Red Clocks(11)

Clementine brought black rockfish as payment. Her brothers are fishermen. The mender lifts it from the cooler, plops it into a bowl, picks up the little knife. She feeds the flesh to Malky and crunches the bones in her own mouth. The eyes she throws into the woods. Malky needs protein for all the hunting he does. Gone for days and comes back thin. Fish bones shouldn’t be feared; you just have to chew them right so they won’t pierce your throat walls or stomach lining.

“Your science teacher will tell you,” said Temple, “fish bones are pure calcium and can’t be digested by the human body, but let me assure you, that’s not the whole story.” One of the things the mender loved best about her aunt was “let me assure you.” That and she cooked regular meals. Not once while living with Temple did the mender have to eat sautéed condiments for dinner. Temple became her guardian after the mender’s mother left a note saying Your better off with auntie don’t worry I will send letters! The mender was eight years old and herself not the best speller, but she noticed that the first word of the note was wrong.

Temple said the things she sold in her shop, Goody Hallett’s, were props for tourists; but if her niece happened to be interested in the true properties of alchemy, she could teach her. Magic was of two kinds: natural and artificial. Natural magic was no more than a precise knowledge of the secrets of nature. Armed with such knowledge, you could effect marvels that to the ignorant seemed miracles or illusions. A man once cured his father’s blindness with the gall bladder of a dragonet fish; the beat of a drum stretched with the skin of a wolf would shatter a drum stretched with the skin of a lamb.

The mender bottled her first tincture soon after her mother left. Per Temple’s instructions, she gathered dozens of stalks of flowering mullein, yellow and shaped cheerfully. She picked the flowers and laid them to dry on a towel. Scooped them into a glass jar with chips of garlic, filled the jar with almond oil, left the jar on the sill for a month. Then she strained the oil into six small brown bottles, which she lined up on the kitchen counter—she was already tall enough—and brought Temple to see. Her aunt stood over her, aswirl with red hair, all that long, ropy, sparkling hair, and said, “Well done!” and it was the first time in her life the mender could remember being praised for doing something instead of for not doing it. (Not talking, not crying, not complaining when her mother took six hours to come back from the store.) “Next time your ear hurts,” said Temple, “this is what you’ll use.” The promise of fixing and curing sent hot waves through the mender’s belly. Show them how Percivals do.

When she wakes, the cabin is so dark from the rain and the trees, she doesn’t know it is morning. But it is, and Malky is scratching, and the door is knocking.

She drinks a tea of horse-flavored ashwagandha. Eats brown bread. The new client wants nothing but water. Her name is Ro Stephens. Face dry and worried, hair dry and dull (feeble blood?), body thin (not perilously). She has lost people, the mender senses. A tiny smell, like a spoonful of smoke.

“I’ve been trying for a long time with Dr. Kalbfleisch at Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine.”

The mender has heard of Kalbfleisch from other clients. One described him as a NILF: Nazi I’d Like to Fuck.

“So you’ve been taking their medications.”

“A shit ton, yes.”

“How’s your cervical mucus?”

“Fine, I guess?”

“Does it resemble egg whites, near ovulation?”

“For a day or two. But my period’s not—that regular. With the medications it gets better, but still it’s not, like, clockwork.”

She is so worried. And trying to hide the worry. Her face keeps twitching out of its behaving lines, cracking with What if? What then? then smoothing, obeying again. Deep down she doesn’t believe the mender can help, no matter how much she wants to believe it. This is a person unaccustomed to being helped.

“Let’s see your tongue.”

White scum over the pink.

“You need to stop drinking milk.”

“But I don’t—”

“Cream in coffee? Cheese? Yogurt?”

Ro nods.

“Stop all of that.”

“I will.” But Ro looks like she’s thinking I didn’t come here for nutrition tips.

Eat warm and warming foods. Yams, kidney beans, black beans, bone broth. More red meat: the clock walls need building. Less dairy: the tongue is damp. More green tea: the walls are weakish still. All in the elementals, bitches. Everyone wants charms, but thirty-two years on earth have convinced the mender charms are purely for show. When the body is slow to do something, or galloping too fast toward death, people want wands waved. Broth? That’s it? The mender teaches them to boil meat bones for days. To simmer seed and stem and dried wrack, strain it, drink it. Womb tea makes a cruel stench.

She pulls down the tea jar from the north cupboard. Shakes some into a brown bag, tapes it closed, hands it to Ro. “Heat this up in a big pot of water. After it boils, turn the heat down and simmer for three hours. Drink a cup every morning and every night. You won’t like the taste.”

“What’s in it?”

“Nothing harmful. Roots and herbs. They’ll make your lining lusher and your ovaries stronger.”

“Which roots and herbs, exactly?”