GHOSTS GATHERED IN the early hours while the mother and the child stretched a mesh between two poles at the pond. They had come, as they did many mornings, to extract water from fog. Though they were far from the sea, the mother heard the doleful sound of a lighthouse and felt the eerie piercing glow coming from it. After the net was secured, the mother and child sat in the grass.
If the child were a monkey, she might take the mesh to the tallest trees and install it there. If the child were a monkey, there would be cymbals and a little hat and an organ grinder. Many people do not realize that a little organ grinder monkey, not the chimp or the ape, is the next smartest mammal after man.
After a while, the pond slowly came into clarity, and the sun came up. It is strange the way one state is always bleeding into another.
Frogs are a sentinel species. The skin of a frog is permeable. Recently, frogs have been growing longer legs or extra legs. Boys catch these frogs in boxes and bring them to science class.
Frogs can be said to have beautiful voices, especially at mating season, but one part per billion of weed-killer in the water shrinks the voice box of the male frog, and they cannot sing their song so well. The earth was turning from one kind of place into another. This frightens the mother who knows all things must change.
She looked at the monkey, now a child again.
All the frogs in the world were singing their crooked songs in the fog. The child did not think the songs crooked, she thought the frog songs lovely. They were the only frog songs she had ever known.
THE MOTHER DIRECTS the child to the eyepiece of the microscope. Ordinarily, if you cut open a bee, its insides viewed under a microscope appear white, the mother said. But these bees were black with scar tissue and disease. Everything you can think of is wrong with them, including new pathogens never before sequenced. The mother knows well that there is a trigger that takes an otherwise borderline population and throws it over the edge.
The mother opens the Report on the Status of Pollinators. It is said that pollinator decline is one form of global change that has the potential to alter the shape and structure of the terrestrial world. They were a people at risk. The disappearance of the adult bee population presaged the human disappearance.
A drift of soldiers came up and over the hill, babbled into their radios, and then vanished.
The tortoise, untroubled, looks up and slowly says, the disappearances have happened before, and will happen again. The truths of the universe are so profoundly concealed. The mother and child hung on to his every word. You’ve no need to worry. And with that, its great liquid eye shut.
EXILED FROM CHILDHOOD, but in the constant presence of it, the mother felt covetous of the child sometimes because the child still had childhood, and to the mother, childhood was no longer accessible.
Even the mother’s mother, the Grandmother from the North Pole, was not young anymore. The light was bright late into the night in summer at the North Pole. When the North Pole Grandmother came with a platter of fish preserved in vodka and lingonberries, the fish had a face on it and the children ran and hid. The candles were lit then and there was juniper and holly.
The child was busy in the corner making a sculpture of a rabbit out of a carrot. Next she was sculpting a boat. On the table sat the Red Book of Existence. Even the child will one day die. It takes three cups of salt to cure a fish. The mother tries to remember being small, not as an adult remembers, but as a child, though it is hard. She would like to fit inside a thimble, and someday she probably will.
There is a casket the size of a walnut shell that waits in the garden. There is a husk. There is always the sorrow of the last morsel of fish to consider. Many of the children are still hiding in the garden. When she was little, she remembers going into the sewing box and taking out her favorite thing: a pincushion encircled by Chinamen. When she was small, she remembers the bright thimble and the way it looked like a castle on her thumb. The Grandmother from the North Pole was there then in the next room where she could hear her preparing the fish.
Lingonberries are something else she remembers. While the mother reaches to remember, the child wishes she had a picture phone so that while she talked to the Grandmother from the North Pole she could see her face and watch her white hair blowing in the wind.
The lifespan of a North Pole Grandmother is eighty-three, the child reads.
THE MOTHER HAD no use for computers and could not accompany the child as she entered the world of ciphers and shadows and glyphs, but the Grandmother from the North Pole, who loved nothing more than the future, gladly went wherever the child took her and was always happy to be able to learn something beautiful and new. The child put her grandmother’s hand on the cursor, and enigmatic, translucent fields were revealed.
It was marvelous, she thought, floating in the digital universe. At these times, above all, the Grandmother from the North Pole thought it was wonderful to be alive.
