The Mothering Coven Read online

  the MOTHERING COVEN

  ©2009 JOANNA RUOCCO

  ISBN 10: 0-9637536-2-2

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9637536-2-5

  COYER DESIGN BY SARAH MCDERMOTT AND JOE POTTS BOOK DESIGN BY JOE POTTS

  ELLIPSIS PRESS

  www.ellipsispress.com

  JACKSON HEIGHTS, NEW YORK

  the MOTHERING COVEN

  Joanna Ruocco

  …

  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER AND FOR NICO

  X

  Leaves used to pile on one side of the house, and now they pile on the other. The wind has changed direction. And who is subscribing to all these magazines?

  Agnes closes the kitchen window. She checks the herring. No bubbles.

  “The oven isn’t even on,” says Agnes.

  “It must be a Bismarck,” says Mrs. Borage. “You never cook a Bismarck.”

  Mrs. Borage has a logical mind. She sits in her rocking chair, snipping pictures from The Helsinki Winki. The pictures are better than the articles. Mrs. Borage wonders if it is the Finnish language that she finds objectionable.

  “Or else I don’t have the patience for very long words anymore,” thinks Mrs. Borage. Mrs. Borage stands up.

  “I caught a herring once,” announces Mrs. Borage, “in Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.” Mrs. Borage sits down.

  “That felt wonderful,” says Mrs. Borage. It’s settled then; she objects to the Finnish language.

  Mrs. Borage picks up her scissors. She is snipping pictures of the Finnish National Hockey Team. Mrs. Borage does not object to Finnish hockey players. Mrs. Borage is about to turn one hundred, but she can still appreciate a Schatzilein.

  [:]

  Agnes folds the laundry—Bertrand’s crimson gambeson—she’s washed it again. Laces, broken. Stuffing coming out. Is that mildew? Agnes looks closer. Death caps have sprouted along the quilting. Pale green diamonds on a crimson field. The sickly yellow fringe, that’s honey tuft, and the leather collar, trompette des morts. Agnes heaves the gambeson back into the dryer drum.

  “The tenth, or tithe, is often given to the Imperium,” says Agnes, to no one in particular.

  “But we weren’t ten,” says Bryce.

  “Agnes, Bertrand, Bryce, Fiona, Dorcas, Hildegard, and Ozark,” says Dorcas. “Mrs. Borage, eight.”

  Besides, is Europe still the Imperium? There are so many abandoned castles, so many unemployed knights, entire orders in desuetude. The Esoteric Order of Night-Blooming Phlox. The Order of Brücken. The Noble Order of Girdle. The Order of Pussy Willow. The Order of Radish.

  [:]

  What is missing from the Bismarck? Not the chemical transformation brought about by heat, certainly not. Then what? Agnes puts her fingertips to her temples.

  “Bertrand’s herbs!” thinks Agnes. She inspects the spice rack, the little, dim jars. She unscrews a lid.

  “Parsley?” asks Agnes. “Or Paris green?”

  “Does it make a difference?” asks Fiona.

  “Paris,” sighs Mrs. Borage. “I received a standing ovation in Paris, decades ago, at the Burgtheater. Tell me, dear, did Bertrand leave the tin of caramel corn?” Agnes takes the tins down from the cupboard. She wipes the labels.

  “Calf’s mugget,” reads Agnes. “Splat-mutton. Hare lights. Creamed kid with laurel.”

  “No corn,” says Mrs. Borage. “Pity.”

  “There is stubble goose,” says Agnes.

  “Geese in the theater,” gasps Mrs. Borage. She remembers sheep, of course, in comic opera. Arias sung on horseback.

  “And Grimaldi’s rabbit,” says Mrs. Borage. “That rabbit had an enviable command on stage. The way she grazed the green-baize carpet.” Mrs. Borage remembers dying beneath the darkened arch, her bloodied skirts in disarray upon the drugget. Mrs. Borage stands up. She shakes her fist.

  “Fie!” says Mrs. Borage. “Fie!” She drops back down into the rocker. Mrs. Borage remembers expiring to thunderous applause. She remembers the dagger smoking in her breast, roses falling from the balconies. The noblesse d’épée—they were leaping to their feet. They were stamping their heels. They banged their sword hilts on the balustrades! They could not whistle; their mouths were filled with caramel corn.

  “They never whistled,” says Mrs. Borage. “Whistling has rare incidence in bourgeois theater. They have no use for it, or for any metaphysical language that subverts meaning.”

  [:]

  Bryce has taped Bertrand’s postcards to the refrigerator door, to the microwave door, to the television screen. Now she is coating them with polyurethane. She adds a bit of moss to Lake Nero, to simulate an algal bloom. Over here—silica flakes! They give a badly needed glimmer to the deserts of Poland.

  Bryce imagines Bertrand in the deserts of Poland. Will Bertrand see the white and gold Polish eagle? Will she see Queen Wanda the Drowned?

  The moss absorbs a good deal of polyurethane. Bryce has a terrible headache. Headaches are always the danger with the plastic arts.

