Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

Good morning Nathan, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah! Good morning Simon, Grace, Prudence, Elizabeth! What astounding feats have you accomplished today? Though it was only eight in the morning, the boys reeled off an impressive list from the homeschooled wee hours.

Wouldn’t it be nice, the mother thought to herself, to live somewhere without fear of looking out the window and seeing Risen Agains waving, pontificating, and spelling everything? Matheletes, Champions of the Spelling Bee, Latin scholars. So what, she said to the child, if you can’t spell profligate or nematode or marsupial?

The mother never understood why they were always quoting Scripture out of context. The use of that, she could not see. What the little Risen-Again brood could not know was that the mother, of course, could quote Scripture with the best of them, if that was what she chose to do. Then the mother got an idea.

O deliver soon to me, the mother prays, the likes of Rebecca and Ezekiel, Simon, Jeremiah, for a Bible-bee! Bring them soon to this bloodstained door.

The Rabbit seemed not to approve.

THE SHEEP KILLERS were her friends, and so the mother refrained from saying things she might have said otherwise. Being friends with someone, the child would learn, had as much to do with not saying things as saying them, and it made the world seem even more lonely when she thought of that.

The Sheep Killers had come from the city, and they had thought killing sheep was the right thing to do. It’s only right, they said, if you are going to eat meat that you should be responsible for where that sheep meat has come from and what that meat has gone through in its life. This was considered acceptable dinner conversation. Uncle Lars could not agree. He looked sheepish and he piped up, I most certainly do not need to know, and it left a bit of a pall over the proceedings. Out the window, a bucolic scene unfolded before them. Sheep punctuated the pasture, and it was pleasant to watch the various patterns they made throughout the evening.

The Sheep Killers liked city music, and while they were doing the chores, they played city music to the sheep. All in all the sheep had a pretty good life, even Uncle Lars had to agree: outside all day with the sweet grass and breezes on Curly’s Corners Road above Tivoli. It was the best view in the county. Look at them! And Uncle Lars drew the sheep in their slippers smoking pipes with their little sheep aperitifs, on a cocktail napkin.

The Sheep Killers did not like to say “killed”; they liked to say “processed.”

IN HER SLEEP now, she hears the black wing-beat. And in the morning when she awakes, the Red-Tailed Hawk circling above with its gimlet eye on Bunny Boy. Now it is a world where birds eat cats, and not the other way around. Now it is the season for the “time is out of joint” speech. The mother snatches Bunny Boy and cradles him in her arms, and she does not duck or cower even as the hawk dives at her. The mother, with the force of her Motherhood, a force which is something like reverse gravity, compels the bird back high into the sky and then pushes it away entirely. This time they are not forsaken; the mother’s powers are still intact.

Later when the Grandmother from the North Pole hears the story, she says quite plainly that it should be perfectly obvious: the hawk had not come for Bunny Boy of course, but for Miss Frosty, the cat from next door who often appeared in the yard. She is emphatic — that hawk was coming for the old lame one. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Miss Frosty!

MORE AND MORE, she was a transparency through which things passed. The self was a window that glimmered, the world outside wavy. The split maple tree had opened something in the mother that had remained closed down in her a long time. Be that as it may, the child wanted the mother to play with her.

She imagined that the thing that had eluded her for so long might actually be within reach — had been there all along: not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf, just as the poet had said, but she could not see it — nor did she wish to. They took out the Tinker Toys. Today it would come no closer.

ONE HUNDRED MILLION years ago, flowers appeared on the earth. Shortly after this, predatory wasps evolved into bees that fed on those flowers anew. The bees had left the hives, and they had not come back. Everyone on earth mourned their disappearance. What’s that? the child had asked. On the horizon, a force of human pollinators could be seen.

The mother understood that the day that people were hired as hand-pollinators would mark the beginning of the end. It would not be long now until they too would perish. She said it out loud. Destroyed will be our remembrance from the earth.

IT WAS NEVER easy being a baby — being a baby meant being at the mercy of almost everything. Things appeared and disappeared before a baby’s eyes, and there was nothing a baby could do about it. The baby’s task was to become a master of the unresolved absence. Oblique is the angle, fragile is the whole setup: crib, changing table, layette, human outlines, mother figure.

Because objects came and went all the time, a resourceful baby might make a wooden spool attached to a string that she could control simply by pulling the string or letting go. A spool so cool, so predictable, so easy to maneuver. So much better than the massive face that came and went at will and crooned peekaboo. Who is that? Uncle Ingmar, no doubt. The spool so much better, more solid, more comprehensible than the whims and figments that otherwise pass before an immobile baby’s eyes.

A baby grown into a child will often still find the spool very useful. And even that child grown further into an adult might find that the spool is a very handy thing to have indeed. First many men were being lost at the front. Then, many men were being lost in the rice paddies or in the bamboo. And now on the outskirts of the ancient city, men and women and children were being lost again. In fact, not a day had passed in the history of the world without men and women and children lost somewhere. She reeled the spool out and it was gone. Then she reeled it back in. It was fun to play a frightening game. It was also fun to play a game where there would always be a satisfactory ending. Coping was what the child learned to do. There was a steady crown of stars around her mother’s head, though the mother could not see or feel them, and so to her they were of no use. But to the child, the stars were everything. The mother proper would come and go, but the stars remained. That is what the child learned to do. Whenever she wanted, she could close her eyes and see stars, or a glove, or whatever she needed to see. It was a neat trick.

A band of itinerant magicians were making their way to the Spiegelpalais. Now you see it and now you don’t, they liked to say. Jugglers filled the void with brightly colored balls for a moment. For the duration of the evening, there were white lights and libations and song. Still the men were being lost, in and out of war, everywhere you turned.

THERE IS A gloom in the day no one can shake. On the horizon they see a toy tractor enlarged to life size — all green except for black tires, a farmer astride it, waving to the neighbors perhaps or to the children, or to something that is not there.

She once saw a boy painted bright white sitting on the floor playing with a toy truck. The truck was rendered in precise detail, but the boy was formless, amorphous, lost in play. Little crouching boy cast in stainless steel and painted white, mesmerized by his toy truck. Bending down to him, the child tries to see the look on his face, and she is surprised to see there that he has no face at all. All of the boy has gone into the truck, she thinks. There he is: in the grooves of the tires, the shining fender, the intricate steering wheel, rendered in the greatest of detail. He’s emptied himself there into the machine.