Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (26 page)

I’m talking about love, professor.

It was like a honeymoon for women only, wasn’t it? How long did it last?

Not long enough. Molly O’Malley and my grandmother had a terrible falling out. Over Mordechai
—
over a Cushing man, of course. He was the only one left, as fat and harmless as a stuffed pig ready to have his throat slit. But both Molly O’Malley and Constance Briody had to have him.

Did anybody know about this?

Not right away. Molly O’Malley and my grandmother preached abstinence as the only way for The Tommies to purge themselves. Constance Briody
—
my grandmother
—
used to rail against men, against “the immortal cock.”

I think I know what’s coming.

They were both fucking Mordechai, of course. He
came from a long line of pricks. He may have been fat and stupid, but he was still a Cushing, and they still wanted him.

Did anyone know?

The last town along the canal is a small town. Everybody knew.

Why did Molly O’Malley prevail?

She was just the stronger of the two, stronger than my grandmother. My grandmother was in so much pain over Mordechai she had to leave town. Some people said she joined the circus. But nobody knows where she went. And nobody ever saw Constance Briody again.

Not even Kate Briody O’Kell, your mother?

No one. She was gone. She was history.

So you never knew your grandmother. Are The Tommies a way to find your family?

Are you a psychologist, professor?

I’m a professor of history who looks for connections because they are always there.

Next question.

What happened next?

Molly O’Malley was left to her own devices
—
and to Mordechai
—
may God rest her soul. The leader of The Tommies was the only woman in the town allowed to have a man. But no one was allowed to talk about it.

The last of the heterosexuals?

No
—
the first of the bisexuals. Molly O’Malley had also begun to develop an appetite for the daughters of the Cushing daughters. The younger the better. And she always got her way. It was like the Politburo and the peasants
—
they suffered for the sake of her rhetoric.

What did their mothers—The Tommies—say?

They spoke not a word but went straight to their work. It was only much, much later
—
after I came to the town
—
that they began to know the truth about Molly O’Malley.

She became a mirror image of Thomas Cushing, didn’t she? Of the corruption and abuse she was trying to replace in the last town along the canal.

Very perceptive, professor.

Did it have to happen that way?

A town ruled by women, for women, with no men
—
let’s just say it was much too much, much too soon.

What would you say to those who would argue that it was just not natural? That women need men and men need women?

I would tell them to take a look at the second coming of The Tommies. Take a look at what happened after I got to the last town along the canal.

Why did you go back?

I was looking for the One True God. I thought I might find Her there.

Seriously.

I really did have a calling of some kind. I can’t explain it, but I knew I belonged there. Seriously.

You said The Tommies “had spontaneously beaten and killed a man
—
John Patrick Cushing—for raping a woman who happened to be my mother.”

Surely your mother had something to do with why you went to the last town along the canal.

It had everything to do with it.

In what way?

I saw her life as a microcosm for everything that had happened to women in the last fifty years. Sometimes I would just think of her as a beautiful young woman
—
she had this gorgeous chestnut hair
—
and she was full of moxie, full of fight. And then she was brutally, brutally raped. Everything in her life and about her life changed after that.

Could you be more specific?

Before it happened my mother didn’t think there was anything she couldn’t do. After, she married a man she didn’t love
—
my father
—
and had a baby by a man she hated, the man who had raped her.

What else changed for your mother? What about her “moxie,” as you call it?

It was still there, in diluted form, but now she had to carry out her ambitions through her husband and children. I made sure that wouldn’t happen to me when I got to the last town along the canal.

Molly O’Malley was an old woman by the time you got to the town.

She was dying.

You went to see her.

Right before she died. She was all dressed up in white, plumped up on a bed with pillows. Like the angels were about to come down and carry her on up into heaven.

Did you tell her you were the granddaughter of Constance Briody?

She knew exactly who I was. And she was terrified. She must have thought I was going to kill her.

But you waited until Molly O’Malley died before you moved ahead.

There was no reason not to wait because she was not long for this world. She was still one of the founders of The Tommies, after all.

And who better to replace her than a descendant of the other founder?

I made sure the women in the town knew who I was, knew my connection to Constance Briody and the past.

What did you tell them?

I said it was time for The Tommies to grow up. To move ahead while learning from the past. I convinced the children born of The Great Fornicator’s sons and daughters to live a life without men. With nothing but love for one another.

History was repeating itself—again.

I told them we all had to know our history. We had to face the truth of what had happened with Molly O’Malley and my grandmother. We had to learn from our truth.

Your critics refer to that process as “The Inquisition.”

No one was punished. There was no Star Chamber. We didn’t put anybody on the rack. We did it to set the record straight about Molly O’Malley and my grandmother and what they had done
—
the good and the bad.

