Once, there was a small hut. There was nothing extraordinary about the hut, or the village it belonged to – a village of small huts that bordered a bay somewhere in the Caribbean. Usually, the village was quiet and beautiful, full of caramel-skinned families, with mothers talking quickly to each other as they sat round a great cauldron, crushing cacao beans, peeling oranges, and storing bananas from ceilings to keep trarantulas from eating into the supply.
The village held a strange sort of harmonious balance between what was clearly hard work, and frivolity. The mothers sometime burst out into harmonized song, praying to the goddess of rain to allow their crops to grow to their full, rich, ripeness. A wailing sound would sometimes interrupt the peacful atmosphere, and one of the older girls would find their respective wandering toddlers, then comfort or scold – whichever was the appropriate response to the child's cries.
There were only a few odd things about the idyllic picture, but as the men of the village had gotten used to the two anomalies, so had their wives, daughters, and sons. For often a tall, stringy boy of fourteen, his skin pale but for the harsh sunburn he'd gained, was found among the smallest children, who were most often found lying and gurgling on a hugely large animal skin, to protect their new bodies from the harsh sting of sand. The boy slunk around them, stopping squabbles, picking up an occasional stinker to change its swaddling, or even lying down among them all, red skin against all sorts of caramel shades that clung to him with the unconcious need to be close to something.
But this day, the boy was found nowhere near the babies, many of whom were holding on to each other in their efforts to stand up and crawl.
The buzzing of the women was louder today, but they were interuppted intermittently by wails of pain from the small hut. The sunburnt boy was sitting with his back against the small hut's foundations. He was concentrating on a piece of string, knotting it, pulling it apart, then starting again to weave it into a sort of bracelet.
The wails became faster and louder, and some of the elder women in the village left their places and walked to the small hut, with pride across their shoulders, straightening their postures. This, now, here – the elder women felt the adoration that fell on them from the gazes of the whole of the village. These deliverers of life smiled wearily as they gathered their tools for the upcoming event – one cut a hollow reed that was standing with a group of its kind where the water met the sand, another sat close to a sharpening stone, and rythmically began to whet her small and precise knife to bring it to its sharpest point. Still other women came out of their dwellings with baskets, digging around in them until they found their targets – bundles of herbs tied together with moldy twine.
Now, they approached the hut, soft smiles on their faces. The door was opened from the inside, and a quick chatter exchanged with the man who had opened it. With a worried look on his face, Teague Sparrow stepped out onto the sandy ground, and noticed his son, Jack, sitting cross-legged on the ground. Wiping his face with the back of his hand, and tembling slightly, Teague took his place next to Jack, grabbing his son's hand and holding on with white-fingered pressure.
All continued in the village. The women and mothers had changed their chanting songs to a fast-paced, never-ending prayer to the goddess of rain – hearing the wailing from the cabin, they were briefly lost in memories of their own time spent with Death on their left shoulder and Life on their right. They recounted stories to each other, stories of horrible hours spent in labor, of amnesiac relief that was felt when a baby was safely delivered and placed in their arms to take suck, and, of course, quietly whispered stories about the unimaginable, but entirely impossible tragedy that faced every woman as she stepped into the hut of deliverance – the possibility of death, not only of their babes, but sometimes, horrifyingly, of their very selves.
The midwives had seen everything in the range, from glorious life, to the ash-tasting death that sometimes arrived when labor didn't go smoothly.
Every so often, one of the midwives would leave the hut, scurrying for something that was instantly needed, and usually instantly provided for by the young women and mothers. Each time they walked back to the hut, the midwife would stare, shaking her head and clucking at the anxiously awaiting Teague. They communicated their frustration to Jack, avoiding his father altogether.
"A man's place during the Deliverance is not here, to sit like a fish worrying over a hook. Tell Him to go out to the fields, to go to the forest. It's not fit for a man to feel a woman's pain – the pain that will belong only forever to the woman." After this proclomation, the midwife would enter the hut and join her sisters in the life or death struggle that only skill and practice could turn right.
Jack knew his father overheard these criticisms, after all, they were addressed, if not spoken directly, to him. A part of him knew that this eavesdropping was considered unmanly, but he always had known, since his memory became a part of his self, that his Teague Sparrow had waited just as worriedly when Jack's mother was in labor with him.
Though, of course, Jack had been born in a completely different setting. He could almost see his father, white-wigged and black-heeled, his shirtsleeves rolled back, pacing the hallway outside his mother's confinement chamber. There would have been others there, peers of his fathers, who would have been urging him to calm down with a glass of brandy, a cigar, a quick sleep – the women of this village seemed to hold the same sort of uncomfortable ill-feeling as Jack imagined those men in England to be, and he smiled at the irony. Teague Sparrow was neither fully at-ease in his homeland nor during his foreign travels, although loving a wife with so much adoration as Teague had had for Jack's mother seemed to be more a sin in the wealthy position than here. He seemed to glean a little respect, actually, for the demonstrative love he held for the second mother of his second child, as most of the men in the village seemed to walk away from the intimacy of their family and transform completely into testosterone-ridden hunters that went out each day early, and came back each night late.
At any rate, Jack, too, admired his father's devotion, and wouldn't have made him leave this scene of worry for anything.
After all, Jack's mother had died in childbirth. Since Teague was seconds away, he had been able to say his last goodbye to his wife – and if the same thing were to happen this time…
Jack looked at his father with admiration and understanding, and placed one of his stringy arms around his father's shoulders. The fact was that Jack knew the worst – if the lovely young woman he had fallen for in this deserted place died as well – he wouldn't be able to bear taking care of the baby. Which, inevitably, left Jack. As day turned to night and the wailing turned to screaming, Jack felt more and more care for this baby. He watched his father fade away, and when the midwives finally finished twenty-four hours later in a mix of elation and mourning, it was in Jack's open arms that they placed the newborn girl, and it was Teague who went inside the hut, mourning his lover – his last lover, the last person he would ever completely trust.
As Jack heard his father crying, he made his way to the mothers of the tribe, who had waiting a goat, newly milked, and a rag at which his little sister could suck. A wave of protectiveness and love washed over Jack, and he attentively fed the girl-child, who surprised Jack by giving intensely strong to her first bit of food. He knew she needed a name, and needed one quickly, if the local stories about angry gods who came take unclaimed babies were true. And so Jack Sparrow thought quickly, and gave the baby a woman's name he had thought could only belong to one person – but seemed ready made for his new sister.
"Isabella," he murmured, slipping the recently woven string around her neck, where it sat, much too loosely, hanging down past her stomach.. "Or Bella. Your choice, really."