The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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The baby is two weeks overdue, a sign of intelligence. It prefers the safety of further percolation instead of expulsion into the world of light and air, sorrow and joy. Lately it has been still, grown too large for its space. Eita’s belly is an immense full moon, her navel a smudge pulled inside out. Her lovely breasts rest high on her belly. She can barely walk.

This is the last day of waiting. I slept three hours last night, anesthetized by a half-pint of bourbon. I suffer no hangover this morning, only a wide-eyed dread of a stillbirth, There is no reason to think this way; Rita is in fine health. She has not broken her ban on caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. I feel odd for leaving her every morning but she urges me out of the house. The only time she gets full rest is when I’m gone. A faint snow filters through the sky. Mist in the trees is actually chimney smoke, held to the earth by impending weather.

The riverbank is a crouching porcupine, bare tree limbs quilling the sky. A pin oak hit by lightning hangs at a right angle like a jack-in-the-pulpit. I crouch within the overhang, a pipeless Pan, Adam before Lilith, a druid needing no specific oak. Tiny beads of snow settle into the folds of cloth at my elbow. The wilderness accepts me as an extension of itself, an arm that knows its hand. I become as old and cold as all the silent trees along the river’s edge, accepting snow.

Unless birth occurs today, the hospital will induce Rita’s labor tomorrow. Such a timetable is usually reserved for jobs and sporting events. Only war and birth erupt on their own, preemptive strikes of broken water and treaties.

Wind on the surface makes the river appear to flow backwards. I cup my hands and emit the barred owl’s call. One answers and I don’t respond, satisfied with sharing the dawn. The final countdown has begun. We are like a stakeout team breaking surveillance to catch the baby in the act.

I fear the loss of independence although I didn’t do so well alone. What passed for adventure was despair, my courage actually a refusal to acknowledge fear. This arrangement of safety ends tomorrow. I will learn the vocabulary of a father — when you get older, maybe later, ask your mother.

Below the oak lies the regurgitated gray pellet of an owl. After eating its prey whole, an owl expels the bones and fur in a tidy package! This one is very hard, which means it’s old. I break it open to find the flat skull of a baby snake. As a child, I was scared of snakes and I intend to teach my kid otherwise. Children are only afraid of what their parents fear, that and the parents themselves.

Beside me the river moves south to join the Cedar, pushing toward the Mississippi, flowing to the Gulf. Everything runs to the Gulf. Rita has lightened. The baby’s head has wedged into the pelvic exit. Tomorrow the baby will join the earth as a trickling creek. We prepared ourselves four weeks ago in case the baby came early. Already it has fooled its folks.

I leave the woods and cross the yard to check on the boat. Months back, I pulled it into the yard to save it from the crush of ice. The boat looks bigger on land than in the water. I sit on the middle seat. Woodsmoke pushes down, swirling around me, the sign of a coming storm. The raw cry of a crow kills the silence, drawing my attention. An eagle stands on one leg in a tree, holding a bloody fish in its other claw, darting its head to rip through the scales. Crows land in nearby boughs as if paying homage to the superior hunter. They remind me of children trying to learn, and it occurs to me that fathers always seem to be of a different species.

I stay as long as I can against the cold. Tree limbs curve to the earth beneath the weight of snow. Every second brings me closer to fatherhood. I’m waiting in a boat on land, surrounded by smoke that does not rise. The river is flowing upstream.