Authors: Lalita Tademy
“He’s gone,” said Maggie. Her voice was flat. “He couldn’t hold
to life.”
The idea had barely taken hold that there were two babies, before there was only one. Cow Tom closed his eyes, his dreams evaporating and carried off by the wind. Still, they’d look to him to set the mood.
“We bury him on Thursday,” he said. “Four days hence.”
He took up the ax and headed to the forest, where he cut firewood until his arms and back ached and he could no longer swing the weight of the ax above his shoulders. Death was a part of life, a transition, but if a departed spirit needed four days to visit old, familiar places and people before moving on, what would a baby do with all that time?
Cow Tom didn’t move back to the house. He stayed by the river alone, two days, and then three, and Maggie brought him food and daily reports. Faithful was missing, not the first time, last seen senseless drunk in the north pasture trying to mend a fence. Amy stayed in the woman’s space tending Malinda and the baby girl.
On the fourth day when Maggie visited, one glance at her face and he knew something had gone wrong.
Maggie paused, some consequential words unspoken, words he would need to coax from her. Edmound gone filled his mind to capacity, and Cow Tom considered not pushing further, not giving chase to further news to disappoint.
“What more?” he finally asked.
His daughter stared out over the churning waters of the Canadian, gathering her thoughts, and Cow Tom regretted the ask. What could be worse than his grandson gone before he ever had the chance to take him buffalo hunting on the plain? To teach him to tell healthy cow from sick, or to lasso a steer?
“Is it the girl?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Faithful?”
“We found him this morning, passed out in the corncrib,” said Maggie, so matter-of-fact Cow Tom knew this had nothing to do
with whatever Maggie came to say.
“Better just to tell it,” Cow Tom said.
“Something’s not right with Ma,” she said.
This last took him unawares, and for a moment, he couldn’t reassemble his thoughts.
“Has she fallen sick?” Cow Tom reached out and took his daughter’s arm, squeezing too hard, he knew, but bringing her to focus. “Speak quick, girl!”
Maggie blinked rapidly, though the morning had only begun and the day wasn’t bright. “Not sick,” she said. Her voice quavered, and Cow Tom saw her distress broaden to include him. “But she isn’t Ma.”
Cow Tom left his daughter where she stood, by the riverbank, first in a determined walk, and then almost at a run, turning in the direction of the women’s tepee. The theft of Edmound was a cruel sting, hope thwarted, an affront that such injustice be allowed. But the concept that something had gone wrong with Amy went beyond, unthinkable. The world was a harsh place, guaranteed of quicksilver change and backhand slaps. But the constant throughout was Amy, calm and unflappable. Amy, the mainstay for them all regarding household or family concerns. He couldn’t consider a circumstance without her. He was Cow Tom because she was Amy, like the flow of the river or the set of the sun, so ever present sometimes he forgot she was there.
“You can’t go in the women’s . . .” Maggie called after him, but her voice trailed, and he paid her no mind, hurrying toward the tepee with no real plan as to what he might do once there.
Chapter 27
THE TEPEE CAME
into view, set off to the side from the rest of the compound, the cowhide flap open. Cow Tom slowed as he got closer, the import of his intrusion into the woman’s space breaking through at last, but he forced himself forward. He didn’t announce himself, but stood in the opening and peered into the darkened space. There were two of them there in a frozen tableau. Amy stood
with a wrapped bundle in her arms, and his daughter Malinda lay asleep and unmoving, only her head visible, a sheen of damp on her dark face and hair loosed from her kerchief in wild and tangled clumps, her form obscured beneath a sweat-soaked blanket. The smell from the tepee was heavy, earthy, of damp and doom.
“Maggie says the boy is gone,” he said, from outside. His voice seemed to echo in the small, stuffy space, too loud.
Amy stared back at him, unresponsive, and Cow Tom welcomed both the dimness and distance between them, giving him time to adjust to Amy’s flatness.
There was movement from the bundle Amy held. Clearly the girl, swaddled and live, but the baby didn’t cry or offer sound. Amy broke her gaze and looked down, made some adjustment to the piece of blanket, as if lost to him.
“She all right?”
Amy nodded, finally. The gloom over the space unnerved him. Cow Tom wanted to be finished with this.
“Where is he?”
At first, Amy didn’t answer. “We’re cursed,” she said at last.
“Where is the boy?”
