The Mother’s Story

P.J. Woodside

I haven’t admitted this to anyone. I want to learn to kill something.

It sounds crazy, but I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know how. Hunters know. Doctors know. Soldiers, judges, murderers, God.

Three weeks and four days ago my baby died. She was twenty-three days and six hours and twenty-two minutes old. She has been dead now for longer than she was a lot outside of me. People still call say things, but John answers the phone. I will not listen to another person say “I know how you must feel,” or “You’ll have other children,” or “I’m so sorry about your baby.” I’m sick of all of it. I quit my job before the birth and John’s been taking his vacation time to stay with me. I keep telling him to go to work, but he won’t listen. He’s not doing any good. He just hangs around all day not saying much, or saying too much, or sighing. Every time he wants to talk to me he contorts his face and sighs a lot through his nose.

“Do you need to talk?” he said it first. Then, “let’s talk.” Then, “Emily, we have to talk.” Then, “Emily, this is ridiculous.”

I don’t mean to refuse him. It’s just that the words bring up too much else with them, like fishhooks.

“I’m okay,” I say it again and again and again. Then I sigh. I think, please leave me alone, just leave me alone. I just wish everyone would leave me alone.

“Emily,” John says. He says it in that desperate way that is sort of a question and sort of an accusation. Emily, you’re not being cooperative, I hear. Emily, you’re not being fair. Emily, you’re in a state of denial. When he talks, he sounds like he is walls away. He thinks he knows, but he doesn’t.

“Emily,” he says, “I want to help you. What can I do to help you?” he has learned his phrase from the psychiatrist, who, I’m sure, found me a very interesting case.

“Emily,” John says, “I love you. You know I love you.” He puts his arm around me. It makes my skin crawl. I don’t want him to touch me or talk to me. I want him to leave me alone. I sigh, try to sound annoyed. He backs off.

“This can’t go on, you know.” I look at the floor, pick at a string on the couch. I feel like a kid in the principal’s office. But I know he’s right about that.

Last week John left me at my parents’ house so he could catch up on some work. I saw my younger brother’s rifle and the rack on his wall, just hanging there, waiting for the next bullet. I wanted the gun. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I would feel better if I had it. I had to be sly, since they watch me every minute now. I got a big box and began to list for my mother all the things I wanted. She was very cooperative. While she was in the attic I slipped the gun under some curtains in the box. I almost forgot about the bullets. I looked in the drawer of the rack and found three loose ones, all the same.

When I got home, while John was showering, I hid the rifle and bullets behind some boards along the unused workbench in the basement. No one ever suspected. Now I have a bunch of curtains and shoes that I don’t want, but I have what I need.

In fact, I think everything started with this rifle. I was fourteen and Richard was twelve when he got the gun for Christmas. It was long and smooth and dark and shiny, incongruous under the blue-green tree. He couldn’t believe it when he saw it there. He picked it up and held onto it like it was made of gold, like it was a gift from God. Daddy stood there grinning and told him he could hunt now; he was a man. Daddy and Richard and my older brother Philip: they were the man in the family. They made a big deal about it being Richard turn. I thought about how they had skipped over my turn altogether, but I didn’t say anything.

They hunted almost every weekend, for anything: ducks, rabbits, deer. They would get up at four in the morning, stomp around the house, get the rifles, get the bullets, put everything in the truck. Get the sandwiches and coffee. Mama would cook breakfast for them, the smell of bacon wafting through the house, eggs popping. I stayed in bed until they were gone. I didn’t care about the hunt; I wanted to sleep. They didn’t stop to think about how much noise they made.

One time they let me look down the sights of the rifle at the tin can, and Richard put my finger on the trigger.

“Pretend it’s a bear,” he said. “Pretend it is a mean old big black bear, and you’ll die if you don’t shoot it. Now,” he said. “Now.”

I pulled, waited for the blast to knock me backwards. But they hadn’t loaded it. Richard laughed, and Phillip smirked in the background.

