Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Nativity

LYNN POWELL 489 NATIVITY from Old & New Testaments (1995) Some parents shy away from the body, but we hush up about the crossrereading our daughter the story about Jesus we must believe in: mother and father kneeling after the hard birth, humbled by the exhaustions of love. She studies the illustration, loves the halos wide-brimmed on everybody's heads. Five pages later, though, it's death that rivets her-Herod, jealous and cross, ordering the slaughter. The unnamed mothers are left out of this version of the Christ, but our daughter worries if God warned them in time, too. She senses love, though fierce, is not omnipotent. Mommy, what's the baddest thing that can happen to somebody? she asks, remembering the museum, the crosses hung a step away from the joyful births, stark scripture plain enough to a child: death looks back at every birth, even God's. She punishes the sentries at the cross in her own drawings, coloring their unloved faces blue, grinding green into their bodies. Once I whispered to my mother, I think God would havepicked me as Mother Mary ifHe'd sent His Son right now--------though birth and the other secrets of the body still eluded me. Now my daughter calls, Jesus! to her baby brother, a prop, lovingly swaddled in blue dish towels, his head criss-crossed 490 LISTEN HERE with paisley scarves. As Mary, she crosses the room regally, diaphanous in her mother's hemmed-up nightgown. Outside, the snow loves everything it touches. Suffering and death keep their distance from the warm house. Jesus laughs as Mary tickles his brand-new body. You be the manger, Mom, Mary says. I cross my legs, sit the baby, fat with love, on the throne of my body, done with the hard births, the beginnings of God. ECHOCARDIOGRAM from Old & New Testaments (1995) An occasional turbulence ofthe heartofno consequence, said the first doctor who heard it, listening, eyes closed, like a god to a conch. But the doctor I visit for a sore throat is less sanguine: You could drop dead tomorrow. He sends me right over to a specialist. The specialist sits beside me on the narrow bed and asks about my family. I tell him of my mother's murmur, and how my father's father, sick with pneumonia, slumped as his wife rubbed his head. I turn away, stretch out on my side, open my shirt. He circles his arm round my chest, and with cold steel he roots for my heart. His electronics amplifY the sound of an earnest washing machine, not the African drum of the heart I walked through as a child at the Museum of Science and Industry, a maze ofplush vestibules I lingered in, peering down the corridors of blood. And, supposedly, my mother's real mother diedyoung, I add. "She grieved herselfto death. " ...