Devil’s Lake

Jane Carman: Baby Stories

STORY 1: A baby is born. It is born inside out, the heart flutters beyond its cage, intestines slithering past their walls, spiraling around the body, circling the legs. The little heart beats. The parents see the heart beat, cannot look at the face until the heart stops. The face is pink, then gray and blue. They bury the baby in a cedar box beneath an oak tree. Every day for thirty-one years, the mother swears she sees the baby’s eye or toe or face in the angles and curves of the tree’s bark. Every day for thirty-one years, the father works. For a few years, he pretends not to think about the baby. After that, he believes he does not think about the baby. Every day for thirty-one years, the parents do not speak of the baby, of the incident. Friends who ask are told it was a false pregnancy. There are no more babies because there is no more sex.

STORY 2: There is a baby born and nobody wants her. She is, after all, a girl. She is carried to the side of the river and tossed away. She cries when her skin smacks against the cold, gray water, but the cries do not last. As she floats away, there are little fish searching for soft eyes and flesh. There are large fish tasting for baby. Once she hits the water, she feels nothing. They say babies aren’t human until they are dressed. This baby never wore clothes.

STORY 3: There is a baby born. In the beginning she belongs to one father or another and one mother. The first father tells the second father that he can keep the baby because the first father doesn’t have enough time or money or breast milk to support the baby. Since the second father possesses the mother (and therefore the breast milk) and because he owns 400 acres of cropland, he should have the baby. So the second father takes the baby, not knowing who she truly belonged to. He calls her his.

STORY 4: There is a baby born to a mother who doesn’t really need a baby to keep her man. She places the baby in a plastic basket (because she cannot find her nice wicker basket) and sets that basket on a fencepost on a dirt road. The mother selects that particular fence post because there are two good geese at the bottom to guard the baby and because the road is isolated enough that nobody will see her dump the baby but not too remote, so somebody might find the baby with the intention of keeping it. There is also a creek, tall grass, and a lot of wild berries in the area, so the baby, when it learns to pick berries and eat grass, will have plenty to eat. A lot of individuals claim this baby.

STORY 5: A babyless mother on a Harley sees an infant checkered with sunburn, covered in dust, sitting on a roadside in a patch of lilies and cattails. The babyless mother scoops up the baby and puts it on the Harley’s gas tank. Together, the two ride until the babyless mother and the motherless baby are lulled into a state of near sleep by the good vibrations of the Harley. Eventually, the baby rolls off of the gas tank into a new patch of lilies. Oblivious to what is happening, the babyless mother remains babyless when she cannot remember whether or not she had a baby for a few hundred miles or if it was the lack of sleep and her tendency to eat horseweeds that had her only thinking she had a real baby and was no longer babyless. For the rest of her life, the babyless mother sends silent prayers and incantations to the once hers baby. The sounds of the babyless mother morph and grow as they reach the baby who is, eventually, no longer a baby.

STORY 6: There is really no such thing as a baby.

STORY 7: A father who loves his baby for reasons he cannot understand (because he has never met the baby but can only imagine what it is like to have a baby), can only imagine that the baby must love him back, because that is what babies do. This father thinks about his baby, the same baby that he gave to another man. As he thinks about the baby, new stories begin to form in his mind. He pictures himself washing the baby, feeding and watering it. He imagines dressing it for school, watching it ride away on the school bus wearing clothes he made from sheep and goat skins. He imagines the baby wearing a feed cap he found at the grain elevator. He imagines making fishing poles out of branches from an old oak tree and fishing for crappies and bluegills, filleting the fish, and having cookouts behind the house where he imagines the baby will grow strong from eating mutton and potatoes and fish and dirt. He imagines how tough the baby will be from wrestling hogs to the ground and chasing geese. He imagines the baby living with him forever, forever letting him hold and feed it.

