Madeleine Gallo
When Ernest came home cradling the egg in his big hands, Mary knew he was up to something. She estimated the egg to be about three inches in length; the density, she found when her smiling husband placed it into her hold, was no more than a light pressure on her palms. The color of it was coffee oversaturated with milk—dirty beige with darker speckles here and there that coalesced into an opaque brownness on the fat bottom.
“Pretty egg, huh? Just like your favorite,” Ernest said with a smile, tapping her arm with his index finger the way he did when he was nervous. “The birds you like, I mean.”
“Loons,” Mary helped him, considering the cool, slightly damp egg in her hands. Ernest had left for fishing no more than twenty minutes ago and she had come to the porch to read magazines and then roll them into weapons to swat the mosquito hawks off her shoulders and ankles while she waited for him. She hadn’t expected the bird egg and wondered if Ernest had gone hunting for one specifically like this after she had complained to him last night that Mississippian mornings were not quite as resonant as Alaskan ones.
“You like it?” Ernest pointed his head toward the egg. “Cute little thing, right?”
“It won’t hatch like this,” she muttered, running her fingers over the surface. “You just found it out in the swamp?”
“Just lying there all by itself,” he sighed, nodding. “Looked around for a bit but couldn’t find traces of a nest or nothing. Worried me to see it alone, no matter what happens. Thought you might like to have it, since you liked them birds at Redheart so much.”
Mary nodded, petting the tips of the egg, the sides. She felt sorry for the thing, knowing it was lost and that whatever was inside of it was most likely already dead. It would have been better to leave it out there, she thought. Give the mother a chance to find it and accept it, if she hadn’t already. Let her have a proper mourning. Mary knew there had to be some way to start.
* * *
In Alaska, the air conditioner had been unnecessary even in July, but what kept Mary up in the South was not the oppressive heat that sat on her thighs for all hours of the night like an insistent toddler without letting up. No, it was the underlying silence that announced itself with the ritualistic death of the air conditioner each sunrise. Redheart, the cabin they had rented for a year because Mary had wanted Marjorie to be born in a beautiful and new place, sat bundled between shrubs, near enough Kenai Lake so that every morning Mary had greeted the white light of daybreak to the noisy tremolo of the loons.
She loved to lie in bed and listen to them while Ernest went out to cut wood during work hours, but Mary was heavy-pregnant at the time, the shape of her more outward than side-to-side, and Ernest never left her alone too long.
Evenings they went out together, Ernest pulling the rental truck up right to the door so he could lift her into the passenger seat. He took her to the clearing between trees at the edge of the lake where they leaned against one another in the car, watching the green-blue line of the water. Sometimes the loons would row by them in small groups, and Mary was delighted whenever a black-headed mother would pass, towing one or two chicks on her back.
“Lookit that, Marjorie. Would you like mama to carry you like that?” she would tease her bump, rubbing the skin that sheltered the girl growing inside of her. At that point, she still could feel her daughter’s every shift and kick. Ernest would join in petting the curve of her with a tender hand, his fingers meditating on the fullness while the loons sailed.
* * *
Once Mary was done bundling hand towels from the bathroom into a makeshift nest, she cushioned the spotted egg into the vacant space she had left in the center. Ernest watched from the mattress when she aimed their small table lamp so its bulb pointed downward onto the egg.
“Don’t like the look of it being cold,” he agreed.
“You know it’s no loon,” she told him.
“Ain’t no loons in Mississippi,” he said with a slow nod. “But it looks close to it, don’t it?”
He was right. Mary angled the egg so the tip of it reflected the orb of light from the lamp. Once, picking their way through the foliage against the lake, Ernest had stumbled across a small ledge of straw and twigs and nearly missed breaking two eggs with his boot. Mary had wanted a photograph of the water mirroring the sky to show Marjorie the place where she had been born, but directed her camera at the brown, freckled, almost-broken eggs instead.
“Better hurry it up,” Ernest had warned her. Mary thought too that the mother must be nearby, and they were running the risk of a good attacking, but she was mesmerized by the pair of eggs, the straw weeded up around them and between them. She hoped the inside of her was as warm and comfortable as this small home. She hoped Marjorie was listening to her voice the way these birds must sleep inside their shells, lullabied to sleep by the long, looming call of their mothers on the water.
Now, watching the unfamiliar egg that didn’t belong to a loon and certainly didn’t belong to her either, Mary wished she had kept the photograph from Alaska. But everything from Redheart was gone now. “Wish we’d kept a thing or two,” she murmured, on her haunches to get a better view of the egg on the bedside table. “From Redheart.”
“Well then,” Ernest said, drawing in a breath. Sitting up straighter. She knew he was surprised to hear her say it, seeing how she had been set on tossing out every last reminder of Redheart in the two years that had passed since then. “No use in hurting over it forever. Might be nice for us to keep the egg a few days.”
Mary nodded.
* * *
Ernest cut wood for a living and spent many hours hacking at trees or hauling them someplace else in his big truck, leaving Mary enough room to build a connection with the egg. For the first time, she took out the knitted baby pouch her mother had made for her after she had announced her pregnancy. Before she’d gone to Alaska. She struggled with the soft pink and white article for a few moments before securing it in place around her neck and back. The egg weighed very little, and anyone looking at her might think she was carrying nothing.
Each morning for nearly a week, Mary started from one of the corners of their small gray house and went far into the trees with the egg, pointing out all that she saw, just as she had hoped to do with Marjorie one day. She would have taught Marjorie everything she knew, everything her mother once had shown her.
“That’s the bald cypress,” she said. “And that’s a beech.” Sometimes she spotted a copperhead on the roots and backed off, whispering to the egg as if the snake were listening. “Now, don’t go near that one. He’s real mean, will bite you good,” she warned, feeling like a real mother.
