Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  She decides to go back to the produce department for plastic bags for her fruit. Then she spots a cashier spritzing her station with disinfectant, wiping everything down, switching on the light that says the lane is open. Katherine scurries over, stepping in front of a slow old man with a package of pork chops. She smiles apologetically; he nods and his eyes twinkle. She puts the mango and pineapple onto a conveyor belt, which still glistens with disinfectant. She will wash them before cutting them up, before closing her mouth around their incomparable sweetness. But she feels confident that even if the washing is not perfect, the fruit will not sicken her in this universe she has chosen/created.

  If she gets sick, it will not be her fault. She has done what she can.

  creating the secure universe: the aspiration of the mortally anxious

  their ritual objects: plastic bags, helmets, antibacterial sprays, locks, alarms, sensors, diagnostic tests, seatbelts, organic foods, insurance policies

  limits on creation of the “safe” universe:

  —ability to choose universes by taking precautions is limited to hazards which can be foreseen and prevented

  —for unforeseen/unforeseeable events, the only chance to choose lies in catching that moment, the fulcrum moment

  —but how to access other universes through that moment?

  A REAL TEST

  The phone rings. Katherine puts down the fork with mango still skewered upon it, reaches for the phone, pauses with her hand extended. She senses her mother at the other end of the line, tries to picture her face: relieved? devastated? worried but hopeful? This is it, the moment, she feels it, she knows it. How does she turn it aside? By never answering the phone? By answering in this moment rather than the next, by waiting another ring? By closing her eyes and taking some inward turn in her mind? By clicking her heels, turning left three times, saying “abracadabra”?

  She sweats, she fights tears, but she cannot move her mind/self/reality into position to leap/fall/dissolve from this universe into another. She feels herself toppling into the well of anxiety, but rallies and lifts the phone. Hello.

  Hello. Her mother’s voice is strained. She wastes no time. “It” is malignant. She will have surgery right away. The doctor is hopeful. But—

  Katherine watches the moment recede in her rear-view mental mirror, feels herself sitting at the bifurcation of universes—they split and split again into a great cauliflower-like fractal of possibilities, of realities—innumerable universes exploding from the moment and mushrooming up and out (those organic metaphors again) in great clouds.

  In which universe does her mother die soon, die later, respond to treatment, not respond, go into remission, experience a complete cure?

  Katherine hangs onto the phone, the tips of her fingers whiten. She wishes she could reach out and grab onto the “good” universes, let them pull her along and her mother with her, into a place where squirrels still frolic and beagles play and, if she cannot avoid all pain, at least she can exercise some choice about which pain to experience and which to let go.

  But the universes slip from her hands like so many silken cords. She clings to the one that remains, praying, with all that is within her, that this is the right one, the one where she belongs, and that the pain will not be more than she—than I—can bear.

  THE CHAPTER OF THE HAWK OF GOLD

  Noreen Doyle

  Two hundred years have peeled paint, broken shingles, and cracked the granite step of the shed that houses the Healy Tompkins Museum. The beams are sound, the floor solid, and most of the glass original. Everything in the museum is in this same state: whole inside, broken only outside.

  Periodically the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society make these outsides someone’s business. Jenny Alcock feared that it would happen to her someday. Her mother doesn’t attend the Historical Society; her father drives for an out-of-town vending company owned by an old French family. Who else at Pithom Independent High School is better suited for the task? Everyone else has their excuses: camp, job, summer school, parents with influence. It is a long, solitary task, and she protests. But even her own mother insists. It will keep Jenny out of trouble.

  Askew on the wall hang amber-colored panoramics of uniformed men, with names scrawled in what looks like white ink. In one cabinet, a Down East sailor’s ropework valentine beds down beside a carved lacquer cup stand from China. A thin, balding rug from Ghiordes carpets the floor in faded Turkish red and yellow. A Spanish silver candlestick, supplied with a beeswax candle, occupies a George I burl walnut side table. (So the labels say.) The silver is tarnished, and alternating seasons of damp summer heat and dry winter cold have split the walnut veneer.

