Those first days and nights of their life together it was hard to tell who was newborn. Odd would nuzzle and fuss and by purest instinct stretch for Thea’s breast, where he would give suck until he was exhausted. Then he’d fall into a fitful and unsated sleep because Thea’s milk had not come in yet. She would hold him on her belly, swaddled in a blanket, a knit cap on his small and misshapen head, until he’d writhe again, still hungry or hungry again, and she’d put him back to her breast. And despite the new winter seeping through the windows, despite the frost left on the panes each dawn, the child was like a hot stone in her lap. When she was alone, or when Rebekah was there, asleep on the other side of the room, Thea would remove her nightdress and rest her babe’s soft face on the sweat-damp flesh in the crook of her neck.
For four dreamlike days and sleepless nights this continued, the child never really at rest, until the fifth day, when she felt first a tingling and then a weightlessness in her breasts and the nursings that had once lasted an hour lasted fifteen minutes, after which Odd fell into an engorged sleep. Her happiness in those hours, with the contented boy in her arms, was her new religion, their communion her new salvation.
Sitting in her bed under the window, looking out over the isthmus that separated the harbor below her and the cove to the north, looking out over the great lake and her shimmering waters, she thought often of who she used to be. It seemed, in those sleep-deprived daydreams, with her boy on her lap, that the travails of the last year were trifles beside her feelings for Odd. He was her reward for the loneliness she’d endured. This thought filled her with peace. She saw the distance between Hammerfest and Gunflint as the way to this peace and so her regrets and misgivings dissolved in the warmth between them.
Though the look back was clear, the one ahead was dark as the devil’s lair, and thoughts of the easiness of her love inevitably gave way to worries about what would come in that darkness. She had every cent she’d made at the Burnt Wood Camp saved in her purse. Seventy-five dollars in all, though what it amounted to she had no idea. She’d been told that returning to the camp on the Burnt Wood was not possible. She would have known it without having been told. She knew finding a husband would be nearly impossible now, too. She knew, finally, that she could no sooner return to Hammerfest than resurrect her childhood. It was as though the way back had been swallowed by the wakes of the boats that had brought her.
Hosea’s generosity had saved her more than once, but she knew she could not live with him forever. She would not ask for so much. She’d shift her view from the water to the buildings on the Lighthouse Road. Perhaps she could become a shop girl. Or a cook at the Traveler’s Hotel. Perhaps she could even work for Hosea, alongside Rebekah. But where would she live? And how could she take care of her boy while she did any of these things? This last was the question furthest from an answer, the one that cast the darkest pall on her days ahead. It was also the question on which she inevitably turned her thoughts.
She wrote letters to her mother and father, not from a sense of duty but because it spared her any reckoning with the future. Instead of giving them to Hosea to post she folded them and stacked them on the bedside table. She read her Bible without deliberation. She tried to sleep but couldn’t. Her days and nights bleeding into each other, her mind wrestling itself, her only clear thoughts arriving when she studied her boy.
His eyes were not often open, but when she caught their glint she marveled at their blueness. In the daylight they were almost transparent, the color of cold, cold snow. At night, with only the bedside lamp glowing, his eyes looked fathomless and dark. She always wished to see them, so she’d feather his full hair back from his forehead. When he did not stir, she’d bend her lips to his face and kiss each of his sleeping eyes. She’d feel her own eyes glossing over with the tears that came at will and without her even knowing.
When his eyes opened he’d search for her and look intently at her as she’d say, “You’re my beautiful boy.” Her voice would send him back into his blessed sleep. What had he seen, looking up at her? And why could she not stop weeping, with all her joy?
Hosea had begun to wonder the same thing. He’d cosseted her from the hour of Odd’s birth, stopping in her bedroom every morning before he went down to the shop and again each evening before dinner. He’d check her abdomen and feel her forehead and then switch his attention to the babe.
“How’s the wee lad this morning?” Hosea might say, not expecting an answer.
Thea would not even look up.
“Dear me,” Hosea would say, checking the boy’s forehead. “I’m worried about you, Thea.”
