Edith's Cedar Wood
BY JESSICA EVANS
Knee deep in the river, Edith hums the melody of Samuel’s mama’s song. It’s the tune Granny sings when as she threads tines of her fork through garden-grown herbs, old crone movements for old crone moments. The melody Granny hums when women come holding their still-flat bellies, begging for change, fearful that if they don’t abandon what’s growing, their lives will repeat for generations. They don’t realize their lives will continue to repeat, with or without their bellies swelling. Cedar and cypress surround Edith, coniferous, evergreen, Tennessee forest beauty. Like those other women, Edith’s belly is still flat, but she hasn’t gone to see Sam’s mama. Edith is not a forest witch, refuses to believe in Granny’s charms. But if she were, Edith would weave a spell to adjust, to alter, to shift, because Oneida is at once too small and too big.
Sunlight flits between trees, light caresses cascading over still green leaves. Edith prays for courage, for confidence, clarity. She wishes to become the root of a cypress tree; then she could ground down, could center, could find a way to exist. Her hand flits to her belly. Impossible to feel and yet the pressure is there. Tomorrow, she’s meeting Tina from the agency to sign the paperwork, to agree to carry to term, to avoid drugs and alcohol, to provide the routing and account number of her bank account, so new that she doesn’t even have the numbers memorized. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Edith had said to Tina on their first meeting.
“Then what way was it supposed to happen?” Tina asked.
In the forest, Edith shakes her head, her hair a cloak. She knows it’s the right choice, and yet. She prays for breath, for space. When she makes her way to Samuel’s house, certain she has the words formed right, Edith can’t look Granny in the eye, fearful the old witch will divine her secret. Before Edith can tell Samuel about their would-be child, he says he’s off to fight a war that isn’t his. In the kitchen, Granny clucks her tongue, twines together red and silver threads around a bundle of dill and oregano, belly herbs to keep things moving. Edith’s courage erases like wind. Samuel leaves without knowing.
Months later, she births a boy who has a gentle face and wide smile. Tina is the only person in the delivery room with her. The case worker whisks away the bundle, whispering into the boy’s ear. Edith thinks of her forest trees, prays for closure, composition, containment. After leaving the hospital, she does not look at her bank account, her freedom there in dollars and cents, blood money paid for a child she’ll never know.
On the arrival news that Samuel is dead, three months post-partum, Edith will invite herself to be swept out from the world. She will shout at the wind, demand the invisible element show itself. And when it doesn’t, she will pluck her mama’s keys from the tray by the front door and drive and drive until she reaches the coast. There, she presents her grief to sea, which accepts her tears, carries them to the horizon, but cannot offer childless Edith any hope. On the beach, the sky bleeds into the shrubs, softer and less painful than her baby’s birth. Edith aims her words at a newly risen moon, demanding answers that never come. The weight of his baby body, perfect in her arms, before the social worker handed sweet Louis over to the couple from Nashville.
Years pass.
Edith will continue to visit that patch of forest, looking for secrets in sunlight, shafts of whispered incantations hiding among the trees, decades of worship with her eyes closed. Against the grain of light, Edith will learn to ground down, to settle. She will hear, on repeat, the labor and delivery nurse’s instructions echoed in her mind her decades. Bear down. Breathe out. Push harder. Her womb is absent, the thickening of her midsection still evidence that there was once a baby inside her. Little Louis, off to live a life with others who will never tell him what it means to gather up Granny’s herbs, who can’t possibly know secret words to make the wind change direction. Edith prays for contrition. She has never forgotten the three small fingerprints on her hand.
Twenty years gone and she can still feel the imprint, her womb never swells. Her bank account grows, compounds and doubles, until the original amount is four times its worth. Edith is fearful, unable to spend it. Two hundred some odd months pass and another war begins in another desert that looks a lot like the place where Sam died.
In town, Edith will see the face of another Coe boy flash across the screen at the pharmacy while she’s waiting to pick up her mama’s diabetes medication. The same quarter shaped green eyes, tell-tale of a Coe, so clear on the screen that Edith doesn’t need to read to screen to verify the name.
“Austin Coe, 18 of Scott County, was killed today after an IED exploded his HUMVEE,” the perky blonde newscaster with too much humor in her voice will announce.
At home, she’ll hand her now-aged mama her diabetes medication, blinking back tears. Her dad will yell something Edith pretends not to hear. She will head to their shed, cursing her life and her love of Sam and her inability to be a mother. Edith will grind out the words that forest witches use to control the moons and ask for lucidity, for release. Her anguish will surround her, an orb of fragrant impossibilities. She lost Sam the day he laced his boots, but really lost him the day she signed away their son.
In the shed, her eyes will land on her dad’s old hunting rifle, its rust and patina as old as her grief. Somewhere in the patch of forest, the cypress trees sway.
