L.M. DAVENPORT

THE OBSTINATE CHILD 

an étude    

            A. 

            Once there was a woman who had an obstinate child. All her other children were good, and did as they were told, but not the youngest.

            God struck the stubborn child with a sickness, and the child died. The mother took her youngest’s body into the yard, dug a grave, and laid it therein.

            But the child was too obstinate to stay dead, and as the mother turned away from the tamped earth, she saw a small hand reaching up through the soil.

            She pleaded with the child to remain underground, but to no avail. Finally, the woman took a rod and beat the tiny, outstretched fingers.

            At once the hand subsided, and the grave was still.

 

            The lesson: _________________

 

 

            B.

            The first thing you’ve got to get straight is that there wasn’t anything wrong with that baby. I know you people from the gene squad get ideas, but I’ll swear to them being whole as you are. The baby was my sister’s, and I looked after them some days, so I ought to know. They were just stubborn, nothing that wouldn’t have been outgrown by the time they were old enough to pick a usename and stamp the papers saying they were man or woman or both or neither. We learn young, out here, that stubbornness and self-will get you nowhere.

            That child never gave my sister anything but trouble and hurt, from the moment they were born. The baby cried like the sky was falling in, and her milk wouldn’t do any good. Nor any of the other tricks my sister knew from her first two little ones. It got so she couldn’t sleep more than a few snatched minutes at a time. Got so she started saying she would walk out into the nowhere, baby and all.

            I was there, the first time she said that. It was winter, and even though her house walls were well and tightly joined, we were huddled by the stove. This must have been five, six months after the child was born. She’d lost the weight she gained from the pregnancy too fast, and her eyes were sunken in. The other children were at our mother’s; she’d seen how things were and told my sister she’d take some of the care-burden for a while. Our husbands were with all the husbands, at the mines dug under the rim of the nowhere. They weren’t due back for a long season yet.

            So there we were by the stove, my sister looking like someone had sucked the marrow out of her, the child in her arms. The baby had cried so long and loud that day, they wore down their little voice, so just then they were only making whimpers, high and hoarse and even harder to listen to than the wailing had been. The infant-face was tucked into my sister’s chest, like they were trying to smother themself. I had had about as much of the sound as I could stand, but our mother had only taken the other children after I promised not to leave my sister alone with the baby.

            My sister’s chair didn’t have runners on the bottom, to rock with; she was rocking in it anyway.

            “It’s a punishment,” she said after we’d been silent awhile. “It’s a judgment on me.”

            All my speech had been used up hours before, when I’d watched my sister’s head drop down almost into her dinner, then jerk back up at her child’s next cry, eyes blinking open but not awake.

            “It’s made me into a dirty, broken thing,” she went on, tonelessly. “This whole night, I’ve been seeing a face in the stove door, in the iron. Its eyes are on me, and it laughs, and says it knows what I did, even if I’ve gone so tired I’ve forgotten. That’s the child’s doing. The child’s wrong, and made me wrong to match. And there’s only one place for what’s wrong in this world.”

            Now, my sister was always the crier in our hearthhold, and to hear her say such terrible things without shedding a tear, without even holding tighter to her child, scared me.

            “Nothing’s wrong with the baby that time won’t even out,” I said. “And nothing’s wrong with you that a night of sleeping suns-set to dawn won’t repair. You’re frayed, is all.” There was a pop in the stove, and a sound of wood shifting.

            She shook her head, and the baby stirred their fists under her chin. “We belong in the nowhere,” she said, “with the other broken things.” Her child gave out a louder whimper, like they agreed.

            I shivered and pulled closer to the stove, so my knees almost knocked against the door. I wanted my own stove, my own bed, my own Eleanor back from the tunnel she and all her fellow-husbands carved in. I’m ashamed of these wants now, but I was tired that night, and tired is selfish.

            “Don’t talk that way,” I replied, after a long moment where all either of us heard was the child and the hissing from the stove. “The nowhere’s for the despairing, and the husbands in their mines. You’re neither.” When her face didn’t change, I tried again: “What will happen to Jon, if he comes back to an empty house? You’ll break his heart, and he’ll walk out after you.”

            This time there was a flicker in my sister’s eyes, but it wasn’t wifely affection. It was shame. “He wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “He knows his duty better than I know mine; there are so few of us.” She looked down, into the child’s face. Their eyes were shut, but they made a muttering whine even then, so we knew they did not sleep. “Jon’ll stay here, and take another wife. Perhaps a man, this time.”

