She became a mirror image of Thomas Cushing, didn’t she? Of the corruption and abuse she was trying to replace in the last town along the canal.
Very perceptive, professor.
Did it have to happen that way?
A town ruled by women, for women, with no men—let’s just say it was much too much, much too soon.
What would you say to those who would argue that it was just not natural? That women need men and men need women?
I would tell them to take a look at the second coming of The Tommies. Take a look at what happened after I got to the last town along the canal.
Why did you go back?
I was looking for the One True God. I thought I might find Her there.
Seriously.
I really did have a calling of some kind. I can’t explain it, but I knew I belonged there. Seriously.
You said The Tommies “had spontaneously beaten and killed a man—John Patrick Cushing—for raping a woman who happened to be my mother.”
Surely your mother had something to do with why you went to the last town along the canal.
It had everything to do with it.
In what way?
I saw her life as a microcosm for everything that had happened to women in the last fifty years. Sometimes I would just think of her as a beautiful young woman—she had this gorgeous chestnut hair—and she was full of moxie, full of fight. And then she was brutally, brutally raped. Everything in her life and about her life changed after that.
Could you be more specific?
Before it happened my mother didn’t think there was anything she couldn’t do. After, she married a man she didn’t love—my father—and had a baby by a man she hated, the man who had raped her.
What else changed for your mother? What about her “moxie,” as you call it?
It was still there, in diluted form, but now she had to carry out her ambitions through her husband and children. I made sure that wouldn’t happen to me when I got to the last town along the canal.
Molly O’Malley was an old woman by the time you got to the town.
She was dying.
You went to see her.
Right before she died. She was all dressed up in white, plumped up on a bed with pillows. Like the angels were about to come down and carry her on up into heaven.
Did you tell her you were the granddaughter of Constance Briody?
She knew exactly who I was. And she was terrified. She must have thought I was going to kill her.
But you waited until Molly O’Malley died before you moved ahead.
There was no reason not to wait because she was not long for this world. She was still one of the founders of The Tommies, after all.
And who better to replace her than a descendant of the other founder?
I made sure the women in the town knew who I was, knew my connection to Constance Briody and the past.
What did you tell them?
I said it was time for The Tommies to grow up. To move ahead while learning from the past. I convinced the children born of The Great Fornicator’s sons and daughters to live a life without men. With nothing but love for one another.
History was repeating itself—again.
I told them we all had to know our history. We had to face the truth of what had happened with Molly O’Malley and my grandmother. We had to learn from our truth.
Your critics refer to that process as “The Inquisition.”
No one was punished. There was no Star Chamber. We didn’t put anybody on the rack. We did it to set the record straight about Molly O’Malley and my grandmother and what they had done—the good and the bad.
What happened to Molly O’Malley?
She was like Lenin—there were statues of her all over town. But she was closer to Stalin.
And you were Khrushchev.
A reformer. Exactly.
You had links to the past. That had to help.
The fact that I was Constance Briody’s granddaughter did not hurt me one bit in the last town along the canal. It meant I had a purchase on the past. By the end everyone hated Molly O’Malley and they wanted to connect with what The Tommies were all about. I became the symbol of that feeling.
What were The Tommies about after “The Inquisition”?
The truth is that we showed what women could do if we worked together. We formed businesses together. We worked the farms, set up schools, created an infrastructure. We do without men. It’s heaven.
But surely you can’t do without men forever and survive? At this rate, The Tommies will die out.
But it’s only a matter of time before society accepts that two mothers—lesbian or not—are far superior to a family where the father is in flight. And in our lifetime we will see artificial insemination, cloning—all kinds of answers. That’s where I’m putting my hospital background with the Sisters of Mercy to work. We won’t need men anymore, just their sperm. And a man’s sperm is always readily available. For the right price, they’re always more than happy to come. And they come cheap.
Is there no place for men in your universe, Ms. O’Kell?
When The Tommies are done, professor, we won’t need men at all.
And what of God, Ms. O’Kell?
What of Her?
AFTERWORD:
KINGDOM COME
By Edith Comer
Department Of Women’s Studies
Sarah Douglas College
That a women’s body is more beautiful than a man’s is scarcely worth debating: the curve of hips, the swell of her sweet breasts, the wanton (wanting?) wetness of pursed lips and poised labia make a man’s apparatus laughable in comparison to such intricacy: a cosmic joke that is not particularly funny. The male’s rudimentary contraption dutifully bears the genetic code necessary for reproduction in the slime of ecstasy, a primitive evolutionary pump and hose meant to deliver the male payload.
Eleanor O’Kell knew intuitively that a man’s genitals had become an anachronism long before the talk shows took up the cry. The millions she poured into her research attacked the logistics of reproduction with furious precision: within two decades a new procreative apparatus was in place in the last town along the canal, one that had nothing to do with men, and everything to do with the future of women.
That was her genius, but it is not her whole story.
