by Eugen Bacon
One day inside the year of my marriage Ma Space found what she was looking for: the budding node of fertility.
I stood tiny in that opulent kitchen, hands dipped in scorching water, plucking feathers off a fowl, when, with a scoop of arms, strong arms, he claimed me. In the bed, despite my unknowing body, a whole body tingling without discernment to his fondling, I stayed fascinated with the bedhead. My fingers ran along the contours of its face as he took me. I missed my room with its pale moonlight, my hand-painted frame of rainbows. But I did not miss the cold in the old house—layers and layers on my chest and feet to keep warm, but still the cold in the old house. Novic’s house was warm, I thought, as my head bump bump bumped against the bedhead over and over until his eagerness finished.
Then Ma Space’s visits altogether stopped.
It was not the bumping that stayed with me, the things Novic did when he took me; it was the things he didn’t do. He didn’t run his fingers on my skin or whisper tender words as I thought a curious husband might. There was just a sense of rush . . . and release. That became his pattern: stalking me in the throes of domesticity. Then an abrupt scoop into arms, naked lust, hungry fingers stealing into folds of my loose dress. Noiseless stalking, noiseless thrill—that was Novic.
I too had a pattern: discussion with the bed chamber all during the taking. I would notice as if for the first time objects. Like the velvet coating the buttons on the bedhead. Like the handcrafted leather shelling our chest of drawers. Like the thread pattern in Duchess curtains covering the tall window, or the Duke carpeting on the floor. Like the sovereign tallboy, the v-shaped pillow, the studded sofa, the beaded lamp with its legs angled like an elegant woman posing. Like the seamlessness of pure satin in soft gold in the quilt we had just soiled.
My examining the bed, the chamber, outlasted his terrible desire. I lay still long after Novic was gone, my fingers still racing along the artisan bedhead that had mutely witnessed my sacrifice to whatever Novic’s desire prescribed.
I never really came into my own.
A look. That was all it took. Not the full weight of his shoulder behind the slap, because lovemaking always followed that. The coupling, what do you expect? Novic, he . . . loved me. Mad, but he loved me—past tense.
I remember those emery hands, stroking the soft in my hair until it shimmered like his mane. Those leathery lips so strong, they buttered mine. Shadows dancing in those eyes old as Jacob, in that contained look that drew secrets from my longing. His skin furrowed into itself with age, clinging to bone, but there was nothing old in his taking.
When he pulled back my head and, like a grown beast, bit my neck in mating, his face looked like death. But his hair! It was a magical mane that fell to his waist. Pitch-black, polished like metal. So soft, even now the tresses of it bounce in my words. Pitch . . . Peach. Same, different. My hair was always peach, a spiral curtain that twirled down my shoulders to my bottom. Kept it long so Novic could touch it. How he loved to touch it. After the look, I shore it, then it grew back all maroon.
• 6 •
My mother’s easing me into the marriage did not prepare me for that gut wrench. Novic bedded me soon as Ma Space confirmed my coming of age. So she was integral to this partnership. It was only natural then that she was at the birthing, in her own preoccupied way.
Present by my bedside were a bunch of Grovean midwives. Best of them. There was Nene, eyes full of sand; Corio, dimples on her pensive face; Anakie, pep in her step; Blanket, leaned toward me in an intimate way, hushed tone like she was sharing a secret; Norlane, like a low-priced engine: low gear, high talk; and Ma Space, the youngest of them, with her dark liquid eyes, long face and tight curls. Hers was a distracted kind of beauty you sometimes forgot, sometimes remembered.
A woman without means was fortunate to get one midwife at her birthing. Sometimes, if her husband was not near, she would snip her own baby’s umbilical cord to disconnect it from her body. But I . . . I had six midwives. I was, after all, the first wife of a Sayneth priest. An honor.
Birthing T-Mo was . . . like someone grabbed my gut, wrenched it out of my stomach and it came out with a baby. Not sure what I expected . . . What does a girl-bride who has never seen birth expect? A baby crawling out of a hole or something, its crown glistering with body sweat? Or something.
It was Nene that shoved a fist inside to grab and turn the head, that yanked him out. Tssk, the sound that pushed out from between my legs, or was it p-pop? Sometimes I remember it like shfffff. But my birthing hips were still in formation and the pain was too loud, I don’t recollect too well that yank-out sound.
