A Bit of Baby Medicine

A BIT OF BABY MEDICINE

by Jessie Loyer

Content Warnings: Pregnancy Loss, Cancer, Death

Your grandmother steps into pawātamowaskīhk and asks when you're going to be pregnant, not unkindly. She's wearing your brother's Blue Jays jacket and you recall that you saw him put a small Blue Jays toy in the casket, tucked right under her armpit. Her sleeve hid it from view. She's walking in the bush, eating chokecherries off the branch. She spits out the seeds, clean, by your feet. "Maybe they'll grow nicely here," she says. As you watch, the seed breaks open and starts to grow little leaves, reaching for the sun. "Can you remember," she says, "when you came to visit me in the city?"

You do. She was still. Sunken into the bed. You had never ever seen her still. Even when you shared a bed with her, she twisted and farted and grunted all night. Snored so loud. Flung her legs and arms around. 

Her sister had laughed when you told that story: "That's why I woke up with bruises every morning!" She knew exactly what you meant; the two had shared a bed as girls. "That's why, to this day, I send my men home! No bruises!" Her sister laughed. No bruises. 

But in that hospital, she was still and covered with bruises. Her skinny arms purple at the inner elbow, big patches of greens and blues, day-old blooms shot through with wriggling reds. She lay in the bed, so, so still. 

It came so fast; or maybe it was achingly slow but long endured, held in a body familiar with swallowing pain. You don't know how long she had cancer. She hated telling people. “They give me their sad clown face,” she said once, pulling her mouth down with her fingers. No single person knew all the details. She dispensed the details of her cancer like doses, little bits of information entrusted to different people. And she never stopped moving. You need quiet and calm to see someone’s small aching parts; she hid them with her constant fluttering.

You remember how her anxious energy fueled her love of dancing. Champion jigger. She won the old-timer’s categories pretty frequently. Fancy stepper. Even as she aged, she still could go for six changes. She liked the way the youth jigged, lots of thunder and lightning. She'd been taught the old way, feet shuffling fast under a calm torso, but she'd laugh and clap when she saw the flashiness of the teen categories at fiddle jams. "I like their style," she'd say, clapping as she hooted and hollered at them. "Maybe I could join them Sagkeeng boys, eh? Guest star!" 

She pauses and looks at you expectantly, hands on hips. "Well?" You shake your head slightly and shrug at her, confused. She grins. "You gonna dance with me, then?" So you start to jig, your feet shuffling a tune through the leaves on the ground. Turns out you're a better dancer in pawātamowaskīhk with its slippery physics, never tripped up by your heavy feet on those quick changes. Never winded.

Your grandmother hooks her arm through your elbow and fixes your jacket. You notice she has pussy willows woven into her hair and her skin has a green tint. "I'm the muskeg" she says to your questioning eye, as though that explains it all. "Lots of good medicine in the muskeg. My favourite time is when it all starts to wake up again. So exciting! All the plants come back to visit. The frogs sing to me." The creases around her eyes deepen.

"Are you in heaven?" you ask. You feel stupid.

Her head snaps back as she laughs and laughs. She claps her hands. "Heaven? Heaven! My girl!" She does a little shake of her shoulders, the Blue Jays jacket shimmying. She raises her eyebrows quickly, once, twice. She smiles wide, and you see chokecherry skins on her teeth. "Maybe, I suppose, something like that."

"I have to show you something," she says conspiratorially. She has always been a granny of secrets. Her house had lots of secrets too, little drawers of treasures tucked away, or old stories she would only air out at the right time. You once overheard her tell a wild tall tale to her school friend, as you washed dishes in another room, about the way that she had watched a girl fly away from the school. A group of magpies had picked the little girl up by the arms of her dress and carried her off. "Up, up, up into the sky, into the bush," you heard her say. 

"Big liar," you whispered to yourself as you scrubbed the pan hard, paused, and let the soapy water slide back into the sink. You let out a long breath. You didn't know why people let her go on and on.

But her school friend said, "I'll never forget it. I wish they'd befriended me too," in a wondering, airy voice.

•••

Your grandmother motions you toward a little plant. You don't recognize it. "It looks a bit different where you are," she says in a reassuring tone.

"What is it?" you ask. 

Her face scrunches and she searches for the word, tapping her chin as she thinks. "Baby medicine," she finally says and pinches your arm.

