Author: Urb-banal

w.c.: 657

rating: P.G.

Prompt: Gimme Shelter

Title: This Heavy Load

Notes:  This is the character Lady from a previous entry about Wales in the 2067 or so, further along in her story.  She is living on the farm in the Green Valley permanently.  Steven continues to commute from the plant to the farm on weekends.  He has, with some reservations, become her lover and protector.  I realized while re-reading it that it I wrote it with a Welsh accent.  If you can’t manage that, try Irish.  (I should be able to evoke that with the words but I worry some would take issue with my archaic cadence.)

This Heavy Load

Lady was alone on the farm. Steven hadn’t returned on Friday night. Saturday came too without him. Sunday there was a blizzard and she could stand just waiting no more. For something to do, she went out to the barn and started mucking out the stalls and laying fresh straw. Bess the cow was complaining and the horses were frightened by the wind howling through the boards.

She told herself that this was her chance to prove to Steven that she could look after things. She pretended this was his test; that he planned to stay away, just to see how she could manage without him, whether she had learned anything. 

In the back of her mind there were worries.  She pushed them there and when they reappeared to the front of her thoughts she worked harder. She scrubbed the stones with a brush and bucket on her hands and knees, her large belly hanging almost grazing the floor at times.

When there wasn’t a lick of work left she could do, she started to head back to their little stone and thatch house where she had lived these past seven months in domestic bliss. It was her house and Steven’s: their oasis in a destroyed world.

 The wind was whipping up razors and she had to pull her shawl around her face for protection.  It was hard going. Nine months pregnant and wearing Steven’s enormous boots made walking difficult. A boot got stuck in the mud and she stepped right out of it and almost fell. She was righting herself, one socked-foot up in the air to avoid it getting wet, while she tried to pull the boot out of the mud. Her shawl wrapped around her face and she struggled to free it still hopping on one foot. The show would have been comical if it had had a different audience. She had trouble believing what she saw when she finally pulled her shawl from her face.  

It was a wolf. Its jaw was slack and its tongue was drooling and its muzzle was slippery and shiny with blood, and then it spoke in a low voice that she would later decide was the wind.

“I’ve killed him” it told her.

It was so close to her she could feel the iron breath of it.  She stumbled out of her other boot as she ran. She made it to the barn and slammed the big doors shut.  No sooner than she thought she was safe, did she feel the grip of a contraction.  She let out a holler that rose to the rafters and shook the pigeons loose, fluttering above her like winged angels. 

“I can’t do this alone!” she called out to them, the urge to bear-down folded time and space into one pure action.

She tore off her pants and crawled to one of the freshly cleaned stalls.

“I can’t do this alone!”

She screamed again and her words disintegrated into an elemental sound. Out the depths of hell her groans came and with a tremendous push, her baby was born.   

“I did it! I did it!”  She laughed, crying and cradling the sticky baby who had started bawling before he had even dropped out of her. “You’re my baby! I did it! I birthed you all by myself!”

 The placenta followed and she tied off the pulsing cord with some baling twine and cut it neatly with a knife she found lying next to the sharpening stone. Steven’s work gloves were still lying beside it.

She wrapped the baby boy in her shawl and laid him on the straw.  She took some of the horse blankets and made a kind of tent out of them on top of the straw and then crawled inside with her baby.

She sang gently:

I will keep you safe and warm.

I will give you shelter from the storm.

You will never be alone.

You’re my darling baby.

Mother and child fell into a deep and exhausted sleep.