            “Stop it,” I told her, as harsh as I could. I knew if she kept talking that way, it would get back to our mother. And, because it was law, our mother’d have her taken away to the city, and her children put out to foster.

            I didn’t think she meant it. I thought she was just worn-out, and if she slept some, then she’d see how foolish she had been.

            So I said: “Don’t. It’s wrong, to plan on your husband’s next wife when you are young and strong, with three children of your body to think of.” I kept my tone sharp and looked her in the eye. It broke my heart to see her so, but I couldn’t have her talking that way in front of other folk, ones who might not know she didn’t mean it. I couldn’t be kind.

            She nodded, and got a look on her face like someone had shut a door behind her eyes. And I thought that would be the end of it.

            It wasn’t, of course. Just the end of my sister confiding in me. If I’d been less afraid of our mother, thought first of my sister and last of the shame, things might have been different.

            The next time, it was spring. The husbands still weren’t back, but my sister had her two older children again. I’d returned to my own house. It was that time when the air tastes freshened, wet and green like it might turn to vine and flower.

            She came to my door, with the first garden blossoms in one hand and the child in the crook of her other arm. They looked strong and cheerfully baby-fat, that morning, but their skin was winter-dull as hers, when it should have been like velvet from her milk. The baby muttered as we stood there, but those seemed only the usual noises of a child their age. I let myself smile and coo in the baby’s direction.

            “Here,” my sister said, thrusting the flowers at me. Her motion was quick, almost rude; the stalks bent back with the force of it. The blooms themselves, when I glanced at them, were tiny pink throats, pollen-choked. “Take them. I don’t want them. They grew so fast.”

            My face split into a real smile, then. Fast-growing flowers mean the husbands will be returning soon.

            “But how wonderful!” I said, one hand out to accept the bouquet. “Jon’ll be home any day now, and he can help you with the baby.” The stems felt furred and brittle, and I half-wanted to hand them back—but I was thinking more of my Eleanor than of my sister’s Jon, of how soon it would be my own husband on the doorstep. Of us waking up together, lazy in the full sun. I went slow on the inside then, and generous; maybe my sister wasn’t so haggard after all, or her baby so fretful. All might yet be right with the world.

            “Yes,” she replied, shifting her child cautiously to the other hip. “Give him my love, when he arrives.”

            I knew, right then, what she was going to do, and it gave me a feeling like someone had poured cold water down my back. But my sister was walking away, and I stood mute and rooted where I was.

            It was a long time before I moved at all, and when I did, it was to gaze down at the flowers. They were wrong, mutated: five crooked petals and not four, pollen tainted an unhealthy green. Up close, their mouths looked as if they had been warped in birth.

            You know the rest: I got up a search party, but it was too late. My sister went into the nowhere, and took a healthy child with her, and by now they’ll have been eaten down to the bones. You ought to know enough by now to leave well enough alone. The other children live with me, and I keep a good household; I teach them obedience, against the day when the husbands will come home.

 

            The lesson of the future, of the nowhere: ____________________

 

 

            C.

            Some of us felt sorry for the other mother, before her child started it. We were the nice ones—we told the wretched cashier with the eyebrow piercing to have a blessed day. We brought hot dishes to the mother from the co-op, who had just had triplets. Or we were the strugglers, the ones who didn’t tell anyone when we went on meds for postpartum depression, when we fed our kids box macaroni three nights in a row, when we dropped a string of f-bombs or put off scrubbing someone’s vomit out of the rug for so long that our spouses did it instead. Either way, we nodded amongst ourselves, thought about bringing over a loaf of banana bread and rejected that as too condescending, looked at her and the child and thanked God or the void that it wasn’t us.

            And some of us were just angry. Maybe her child had bitten our child, underneath the fossil skeleton of a mastodon on a trip to the natural history museum. Maybe her child taught our child a bad word. Maybe her child was just too loud and too clumsy, too close to one of our breakable objects. Whatever had transpired, we seethed. If that were our child, we said to one another in texts, on the margins of the playground, in the locker room after Pilates, we wouldn’t let that go on. That child would know some discipline. We still smiled at the other mother, when we passed her in the gym or at the post office or the choir room. After all, we were normal mothers.