STORY 8: Ladies who find themselves pregnant out of wedlock should make sure the baby is either not born (by eating controlled amounts of rat poison or by drinking castor oil or by having somebody jump on the prospective mother’s stomach or by use of a stick aimed at the problem), or go into hiding for a long enough period to have the baby to be discarded (in a river, feed to livestock, or abandon in a wooded area) or left on the doorstep of a church very early on a Sunday morning.

STORY 9: Possible fathers of babies produced out of wedlock should pay off the mother or enter into an undetermined time of emphatic denial. Of course, there is nothing to be ashamed of. As a man, one has certain needs that have to be fulfilled.

STORY 10: A baby is born to a married mother and father. This, in itself, is nothing extraordinary. In fact, this is how babies are supposed to be born. This baby lives with the mother and father for nearly nine long years, doing baby things and getting the sort of attention babies crave, things like: food and water, clothing, a temperature controlled climate of approximately sixty degrees in the winter and eighty-five in the summer. The baby is held an average of 7.3 times a day through the age of nine months, 6.77 times a day from nine months to seventeen months, at which time the holding is decreased to 4.85 times a day for the baby’s own good. By the time of the baby’s third birthday, when there is a cake and a father wearing a clown wig, the frequency of being held graduates to 0.4 times per day. Being mature, the baby learns to do simple chores and is ready to be on its own for hours at a time by the age of 5.129, and, by the age of 8.56, the house smells too much of mature baby and the mother has to leave in search of herself, a self that is lost almost immediately after the birth of the baby, a self that is particularly slippery and elusive for the mother has been searching for this self for most of her life (or at least since the age of 8.56). Shortly after, the father understands the depth of the baby’s self-sufficiency and spends weeks at a time at meetings and conventions or at the homes of girlfriends, the baby learns to make both toast and omelettes, how to collect eggs and milk from the farm animals, and berries and vegetables from the garden. Eventually, the baby, understanding how mature it really is, leaves the home in search of a job and a dog with which it can share leftovers.

STORY 11: An abandoned baby is found in a trash barrel. This happens in 2002 in St. Petersburg, Florida. The baby is abandoned by a twenty-four year-old mother who is later charged with attempted murder. Had she left the infant at a fire station, police department, or doctor’s office (it is not clear whether this office has to be that of a medical doctor), there would have been no charges filed. Five years prior to this incident a baby is found under a stairwell and later adopted. The same year a fifteen year-old can’t tolerate the grief or depression that sometimes accompanies the birth of a baby out of wedlock or the birth of a baby to a teenager, a teenager who might be called a whore or a slut or a bitch or a worthless piece of shit that should have been aborted or murdered or taught a lesson through rape or another form of physical pedagogy. A year later (and having learned a lesson about how abandoned babies might be discovered), a sixteen year-old places her newborn in a garbage bag before dropping it in a shed behind her house. This baby is not adopted. Two years before a baby is abandoned in a trash barrel by a twenty-four year-old mother, a baby is found alive under a tree at a hospital. Since there must be a doctor’s office in the vicinity, it is likely that the mother, if found, will be able to declare amnesty.

STORY 12: In 2008 an eighteen year-old man is charged with raping a five month-old baby girl while her mother is in class at the local high school. The baby (who requires surgery and cries hard enough to either vomit or overfill her lungs with melancholy) might have been crying too loud for the man to tolerate or the man might have been on drugs or drunk or the baby might have been asking for it or the man might have just needed to settle a primal need to dominate or get off. A century earlier a father rapes a ten month-old daughter who bleeds to death and is placed (along with several rocks and fathers) in a burlap sack and sent to the bottom of a river that flows into the Mississippi and then into the Gulf of Mexico. It is unclear how far the body, bricks, burlap, or flowers travel before being consumed by fish or mud.

STORY 13: A baby is born dead, the cord wrapped around the neck. Two days earlier, the mother complains of a series of violent movements in her womb and calls the doctor who says that there is absolutely nothing to worry about and to stop overreacting and that he will see her at her next appointment and that the baby will be still for a few hours to a day before it is born, which it is. The baby is still, and it is born.