Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

Awhile back, Jean Audubon, having captured a Golden Eagle, tried to smoke it to death by setting a coal fire under it and putting it in a closet and covering it with a blanket, but four hours later when he checked, what he saw was an eagle glaring back at him, bonjour! The next day, he added sulfur to the rekindled fire, and still after many more hours, a glaring, living bird greeted him. Finally he had to resort to five stilettos through the heart, all the while being careful not to ruffle too many feathers.

Don’t forget that Audubon was French, and to look at a bird that hard, and to draw and paint it feather by feather by feather, was to remove five stilettos from its heart and bring it back to life five times over, the mother thought. If you are Audubon, the moral is that try as you may, you cannot kill a Golden Eagle. It is still there; it is always there, radiant and waiting when the mother and child open the book.

Imagine then that astounding red bouquet brought to the door by the artist’s aging feline, Birdy Boy. Incredulous, the artist’s assistant snatched it from the jaws of the cat before it became red pieces of bird. Still warm, it seemed to beat like a heart. What an astounding gift — that shock of red — the first thing the artist saw, upon waking that morning. Who can believe — it is not a dream — it is in the artist’s hand, this small, perfect, astounding red corpse.

The law, as you might imagine, prohibits the stuffing of songbirds in the Valley for any reason. It is quite simply against the law to bring a dead songbird into a taxidermist in the Valley to have it stuffed. If you happened to come upon a dead songbird, you will need to send it to another place altogether if you would like to have it stuffed. Before the artist went blind, she wrapped it carefully in white paper and placed it in a shoebox and sent it to Texas: that riot of red feathers and perfect cardinal beak and head. What a work of art it shall be, the artist cried with glee as she danced in her circular room and prepared herself to go to the Cabaret Rouge that evening at the Spiegelpalais.

Music

The casket holding the harp was lowered slowly now into the silence. It had been laid out on a smooth, white satin pillow, and the people in the Valley shuffled past it and mourned the end of music.

Precisely a week after they watched the harp — all that was left of the man, lowered into the earth in a box — the small, sad entourage traipsed across the field to witness the unveiling of the new fire truck. It was noon and twelve bells sounded, and the chicken was cooked on the grill, and the living went about the things the living do. Wise Jean pointed to the new fire engine that lay covered under a black tarp — a large and jarring shape on the landscape — and the mother balanced a small flame quietly and waited.

At last something was said over the loudspeaker, the people drew close, and the great shroud was lifted with a drum roll. There it was before them: red, shiny, bright, several stories high. Everyone gasped. It was a wondrous sight: its tires the size of a human child; its body impervious and strong. For a long time no one moved. Then all of a sudden, the children ran to embrace it as best they could. They rubbed their hands along its smooth, gleaming surfaces. The chief rang the bell, and the truck, although stationary, seemed already in motion. How much we miss you, she thought she heard someone call out to the new fire truck. And the women wept. How strong you are, and how brave! The truck, she understood, was an obvious stand-in for the man.

Something inside the mother was burning. Today there was no way around it. She wondered if you dug a hole to the perfect center of the earth whether it would be possible to float.

Fire

The ladder is lowered and the children climb up one by one by one. They lift in unison the heavy yellow fire hose and point it as best they can at the towers in the distance, which are on fire.

THE CHILD’S LAMB, her most precious possession, had disappeared. It had been sitting on a small desk atop a high pile of books the last time anyone had seen it, its arms, as always, extended.

The mother remembers thinking the day before that because the little lamb had been loved so hard over so many years, it had grown lighter, as light almost as a feather, and hollow. Its little teal blue T-shirt. Through love, its interior had been assumed into the body of the child, and only the exterior shell remained. The mother’s fear was that now the child could float off too. In the night, the mother made a second tether, this one out of satin ribbon, to keep the child here awhile longer. She thought of all the things that could no longer be held by the earth, utterly exempt from its charms, things with reluctance the earth gave up, or the sky attracted.

The child was always trying to understand the science of things. The rational explanations for what seemed extraordinary, outlandish occurrences. She thought there must be some sort of magnet in the sky, and that the earth’s pull loosened once a day and allowed certain things to lift entirely off the planet. There was a vulnerable second in every day, a wobble, a warp through which things escaped. Otherwise, the disappearance of the lamb was intolerable to both the mother and the child. The mother could not see living in such an inexplicable place. The child wished the sky might have assumed the Toothless Wonder instead. Why Lamby?

Soon it would be the fifteenth of August again, and the Virgin would be assumed into Heaven. The Virgin looked beautiful every single time her body was assumed, but Lamby went up without even a single sighting, into thin air, as they say. Poof! Just like that.

She would like to inquire about the magnet in the sky. If the soul is flat and metallic and spins like a disc, then what does that mean for it? She wonders if rain strengthens or weakens the attraction between two poles. The day Lamby disappeared, it never stopped raining.

The mother wonders what makes the child stay on the Ferris wheel and not fly up. Sometimes children too must be assumed, the mother thinks. When the mothers sitting in the park close their eyes for a nanosecond, that is when the slippage occurs. Lost forever in the blink of an eye. She wonders what makes a girl stay fastened to the earth. What makes some girls stay fastened to the earth, and not others. What happens when some children go up that way, never to be seen again? All that remains is the vacated space and the mothers who did not keep their eyes open.

The mother decides it must be one of the Luminous Mysteries. What brought Lamby to them, why the child loved it above all others, and why it had to disappear like that. There was no other way for her to think about it.

WHEN THE CHILD thinks about all the things that get lost or forgotten, she thinks that someday there will be no one alive who will remember Lamby, or the Grandmother from the North Pole. This, more than the mother’s death or even her own, pains the child.

THE VERY NEXT Sunday, the magnet assumed the baguette that the mother and child had gotten at the bakery for the Sunday breakfast. It had been lying atop The Poetics of Space, a book the mother was reading. The Law of Funnels suggests that not the lamb nor the missing children nor the baguette is coming back.

IF THE MOTHER and the child flew high above the world in an airplane of some sort, they would see below them a field of wool. The clouds are like that. They bring back to people the things they most deeply love. Slowly it would seem from that height that they were traversing the entire body of the lamb.