Well now, let me tell you how this curious tale of woodland folly met its conclusion, for it is one of those stories that folks in our town will speak of in hushed tones for generations to come, partly out of respect for the departed and partly because it’s simply too peculiar to be believed without the solemnity of lowered voices.
They found Mrs. Eleanor Abernathy two days into the search, lying pale and still in that ridiculous clearing she had mistaken for nature’s delivery room, her face wearing an expression of such profound surprise that one might think she had just discovered that bears do not, in fact, make excellent midwives. The strain is much too heavy for giving life to the he-child that she surrendered hers, as the poet might say, though I suspect the strain had more to do with her foolhardy notions than with any deficiency in nature’s design.
The babe, a sturdy little fellow with lungs powerful enough to frighten the birds from their nests, was discovered wrapped in what remained of Mrs. Abernathy’s shawl, looking considerably more alive than his mother and considerably less pleased about his woodland birth than she had been. Oh, the sorrow of her life has passed, her dreams to be fulfilled, even though I must say it strikes me as the height of irony that she died fulfilling a dream that was never hers to begin with, for the child she so desperately wanted to bear was not, in fact, the child she was actually carrying.
The doctor, having examined both mother and child with the grim determination of a man who has seen too much of life’s peculiar ironies, confirmed what some of the town’s more observant ladies had suspected for months, that Mrs. Abernathy’s condition had more to do with the baker’s son than with her own long-suffering husband. The town, upon hearing this news, reacted with the sort of collective gasp that usually precedes a scandal of such magnitude as to provide conversation material for the next decade.
Mrs. Abernathy’s husband, a man who had endured his wife’s peculiarities with the stoic resignation of a saint, merely nodded slowly when informed of the child’s true parentage, then proceeded to the tavern where he remained for three days, emerging only to announce that he would raise the boy as his own, not out of Christian charity but because “the boy’s got Abernathy blood in him now, and no Abernathy has ever been raised by anyone but an Abernathy, no matter how he came to be.”
The baker’s son, meanwhile, took one look at the squalling infant and fled town with such haste that he left behind not only his shoes but his reputation, which was subsequently found by the blacksmith’s wife and returned to the baker’s widow with a stern lecture about the dangers of hiring handsome young men with wandering eyes.
And so it was that Mrs. Abernathy achieved her dream in death, if not quite in the manner she had anticipated. The town erected a small monument to her memory, describing her as a woman who “gave her life for the miracle of birth,” which is true enough if one ignores the inconvenient details about woodland foolishness and questionable parentage.
The child, named Theodore after Mrs. Abernathy’s father, grew up to be a sensible man who became the town’s most successful banker, never once mentioning his peculiar birth or the mother who died convinced she had fulfilled her destiny. As for the woods where this drama unfolded, they remain much as they were before, though folks now give them a wider berth during birthing season, having learned that nature may indeed be wise, but it has little patience with humans who insist on testing its wisdom with their romantic notions and questionable judgment.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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