If Eleanor O’Kell ever had the ambition to publish it was never evident during her own lifetime. The plain and even painful truth is that no one—not even Nancy Perkins, her first Sisterly lover from the Convent and one of her last in the last town along the canal—knew that Eleanor O’Kell kept a journal in any form, let alone one that aspires, in bursts, to literature. It remains easy to overlook, as her detractors must, that Eleanor O’Kell’s initial cerebral gymnastics were theological, not sexual. The interplay of both—Eleanor O’Kell’s contemplation of the sublime and the sexual—is the dominant theme of this entirely personal work. Nuns were shrouded when she entered the Order, closeted, their bodies cloaked and concealed, but within that container Eleanor O’Kell found the core of modern Catholic erotica, and much more. Over time her concern with the worship of the Lord was devilishly transformed into an overriding preoccupation with her own carnal plumbing. If Eleanor O’Kell had remained religious, she might have called such a vital transformation miraculous.
“MOTHER NATURE: The Journals of Eleanor O’Kell,” as edited, belongs alongside the finest in the erotic literature of Catholics faithful and fallen. Unlike so many others who turn to the personal journal, Eleanor O’Kell was not looking over her shoulder for the approval of intellectuals or a pat on the back from radicals. These are most assuredly not secret musings delivered on a silver platter for the slavish approval of critics and/or acolytes. You now hold in your hands the flawed literature of a movement, the swing of a woman’s psyche from the One True God to the one thing that mattered to a woman of her times: the creation of a society entirely without men.
The lockbox that held E
leanor O’Kell’s journals was supposed to be locked up for thirty years. But even a pioneer, once deceased, can’t control the path taken into the future, especially not when her torrent of words demand to be heard. The sheer volume of Eleanor O’Kell’s musings, sacred and profane, would fill all the shelves of a small town library with these notations from her secret world. With the possible exception of the radical theologian Mary Daly, no one in the history of either feminism or Catholicism has ever been able to articulate the inextricable yet contradictory link between eroticism, love of God, and the ultimate mission of feminism. Eleanor O’Kell lived through that contradiction in public—and privately here in these journals—a journey from the worship of the Heavenly Father, to outright scorn for her own father, to the notion that a father was no longer needed in the creation or the disposition of a woman’s life. Love her, hate her—Eleanor O’Kell’s journals are like a coda to the 20th Century history of women reaching for the light. Her journals are the sound of one hand clapping, of a soul never at rest.
Edith Comer
Bronxville, New York
August 20, 2020
BOOK OF O’KELLS:
SINS OF THE FLESH
Part I
Chapter One
In the Wake of The Great Fornicator
The Archbishop cursed the light with language bright enough to bring the dead back to life. He used up the usual blasphemies—he brayed damnation for that damned Edison—and then he lay there, flat-backed, more blanched corpse than famous cleric lying in such a state. The great swell of his belly had lifted the light cotton of his nightshirt high up above his knees, and now the Archbishop turned his back to the porthole (and against the light), and in the dark his knees tried to find his chest in quest of warmth, and youth, and God knows what else.
From what I have learned of his life and those times—from what I have managed to imagine—the Archbishop had no way to know what was to come in the last town along the canal. There was nothing to betray either the great tragedy that awaited the town the next morning, or the great good that would come of his own spineless flight.
The Archbishop was at the tail end of his annual odyssey to the parishes along the canal: a trip always timed to coincide with the longest, lightest days of summer, when the canal was the only salvation from heat so hot even the godless seemed to throb. As the century waned, the towns along the canal had become nothing more than glorified ports of call for the Archbishop, scheduled respites required to stoke his unabated appetites, and to take on the best supplies a parish could afford: fresh-faced colleens, corn or strawberries in season, the latest gossip ground fresh from a town’s rumor mill. In arch response to his critics, the Archbishop had increased not only the length but the lavishness of his trip along the canal, until the voyage had become its own warm-weather trinity of worldly pleasure: devoted, in equal part, to The Word of God, and the long days of summer, and the earthly comforts of the Archbishop.
Supine on a bed big enough for a king, the Archbishop lay there mute and oblivious beneath the fine mesh of mosquito netting, at the exact moment in time when his flickering sight gave way to the unadulterated power of his remaining senses. It was then that the scent came: not the incense that meant the empty promise of sleep, or the burnt coal that meant going home, but the immortal smell of young girl: the scent of salvation heaven-sent. He could smell the clean tang of colleen clear through the door.
“Grace?” he said.
“Coming,” came the miraculous voice of Grace O’Kell.
Grace O’Kell had always been a sight for his sore eyes, and yet, as she waited, teasing and tittering behind the green door, the Archbishop was thinking of all of the things that she was not. Grace O’Kell was not one of his commonplace colleens—oh no—not beautiful, despite her silvery curls, and definitely not pliable, not born of the right Hat City clan—not by a mile—not a candidate for canonization, and not even—not ever!—on time.