What happened to Molly O’Malley?

She was like Lenin
—
there were statues of her all over town. But she was closer to Stalin.

And you were Khrushchev.

A reformer. Exactly.

You had links to the past. That had to help.

The fact that I was Constance Briody’s granddaughter did not hurt me one bit in the last town along the canal. It meant I had a purchase on the past. By the end everyone hated Molly O’Malley and they wanted to connect with what The Tommies were all about. I became the symbol of that feeling.

What were The Tommies about after “The Inquisition”?

The truth is that we showed what women could do if we worked together. We forme
d businesses together. We worked the farms, set up schools, created an infrastructure. We do without men. It’s heaven.

But surely you can’t do without men forever and survive? At this rate, The Tommies will die out.

But it’s only a matter of time before society accepts that two mothers
—
lesbian or not
—
are far superior to a family where the father is in flight. And in our lifetime we will see artificial insemination, cloning
—
all kinds of answers. That’s where I’m putting my hospital background with the Sisters of Mercy to work. We won’t need men anymore, just their sperm. And a man’s sperm is always readily available. For the right price, they’re always more than happy to come. And they come cheap.

Is there no place for men in your universe, Ms. O’Kell?

When The Tommies are done, professor, we won’t need men at all.

And what of God, Ms. O’Kell?

What of Her?

AFTERWORD
:

KINGDOM COME

By Edith Comer

Department Of Women’s Studies

Sarah Douglas College

That a women’s body is more beautiful than a man’s is scarcely worth debating: the curve of hips, the swell of her sweet breasts, the wanton (wanting?) wetness of pursed lips and poised labia make a man’s apparatus laughable in comparison to such intricacy: a cosmic joke that is not particularly funny. The male’s rudimentary contraption dutifully bears the genetic code necessary for reproduction in the slime of ecstasy, a primitive evolutionary pump and hose meant to deliver the male payload.

Eleanor O’Kell knew intuitively that a man’s genitals had become an anachronism long before the talk shows took up the cry. The millions she poured into her research attacked the logistics of reproduction with furious precision: within two decades a new procreative apparatus was in place in the last town along the canal, one that had nothing to do with men, and everything to do with the future of women.

              That was her genius, but it is
not
her whole story.

If Eleanor O’Kell ever had the ambition to publish it was never evident during her own lifetime. The plain and even painful truth is that no one—not even Nancy Perkins, her first Sisterly lover from the Convent and one of her last in the last town along the canal—knew that Eleanor O’Kell kept a journal in any form, let alone one that aspires, in bursts, to literature. It remains easy to overlook, as her detractors must, that Eleanor O’Kell’s initial cerebral gymnastics were theological, not sexual. The interplay of both—Eleanor O’Kell’s contemplation of the sublime
and
the sexual—is the dominant theme of this entirely personal work. Nuns were shrouded when she entered the Order, closeted, their bodies cloaked and concealed, but within that container Eleanor O’Kell found the core of modern Catholic erotica, and much more. Over time her concern with the worship of the Lord was devilishly transformed into an overriding preoccupation with her own carnal plumbing. If Eleanor O’Kell had remained religious, she might have called such a vital transformation
miraculous
.

“MOTHER NATURE: The Journals of Eleanor O’Kell,” as edited, belongs alongside the finest in the erotic literature of Catholics faithful and fallen. Unlike so many others who turn to the personal journal,
Eleanor O’Kell was
not
looking over her shoulder for the approval of intellectuals or a pat on the back from radicals. These are most assuredly
not
secret musings delivered on a silver platter for the slavish approval of critics and/or acolytes. You now hold in your hands the flawed literature of a movement, the swing of a woman’s psyche from the One True God to the one thing that mattered to a woman of her times: the creation of a society entirely without men.

The lockbox that held Eleanor O’Kell’s journals was supposed to be locked up for thirty years. But even a pioneer, once deceased, can’t control the path taken into the future, especially not when her torrent of words demand to be heard. The sheer volume of Eleanor O’Kell’s musings, sacred and profane, would fill all the shelves of a small town library with these notations from her secret world. With the possible exception of the radical theologian Mary Daly, no one in the history of either feminism or Catholicism has ever been able to articulate the inextricable yet contradictory link between eroticism, love of God, and the ultimate mission of feminism. Eleanor O’Kell lived through that contradiction in public—and privately here in these journals—a journey from the worship of the Heavenly Father, to outright scorn for her own
father, to the notion that a father was no longer needed in the creation or the disposition of a woman’s life. Love her, hate her—Eleanor O’Kell’s journals are like a coda to the 20
th
Century history of women reaching for the light. Her journals are the sound of one hand clapping, of a soul never at rest.

Bronxville, New York

August 20, 2020