The Mothering Coven (8 page)

“Zdravstvuite,” says Mr. Henderson. She is staring off into space with a dreamy expression. Mr. Henderson looks up at the sky. Will he see a woman fly over the courthouse? Will he see clouds of salt and pepper? The sky is pale blue. Leaves are spinning and spinning in the street. Little vortexes are springing up everywhere. It is noon; the drifting hours spiral around the white sun.

[:]

Mrs. Scattergood is sitting on the circulation desk in spangled tights. She is trying to put her leg behind her neck. She looks at Mr. Henderson and blushes. She takes her leg down swiftly and almost upsets her mug of chamomile tea.

The woman standing in the reference section looks very tweedy in her houndstooth skirt and jacket, but Mr. Henderson recognizes an adult niece of Mrs. Borage. The adult nieces of Mrs. Borage are unmistakable although Mr. Henderson may be mistaking one for another. He thinks that their faces are more or less identical.

“But then I have never been a people person,” admits Mr. Henderson.

“What is a pogonip?” asks Mr. Henderson. Ozark frowns. She senses it is a word filled with luminous intensity. Her flashcards are in the flannel backpack on the circulation desk. She sorts through them.

“Is it Finnish?” she asks.

Mr. Henderson sees that Mrs. Scattergood is drinking from a familiar blue mug. Now it is his turn to blush. He ducks his head and sifts through her collection of science journals. She has been reading about translucent concrete. Mr. Henderson imagines himself, a mason of translucent concrete. He imagines making a library of translucent concrete. It would be ferocious in its beauty, and when he poured the final wall, the structure would glow with refracted light. Mr. Henderson would be blinded. He would have to borrow back his ugly blue mug. He would have to walk all through the town begging for his supper.

[:]

Ozark has not gotten as far as translucent concrete. She has gotten to Postnik and Barma, who built onion domes for the fool of Moscow. She has gotten to Anna Ivanovna, who built the palace of ice, ice elephants in the garden, ice ring doves in the nuptial chamber, ice sheets turned down on the ice bed, and blue-white doves nesting on the pillow slips. She remembers that Anna Ivanovna sewed iron rods in her shirtsleeves to protect her bones, the glass balls and sockets. She was not a front-bender.

“Or a back-bender,” thinks Ozark. She remembers the pink and gold tents pitched by the highways, all the vanished encampments, the sudden pyramids of acrobats that came down and left no trace.

“Like the snow tomb of Ozymandias,” sighs Ozark. She drops a triangular flashcard. It slides beneath the circulation desk.

[:]

Ozark and Mrs. Scattergood duck into the reference section to change their clothes. Mr. Henderson sits at the circulation desk. He makes a convincing librarian. He puts the blue mug behind him, out of sight, on an empty metal cart.

“Hot tea by the library books!” he says.

“Goodbye!” waves the adult niece of Mrs. Borage. How bizarre. She has a rectilinear thorax. It is about the size of a reference book. Mr. Henderson glances at Mrs. Scattergood. Is she going to say something? She is.

“Would you like some tea?” says Mrs. Scattergood to Mr. Henderson. “I have another mug.”

X

Dorcas and Fiona have started building a metal fence around the sixteen dogs in the garden. Agnes insists. Invariably, there are guests who fear dogs.

Fiona went all around town collecting the poles. They all have wonderful names—Larch Saint, Bramble Saint, Honeysuckle Saint—but the lettering is inexcusably dull.

“It will be hard to add serifs without a soldering gun,” thinks Bryce. “I’ll have to gild them instead.”

“Dear creatures,” says Bryce, from deep in her lungs, like Ms. Kidney. “Have you ravened your krill paste?” The dogs are lying on their sides with their eyes shut tight.

“Do they seem moribund?” asks Bryce.

“Not really,” says Fiona. She dips a corner of toast into the krill paste and crunches.

Her face pales. She grabs her thermos from its holster and swallows frantically, many ounces of good liquid chocolate. Bryce takes the bowl of krill paste into the kitchen. She flours the counter and flattens the paste with the rolling pin. She picks through the cookie cutters.