“You’re dead now,” Richard said. “The big bear done gotcha.”

His gun was hardly broken in when he shot his first deer. Amazing, at thirteen. When we heard the truck pull up in the gravel outside, after dark, Mama and I went to meet them, to see what our man had brought us. There was a deer lying in the back, small, its antlers not as long as its head. Its underbelly white and soft in the moonlight.

When Richard got out of the truck, he was black and sticky-looking and dirty. They had covered him with the blood of the deer—just as they had Philip when he got his first one. His face glowed.

“I killed one,” he said. “I got the only one today. He just stood right in front of me and looked at me and I killed him.” I kept looking from the deer to Richard, thinking that if it wasn’t for my brother that deer would still be walking through the trees. I imagined the instant he’d decided, looking down the sights of that rifle. I wondered what the waiting moment was like, if he’d felt strong or weak-kneed. I wondered if he’d heard the animal’s last heave. I moved around the truck and looked at the deer’s face. There was no pain there, no malice, just the still, flat eyes staring out at me.

It was cold, and I felt the chill along my neck.

“Hot damn,” Richard said. My mother didn’t scowl or object to his cussing. She just told him not to go in the house yet. Daddy kept looking over at him with this glaze in his eyes, like the preacher gets when he talks of God. Then he looked at me, and his eyes changed.

“Emily, don’t just stand there,” he said. He handed me the thermos and I took it inside.

Richard was fluffed up like a peacock for days afterwards. We ate the meat; we put the antlers on the wall. Everyone was proud of him. Still, I thought his caring the detail around was too much.

“You’re just jealous,” he said. I denied it at the time. But now, looking back on it, I guess I was.

The thing I can’t put straight is that I did everything I was supposed to do. It wasn’t my fault. I went through nine months of no alcohol, no sugar, no cold medicine, no cigarettes. Not even one goddamned aspirin. I even left smoke-filled room so that my baby would have a decent chance in life. I did everything they told me. Gained weight. Ate right. Took vitamins. I got that for my child, something I would do for no one else. I wanted it, new it was right, filter growing inside and made myself into a perfect vessel. I did all of that.

They say in this life that you pay for everything, but I can’t figure what it was I was paying for when she died. I must have done something awful, something I don’t remember.

That’s one way I look at it.

Another way I look at it is that I have paid in advance for some horrible crime. I have a free ticket coming. I have a lifetime of sins to commit in exchange for what I paid. This is the way I prefer to think of it.

John finally says he can’t miss anymore work. He calls his sister Julie to stay with me, but she can’t be here until noon.

“Will you be alright until twelve?” he stands in the shards of light that penetrate the big front window. He leans closer to me, takes his hand out of his suit pocket. He looks important, when really he is only a salesman.

“Yes,” I say. I try to smile because I want him to leave me alone. He kisses my fore head, goes to the doorway, looks back at me, sighs, then leaves. I get up and watch the car pull out of the driveway, inch, it seems, down that long stretch of road out of the cul-de-sac. I watched until I can’t see it anymore. Then I go into the basement and get the gun and the bullets.

I imagine it’s the thrill a mass murderer is addicted to. He chooses someone, anyone, then he decides: I will let this one live; I will cause this one to die. He must think of them as objects which he will turn off, permanently. He must feel like God through it all, or like he has some great purpose which he has fulfilled. I’m just curious. These are things I’ve never used to talk about. People would have thought I was crazy.

When Philip turned eighteen he went to war. We were worried all the time he might be shot. I envision him lying in a field somewhere, bloody, his cold eyes staring out. Mama sat in the same chair night after night writing letters to her oldest son. I wrote at first, but after a while I couldn’t think of anything more to say.

It was the not knowing that made each day seem like wading through thick fog.

I was seventeen when he came home we were complete again a family. He moved back into his room, next to mine.

