Talk Vomit

By Tess Fahlgren

In the middle of the night, a ewe was on her side. Two hooves and a tiny nose erupted from beneath her tail, then half a slimy body. Too early, another set of hooves came squeezed alongside the first; the twins were coming at the same time. I climbed into the pen and tried to push mama up, saying, “Tug on that one,” and Matt pulled on the forelegs of the first lamb. They both slid and landed hard on the dirt floor, stone-still and dark with fluid, eyes closed, still as death. With a blue paper towel, I cleared goop from their noses, then pushed against their mother with both hands, rocking her, trying to get her to stand up and take care of her children — and then she stood, and the cords broke, and her babies twitched alive, and she explored their bodies with her tongue.

When I finally slept, I dreamt my ex’s babies were mine. My not having them was a big, public tragedy. I was suddenly determined to retrieve them, but on my way to his house I couldn’t remember ever having been pregnant. I stopped short outside his door. This body has never held a baby. Those babies aren’t mine. When I woke, I couldn’t tell from where my grief had come.

\\

In the morning, I took the half-day drive home from my father-in-law’s ranch. On the ranch there are sheep; on Dad’s farm there are cows. Across the pasture and along the river, eighty condescending ladies — pure woman, whole mother, big eyed, and serious — hold meetings and share the labor of child rearing. Their heavy curves are feminine and luxurious. That spring, I split my time between our farm and Matt’s family ranch, ushering new generations into the world.

Dad and I baited the herd with hay from the pasture into increasingly smaller corrals until finally they squeezed into the smallest; from there we separated the cows from their calves. Alone, the calves are manageable; if you need one, you can grab it by its leg and drag it where you need it to go. I prefer, however, to wade in, let them jostle around, and watch for one to face the right direction. When she takes a step forward, I sprint up the alley like a border collie with my hip against her hip. If she balks at the last minute, I wrestle her and with my boot push her into the small chute, which after it is squeezed shut and turned onto its side becomes something like a panini press; a table with a metal grate that holds the calf down to be branded. Someone pulls on its tail to hold it still and fresh-grass calf shit flows bright green, and Dad presses the hot iron to her side. As the acrid smoke of burning hair fills the air, the calves beller and cry and then quiet. Sometimes at the end they just collapse, as if they don’t remember how to move. Sometimes they bounce out like nothing.

This was all routine until one calf’s shit wasn’t a healthy bright green, but a deep red that exploded over us in a fine mist. A horrifying smell, as if the calf was rotting from the inside, occupied the corral like an army.  Mom wondered aloud if it was okay, and Dad didn’t know.  He shot an antibiotic into its neck with a syringe. Even after the calf was released, the chute smelled dark and alarming. 

We drank beer from cans. I passed mine to my brother, then Dad took a sip. Everyone was doing it. Dirt collected on metal lips. We dug into the chip bags with our hands, popped grapes into our mouths.  

\\

For weeks I’d been dreaming about a girl I knew, Mckenna. I knew she was pregnant, and in my dreams, she’d had her baby and needed help. I had known her when I was a young teacher and she was sixteen, the most naturally skilled young artist I’ve ever known, with a thousand miles of anger, determination, and intelligence going like tunnels behind each eye. I dreamed about her again and again, waking with the anxiety of unmet responsibility, until I finally gave in and made ten chicken and rice burritos individually wrapped in tinfoil and packed them in a long-handled box with strawberries, chocolate, and fruit snacks. I brought it to her apartment and saw the long fuzz on her baby’s head and in my hug, she was so tiny, still, but seemed to scowl less and her floor was very clean and I rushed out and sat in the car and tried to feel relieved but instead my face crumpled and I breathed deeply with my forehead against the steering wheel.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was sick. By the time I was back at the ranch with Matt, it descended on me like a hailstorm. I was pelted with boulders, my neck and kidneys hit with a thousand hammers, my back injected with tetanus. I shivered and shook and asked Matt to help me get the soft blanket from on top of the blankets to the inside of the blankets, then asked for more blankets. He made for me a plastic bottle filled with hot water and wrapped in a towel — what we call a Nalgene baby. 

In the room where we slept, a monitor showed a live feed of the barn where sheep were in various stages of pregnancy and early motherhood. Wind scratched the microphone and woke me from a fevered sleep. For three nights the lambs cried and for three nights I pushed Matt out of bed to check on them, but he always crawled back in, saying, “They were just talking.”

When I was able to walk to the shower, I remembered being with him in the mountains. I remembered dark soil and cold water and sunlight lighting bear grass like light bulbs suspended over a field of scarlet paintbrush. My hands on the cold bathroom counter were like a stranger’s, and three times I shuddered, about to puke into the sink but what instead came up was how far I’ve gotten from who we used to be.

