Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  “...And by the third you’ll know as much as The Butcher ever knew.”

  The Florist had both legs now wrapped in paper, and he walked back to the customer side of the counter.

  Mano whacked at a few other things on the sheep, even though he wasn’t quite sure what they were. He wrapped those bloody things up in brown butcher paper, too, and handed them over the counter to The Florist.

  “That’s too much.”

  “It’s on me,” said Mano.

  In the days after all of the Lets sailed their own bodies down The Cure to the sea, Mano became Pie Time’s next butcher in addition to maintaining his position as the town’s barber. In many ways, this was good for Mano. He didn’t want to return to the house he shared with his mother, and he wanted nothing more than to avoid idleness. Also, being a butcher made him feel like a Let, as if he were married into the family through his profession. He was The Butcher now, just like every Let man had been before him.

  Despite the patience and generosity of his very first customer, The Florist, being The Butcher was very difficult for Mano at first. Chopping the arms and legs off of all the dead sheep only reminded him of the horrifying de-arming and de-legging of his mother. It was a reminder he didn’t need, yet being The Butcher meant that reminder would be constant, daily.

  In his first days of being both The Butcher and The Barber, Mano was very tired. He worked all night in the back of the butcher shop, cutting all the meat, cleaning and sharpening all the knives, draining all the blood, and preparing everything for sale for the next day, and then he’d lock up and walk to the barbershop, where he’d open for business until the middle of the afternoon, cutting hair, then sweeping it up into piles. He got so good at sweeping dead hair that he wouldn’t even need to touch it with the broom. He could just use the broom’s breezes to make a little mountain. But there was no time for sleep. After he closed up the barbershop, he would return to the butcher shop in time to sell the meat for the customers returning home from their own jobs. He kept the butcher shop open until 8pm, to be sure that everyone had their meat for dinner, and then he closed the shop in order to begin cutting the meat for the next day. It was a schedule that his customers learned quickly, and understood. They stood in lines in the hours the barbershop was open, and they stood in lines in the hours the butcher shop was open.

  On the first day without sleep, Mano was incredibly tired. He rested his eyes for a few minutes in front of the black square in the back room of the barbershop. He began drifting down to the bottom of the pond again. He let his body rest there, at the bottom of the pond, the man and the woman taking their clothes off in the murky sunlight above him on the pond’s surface. But then the jingle of a bell came from a customer at the front door. After a few days like that without any sleep, Mano grew more accustomed to his sleeplessness. His body adjusted. It became more capable. It grew more agile despite its extra weight. The things he held became more and more a part of his body. His hands were free as they cut hair and meat. His body grew to know its own rhythms and repetitions, and it knew them well. His body worked without him even having to think about it. Sometimes, while his arms were moving like a machine, he thought that all he was was a body. Not a person, but a body; not sleeping, but moving, cutting, holding, talking, growing and growing.

  While at the butcher shop, one of his duties was to tend to the half dozen sheep that were in a pen out back.

  “Come here now, Curls. It’s your turn.”

  Mano gave names to all the sheep, but all their names were the same. Curls. Before he butchered them, he cut their hair with the same kind of shears he used in his barbershop, instead of the electric shearing machines that Pepe’s father had used. Mano was much more comfortable with the shears, and the electric shearing machines reminded him of the steaming machines in the Pie Time Factory. Using them would feel like a step backward. At first it took Mano about an hour to cut the wool from one sheep. But after a few days of practice, it only took him about 15 minutes.

  He held Curls around her waist and spoke gently to her. “I’m going to cut all of your hair off, then stun you with a hammer between your eyes so you don’t feel me slit your throat while you hang upside down from your feet. All of your blood will drain out into a pan. Then I’m going to chop you up into pieces so that people can eat you.” He said this to each sheep each time before he did it, and each time it made him feel like dying, too. It made him very sad. But he knew she was ready, because each time he would look her in her sheep eyes, and ask her, “Are you ready?” And he would wait until Curls looked him back in the eyes. And before he stunned her with his hammer, he asked her out loud for her forgiveness.

