The Mothering Coven

by Joanna Ruocco

  “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.

  Give a yell, give a cheer

  for the girls who drink the beer

  in the cellars of St. Catherine’s school.

  We are brave, we are bold

  for the liquor we can hold

  in the cellars of St. Catherine’s school.

  For it’s run, run, run!

  I think I hear a nun!

  So grab all your liquor up and run!

  If a nun should appear, yell “Sister, have a beer!”

  In the cellars of St. Catherine’s school.

  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.

  X

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Borage has had a shock.

  “Haloed martyrs,” shouts Mrs. Borage.

  “No,” she sighs. “It is Fiona’s head. She is standing in front of my commemorative plate. Silly of me.”

  [:]

  Dorcas puts the last scoop of ice cream in her root beer float. She opens the cupboard.

  “Where are the straws?” asks Dorcas.

  Does Dorcas think the pinwheels grew overnight? Dorcas stares out at the backyard. Everywhere, pinwheels. There are even pinwheels on the pyre. Some of the wheels are made of paper, but some of the wheels are made of plastic. There are wheels of aluminum foil, and there are also wheels of lettuce and maple leaves and orange peels.

  Dorcas imagines that it looks something like Holland.

  [:]

  Mrs. Borage is sitting on the kitchen floor.

  “It was a good rocking chair while it lasted,” says Mrs. Bor age. She picks up her scissors. A blade drops. She holds the remaining scissor. What will she do with a scissor? Mrs. Borage would rather have a trouser than a scissor. At least with a trouser you have one warm leg, which can support a good left profile. Mrs. Borage has a good left profile. Maybe the best. She sighs. She likes to snip the Helsinki Winki but it doesn’t do to get too attached to methodology.

  “The Russians might upset the Finns at the semifinals,” says Mrs. Borage, tearing. “Which could have a ripple effect in the world of hockey. Generally, I feel isolated from the vicissitudes of nations and their sports teams, but look at the way these men hold each other after the penalty shot.”

  Dorcas looks.

  “They are stroking each other’s carapaces,” says Mrs. Borage. “What does it trigger in you, Dorcas?”

  Dorcas scratches her neck.

  “The phylogenetic memory of your days as an invertebrate?” asks Mrs. Borage.

  “Yes, that’s it,” says Dorcas. “Exactly.”

  “Isolation is an illusion,” says Mrs. Borage. “The Russians are an illusion. The Finnish National Hockey team is an illusion. A beautiful illusion,” sighs Mrs. Borage. She rips a winger, something written beneath his left skate, agglutinative. What should she call him, this wing man?

  “Gluteus Maximus!” says Mrs. Borage. It sounds so Roman. Rome is an illusion. Centurions are illusions. There is no Impe-rium.

  “Right now I feel real,” says Mrs. Borage. “But who knows? Tomorrow I might feel completely different.”

  [:]

  Everyone is anxious before a party.

  “We should sleep,” says Agnes. She is standing over the toaster. Just a few more pieces of toast. She looks out the window. She sees a horned figure creeping through the tree line. Robin o’ the Wood! He’s come early! He’s wearing a fringed leather jacket and chaps and carrying an armful of soup cans.

  “He must be cleaning the forest,” thinks Agnes. She feels ashamed. The forests in the United States are so filthy.

  “Has Ozark gone to sleep?” asks Agnes. “Where is Fiona? Where is Dorcas?” Two more pieces of toast. Maybe four.

  Mrs. Borage is drawing a bath. The steam fills the kitchen.

  “You have nullified my toasting,” says Agnes.

  “It is an election year,” says Mrs. Borage. “But only according to the Julian calendar.”

  It is wonderful to relax in the bathtub, talking politics. Mrs. Borage has put her wig on the shelf in the oven. Her real hair is very long and dark, with red highlights and orange highlights and yellow highlights, and green and blue and purple highlights, like a midnight rainbow.

  Agnes is anti-capitalist. Of course she is. She is an heiress. Mrs. Borage likes capitalism.

  “Capitalism is the religion of illusion,” says Mrs. Borage. “When you turn 100, you start looking for religion.”

  [:]

  “Which reminds me, where is my credit card?” asks Agnes. “I should pay our back taxes.”

  “I know where it is,” says Fiona. She runs to check the por table
television on the mantel. The credit card is missing. Instead of a credit card, there is a torn piece of green paper glued in the upper left-hand corner of the screen:

  THE ORDER OF CRÊPES SUZETTE.

  “Are we knights?” asks Fiona. “Or just unemployed?”

  Agnes is looking for her bank statements beneath the magazines. The bank statements are very red. “Is that dye?” asks Agnes. Alas.

