Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (27 page)

BOOK OF O’KELLS:

SINS OF THE FLESH

Part I

Chapter One

In the Wake of The Great Fornicator

The Archbishop cursed the light with language bright enough to bring the dead back to life. He used up the usual blasphemies—he brayed damnation for that damned Edison—and then he lay there, flat-backed, more blanched corpse than famous cleric lying in such a state. The great swell of his belly had lifted the light cotton of his nightshirt high up above his knees, and now the Archbishop turned his back to the porthole (and against the light), and in the dark his knees tried to find his chest in quest of warmth, and youth, and God knows what else.

From what I have learned of his life and those times—from what I have managed to imagine—the Archbishop had no way to know what was to come in the last town along the canal. There was nothing to betray either the great tragedy that awaited the town the next morning, or the great good that would come of his own spineless flight.

The Archbishop was at the tail end of his annual odyssey to the parishes along the canal: a trip always timed to coincide with the longest, lightest days of summer, when the canal was the only salvation from heat so hot even the godless seemed to throb. As the century waned, the towns along the canal had become nothing more than glorified ports of call for the Archbishop, scheduled respites required to stoke his unabated appetites, and to take on the best supplies a parish could afford: fresh-faced colleens, corn or strawberries in season, the latest gossip ground fresh from a town’s rumor mill. In arch response to his critics, the Archbishop had increased not only the length but the lavishness of his trip along the canal, until the voyage had become its own warm-weather trinity of worldly pleasure: devoted, in equal part, to The Word of God, and the long days of summer, and the earthly comforts of the Archbishop.

Supine on a bed big enough for a king, the Archbishop lay there mute and oblivious beneath the fine mesh of mosquito netting, at the exact moment in time when his flickering sight gave way to the unadulterated power of his remaining senses. It was then that the scent came: not the incense that meant the empty promise of sleep, or the burnt coal that meant going home, but the immortal smell of young girl: the scent of salvation heaven-sent. He could smell the clean tang of colleen clear through the door.

“Grace?” he said.

“Coming,” came the miraculous voice of Grace O’Kell.

Grace O’Kell had always been a sight for his sore eyes, and yet, as she waited, teasing and tittering behind the green door, the Archbishop was thinking of all of the things that she was not. Grace O’Kell was
not
one of his commonplace colleens—oh no—not beautiful, despite her silvery curls, and definitely not pliable, not born of the right Hat City clan—not by a mile—not a candidate for canonization, and not even—
not ever!
—on time.

She was in fact all of the things a colleen was
not
supposed to be: a talker who loved to talk back, and a troublemaker who made her small trouble to no end.

“You’re late,” the Archbishop said.

And yet, and yet.

The Archbishop found Grace O’Kell to be a breath of fresh air compared to his cookie-cutter colleens. Perhaps he no longer cared for their bland acquiescence or his predictable blandishments. Perhaps—a sixth sense?—he
understood it no longer made sense to extract free will like a ditch digger digging deeper down with those new-fangled drills.

Perhaps the Archbishop had simply seen something of himself—something of the devil—in Grace O’Kell.

There was her voice to be reckoned with—the beatific voice of an angel—a voice for the ages, for all time. Grace O’Kell was humming now, in his chambers, humming the hymn about Him without need for the glorious words, and the light melody carried her right along into the room. For the first time, the Archbishop heard her voice ring out somehow beyond the highest register that a man could imagine, up there in the range between God and dog. God had given Grace O’Kell that voice to be used, the Archbishop knew, and by God she had used it. It was because of her voice that the Archbishop had plucked her from the gutter like a piece of forgotten, ripening fruit.

“
Coming
,”  Grace O’Kell hummed.

Warm air came whooshing into his chambers, and what the Archbishop could no longer see began to take shape in the growing light of day. No—God had not given Grace O’Kell beauty, but He had given her something better: the soul of beauty. Her light hair shone almost silver in the light from
the porthole, but her eyebrows were darker than her hair, almost black, and they curved high above her eyes and hung like two half-moons. With her willowy build—and the billowing white gown of the Archbishop’s colleens—she could have been an angel alighting for a quick look-see.

“So where’s the fire, Archie?” Grace O’Kell said.

She plumped onto his footstool with one foot on the Bible below the bed, and the other propped up against the real lace of his virgin sheets. Grace O’Kell spread her legs into the widest
of
Ys, and when she lifted her gown the Archbishop could see nothing, not even the soft silvery blur down between: a sight that would have stirred him to ecstasy, had he the eyes to see.

Her soft purring became a mumbled, magical prayer.

Grace O’Kell was using the very tips of her fingertips, as he had taught her (and all of the colleens) to do. She worried the bead of her own flesh like a rosary, and then she tried to think of God, as he had taught her to—
Oh God
how she tried!—but instead she came as ever to the earthbound sounds of the men biting at coal in the boiler room down below, to the black streams of soot that twisted down their bare chests, down the stems of their shovels, and down onto the quivering deck.

“What’s
w-w-
wrong?” Grace O’Kell was quivering.

The Archbishop had begun a flat-backed baying at the light of day: a low-throated howl that belonged to back-alley dogs roaming the gloaming, forever feeding on the meek.

“
Archie?
”

“Begone now, my pup.”

“You’re not well, Archie. I can see that. Maybe a proclamation to make you feel better? Something about sacrifice? That
always
cheers you up.”

Grace O’Kell clucked at the lump of cleric laden with real lace beneath the veil of mosquito netting. She stood up and down came her billowing gown, and then she ducked her head down to the porthole for a look at the last town along the canal.

How she had come to dread this sight!

