Sea Hearts (10 page)

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 apologising 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 summer 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.

And my gaze fell to the weed that straggled from the fresh-piled tide-wrack. The kelps and dabberlocks lolled like shining tongues on the rock. Perhaps that strappier stuff would do, or the egg-wrack higher up, with its bubbles? Then there was that other kind, harder to see in the stark dim light, like furred string, finer than the others. I laid the bundle of sleep that was my little prince in a hollow in the rock and unravelled some weed-clots and tangles, some long lengths. And I began a loop-and-looping, which, when I turned after a certain length and went back along the loops, pulling more weed through and through them, became one edge of a small blanket.

Before too long my fingers tired of being the wrong instruments for this task, and I cast up and down and found the perfect bone of some fish or sea-bird, with a broken-off end making it a hook, which I smoothed on the rock so it would not catch in the weed. I collected more makings, and I sat there piled about with them, taking here the fine-furred weed that sparkled wet under the moon, and now and then a strand of bubbles, and back and forth, back and forth, I knitted and knotted my son’s peacefulness up out of the night and the sea-stuff. When I had finished a perfect square of blanket I covered my bab with it, and wrapped him around and gathered him up, and walked wearily home through the beginning dawn.

The seaweed blanket achieved its end, for a time, but as it dried, it soothed Ean less — though I could revive it, I found, by sprinkling it with fresh seawater or, even better, by soaking it in a bucket of the same.

But my little one’s distress grew, and though I knitted up another blanket, so that one could soak while the other kept him calm, still he began to be never quite comfortable, never quite comforted. He drank and drank from me, all my milk and more. I was worse than slender now; women stopped me in the street to ask what ailed me, to scold me for not eating. And still the little prince of my life would not grow, but only slept or lay awake listless, making his small speaking-sounds, as if remarking, low and constantly, how this was not his world, however hard he might labour to exist here.

I could see all too clearly what I must do. Deep in my deeps I felt the dread of it, the knowledge I fought against with my soaking of blankets, my wringing of breech-cloths, my hours of feeding him. I knew we could not go on this way.

Finally it came time to do the impossible. Mam had come by that afternoon, throwing about orders for me to begin spring cleaning. The only door she had not flung open was mine; if she had, she would have seen the little prince in a nest of damp weed on my bed, the clean breech-cloths beside him where I’d pitched them, having snatched them from the fireside when I heard Mam greet Pixie Snaylor outside.

Spring was coming. If I did not act, others would have to know of this bab; Mam would have to know, and my sisters, and the town. Ean had lain unhappy for weeks, his little face creased with pain. His body would not strengthen itself by moving any more, would not lift its own head; he only lay close, his miniature arm around my neck, only lay still, dreaming of better places, his tiny nostrils breathing the sour air off the seaweed around him.

Night fell and the full moon rose. I unfastened my crossed bands, rolled them up and pocketed them. I picked my boy up, and I wrapped him close, and I took him down through the teeming night to Crescent Corner. Only a few seals greeted me as I came down the cliff path, but more bobbed out in the water, their heads like shawled women’s.

I knelt with Ean, unwrapped him and kissed him. Fresh weed I took from the lip of the sea, fine as lace. I bound this round him as he gasped, around his tiny goose-fleshing chest that would not breathe enough, that would not broaden and fatten like my niece and nephew’s. Two X-es I made on him, front and back, to make sure he always fled witches and men, to keep him safely in the sea.

I kissed him again, and then I wrapped him head to toe in clean breech-cloths like a shroud; he moved inside them, inside his sleep. Around the cloths I wrapped a weed-blanket, freshly wetted. I sang all the while, one of the odd-tuned lullabies I had made for him without intending — it had come up out of me, as they did, one long winter night or day, just for this little one and no other. The song and the sea-sound came together; the seals waited and watched, bobbing. I sang and I sang, and I tied him into the blanket. And as I tied, the leaves of the weed clung and clamped to the white cloths underneath, and the woven stalks sank in; my singing and my weaving and the seal-gaze and the moon and water all worked together to combine the weed, the cloth, and the bab. Magic rose from the rocks and the sea like locusts from a summer crop; power welled up in me like tears, and was held in check as tears must be held, for this business must be done right. I must make of myself a pure channel for the magic to tumble along at its right pace, in its right depth exactly.

When my boy was quite sewn away, down I carried him — already he was heavier — to the narrow curve of sand that showed here at the lowest tide. The seals had nosed a little closer through the water; I sat and took off my shoes and hailed them: ‘Are you ready, beautiful women, to take charge of my Ean?’ I knotted up my skirt, lifted the bundle, waded out.

I laid him on the wavelets, held him there awhile, unable to move for fear of what I was about to do. I glanced up from my armful, the sea rocking cold about my knees, lapping at one elbow and one hand. The seal-mothers were still some yards off, but I could hear their breath, and I could smell it; I could see their whiskers bristling; I could feel their attention to my song and my activities, like cords stretched tight between us, heavy with seawater, drenched with starlight.

I gave Ean a little push towards them. I let him go, and he sank, and I could not see him below, only water-shine. In a panic, I bent and wet the front of my dress, reaching down. I pushed him again, and he was smoother, and at once livelier. At my fingertips moved all the vigour I had longed for him to show while he lived with me. This heartened me to strike up my song again. Ean wriggled; he sprang away from me; two of the seal-women dived to meet him. I straightened and stepped back, my cold wet hands to my mouth. I imagined their meeting underwater, the two large beings and the one tiny.

I backed from the wavelets watching. The water busied as they brought my son into the group of them. His round head bobbed up among their larger ones, and his sleek side shone as he threw himself over in the water in a game, to their amusement. He broke my heart with his celebrating — how little he needed me, how perfectly happy he was now, as he had not been before, in my house, at my breast! I was glad of his gladness, and that he would be cared for, but how would I live without him, the little prince who had ruled my days and nights?

Empty-handed, empty-armed, I watched my son play among his new mams and be taken away. It was heavy toil to watch, the heaviest I had ever done, yet I felt I had to stay and see all there was to see. He grew littler and littler, leaping among them, till he was no more than water-gleams on the darkness. They too shrank, until they were only mistakes of my eyes among the waves. Then I crouched and hugged my bare knees, and laid my face on them, and I was incapable, for a long while. All the years to come crowded into that time, and I lived them, long and bitter and empty of him. The rightness of what I had done, and the wrongness both, they tore at me, and repaired me, and tore again, and neither of them was bearable. I did not know how I would ever lift myself from that crescent of sand and that water’s edge, and make my cold way home.

I spent a wretched spring. I did not go down to the Crescent; I did not want to recognise my son among the young and to remember that I had had him, that I held him no longer, that I never would again.

I cared for Dad; Mam seemed to despise him now, and did very little for him. When he slept, though, and I had got the house more or less in order, I went to my bed and hid away in sleep, for to be awake and unoccupied was to be filled with a leaden and unending sorrow.

‘At
this
time of the day!’ Mam cried, throwing open the door to my room one afternoon. ‘What kind of lazy lump lies abed mid-afternoon?’