The Mothering Coven (2 page)

Ozark wonders if she shouldn’t be doing something else. She looks through her notes: mercer, girdler, dyer, draper, huer, horner, fletcher, cordwainer, tapicer. She is heartened by how many professions she has already recorded. Maybe her inventory isn’t hopeless after all.

“I will give it just a little bit longer,” thinks Ozark.

[:]

Outside, the ghosts have passed us by, leaving a strange quiet in the world. Mr. Henderson has gone out onto his porch to share his muesli with the birds. He thinks he sees armored men gliding along the sidewalk.

“Hugues de Payens,” says Mr. Henderson. He looks behind him. Was that him who just said Hugues de Payens? Who is Hugues de Payens?

“I meant to say, ‘hockey players,’” says Mr. Henderson. The birds are slipping off the trees, all the tiny branches outlined with ice.

[:]

In the parlor, Fiona brings the tank down from the high shelf. She hits the side with a black piano sharp and the clownfish swim out of the castle into the moat-sphere, snapping their jaws. We hear the sharp tapping of the piano key on glass and the xylophone sounds of bones knocking underwater.

Mrs. Borage comes running down the stairs, blowing gaily on the pitch pipe. She wears a lace jabot, frothing white, with a black jacket. Her wig powder gets all over the jacket but who would notice? It is more edifying to observe the perfect circularity of her adhesive beauty spot and the symmetrical peaks of her crimson lip line.

Bryce turns the keys in the stuffed cockatoos on the hat stand. The tiny boxes in their chests play Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja, and we dance for the ghosts until Agnes, in the quiet light of the open window in the corner, cries, “Ms. Kidney!”

X

Ms. Kidney can’t maneuver her long sled between the cairns. She leaves it on the sidewalk. She trudges into the house in her parka and her great swamp boots. Only Ms. Kidney could get away with drinking Honey Bishops from the ladle! She stands by the pot, drinking and laughing. She throws her parka on the rug and her frozen purple overalls start to steam.

“Where’s the gandy stiff, you old blister,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Where’s my Scrumpilgardis?” Mrs. Borage steps forward.

“Dear Ms. Kidney,” she says, and bows deeply. “How is Axel Heiberg? How is the Bay of Baffin?”

“Better than ever,” yells Ms. Kidney. Her lungs are big with the warm air and her leather bag is filled with gifts: whale oil, arctic-willow twigs, cranberry mead—eight bottles, and a tremendous silver herring for Mrs. Borage.

Ms. Kidney has crossed the frozen seas early this year, on the long trip south for the winter, to harvest oranges on the Indian River.

“I’ll have to take the bus from here,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Will you mind my dogs?”

We always mind the dogs for Ms. Kidney.

“Oatmush and a scoop of krill, twice a day,” yells Ms. Kidney.

“Soak the krill,” adds Ms. Kidney. “Make a kind of krill paste.”

“My dogs are older than the first horse, the toothless devils,” she sighs. “But we’re all Przewalskis, eh, Agnes?”

Przewalskis? Bryce starts. We’re not that old.

“Dog years accelerate the matter,” says Mrs. Borage, diplomatically.

“Indeed,” says Ms. Kidney, soberly. Did Ms. Kidney feel it as well, the cold wind of the ghost procession as it passed?

“And Bertrand?” asks Ms. Kidney.

“Shhhh,” says Bryce and we all expel a little breath. Shhhhhh.

“Ah,” says Ms. Kidney, who lives alone at the tip of the narrowing North and has lost everyone, her three sisters beneath the green ice, marked by their upright sleds, for as long as we’ve known her.

[:]

Agnes does not study Przewalskis.

“Did Ms. Kidney mean trilobites?” wonders Agnes. In any case, it is impolite to correct a guest.

Like most paleozoologists, Agnes supports the Crick Theory of Panspermia. Life arrived on Earth as spores blown from a distant star system. It is a very dull business, paleozoology—tracing this flat worm to Alpha Centuri, this sea sponge to Cygnus.

Agnes devotes herself primarily to witchcraft.

[:]

Ms. Kidney is so vigorous! Already she has collapsed Dorcas’s card barbican and two legs of the card table. Bryce’s barkentine has also sustained damages. The bottle is intact, but the spanker mast has snapped.

“How did she do that?” wonders Dorcas. She looks at Ms. Kidney moving vigorously about the parlor. She wonders if Ms. Kidney has a Theta-brain.

Dorcas tries to picture Ms. Kidney engrossed in the harvest: Ms. Kidney moving slowly and rhythmically through the trees, dropping a thousand round oranges, one by one, into the Indian River.

