goat, also some of the chickens, one of the ducks. I gasped; he grunted. There was no orgasm, there was only orgasm from beginning to end. I remember shrieking in the middle of some night traversed noisily at high speed: ‘I am conceiving!’ From Unguentine, a low and rhythmic groan, a syllable mouthed over the course of an hour, a morning, with the rising sun burning into our bodies on the lawn; I see him suddenly in spasms, then rolling away in the grass, perhaps hissing, ‘I have generated . . .’ We lay immobile, separated, until nearly noon, until the neglected barge drew us to our feet. We embraced once briefly, and while he bent about his business in the garden, I withdrew below to tend to my pregnancy.
As for our child to be, I already knew he would be a girl: manchild while within my belly, but a girl once born. I made up lists of names and posted them around the barge for Unguentine’s approval. Beatrude? Marygret? Gertrice? Barbarence? Nancice? Jilly? I wove a set of little blankets on a loom. Speedily I knitted what few clothes she would need between birth and age six. Long hours I lay in the sun on my back, that my belly might rise like yeasted dough. Unguentine spent days below deck partitioning off a section of the hold for the baby’s room, boring a hole in the hull that she might have her own porthole and for which I sewed up a set of curtains. Peaceful days, still and calm days of quiet work, with all time stopped and only gentle, distant intimations of nibblings, flight, panic, the rush of emergencies. Arm in arm we would stroll about the garden by day, brush through banks of flowers, our hair caressed by the needles of overhanging boughs, our bare feet padding upon wood, upon stone, upon grass, the metal of the deck; now and then we would stand close to the windows and peer out to sea, whitecaps and troughs of cobalt. I remember that midnight on the bow, anchors dropped, a moon casting a strange simulacrum of daylight over the water through some haze in the sky, a tone of light almost identical to that of a foggy day; and we stood at the railing which glistened under the slightest application of dew, the sea being waveless and graced only by lazy swells that passed us like the undulations of a great caterpillar’s back; and it was then, spontaneously, that we both broke into song, into a lilting sort of aria, but unsyllabled and smooth and which trailed off into a low hum, charging the night sea until the horizon bubbled with sheet-lightning and the waters glowed with the pulsations of electronic plankton, and we fell silent. Unguentine trembled; I nestled closer to his warm body. He was about to speak, I sensed, knowing the signs. He did finally, to announce quietly that he would deliver the baby. I confided that I had never dreamed of anyone else, being so far from all land now.
However, a month passed when there took place an event such that I realized I was not pregnant after all—and I not pregnant with a husband who measured my girth with a tape-measure each night before bed was in a perilous position, or so I felt. I had no way of knowing. Unguentine, it seemed, was frankly worshipping my womb. One morning I arose somewhat earlier than usual and spotted him kneeling on the stern deck. I approached softly, on bare feet. But my toe brushed against an empty paint can which let out a raucous clang. His back doubled, his arms swooping in. I saw candles. I saw a shiny tin form, bulbous and horned. An embroidered cloth. But he scurried away, all his objects of devotion bundled pell-mell into the cloth from which billowed the black smoke of candles still lit, and he vanished round a corner, coughing. At other times he seemed to be in the grip of a peculiar depression and took to napping lengthily in an ugly tent-like shelter made out of old carboard boxes, as if to shut out the splendours of the dome. The Plum Patricia, a heavily bearing tree from which I made my best jam, suddenly vanished one
As for our child to be, I already knew he would be a girl: manchild while within my belly, but a girl once born. I made up lists of names and posted them around the barge for Unguentine’s approval. Beatrude? Marygret? Gertrice? Barbarence? Nancice? Jilly? I wove a set of little blankets on a loom. Speedily I knitted what few clothes she would need between birth and age six. Long hours I lay in the sun on my back, that my belly might rise like yeasted dough. Unguentine spent days below deck partitioning off a section of the hold for the baby’s room, boring a hole in the hull that she might have her own porthole and for which I sewed up a set of curtains. Peaceful days, still and calm days of quiet work, with all time stopped and only gentle, distant intimations of nibblings, flight, panic, the rush of emergencies. Arm in arm we would stroll about the garden by day, brush through banks of flowers, our hair caressed by the needles of overhanging boughs, our bare feet padding upon wood, upon stone, upon grass, the metal of the deck; now and then we would stand close to the windows and peer out to sea, whitecaps and troughs of cobalt. I remember that midnight on the bow, anchors dropped, a moon casting a strange simulacrum of daylight over the water through some haze in the sky, a tone of light almost identical to that of a foggy day; and we stood at the railing which glistened under the slightest application of dew, the sea being waveless and graced only by lazy swells that passed us like the undulations of a great caterpillar’s back; and it was then, spontaneously, that we both broke into song, into a lilting sort of aria, but unsyllabled and smooth and which trailed off into a low hum, charging the night sea until the horizon bubbled with sheet-lightning and the waters glowed with the pulsations of electronic plankton, and we fell silent. Unguentine trembled; I nestled closer to his warm body. He was about to speak, I sensed, knowing the signs. He did finally, to announce quietly that he would deliver the baby. I confided that I had never dreamed of anyone else, being so far from all land now.
However, a month passed when there took place an event such that I realized I was not pregnant after all—and I not pregnant with a husband who measured my girth with a tape-measure each night before bed was in a perilous position, or so I felt. I had no way of knowing. Unguentine, it seemed, was frankly worshipping my womb. One morning I arose somewhat earlier than usual and spotted him kneeling on the stern deck. I approached softly, on bare feet. But my toe brushed against an empty paint can which let out a raucous clang. His back doubled, his arms swooping in. I saw candles. I saw a shiny tin form, bulbous and horned. An embroidered cloth. But he scurried away, all his objects of devotion bundled pell-mell into the cloth from which billowed the black smoke of candles still lit, and he vanished round a corner, coughing. At other times he seemed to be in the grip of a peculiar depression and took to napping lengthily in an ugly tent-like shelter made out of old carboard boxes, as if to shut out the splendours of the dome. The Plum Patricia, a heavily bearing tree from which I made my best jam, suddenly vanished one
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