Red Clocks(52)

THE MENDER


The jail washes its blankets with so much bleach she has to shove them in the opposite corner of the cell. She sleeps in her clothes, the mattress thin, she pretends it’s the forest floor. When she wakes, her chest hurts and her nostrils are full of chemicals. The walls are still gray.

She draws the outside inside her head. Sky full of water. Clouds full of mountains. Shark field full of bones. Stoves full of trees. Trees full of smoke. Smoke full of winter. Sea full of seaweed. Fishes full of fishes.

In here they bring her nuggets and colas, but no fishes.

The bitches are squirrely. They are sending letters. They want advice remotely. Give them recipes, they demand. What about the ointments for their figs? The stinky teas for their bloods? Oh, bitches. Please can the mender provide the name of a pharmacy that carries the ingredients? No, she can’t, because the pharmacy is the phorest. It is pherns, phunghi, phauna. It is hairs from dead Temple, ground up.

Mattie Matilda has not written to her. Term-house procedure gone wrong. Untrained scrapers. Dirty gear. If the girl started to hemorrhage, they would’ve been too nervous to take her to the hospital.

“Breakfast,” calls the day guard.

“Don’t want it,” says the mender, not sure if she is saying this out loud.

The guard has unlocked the cell door, stands holding a tray. “Cereal and sausage.”

“Poison.” When she eats cereal, her scabbard gets yeasty; and truly anything could be in that sausage.

“Your trial starts next week, Stretch. I’d advise you to eat.”

Can she see into next week, this guard with the sixth finger on her off hand? Can she see the mender fainting from hunger on the stand?

“Well, it’s here if you change your mind.” Clunks the tray down on the floor, and the little milk box jumps.

Squeeze the lemon. Grind dried lavender and fenugreek seeds in a mortar. Unscrew the jar of elderflower oil.

Then Lola’s husband gets ahold of the bottle. Pours in the crushed?up drug. Makes her drink it, or she drinks willingly. Washes it all down with Scotch.

Ninety months is two thousand, seven hundred thirty-nine days. All those days in a cell like this one. Her nostril walls will turn white from bleach. Hans and Pinka and the halt hen will die. Malky will forget her.

To quit shaking, she reminds herself: You are a Percival. Descended from a pirate.





25 January 1875


Dear Captain Holm, Allow me to offer my services on the upcoming voyage of Oreius from Copenhagen to the Polar North. I am a hydrologist with significant expertise in the behavior of pack ice. It would be my honor to assist in your collecting of magnetic and meteorological data.

Though a Scotsman by birth, I speak and write fluent Danish.

I am, Sir,

Your most obedient servant, HARRY M. RATTRAY





THE BIOGRAPHER


You can’t just say to a person, “Would you give me your baby, please?”

Allow me to offer my services.

Eiv?r Mínervudottír did things she wasn’t supposed to. Took plunges.

“It doesn’t work for everyone,” said Dr. Kalbfleisch at their first appointment. “And you’re well over forty.”

Woman who is thin and ugly. Cruel and ugly old woman. Witch-like woman. Mínervudottír was forty-three when she died; the biographer turns forty-three in April. Crones to the bone.

“You need to cultivate acceptance,” said the meditation teacher. “Maybe motherhood isn’t your path.”

Acceptance, thinks the biographer, is the ability to see what is. But also to see what is possible.

She puts on her running shoes. Her gloves. Dark out: she’ll keep to the lit streets. She jogs up the hill, focusing, as her track coach taught her, on the balls of the feet pressing at the asphalt, press and release, press and release. Her breath is stiff. Sweat tingles in her armpits and at the top of her butt. She’s too out of shape for running to feel good, but it feels correct, a corrective—slam the blood through every vein, unseat the sediment, flush the channels, ask the heart to do more.

She cuts over to Lupatia and back down toward the ocean. Passes Good Ship Chinese and the church. If she turned left here, she would end up, after a zigzag or two, on Mattie’s block. She stops. Leans against the trunk of a madrone, panting. On the family trip to the nation’s capital she raced her brother up the Exorcist steps and won. Archie said, “Only because you’re older.” Dad yelled, “Come the hell back down.”

Mattie, can I ask you something?

The biographer doesn’t know when the average person eats dinner, but she guesses by eight p.m. most dinners in Newville are done.

When Mama made a whole chicken, she claimed one drumstick for herself, and Dad and Archie fought for the other, and the biographer was the good child who ate breast.

Mattie, if I paid for all your checkups and vitamins, would you—

Her feet turn left.

If I drove you to all the appointments, would you—

She is not really doing this.

It can’t hurt to ask, can it?

But how would she even get the words out?

The biographer’s baby will be the good child always, even when he scribbles with permanent marker on the walls. Even when he throws his drumstick out the window into the neighbor’s yard.