Anakie snipped the umbilical cord. Baby’s arms and legs were all bent up close to his body, fingers clenched. He was a scream, literally. Opened that mouth and shook the room. I remember the birthing chamber: cathedral walls, mustard color. Or was it custard?
By the time he unfolded from his fetal position to tug at my tit, my gut felt already whole. They say babies come out face all squished, looking a mess. Not mine. He came out face all beautiful: big brows, full lips, smooth skin—softest ever; looking at it made you feel at home.
Blanket leaned toward me, intimate, baby in her arms all swaddled already, and said, “What’s his name?”
“His poppy decides,” said Nene.
“Novic? Why he got to decide?” said Corio.
“Take all my souls if a woman don’ name her own chile,” said Anakie.
“Yes, we matriarchal.”
“But Novic, he a Sayneth priest.”
“Jus’ cos he a priest don’ mean he take our rights.”
“No he don’. We matriarchal.”
“What mother she be if she don’ name her own chile?”
“Baby look like a Jules or a Wally,” said Ma Space, absently.
“An Avon or a Brooke to me,” Anakie.
Names ping-ponged back and forth like balls in a game but all I was thinking was not how the child didn’t crawl out like I thought he might, or how he pulled out tssk, p-pop or shfffff. Didn’t even think about the pain. I just thought what a dream, most gorgeous baby ever.
“What’s his name?” Blanket in my face.
I looked at the midwives, scouring their faces one by one for a muse. What-am-a-call-him? Staggered myself with the choice I came up with: “T-Mo.”
“T-what?”
“His name is T-Mo.” I smiled. T, I liked the sound it made, quiet-like, no pull on the voice. I wanted to put my hand on the throat and say T, T, T, but instead reached and took him from Blanket, who was so stunned at my naming of the child, she nearly dropped him.
Looking at him, I said it over and over in my head: T, my throat does not move. Not always a soft or a light sound, depends on how you say it. You trap air with your tongue against the roof of your mouth, release the tongue downward. M, I press my lips together and make a circle to start the rest. Mo, air comes out to finish the sound.
The midwives looked at me as if I had tied empty tins to my ankles. “His name is T-Mo,” I said firmly.
“Say who?”
“Name her son a syllable.”
“Two syllable, not one.”
“If T is what you want name him Transfix.”
“Or Trap.”
“Or Tell.”
“Pops out baby one time and her brain goes all over.”
“A muscle-head like her da,” said Corio, her face all flat, her scorn close enough to touch. Even her dimples vanished.
“Dropped eleven babies and my head not muscle,” said Ma Space. But she was random as always. “T-Mo” defied them all. “I think I like it.”
The look in the rest of the midwives’ eyes confirmed she was crazy too. Crazy, foolish, or both.
Novic. He took one look at the baby, stood straight as a board and contradicted us all. “His name is Odysseus. The traveling one.”
&nb
sp; The hush that fell . . . everyone knew it was a curse. Sayneth priest meant nothing—only a mother could name her chile.
• 7 •
Same one—two people. That is what Novic created. Was it tunnel vision, or insight? What caused Novic to do the deed that brought this chaos?
My stomach took his contradiction very seriously—in a matriarchal society, a mother names her child. My belly took such offense, it curled up. And although I still ran fingers along the bedhead, discovered anew my bedroom, Novic saw no more babies. Not from me, he didn’t.
What he created was an enigma that was weird, electrifying and heartbreaking. T-Mo. Odysseus. It mattered which side of him you saw. It was T-Mo that closed his baby eyes as he fed, closed them like there was heavenly flavor in my milk, angels pissing nectar on his tongue. When I touched his palms, fat fingers clasped me back. He sucked and sucked, grew like a magic bean. He sneezed, he hiccuped, he kicked—like when I carried him in my belly—but he also sucked sucked sucked like it was life and death. Dropped his guts often, no wonder.
When I strapped him to my breast in his carry sack, I never for one moment felt the cling, the soft lean of baby hair against my neck, the quest for comfort. T-Mo was always an independent baby, but so was Odysseus.