\\

On Mother’s Day, I called my mom from my sick bed, but she didn’t seem interested in speaking with me. We talked about a friend of hers who was getting old and frail, and she started to cry and tried to get off the phone, but I didn’t let her. She tried to avoid it a few more times but I stayed put. So, I suppose it’s my fault. She told me, “I am a failure. I’m not smart.”

“You’re not a failure, Mom. By definition you are not.” 

“I’d need evidence,” she said. I told her she didn’t have to believe the stories she told herself. The room was dark, and the monitors showed pale sheep like ghosts in their pens. One lamb cried like his mother wasn’t right there.

\\

When I was strong enough, Matt and I walked along Flatwillow Creek. Every spring, the very idea of growth is a shock. We spend winter dreaming of the unbelievable abstraction of warmth, and then it’s here, spilling over the banks of the splashing creek while lambs bounce around on fresh spring grass. They were leggy, small, and white, their too-big ears like croissants above each tiny face, their noses impossibly pink. To keep track of which babies belong to which mothers, Matt painted big numbers on their sides. It’s important for their health, this is how we help mother, but it is ugly. Motherhood often is.

Across the pasture, the big white shape of Bianca, the sheepdog, raced after the wicked gray figure of a coyote, away from her flock. 

\\

I drove home again. Back and forth, back and forth. I felt well enough to get drinks with a girlfriend and ordered from the laminated cocktail menu something called The Mighty Milk. This, I thought, was my favorite kind of funny. The Milk River meanders through the valley, the color, as the explorers Lewis and Clark decided, of tea heavy with milk.  It is not what most would consider “mighty.” When I ordered one, the bartender pulled dusty binders of cocktail recipes from below the bar and flipped through plastic sleeved recipes until she found it: tequila and vodka in milk. The next morning, I woke with a sore stomach and blamed the Mighty Milk.

An appendix is a little tail at the end of the colon. It’s supposedly a defunct piece of machinery, there only to eventually become an issue when it does its old job too well.  Its purpose is still debated, but the presence of lymphoid cells suggests the appendix once, or still might, play a role in the immune system. I imagine it like an old sea captain puttering around the docks, cleaning up after people and hanging signs to combat their annoying habits.

When an appendix becomes inflamed and ruptures — appendicitis — it is often considered the worst pain imaginable. Akin to childbirth, or so they say. Mine didn’t hurt like it was supposed to. Just within the soft human belly, the peritoneum lines the inner cavity and encases our abdominal organs. It holds our organs to keep them padded, safe, and arranged just so.  The peritoneum doesn’t feel somatic pain, such as the sharp, localized pain of a knife wound. Instead, when an infection causes inflammation, the pain is visceral. It can be difficult to pinpoint from where the hurt originates. 

That night, when my niece and nephew asked me to pretend that my parents’ bed was an island surrounded by boiling lava, like we always do, I agreed, but asked them to pretend I was an old man who couldn’t move. I lay on our island and played my role well. Later I skipped going to the movie with my sister so that I could instead move through a series of yoga poses that were supposed to help with gas.

I didn’t know it yet, but that calf had been full of something that spread – Dr. Andy, my brother, calls it a “virulent form of Escherichia coli.” It sprayed all over me and probably my can of beer, my hands, maybe even directly into my mouth. I thought I was better, but the illness was creeping through my system, pooling in my appendix.

The next day I was twenty minutes late for our second branding. Instead of pushing calves up the alley, I hung around the calf table with my mom, lethargic, until a calf escaped, and I chased after it and grabbed its back leg above the hard black hoof.  He hopped and tried to kick. I flipped him on his side and sat on the dirt, gripped one leg with both hands, and pressed my foot into the other to expose his underside so Dad could castrate him.

I closed my eyes to avoid seeing the white rope my father pulled from the red tear in the calf’s scrotum, and in the dim redness the pain in my gut was overwhelming. When it was time, I released the calf, and he kicked at me and stumbled away. “My stomach hurts,” I told my mom, “Especially right here,” and squeezed my right side between my hip and rib cage. 

“Maybe it’s your appendix,” she said. 

“Where is the appendix?” 

I looked it up and saw that the appendix was in the lower right side of the body. 

That afternoon, my brother met me at my house. I laid on my yoga mat and showed him where it hurt. He poked me and I tasted sea salt. His mouth was a grim line. He asked if it hurt and I nodded, then loosened into a teary mess. He ordered a CT scan.  I didn’t have health insurance. I called my mom, sobbing. “I’m on my way,” she said. “Super mom!” 

In my brother’s office, I drank two bottles of too-sweet barium sulfate fluid, which would coat my insides and allow the CT scan to create an accurate rendering of them. While we waited, my mother dug through her purse for a distraction and found a head of garlic. She set it on my brother’s desk for us all to draw. 

