Joanna Ruocco: The Mothering Coven

The smell of wood smoke is in the air. Of course, Mr. Henderson sees the faces of the dead in the wrinkles of the cabbage heads. We all do.

“I don’t,” says Mrs. Borage, stubbornly. She still sees with her Theta-brain, which gives her a distant perspective, as though she is flying above the surface of the Earth. Mrs. Borage sees topological formations, for example, the shallows of Lake Chargog-gagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

There is Mrs. Borage, far below, casting for herring, casting into a cold wind, wearing squirrel fur. The hook lands behind her in the fanwort.

Mrs. Borage shivers.

The ground is whitening between the cairns. Deep within the non-Euclidian curvature of the lettuce hearts, tiny ice crystals are forming.

Mr. Henderson is a large, shy man who knows nothing about Euclid. He knows that he would like to mold a piece of clay into a lettuce heart and give it to Mrs. Borage. He’s so excited to get started he almost runs back to his house without saying goodbye, but he remembers just in time.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Borage,” says Mr. Henderson, shyly, but Mrs. Borage is still gazing into a lettuce heart.

“Does this look like the physical universe?” asks Mrs. Borage. Mr. Henderson takes the lettuce heart. He had always thought the physical universe had no shape at all, just a multi-directional nothingness with deep space objects floating around at varying speeds. He realizes that he has been ridiculous. All these dark folded places, opening everywhere at once — of course, that’s what the physical universe looks like.

Mr. Henderson can’t make a lettuce heart now. It’s far too daunting. He leaves Mrs. Borage to her compost heaps and goes inside his drafty Colonial. He makes tomato soup on the utility stove. He drinks tomato soup, alone in the dark, big house. His eyes hold no expression. They are big and blank like the eyes of the blue-back herring, like the eyes of Abraham Lincoln, like the holes in a glass flute, shattering.

In the middle of the night, Mrs. Borage tiptoes out the front door. The yard is dark. The cairns seem even taller and more somber in the darkness. Mrs. Borage lifts her whale-oil lantern. Leaves race past in the wind, and the lantern swings back and forth, throwing shadows.

Mrs. Borage looks at the wrinkled cabbage heads. There are the little children, stacked against the city walls. There is Henrica, who perished on the Deutschland.

Mrs. Borage supposes many Henricas are walking even now in the streets of Salzkotten, between the salt-water fountains. She supposes there are many children in Salzkotten, sitting on the ruined marble of the fountains, dried salt on their fingers, eating derfbrot. Nonetheless, it feels to Mrs. Borage that tonight the world is a place for ghosts.

“Even in the United States of America?” asks Mrs. Borage.

[:]

When Mrs. Borage wakes up in the morning, she moves swiftly to the bedroom window. She is not surprised to see that the world has been covered with salt. The cairns are white with salt, and the rows of broken stalks in the garden, and the trees and Mr. Henderson’s rooftop, and the street is also long and white. Mrs. Borage pokes her head into the hallway, but there is no salt on the carpet.

“They didn’t enter,” muses Mrs. Borage. “I wonder why?”

[:]

Could it be that the ghosts are still under the spell of rationalism? Are they processing, single-file, down the highways of America? Are they upholding the myth of architecture? Are they stopping at every wall? Mrs. Borage imagines the spirit-knights of the Imperium at the head of the column, rigid on their chargers, reining to the left, to the right, around the library, the courthouse, the firehouse, steady hoofbeats on the paving stones.

“Order is an illusion,” says Mrs. Borage.

Where is The Immanent Swarm of Night-Blooming Phlox? The Swarm of Brücken? The Dynamic Swarm of Girdle? The Swarm of Pussy Willow? The Swarm of Radish?

[:]

Ozark watches the snow through the dining-room window. She feels her heart sink. Ozark is trying to make an inventory of the episteme. She had not considered snow. How much of the episteme is snow?

Ozark wonders if she shouldn’t be doing something else. She looks through her notes: mercer, girdler, dyer, draper, huer, horner, fletcher, cordwainer, tapicer. She is heartened by how many professions she has already recorded. Maybe her inventory isn’t hopeless after all.

“I will give it just a little bit longer,” thinks Ozark.

[:]

Outside, the ghosts have passed us by, leaving a strange quiet in the world. Mr. Henderson has gone out onto his porch to share his muesli with the birds. He thinks he sees armored men gliding along the sidewalk.

“Hugues de Payens,” says Mr. Henderson. He looks behind him. Was that him who just said Hugues de Payens? Who is Hugues de Payens?

“I meant to say, ‘hockey players,’” says Mr. Henderson. The birds are slipping off the trees, all the tiny branches outlined with ice.

[:]

In the parlor, Fiona brings the tank down from the high shelf. She hits the side with a black piano sharp and the clownfish swim out of the castle into the moat-sphere, snapping their jaws. We hear the sharp tapping of the piano key on glass and the xylophone sounds of bones knocking underwater.

Mrs. Borage comes running down the stairs, blowing gaily on the pitch pipe. She wears a lace jabot, frothing white, with a black jacket. Her wig powder gets all over the jacket but who would notice? It is more edifying to observe the perfect circularity of her adhesive beauty spot and the symmetrical peaks of her crimson lip line.

Bryce turns the keys in the stuffed cockatoos on the hat stand. The tiny boxes in their chests play Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja, and we dance for the ghosts until Agnes, in the quiet light of the open window in the corner, cries, “Ms. Kidney!”

Ms. Kidney can’t maneuver her long sled between the cairns. She leaves it on the sidewalk. She trudges into the house in her parka and her great swamp boots. Only Ms. Kidney could get away with drinking Honey Bishops from the ladle! She stands by the pot, drinking and laughing. She throws her parka on the rug and her frozen purple overalls start to steam.

“Where’s the gandy stiff, you old blister,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Where’s my Scrumpilgardis?” Mrs. Borage steps forward.

“Dear Ms. Kidney,” she says, and bows deeply. “How is Axel Heiberg? How is the Bay of Baffin?”

“Better than ever,” yells Ms. Kidney. Her lungs are big with the warm air and her leather bag is filled with gifts: whale oil, arctic-willow twigs, cranberry mead — eight bottles, and a tremendous silver herring for Mrs. Borage.

Ms. Kidney has crossed the frozen seas early this year, on the long trip south for the winter, to harvest oranges on the Indian River.

“I’ll have to take the bus from here,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Will you mind my dogs?”

We always mind the dogs for Ms. Kidney.

“Oatmush and a scoop of krill, twice a day,” yells Ms. Kidney.

“Soak the krill,” adds Ms. Kidney. “Make a kind of krill paste.”

“My dogs are older than the first horse, the toothless devils,” she sighs. “But we’re all Przewalskis, eh, Agnes?”

Przewalskis? Bryce starts. We’re not that old.

“Dog years accelerate the matter,” says Mrs. Borage, diplomatically.

“Indeed,” says Ms. Kidney, soberly. Did Ms. Kidney feel it as well, the cold wind of the ghost procession as it passed?

“And Bertrand?” asks Ms. Kidney.

“Shhhh,” says Bryce and we all expel a little breath. Shhhhhh.

“Ah,” says Ms. Kidney, who lives alone at the tip of the narrowing North and has lost everyone, her three sisters beneath the green ice, marked by their upright sleds, for as long as we’ve known her.