The main difference is how Odysseus hated touch, shrugged to get loose from my clutch way before he could crawl. He frothed like he was being strangled when I tried to pick him up, but showed little range of emotions most times. He didn’t respond if someone cooed or clucked at him. He did not stretch out fat arms and say “ah-ah” or ”ooh-ooh.” He ignored people or looked at them with flat eyes, unless he wanted something. Even then, when he wanted something, he reached and snatched the object (a ball, a fruit, a pebble . . .) without babbling, but with a flash of triumph in his eyes. At first, I thought he was deaf and could not hear sounds to echo them. But he responded to sound, like the slam of door—not with startle, just a glance in the direction. And he did make a sound early on, it was a giggle, almost a belly laugh, the sound he made when he rolled onto a moth down the hallway and crushed it. The only times I heard him giggle again like that were when he was with Novic.
It was T-Mo that grunted and squeaked, baby-talk-like. He wasn’t a fussy baby, not a whisper of colic. His smile, when he learnt it, was wide as a rainbow, poems in his eyes. Loved the sun—soon as he could toddle, raced out the house at daybreak to find soil or a rock, sprawled himself tongue out, lapped up heat like a reptile.
But it was Odysseus that Novic knew, reared. The boy picked his father’s powers, walked through doors. T-Mo I could hold close and cuddle; Odysseus I couldn’t draw near. He was cunning, greedy. Nothing like the child that lay in a cot following objects with his eyes, stretching, kicking on his back, exploring with his hands and mouth, rolling both ways, gleeful, when for the first time he raised his chest from a stomach position. With Novic, the child was grown and strong and dark, even as an infant.
Toddler T-Mo and I walked hand-in-hand, marveling at Grovea. His eyes mirrored the city: diamond stars in the jeweled sky before the moon turned bloodred. Charcoal pebbles along Turtle Cove. Amethyst sand from waves on the great reef at Rocky Point. I watched as down the esplanade of the inner city, Bruthen, he chased fireflies that glowed crimson, yellow or lime.
“Tell me about Nana Space,” he asked when he was breathless, a Vulcan eagle—gold breasted—on his arm.
“What about her? She was a midwife.”
He would give me a look. She had ten brothers named Hook, True, Bone, Fever, Pretty, Cute, Lantern, Comet, Code and Rush. T-Mo looked at me until I mellowed: “Her mother was an enchantress, her grandmother also an enchantress but her great-grandmother was a midwife.”
“Tell me about Grandpa,” guiding the eagle’s flight from the tip of his hand into the sky.
“What about him? He was a migrant.” The look. Folk nicknamed my father Runaway. I relented: “He was a guard from the land of Shiva who, during prisoner transfer and a stopover for supplies, absconded after he fell in love with a local girl, the daughter of an enchantress born in a family where women became midwives or witches and it ran for generations.”
Finding himself stripped of the familiarity of Shiva and all its harshness, and rewarded with the jeweled sky of Grovea, its red moon and fauna, marked the start of his impairment. Rather than adore his new world, Runaway could not bring himself to imagine life without fear. The tangent life he lived was removed from normality. A recessive mutation incited an allergy on his skin; it formed what looked like all-over body acne, a condition that later manifested itself in its wildest form in T-Mo. But most about Runaway, I remembered his roar. He roared at everything, the bellow a derivative of fear.
“Why did Grandpa leave Shiva?”
“People move on all the time.” The look. Shiva was a harsh place only guards, prisoners or exiles could inhabit. It was a place of rationed food and water, even air, labor in plenty. Everywhere were steel fortresses whose walls were spiked with a battalion of metal. I relented: “Your grandpa was a deserter who traded his laser gun for the love of a woman.”
He lived in fear that somebody might one day recognize him and betray him and he’d be carted back to Shiva to face execution for desertion, and he was craven to his death.
“Why did he trade his laser gun?”
T-Mo loved those questions: why, how, when, from where? But he never asked about Novic or his family. Novic was so ancient that nobody understood anything of his past, what brought him from the land of Sayneth all alone to Grovea. I never understood his future either, or his hang-ups. All I know is that the obsessions weren’t there at the start. But after T-Mo—no, Odysseus—everything about me except amorous activity was a problem to Novic. A single hair out of place, a missing ladle in a gravy bowl, whatever thing that was nothing, it could bring on a slap.
