“I just want to make sure I'm hearing this correctly before I translate,” she says, in a lower register. “Did you seriously just show up to what is basically a diplomatic meeting with no bargaining chips whatsoever?”
Each moonrise the metal bird in the box screams a mad musth cry. Like all Man-things, the bird is obsessed with the rising and setting of the sun. The night-whistle signals rest. The night-whistle signals a bag full of tasteless dried oats, a brief escape from sad dead girls and tormenting men, and four more wooden walls, the inside of a dry skull plugged tight with moldy hay and dung. She remembers a place where the Night was made of warm shuffle and star-graze, tearing up sweet wet grass by the trunkful with moonshaded Mothers when she was old enough to tooth. She remembers, but there is no sweet grass to tear up by the trunkful, so instead she thoughtfully tears apart her stall, board by splintered board. There will be a beating in the morning. There are always beatings in the morning.
As she works she sings, tufts of Story-song plucked from memory, faded but firm-rooted beneath the skin. She can hear the Many Mothers beyond the crackrip of wood, their voices low lower lowest, sweet vibrations no Man's tiny ear could ever catch and hold. They are with her still, humming in her teeth and skull. Listen, mooncalf, they sing. Listen. The songs are still behind your left eye. Pull them up and scatter the seeds.
She pauses for a moment in her song. She pauses, but the singing continues, outside her skull, outside her memory, rippling out through the barn's beams. Up and down the dim length of the building, unseen Mothers catch-carry the thrum. They pass it along the line like a Great Mother's thighbone, trunk to trunk, tongue to tongue, mouthing tasting touching smelling remembering. Yes. Yes. I know this one. This is Furmother's Lay. She tricked a bull. She scattered the Stories. This is one of those Stories.
Her hum rejoins the others. The night ripens with song.
What there are of Jodie's belongings make for a pitiful small pile. The nun brings them all out in a single wooden peach crate: a silver lighter, a plug of tobacco, a few badly mended pairs of trousers originally meant for men, work boots, a busted music box with a ceramic bluebird fixed to the lid, a leather coinpurse with 3 dollars in nickels still jingling around inside, pill bottles by the double handful, and a key on a length of ribbon faded to the color of attic curtains. There's a letter, too, addressed to Regan in a hand so loosey-goosey it's hard at first making out what it says. Penmanship was never what you'd call a strong point for either of them.
“Will you be taking care of the burial arrangements as well?” the nun asks. “If the girl had no living relatives left to take the body… ”
Regan hasn't even begun thinking over the practicalities of getting her friend in the ground. She's got no spare money; all that's left goes straight to Mama and the girls. In a way she's lucky; family ground costs nothing. You get some pine boards and nail them together and you're good.
“Hell,” she says, finally. “She's dead. She don't care anymore and neither do I. Nothing wrong with the potter's field. Jesus was a potter, wasn't he?”
“A carpenter, my child. Our Lord was a carpenter.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “Well, hell. I still don't think she cares.”
Down down down sank the Furmother, deep down slowly beneath the Blacksap where nothing grows but bone-rooted ghosts.
She held her breath as she dropped. She held her breath, but the Blacksap oozed inside her ears, her mouth, the tip of her trunk, the corners of her eyes. It smothered her fur, stifled light and air and up and down and night and day. Ghosts tethered to drifting skeletons stretched out their trunks to touch her; whispers filled the echo-empty places of her skull.
Am I dead? Are you? Where is the sun?
The tusk-tiger! It followed me in!
Why do you not fight when there is still breath and blood within you? Why do you not trumpet and flail?
My calf, did she escape, at least? Have you seen her?
I do not have your answers, Furmother hummed. I do not know about those things. I only come for the Stories. Have you seen where they settled?
Many voices, like sticky bones rubbing together. Stories? Is that what they are? We know nothing of those, but we know where they fell. Reach out your trunk, living Mother. They are much farther down; do not miss them as you sink.
