Luna (15 page)

“Today we celebrate that labour, we celebrate that toil. Look around you and see what it has brought you: a way of life that is good, a closeness to nature, to God’s green earth and to his wide, blue sky, and to the care of the animals of the fields. It has bought homes for your wives and your children, and put food on the table for them. Your toil, even in this time of drought and grasshoppers, has not gone unrewarded.”

Selena wished Kent and Tony were here to hear this. She would tell the minister on the way out what a good sermon he had preached. And Rhea too. If only I could get that woman to come to church with me. She used to go, I’m sure she did. Mother told me. Yet imagining Rhea sitting in the pew beside her with her face turned up toward the small minister almost made her laugh. That would be the day.

“You toil all your days because Eve disobeyed the Lord and ate the forbidden fruit. But she, too, has paid for her sin, for she bears children in pain …”

Selena looked at Mark, but he plainly wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on the back of Marcie Morrow’s blonde head two rows in front of them. Oh, Lord, she thought, before I know it I’ll have a daughter-in-law to worry about. Jason sighed loudly. She glanced warningly at him and he straightened reluctantly.

After church, Mark at the wheel, they drove to Rhea’s to pick her up and take her home for dinner. They had rolled up all the windows to protect themselves from the dust and the grasshoppers, and it was stifling in the car, but nobody bothered to complain.

“Boy, was that ever boring,” Jason said, referring apparently to the service.

“It’s the Word of God,” Selena said, more to herself than to Jason.

She wondered if it was really true that God had made women bear children in pain because they were responsible for driving everybody out of the Garden of Eden. She supposed it must be, if the Bible said so. She remembered her own three labours. Phoebe, the first, was the longest and the hardest. But worth every second of it, she reminded herself. Labour. Funny the minister didn’t mention that having babies is called labour, that women labour doing that.

She turned to Phoebe to tell her what she had just thought, but the presence of her two sons, and the look on Phoebe’s face, stopped her. Phoebe was staring at the back of Mark’s seat. Her eyes were so distant that Selena was afraid. What could she be thinking of?

“Phoebe?” she asked gently.

“What?” Phoebe asked, her expression not changing.

“I … Nothing,” Selena said, finally. Phoebe turned to look at her then, her head vibrating faintly with the motion of the car. “Thanks for helping me with Cathy,” Selena said.

“That’s okay.”

They were driving up the lane into Rhea’s place now. Everybody itching to get hold of her land, Selena thought, so they can plow it up and farm it, and Rhea won’t sell. So it sits there. She wondered who Rhea would leave it to when she died. Maybe Mark, she thought hopefully, then remembered Rhea’s three sons, her own uncles. God knows what’ll happen to it, what’ll happen to any of us.

Mark parked the car in front of the garden.

“Jason,” Selena asked, “run in and tell her we’re here, will you?” Jason got out of the car and disappeared through the raspberry and gooseberry bushes.

“I don’t know how she does it,” Selena said.

“What?” Tammy asked, looking up at her.

“See all the flowers and the shrubs? Nobody else can make them grow like your Great-auntie Rhea does.” Tammy climbed onto her knees, rolled down the window and leaned on the frame to stare out at the garden. Bees buzzed in the noon sun, and birds warbled and skittered from shrub to shrub. Selena thought of the Garden of Eden. Only the older
women could make gardens like that. She wondered why.

“Hi, Grandma Rhea,” Tammy called, seeing first Jason and then Rhea come around the corner of the house. She leaned out so far that Selena caught her by the dress and held on.

Climbing into the car, Rhea said, “Been to church, have you,” and then let out one of those long, pointless peals of laughter that went on and on and on.

When it was time for the little girls to go to bed that night, the men had still not returned from the ball tournament.

“I suppose we should have gone with them,” Selena remarked, sighing. They were upstairs, Phoebe sitting at her desk in her room with the door open, Diane putting the little girls to bed in the extra room across the hall from Phoebe, and Selena leaning in the doorway watching her. They could hear Rhea coming heavily up the stairs.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Diane said calmly. “At their ages they shouldn’t need you there every time they play ball. When are they going to grow up?” Selena shifted, pressing her spine against the cool wood of the door frame. It would be so nice, she thought suddenly, not to have them to worry about or feel guilty over, for all the ways she was surely failing them.