  Mano thought that death wasn’t a thing to fight, but a thing to be ready for. He thought that if we could all just be ready for it, it could be beautiful. It was important to him that everyone in Pie Time knew that. If his customers were going to eat the sheep, he wanted them to know that he had to kill the sheep first. These arms and legs they ate, the thing that was giving them life, was death. So on Monday mornings, the day that the barbershop was closed, Mano started a community education program in the sheep pen behind the butcher shop called The Death Lessons.

  The Death Lessons were for children. On the first Monday morning, the first children to attend The Death Lessons were Ernesto, and his younger brother Ernest. Their mother, Lois Horn, picked weeds in people’s gardens, and their father, The Shoveler, shoveled what the people needed to have shoveled. The Shoveler was willing to shovel anything, but mostly he shoveled snow. It hadn’t snowed in Pie Time for a long time.

  “I heard you were giving away free meat,” said The Shoveler while opening the door of the butcher shop for Lois and their two sons.

  “It’s true, it’s true,” confirmed Mano. “But the children have to have their Death Lesson first.”

  The Shoveler picked up Ernest and held him. Ernest put his arms around his father’s neck and looked back at Mano.

  Lois wanted to leave at the first mention of death. “Sorry, we don’t...”

  “It’ll be fun. Here...” Mano motioned for the family to follow him around the counter, and he led them to the pen of sheep in the back.

  “Sheep!” cried Ernest. He tried to squirm out of his father’s grip.

  “Yes, they’re such beautiful animals,” encouraged Mano. “Go on, you can say hi to them.”

  The Shoveler lowered Ernest from his arms onto the ground, and Ernest walked over to one of the sheep to look closely at it. But he was too scared to touch it.

  “All of their names are Curls,” explained Mano.

  “Hi Curls,” said Ernesto to a different sheep than the one his younger brother was staring at. Ernesto put his hand on Curls’ back and pet it slowly.

  “I need your help.” Mano adjusted the hot water bottle on his back, then bent his body at the knees so he could speak directly to the children. “I need you boys to pick out one of the sheep for me.”

  “This one!” Ernest was suddenly very excited.

  “No, this one,” argued Ernesto, as he continued to gently pet Curls.

  “You can take your time. We’ll put a saddle on them and you can ride around the pen, and...”

  The Shoveler interrupted. “How much will this cost?”

  “The Death Lessons are free,” explained Mano. He continued to talk to Ernesto and Ernest. “You can ride them, pet them, talk to them, tell them your secrets.” Mano was tightening a saddle onto the back of Curls. “And then once you pick one out, you can say your goodbyes. You can say whatever you want to say to it, and you can take as long as you’d like. And you can ask it if it is ready. And then, when you’re ready, I’ll take it inside and kill it so you and your family can eat it.”

  “Yay!” Ernest shouted.

  And that’s how it went. Lois helped Ernesto onto the saddle of his sheep, and The Shoveler helped Ernest onto his. They both rode around the pen, bouncing off the railings, and falling into the grass. Ernesto got his
sheep to lie down on her side with him, and they talked while they snuggled. It was Ernesto’s sheep that the family finally settled upon. Curls.

  “Say your goodbyes,” prompted Mano.

  The entire family cried, including The Shoveler, and especially Ernesto, who wasn’t quite ready. And then, after much goading and consolation, he was. Mano took Curls into the butcher shop, and a little while later met the family at the front of the shop with the entire sheep butchered into parts, a few dozen chunks wrapped in brown butcher paper. The Shoveler and his wife, Lois, were very thankful, while their sons were still rubbing their red eyes.

  “Meat comes from where death goes.” That’s what Mano said every time after he handed the many packages of meat over to the families that participated in The Death Lessons. Meat comes from where death goes.

  The Shoveler held Ernest in his arms and bounced him up and down. “Say thank you, boys.”

  “Thank you,” Ernest and Ernesto whined in unison.

  The Death Lessons became popular with the poorer people of Pie Time. While its popularity was a bit of a strain on Mano, who was overworked, he continued to stay true to the original values of The Death Lessons. He always refused to take money for the sheep butchered on Monday mornings. However, it did become important that he receive something in return.