The air inside her swelled and grew large. It pressed against her throat, demanding to be calved, and the Furmother fought with wounded tusk-tiger fierceness to keep it from escaping. Strong was Furmother-With-Her-Tusks-Whole, greatest of all Great Mothers! There was no boulder she could not move, no tree she could not uproot. Her squeal crumbled mountains to dust baths.
But her descent was slow.
“I can't outright promise you anything, no. Everything will have to be negotiated.” Think fast, Kat. Do something to salvage this mess, quick. “But,” she hurries on, “the mountain the waste will be buried under and everything around it will be designated sovereign elephant territory, obviously. No unauthorized trespassing. You and your daughters and the daughters of your daughters will live there undisturbed, forever.” She doesn't mention how it's all blasted scrubland and decommissioned atomic test sites, a sandy wilderness pockmarked with green glass craters. Someone else can get into that later — namely and most importantly, someone who isn't her. I'm just here to sell the idea, she tells herself. “And I'll talk to someone about the education campaign.” Not a lie. She'll definitely try and bring it to the table for discussion, for all the good it may or may not do. Whether it gets any further than said table is anyone's guess. “I don't see why they wouldn't at least look into it, right?”
There are a million different reasons they might defer looking into it, ranging from expenses to manpower. Kat hopscotches over that and lands on one leg and holds the pose, waiting as the elephant takes in the translator's hand gestures. Her old eyes shift to Kat's, ancient and endless and unhurried, as cool as Kat feels hot. God help them if elephants ever start playing poker.
“You still hanging around here? What the hell are you teaching those things, the goddamned alphabet?”
Out of all the things Regan misses leastmost about this job — the lip sores, the busted dorm beds, the gritty taste of the paint between her teeth — floor supervisors probably rank somewhere nearabouts where the cream rises. And of all the fume-breathing, foul-grinning fool men picked out of a handcart for the task? Slattery's probably — no, definitely — Slattery's definitely the one she'd be most eager to see walking out the door for good. Jodie used to spit globs of tobacco juice at the back of his head for every dirty thing he said to the girls, but Jodie's moldering dead in the ground now and Regan doesn't chew anymore, for obvious reasons. She ignores him and keeps packing, throwing everything into a canvas bag through a gauzy oil slick of hurt fierce enough to make her dizzy and queasy at the same time. Sometimes lately she wonders if she could wrench the entire rotten length of her jaw off if she gave it a shot. Get a good hookhold beneath the chin with a couple of fingers, brace herself, and —
A noise like an angry foghorn cuts through the haze. Regan looks up just in time to see Slattery idly tickling Topsy's tail with the little leather quirt he's always flashing.
“Lord Jesus, Slattery, cut that out! You looking to get squashed to bear grease?” Not that that outcome would bother her any; she'd pay full admission for a Splattery Slattery sideshow. It's more the elephant she's worried about, flaring and stomping and teeter-tottering on the edge of something dark and crazy-mad. Regan staggers to her feet, everything above the neck pounding hell bent for leather. Slattery ain't worth it, Topsy. None of this mess is.
“Aw hell fire, girl, I'm just playin' a little. Can't you take — ”
She pushes him hard against the stall wall with an anger she didn't even know she had energy left to nurse. He stumbles and falls slap on his ass. “Everyone else we worked with is deader than dog ticks and I ain't far behind,” she says. “All I gotta do is get on
through this week and I can go home, but all that really means is I get to die where my baby sisters can see me screaming and hollering and messing myself. Take your fun and go straight to hell with it.”
He glowers up at her from the dirty straw. If looks could kill, her troubles would be done, but unfortunately they don't and they ain't and she's got a ways to go yet. She ignores his glare and turns to Topsy, who's vibrating like a clothesline in a norther.
Hey, she signs. Topsy? Hello? y'all still with me? Hello?
No reply. A low bee tree hum thrums deep in Regan's aching eardrums and molars. She takes a step backwards. She's about to ask again when something hits her in the back of the head, hard enough to send her palms-first cattywampus across the floor of the stall.
“You think you're the only one having a rough time, girl?” Slattery says. “You think you're the only one with a family needs feeding?”
