The Untold Read Free

steered his head to face the highest point of the mountains. Then she leaned in close to his ear and said,
My friend, even if I fucking die and rot upon your back, do not stop until we get there.

M orning of my mother’s birth was not like my own. She was vital, for one.
    Her father, Septimus, had taken her in his arms as soon as Aoife, her mother, had given birth to her in a washtub on the porch.
    It was 1894. The night was clear and the sky was full of stars and Septimus watched on like some anxious popeyed insect, pressed against the window of his shed. Aoife bellowed and roamed outside as the midwife, Mrs. Peel, tried to steer her back to bed.
    But when Aoife caught sight of Septimus at the window, backlit by a fire, his hair sticking on end, she raised her fist to him, and then she slipped. She fell backwards into the washtub and as she did a contraction seized her. When it passed, her legs and neck and arms went limp and she hung over the tub like some overwatered plant.
    Septimus watched as Mrs. Peel disappeared and returned again, her arms full of candles and lanterns. She set them all around Aoife’s feet, exclaiming,
None of God’s creatures shall be born in the dark!
She went about lighting them like a zealot.
    Aoife had begun writhing and screaming,
Get it out! Get it out!
And as she writhed a wave of water spilt out of the tub and collected the candles and the lanterns and put them all out.
    Mrs. Peel tried to hold down Aoife’s legs but they were splitting around her like scissors in the dark. Aoife did not want the child inside of her and she did not want it out. Septimus clutched his heart and cast his eyes skyward. He saw Centaurus there, markinghis bow, and the Southern Cross sparkling like some talisman around an upturned neck. He thought at least the beauty of it augured well.
    In no time, as this was Aoife’s fourth, Septimus heard a trembling wail.
    He jumped up, ran to his furnace, thought to put the fire out, changed his mind, caught his shirt on the tin of the door, freed himself, then sprinted across the lawn. He took the child in his arms and Mrs. Peel cut the umbilical cord and then they wrapped my mother in a cloth.
    A daughter
, said Septimus, leaning down to Aoife to show her.
    You take care of her
, said Aoife
. I just want to sleep.
    Mrs. Peel helped Aoife inside and Septimus stepped out onto the lawn, my mother curled against his chest. He kissed her damp head and held her above him. She cried and then her little face, still crinkled by the passage of birth, opened up. Septimus saw it as he felt it then: Centaurus drawing his bow among other constellations and firing an arrow straight into his heart. He held my mother and he knew he could never, in all the world, love another trembling creature so much.

    Y EARS LATER, when my mother asked him what stars he saw on the morning of her birth, he could not describe them. He would only say,
Darling, there were constellations wrapped in the visible sky and the sky below the horizon, and they were all spinning by some force and design. There was a carnival, a parade, on the day you were born and it was spinning around the poles of the universe.
    And although Septimus did know what he saw in the visible sky (an archer, an arrow sent forth) with his own passage through life he had begun to believe more that there was no design in it at all—that the stars themselves were just nebulae visible but indistinct to one another, silhouettes shifting against other luminous matter.
    But he did not want to tell that to his daughter.

W ith her gaze fixed on the mountains, my mother rode all day. Her eyes grew hot and her neck felt too weak to hold her head. Yellow grass streamed endlessly beneath her and she did all she could not to slip sideways into it.
    She was losing blood. It soaked into her trousers and the thick skin of her saddle. On the brink of passing out, she lay against the neck of her horse. He was a dam of hot and cold and