Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell

by Michael Conniff

“Mutton,” the Archbishop commanded for the penultimate time.

  The Archbishop was already wise to the waste The Great Fornicator had left behind in the last town along the canal. He knew Hads had come to know Thomas Cushing far too well—for far too long—the hard horsy prick of his pole in both darkness and light, the grunt of his untimely exit a heartbeat before the pounding demise of his hose. The Had Nots could see the obliterating bliss of the Hads, as if those who raised their skirts to Thomas Cushing had risen one step closer to God. Bliss came at considerable cost, of course: sinful binges by the Hads were always followed by the need to purge. In those early days of damnation, it was not uncommon for hell-bound Hads to fall weak-kneed onto their knees, to free-fall back into the black hole of the confessional at The Church of The Immaculate Conception. There they pressed their foreheads to the wire mesh like so many wild, trapped animals—all the while spilling their sins into the cupped upturned ears of the hardening priests. The priests would prod the damned, as was their wont (and need), and they would dole out X Hail Marys or Y Stations of the Cross, like so many hard biscuits or plain Johnny Cakes.

  The Archbishop knew that Thomas Cushing’s hold on the town was so complete that Had Nots had granted an unspoken dispensation to Hads. In the last town along the canal, there was thus a moral discounting of that brand of adultery from a damning sin of the flesh to a minor slip, one that a God-fearing Had might dilute further with a few dozen rosaries of atonement.

  On Saturdays, blessed by the priests and their peers, the Hads would go round and round the dark circle of Stations—one sinner stepping lightly aside to let the next one past—their thoughts of God waging a hopeless battle with The Lord’s polar opposite: Thomas Cushing and his rank pole. The more women walked from Station to Station in the church, the more their thoughts fell inevitably to The Great Fornicator, and to what had come to pass in the past between each of them and him—and, with luck, to what new sins might lighten their load in the days to come.

  As the veiled women of the town repeated their weekly ritual of commingling and confession and cleansing, the lines for confession grew longer and longer still, with longer waits between each Station of the Cross for each sinner, until each Station was backed up four or more deep with the damned, depending upon the toll from a particularly dark week.

  The situation of the sinners had grown even more dire for the parish, for Hads in transit had begun to swap their godawful stories of transience, thereby transforming the aisles of the church into a kind of sinful bazaar. First one and then another began to drop their penitential poses, to timidly lift their veils, and to confess their respective sins to each other in great carnal detail. The weekly procession to the Immaculate Conception had thus developed into a bona fide women’s club, with explicit shorthand between sinner and priest, a verbal economy belied by the scandalous detail that snaked unadulterated from Station to Station, from sinner to sinner, from the lips of Thomas Cushing’s intransigent women and on to God’s ear with just that one stop in between.

  In time, the ungodly procession had come to a complete standstill, as each Station came to represent a particular strain of grievous sin, where those lucky enough to be guilty would gather with the giddy anticipation of a church social. With the tacit approval of the priests, the penance generated by Thomas Cushing’s pounding hose came to be truncated and then cut off entirely… in favor of the free flow of communal information around the church—like so many dots and dashes dancing down a hot wire.

  Before long, to the horror of the Monsignor, a hoary rivalry had erupted among Hads and Had Nots, with profound political consequences not known in the town since the days of the Know Nothings.

  A machine candidate, dutifully campaigning on the stoop of the church on Saturdays, was simply paying homage to the harsh realities of headcount. This predicament was made all the more vexing by the propensity of Had Nots to pose as the most unrepentant of Hads. As one machine candidate after another failed to pull the full parish vote, the leaders of the machine had finally conceded that the town had split smack down the middle between Hads (real or imagined) and Had Nots (all too real). This division represented the gravest threat to party harmony since “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” had soiled the second coming of Grover Cleveland.