“I’ll tell the children a story,” Rhea said, suddenly beside Selena in the open doorway. “Then I want to go home. There’s a harvest moon tonight.” Selena glanced at her, puzzled, but Rhea was looking at Diane, a funny, determined look in her eyes, as if she would brook no objections or interference.

“Okay,” Diane said, a little surprised. She came from between the two single beds to where Selena stood beside Rhea. Rhea went into the room and seated herself on the foot of Cathy’s bed. Tammy squirmed happily, trying to get comfortable to listen. Diane watched for a moment, then snapped out the overhead light. The hall light spilled into the room, across the foot of the beds, lighting Rhea’s broad back and her head with its crownlike roll of white hair, from which strands were escaping—how long her hair must be when she lets it down, Selena thought—giving her silhouette a powerful, almost frightening appearance.

“I’m going to tell you about the beginning of things,” Rhea said, into the darkness.

“The beginning of what things?” Tammy asked.

“All things,” Rhea said firmly, and Cathy repeated in a sing-song, “All fings, all fings, all fings …”

Selena and Diane moved into the hall and paused at Phoebe’s door.

“I’m going downstairs to put some coffee on,” Selena whispered across the room to Phoebe, but Rhea had started to speak and Selena’s intention slowly weakened. Instead, she walked into Phoebe’s room and sat down on Phoebe’s bed. Lots of time for coffee, a voice said in her head, and she agreed drowsily. Diane followed her and sank into the rocking chair across the room from where Phoebe sat at the table that had served her as a desk for years. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

Rhea’s voice had begun again, steady and distinct even though it came to them from another room, across the hall. They knew she was speaking to all of them.

“I am going to tell you this story,” she said. “And when the time comes, you must tell it to your children.”

“I could tell it to my dolls,” Tammy suggested in a sleepy voice, “Or to the kitties &” Her voice fell off in a deep yawn.

Listen to her, thought Selena, that’s not the way to tell a story to children. But, although the words of the criticism formed themselves in her head, she couldn’t seem to speak them, and her mind had already jumped forward to follow Rhea’s story.

“In the beginning” Rhea began again, and a shiver ran down Selena’s back. Her voice was not loud and yet it resonated through the whole house. Selena could imagine the animals in the field hearing it and the birds nested down for the night in the trees and the tall grass.

Phoebe hadn’t pulled her blind. Her bedroom faced east and the moon was rising between and above the row of steel bins. It rose orange, a perfect circle in the dark sky. The old house was silent.

“There was Woman,” Rhea said, and they waited, they didn’t know for what. “And she had all the wisdom from time when there was no time gathered together in her body. It rested in the soles of her feet, and in her knees, it
flowed with her blood upward into the secret organs of her body, it waited in her full belly and her great breasts, it murmured in the muscles of her arms and made the palms of her hands tingle, and it rose to sing its song in her heart.

“Around her head and massive shoulders there was a noise like the buzzing of a thou sand bees, and when she moved she gave off a smell that was so powerful that, had there been any living thing to come near her, it would have been stupefied by the heaviness and sweetness of the scent and would have fallen into infinite sleep.

“No one knows what there was before she came. Perhaps there Was nothing at all.”

Selena and Diane, and even Phoebe, listened. They forgot where they were, they forgot what day it was, they forgot each other and the small, ramshackle house in which they sat. Selena and Diane forgot their husbands, they forgot their children. Who knows what Phoebe forgot.

“She was, before there was the sea or the sky, the forests or the meadows, the rivers, lakes and streams, the desert and the mountains. Before there were creatures that run on four legs or swim or fly, she was there. Before there were women or men, she was there. And all these things she contained inside her, in her womb, for Woman is possibility, Woman is life, and out of this possibility, she drew forth the universe.