Dorcas pictures the oranges bobbing all the way to the harbor where the International Association of Lepidopterists has merged at last with the International Association of Longshoremen, netting and crating oranges, loading them onto ships. One crate. Two crates. Tall cranes. Blue sky. High spanker masts. Warm air, oddly still.

“Dorcas, how beautiful!” cries Bryce. Dorcas looks down at her hands. Her hands have been scouring the rinds of oranges.

Dorcas watches from the other end of a Theta wave—hands peeling bright wings of orange rinds, mounting them on the bare branches of the hat stand. The cockatoos have fallen silent, watching.

[:]

Bryce claps her hand over her mouth. Why can’t she keep her peace, like a cockatoo?

“Because beauty crowds me,” thinks Bryce, woefully. What if her impulsive cry has trapped Dorcas’s soul forever among the starry branches of the hat stand?

Bryce remembers the story of the old couple in the forest, how they shaped the snow into a maiden with a glittering crown and a brocade cape and the snow maiden was so beautiful, the old couple cried, “Come home with us, Snegurochka!” and she went with them between the pines to the warm little hut with the wood fire crackling and she turned into a puddle right then and there. The old couple tried and tried, but they couldn’t love a tepid little puddle, and the puddle-maiden was so saddened she wept bitter tears, and every day the puddle grew larger until at last the old couple was swept away, the end.

“Oh!” thinks Bryce. Will she be swept away? No. Bryce will love Dorcas’s soul up in the branches of the hat stand. She will care for it tenderly. She will hang Dorcas’s favorite things from the hat stand—hard squares of cinnamon toast and her collection of clear plastic cassettes. She will put Dorcas’s body in the opposite corner, with her arms stretched upwards, just like a hat stand. She will put an orange in each hand.

X

Ms. Kidney’s purple overalls have given off all their steam. They’ve started to shrink, the cuffs rising up to the tops of her swamp boots until they are the perfect length for wading in the Indian River. It’s almost time to go, then. A moment more.

Ms. Kidney and Agnes and Mrs. Borage sit together on the sofa, talking politics. Mrs. Borage is remembering a red-lacquered voting booth, how she swept the velvet drape to the left and all the golden rings whistled on the pole. She sat. A burst of light. Her picture fell through a metal slot.

We have the picture on the mantel. Mrs. Borage looked serious, voting. Those were serious days.

[:]

The three women on the sofa have fallen asleep. Now there are many kinds of brain waves in the parlor. Bryce paints the different waves across the walls. She doesn’t know very much about neuroscience. The waves are all tangled up.

“Medusa again,” sighs Bryce. She adds a pegasus. She gives the pegasus a mane of green vipers and a green viper tail.

Will Bertrand see the self-eating serpent? It is unlikely. Every year there are fewer snakes in Europe. The Irish Example has proven too powerful.

[:]

Agnes jumps to her feet.

“Fo ic under fot, funde ic hit hwæt eorðe, mæg wið ealar wih-ta gehwilce and wið andan and wið æminde and wið ba micelan mannes tungan,” says Agnes. She looks around the parlor. The charm has had no effect. Bryce’s painting, however, has turned Dorcas to stone.

“Beginner’s luck,” thinks Agnes. “Luck of the Irish. Lucky stars.”

Ms. Kidney is pulling on her parka.

“You,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Buzzard with the crockpot!” She rattles the amber-poke against the window frame.

“You,” she bellows. “Vile Borgia! Away!” We rush to the window.

“It’s just poor Mr. Henderson,” says Mrs. Borage. Mr. Henderson waves towards the open window.

“Do the creatures take soup?” shouts Mr. Henderson. He is stamping his boots on the sidewalk, clutching the crockpot. The streetlight above his head winks on.

“The last bus!” yells Ms. Kidney. “It leaves from the lumberyard at sundown.”

A kiss for Mrs. Borage.

“Happy birthday my Scrumpleshine, my darling,” says Ms. Kidney. “I’ll bring you honeybells.” She bangs through the front door.

“Skip, Ziegenpeter!” bellows Ms. Kidney, and Mr. Henderson goes skipping out of Ms. Kidney’s path. His knees creak. Mr. Henderson is a Przewalski, quite a Przewalski, but his legs are the legs of a cricket, skinny, black, and chirping. Mr. Henderson skips like a buzzard-horse-cricket. It is the saddest skip we’ve ever seen. Agnes documents it for her research. A hyper-color Polaroid.

“Can I have it!” says Bryce.

“No,” says Agnes.

[:]

Suddenly, the crockpot slips out of Mr. Henderson’s arms and breaks on the sidewalk. The broken pieces fall away from the soup, which is a red cylinder, unmoving. Mr. Henderson stares at the cylinder of soup. He stares at the unnecessary crockpot.

