Red Clocks(40)

On Parent Conference Day the teacher said, “But where’s your mother?” and the mender said, “She took a ship.”

But really she left in a taxi, paid for with cash stolen from the till at Goody Hallett’s. And the mender, eight years old, waited by the hour. The day. The winter. Then Temple drove them to Salem and got legal guardianship.

Eight winters ago she found Temple’s body flopped at the base of a silver fir, and will never be sure of the reason. Heart attack? Stroke? Out to gather miner’s lettuce, her aunt had been gone so long the mender started to worry. Went looking. There she was. Her skin was bluish, but otherwise she seemed asleep.

Goody Hallett’s was closed by then, because not enough tourists were buying candles and tarot packs. Temple had sold the building. They had moved from the apartment above the shop to a cabin in the forest, and Temple had told the mender, who since leaving high school had kept to herself in the library and on the cliffs: “Time for you to get to work.”

The mender did not want anyone taking the body away. She couldn’t give her aunt to a funeral home to be gutted and waxed; and the ground was hard; and Temple had never liked fire. So the mender clipped off her nails and her hair and her lashes, shaved the skin from each fingertip, and put her body in the chest freezer, under salmon and ice.

Last winter the mender turned thirty-two: two times sixteen (the age of the girl come February) and half of sixty-four. Sixty-four is the number of demons in the Dictionnaire Infernal. Of squares on a chessboard. Sixty-four is the square of eight, which is the number of regeneration and resurrection: beginning again, again.

How can she sleep when she keeps seeing the girl’s face?

She used to go months, years, not thinking about it. Then something (the smell of cherries, the word “soon”) would remind her. Then she would forget again, let the little fish slip away. But after seeing that face outside the library, she couldn’t stop thinking. Wondering if she really was. Are you?

She is.

“Malky, come here.”

She cuts a piece from Cotter’s loaf, offers the first bite to the cat. She presses a drop of black spruce oil to the corner of the ball of her right foot.

And sleeps.

The wood is knocking, Malky’s hissing, and every chicken in the family is squawking its throat off. She stands, stuporish. Clears her throat. Farts.

Her door is knocking. Malky goes from hiss to howl.

“Quiet, mo,” toeing him away from the threshold.

Men in blue uniforms. A black haired, a blond.

“What,” she says.

The black haired says, “I’m Officer Withers and this is Officer Smith. Are you Gin Percival?”

Did they see her watching? Will she be accused of stalking? Did the girl, on meeting her, remember seeing her in the trees by the school and tell her parents?

She only wanted to look at her face. Hear her voice. See how she turned out.

“Gin Percival,” says the black haired, “I’m placing you under arrest for medical malpractice.”

The mender gapes.

“Does she not speak English?” says the blond.

The black haired clears his throat. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

She waits on a bench near the desk of the blond policeman. They have given her a package of elf crackers, water in a wax cup.

Who will pour grain for Pinka and Hans? Carry the halt hen to shelter? Set out fish for Malky? And what if they open—

“I want to call someone,” says the mender.

“You already had your call,” says the blond policeman.

“No, I didn’t.”

He yells over his shoulder, “Jack, did this one get a phone call?”

“I have no idea,” someone the mender can’t see yells back.

“Go ahead, I guess,” says the blond.

She stands at the desk with her fingers on the plastic receiver.

“Go ahead, ma’am.”

She hasn’t used a phone since Temple was alive.

“I forgot the number,” she says.

How many salmons has she thawed recently? How many are still in the freezer? How many bags of ice?

“All your contacts are on your cell, am I right?” says the policeman. “Common predicament.”

“I need the number for the P.O.”

“The one in Newville?”

She smiles, because a nod would shake the tears out of her eyes and down her face.





The ice that would chase me is called by the Inupiat ivu and by the Europeans “ice shove,” and it never gives warning. It gallops to shore from the outer sea, a heave of water caught and stropped into an iron tidal wave. But I would be faster than ivu. I would change into a snow deer and outrun it.





THE WIFE


Walks the children down Lupatia Street, killing time. The wind is fast and blue and sharp with late November.

In front of Cone Wolf, she thinks of Bryan’s dimple.

Bryan’s thighs.

The way he looked at her.

“Morning, Susan!” says the passing librarian.