Marjorie would have been a quick, smart girl. She’d know the name of every living thing that surrounded her. When to put up a fight and when to make her escape—she’d already known, that last one, even without Mary’s help. That’s what Ernest had told her when the movements ceased in Mary’s belly, when Marjorie’s adamant kicks weakened and stopped waking her up. The sudden calm gave way to pain.
“Somethin’ in her knew to give it up. All that hurt she was causing her mama at the end. Wasn’t in her nature—” Ernest paused, something under his eyelids fluttering. “But look, Mary. Look how pretty,” he had said when they were offered their daughter into their arms at the same Alaskan hospital where they first saw the determining ultrasound image, a place with green walls.
For the first thirty minutes, Marjorie had been as warm and soft under their fingers as a flower petal in the sun. So still, but like she was alive. The nurses warned them that soon she would lose her heat and her color, but Mary wanted to hold her daughter through all the temperatures and shades this world had to offer her. And so she had, her arms looped together with Ernest’s like a bird’s nest to hold their daughter while Marjorie’s skin slackened and deepened to robin’s egg blue.
“She looks like you,” Ernest kept saying. “Lookit her, Mary. Beautiful. We made her.”
“Yes,” Mary repeated until the time came to hand away Marjorie. She kept kissing and reaching until Ernest folded her fingers back against her palms, stroking her as he’d done with their daughter. Mary’s cramps subsided soon after. The bleeding was over, all of it over except for the leftover bloating inside of her, the nothingness it signified. An empty bassinet.
“I want to go home,” said Mary on the drive back to the cabin. The morning was so young that the sky was still black-capped like a loon.
“Let’s go,” said Ernest.
* * *
On the last day of carrying the bird’s egg, Mary’s shoulders and forearms were nearly bleeding from sunburn and the egg was beginning to smell bad inside the baby pouch. Ernest found her on the porch with the pouch still on and the stinking egg inside of it. She hadn’t expected him home before sundown and she felt her cheeks redden when he saw her with the pouch. His angular face became soft, his shoulders sloping.
For a long time, they stood in the golden triangle of light the sun cast over the porch, ignoring the mosquitoes that ravaged their cheeks and necks. Mary felt Ernest’s splinter-ragged thumb wiping at her cheek before she felt her tears.
“We oughta put her to rest now,” he said.
“It’s what the mama would want,” Mary agreed.
Their hands stuck together with sweat as Ernest led Mary to the place where he first had discovered the egg—a smaller mire separated from the larger cypress swamp surrounding their home and the few others down their road. The barrier between the two marshlands was a curtain of low-hanging boughs and vines that people rarely crossed. Mary recalled how Ernest had told her he had come here fishing, but there was no way, not with the thick mud water. No good trees for cutting, either. All the bark was wet and peeling.
“It’s a good place out here,” he said once they stopped and stood looking at the green-brown line of mud, as if listening in on her thoughts. “To just be. I like to come out and think sometimes. Think ‘bout Marjorie, how far we got along with her. So close. I know that girl tried her best. The kind of daddy I coulda been—” His voice thickened and was carried off by a mud dauber.
“You are her daddy,” said Mary, looking at him. His face was heavy and long, the skin sagging in places where it hadn’t before. “You are.” She made herself smile because she wanted to see his face change, to see him smile back. He did, moving his hand from hers to up her arm, and then between her shoulder blades.
Mary lowered to her knees and took the egg from Marjorie’s unused pouch, experiencing the heat of it inside her fingers. The egg was losing its shape, the shell sinking in on the left side and swelling on the right so that it had the distorted appearance of a human heart.
“Think the mama knew something was wrong with it?” she asked, sucking in her breath.
“Don’t think it’s always easy like that,” Ernest answered carefully. His weight remained against her.
“I really wished it was a loon,” Mary muttered, scraping her fingernail into the shell just enough to leave a crescent indent. “I like loons. Can’t ever tell if they’re laughing or crying.”
Ernest and she had disagreed on this point once while their toes froze in the water of Kenai. He knew a loon’s tremolo from the wail, and shuddered listening to the latter. Mary thought she could hear joy and despair in both the syncopated chuckles and the elongated moans. What Marjorie would have thought—they wouldn’t know, but could wonder.
“You know what made this egg, don’t you?” she said, pressing the egg to her chest so she could feel her pulse through it for a moment. “You just didn’t want to tell me.”
“Thought you needed something like this,” said Ernest after a long breath. “Been a while, Mary. Didn’t want you to feel sad it wasn’t how you wanted it to be.”
“This never was a loon,” said Mary. She kissed the top of the egg. The shell was hot and the odor of it tickled the inside of her nose. “This never was.”
“But it was,” came Ernest’s quiet voice. “It was a sandhill crane. It was.”
Mary closed her eyes to imagine the long-legged mother whose body had carried the egg. A mother, not knowing whether her young would hatch or not. A traveling mother who had no choice but to leave her daughter to the grasses, the flowers. There had been sandhill cranes in Alaska too, lots of them, Mary had heard. In Mississippi, they were a hard find, endangered and often straying from their flocks. Often alone.
Ernest touched her hair. Leaning forward, Mary let the crane’s egg roll from her hands down the damp shore. The thick water was quick to separate and make room for it, parting and then settling until the egg and everything inside of it was deep under a blanket of green.
Madeleine Gallo
Madeleine Gallo is a poet who earned her MFA from Hollins University. Her poems can be found in THRUSH Poetry Journal, Rattle, Oyster River Pages, and others. She is a recent Best of the Net nominee. Her debut poetry collection Acorn, Eggshell, Honeycomb is forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press. She currently is the poetry editor for Susurrus: A Literary Arts Magazine of the American South.