She wanted to be a cāpān so badly. When you found out you were pregnant, you called her first. Over the phone, you heard a heavy thud, some swishing sound, then strange silence. "Are you there?" you asked into the quiet. A moment passed. Then there was a clatter and her voice crowed loudly, "Oh, sorry, I dropped the phone, I was doing my baby dance of happiness!" You were twenty-one. You would have had the baby when you turned twenty-two. But that baby. That baby's heart didn't get shaped right in your body. 

"I seen her," she says, off-hand, "She has our family's eyes." 

"...My baby?" you ask. She nods. Your chest aches. You can feel your heartbeat dance in your ears. Can a heart bear this? Your dead baby. Your dead grandmother. 

"There are lots of babies. It's so much fun," she says breezily and brushes the wet from your eyes. "But this? This is for new babies."

The plant could only be found in pawātamowaskīhk, purple leaves shot through with yellows and greens that your eye has never seen. Glowing, pulsing with light. She picks one of the leaves and rolls it between her fingers. "Smell," she demands and holds it to your nose. It smells like a warm afternoon sun in the spring, when the ground is just waking up. It smells like pine tar and red clay. It smells like laughter. "I'll make it into a tea for you," she says, and the cup is in your hands. "Drink!"

"Is this gonna make me pregnant?" you ask. She laughs and laughs and laughs. Her mouth is wide with delight. You smile too, at your absurd question. You feel dull here, like you can't quite grasp the edge of this place. Maybe it was a joke. A tea, making someone pregnant. Your grandmother wipes a tear from her eyes and says, "Oh, probably!"

She was there in the hospital when you lost the baby, bustling around, tucking in your blanket, tidying the chairs. She'd eat one thing off your tray each meal, usually the cottage cheese or an orange. She didn’t eat much, and in town, her food was usually scavenged from someone else’s meal, so she didn’t have to waste money. "We'll see that wee one again," she whispered as she kissed your forehead. The pain was everywhere, but mostly it weighed your head down and your sinuses hurt from crying.

You had felt the baby stop moving. You had known. You had to give back the baby clothes and the crib and the diapers that people had dropped off. But she had done most of the work for you, had known you couldn't handle the awful sympathy of small talk. To be pregnant and then, suddenly, not pregnant, but not a mom, either. Unrealized hopes your heart only began to articulate once out of reach. And for her, suddenly not a cāpān, but persistently a grandmother.

"This one will be loved, loved so much!" She crows and taps your belly. "But you name this one after me. You give them a name that belongs to the muskeg." You nod. Are you pregnant? You reach down and feel your belly, swollen and stretched.

She leads you to a soft mossy area. You start to go into labour, but there's no pain, just suddenly a rush of liquid and then, a baby. You look at your grandmother in surprise. She's grinning and petting your hair. You can't see the baby's face, but you feel her breath push up her little chest. "A sister for the first one that left, I think," says your grandmother.

Your grandmother holds the baby, coos at her, kisses her so many times, kisses you so many times, and then bustles around. "Gotta go!" she shouts brightly, and she sort of melts into the muskeg. Already? No. It's too soon. Too quick! You forgot to ask her so many things.

•••

When you had come into the city to see your grandmother, you went in with a mental checklist. Ask her about that one story where her sister drove her to Toronto to play ball, when she had seen the Jays. Ask her when the willow bark is right to make whistles. Ask her what she wants at the end, when it comes. Ask her about what really happened at that school. But when you arrived, she was already too still. Quiet. There were no meal trays to steal oranges off; her body was being nourished by a tube. Her eyelids fluttered occasionally, but she was still. It came too soon and not the way you imagined, with everything already so decided. The room was never empty, as people stood around the bed and prayed. Her sister came and held her hand and cried and told her she was cheap for leaving her like this. You had to look away; you couldn't bear it at that moment, one sister leaving another. You saw their arms entwined on the bed, one plump, strong, and brown, the other stringy, pale, bruised. It looked like the line between life and death.

You look out at the muskeg, the soft swaying of the sunlight, the trees breaking through the moss, just starting to change colour. She made this pawātamowaskīhk for you, a beautiful place. You have a baby in your arms, and the one who left is with your grandmother. She's ok and you're ok. No. No, that’s not quite it. What’s true is that it might be possible that you will eventually be ok.

•••

When you wake up from the dream, you have no baby in your arms, but you don’t feel as weighed down by the big horrible sad. These days, there is no moment where it is absent, but the sadness is re-organized, put into a small cabinet for now. You look out the bedroom window and notice the way the leaves are starting to bud. You realize you can smell the earth. It's spring, and she visited you. And maybe, a baby will too.