            We watched the child screaming for fifteen minutes in Trader Joe’s, laying on the orange cement and twitching while the other mother begged: calm down, get up, come away. After that, we reached a consensus: the problem lay in a lack of obedience. The child simply did not, or could not, understand the concept of doing what somebody superior instructed. We were divided only on the question of whether this problem was fixable.

            So we were not greatly surprised when the child died, and then refused to stay dead.

            The other mother could not make the child go back in the ground. (We heard her trying, those of us who were her neighbors.) She told her older children to go inside, where we felt they should have been all along. The other mother put on her rubber gloves, yellow with red tartan cuffs, which had been sitting grubby and abandoned on the cement stoop. She looked fierce, unsanitary, unspeakably sad.

            Then those of us who were her neighbors, we who had chain link and sheer curtains, saw the child begin to pursue her. No theatrical, dangle-handed shamble, this. An earnest and terrible chase. So the other mother hit her child with a shovel that had been propped up next to the gloves, and ran weeping into her house which looked so much like our own houses, and locked the door.

            And although we were very careful, and some of us even carried shovels ourselves, it came to pass that one of our own good children was bitten by the disobedient child. And we minded this bite, much more even than we had minded the one which took place underneath the mastodon. But of course it was too late. Undead children, we quickly learned, cannot be disciplined.

            There is only one thing to be done with undead children, and that is to set them on fire.

            So that is what we did. Some of us had children who were in the scouts, or who liked to play with magnifying glasses, before they were bitten, and we understood how fires were made; we showed the others what to do. Half of us sobbed inconsolably while the smoke rose black and greasy, and the other half of us rubbed backs and held hands and said to be strong, that God would never test us with anything we couldn’t handle. Some of us looked away from the blaze while we said this, up at the windows of the other mother’s house. We had set the fire at the foot of her driveway, where the concrete apron spilled out into the deserted street, so that she would not miss the consequences of her child’s unruliness. We had not seen her, or her older children, since the day of the shovel, but on occasion we caught a shiver of the blinds which told us someone was alive and peering out. We hoped she had an excellent view.

 

            The lesson of the watchers by the fire: ____________________

 

 

            D.

            I don’t ask my mother if I was obstinate as a child. There is still plenty of room under the ground. And there’s still scars on my neck from the last scourging of plague, still dirt under my fingernails from the last time I clawed my way out.         

 

            The lesson of the fingernails: ______________________

 

 

            E.

            Here ends the lesson:

            There was once a stubborn child, and a mother who felt and behaved as mothers generally will. It has not come down in the records whether she loved the child because or in spite of this stubbornness, only that she loved that child as she loved her numerous other children.

            But the child was very stubborn, and for this reason took a sickness that no doctor could cure. And within a very short time, the child died.

            The mother took what had once been her child into the yard and buried it, because there was no money for a priest. Her neighbors watched and did not console her. They thought she must have done something wicked to deserve such a child (and to wind up so poor as to bury the corpse herself).

            As the mother turned from the fresh grave, soil clinging to her hands, she heard a sound like flour going through a sieve, or a bird’s footfall. She turned and saw one small hand, which only an hour before she had believed would never move again, reaching up from the mounded earth. With a cry, she ran back and knelt by the graveside, not knowing whether she wanted the child to arise whole from the ground, or to subside once more. 

            She touched the hand, and though the fingers curled around her own, she found the flesh was cold. That decided her, and through tears she begged the child to stay buried, to accept the peace that at last was offered, the liberation from the struggle between that small will and the world’s. The grip did not loosen, and slowly the arm began to rise further from the soil, as though the dead child drew strength from her contact.

            At last, the mother wrenched her hand away. The child’s fingers stilled, and then began to grope blindly after hers. She slapped the outstretched hand and stumbled backwards, weeping and trying, with the hand which had not touched the child, to cover her face.

            The child’s hand withdrew under the earth, and did not stir again. The mother lay beside the grave a while, sobbing into the bright grass and no longer caring what the neighbors thought.

            After a time, however, she stood up, dried her face on her apron, and went back into the house. Her other children were waiting.

L.M. Davenport is a third-year MFA student at the University of Alabama. Her work has previously appeared in Quarterly West, Booth, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Her last D&D character was the world's most incompetent Tabaxi rogue.