The relationship between the Abrahamic religions and biological diversity from the creationist 'Adam and Eve' model is simple enough to understand: biological diversity can not exist and if everybody pretends it isn't there, then it won't be. This short story, written by Joanne Proctor, explores the denial in an historical setting.

The story may upset some readers. Perhaps on religious grounds, or even because it is seen to be exclusive of transgenderism. It certainly is the latter: It has nothing to do with gender role transgression, though it might help explain why western cultures insist on turning everything into a TG behaviour, and legitimising that, rather than acknowledging biological diversity.

But if you feel offended the solution is simple. Stop reading it. As to everyone else, the author hopes you enjoy her writing.

        

I Remember Thee.

Will, the miller loved his daughters. Each in her special way, reminded him of the wife he’d lost two years before.  But a man needed a woman, and the mill needed an heir.  So he’d remarried eight months after Agnes died.  His new wife was seventeen, the age of Ruth, his youngest daughter.

Youth was not Meg’s only difference. She was taller, thinner, freckle faced, with green flecked eyes and hair the gold of ripened barley.  In time Meg’s presence drove away the ghost that William found in every room.

Now Meg lay in their chamber with Mother Watt for company. William had already played his part.  Both in the bed and in the tiny village church, where he’d  knelt each Sunday since their wedding and prayed for intervention from above.  After every mass he’d lit a candle.  And he’d donated a firkin full of flour to friar Jean Belgae, so  the cleric’s voice would join with his.  Surely God would listen and, by heaven’s grace, Meg would soon present him with a son.

A lazy fire burned in the great stone hearth.  Low rafters threw shadows into corners and phantoms flickered where simple angles met.  Sometimes a muffled grunt or half-choked scream filtered through the timber walls.  But the miller waited for the crying of a baby. He’d waited while long minutes crawled past midnight.  He waited as sunrise crept toward the valley.

Giving birth was women’s work.  William’s elbows rested on the dining table with his chin cupped in his callused palms. He was in his middle forties, square and powerful of frame. His thick black hair was turning grey, his eyes the cloudless blue of a distant summer sky.

Those eyes were closed, his brain was dulled by brandy and Mother Watt’s elixir.  Its reek escaped a tankard near his elbow.  Each time he took another sip the miller’s head grew heavier. An hour before the first cock crowed, William took his final swallow, then folded slowly to the table, and began to snore. He didn’t hear his wife’s last frightened cry. Or the keening of the new born babe.  Or Mother Watt’s  frustrated curse when she failed to wake him half an hour later. 

***                    

Friar Jean Belgae paused upon the crest that overlooked the mill.  Dark clouds flocked like pregnant sheep around the western mountains. In spite of their portents the morning sun was warm. Early mist rose off the river and blanketed the vale below him.  The cleric had seen the valley often, though not as it appeared to him that morning. 

Groves of willow traced the river banks. Their topmost branches floated on the surface of the fog.  A league off, where the village stood, smoke curled from chimneys without houses, and formed a canopy over roofs that seemed to have no walls.

The mill was raised on piles to protect it from autumnal floods. The massive wheel that turned the granite stones was hidden.  The buildings sat like stranded arks upon the mist.

Two hours earlier, with the miller’s wain and the squat shape of its driver silhouetted, dark against the blush of dawn, he’d listened to the midwife’s crooked shadow describe the scene inside.  The Mistress Miller lying in a trance near death. A baby different from any she’d seen before, and finally the drunken miller sleeping at the table, stupefied by a potion of St John’s wart, willow bark, and the vulgar tasting brandy of the village.  

The cleric kicked the mule into motion. The track slipped off the hill.  Sunlight refracted through the mist.  On the valley floor the mule and rider were drowned in diffuse yellow light.  The very air around them seemed to tremble.  The ancient wall of stone beside the road loomed larger. And the clay beneath the mule’s hooves became a golden strand that drew the friar forward to the mill.

***

The Miller lay as he’d slumped four hours earlier.  Mother Watt’s last attempt to rouse him had been as fruitless as her first.  Earlier she’d looked into the crock of brandy and found it almost empty.  But the phial of elixir in the pocket of her skirt was still half full.  Aside from William,  she’d used a little soothing Meg.  And one tiny drop upon a new born baby’s tongue had always been her custom.

The oaken door was bolted,  the shutters closed against the fog that Mother Watt’s old bones had signalled on her way back from the chapel.  The room was thick with smoke.  The stench of last years threshing lifted from the floor and William’s rusty snoring hacked the air like a badly sharpened cleaver.

Standing in the orange fire light, washed by a tallow candle’s smoky glow, Mother Watt looked at her flickering hands.  Hands with knotted joints, macramé veined and purple webbed beneath her ancient skin. Those hands had drawn William’s daughters into the world.  They’d been the first sensation Meg had felt beyond the womb.

Half the valley’s population were the midwife’s children, and Mother Watt  remembered every one.  She knew that God did not bestow his blessings equally.  For example there was Ham, the tenant farmer’s son.  Hunch backed, club footed Ham. Created by the Lord to stoop and stumble crab-wise through his life.  Or gentle Ashley, strangely over thick of neck and tongue. Ash, the placid, ever helpful miller’s boy.  Mother Watt had often seen his like before.  None had lived to see their middle-twenties.     

The midwife pulled her ancient body straighter and shuffled to the kitchen. She chattered to herself as she took a shallow bowl from a pile beneath the bench and shuffled back into the room where the mother and the baby lay. She clutched the phial in her pocket briefly, as if it were a talisman,  then she pulled the cover from Meg’s unconscious body.

