Falling From Grace by Ann Eriksson Page B

elder brothers, who slid from Grace’s womb with the ease of soft fruit dropping from a tree, I nearly killed my mother the night I was born. Twice.
    In the hours between midnight and dawn, the time when all things mysterious and life-wrenching happen, after thirty-six hours of labour—and a crescendo of drug-induced contractions—I burst into the world with an audible pop that turned the heads of the nurses, Mel hovering in the hallway, the doctor waiting with gloved hands.
    Pop. The sound of rectal muscle parting against the force of the baby’s too-large head. The first sign of my lack of elegance.
    I dropped, newborn, into startled silence.
    Chaos erupted against the absence of a cry. While the room filled with monitors, machines, and an emergency medical team, Grace, confused, lifted her empty arms from the pillow. “Where’s my baby?” The doctor, a kind woman with liberal leanings, focused like everyone else in the room on the scene in the corner—the oxygen tank, the wheeled incubator, the mutterings of the neonatal specialists—turned back to the bed, eyes tired above the white paper mask over her mouth.
    â€œA girl . . .”
    Of course I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know if the doctor was kind, a woman or liberal. The precise instant of birth. Whether my father gaped at my stunted and bowed legs, willing me to die, or Grace’s tears of regret mingled with the first watery stream of breast milk on my tongue. I had torn up the story into bite-sized pieces one day years later and fed them to my gerbil.
    â€œI draw the line at sleeping on the ground.” Grace manoeuvred a light folding camp cot through the door of their full-height tent. “We are over sixty.” Grace appeared a decade younger, few wrinkles and slim, her hair—the white still streaked with coppery brown—swept up in a coil at the back of her elegant neck.
    â€œWhy don’t you draw the line at camping altogether,” I argued. “Go home and write letters, make phone calls. I can give you a list,” I said. “I’m sure Terry would have lots of suggestions.”
    â€œAfter all the work it took to get here? Besides, didn’t you get my email. I explained it all to you. Affirmative action. Peaceful resistance.”
    I mumbled about a lack of a connection. Rainbow, on sick leave from the blockade because of a runny nose, called out from Grace’s tent where she was testing out Esther’s cot, “Let them stay, Dr. Faye.”
    â€œYou keep out of this,” I shot back.
    â€œI’m afraid you have no say in the matter, dear. Esther and I are here to do what we can to help.” Grace shook her sleeping bag from its sack and tossed it through the door to Rainbow.
    Esther, Grace’s loyal friend for thirty-five years, looked her age and was quite capable of dropping things and stumbling. She hammered in a stake at the corner of the tent. “Your mother and I never back down from a fight for justice.”
    I knew Esther spoke the truth, she and Grace a formidable team at the endless marches I endured along with my brothers, Esther’s four children, and a dog or two, the dogs tolerating banners with slogans like Paws for Peace or I Bark for Human Rights . Save the Trees was no different.
    â€œWhat about Dad?” I whined, childishly.
    â€œYour father can take care of himself for a few days. I told him he could bail us out if necessary.”
    â€œYou’re not going to get arrested, are you?”
    â€œIf need be,” she repeated.
    â€œIt’s not going to help,” I insisted.
    Grace fixed me with the gaze that never failed to stop me in my tracks, my mother’s sharp opal eyes pinning me to the wall or in this case a tree. “‘It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head than to crawl on one’s belly.’”
    How could one argue with Mahatma Gandhi?
    â€œCome on,