Child’s Moon

Mara Bateman

I wake up in the dark to some activity among the sagebrush. There is no wind and the pale cold of the night rests like a still hand on my chest. But: there is talk among the small, gnarled bodies nearby. I stay still, barelynot the grass beneath me, barelynot the moon shadow resting like a hound along my side. It’s new, this type of listening, fragile. To disturb these conversations is to destroy them. So I lay there, still as last year’s leaves, and listen. There is a disturbance in the sagebrush. A roaring monster arrived and departed in the night, its eyes long legs of light across the hills; its feet rubbertreaded, crushing grass and branch and bird. In the broken frost of its passage something is left behind. Something living, smaller than a polecat, larger than a rabbit, with a naked face and two moon-eyes. An owl predicts its death. A mouse hides under it, and perceives it has a heart. Above me, the moon ticks towards setting. A small breeze says hush. I stand up and let the shade slide of to crouch at my feet. I turn in the direction of the disturbance and walk. The sagebrush taps me and chimes with ice, but doesn’t speak. My breath is white. I might arrive too late. I don’t, not quite. There is a tear in the hillside ahead, tire tracks that cut down to the frozen mud. Here is where a truck turned back. Here in the grass is what it left behind. I walk over and kneel down. A little face looks up at me, frowning. Fists kick a little. Carefully, I pick it up. It’s heavier than it looks. The mouse darts into the grass faster than an eye. I don’t know anything about babies. This is certainly the irst one I have ever held. I know something about seedlings, however, and it’s winter. I open up my coat and plant the baby snugly against my chest. It folds in. It becomes a seed of itself, knees and elbows itting frog-like. I zip it in tight.

There are antelope out here and in the pre-dawn I go to visit them.

They lift their long heads at my approach, but mammals are easier than woody things and there is soon an understanding. Herds are kind to the hunted, the lonely and unarmed, the orphaned. As long as you can keep up. I hold the baby up so it can suckle. The mother swings her head around to look at me. “It’s not mine,” I say, and then, “Yes, it does have to be carried.” The baby sucks. Maybe it is a good baby, a smart one. Or maybe babies will suckle anything, when given it. I don’t know. I thank the mother. She bows her head back to the grass, needing nothing. I tuck the baby back in my coat. It sleeps. At the top of the hill the sun comes up. Above it, the faded moon remains, abandoned by the retreating night. I sit facing the dawn and make tea. I watch the frost glitter. I see the irst beads of water form and ill with a globe of the world. I watch the baby sleep and begin to think. The rising of the sun encourages it. This is what I think in one hundred diferent ways: What the fuck am I going to do with this baby? I should have left it where it lay, in a bed of frozen grass, until the cold quietly closed over it. It had barely arrived in the world. It had nothing to miss. And the high, cold hills in winter are no place for a baby. Soon the snow would be deep. Soon I would be buried under it, sleeping in white tunnels and dreaming long, long dreams. The baby makes me think about the past, before, when the talk around me was the beeping of human voices and all their accessory chaos. The irst good things I learned were from trees. At least babies can’t talk. But, of course, they learn. They watch and watch and they listen and listen and like the earth itself they seed their own minds with a landscape, all in secret. When I look down again the baby is awake, and the air is just warm enough to smell like sage. The baby’s eyes are blue, and look up through their water like summer rocks in a stream. It watches me. Suddenly it looks away, up. I look, too, and see a bird loating there, alongside the lingering moon. “Red-tailed hawk,” I tell the baby. The baby seems to consider that. Then it frowns and pees, drenching my

shirt and pants. The liquid is hot at irst, but rapidly cools and grows clammy. “Oh, baby,” I say and pull it out of my coat. It begins to cry.

At the stream I wash the baby, which I observe is male, and myself. I wrap him in my coat, but he is cold and quiet. The afternoon sun is blotted with clouds and weakening. I ind the antelope mother again on the hill crest, but the baby’s head droops and he won’t suckle. I consider if he will die. I don’t want him to. The antelope advises a storm is coming, and before long I feel it too; my eardrums begin to ache and the clouds snarl together on the horizon. It is colder now. I huddle the baby close and walk downhill towards the river. We can’t stay here. It is time to travel, south and forward, home, to the land of temperate giants. Overhead the moon is still there, following us, as the sunlight is submerged. A child’s moon, I remember that being called. Or a ghost.

There is less time for preparation this time, but I let uncertainty pass through as a shiver and listen, walking on the ears of my feet, softly, down among the tree fringe along the water’s edge. This time of year the river is thick with ice, free only where it lows fast and steep. Here the ish come, feeding, and may be caught. I don’t go there today, though, but walk where the trees are thickest, where the spring loods and leaf-shed have made a mulch. The cottonwoods sigh to the river willows, dreaming, all naked and asleep. Even here the ground is hard frozen. Spring is a better time for traveling. Summer or fall. Winter is worst. But there. There, I can feel it, at the base of a birch, a tiny crackling, a giggle, a chirp, muled deep beneath the earth. I sit down under the birch tree and cross my legs. I rest my back against the tree and the baby against my chest. I am still. Still except for the tiny movements inside. Cells, dividing. Blood moving its cargo from port to port.

The tiny mouths of my lungs, sipping air, separating, sifting. Under the earth there is movement, too, subtle threads and endless intentions. I sit there, my skin slowly dying, slowly being reborn. I breathe the tree and the tree breathes me. I sit until the presence beneath the ground recognizes me. I sit until our patterns begin to align, thread by thread, cell by cell, until I sink down into it, until I am among its ranks, one spark in a universe of sparks. The irst snowlakes begin to fall. The sky is heavy, gray, white. More snow falls. It lies, silent, thicker and thicker, until my open eyes see only white lakes spinning and my shut eyes only white threads, growing. The baby’s heart putters against my ribs. The baby is me, I insist, when the presence inquires. I am a woman with two hearts. The white becomes a road, a tree, a face, a herd of antelope, a mushroom, a forest, a sea. It becomes anything. It becomes everything.

Be —, I think, and the end of the thought is whiteness and the black beauty of the inside of the earth.

I wake up with my back lat on soft and unfrozen earth. My heart is roaring like a sea-cave. My limbs are absent, and then arrive, trembling, aching as though with a tremendous efort spent. It’s not a free ride. I listen for my second heart and ind it, then feel it; squirming, hungry, awake. I open my eyes to columns reaching up and up towards swaying, far tips, tufted green, wandering rainclouds overhead. The air smells like wet green. Woods. Moss. Fungus and the distant sea. I turn my head to one side. A sword fern is unfurling beside me, its new growth coiled like the spring of Spring. The baby speaks a syllable and burrows against my chest. I lift him up, even though my arms tremble like ancient arms, or never used ones. “Look,” I say, as his eyes roll from thing to thing. “Listen. Redwood tree. Fiddlehead. Home.”