Still no answer. Amy sat down on the ground cross-legged beside the figure of Malinda, the recovering mother’s breathing soft and barely audible, and she placed the baby in the hollow by Malinda’s side on the pallet. Cow Tom suddenly feared their daughter was also at risk.
“Malinda all right?” he called into the tepee.
“She’ll be fine,” said Amy. “She’ll rest awhile, to live another day.”
“Amy, where’s the boy?”
Amy fussed with the girl baby, picked her up and stood again, this time moving her from one side of Malinda to the other, so the child could feel the warmth of the mother, even in sleep. Again she sat, as if Cow Tom hadn’t spoken.
“Amy.”
She looked up. The flat black of her eyes revealed an Amy gone to a deep, dark place he dare not follow, even had he wanted. Though he understood how much she looked forward to this grandchild as boy, Cow Tom couldn’t imagine her dismay taking her to such a dangerous mood, but Amy had always been inextricably tied to her omens and superstitions in ways unknowable.
The space inside the tepee was not large, and Cow Tom was loath to enter. Still outside, he sought a sighting of the boy, and sensed the stillness in the corner of the tepee. Another bit of blanket, a rounded form, but no movement beneath. From behind, his other daughter had come up from the river and now stood almost alongside with uncertainty, only a footfall away, unsure how to handle the unprecedented male presence contaminating their sacred ground. For one moment, it seemed she intended to pass him at the threshold and enter the tepee, but she stepped back again, her internal battle betrayed by the indecision on her face, a tug-of-war between bonds of womanhood and duty of filial piety.
“We bury him before midday,” Cow Tom said. “He must go to ground.”
Cow Tom thought then that Amy would rouse herself to prepare the boy, but instead, his wife pressed at Malinda’s forehead with a dampened rag. She cleaned and bundled the girl baby, but did not touch or acknowledge the body of the lifeless boy, nor did she speak.
“I’ll see to him,” Maggie said. She took a few tentative steps toward the entrance, but Cow Tom didn’t give quarter, blocking her way. He shook his head, stopping her.
“It is Amy must do it,” he said, making his tone hard, “not you.” He put his body in between his wife and daughter. “I’ll be back within the hour for the boy. Gather family. We meet at the clearing by the twisted elm in the east pasture. Tell Faithful to bring a gun.”
He lingered just long enough to assure that Maggie left them to attend her task.
“Amy,” he commanded into the semidarkness, his voice barely above a whisper. He hoped he did the right thing, nudging her back to her responsibility. “Have the boy ready by my return.”
Cow Tom lit out for a part of the pasture prone to wildflowers, an area Malinda fancied as a girl before her hours filled with being a woman. He stopped at the lean-to supply shed along the way to collect a shovel. It didn’t take long to dig the hole, so small as to be hardly more trouble than turning over the soil for a garden’s planting, and when satisfied with the location and the depth, he threw down the tool, wiped his hands on his tunic, and returned to the tepee. As he got closer, he listened for Amy’s voice, anything that could give him a clue as to what he would find. He made noise so they knew him coming and might prepare themselves, stopped once more at the threshold of the tepee, and peered in, feeling the fool all the while.
Amy still sat on the ground, just as he’d left her, listless. But now Malinda was awake, albeit droop-lidded and somber, propped up on the pallet with the girl baby at her breast. She started when she caught sight of him there at the threshold of the tepee, and did not try to hide her distress. Cow Tom didn’t know the right thing to say.
“Malinda.” He forced his voice to cheer. “The girl presents healthy.”
Malinda looked down at the baby’s suckling, and covered herself as best she could.
“Take the girl,” said Malinda. Her tone, flat with fatigue, was edged with sorrow, and it wasn’t clear who she talked to, whether herself or Amy or Cow Tom or God. “Take the girl away. I release my claim on her, only bring back my son in her place.”
Cow Tom expected some rebuke of their daughter from Amy
at this crazy talk, that she would take charge as she always did to coax reason from calamity, but Amy said nothing. His wife had yet to take her eyes from the mother and baby, or to acknowledge his presence at the threshold. Cow Tom had to believe that Malinda spoke from her exhaustion, and with time would weather Edmound’s death, but if Amy set adrift, they were all lost.
“Did you prepare the boy?” he asked his wife.
