The Mothers of Sauerkraut Cave Cry for Their Children

Hailey Small

I.

From 1873–1996, two spires of Central Kentucky Lunatic Asylum loomed like a pinpricked stare. Here, abuse and neglect were rampant. Patient deaths went unquestioned. Hundreds of bodies lie in unmarked graves across the grounds, fenced off in sections of what is now E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park in the middle of suburban Louisville.

Screams of labor could disturb the insane, so pregnant women—rarely pregnant when admitted—were dragged to Sauerkraut Cave. Women gave birth beside hundreds of jars of sauerkraut, stacked in chilly piles in the natural underground refrigerator. Later, they returned to their rooms, mysteriously, without a baby.

II.

A double-hinged cry races through oak and concrete, shakes the sawback turtles and racoons, threatens to shatter sauerkraut glass. Mud clings to mother’s shoulders and ankles. The breeze cools her sweat. In labor, two mouths are opening; mother separates like the earth itself, cracking at the middle like this opening in the hillside, finally revealing a hollowness and release. 

The first shriek shrivels like the bloom of a sawtooth tree. It fades into bedrock, replaced by infant lungs wailing with newborn fervor.

Baby, mouth open, is flung into the cave’s pond belly, where silt shifts liquid. First babbles are replaced with suckled water. Sediment settles in the esophagus. Crayfish learn to lobotomize.

The asylum is overcrowded.

III.

Today, clover and iris are sustained by patient bone, and ash tree roots sprout from wombs of Lunatic Women. Their arms grow up, branching from each stomach to cradle the moon’s translucent milk skin. When it rains, leaves rock little raindrops in time with the wind. The canopy wraps itself around swaddling clothes of cloud.

Each drip whistles lullaby notes on rockface as they dribble towards the cave. This water cycle—its tip-tap rhythm—fades and reverberates in circles on the pond’s surface, dissipating among hundred-year-old sulfur left in Sauerkraut Cave.

Hailey Small is a senior and almost-alumni of Asbury University, where she studies English, history, and creative writing. Find her poetry and essays published in Kentucky Monthly, Anthrow Circus, The Sundress Blog, and The Asbury Review, where she also serves as the editor in chief.