  As God’s Finger continued to plague Pie Time on a nearly daily basis, and the tolls rose, Mano knew that the dead were leaving things behind in their death holes. The people of Pie Time were in a steady state of panic. Mano made a sign that hung on the walls of both the butcher shop and the barber shop.

  Bring me your things of death.

  Bring me things your dead have left.

  Those who were grieving did not want to keep the things that were born from the holes of their newly dead. On the other hand, they didn’t want to throw those things away either. They knew where they could go if they wanted the thing returned to them. In the meantime, Mano held their things, and he loved their things. Quickly, Mano became a kind of living heap of the town’s grief—a walking, talking museum of loss and pain, a hard-working receptacle for the sorrow of others, hidden from their view should they choose, yet accessible, the way that kind of pain works best.

  In the first full month of The Death Lessons, Mano was given many things from the poorer mourners of Pie Time to hold in exchange for complimentary cuts of sheep. He was given a black umbrella, an electric toaster, a house plant, a hatchet, a pair of crutches, a smoking pipe, a frisbee, a birthday cake with 14 lit candles, a complete set of encyclopedias, and an oscillating fan. He became a magnificent holder of things. He learned exactly how to arrange the things on his body so that they could become his body. It became a real skill, but was more like a magic trick to the others. Some of the richer mourners gifted him a death thing, not in exchange for free cuts of sheep, but just to see how and where he would hold it, how he could make it disappear into the folds and layers and shelves of the other things that he was already holding. For some mourners, this ritual became like throwing a coin in a fountain. Mano’s body was becoming enormous. It was becoming mammoth. After a month of holding more and more things, on his head and legs and back, Mano was much taller than Pepe was, and much heavier than Pepe would have ever become. Mano was the mammothest person in Pie Time, and growing mammother by the day.

  Early one morning, after a full night of cutting up sheep at the butcher shop, Mano maneuvered his huge body through the door to walk to the barbershop, so he could prepare the scissors and razors for a day of haircuts. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to maneuver his body through the doors of his shops. That, too, became a kind of trick. A heavy left leg last out of the butcher shop door, a heavy right leg first into the barbershop door.

  The barbershop door jingled as he squeezed his hips past the doorknob. Inez Roar was already there, waiting for him in the chair. Baby Zuzu was asleep in a basket on the counter below the razors.

  She didn’t say hello. “I never told you about the black square in the back room,” she said.

  Mano was nervous to see Inez, and he wanted to start at the beginning of the conversation instead. “Good morning, Inez.”

  “The black square,” she insisted. “Come look at it with me.” She stood up and found Mano’s hand, which was at the end of an arm full of an umbrella, a pair of crutches, and a butter dish among other things. Together they walked into her dead husband’s back room, and stood in the center. “It’s a painting of me,” explained Inez.

  “That’s you?” Mano couldn’t see what Inez was talking about.

  “Yes, look here. Look closely.” She pushed her dead husband’s glasses further up on the bridge of Mano’s nose so that the details of the black square could be sharper for him.

  “What exactly am I looking at?” Mano asked.

  “Those are these.” Inez’s hands held her own breasts.

  “I don’t see them.”

  “No, no. Ok, look. Look here.” Inez pointed to somewhere in the center of the black square. “These are my legs.”

  “That’s the sun shining through the trees through the surface of the pond,” argued Mano.

  “No. It’s not, here, let me show you...” Inez lifted up her black dress. “Go on,” she said. “Get on your knees if you can.”

  Mano instinctively wanted to bury himself in the blackness beneath her dress. He moved his body clumsily onto its knees. The set of champagne glasses he was holding between his thighs clinked together. Inez helped him lower his gigantic body down to one knee, and then she slowly lifted her dress above the black birds, and the jar of buttons on his head. She climbed on top of the whole pile that was Mano’s body.

  Once inside the dress, Mano found Inez’s legs, and then eventually he found her breasts. Now that he was just beginning to grow tired from his lack of sleep, and from holding so many things, he felt relief inside Inez’s dress. It was a dark space that for a moment held him.