  It was no surprise to the Archbishop that the machine feared Thomas Cushing, a man who seemed to float unimpeded beyond the laws of man or machine. The husbands of Hads had already been had by this man, while the spouses of Had Nots eschewed random infidelity in the interests of any machinery other than their own. After days of unholy war—the cries of the wounded parties echoing across the canal deep into the night—the machine had forced its negotiated settlement onto Hads and Had Nots alike.

  Saturdays had thus become a kind of second Sabbath for the damned women, with those unfortunate enough not to have sinned with Thomas Cushing forced to mind the children of those Hads who had as they made their way to Confession.

  Today was a Saturday of a different sort, of course.

  On shore, as the Archbishop’s barge bumped up against the lock, it was all Monsignor Fahey of The Church of the Immaculate Conception could do to mouth the words that meant forgiveness in a dead language: Oh my fault...oh my fault...oh my most grievous fault!.... Oh—how the Hads had sinned—every one of them, in every one of the worst ways—but the Monsignor knew that no sin had been so heinous as his own. It was his fault, the Monsignor reckoned, his most grievous fault, because only he had had the power to break the hellish cycle of the Hads, and he was the one who had done nothing yet to set things right—not a thing, not even after the Archbishop had invoked the words of the devil and the wrath of God.

  The Monsignor had wanted to believe in the mercy of a merciful God—but how could he? His parish priests had become nothing more than an ordained police force paid to look the other way. Deprived of any flesh save their own, his priests had come to rely upon the shorthand Confessions of the Hads and those who wished they had slept with The Great Fornicator. They had come to vie shamelessly for the best assignments during peak hours, with the prime spots saved for those who had performed their weekly ministries most unselfishly.

  Truth be told, Thomas Cushing’s ad hoc excesses had provided His spark to those priests in the parish least convinced of their calling. Faced with the carrot of the Saturday Confessional at the end of Monsignor Fahey’s stick, Immaculate Conception priests did everything in their power to be pious and Godly throughout the week. Thanks to Thomas Cushing, the worst tours in the most hellish wards became the most coveted assignments, as priests in the parish sought to establish their proximity to God for Monsignor Fahey’s benefit. If his religious fervor flagged, a priest might beg off from such a dark and discouraging assignment, but one week away from the hot breath of the sinful town women was enough to send that same priest crawling back to his one, true God.

  The more pious of the priests came to know the women of the last town along the canal in a way that neither their husbands nor Thomas Cushing ever would. To the priests, it was as though the women glowed in the darkness of their guilt before God, as though neither Confessional wire nor stone walls separated priest from sinner or soul from soul. As the priests grew more pious—and the women more bold—both parties had dispensed with the formalities of church ritual across wire mesh, in favor of a sinner’s blow-by-blow account (real or imagined) of the latest damnable indiscretions. At first, under the gentle prodding of the priests, the women had regaled the emissaries of God with splendid approximations of size and length, with tall tales of their most hellacious mortal sins. But as the lines to the confessional grew deeper still, such details came to be spent like precious coin changing hands. Their private moments with the priests were no longer squandered on these smoldering events, but rather on the more lofty and lasting matters of the soul. Like old lovers with all secrets spent, the priests and the women moved on to more important matters in their lives: to talk of children, and God, and the loss of love. So
intimate were these sessions—so telling in the lives of sinners real and imagined—that Confession had become a kind of heaven for the women: a quiet moment in a quiet place with a quiet man. For the priests, these revelations were so stirring that they too confessed from the heart: they told the women of their lives and their worldly loves, of their sacrifices on this earth—all for the sake of Him.

  On shore, the Monsignor’s behatted lackeys were all waiting to follow his lead—but he had lost his capacity to know the will of the people just as will became want.

  It was all he could do to raise a hand—and to hear the ripple of lackeys raising their hands behind him as the town’s prize colleens-to-be began their procession on cue from The Church of the Immaculate Conception.

  For all the world, the colleens-to-be looked to Monsignor Fahey like sisters born of the same sacred coupling. The hair of one might have been darker than the brow of another, but they all had the same freckled blush and full-bodied voice of their father, The Great Fornicator, and the press of their full breasts all pointed heavenward against the close stitching of their white gowns. Like a string of imperfect pearls, they all came now from the church in singing single file, the starched white of their dresses the whiter still against the dark contrasting mass of huddled Hads and Had Nots waiting for the worst along the shore.

