Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Refusing a Spinal

328 LISTEN HERE REFUSING A SPINAL from Heart Cake (2000) Six years old and pale that night, I was already experienced in surgery-days in my father's clinic, evenings when he let me ride along. This night the cow stood quiet, straining and her backside bulging as if to split. I screeched, "Something's wrong!" I knew something had to be sideways when she hadn't waited for Dad to cut the clean window in her side and pull out the soaking calf and neatly sew the edges like two halves of a blanket hem-stitched. Not this mix of shit and straw, cobwebs greasy with old dust the one raw bulb hanging brown with fly droppings, her baby falling finally onto the slime. No wonder the doctor said to me twenty-one years later when I requested natural childbirth (me in the chair and him behind the square expanse of desk in the right angles of his well-lit office, walls blazing with white rectangles)-no wonder he said to me that he could not understand why some women wanted to have their babies like cows in a barn. It was then I saw again the liquid gleaming globe of the cow's eye, the patient rhythm squeezing her sides, the calm heaving and the pale tips of the calf's hoofs tender as tulips as he left her, the swell and rush ofwater, the newborn swimming out into the half-dark of the barn. LEATHA KENDRICK 329 I could not speak in that white room, was sobbing so hard as I left that my friend had to ask, "What's wrong? Did the baby die?" I could see my father watching from the shadows, hear the rough scraping of the cow's tongue, regular as a heart urging the newborn onto his feet, her sudden lowing, so loud it startled me. My father loved to blast our ignorance, loved to laugh at any fear whiting our eyes. Running his hand along the sharp ridge of her spine, he said, "This is how things get born." ...