Down in the shop, during the late-morning lulls, he was consulting Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Charles Daniel Fox’s Psycho pathology of Hysteria. He’d made a preliminary diagnosis of postpartum melancholia but knew such a diagnosis wasn’t complete. There was no question she cried often, almost incessantly. She talked to herself, he knew from passing her room, and she seemed to have no eagerness to rejoin him and Rebekah at table or in ordinary conversation. She was overly protective of the boy, seemed paranoid, was even twitchy at times. Yet despite these symptoms, he was mystified by what he could only think of as an aura. Though she’d always seemed, in some way or another, angelic, in those first days after Odd was born she literally had a sheen about her, a radiance that as much as lightened the air around her.
When two weeks passed with no change in her aspect — two weeks he’d spent immersed in his books, mulling options for her cure — he decided something had to be done. Before he went downstairs to open the shop he stopped in to Thea’s room.
“Good morning, Thea.”
She adjusted Odd’s cap.
Hosea thumbed the wee boy’s little toes, spoke his baby gibberish, then stood up and looked down at Thea. In his clumsy Norwegian he said, “Has two weeks of rest given you your strength back?”
Thea did not answer.
He continued in Norwegian, “You’ve hardly spoken at all since the child was born. Are you feeling well? Are you happy?”
She turned her attention back to the child, touched his face gently, then looked back at Hosea. “Very happy,” she said.
Hosea stepped forward and knelt at her bedside. He put his hand on her arm. “Join Rebekah and me at supper tonight.”
Thea nodded, smiled.
“Very good!” Hosea said in English now. “Rebekah will prepare a feast.”
And she did, fish soup and buttermilk biscuits, apple strudel for
dessert. Thea came to the table for supper with Odd in her arms. She appeared sleep-starved and nervous, and when Rebekah asked — as she’d been instructed to — if she could hold the boy, Thea shook her head and held him closer.
“Now, Thea, you can’t hold him forever,” Hosea said in Norwegian, his voice jolly, his line rehearsed. “Rebekah wants a turn with the little one.”
“Sleepy,” Thea said in English. “Odd. Sleepy.”
“Okay, child,” Hosea said, his tone full of sympathy.
By the time Rebekah served the strudel, the boy was indeed asleep. Thea held him close while she nibbled on the baked apples, tending constantly to the blanket wrapped around him, to the knit hat he wore on his head.
“I’ve got something for Odd,” Hosea said, setting his empty coffee cup on the saucer. He stood and wiped his mouth with the napkin off his lap. He went into his bedroom and returned a moment later lugging a birch-wood bassinet. He set it down next to Thea. “A place for the boy to sleep,” he said, rearranging the muslin canopy. There was a scalloped skirt hanging under the ticking.
Thea leaned forward, looked into the bassinet, at the plush bedding. She looked doubtful, seemed to be holding the boy closer.
Hosea did not hold much hope she would put the child to bed properly. “You must get some rest. Your humors are not well.” And with those words Hosea left Thea and the boy at the table, carried the bassinet across the flat.
Rebekah stayed up late that night. She trimmed the apothecary with holly and mistletoe, with candles in all the windows and a ten-foot spruce covered in tinsel and strung cranberries. When she came upstairs after midnight Thea was changing Odd’s diaper. He was fussing, sending up his little howls, punching the air with his balled fists. After Thea finished wrapping his bottom and straightening his layette she lifted him and started to sing.
Her voice was lilting and faint and it put the boy at ease. She went to the rocking chair next to the window and lifted her nightdress. Her full breast shone in the winter moonlight. Odd as much as lunged for it, and in an instant Rebekah could hear him suckling.
Thea began another song, her voice even fainter from across the room.
“What does it mean?” Rebekah asked, her voice upsetting the deep silence enough that Odd pulled off Thea’s breast.
Thea guided his head back to his feast. “A bear sleeping,” she said softly.
“It sounds pretty. You sing nice.” Rebekah could see Thea’s smile in the moonlight, could see her glassy eyes. “It’s a lullaby. A song you sing your baby. It’s called a lullaby.”
“Lullaby,” Thea repeated.
“You’re making me sleepy.”
Again Thea smiled.