  To Jenny such decay is at once opulent and familiar. At home, linoleum peels away from the floorboards, hard water has pitted and stained the stainless-steel sink, pink sheets are mended with blue thread. Thumbtacks hold sun-faded Polaroids to a wall. They have no names written on them.

  No one in Jenny’s home (except maybe Jenny, now and then) ever cares about these things. The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society, however, do worry about dust and tarnish, at least now and then. It is the only tolerable thing about them. Jenny just wishes that they would care for someone other than Healy Tompkins, at least now and then.

  Healy Tompkins was a paper-mill baron and traveler almost a hundred years ago. He went often to Egypt on business and made pilgrimages to most of the Christian shrines in Jerusalem, of which she finds old photographs in a steamer trunk. One cabinet is devoted to such things as “Sliver of the True Cross” and “Saint Peter’s Tympanum.” But of all Healy Tompkins’s Egyptian travels, this museum holds only one souvenir.

  The label, pounded out on an old Underwood that cut out all the o’s, reads: Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889.

  Covered in dust as thick as gray felt, it feels light, like the paper-mâche parrot she made in seventh grade. Light as a bird.

  A wooden mask, once gilded but now mostly bare, encases the head. Jenny pities it, wings all linen-bound, and she always dusts it twice each week.

  Why had Healy Tompkins returned to Pithom, Maine, of all the places in the world he could have gone? Jenny thinks about this while she wipes the bull’s-eye window panes and soon decides that his mill and his bank accounts and his big house must have been enough for him. Those days, however, are long past. The paper mill is a ruin.

  Why did any Alcock—once millwrights, now painters and carpenters and truckers—ever stay?

  Jenny envies her father and the company truck, his road trips to Portland’s shopping centers, its airport, all its people. Each time he went out, she thinks as she props a stereoview of the Wailing Wall on a shelf, it was a little like Healy Tompkins’s pilgrimages.

  Her father has spent a lot of time away lately, although Portland is scarcely an hour’s drive from Pithom, and last night her parents fought about that. This morning her mother, still in pink curlers and white feathered slippers, followed him out into the dooryard. Was he coming home tonight? Of course, he said, he always came home (although he had not been home the night before last). He was sorry, he was so very sorry, Ellen, Ellen, it was nothing, nothing at all, just one night. Then they kissed, memory of their harsh words swept away by promises and I’m-sorries.

  Jenny, whom no one balms with promises or I’m-sorries, does not, cannot, forget. Memory of what has happened coats her like dirt.

  She dusts the hawk—poor thing—for the third time this week, wishing that someone, just someone, would do as much for her someday.

  As the ceiling fan vibrates the overhead light, the hawk winks its black glass eyes.

  The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society usually arrive at four.

  Someone from the Maine State Museum will be visiting, they say and run a white glove across the glass display cases, put a cotton wad on a yardstick and thrust it down behind shelves. This won’t be like your parents’ trailer, they say. It’s to be cleaned and polished, the panorami
cs of Union soldiers will hang so evenly that Mrs. Egars will be able to balance a pea on top. The same grade of paper will be used for each label, all t’s crossed, i’s dotted, and p’s and q’s properly tidy, that’s how it’s to be you little snot.

  One of these inspections dislodges a sheet of brown paper behind the mummy.

  Which leaps from its shelf.

  Mrs. Egars jumps two feet straight. Madame President Wallace shrieks and throws herself to the floor, but the hawk follows. It is five minutes before everyone has calmed down enough to see that Mrs. Egars knocked it over with the yardstick.

  For all its hard fall, the hawk mummy’s glass eyes stare as brightly as ever, looking proud of its first flight in more than two thousand years.

  The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society leave early that day.

  The paper, written by Healy Tompkins, is headed: Book of the Dead, Chapter LXXVII. Transforming to Hawk of Gold. Am I, it goes in English beneath Egyptian hieroglyphs, rise I from secret place like hawk of gold coming from egg his. Fly I like hawk of cubits seven across back his. Be glorious I.