She was in fact all of the things a colleen was not supposed to be: a talker who loved to talk back, and a troublemaker who made her small trouble to no end.
“You’re late,” the Archbishop said.
And yet, and yet.
The Archbishop found Grace O’Kell to be a breath of fresh air compared to his cookie-cutter colleens. Perhaps he no longer cared for their bland acquiescence or his predictable blandishments. Perhaps—a sixth sense?—he understood it no longer made sense to extract free will like a ditch digger digging deeper down with those new-fangled drills.
Perhaps the Archbishop had simply seen something of himself—something of the devil—in Grace O’Kell.
There was her voice to be reckoned with—the beatific voice of an angel—a voice for the ages, for all time. Grace O’Kell was humming now, in his chambers, humming the hymn about Him without need for the glorious words, and the light melody carried her right along into the room. For the first time, the Archbishop heard her voice ring out somehow beyond the highest register that a man could imagine, up there in the range between God and dog. God had given Grace O’Kell that voice to be used, the Archbishop knew, and by God she had used it. It was because of her voice that the Archbishop had plucked her from the gutter like a piece of forgotten, ripening fruit.
“Coming,” Grace O’Kell hummed.
Warm air came whooshing into his chambers, and what the Archbishop could no longer see began to take shape in the growing light of day. No—God had not given Grace O’Kell beauty, but He had given her something better: the soul of beauty. Her light hair shone almost silver in the light from the porthole, but her eyebrows were darker than her hair, almost black, and they curved high above her eyes and hung like two half-moons. With her willowy build—and the billowing white gown of the Archbishop’s colleens—she could have been an angel alighting for a quick look-see.
“So where’s the fire, Archie?” Grace O’Kell said.
She plumped onto his footstool with one foot on the Bible below the bed, and the other propped up against the real lace of his virgin sheets. Grace O’Kell spread her legs into the widest of Ys, and when she lifted her gown the Archbishop could see nothing, not even the soft silvery blur down between: a sight that would have stirred him to ecstasy, had he the eyes to see.
Her soft purring became a mumbled, magical prayer.
Grace O’Kell was using the very tips of her fingertips, as he had taught her (and all of the colleens) to do. She worried the bead of her own flesh like a rosary, and then she tried to think of God, as he had taught her to—Oh God how she tried!—but instead she came as ever to the earthbound sounds of the men biting at coal in the boiler room down below, to the black streams of soot that twisted down their bare chests, down the stems of their shovels, and down onto the quivering deck.
“What’s w-w-wrong?” Grace O’Kell was quivering.
The Archbishop had begun a flat-backed baying at the light of day: a low-throated howl that belonged to back-alley dogs roaming the gloaming, forever feeding on the meek.
“Archie?”
“Begone now, my pup.”
“You’re not well, Archie. I can see that. Maybe a proclamation to make you feel better? Something about sacrifice? That always cheers you up.”
Grace O’Kell clucked at the lump of cleric laden with real lace beneath the veil of mosquito netting. She stood up and down came her billowing gown, and then she ducked her head down to the porthole for a look at the last town along the canal.
How she had come to dread this sight!
For her, this godforsaken hole had always meant the end of summer—and the ends of the earth. Civilization may have extended to the last town along the canal, but Grace O’Kell had her grave doubts. The rust-bucket lock, bare of traffic, looked dry as a bone, like a mass grave waiting to be spaded over, and the steeple of The Church of The Immaculate Conception seemed to have no point for want of paint. Left to right, the red light strip was wretched with one ratty shack after another, with each storefront dedicated to a different
strain of mortal sin. Grace O’Kell watched the slops lap up against the hull as the barge came to face the town: the rotting husks bobbing like bad apples, the shapeless lumps of human waste, the ground-down hooves of dead calves and slaughtered sheep. The rickety telegraph shack looked to her like a lean-to for the dead and gone. Everything about the town struck her as small potatoes now, even that boy in rags zagging from lamp to lamp—sagging with the weight of that long, beaked pole.
Hadn’t anyone in this town ever heard of electricity?
Grace O’Kell thought the last town along the canal had to be the last place on earth to get the word on anything.
“Can’t you hear them?” the Archbishop said.
“Who?”
“There! Them!”
“Where? Who?” Grace O’Kell said.
“The Hads, damn you!”
At first, Grace O’Kell heard nothing but the sounds of a town still nodding awake: the high whinny of a horse, a baby’s whining cry, the creak of a distant door across soiled water. Only then could she hear the low-throated chant of shared public sin, the words of The Lord’s Prayer chanted over again and again: But deliver us from evil... For thine is the kingdom...and the power... the words growing more desperate with each fresh start—until the low hum had become a deafening hymn. Grace O’Kell could see the long line of sinners snake past the zagging boy with the long pole, past the church and that last flicker of lit-up gas lamp. Behatted and veiled in black, the chanting line moved forward, as if marching onward to The Final Judgment with full knowledge of the only possible result.
“My God!” Grace O’Kell said.
Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Page 23