“Reindeer!” says Bryce. She punches out sixteen reindeer, each mid-leap, with branching antlers. She lifts them with the spatula and lays them one by one on sixteen paper plates. They look appetizing, just like reindeer in the wild, silhouetted against the glaciers of the North. She hopes the wolves don’t get discouraged by how far away the reindeer seem, each one just a few inches tall. She tries to pick up a reindeer. It is unappealingly floppy.

“I’ll toast them,” thinks Bryce.

[:]

There is Mr. Zimmer, walking down the sidewalk. He is carrying a very large box.

“The baking pan!” says Bryce. Not a moment too soon.

“Mr. Zimmer is about to walk into a cairn!” cries Fiona.

Mr. Zimmer walks into a cairn. He sits down hard.

“Do you think that hurt?” asks Bryce.

“I doubt it,” says Fiona. “There are still so many leaves.”

Now that he’s seated, Mr. Zimmer can look much more closely into the faces of the sixteen wolves in the garden.

“They don’t have any teeth,” calls Mr. Zimmer.

“Oh no, not at all,” calls Bryce.

“I should have asked,” thinks Mr. Zimmer. He feels foolish now, with his trouser pockets filled with pork ribs. He had to take out his hip flask to fit them. Now the hip flask is under his hat. Mr. Zimmer pretends to scratch his head. He takes a sip of whisky. He wonders why the wolves are surrounded by street signs.

The garden looks like a complicated intersection. The wolves could walk out, but which way? Even Mr. Zimmer feels a moment of indecision, staring up at the forest of street signs, and he has been mail carrier for twenty-seven years.

[:]

“Come inside for schnapps,” calls Bryce. Mr. Zimmer puts the box on the front step. He wipes his palms on his blue trousers. He is still indecisive, but the whisky is helping.

“No schnapps,” he says.

“Presbyterian?” says Bryce.

Mr. Zimmer hesitates. Certainly he is Presbyterian. He is descended from James K. Polk.

Mr. Zimmer is suspicious of unmarried women, particularly of a certain age. They have brash ideas.

He wonders if he is poised to stumble upon an illegal operation. There is a strange smell coming from the house. It is a toxic smell, a new shower-curtain smell, the smell of thousands of freshly minted shower curtains, as though inside, the house is really a factory, the Shower Curtain Complex.

Mr. Zimmer takes another slug of whisky. It is good Presbyterian whisky, the very spirit of the speyside.

He fears he has discovered the illegitimate sister of the Security Spray Complex, which moved its operations away in the night, twenty-seven years ago.

The morning after, workers stood outside, looking at the chains across the iron doors. They looked at each other and then at the blue sky and then at the chains on the doors and then they left all at once and no one travels up this dead end road anymore, except Mr. Zimmer, who has to, come rain or sleet or gloom of night, according to federal law.

He tries to peek past Bryce into the house. Bryce is wearing a feather-stitched white cambric chemise. The feathers fill the doorway. Bryce is slightly embarrassed by the feathers. She tried to photosensitize the birds, but the birds did not recover. Bryce has not given up.

“Imagine the birds,” thinks Bryce, “photosensitized, absorbing light pollution, developing gently in the rainfall, traffic patterns appearing on their breasts and under-wings, their backs and their pinions!”

Of course, Bryce has written to the Audobon Society. She is a very proactive person and, given the opportunity, an excellent correspondent.

Someday the feathers in Bryce’s chemise will look like the sky over peri-urban Ohio. Someday the feathers will color faintly with the trefoil insignias of the cloverleaf highways, but not yet. The feathers are dingy gray, with chemical burns. Hardly fit for a party. She will have to change.

“Into cherry satin,” thinks Bryce.

“At least take this invitation,” she says. She hands it to Mr. Zimmer.

“It doesn’t have a stamp,” says Mr. Zimmer.

“It’s for you,” says Bryce.

“Still,” says Mr. Zimmer. He holds up his hands. Mr. Zimmer is a strict anti-corruption man, like James K. Polk before him.

“Especially
if it’s for me,” says Mr. Zimmer.

X

Agnes is toasting bread. Next she will mix the nuts. Is there a tray big enough for the tremendous silver herring? No. The oven door? The oven door is gone. And the metal folding chairs.

“The brunt of everything falls on me,” thinks Agnes. It is because she has a professional degree.