The right side of Meg’s face sagged, as though the muscle that held it to the bone had lost its grip.  One open eye stared sightlessly into a corner.  Saliva trickled through her open lips.  Her breath was weak and for a moment the midwife thought her heart had stopped.  She probed Meg’s throat and found the fragile rhythm of its pulse, as if the fluttering wings of a dying butterfly were trapped beneath the woman’s flesh.

She knew that greater powers already held Meg’ spirit in their hands.  What life remained were memories captured in her flesh and blood.  Mother Watt worked slowly.  She fumbled with the ribbons that kept the bodice of Meg’s night-dress closed. Then she rolled the other woman awkwardly onto her side. 

She took the bowl and placed it under one full breast.  Gently the midwife began to press, draining the fluid Meg secreted, until her milk lay inches deep in the bottom of the basin.  As she worked she talked aloud,  in case some part of Meg were watching from the rafters or lurking in a corner listening.

“For the baby,” she explained.  “You’ll soon see, child.  Though you know the whispers in the village well enough.”

She took the phial from her pocket and emptied it into the basin.  “Some call me witch…,”  she muttered.  “Even them I’ve helped into the world, or live because the Lord gave me the gift of healing”   She closed Meg’s bodice and retied the ribbons. “Whatever comes thee must be decent for the priest,”  she murmured softly. 

The baby in the crib began to cry. 

“Hush, child.”  The midwife whispered.  “I’ll tend thee soon enough.”

She went back to the brandy crock and tipped its dregs into the bowl. She added honey from the kitchen and stirred until the flavours of the brandy and elixar had almost disappeared.

The baby’s cry drowned William’s guttural snore.  She held it to her breast.  She rolled a corner of Meg’s sheet in a tube, dipped it in the bowl and brought it dripping to the infant’s searching mouth.

“It’s best this way,”  she crooned.  “You’ll see. For everyone, it’s best this way.”

***

The road forked. The fog thickened. The air grew darker as the friar turned toward the river. The glow had almost vanished by the time he heard the muffled barking of the miller’s dog.  Buildings emerged like spectres from the fog.  Elm trees near the mill-house stretched their sullen branches overhead.  The water-wheel creaked and splashed nearby.                                         

Iron rapped on iron.  The sound died dully in the fog.  The friar listened for the sound of movement behind the door.  His left hand poised, then raised the knocker for a second time.  But the silence was deceptive.  The door opened unexpectedly. The midwife watched impassively as he caught his balance on the frame.

Bottomless black eyes stared from her furrowed face.  Jean Belgae had heard the whispers that swirled around the midwife.  But Mother Watt had never missed a mass. She wore a blessed crucifix around her neck, and he could not fault her dedication.  Yet still the friar wondered every time he looked into her eyes.

“Praise God,” she said.  “Things remain unchanged.”  Mother Watt stared a moment longer at the friar, then she stepped aside. “Best ye come and see,” she finished.

Jean Belgae was silent as the woman led him to Meg’s chamber.  He nodded when she said,

“I’ll tend the fire.”

And left him standing at the bedside, to observe the barest rise and fall of Meg’s breasts beneath her linen gown.  Then to carefully examine the un-swaddled baby in the cradle.

Jean Belgae shivered. Memories of golden light expanded in his mind.  He sensed the aura bathe him in its glow again, and suddenly he understood its meaning.  He stepped back from the crib and spoke to the unconscious woman on the bed.

“Do not the scriptures teach us that God made Adam in the image of himself?” He asked her.  He paused a moment and continued.  “And did he not make Eve from Adam’s side?”

Again the friar glanced down at the infant.  His eyes rested on the webbing between its toes and fingers. They paused a moment on the baby’s lack of male or female organs, then passed across the tiny mottled chest devoid of nipples. 

“Did he not create all humans in the form of Adam, or in the shape of Eve?” He flung his upturned palm toward the baby.  “What then has issued from your belly?”

Standing near the door, the midwife listened to the friar’s questions.  Her eyes were closed.  Her head was bowed.

“Is this the form of Adam. Is this the shape of Eve?”  The cleric hissed. “Did you not consort with Satan?  And is this not his demon,  brought forth from your loins?”

The midwife had heard enough.  She shuffled, heavy footed, past the miller.  William stirred and raised his brandy addled head.   Mother Watt ignored his guttural grunt.  She hung a tiny bag of herbs across her back and grasped her worn staff.

***

Almost two hours  passed. The wind that shepherded the clouds dispersed the fog.  The sky above the midwife darkened.  Once she stopped and turned. Her eyes gazed back toward the mill.

She watched the friar climb upon his mule.  She saw the miller standing with his shoulders slumped, staring at a pyramid of burning timber. Dark smoke billowed from the fire and disappeared into the clouds.  For a moment she imagined the spirits of the mother and her child rising to the heavens, drifting upward with the smoke.

“Nay,”  she whispered to herself. “For Meg were gone already, and if I tended properly to the baby, it would not have suffered.  The master will survive on brandy ‘till he takes another wife.  And the priest did not get everything his way,  for I’ll not yet feel his heat about my ankles.”  Sadly the midwife shook her head.

“But live or dead,  all my babies I remember.  So you not made as Adam were, or  not alike to Eve,  how can I not remember thee?” 

She turned her aching steps toward the junction.  Behind her the fire grew brighter.  Flames reflected from the river. Shadows danced like drunken goblins through the trees. 

Short Story by Joanne Proctor