  The English is fractured, as if he’d written drunk (wouldn’t that shock the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society!), but the writing is businesslike. The hieroglyphs marching between the lines of English are neat and tidy and precisely drawn.

  She likes it. More than two thousand years ago some ancient Egyptian had felt exactly the way she feels. Unlike her mother (who again this morning went out to the dooryard in pink curlers, the feathers of her slippers now tattered and brown), Jenny Alcock is going to leave behind this town and make something of herself. She will be free and with her she will take no dusty excuses, no filthy I’m-sorries.

  Having dusted the hawk again, she turns to the panoramics. She sees typically Egars noses, the broad hands of Mackees. In all these years they have not changed. The new Wallaces look like the old Wallaces. Even in some Great-Great-Great-Uncle Somebody Alcock she can see a reflection of herself and she shivers. But there are no Tompkinses in Pithom. Not anymore.

  Soon perhaps there will be no new Alcocks in Pithom, either. Because, unlike her father (who again this morning said he was sorry, Ellen, and promised that of course he would be home tonight), when Jenny leaves, she will never come back.

  On an old Underwood she types new labels, hitting the o gently, so as not to cut out the letters. She tends to the photographs first, then to the sailor’s valentine. Lastly she taps out a new label for Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889.

  But what, then, about the paper written out by Healy Tompkins? The poem should be written better, and she will, and playa trick on the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society.

  With pen and ink and old brown paper from Healy Tompkins’s writing desk, she meticulously practices his handwriting. For an entire week, twenty minutes each day, she practices the long loops of his g’s, the firm dots of his i’s, the miserly crosses of his t’s. Satisfied at last by her progress, she buries these papers in Mr. Mackee’s pile of leaves, knowing that they will be ashes before noon.

  Today she will rewrite Healy Tompkins’s poem.

  “A Translation, in His Own Hand,” a label will say. “Found by Mrs. Charles Egars.”

  The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society will look foolish when someone from the State Museum notices that the ink is fresh. Jenny’s mother will punish her for making trouble, but Jenny doesn’t care. As soon as she is finished, she will flyaway from Pithom and this museum and her parents’ fights and everything. She is ready. Knapsack, one-way bus ticket to Portland, woolen jacket, and extra pair of sneakers wait by the door.

  The hawk mummy winks at her with black glass eyes, although by now it is late October and the ceiling fan isn’t on and the light hangs perfectly still.

  It is not much of a poem, but she likes it anyway. Shabby outside, its strength lies within its words.

  Jenny knows the power of words. She has heard her father work them upon her mother: I’m sorry, Ellen, I didn’t mean it, she doesn’t mean anything to me, it won’t happen again, I’ll come home tonight. Words make what he says true, even when it happens again.

  But no one offers Jenny apologies to brush away the gray mat of lies that mantle her shoulders. They don’t care about the filth. Do they even see it? No matter. If no one will remove it, she will escape it. She will escape it and never look back to Pithom and will never need to look back because before her will lie the entire rest of the world. Someone, somewhere, will care.

  She writes in her best Healy Tompkins hand:

  Before she can complete the exclamation point, the pen shoots across the shed as a spasm tears through her wrist. The inkwell tips and brown-black ink streams off the burl walnut desk onto the Ghiordes rug, which drinks it in.

  It is nearly four o’clock.

  Fear knots her stomach and arms and legs, which cramp with terror because soon the Ladies will be here; but no, it is something deeper than fear. It is something that knots up her bones and her skin and her arteries and her hair and reweaves them from the inside.

  Legs shorten and twist, fingers lengthen, toes extend, a feather sprouts from each follicle.

  She has wings to spread!

  They are fast against her side, but she has wings and will fly. Far below will Pithom be, she will come forth from this tomb. Away from the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society and away from her parents, Jenny Alcock will become glorious.