“First, she made the sea. It issued forth from her womb, and she thought how beautiful it was, and she blew on it and watched it dance. She danced, too, with it, and her long silvery hair floated over the sea and through it, like long drifting fishes or fireflies, and this made the wind. She spun and her hair followed, flowing, and out of it she fashioned the moon and the stars.

“Although the moon was her creation—she had made him—he became her lover. As the moon waxed and waned she began a companion cycle, she began to bleed, and she called that time from bleeding to bleeding a month, a mense.

“And that is how time was born.

“Out of her monthly bleeding, her menstrual fluid, she fashioned the earth, a daughter, and the sun, which she threw into the sky so there would be light. She breathed life into earth and her daughter began to
grow grasses, trees and flowers to cover herself with. Out of her menstrual fluid Woman made human creatures, first a small one like herself, which she called woman, and another which she called man, to keep woman company. Woman placed in the man seeds and the desire to plant them in the woman’s womb so that he would be a faithful companion.

“For a time women and men were happy, peopling the earth as Woman had told them to do. Earth was good to them, giving them fruits to eat from her trees, and nuts, and roots. Seeing that her creation was complete and fruitful, Woman lay down to rest.

“But gradually, men grew jealous of women, for out of them issued forth new life. The monthly bleeding that coincided with the waxing and waning of the moon frightened man. It seemed to men that all nature was in harmony with women, and they felt themselves left out of this great and beautiful rhythm.

“Men muttered among themselves. Why should we be servants to these creatures, they asked one another. Gathering roots and berries, fruits and nuts for them to eat. Retreating to our huts when the moon shines and the women dance outside. Why must we bow to their rhythm?

“Huddled in their huts at night, they told stories about a day when men would rule, when men would be the ones to give birth, and about a great male god they would create for themselves.

“Till it came to them that the strength Woman had given them to build fires and gather food was greater than the strength the women had. When they realized this, their mutterings grew louder, and the care they took of the women grew less and less.

“Slowly men overpowered women and made them slaves. Because they could not bleed in the way of women, and because they knew that bleeding was the secret of women’s power, they shut women away when they bled. No man could go near them at that time, nor when they were giving birth, either. Bleeding is dirty, bleeding is evil, they told each other. Men are clean and good because their bodies do not bleed in such an indecent way.

“They were jealous of that blood though, of the power that it seemed to hold. So men began killing, they began to kill animals and to drink their blood and to devour their bloody flesh. Killing makes us more powerful than
women, they said, because we can make blood flow in copious amounts whenever we choose, and then they invented rape, and wifehood.

“The women became terrified of the men. They began to try to please them, they pretended they were weaker than men were, and they acted as if they had been designed to be ornamental, pleasure-givers. They pierced their ears and noses, and hung ornaments in them, they starved themselves, or ate far more than they needed to please first one demand and then another, they painted themselves and wore garments that hobbled them, or hampered them, or hurt them.

“As time passed the women grew more and more confused. Each woman became split within herself: one half of her stayed in harmony with nature, bleeding and giving birth, while the other half of her became coy, seductive and servile.

“But still the men were afraid, especially of what the women might be fomenting in the birth huts. One day they declared that they would take over the births. The women were astonished. Did this mean that men could now give birth? But no, it meant that from that time forth men would take charge of births, drugging women or not, removing them from their relatives and friends, placing them in a ritual environment of their own fashioning.

“Eventually men invented science in order to try to control nature. They even discovered a way to make human life in test tubes without the need for a woman: they wanted to make women, whom they hated and feared, superfluous. In their struggle to take control of creation they destroyed natural things and their efforts produced disasters. They were in danger of destroying all human connection to the Great Swelling Mother who gives life to all things and to her daughter, earth. All human life was threatened with extinction.

“But listen! Woman is waking now. Disturbed in her dreaming by intimations of disharmony drifting from her creation, her beautiful, silver-toed feet are stirring, there is a twitching in her massive thighs and in her great shoulders. She moves her head, and her long, silvery hair lifts and floats. The buzzing around her head, shoulders and arms grows louder. Soon Woman will wake.