Agnes must get out of the house. She strolls down to the center of town. She is shocked to see a bright pink arrow on the church and another on the courthouse. They must be visible for miles.

“And they’re pointing straight to the house!” cries Agnes. Who would come to the party on the highway? No one she can think of has a license.

“Only the dogs have been offered licenses,” thinks Agnes. “And they’re already here.”

Gervais? No, he always comes on foot. Will Gervais come at all? He doesn’t like to travel on Kingfisher days. He always brings the frost.

“Dear Gervais!” thinks Agnes. “Gervais Fool-for-Frost.”

[:]

There is a man standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the pink arrow on the courthouse. He’s wearing a black suit and a blue tie and shiny black shoes. He looks at Agnes. Examined straight-on, the man’s face gives the same aloofly pondering impression of the best three-quarter profiles. He has a little mustache. He looks very familiar. Agnes thinks he must be a currency model from the Commonwealth. She smiles to put him at ease.

“Where does a man like that belong?” wonders Agnes. “In this day and age?”

[:]

Dorcas has to stand on Ozark’s stilts to reach the top of the pyre.

“It is a substantial pyre,” thinks Dorcas. She heaves another bundle of newspapers. Difficult, heaving on stilts. More difficult than shamanism.

From her great height, Dorcas can see a large black cat with emerald eyes in the rubble of the Security Spray Complex. The cat bats a bird back and forth between its paws. It is a large bird, white and gold.

“Bertrand?” whispers Dorcas.

[:]

Ozark is discouraged. She thought she had borrowed a book about Magellan. Instead, she has borrowed one of the books of lost girls. She can’t include them in her inventory. What if they want to stay lost? Ozark flips through the pages. Does she read of Gudrid the Wanderer? Does she read of Queen Wanda the Drowned? The pages are blank.

The flannel backpack weighs on Ozark’s shoulders. She wanders along one street, then another street, then another street. They are all unmarked.

“Drifting streets,” thinks Ozark. She looks up at the pink arrow on the courthouse.

“But how can I be sure they’re on the right highway?” thinks Ozark. She stops at the corner. There is an overturned truck by the Greece Trap. The long silver trailer has jackknifed and the contents have tumbled out, boxes and boxes of pies. Luckily, the pies are frozen solid. They have been shipped from Axel Heiberg, where many of the world’s frozen pies are stored.

“And popsicles,” thinks Ozark, “and Erdbeer Käsekuchen Eis.”

The truck driver hasn’t hit his head, but he pretends that he hit his head to hide his embarrassment. He sits in the sideways cab with his hands covering his face.

“My head,” says the truck driver. He peeks between his fingers. The passenger-side window was showing the pale blue sky. Now it is showing a seasoned-looking Vegas showgirl, gingery hair shot through with white. She wants to use the CB radio. The truck driver turns down the stereo. He is listening to an au-diobook called the Treasury of Irish Love Poems. Ozark knows quite a few of them. She wishes she had brought Dorcas’s cassette tape of Chevrefoil. Or for that matter Equitan, Le Fresne, Bisclavret, Lanval, Les Deux Amants, Yonec, Laustic, Milun, Chaitivel, or Eliduc.

“Mr. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc., etc., 10-22 73W12, 42N52. 10-20 73W12, 42N52. Bravo.”

Ozark drops the transmitter. Did she leave anything out?

“Would you like to come over for a party and a few Breton lais?” asks Ozark. In fact, the truck driver would like to very much. First, he has to pick up a few frozen pies.

[:]

At this very moment a pink caravan is pulling out from a rest stop in the Florida panhandle, roaring up the entrance ramp to the interstate highway. Is there enough room for the contortionists in the equipment trailer? There is. Did Mr. Fibonacci pack enough sugar cookies for the elephants? He did. And for the World’s Smallest Boy? No, it cannot be done. The World’s Smallest Boy is sprawled across the dashboard, eating a Lemon Lulu. He is no longer a boy. He is mini-Przewalski. He washes down the Lulu with a dropper of schnapps and lights his black cigar. The truck cab fills with smoke. The stereo is broken. Mr. Fibonacci turns up the CB radio. Truckers across the country are caroling.

The World’s Smallest Boy sings along. Of course, he has a fine bass voice. The truck doubles in speed. The kinetic energy increases by a factor of four.