  The shed is too small for her wings; they remain fast. The spell says seven cubits, which Jenny suddenly realizes must be very large. How big is a cubit? Outside there would be room for seven cubits, and more. Jenny takes a step forward toward the window and the wide world beyond. And cannot.

  She is linen-bound.

  To one side of her sits a fragment of wood and above it a label: Sliver of the True Cross. At her feet is another label, its o’s gently typed: Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889.

  Jenny finds herself stared upon by herself. But this other girl who has Jenny’s face and Jenny’s shoes and Jenny’s hair has eyes that are too shiny, too black, like polished glass.

  This glass-eyed-thing with Jenny’s face speaks in a language thick and throaty with age. Jenny cannot understand it, but she recognizes the words. Hieroglyphs have sound in them, and this is that sound.

  The thing with Jenny’s face throws open a window with bull’s-eye panes. Wind flashes through the shed, tearing gently typed labels from their pins, shattering cabinet doors, snowing dust over shelves and tumbling precious, ancient relics: the tympanum of Saint Peter, the sailor’s valentine, the hawk mummy.

  As Jenny falls she shrieks, or would shriek, if her beak were not bound up like her wings.

  The thing with Jenny’s face replaces hawk-mummy Jenny carefully upon the shelf, dusts the linen wrappings and the wooden mask, and winks.

  And flies out the window on wings seven cubits wide.

  THE BUNG-HOLE CAPER

  Thomas A. Easton

  The aliens came to Earth the same spring that Cyrus Holmes found the old barrel. It was buried under a stack of old lumber in a dark corner of the barn, and it would have stayed buried if Cyrus hadn’t been looking for his grandfather’s tool chest. Grandpa had been a cooper all his life, and when he was gone, the tools had been stored away. They included a cooper’s adze, which Cyrus thought might be just the thing for roughing out a new plow handle.

  He found the adze. Once sharpened, it worked as well as he had hoped. He also found the barrel, and that was in rather worse shape. It had been drying for half a century, forgotten in the shadows, and its staves now fitted as badly as fence pickets. But a month or two in the pond would fix that, he told Allie, his wife. Then he could replace the hoops and have a decent vessel to harden his cider in.

  All through that summer, Cyrus tended the barrel. He soaked the wood in pond water, watching the wood swell and tighten. He replaced the hoops with cobblings from his workbench. He stood the thing in the yard, f
illed it from the hose, and watched as the last leaks slowed and stopped. Finally, it was as tight as it would ever be, and the apples in his small orchard weren’t quite ready.

  In the meantime, there were the aliens. Cyrus knew all about them. He didn’t have a tractor or a chain saw or an electric milker. He worked his fields with a yoke of oxen, cut his firewood with an axe, and milked his dozen cows by hand. Still, he was up-to-date enough. He had a car, for getting to church of a Sunday and so Allie could drive to her job in town. He had a radio or two. He even had a teevee set, and he never missed the six-thirty news.

  He knew all about the aliens. He’d seen pictures of them, all smothered in pastel-patterned coal-scuttle helmets, like something out of a movie about the Great War. He’d heard they were refugees from some foreign disaster or war, and he knew they were asking for a place to settle in the ocean shallows, promising not to interfere with navigation or fishing—they farmed their food on land—and offering to trade. They had science beyond anything Earth knew, they had technology, and they had a price list. The space for a small colony, a little place to call their own, for instance, was worth the plans for a space drive. Help in settling in was worth a map to worlds that men could live on. Other things were worth money, credits that could be exchanged for travel tickets, for lesser goods, even for alien encyclopedias, suitably translated. Earth was drooling.

  Cyrus thought it all interesting enough, but he was a farmer, a raw-boned, weathered outcropping of Maine’s coastal hills. The aliens scarcely touched his life, and they never would, any more than the rest of modern life did. Too, he’d never seen an alien. Not many people had, for though they traveled plenty, they did it in closed black limousines, chauffered by UN flunkies.