The Man, like all Men, is only there to tickle Her rage, to make it stand awkwardly on wobbly hind legs for his amusement. The dead girl tries to intervene and he slaps her down, kicking and bellowing in full musth. She hums a growing song, a ripening song, a full red swaying splitting-sticky song. In their work stalls the other Mothers hear it and drop their brushes, chorusing suddenly like a flock of beautiful gray-skinned birds.
The fruit hangs heavy on the branch
Good to pick
To pluck
To share!
Is it ripe?
Is it ready?
Is it good, O Mothers?
At the bottom of all things, O best beloved mooncalf, where the Blacksap was densest and darkness the thickest — that was where the Stories had settled. That was where the Furmother's trunk finally felt them, nestled together like summer melons in an unseen heap. But what to do with the air flailing mad inside her and no way back to the surface? How to share the stories when She and they both were trapped at the bottom of the Blacksap? Furmother felt the pressure building and understood what must be done. She was, after all, cleverest of all Great Mothers.
One by one she took the stories in her trunk and pushed them into her mouth. They burned her tongue and throat as she swallowed them down. Most tasted foul, like the Blacksap they were coated with. Some had split like ripe fruit, their sweetness leaking to mingle with the bitter. Furmother did not stop until all were grasped and gulped. Her belly bulged with endless Story, all the tales that were and all the tales that would ever be. Even yours, O best beloved mooncalf. Even mine. The reason we glow — that, too, was there, snug beneath the ribs of Furmother.
“Now,” thought Furmother-With-Her-Tusks-Whole. “At last.”
The trapped breath within could no longer be contained. With a noise like a mountain bursting into song, Furmother blew apart.
“Very well. We will… consider guarding the place, contingent on these stipulations. We will remember what lies beneath when all of your clever inventions have broken down to dust and rust and food for weeds to pick apart and nothing but poison and damage is left to tell your Story.” The translator sounds about as grim as the elephant looks. Kat searches for sympathy in their eyes, but it's an Easter egg hunt hours after the toddlers have all gone home with sugar headaches. “We may even consent to the glowing.”
“Okay! That's… oh, that's great, that's fabulous.” That's motherfucking funding. For the first time in two hours, Kat takes a deep, hopeful breath. “You'll be doing an amazing thing for future gen — ”
“However,” the translator says.
“All that pig shit about the paint being poison, was that even true? What I heard — ” A boot digs into Regan's hip; pain sprouts and grapevines up the trunk of her to join the thicket running wild in her head. “What I heard is that you all were just a bunch of loose whores who caught syphilis and decided to milk the company dry. I need this job, you hear me, girl? I can't go fight and I'll be goddamned if I go back down in the mines. They end up shutting the factory down because a bunch of giggling girls had to go and get their holes filled, I swear — ”
She sees the kick coming this time and manages to catch Slattery's foot before it connects. He tries to jerk away; she hangs on for dear life. Spots swim across her eyes. The air whistles through the empty spaces in her teeth as she sucks in a lungful around the pain.
“Just wait,” she manages to croak. “Hang around a while longer. Breathe in that dust for a spell.”
Confusion and irritation crease the middle of Slattery's forehead. Again he tries yanking his foot back; again Regan clamps down with an alligator snapper's dead-eyed dedication. She sees the seeds of doubt land. For the first time in Lord knows how long, she smiles.
“Oh yeah. That powder don't stay lying down. You been getting you lungfuls of the stuff for — how long you been a supervisor? Since the day they started up? And you never thought about all that dust floating around?” She pushes him away. “You're stupider than you look and you ain't much to look at, you want the God's honest. May take a little longer, but truth's coming for you, Slattery.”
Which may or may not be true. She dearly hopes it is, but for now it's enough to watch the fear scrabbling behind his eyes, looking for a knothole to slip into. “Bullshit,” he stutters. His back is against Topsy's side now, palms pressed to her ribs. “They would've told me.”
“Yeah, just like they told us? May be overthinking your place in the pack, hound dog.”