Dutifully, my brother dispensed ballpoint pens and office paper and we obeyed. My mind was an empty vase. I called Matt, still at the ranch. “Should I come?” he said. I told him I didn’t know. He was busy — responsible for all those babies. Why should he have to drop everything for what should be a routine surgery?

After the scan, Andy showed us on his monitor the appendicitis. It looked like an ultrasound without a baby; I would need surgery. Mom accompanied me to my hospital room and then, right when the reality of anesthesia began to loom, and the horror stories of half-awake patients made my palms sweat, she left to go check on her dog.

\\

Three months later, my mother’s inconsistency and declining mental health would crash and burn. She would tell me how she wanted to drop off the conveyor belt of life, how she was worthless. How can that be? I wanted to ask. How can you do this work all day every day and not see that something worthwhile has happened? That you put in the work, and it came to fruition, all the little babies running around, the regeneration of generations, the fresh wool yellow with birthing fluid and the shiny black calves dancing in the pasture — my sisters and I, their children, our brother, this life. 

You can reach what is supposed to be the pinnacle of human existence, break that divine barrier into motherhood, and still, you are going to have the capacity to feel immense, terrible pain. I fear those peaks of joy must be balanced by cavities of depression, and when I see all of it near all these mothers, I feel that I experience enough. 

So it wasn’t a surprise, she only voiced the words I’d always known, and what I already knew about the uneven calculation of effort and outcome that promised nothing. 

\\

The surgeon only worked at our hospital half of the time; we were lucky she was in town. I was alone when she sat beside my hospital bed and told me there was a chance my appendix would be perforated. There was a chance that other bad things would happen, but these were unlikely. The surgery would take thirty minutes, and I’d sleep in my own bed that night. The dark pressed against the tall, narrow windows, and I thought of calves bedding down with their huge mothers, of lambs crying in the barn. 

After surgery, I woke up crying. The doctor told me she’d spoken with my husband and I heard my own voice as if from very far away, thin and high like a child’s, ask, “Matt’s here? He’s here right now?” Despite the odds, there had been complications. My appendix had not only been perforated, but tucked up behind my colon, and the infection had leaked all over and made all my guts stick together. It had been hours. My initial pain hadn’t been what others experience because it hadn’t been near enough to the peritoneum. If I had waited for the pain to reach that level, I could have lost part of my colon and may have needed to live with a colostomy bag. Instead, the pain came from the extent to which the surgeon needed to manipulate my organs to remove the appendix. Imagine that, manipulating organs. Moving them around. I’ve seen organs before, in a bucket beneath the hanging carcass of a sheep. They are blue and purple and streaked with white, and I bet mine are, too. I asked her, urgently, what an appendix was. “What does it do?” It seemed absurd that she had taken something from me. “You took it? What color is it?” She handed me a small jar, and through bleary eyes I saw the sliding mess of an organ within.

And in my hospital room, my whole world was in the warmth where the palm of my hand pressed against the palm of Matt’s. I tasted metal, remembered Bianca chasing the flash of gray through the pasture. Through a tube in my abdomen, a small plastic contained collected warm fluid. The nurse squeezed the tube to clear it and I gasped in pain. When the doctor tried to show her how to do it right, the pain was so much worse. My heart rate dropped, they took my vitals every fifteen minutes, then finally gave me dilaudid and I sank into the pillows. 

They taught Matt how to empty my drain and what medication I needed to take and when. I handed over all my power. After three nights, he took me home and put me in bed. I was nothing but a slab of pain. He emptied my drain and recorded, in ounces, how much flowed out of me. I couldn’t look, the container was too warm, like an infant – it was me, outside of me, but I don’t want to be Mother. Mother says family first and that can’t be the rule anymore. Mother says be home now, mother makes home scary. Mother says honor thy mother and father, but mother makes you lie. Mother is wrong but mother is always right. Mother makes you hide inside yourself. Mother wasn’t bad or evil, mother didn’t fail, mother didn’t abuse, but the fact of a mother is to usher a being into a painful world, as if there aren’t any other options. 

When I returned to the hospital so the doctor could remove my drain, she told me that she’d heard it wouldn’t hurt. This time I felt pain I wasn’t supposed to. I thought it would be a short tube, and smooth and that its removal would like removing a meat thermometer, but instead she pulls and keeps pulling. I can feel it snaking and sucking through my guts and the feeling goes on and on until its two lambs dying on the barn floor — a piece of hardware snags the hole in my skin and its done. She’s holding a tube twenty inches long, perforated, with thick joints. I feel clammy. I want to scold her. I want to disabuse her of the notion that any of this didn’t hurt, but instead I say thank you and walk slowly out. I ask Matt if we can go to the gift shop; I want to buy for myself a thing, any thing. I pick up one small item after the other, remember the wrenching of that slim snake sliding through my belly, feel my unsteady legs beneath me, moving, keeping me upright, and leave the shop with nothing new but still the warmth where his palm presses against mine.