it had a significance to Linda. Mostly, I worried it was somehow tied up with Luke, a code only he would understand.
For a couple of months me and the baby were in a standoff. I cooked for Linda as she napped on the couch, sunlight scanning from her face to her toes ast he day shifted around her. I held the baby by the wood stove at night and rocked but he was stiff and resistant in my arms. We were like two pieces of the same puzzle but from opposite ends of the board. He stirred very little in my heart and his shit smelled rancid, somehow more animal than the inoffensive grass and grain that the livestock passed, that I waded through and shoveled into great mounds outside the barn.
In the fall we did go hunting together. I carried Hamlin on my back as he gurgled and slimed my hair with his tongue. Linda shot at her first moose and wounded it. I saw it lurch forward and almost go down, but it recovered and limped into the woods. We searched for a day and a half, listened for the rush of leaves in the underbrush and followed trails of blood and tissue that coagulated on the moss. We spent hours snaking back on ourselves, thinking we would find the wounded animal under the next tree, hunkered down to die. But he had evaporated.
Linda got a faraway look in her eye. She went to her tent early on the last day of camp and left me and Hamlin together by the fire. He was smooth like a pebble, just like Linda. My arms bowed into a bassinet, and the crease of him fit together, met my forearms perfectly. He wasn’t afraid of the night that came on fast; He was still used to the dark of his mother’s insides. We sat together as the smoke curled blue and fat spruce bark beetles rained on the tarp overhead. I was comforted by his gentle mewling and lack of opinion about the whole situation. About the unintentionally bad thing we had done.
Early December and Linda had gone into town and left me with the baby for the evening. She needed time to herself. She needed more and more of that, in those days. She drank glass after glass of wine at night, until her teeth turned purple in the crevices. Sometimes, I would comb and braid her hair and she would lean back against my shins and sigh. My hands were articulated looms then, made to weave her hair into elaborate knots.
That night, me and the baby were sitting by the coal stove in my house. Hamlin was propped against the couch, legs splayed, clapping at nothing but the newness of being alive. The inside of the house was as warm as the inside of our bodies and our cells and our happiness were diffused, everywhere, mixing with the pheromonal richness of the salmon I was cooking. I was pretending to make an elaborate meal of his tiny, dumpling feet when the VHF radio blared to life.
“Eliza Jean to Gray House. Eliza Jean to Gray House. This is the Eliza Jean calling Gray House.” Luke’s disembodied voice came from the bookshelf in the corner. I had the brief, embarrassing notion that he could see us together, me and his child. I made myself very still, in case this was somehow true. Hamlin stopped clapping and pitched forward at the sound of his father’s voice. I held him up with one hand on his humming belly. Maybe he had grown used to his father’s voice when he was in utero. I had let myself forget how half of him would always be Luke.
“Linda. If you’re there, pick up.” He waited a minute, then said her name again. “Linda, I’m sorry.” He was apologizing to her and to anyone else that was listening. He was somewhere on the water, surrounded by gray in all directions, eating the last dregs of boat food. Some concoction of canned corn and bacon most likely. His arms levered crabs from pots, picked fish from nets. At night he slept harder than the dead and swirled, dreamless, with all the other lost men. Every now and again a seam of want ran through him, I imagined, and he would pick up the radio and switch the dial to the least trafficked channel, talk to nobody and anybody at once. Someone in Siberia with their frequency tuned just right might wonder who Linda was, feel pity for the sad boy on the fishing boat. For what he had lost.