At night he talked in his sleep, swearing and shouting names, saying things I’ve never heard before. He made it hard to sleep at night. One night I got up, went to his door and knocked on it. He didn’t answer. I cracked the door, just a little. When I looked him, he sat up and lifted his arms like he was going to shoot me. His face was mean, hard. You pulled the trigger, then woke up. He looked at me and lowered his empty arms. “Who are you?” he said.

I shuttered. I had always thought it would be hard to kill a man, but Philip had done it. Lots of times. After that I had dreams about soldiers blasting me away. At first I was helpless: running, falling, stumbling through vines, my heart pounding, trying not to breathe. I could hear the steps behind me, see the barrel of the gun. Then, in later dreams, I would find a weapon in the leaves and wake with relief.

We never talked about the war with Philip, and he never talked about it. A lot of people said we were sure lucky to get him back in one piece.

There was the boy I dated in high school senior year. He was an athlete, handsome and strong. Real genuine, not big-headed like a lot of boys. He was the lead in the school musical and I have a small part and we fell in love. At first sight, he said. I tried to pass it off. You’re probably not really in love, I said. Not yet. But we can see what happens. I have always been shy of romantic notions.

But it was loved, at least a kind you have in high school. We went to the prom and we drank our first beers and we necked on back seats. He had bony hands, red, long, slender fingers that were not too strong nor too gentle. He couldn’t read music, and I played the hard parts of songs on the piano for him over and over.

We broke up. It was my fault. A college guy asked me out and I went. It was a stupid thing to do and I regretted it. Every day I put notes in his locker. Please call me. Let’s get back together. I know I made a mistake. But he had a new girl by then. When I asked him if he gotten my notes he always said yes. That was all. Yes.

It was a teenage girl’s nightmare. I had screwed up. I have lost one of the nicest boys in high school. It seemed like the end of the world.

Then he shot himself.

They told me at school. My insides wouldn’t stop shaking; I threw up four times. The hardest thing to believe was that he would never grow up. He would never become. I imagined him in the coffin in the ground, decomposing. I force myself to see it, the worms eating, the skull showing more and more. The stench. I tried to go on, did my homework and cried, ate dinner and cried. The world had cracked. My mother could do nothing but stand beside me and press my cheek against her shoulder. My father didn’t know what to do.

And I thought, did he put the muzzle to his head knowing the mess there would be afterwards? Was he thinking of me at the end? What about my notes in his locker? People asked, why? I felt like I knew. My finger had pulled the trigger; I was to blame.

Then I dreamed about him. He was alive again, and I felt deceived. “You didn’t do it,” I said. He just looked at me. He was thinner, sadder, older. He asked if I wanted to his apartment. I looked around—there were no boxes packed, no signs of moving. “You don’t want it?” I asked. “I won’t need it,” he said. Then I saw the gun on the dust, and the lucky had, and I knew you was going to do it again. His face was decisive, resigned, and there was nothing I could do stop him.

I woke. I felt ashamed. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was for thinking I had played apart. For taking credit. What he didn’t took a lot of guts, and he did it by himself. He saw that he had the power. He saw that he had the final say. He chose. I had nothing to do with it.

I look at the gun in the hard sunlight. It still clean and smooth, but scratched now, worn-in. I rub my hand along the oiled barrel, lifted to my shoulder, lower, lift again. I pick up one of the bullets and look at it. It’s cold and heavy and my hand. The day feel slow and too-bright, like slow-motion. I take the gun and the one bullet into the yard with me. I take the chair, too, and set it on the grass beside some gnarled flowers. It’s mid-morning. People are either at work or running errands or fiddling in their houses.

I sit down and lean my head back; the sun slaps my face. The sky is dark blue, the day already August-hot.

I know exactly what to do. I have never done it, but I have watch the men in my family caressed their guns hundred times.

I pull back the bolt, insert the bullet, close the gap. I lift the rifle to my shoulder and look down the site. For a while I just look at things: a car passing on the main road, a squirrel, the knot of a tree. Than the woman across the street comes out with her daughter, and I aim at them. The woman doesn’t see me, seems only to see what is close to her, immediate. I look down the sites of the little girls standing in the driveway with a yellow dress on, all legs.