“Does everything suffer my attention?” asks Mr. Henderson. He can’t bear to look at the brightly lit house, with the warped walls and the sinking roof making curves like the physical universe, and Mrs. Borage waving kindly from the window, so he looks down the street, not toward the cul-de-sac and the abandoned Security Spray Complex, but in the other direction, toward the lights of the lumberyard. He watches the woman run toward the lights, her broad back and high-crowned Russian hat with the earflaps moving up and down like wings. She is shouting something. It sounds like “Heißa hopsasa!”

“Who is Heißa Hopsasa?” says Mr. Henderson.

Mr. Henderson is afraid that he will see the woman lift into the air. He is afraid that the wings of the Russian hat will carry her up, up, and away, high above the treated planks piled in the lumberyard, and she will go flying through the unmonitored airspace of the town. Did the Russians send her?

Mr. Henderson remembers the days of espionage, the little plane circling the pink and gold striped domes of St. Basil’s Ca thedral. Basil the Blessed. Basil Fool-for-Christ.

Mr. Henderson forgets how Ivan the Terrible blinded the architects, how they never erected another dome in Moscow. Poor Postnik! Poor Barma! That happened before the days of espionage, in the days of feudal pattern warfare.

Mr. Henderson has been losing his vision slowly, a little bit lost to each pot, not one of them fearsome in their beauty.

X

Bryce turns the keys in the cockatoos and the music starts again. Does everyone know the words?

Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja,

stets lustig, heißa hopsasa!

Ich Vogelfänger bin bekannt

bei Alt und Jung im ganzen Land.

Ozark does! She winds the cockatoos at night for practice. She likes to hear them sing about Ganzenland in deep, rich voices, as though Ganzenland is where the cockatoos belong. Every time she creeps to the hat stand in the darkness, Ozark expects that they’ll be gone, the whole flock out the window. She has not been able to locate Ganzenland anywhere in the episteme. But does an island of cockatoos belong in the episteme?

It’s too cold to go outside in just her spangled leotard and tights, so Ozark puts on Bertrand’s gambeson. Ozark climbs up the rubble of the Security Spray Complex. She can look out at the lights of the town. What does she know about the town?

It is latitude 42N52, longitude 73W12.

“It is one of the vortical centers of the universe,” thinks Ozark. But there are so many of them. It might not mean anything. She takes out a piece of paper and makes a guest list. If the episteme and the guest list were a Venn diagram, the area of intersection would be very, very small. The episteme has a smaller inventory than Ozark originally thought.

Ozark hears distant cursing. It sounds like “bung-less barrel saunas.”

There is Ms. Kidney, sneaking up the street. The wind has just swept her Russian hat off her head. Up it goes. Ozark blinks in surprise. Is she imagining things? It is hard to imagine Ms. Kidney. She is so voluble and Ozark’s imagination is mostly pictures.

“Neck pimples,” yells Ms. Kidney. She kicks Mr. Henderson’s garage door. Her wild, steel blue hair is blowing every which way.

“Not a brindle, ponies,” shouts Ms. Kidney. She is shouting at her dogs. They are standing silently on the sidewalk, two by two. Ms. Kidney disappears through Mr. Henderson’s garage door just as Mr. Henderson comes out onto his porch. He sees his garage door swing open and slam shut with the wind. He sees the dogs lined up, looking at him. The soup is still frozen on the sidewalk, only now it is white, like cream of mushroom.

[:]

Ms. Kidney is staying for Mrs. Borage’s birthday party after all! Of course she is. Ozark has the urge to hook her legs behind her neck for joy, but she hesitates. She does not like to trigger muscle memories from her days as a contortionist. Ozark turns somersaults instead. The muscle memory this triggers is not specific to contortionists. Everyone turns somersaults. Certainly, ev eryone on the guest list. Ozark writes “Ms. Kidney” in purple letters. Now it’s back to her inventory.

She has reached “Magellan,” as is inevitable. Before Magellan the ships sailed over the thunderous falls that marked the edges of all the oceans.

“Magellan did something,” thinks Ozark. “He invented hydroelectric dams?” Ozark tries to remember about hydroelectricity. She taps her pen on the paper. Snow is settling on the paper. Ozark shivers. Her face has grown numb. She suspects there is some accumulation on her face, on the bridge of her nose. She remembers when the circus caravans drove through Buffalo, the little towns on the outskirts of Buffalo, and the helpful yellow signs, Bridges Freeze Before Roadway. She remembers Magellan in the Channel of All Saints, how he was starving there, how he gave up all hope. It was All Saints’ Day, and crying, Magellan ate his entire cargo, 26 tons of cloves. After eating 26 tons of cloves, Magellan was unable to form any words. He tried to move his lips but his face was still and astonished.