He opens his mouth to say something back. He opens his mouth, but he's suddenly six feet in the air with an elephant's trunk wrapped around his neck, and so all that comes out is a strangled ghrrk.
Yes, O Mothers
Yes!
It is Ripe
And Good
And ready to be plucked
Sweet on the tongue,
In the trunk,
On the tusks,
To toss, to tear, to trample!
All of her pieces, all of the Stories, everything that held Furmother together — all of it sailed high into the sky. Bones and Blacksap and insides and outsides, fur and tusks and tail! End over end over end they flew, until the wind caught them and scattered the bits across the frozen world like plums. Half of a tusk lodged in the sky's belly and became the moon; much of her hair blew away and turned to clouds. Her hot blood thawed the earth; the songs she had scattered behind her on her journey sprouted and were plucked by the wandering Mothers.
Stories, too, they discovered. But it was a funny thing: They were shattered into pieces, like the Great Mother who had scattered them, and no one tale held to the ear by itself could ever be fully understood. To make them whole required many voices entwined. Then and only then could they become true things, and then and only then could we become the undying We, endless voices passing along the one song that is also Many.
“We are not doing this for you. We are doing it for all the ones that might suffer in the future because of you and your thoughtlessness, your short tempers, your dangerously short memories. We will tell them what you did as we tell one another, passing it down from She to She. If this… compromise is the only way to make sure the story survives, the real Story… ” The translator shrugs. The matriarch is a granite statue. “Please do not misunderstand me. We aren't protecting your secrets. We are guarding the truth. They will see how we shine, and they will know the truth.”
There are a hundred interviews and uniforms and grim-faced men with typewriters lurking in Regan's future, each of them more or less asking the same damn thing over and over: What the hell happened? Did Slattery provoke the elephant? Was there any warning in Topsy's behavior in the days leading up to the attack? Did she get a good look at what happened?
Hell yes I saw what happened. How could I NOT get an eyeful of what goddamned happened? You think I'm blind and deaf on top of being the walking dead? A fella got turned to raspberry jam spitting distance from me and I had to go back home and comb little bits of him outta my hair and you sit there asking if I got a good look?
&nb
sp; But all of that's still waiting up ahead, throwing jacks just around the corner. Right now she's watching it happen, backed up as far against the opposite side of the stall as she can scoot, while every elephant in the place from one end to the other stomps and screams loud enough to shake sparkling radium dust from the rafters. Slattery screamed too, at first, but the only noise left over now is that triumphant roar, like bugles and trumpets and the footfalls of an angry god come to collect.
Way away down at the bottom of herself, buried deep beneath the frozen shock and the pain in her jaw and throat and places where Slattery kicked her, she feels something strange stirring, like sitting in church and getting the Holy Ghost. It takes her a while to stick a tack in it, hunkered cowering in that corner with her hands over her ears and madness mopping the floor red right over yonder, but it comes to her eventually, guilty as a kid stealing ripe melons.
Satisfaction. That's what it is. It's satisfaction.
Part II
Cascade Reaction
If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take no care for it.
— Michel de Montaigne
RAMPAGE AT US RADIUM!
Macabre & Bizarre ‘Mad Elephant’ Attack Sparks Shocked Investigations, Temporary Plant Shutdown
Victim “was not the first nor second man” to fall to the Beast's capricious wrath, say sources
Local constabulary describe “scene of unfathomable carnage and butchery”
Local constabulary describe “scene of unfathomable carnage and butchery”
Police were called to US Radium's factory floor in the early hours of yesterday evening, whereupon arriving they found a bloody tableau of horror. One of the factory's workforce of helper elephants had indiscriminately gone stark raving mad and snapped the fetters of bondage, destroying her stall and smashing a foreman beneath her vast and terrible agglomeration in the most gruesome and gore-streaked way imaginable. No resuscitation was possible, for the body of the poor victim was so crushed and mutilated it “looked to have gone through a pressing machine,” according to horrified onlookers.
The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters Page 12