  “Eight motorcycles!” says Agnes. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable investment. Steel appreciates. But the millions transferred to star-naming companies? Misguided.

  “Which one of you has been on the phone long-distance for the last five and a half months?” asks Agnes.

  [:]

  It’s always harder to throw a party penniless.

  “At least, we have plenty of bread,” thinks Agnes. She still needs to butter the toast and add cinnamon. Cinnamon doesn’t grow on oak trees.

  “Mr. Zimmer brought 26 tons of spices,” remembers Dorcas. “I put them in the back yard.”

  Who mailed us 26 tons of spices? Agnes opens the little card. The handwriting is appalling. It looks like something-something Mrs. Borage. Something-something love. Something-something… Magellan? Who invited Magellan?

  “I didn’t mean to,” says Ozark.

  But did Magellan mail butter? No, he didn’t. This will require a cookbook. Annals of the Irish Potato Famine. Le Ménagier de Paris. The Many Ways for Cooking Eggs. Agnes checks the recipe box instead.

  Oil of Cockatoos

  Take lavender cotton, knotgrass, ribwort, French mallows, strawberry strings, walnut tree leaves, the tops of young bays, sage of virtue, fine Roman wormwood, chamomile and red roses, of each two handful, twenty quick cockatoos, and beat them all together in a great mortar, and put to them a quart of calves’ foot oil, and grind them all well together with two ounces cloves well-beaten, and put them in an earthen pot, and stop it very close that no air come into it, and set it nine days in a cellar or cold place, then open your pot and put into it half pound yellow wax cut very small, and let it boil six or eight hours. Strain.

  “Crisco!” cries Agnes. There is still a great big can of it. Thank goodness.

  [:]

  “Did you give Mrs. Scattergood her invitation?” asks Ozark.

  “Of course,” says Mrs. Borage.

  “I think it was a fragment of the episteme,” says Ozark. “Something irresolvable.”

  “That’s lovely, dear,” says Mrs. Borage.

  [:]

  It is midnight. Neither today nor tomorrow.

  “I am not ninety-nine nor one hundred, but something else,” thinks Mrs. Borage. She slips out of the house and stands barefoot on the bricks between the cairns. A red leaf of lettuce sails past in the wind.

  Will Bertrand return with white sails? The cairns seem shorter. Mrs. Borage gazes over them. She sees a ship without sails. It is a black funerary craft. The leaves rush past in the wind. The sawing trees sound like the surf.

  Mrs. Borage searches the cairns for the faces of the dead. The cabbages are badly decomposed. Mrs. Borage plugs her nose. It is a pungent deliquescence.

  “The spirits have left them,” says Mrs. Borage. Her spirit feels far off also, aligning with the sun and moon, in syzygy.

  [:]

  When Mrs. Borage wakes up in the morning, she moves swiftly to the bedroom window. She would not be surprised if the world were covered with salt. It is not. The grass is yellow; the streets are gray. Mr. Henderson’s rooftop is dry and black.

  The cairns have fallen. Trampled vegetables are strewn all across the yard. Now the brick pathway is just a series of linked circles.

  “An eternity chain,” sighs Mrs. Borage.

  Mrs. Borage inspects the yard. Here and there the grass has been torn. Great muddy gouges. Are those the prints of odd-toed hyraxes? Hartebeests? Soldiers marching in footwear special ordered to the front by their commander Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher? Ms. Kidney’s dogs give no comment. They are looking at their painted toenails, cyan blue, cyan green.

  [:]

  Ozark watches Mrs. Borage through the dining room window. Mrs. Borage is raking leaves with great vigor.

  “She doesn’t seem any older,” thinks Ozark. “She seems closer to the sun.” Ozark feels as though she is seeing Mrs. Borage through bright yellow rays. Ozark walks out into the yard. She looks at the house. It has been wrapped in yellow barricade tape.

  “Have we been condemned?” asks Ozark. Mrs. Borage is wearing crimson bluchers and her white ponytail is tied with a crimson ribbon. She’s whistling.

  Ozark pulls at the yellow barricade tape. She rips a short strip and flips it caution-side down. She takes out her big black paint marker and writes the first thing that comes to her. She nails the banner above the door.

  KOLIK JAZYKŮ ZNÁŜ, TOLIKRÁT JSI ČLOVĚKEM

  She thinks it means, “Merry Meet We Within This Circle,” or maybe “Blessed the Gods Who Turn the Mighty Wheel.”