I feel the trigger tease my finger. I think of my own daughter. Her skin was so thin, like rice paper, light onion skin, like he could peel it back and reveal her organs. Her fingers were tiny and strong. Nothing man-made could be that perfect. When she was born, I wanted nothing but to look at her: her fawn-colored eyes, glassy, mirroring me; her tiny nose, her mouth, her tongue, her ears, her hair. It was incredible that I had made this. Such a simple thing, such animal things our bodies do; but so amazing. And I thought this is I lay there holding my daughter for the first time, but knowing her more than I ever knew anything else in my life; I thought, how can anyone doubt there is a God?

Now, I doubt. Through the first hours of her life I believed, but after the consultations, the surgeries, after weeks of doctors and tests and machines and tubes, I doubt. Did I fail her? Or did God fail me?

One lousy gene, one weak link, one half for me and one from John, and this: after nine months of giving life so carefully, it is gone an instant.

I rubbed the cold metal of the rifle and lift it again. I am in the car this time, follow it as it backs from the driveway and departs. I am at Mrs. Nelson’s head which I see through her kitchen window. I am at for a long time. She is washing dishes. Wash, rinse, stack.

I think: she lives. I lower the rifle. I feel clever, powerful. I feel that Mr. Nelson should be grateful to me.

I would have been grateful to the doctors. I don’t believe they did everything— they didn’t hold her in their arms and see her open her mouth for more air and field frustration at the limits of giving. They didn’t hold their breasts to her and watch her lips want to suck but fall away because she was too sick. They didn’t carry her in a pocket below their stomachs for nine months. They didn’t do this, and how could they know?

I held my very own baby and watched her take her last breath and I couldn’t do anything about it. I saw the last heave of her chest, felt the flesh stop, smelled the air change. I laid her on the hospital bed, and, with the nurses trying to hold me away, I pushed on her chest again and again. Again. Again. Her arms flew up and down on the bed beside her and her eyes were open. But they couldn’t see, they would never see a tree or the sun or young deer with antlers as long as its face. There was nothing I could do, a nothing so enormous that I can’t even see through anymore. I see the eyes in my dreams, detached, floating together in a milk-white liquid.

Julie drives up and then drives away, and John comes, and the police, and they stand the other end of my rifle and talk to me. I don’t hear what they are saying. I keep thinking: this one lives, this one lives, this one lives. Then the air seems to go white, hot, and I hear John’s voice above the soft buzz. He’s crying, and there’s nothing I can do. My body is sore, heavy. My breast still ache from the chains. They have not yet learned motherhood.

“I love you,” he says. I see him now, and hold my finger tight against the hot trigger. I just begun, aim at his heart. I look him down the sites for along time. John: husband, lover, friend, salesman, father of my child, carrier of bad genes. There seems to be a voice weeping far away in my mind, but I don’t listen to it. Instead, I decide. I choose. I think: he lives. Put the gun down on the soft grass and the bodies rush at me. I ignore them. I look up, and see how far away the sky is, and hear her name resounding in my ears.

PJ Woodside (George Mason University, MFA 1989) is now a filmmaker and teacher residing in western Kentucky with her husband Jude Roy (also George Mason University, MFA 1989) and son, Lawrence Roy. Their daughter, Jessie Roy, who was born during the couple’s stay at GMU, holds an MFA from Syracuse University and resides in Chicago with her wife, Whitney Pow. After many years of writing, acting, and directing in various places, Woodside joined up with co-producer Steve Hudgins and began making films with Big Biting Pig Productions. They recently released FRANCES STEIN, which Woodside both wrote and directed.You can find them on www.bigbitingpigproductions.com as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find Woodside’s musings about filmmaking at her archived blog, “This Old Bitch Makes Horror Flicks,” on WordPress.

From issue 17.3/4, summer 1988
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