  The Monsignor could hear the colleens-to-be lifting their beatific voices to The Lord. He could see that these beautiful girls came from the same seed, yet they remained miraculously protected from the truth that darkened the town every day of their lives. They were all half-Cushings, half-his if Thomas Cushing had cared to know, but in the conception each girl had become more his than hers, so that each of the colleens-to-be could easily have shared the same mother as well, with any physical discrepancy left to generations long gone. Half-Cushings were made of stronger stuff, as everyone knew, and they had always managed to survive childbirth and the pestilence that claimed their lesser halves in the last town along the canal. Neither the Monsignor nor anyone else could account for the dearth of boys born out of wedlock in a town that bore the sultry evidence of Thomas Cushing’s rank pole wherever an eye might wander. There were in fact eight of his boys born of Mary Reynolds Cushing—nine if you counted the runt Tommy Tom—and they formed the heart if not the soul of Cushing & Sons, as if Thomas Cushing could have no Sons other than those sanctioned within the Most Holy Sacrament of Marriage.

  The chorus of would-be colleens had come to a keening climax.

  Monsignor Fahey removed his satin cap on shore to scratch his head in wonderment at the colleens-to-be. The scratching at his scalp was a nervous tic the Monsignor had developed during decades of procrastination, but an observant lackey could pick up the habit in days, and now each lackey hacked at his own head until the Monsignor had replaced his own cap.

  Knowing full well that the worst was a certainty—and further procrastination an impossibility—the Monsignor, scratching away, walked up into the barge and on into the Archbishop’s chambers. The Archbishop was blinder than before, or so the Monsignor imagined, because the Archbishop was blinking now in the dim room as though a great light shone directly into his fading eyes.

  “You say that he is just one man?” the Archbishop said.

  “Yes,” the Monsignor said. “He is one.”

  “Saints be praised,” the Archbishop said. “He fornicates like a steam engine.”

  The Archbishop, bless his soul, had come to see the strange case of Thomas Cushing in the finite terms of dollars and cents, rather than in the everlasting currencies of damnation and salvation. The half-wit in the telegraph office two towns back down the canal had known enough of higher math to add a zero to every dollar mentioned in the Monsignor’s wire. . .and, for good measure—to remove a zero from the number of Hads with whom Thomas Cushing had had his way. The Monsignor’s detailed message had thus been reduced to a few brief phrases that promised maximum financial return from the minimum number of sinners: a misleading message that had been music to the Archbishop’s increasingly keen ears. By the time the Monsignor’s garbled wire had reached the Archbishop, all mention of the party apparatus in the original plea had been superseded by a simple business proposition: the near-term potential for the tithing of the sinners—and a tidy profit for the building fund of the Archdiocese.

  Lost in translation were all references to the heart of the matter: the soul of the town.

  The Archbishop had immediately decreed via return wire that he himself would hear the most solemn Confession of every Had on board his sacred barge that Saturday, this very Saturday, in the privacy of his own chambers. The Archbishop had assumed that such a task might take him the better part of an hour—long enough for a dozen or so of the hell-bound Hads to shuffle repentantly through his portable quarters. It was not until he had heard the mass murmuring that morning that the Archbishop had come face-to-face with the enormity of the sin splitting the town asunder.

  “The time for forgiveness is at hand, Your Grace,” the Monsignor said.

  “Let’s see if these Hads are as bad as you think,” the Archbishop said.

  Confession began as the first breath of fall shivered through the town that Saturday, and the administration of the sacrament did not end until gas lamps were the only source of light left along the canal.