  [:]

  A many-colored montgolfière floats close to the tree line. Ozark blinks. The cloud cover rearranges itself rapidly on windy days. Now she can’t be certain. Would Bertrand return in a montgolfière? Her last postcard was an aerial view of Croton Magnus!

  Agnes runs out into the yard to watch the montgolfière floating low over the trees. Her heart beats faster. Still, what is Croton Magnus known for, if not its steep terraces, its high, narrow roads and scenic overlooks? She can’t go chasing every montgolfière, dragon kite, and Cessna. The toast is burning.

  [:]

  Suddenly, Mrs. Borage hears a plaintive sound, wavering and thin. She throws down her rake.

  “The Song of the Herring!” thinks Mrs. Borage.

  The montgolfière crests Mr. Henderson’s house and starts to rise, the many-colored envelope expanding, and in the tiny gondola, Manxmen waving, singing along to the whine of the whisper burner, the old sad songs of the Irish Sea. Mrs. Borage waves back.

  “I’ve never ridden in a montgolfière!” says Mrs. Borage. It is a crime in this day and age, that a centenarian can say that.

  “Come around the house,” calls Fiona. Mrs. Borage gasps. A touring motorcycle, pink bodywork and gold chrome. Pink balloons trail from the exhaust pipe, and soup cans, and stuffed cockatoos.

  “Happy birthday,” say the cockatoos.

  “Happy birthday,” says Mrs. Borage. She smiles at Fiona. Her wig is large and freshly powdered.

  “I don’t think the helmet will fit,” says Mrs. Borage.

  Fiona dons the green helmet.

  “It fits,” calls Fiona. Her antlers branch against the sky. She climbs onto the motorcycle. She kickstarts the engine. Around and around the pyre rides Fiona. The motorcycle is very loud. Mrs. Borage shuts her eyes.

  The sound of the engine fades into the distance. Dorcas is picking up the broken pinwheels.

  “She’ll be back,” says Dorcas.

  [:]

  Before Bryce began to découpage, she studied sports medicine. She doesn’t remember much. The foundations. Pheidip-pides at Marathon. The pentathletes at Delphi. She tries to remember more but she finds that her memories are very similar to Monet’s water lilies. She closes her eyes and concentrates, but she sees floating shapes.

  “Green, ocher, blue, ultramarine,” says Bryce. Were her memories always like this?

  “It’s my ecstatic temporality,” cries Bryce. “I’ve found it.”

  She takes off her cap with the streaming ribbons. She takes off her cherry satin sash. She takes off her corset. She doesn’t want to be discredited by an hourglass figure, a relic of common time. She puts on her smock and starts to nail the barn stars to the side of the house.

  Rosettes mean good fortune. Bryce paints eight red petals.

  “She loves us,” says Bryce. “She loves us not.”

  She looks up at the sky. Is that a castle?

  “It is definitely a corbelled turret,” says Bryce. “White battlements.”

  A War i
n Heaven? Today?

  It must be the fixative she’s spraying. Another scotoma.

  “I need a respirator,” thinks Bryce.

  [:]

  A pink and gold motorcycle is gliding silently up the street. Agnes squints. No, it is a red and purple bicycle rickshaw. Could it be? Dragomir! He is wearing a black suit and a blue tie. He has a little mustache. He has turned into quite a dashing young man. It helps that he is carrying a red rose.

  “Happy birthday Mrs. Borage,” says Dragomir.

  “Nut mix,” says Agnes. She is an aggressive hostess. Dragomir takes the handful of nuts. He takes another handful of nuts. He and Mrs. Borage stroll over to admire the dogs. Dragomir tells Mrs. Borage of his recent divorce from a cabriolet driver in Central Park. Mrs. Borage remembers Central Park.

  “The golden gates,” she says, wisely. She remembers the heavy fog, how she sat beneath the shade trees in winter, drinking lavender chocolate, the golden cables lashed to the clouds.

  [:]

  Bryce sways on the ladder. Her palms tickle. She stares at Dragomir. The unhealthy man from the pinochle deck! His cheeks are filled with pistachios, and he looks unexpectedly robust, but it is he. Bryce holds up her palm. The little mustache—identical! He is a divorcee without many prospects, but at least he is not a member of the Romanian police. He is not a professor of the polynomial rings. He has his rickshaw. He has his independence. He’s grown up. No wonder Agnes didn’t recognize him.

  “What do I have?” thinks Bryce.

  “Glorious detritus,” thinks Bryce. “Patience.”

  [:]

  Of course Mr. Fibonacci is asleep at the wheel. Driving is so monotonous. The Misses Fibonacci hang their heads out the window. They think they just saw a motorcycle shoot past in the sky, surrounded by cockatoos.