For her, this godforsaken hole had always meant the end of summer—and the ends of the earth. Civilization may have extended to the last town along the canal, but Grace O’Kell had her grave doubts. The rust-bucket lock, bare of traffic, looked dry as a bone, like a mass grave waiting to be spaded over, and the steeple of The Church of The Immaculate Conception seemed to have no point for want of paint. Left to right, the red light strip
was wretched with one ratty shack after another, with each storefront dedicated to a different strain of mortal sin. Grace O’Kell watched the slops lap up against the hull as the barge came to face the town: the rotting husks bobbing like bad apples, the shapeless lumps of human waste, the ground-down hooves of dead calves and slaughtered sheep. The rickety telegraph shack looked to her like a lean-to for the dead and gone. Everything about the town struck her as small potatoes now, even that boy in rags zagging from lamp to lamp—sagging with the weight of that long, beaked pole.

Hadn’t anyone in this town ever heard of
electricity
?

Grace O’Kell thought the last town along the canal had to be the last place on earth to get the word on anything.

“Can’t you hear them?” the Archbishop said.

“Who?”

“There!
Them
!
”

“
Where?
Who?” Grace O’Kell said.

“The
Hads
, damn you!”

At first, Grace O’Kell heard nothing but the sounds of a town still nodding awake: the high whinny of a horse, a baby’s whining cry, the creak of a distant door across soiled water. Only then could she hear the low-
throated chant of shared public sin, the words of The Lord’s Prayer chanted over again and again:
But deliver us from evil... For thine is the kingdom...and the power...
the words growing more desperate with each fresh start—until the low hum had become a deafening hymn. Grace O’Kell could see the long line of sinners snake past the zagging boy with the long pole, past the church and that last flicker of lit-up gas lamp. Behatted and veiled in black, the chanting line moved forward, as if marching onward to The Final Judgment with full knowledge of the only possible result.

“
My God!
” Grace O’Kell said.

“Mutton,” the Archbishop commanded for the penultimate time.

The Archbishop was already wise to the waste The Great Fornicator had left behind in the last town along the canal. He knew Hads had come to know Thomas Cushing far too well—for far too long—the hard horsy prick of his pole in both darkness and light, the grunt of his untimely exit a heartbeat before the pounding demise of his hose. The Had Nots could see the obliterating bliss of the Hads, as if those who raised their skirts to Thomas Cushing had risen one step closer to God. Bliss came at considerable cost, of course: sinful binges by the Hads were always followed by the need to purge. In those early days of damnation, it was not uncommon for hell-bound Hads to fall weak-kneed onto their knees, to free-fall back into the black hole of the confessional at The Church of The Immaculate Conception. There they pressed their foreheads to the wire mesh like so many wild, trapped animals—all the while spilling their sins into the cupped upturned ears of the hardening priests. The priests would prod the damned, as was their wont (and need), and they would dole out
X
Hail Marys or
Y
Stations of the Cross, like so many hard biscuits or plain Johnny Cakes.

The Archbishop knew that Thomas Cushing’s hold on the town was so complete that Had Nots had granted an unspoken dispensation to Hads. In the last town along the canal, there was thus a moral discounting of that brand of adultery from a damning sin of the flesh to a minor slip, one that a God-fearing Had might dilute further with a few dozen rosaries of atonement.

On Saturdays, blessed by the priests and their peers, the Hads would go round and round the dark circle of Stations—one sinner stepping lightly aside to let the next one past—their thoughts of God waging a hopeless battle with The Lord’s polar opposite: Thomas Cushing and his rank pole. The more women walked from Station to Station in the church, the more their thoughts fell inevitably to The Great Fornicator, and to what had come to pass in the past between each of them and him—and, with luck, to what new sins might lighten their load in the days to come.

As the veiled women of the town repeated their weekly ritual of commingling and confession and cleansing, the lines for confession grew longer and longer still, with longer waits between each Station of the Cross for each sinner, until each Station was backed up four or more deep with the damned, depending upon the toll from a particularly dark week.

The situation of the sinners had grown even more dire for the parish, for Hads in transit had begun to swap their godawful stories of transience, thereby transforming the aisles of the church into a kind of sinful bazaar. First one and then another began to drop their penitential poses, to timidly lift their veils, and to confess their respective sins to each other in great carnal detail. The weekly procession to the Immaculate Conception had thus developed into a
bona fide
women’s club, with explicit shorthand between sinner and priest, a verbal economy belied by the scandalous detail that snaked unadulterated from Station to Station, from sinner to sinner, from the lips of Thomas Cushing’s intransigent women and on to God’s ear with just that one stop in between.

In time, the ungodly procession had come to a complete standstill, as each Station came to represent a particular strain of grievous sin, where those lucky enough to be guilty would gather with the giddy anticipation of a church social. With the tacit approval of the priests, the penance generated by Thomas Cushing’s pounding hose came to be truncated and then cut off entirely… in favor of the free flow of communal information around the church—like so many dots and
dashes dancing down a hot wire.

Before long, to the horror of the Monsignor, a hoary rivalry had erupted among Hads and Had Nots, with profound political consequences not known in the town since the days of the Know Nothings.

A machine candidate, dutifully campaigning on the stoop of the church on Saturdays, was simply paying homage to the harsh realities of headcount. This predicament was made all the more vexing by the propensity of Had Nots to pose as the most unrepentant of Hads. As one machine candidate after another failed to pull the full parish vote, the leaders of the machine had finally conceded that the town had split smack down the middle between Hads (real or imagined) and Had Nots (all too real). This division represented the gravest threat to party harmony since “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” had soiled the second coming of Grover Cleveland.