Then there was only the sound of Odd suckling, of Odd catching his breath when he was finished. Thea put him over her shoulder and stood and walked around the room as she patted his back. She stopped at the window and stood there with her son, the moon gone higher but still shining through the glass.
Rebekah watched them for what might have been an hour. Long enough that the moon no longer gave them light. When Thea finally returned to her bed with the sleeping boy, she did so still whispering the lullabies. She fluffed her pillows and lay down. She pulled the bedding up over her legs and sang to him more.
And Rebekah might have fallen asleep listening to Thea sing but she was intent on enforcing Hosea’s will. So she struggled to stay awake. When no sound had come from the other bed for some minutes, Rebekah slid from her bedcovers, crossed the room, and stood above Thea and her son. It was the first time she’d seen Thea sleep since the child had been born. Odd lay in her limp arms, wrapped in his blanket, the cap falling off his head, his hair winging out after his bath earlier that night.
Neither Odd nor Thea woke when Rebekah picked up the boy. She held him as she’d seen Thea, setting him in the crook of her arm, holding his head with her free hand. His lips puckered and he reached for his face with his bunched hands and she was sure he’d wake bawling but he only settled deeper into her arms. The floor creaked as she stepped off the carpet, into the whispered light from the window.
Thea slept soundly, her head fallen on her shoulder, her breathing slow and tremulous. There were no dreams there. And there were none in the boy, either. She could see that. All of that sleep absent of dreams saddened Rebekah deeply. She laid the boy in the bassinet and tiptoed to bed, thought she might conjure dreams for all of them. Lord knows she had them.
Rebekah woke to Thea’s screams and the light of morning. Her eyes flashed open and the first thing she saw was Thea thrashing in her bed, kicking and tearing at the bed linens. “Odd! Odd! Odd!” she said, her voice shrill and piercing.
Rebekah threw her covers back and jumped from bed, not remembering her antics in the middle of the night before. They reached the bassinet at the same moment and looked together into its emptiness.
Thea hollered as she ran from room to room in the flat, her panic rising alongside her shouting, Rebekah trailing the desperate mother.
By the time Thea reached the second floor her shouting had given over to sobs. She went down the hallway from door to door, stepping into each room to check for the boy. It was in the fourth room, in the surgery, that she found him, lying on the table, Hosea standing above him with a pair of eight-inch nickel-plated shears in his hand. On a tray next to the boy lay a pile of bloodstained gauze and a long needle and syringe. The boy was naked and wailing.
Rebekah managed to get her arms around Thea before she reached the table. Before she reached her boy. Thea’s cries mixed with Odd’s and Rebekah hugged her tight.
Hosea spoke. “Dear child, there’s nothing amiss.” He set the shears on the table, turned and reached out for Thea, took her hands in his, and tried to pull her to him.
"My boy! “Thea shrieked, fighting to free herself from both Rebekah and Hosea. They held her tight. Her crying had sapped her breath and she went limp in their arms and could only muster a whisper as she said, “Good Lord, my boy."
Hosea ushered her to a chair and urged her to sit. To Rebekah he said, “Apply an ample dose of Vaseline to the boy’s prepuce and wrap him up.” Turning to Thea he said, “Miss Eide, listen to me.”
Thea seemed to have no breath left in her.
“Miss Eide!” Hosea shook her by the shoulders. “Miss Eide, listen to me. Odd is fine. I gave him an examination this morning, I circumcised him. There’s nothing wrong with the boy that a little nap won’t cure. You’ve nothing to worry about. These are things the child must have done. Do you understand me?”
Of course she did not.
On the table on the other side of the room Rebekah had wrapped the boy’s bottom, had dressed him in his layette and his knit hat. In her clumsy way she picked him up and carried him to Thea, who pushed Hosea out of the way and stood and took her boy in one motion. Odd stopped wailing as soon as he was in his mother’s arms. Thea hurried from the surgery, ran up to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her.
Hosea and Rebekah stood in the surgery, looking at each other, shocked though they ought not to have been.
After a moment Hosea said, “There’s no use denying it any longer. She’s suffering badly. Postpartum melancholia. Worse than I’ve ever seen it.” He looked at Rebekah and said softly, “Will you check on Thea?”
