Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

Nevertheless, the child would like to order little wallet-sized photos to trade with her friends, and perhaps an 8×10 or at the very least a 5×7 to send to Uncle Lars and Uncle Ingmar, and Uncle Sven and Aunt Inga, and to Uncle Anders, who had never met the child even once, and of course to the Grandmother from the North Pole.

She doubts they will see the claustrophobic jail the mother speaks of when she speaks of a photo. If the mother ever gets a friend again, the child thinks they might try to make a photo exchange. She might put the picture of the friend in the tiny window space in the wallet meant for that, and she might look at the photograph and feel happy. After that, she might look at the little school photo of the child in the next wallet window, and smile too.

AT BACK TO School Night, the mother sits in the classroom as a variety of science experiments are staged by the children. Rows of mothers sit silently and watch, applauding at the appropriate intervals.

One of the Horsey Mothers stands up and peers into the bottle where a tiny funnel has been conjured, and in the swirl of the water she remembers something she had not remembered before. On the flatlands, when she was small and her aunt was big, they would stand in the funnel’s path until the very last moment. Then her aunt, laughing wildly, would guide the child to the underground shelter.

The next time the teacher shook the bottle, the girl and her aunt were still small inside the funnel, but before the little girl knew it, they were in her uncle August’s basement where there were live minks and dead minks, and the little girl was afraid. Her aunt was laughing with her uncle August and they were drinking elixirs, as her aunt called them, out of miniature crystal glasses. If you looked closer, you could also see chinchillas in cages at Uncle August’s, and beavers, and muskrats. And along with live minks, chinchillas, beavers, and muskrats in cages and the dead minks hanging from the rafters, there were jars lined up along the walls filled with a rose-colored liquid. What the liquid was was anyone’s guess.

GLAZED SOLDIERS PASS with jars of rose liquid looking for the Burning Field, and the mother puts her hand on their shoulders, soldier after soldier after soldier, and turns them around and points them in the right direction.

FOR THREE DAYS the Fathers had labored building the mute man of wood. It was nearly the solstice, and they had finished early, and so they sat around watching the man they had made and they waited. The man stood nearly fifty hands high. It was a magnificent sight, and the Fathers felt pride. Soon the Burners would arrive; word was they had made it as far as the glen. Months before they had set out on their journey here. It was a transfiguration and a purification as well as a penance, of that she was sure.

The Burners had dreamt of the man for many months and suddenly, at last, there he was before them. All praised the fifty-hand man. How mighty, how noble, they said, and then they took out a long-stemmed match. In the moment before he was set aflame, the mute man seemed about to say something, the mother thought. At last he caught fire. He is the most beautiful Burning Man of all, someone could be heard bellowing. Praise him as he goes!

Fire illuminated the Valley, and there was nowhere one could look and not see it. Inside the fire was another fire, and inside that one, another, and so on. The Burning Man held a multitude of fires within, and all recalled their own origins, and the history of the fires they carried inside, and in not such a long time the man, once fifty hands, was reduced to ash.

Part of the Burning Man Creed was to leave no trace behind, and the Burners stayed until the Burning Man was done, and then they buried the ashes. After the ashes were buried, the Cooling Man Committee arrived to calculate the Burning Man’s contribution to Global Warming, and they exacted their fee. Meanwhile the Burners waited for a clue as to where the Fathers might build the next mute man of wood and straw. Ash graves mottled the Valley, and the Fathers and the Burners alike lay down side by side and waited for a sign. The mother stepped over the prostrate men who appeared to be asleep.

Earlier that day, the mother and child had gone in search of the lost spring, the place where they would burn the next man, something the mother and child knew in advance, because Wise Jean had seen it in a dream. Liquid water graces our planet. The place was named “the reed shelter protecting the little water-place spring,” or Poughkeepsie, by its Indians long ago. There, a clear water spring had been issuing up longer than recorded history. The child took the mother’s hand.

Some time from now after the Burners have vanished, leaving without a trace, the mother will envision the last of the Burning Men, and she will carry that silhouette behind her eyes a very long time. How beautiful you are, Burning Man, the mother will whisper. The child knew there was nothing she could do — a part of the mother had already left to meet him, had always been walking to him, the last Burning Man at the end of the world. And the fire.

OTHER EFFIGIES APPEARED along the route. Four men in bird suits called Operation Migration had arrived at the Spiegelpalais. The four birdmen brought four gliders equipped with four silent propellers. It’s so nice to see you fellows again, the people of the Valley said. The four men nodded, and smiled through their beaks, but they did not speak.

The men, dressed as birds, were to teach the Whooping Crane babies first how to eat and then how to fly, and eventually how to migrate. Operation Rescue promised all the basics because there were not enough actual adult Whooping Cranes to perform these tasks anymore. The four men in bird suits with the four gliders would be their substitutes. Day after day they wore the bird suits and silently slipped a crane-head puppet on so as to teach the chicks how to peck and forage.

Because there were no adult birds to sing lullabies to the Whooping Crane eggs, the eggs were played recordings of the glider-propeller song, and when they were old enough to migrate, they would follow that sound, with the four silent, suited men that had taught them how to eat and fly leading the way.

There’s no hope for the Whooping Crane in the long term, the birdmen say later, lifting their bird masks after their mission is accomplished. There are just no Whooping Crane habitats left to live in anymore.

Still. .

In the off-season, Operation Migration has been sighted on a faraway river, where they ferry salmon on barges past a dam’s hydroelectric turbines so that the salmon can spawn. Though the salmon suits are not required, Operation Migration likes to wear them anyway.

ONCE A YEAR, on the night of the Autumnal Equinox, the mother gets out the Glove and places it on the Etiquette Bed. Along with the Glove, there is a dome, a snow globe that says Paris, and a gold locket shaped like a heart. All are assembled for the child to see. It is a night unlike any other night, a night without fear or reproach: the anniversary of the night the child was conceived.

On this night, everything is perfect in the world. The hours are equally divided between night and day, dark and light, and most remarkably, that is the kind of child she has become: perfectly balanced, astrologically prefigured. The child feels dizzy and weak in the presence of these things. The heart stops, but then begins to spin again. Everything at this moment is at the mercy of the mother, and the collection of objects, and the night.

IN THE NIGHT, the mother could hear the beautiful night music passing through the left ventricle. After a while, in an attempt to rest, she would put on the television and watch the screen’s deep blues which she found beautiful too.