A blue multitude of children huddle around her. They’ve just come in from the blueberry patch. See them now as they dose off with their full buckets: Lars, Bibi, Ingmar, Anders, Sven. Baby Inga must be at home, or maybe she is not born yet.
Before the screen’s deep glow, the Grandmother said, I should like to write the Book of Wonder before I die, and her eyes sparkled.
IT WAS A privilege to live so near the river, that is what the mother always said. Silt passed through them some mornings and the mists worked themselves into the ways they thought about things. The child found fish in her pockets and river rocks in her pockets, and the sense of weight and immensity filled them, and many days they walked immersed in water and water-song.
There was swell and verge in the world. In spring, the banks surged. In the winter when the river froze, the mother and child read about how once cakes of ice were cut from it and stored in small icehouses. The river fed their notions of spaciousness and hope. They imagined carrying great cakes of ice in the shapes of hearts to the neighbors.
They would put the cakes on a baby’s feverish head. Or preserve a fish for the Christmas Eve dinner.
The child was thankful that the mother treated the river like a god. Some Sundays, they would spend the whole day lazing on its banks. They found fossils and slate and shale, and trains went by, and people from the city could be seen blinking in the windows. Then all was quiet again, and the train, sleek and fleeting, was gone. The child grew sleepy. The river made everything in the Valley radiant, even at night.
At night, the mother said, the river crept into their beds, and they could wade out until it was over their heads, and at that very place in the river there would be a birch canoe waiting to meet them. The child loved this part most of all, floating in the boat, and waving to the people on the other side who waited. She thought she could even see a girl about her age.
Before the mother and child arrived, the Indians had already lived here for thousands of years.
THE MOTHER WOKE the child before dawn and told her that she was to quickly dress because they would be going with the elders today on a bird-watching expedition. The child liked the sound of it: a bird-watching expedition. The mother loved bird-watching because it fostered the things she valued most: attentiveness, patience, care. What should have been a white stripe on the head of the smallest bird in the deepest wood, if one looked carefully and was very quiet and did not move, was actually orange because of the abundance of berries in the bird’s diet at this time of year. So much, the mother thought, depends on this. This watchfulness. The mother liked standing there in the dew in the sweet fleeting early hours of the day. What could be held could be held only for an instant—all the rest was held in the mind. A sighting, then a flitting away. And then the linger. That dream. It was a beautiful, prolonged instant, this being prepared, ready to let whatever flew into the field of vision be caressed by the eye.
When the child awoke that morning, the mother had handed her a bird atlas in which to make notes and record the names of the birds she saw. Standing in the meadow, suddenly and with great force the child was overwhelmed by the desire to fill the entire bird atlas. She was taken aback by the feeling—she had no idea where it had come from. She tried to quell it, for otherwise she would have to run around and shout with glee, which might scare away the elders and the birds.
Mostly they were very quiet, but sometimes the elders made sounds—phisshhhhhhh and phoshhhhhhh—and this seemed to call the birds to their sides. The child liked the sound, and she thought she would try it at home when their cat Bunny Boy was in the house.
There! Over there! a woman said in a hush—a momentary silhouette on a dark branch—there! It was the Ovenbird. You could tell by its song, teacher, teacher, teacher, it said.
Where? Where?
So little so drab so gray—or green, impossible to see.
Later when they were out of the forest, she would hear about the enclosed nest that the little bird would build. I should like to see the covered nest of the Ovenbird, the child said. Someone else spoke of the courtship rituals of the Woodcock.
In a great and mysterious turn, one of the elders took the child’s head and pointed it upward and to the left. The mother gasped, remembering how round and perfect the child’s head had been when she was born. It had seemed to her like a planet. One of the elders spoke of the Sphinx Moth. It was very quiet, and when someone spoke, it was always in a whisper, and what was said sounded like a secret. Another bird flew by. There! someone said. But she could not rescue the bird from the distance.
One of the elders, a woman without binoculars who led the way for a while, had fallen behind.
I can’t see a thing anymore, she whispered to the child, but I like to come nevertheless.
She took the child’s hand so as not to stumble, and they walked a little further, into a place of improbable darkness. The woman who could not see anymore phished and phoshed. Her eyes were the same watery blue color as the Grandmother’s from the North Pole.