  [:]

  The telephone on the mantel is tiled with mirrors, sunflower seeds, golden nuggets of bee pollen, and, of course, the delicate skins of glue Bryce peels from her fingers, nine whorls and a pollex loop, repeating. Agnes has a sudden urge to pick it up.

  “Hello?” says Agnes.

  “ZZZZZZZZZ!” says a collective voice. Agnes hangs up, puzzled.

  “A dial tone?” asks Agnes. As far as Agnes knows, the phone has never been connected.

  [:]

  Where is everyone? The house seems larger. Was there always a ceiling medallion in the dining room? Were there always wall sconces? Crown molding? Agnes is reminded of something.

  “The Grand Hotel of Concentrated Virtue!” cries Agnes. But can it still be in business? Surely not. Not when even houses have vacancies.

  X

  Mrs. Borage is in the yard, raking leaves into enormous piles. The wind keeps carrying the leaves away. They fly back and forth past the dining-room window.

  “Should we help her?” asks Bryce.

  “Her movements are so regular,” says Fiona. “It must be a form of raking meditation.”

  Now Mrs. Borage is carrying rocks from the garden, rocks and cabbage heads and dried pumpkin vines and red lettuce hearts, big armfuls.

  “She’s weighing down the piles,” says Dorcas. “That’s very clever.”

  Mrs. Borage goes back and forth, back and forth, from the piles to the garden.

  “It looks fun,” says Ozark. Bryce is putting on her green mackintosh. She’s been meaning to make leaf lapel pins for quite a while now, and maybe a catkin sash.

  “I’ll get the wheelbarrow,” cries Dorcas. Fiona blocks the doorway. We look at her.

  “No sudden moves,” says Fiona. “We can’t interfere with the Theta-brain.”

  “The Theta-brain,” says Dorcas. “Of course.” We cluster again at the dining-room window. We try to peer less obtrusively. This involves curtains.

  “Achoo,” sneezes Ozark. Fiona glares. We glare. We peer between the curtains.

  If Mrs. Borage is jolted from her trance too soon, she could be trapped: her soul on a shamanic journey, her body piling cabbage heads on oak leaves, back and forth, back and forth, for all of time.

  [:]

  Suddenly, Mrs. Borage stops, her arms filled with bottle gourds. She realizes that she has built eight cairns on the front lawn. They give the property a somber aspect. This is not at all what she intended.

  “Fiddlesticks,” curses Mrs. Borage. Mr. Henderson comes out of the Colonial next door, covered in clay. He is a potter and very fond of Mrs. Borage.

  “Hello, Mrs. Borage,” says Mr. Henderson. He regards the compost heaps, towers of harvest vegetables, rotting. He has a feeling tha
t death is near.

  Mr. Henderson thinks about death a great deal, alone in his garage, spinning and spinning his bowls until they’re so thin he can see his hands through the walls, like the bowls are made of glass. He pulls the walls up, higher and higher, narrow shafts that hold for an instant, tall and translucent—glass reeds, glass flutes—before collapsing again, into mud.

  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.

  X

  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!”

  X

  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 narrowi
ng 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.

  [:]

  Agnes does not study Przewalskis.

  “Did Ms. Kidney mean trilobites?” wonders Agnes. In any case, it is impolite to correct a guest.

  Like most paleozoologists, Agnes supports the Crick Theory of Panspermia. Life arrived on Earth as spores blown from a distant star system. It is a very dull business, paleozoology—tracing this flat worm to Alpha Centuri, this sea sponge to Cygnus.

  Agnes devotes herself primarily to witchcraft.

  [:]

  Ms. Kidney is so vigorous! Already she has collapsed Dorcas’s card barbican and two legs of the card table. Bryce’s barkentine has also sustained damages. The bottle is intact, but the spanker mast has snapped.

  “How did she do that?” wonders Dorcas. She looks at Ms. Kidney moving vigorously about the parlor. She wonders if Ms. Kidney has a Theta-brain.

  Dorcas tries to picture Ms. Kidney engrossed in the harvest: Ms. Kidney moving slowly and rhythmically through the trees, dropping a thousand round oranges, one by one, into the Indian River.

  Dorcas pictures the oranges bobbing all the way to the harbor where the International Association of Lepidopterists has merged at last with the International Association of Longshoremen, netting and crating oranges, loading them onto ships. One crate. Two crates. Tall cranes. Blue sky. High spanker masts. Warm air, oddly still.

  “Dorcas, how beautiful!” cries Bryce. Dorcas looks down at her hands. Her hands have been scouring the rinds of oranges.

  Dorcas watches from the other end of a Theta wave—hands peeling bright wings of orange rinds, mounting them on the bare branches of the hat stand. The cockatoos have fallen silent, watching.

  [:]

  Bryce claps her hand over her mouth. Why can’t she keep her peace, like a cockatoo?

  “Because beauty crowds me,” thinks Bryce, woefully. What if her impulsive cry has trapped Dorcas’s soul forever among the starry branches of the hat stand?