  As luck or the will of God would have it, the first of the Hads had been Molly O’Malley, wife of Michael O’Malley, one of the leaders of the machine. Through the blur of his diminishing vision and the fine mosquito mesh, the Archbishop could make out a woman as wide as she were high, one who fell like a dead weight to her knees in front of him. He could not see the fine metallic sheen to her eyes beneath the veil, but in her voice he could hear something that was not of this world.

  “Bless me father,” Molly O’Malley said. “For I have sinned.”

  It was every bit like Molly O’Malley to be the first in line. It was Molly O’Malley who had always been first at the door to the confessional at The Church of the Immaculate Conception, and it was Molly O’Malley, parading from Station to Station, who had first spoken to the other Hads of her remarkable sins. For that matter, it was Molly O’Malley who had first opened her legs (and her heart) to Thomas Cushing, and who now had a fine would-be colleen waiting on shore to show for it.

  Even on her knees in front of the Archbishop, it was Molly O’Malley who was reliving that first time with Thomas Cushing in her mind. She remembered how he came to the fore with all of his tools, how he began to hammer out a room for the little Michael that Michael O’Malley believed to be only a matter of God’s will and the passage of time. There was a taste of new snow in the air and on her lips, and yet Thomas Cushing had stripped down to nothing, or next to, just a slip of a shirt rising and falling against the fine ripple of his biceps and ribs. Thomas Cushing had hammered in a wide sweeping arc, with no mind for the helpless fingers that held the nail: the head of the hammer snapping onto the face of the nail, the high arc repeating then repeating then again, the swing traced in the sweep of the air, the head of the hammer always landing with the same smashing result.

  Molly O’Malley herself was just the stem of a flower back then, and she had brought him so much water that day she thought for sure that Thomas Cushing would float away and leave her to drown in her own lust. She had watched him drink water all day from every angle: peeking past the sash and around the doorjamb: spying as he stood up and when he knelt down. She had seen the bob of his Adam’s Apple rise and fall like a lure, and she had watched the sweat gather across his back while she shivered with the raw cold within her own home.

  Molly O’Malley heard Thomas Cushing whispering something about her beautiful hands—hands that could only grow more red and raw over time, as the duties of the household and her husband made their claims. All the while hammering, Thomas Cushing was whispering now of her neck and of her back, of her lobes and of her toes (and of every hidden trove), until Molly O’Malley could stand it no longer, or s
o she swore, and she had to have at him right there on the splintered floorboards of the kitchen, with the hammer still held up high in his hand like a torch, and her shrill silly cries of lust echoing in the cold hollow of a new room in the making.

  “Repent,” the Archbishop said to Molly O’Malley in his chambers.

  “How much?” Molly O’Malley said.

  The Archbishop named a dollar amount and Molly O’Malley agreed to the figure. He was about to tell her to begone, but Molly O’Malley wanted her money’s worth from this transaction. She told the Archbishop every detail of every one of her sins with Thomas Cushing, and every transgression that had taken hold only in the fertile soil of her own rabid soul. She told the Archbishop everything, until she herself could no longer tell the difference between light and dark, between sin and truth. She told the Archbishop about the time on top of the chopping block, and that night backwards and buck-naked on Thomas Cushing’s lap, and the smell of the slops as he drowned her along the canal, and the blisters from the sticky bar stool—and even of that moment in the back alley when she was as big as a house with his child, her only child, her colleen-to-be.

  “For your penance,” the Archbishop said when she finally drew a breath, “say one hundred Hail Marys, one hundred Our Fathers, and one hundred Acts of Contrition. Say them all, and be done with this devil for good.”

  “But I’m not done!” Molly O’Malley said.

  “You are finished!” the Archbishop said. “He’s a dead man now. May God have mercy of his soul!”

  Molly O’Malley’s litany of sin had only whetted the appetite of the Archbishop for more. From behind the mosquito netting, he proceeded to quiz each of the damned with all the subtlety of a fire bucket thrown into the face of these hellish flames—

  How?

  How many times?

  Where? How could that be?

  When? How’s that again?

  —and on and on his questions came and went, until the Archbishop had spent every question, save the one that he could take to the bank.