• 8 •
T-Mo loved centuries—the color of history.
Hues along our strolls charmed him. He stayed in awe at the rainbow of street music, the blackness of the printer’s ink, the lemons and blood oranges of the market, anything grass green or snowy or cerulean or antique.
Before you got to Cozy Place, there was this herbarium of exotic plants. I remember T-Mo’s fascination with the ornamental conifer, the withered olive that was the habitat of the paper-making spider, the sweet daisy species, the temple of winds shrubbery, the knotted pond-leaf, the flowering elm . . . all brought as seedlings from other worlds. So strong their scents, you could smell the plants from blocks away. That is where I found Weed.
Weed’s mother worked in the herbarium. Hers was more than a green thumb; she was a Botan, gifted with nature. Loaned us her son Weed, a tall, thin boy always wearing a red scarf around his neck and a jacket. He had all over black hair going north, east, west but not at will. He brought along a half-jar of Lycopod spores that grew into dwarf plants with soft, single-veined leaves. Three times a week, he came to the garden to stroke the branching stems. The plants were simple in their forms but they carried presence. He kept them fragrant and flowering all seasons, through winter, spring, summer into autumn. He watered them sparingly, removed dead leaves and tenderly buried them.
Weed knew everything about plants, made sure our garden wore plenty of color. He knew how to get the space right between seeds for maximum growth and spread, understood which plants needed the soil to warm them up and bring out their explosion of pigmentation, call the birds and the bees. He knew which ones mushroomed and rainbowed, flowered and flowered best and without pause when he wrapped their roots in ice. He was friendly enough with T-Mo but cautious with Odysseus.
Weed, perhaps the Botan in him, was one of the early ones to distinguish between T-Mo and Odysseus. Easy for a mother to tell difference, but in time more people could tell. Eyes told the boys apart: T-Mo’s carried poems in them; Odysseus and his eyes stayed flat. And smiles: T-Mo’s smile was wide as a r
ainbow; Odysseus had none—just a movement of lips that did not reach his eyes. Later clothing, hair and how the boys interacted with people enhanced difference.
Down Cozy Place to Chirnside and away from Mead Street, as T-Mo and I walked, I pointed out the trading part of the city where you would find Jarvis the blacksmith who was also a goldsmith and a tinsmith, all muscled and wiry; Moriac who sold candles, lanterns and soaps, face like he was born in a wrecking yard; Autry the foundry man who spun metal into anything but was infamous for his bummed-out moods; Berchill who owned a drapery store—the place I bought baby wear and linen for T-Mo when he was a tot, before I could yarn them myself after Ma Space resumed her visits and remembered to learn me.
T-Mo loved best Miss Lill’s sweet shop between the grocer and the post office. His favorite was the fish licorice that tasted of honey and vegetable and fish, and held a texture of oatmeal, chicken and liver. I liked the pepper and mint drops, nothing shy in those flavors, real kicks.
Miss Lill, she was a golden woman with sun in her hair, happy lipstick on her lips and laughter in her walk. She never asked T-Mo what he wanted; she just saw us and gladly cried out: “Little Poetry come to visit, bless those eyes,” in her sing-sing way, all cultured-like. She spoke good sounds; I could listen to Miss Lill all day. Ultra slender for one who sold confectionery, she would ease the lid off the fish licorice jar, scoop the boy a handful—never charged him what it was worth.
“Manners all impeccable, my little Poetry, remembers to say please and thank you,” she would markedly exclaim to her cap-headed helper named Warun. He was a boy with one lazy eye, lanky arms sprinkled with baby hair and a shop pet named Mate—a yappy but harmless tail-wagger two-feet tall.
By the time the door swung back at Miss Lill’s, Mate yap yap yapping, T-Mo had gobbled all lollies. Then his eyes would gobble the city, a place not split into domains—it just flowed. It didn’t matter whether you sauntered along the avenues of commerce, where folk peddled aloud their wares, or you strolled in the suburbs on a person-wide track that bordered the elbows of a racing river and fingers of a fattening brush, where a nudge could plunge you into the wet churn: the flow was still there, that sense of seamlessness. Tradesfolk in Bruthen were friendly, nobody littered the street. Further down, shores were pristine not bird-pooped, and wild things and micro things showered the coastline.