THE MOTHER RECALLED the Arctic Cloudberry—rare, brief of season, difficult to pick, unlike anything else. And how the Grandmother from the North Pole would make a Cloudberry Cake. Cloudberries were always the Grandfather from the North Pole’s favorite. Grandfather was said to have made Arctic Cloudberry cordials back home. The mother recalls currents and lingonberries and elderberry saft.
She would like the child to write the names of the berries in the atlas. She would like the child to keep track for her. Cloudberries grow in the remote fir and silver birch forests in the north or in the far bogs. They can also be found in the mountains of Lapland. In late July they appear on the forest floor, and by early August they are gone.
THE HONEYBEES HAD disappeared three years ago now, but to celebrate the child’s birth, Aunt Eloise made funnel cakes shaped like beehives nonetheless. Happy Birthday, she sang to the child, and while she sang Uncle Lars did a sprightly dance. The cakes were curved, and all agreed they were most splendid in all the Valley. She made tiers of hives, replete with little marzipan bees. Everyone sighed. They were the most beautiful cakes anyone had ever seen, and Aunt Eloise and the child closed their eyes and pictured the bees.
After the candles were lit and the song was sung and the child had made her wish, it was not long before a single bee—regal, gilded—landed on her birthday crown. And then another came. And then another.
Word spread quickly as Aunt Eloise had a talkative streak, and before long, beekeepers all across the country came leaving their offerings for the child.
The beekeepers traveled a glowing corridor to the child’s door, holding cakes they themselves had baked. They moved as if through a golden tunnel, or a honey lozenge, to the child.
The mother, drowned in amber, accepted the offerings on behalf of the child and quickly closed the door.
Bees use the sun as a compass. They search for the place of continuous nectar flow, and all season beekeepers from across the world left their farms and made their way to the Valley.
A wooden aqueduct holding aloft a fleet of six beeswax boats floated by.
A golden halo of pollen appeared to hover above the child’s head.
THE VIRGIN SMILES at the mother and child. She wants them to come to the clearing in the forest, to her shrine near the hive. She is holding a honey cake. There will be three schoolchildren there to play with, she promises. She is wearing a beekeeper’s suit. Gloves and a hood. With a smoker she puts the bees to sleep. Come to me.
WHEN THE MOON was full and the weather was right, she would invite the child out to the night garden. The garden at night scared the child who was afraid of the dark, so she would always stay inside. It was time again for applying the fish emulsion, the ritual feeding of the roses with the bodies of liquidated bass and trout and sunfish. It was quite a sight—the mother working through the night.
When the child looked out the nursery window, she saw fireflies plastered to the outline of her mother, and she watched her like that for a long time. Small things of all sorts seemed to attach themselves to her and cling. When the raccoons came, as they always did with their awful tiny human hands pressing, the child would be jealous and she would try to force herself out the door.
Come see the Luna Moth, the mother cried with delight, but not even that enchanting, silk-producing creature with its huge pale green wings could entice the child. Instead she held vigil at the screen door and waited for day to come. From the door, she could hear the mother singing, “Tomorrow will be my dancing day,” and it soothed her.
And in the morning, resplendent and smelling of fish and roses, and wiping away bits of fur and fin, she would bring the child out into the daylight to live their daylight lives, and the men and the boys would follow them, and hum and trip and fall around the mother, and touch the child’s hair, and this alarmed the child for they lived in a household without men or boys.
How sad are the men, the mother thought, in love with fish and figment and oblivion and the night.
THE MOTHER WAS drawn to the glow of the votives and she would kneel before them, and the child too loved the small flickering flames in their cups.
Once after Midnight Mass, the mother told the child a story of when she was a girl. She had never forgotten, though it had happened long ago now. She was out late, when all of a sudden the dazzling body of a wolf appeared on the path. The silver fur. The sleek head. She motioned to it, ablaze on the trail, and slowly neared it, and her hand slid beneath its head. How to describe such velocity? How to describe this passage in the night? This transit? This portal? He had carried her across the threshold and introduced her to the other world. Never had there been such an initiation as that. Thinking about it, even now, she shuddered. She had never told a soul.
For a long time she forbade herself from even uttering the word “wolf.”
That night they put a candle in every window and waited.