Hosea read deep into the night, consulting his old medical journals and further chapters in Fox’s Psychopathology of Hysteria. Around midnight he’d decided there was but a single course of action: He must remove her ovaries to quell the madness. It was a decision that greatly eased his concern, and after he reread Battey’s “Oophorectomy: A Case Study” in the British Medical Journal he made notes in his surgeon’s journal. Before he retired for the night, he wrote a long explanation in Norwegian and practiced it twice.
Early the next morning, after only two hours’ sleep, as soon as he heard stirrings in Thea’s bedroom, he knocked quietly on the door.
He knocked, put his ear to the door, and listened to her feet hurry
ing softly across the floor. “Miss Eide?” he said quietly. He knocked again when she did not answer. “Miss Eide, I must speak with you. May I come in?”
When she failed to answer again he pressed the door open. She sat on the bed, Odd clutched in her arms. She had the look of a cornered animal.
“Thea, dear, what do you think I’ve done? Do you not understand that I took Odd yesterday only to perform perfunctory and essential examinations? That if I’d failed to perform those examinations I would have been in breach of the code of ethics by which my profession is governed?”
He’d intended to spare her his lecture on professional ethics, to cut right to the matter at hand, but he couldn’t help himself.
She only looked at him fearfully.
He proceeded in Norwegian, reading from the notes he’d prepared late the night before, notes he hoped would convey not only his sense of urgency but his profound affection for her and her boy. “Miss Eide, I am your friend. I have tried to help you. And your boy.” He paused, judged the look on her face, and took a step closer.
“Thea, I was helping your boy yesterday.” He paused again, looked at his prepared remarks, looked at Thea, still clutching Odd on the bed, her eyes swollen with tears and lack of sleep, and thought he loved them both. He wished he could tell her, wished he could convey the honesty of his feelings. Instead he returned to his remarks.
“Thea, you are sick. Postpartum melancholia. You must get well. If you don’t, you will be unable to care for the boy.”
This last made her clutch Odd tighter still.
“I would like to perform a surgery called Battey’s Operation to remove from your body what’s causing your morbid condition. I will remove your ovaries. It will cure you. Do you understand what I’m proposing?”
She only looked more frightened.
“Miss Eide, without this surgery, you will go insane.” This last he said in English as he shook his solemn head.
And so two days later Hosea Grimm held a sponge to Thea Eide’s nose. She breathed in the chloroform and went into a catatonic sleep and he, with his sure hands, removed his scalpel from a bath of carbolic solution, took measure of her linea alba, and made a small incision from which he removed the first of her ovaries. He stanched the flow of blood and stitched the incision. He gave her another dose of chloroform and made a matching incision on the other side of her abdomen and repeated the procedure within and without. An hour later, after Thea woke vomiting and feverish, he injected a dose of morphine into her thigh and set a cold compress on her forehead.
He stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and believed honestly that his methods were sound and that Thea Eide, asleep again on the table, awaited a kinder fate thanks to his steady surgical hand.
If Thea had spent her life in prayer and devotion in hope of finding God’s grace, and if God’s grace meant everlasting life in heaven’s gentle glow, then what she found in her fever dreams those ten days after her surgery were her hopes dashed. Whatever bacillus took root in her womb was swift and voracious. A riotous fever set in, and in her delirium there were no trumpets, no bronze altars, no jasper and carnelian, no unapproachable light. There was only the Cimmerian wilderness of her fever and Odd’s howling. She wanted to reach for him, wanted to take away his sorrow, but she was too weak to say so, much less do it.
Odd’s care had fallen to Rebekah. And Eleanor Riverfish, who became Odd’s amah, and who visited five times a day to nurse the boy. It was in this way that Odd Einar Eide and Daniel Joseph Riverfish became brothers, and it was in Eleanor’s arms that he forgot the warmth of his mother’s lap and the soothing sound of her singing voice.
The only song that remained was the dirge of her final hours. She sang in time to her slowing heart her last true words: My boy, my boy, my love. Odd would never hear those words, though one day he’d learn them in his own way.
Finally her fever boiled and her brain burst and she left him. She left all the world. And wherever else her sorrow scattered in the hereafter it went first to Odd’s infant heart and found shelter there.