  Once Mano was completely beneath Inez’s dress, a sad and lonely Enid Pine walked in through the open front door of the barbershop. She stepped over the black poodle that didn’t move. She peeked at Baby Zuzu sleeping soundly beneath two layers of blankets in her basket. The sun was pink and new in the window behind her. Enid was holding the black telephone that she found inside Nana’s death hole. She had no more use for the telephone. She came to Mano’s barbershop because she wanted to see him, and she wanted to see where he would put the telephone on his growing body. But mostly, she just wanted to see Mano. Instead, what she saw when she peeked into the back room of the barber shop was only Inez, her black dress moving beneath her body like the oiled gears of a giant combustion engine, moaning wildly like a feral cat into a black square which looked, to Enid, like a painting of an endless strawberry patch.

  Enid set the telephone inside Baby Zuzu’s basket before she sprinted for the door. The receiver of the telephone fell off and rested on Zuzu’s forehead.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said the voice inside.

  22.

  Ernesto and Ernest Horn were playing cowboys when they found their mother, Lois Horn, dead in the bushes behind their house. She had been picking weeds in the morning. It was the afternoon when they found her. At first, they thought maybe she was playing a dead cowboy, but she wasn’t. She died of God’s Finger. Two toy guns were in her death hole, but her sons didn’t want them. They gave them to Mano one Monday morning during a Death Lesson. But all of Ernesto and Ernest’s training in The Death Lessons could not have prepared them for their mother’s death.

  The day after Lois died, her husband, The Shoveler, had a stroke of genius that would briefly transform his small poor family into a small family of means. Ernesto and Ernest would never again have to ride a sheep at The Death Lessons in order for their family to eat for free. Instead of hauling Lois’ body to The Cure, building a raft out of logs, and setting fire to the body before sailing it down the river to the sea, which had always been the tradition in Pie T
ime, The Shoveler decided to use his one skill to dispose of his wife’s body. Shoveling. This way, he saved time and he saved money. The Shoveler adamantly refused the forced good will of The Humanitarians, a refusal which took hours of effort. Instead, in the back of his modest shack on the outskirts of town, with the help of his sons, The Shoveler shoveled a hole six feet deep, six feet long, and two feet wide. The three of them lowered Lois’ body with ropes into the hole. In a private ceremony, they said their goodbyes above her, and wished her well as they shoveled the hole back up with dirt. Her body turned back into the earth that it was buried inside, and before long, white ranunculus grew from that spot.

  The stroke of luck and fortune, however, came from the fact that this shoveling ceremony was witnessed by a small crowd of people walking to The Innkeeper’s inn past The Shoveler’s shack after church one Sunday. Most significantly, the crowd included both The Businessman and The Lawyer.

  “What’s that you’re doing there? A new kind of gardening?” shouted The Businessman across the field so that The Shoveler could hear them.

  The Shoveler walked over to the crowd, his sons trailing behind him. “Oh, no, no. The wife died. God’s Finger. We’re just burying her, saying our piece, and our goodbyes.”

  “Burying her! We’ve never heard of such a thing. What’s wrong with saying your goodbyes at The Cure?” asked The Businessman.

  “Nothing’s wrong with The Cure, I suppose. We just want her here with us. We can say goodbye whenever we want. We know right where she is.”

  “Death is where life comes from.” Ernesto repeated something of what he learned from The Death Lessons.

  “We’re going to make a garden,” added Ernest.

  “Is that what The Butcher’s been teaching you?” The Businessman directed their question to Ernesto.

  Ernesto and Ernest both nodded their heads yes.

  The Businessman, The Lawyer, and a few other people in the small crowd laughed at the young boys. It was this shaming laughter that triggered the lucrative idea inside the mind of The Shoveler. Later that very afternoon, with the meager savings that he and his late wife had been stashing between the mattresses of their marital bed, he purchased a very undesirable five acre plot of land on the eastern banks of The Cure. He bought it directly from The Lumberjack, who had no need for the land now that it had been completely cleared of trees. It was nothing more than a field of tree stumps. Then with the money he had left over, The Shoveler bought a respectable black suit and tie combination from The Tailor. Within a week, with the help of his sons, he shoveled dozens of 6 x 6 x 2 holes in the land, each at the foot of a tree stump.