His daughter’s mouth clenched when he referenced Edmound, a slight shake to her shoulders as if chilled. Cow Tom became suddenly aware of three generations of women unfolding before him here, each under his protection, and his worry shifted from one to the next. His lot was to see after all three. Malinda was a strong girl, practical-minded and dutiful. She’d get beyond this. She’d lost the boy, but would come to accept the girl. The baby girl had already shown to be more warrior than her twin, and she would survive or not, as destined. Amy rubbed his heart most, her behavior puzzled him most.
Again Amy avoided his request, and Cow Tom forced his gaze to the back corner of the tepee. His grandson’s body remained untouched, exactly as when Cow Tom left to dig the grave.
The thought was slow to come to Cow Tom’s mind, but once it did so, there seemed no other way. Malinda was still too weak for practical matters, he had banished Maggie from the tepee in hopes Amy would come to herself, and now Amy was of no use. Unthinkable, and yet. Edmound hadn’t managed to draw breath for more than the time it took the sun to rise and set, and now he must be set to ground. Custom be damned. What should fall to one of the women still needed doing.
Cow Tom entered the tepee, ignoring the looks of shock and disapproval from both daughter and wife. He lifted the corpse-child from the blanket where he rested, holding him close to his chest. The hole waited. He made one more appeal to Amy, but she folded her arms in defiant helplessness. He seized her arm to pull
her to standing, made awkward by the child, and led her out of the tepee. She didn’t fight him; she didn’t help him.
“There is no curse,” he said, although he wasn’t convinced. “The girl still fights, and Malinda is young yet. No one knows what is to come.”
They met Maggie on the foot-worn path outside.
“The family waits by the elm,” she said.
“Go to Malinda and the baby girl,” Cow Tom instructed. “See no harm comes to the girl.”
He stopped at the supply shed once more, this time for a precious length of white cotton muslin he knew Amy saved for a special purpose. He grabbed up the material and headed for the river, pulling Amy along as best he could with his free hand, and when he was sure she would follow on her own, he went ahead with the boy in his arms, trusting her to come behind.
Once at the riverbank, he expected Amy to take over the duty from him, but she did not, watching him carefully, his every move recorded. She neither stepped up to clean nor to touch the small bundle, standing along the riverbank as spectator.
Cow Tom ripped the cloth into strips and cleaned the child, wiping those smallest of toes and smoothing down the fuzz at his head, and he wrapped the stilled body in the white muslin until the exact form could no longer be determined.
Chapter 28
COW TOM CARRIED
the white muslin bundle through the muddied pasture to a pinch of land he reckoned forevermore would be the family graveyard. Amy followed at his heel. He was oblivious to the ribbed globes turned deep orange on the ground, pumpkin time, his thoughts pulled too tight around loss. Unlike so many others in the tribe, black or red, Cow Tom had yet to bury one of his own here on this stretch of soil along the Canadian River, and that it should be thus, not of starvation or epidemic or someone’s natural time, but before life even had a chance to blossom, weighted him like an anvil. The tiny body in his arms was light, shockingly light, a still, transient thing, and he tried not to imagine what could have been. Edmound.
Amy’s step was close behind his own. She slid in the mud once, a slippery footfall, but righted herself without going down, and carried forward without comment. His arms were full. He couldn’t help her.
“The girl still lives,” Cow Tom reminded. Amy didn’t answer, yet trudged along after. “And Malinda will come round,” he added.
The family waited on them at the clearing, standing in a circle round the hole Cow Tom dug earlier that morning. Edmound’s father, Faithful, wore his cloth meeting jacket, but atop his head, slightly askew, was the ceremonial red turban, the soft cotton soiled and fraying along the edges, but majestic nonetheless, and draped around his neck on a leather strip, his shell gorget necklace. Faithful did his best to rise to the formality of the occasion, but even standing still, he swayed in place, his head seemingly too heavy for his
body, his red eyes blinking against the light, the reek of alcohol escaping from his pores. He carried his old hunting rifle resting stock down, barrel up at his shoulder, as a military man would on parade. Next to him stood Sarah, filled out and more matronly than those days so long ago on the
Monmouth
. Concern deep-etched her face like the carvings on Faithful’s gorget shell, and she rushed over to throw her arms around Amy’s shoulders and lead her into the bosom of their circle. Amy seemed to take comfort. Sarah didn’t let go her grasp, and Amy didn’t drop Sarah’s hand as she took her place by the graveside.