THERE WAS ANOTHER mother with another child not far from here, except the child had grown up and gone away as children naturally do. This got the mother to thinking how many times, in this very spot, the mother-and-child scenario had replicated itself through time. She thought of the reproduction of motherhood and the reproduction of childhood, and she found herself caught in the reverberating world—the world of multiplications and resonances and profiles.
Children a long time after they have left are known to return to the Mothering Place, and when they arrive, some remnant of childhood is always still there, waiting for them. Sometimes there is still an alive mother and sometimes there is not.
One child, now a grown man, has just returned from the war. Nevertheless, he limps home to the place of his birth, and his mother is there still waiting. In the forest, she points to a stain on the forest floor. When the neighbors kill a deer, they always call and tell her where they did the field dressing, and she goes in the middle of the night and grabs the heart. The mother is not entirely sure whether her son is living or dead—or somewhere in transit, like the steaming body of the deer.
The next time your life feels bereft of meaning, go to the Mothering Place if you can, and greet that mother, and she will open her cupped hands and show you the heart.
AT THE EDGE of the Mothering Place the gamelan can be heard—it’s the Boy in the Glen and his friends come to play their song. Xylophones, drums, gongs, a bamboo flute, and strings being plucked.
THE TROOPS, YOUNG already, grow younger and younger until they are small boys preparing for the first day of school, but while their bodies have shrunk and they have grown backwards into childhood, their uniforms are still regulation size and their helmets are enormous, obscuring their view (maybe it is better that way) but also decapitating them. The boys lift the helmets up and laugh.
THE MOTHER TOLD Uncle Ingmar after the child was asleep, that although it was obvious, she could not get her mind around the idea that the boy in the coffin would not be growing anymore. She had glimpsed him in her sleep and had immediately begun to problem solve, as all good nurses will. She thought the coffin might need an extra hinge as an accommodation just in case, like when the guests suddenly appear at the door out of nowhere and you quickly put a leaf in the dining room table. There was no telling what might happen under the earth. She would hate to imagine. The ancients understood this. She thought it peculiar that the growth plates would stop just like that. With an adult, who had finished his growing, it would be different.
THE SOLDIERS SWOON on the fever field and they call into the future for their betrothed and for their progeny and they weep. The soldiers swoon and call for their mothers. They are between souls—neither children nor men—and in the in-between state they perish.
NOW IT WAS clear. She realized that what she had once thought was a coyote staring at her in the driveway was actually the Egyptian god Anubis, the Jackal, escort to the Afterlife, the god who protected the dead on their path to the Underworld. Even in profile there it was staring back at her now from inside the child’s history book. When she at last looked up, she saw four coyote-ushers there to greet her.
CECIL PETER THE one-armed handyman skittered down the icy path carrying a dead rat by the tail. Maggots feasting on a cadaver sound like Rice Crispies popping, Cecil Peter said rather cheerfully in passing. The mother never knew what Peter Cecil might say next. It was frightening knowing that someone the mother needed as much as she needed Cecil Peter was also someone who was going to invariably terrify her again and again in ways she could not even begin to imagine. She bows her head and waits.
THE NEXT TIME a bat entered the house she would be better prepared, she reasoned. She imagined catching the bat in a bag and saying calmly and with a certain authority, yes the bat is in a bag on the porch. She knew the bat, in a bag or not, would always function as a catalyst. Something always shifted after a bat. She hoped next time, if there must be a next time, she would better understand what its appearance signified, so as better to be able to capitalize on the change its appearance foretold.
If the bat returned in winter she would know to bury it in snow. This would ensure its brain, frozen, would be properly encased and preserved for testing.
She would capture it and put it in a hat or a bag, and bury it in the snow and uncover it, when the time came, with her foot. She would paw the snow like a reindeer or a horse. She would not be afraid.
She would never allow herself to be that afraid again.
FLITTERMOUSE. FLITTERMOUSE, WHAT are you doing in the child’s house? The shadow bat swooped. The mother was dreaming. She got up and looked out onto the white world and then fell back into sleep. The bats were hibernating, but the shadows multiplied.
UNCLE INGMAR, UNCLE Ingmar what are you doing in the child’s house in the deepest of wee hours?
Shh, he whispers, I’m here to steal the mother’s clock.
IN THE QUIET and distance of winter, while the snow still blanketed the earth, the mother had agreed to join the local farm cooperative, where for a fee each week, beginning in the spring, there would be a delivery of the Valley’s bounty. What could be better than that? the mother wondered. All that nature afforded, available to them.
And she sank back into the calm and white of winter, but when she fell asleep, the Spring was there to meet her:
The Valley is indeed teeming with vegetation. Every week more and more fruits and vegetables arrive, the Valley’s pride. Every day the mother dutifully cooks the bounty, but impossibly, the more she cooks, the more vegetables appear. How can she ever keep up with the growing world, wild and alive? she wonders. Now the mother walks on the spongy vegetable floor. Now the walls are lined with rotting cabbage heads, and the child refers to them as skulls. She ponders her problem for a while, and then in the terrible hollow of the room, she begins to weep. Who can keep up? Not she. She welcomes in the white worm, the green worm, the maggots.
I hope there will be a solution soon, the child whispers to her, before more white worms and more green worms and beetles or much worse comes. And the mother nods and sits all day in the center of the house and forces herself to eat, spooning in mouthful after mouthful of the blackening vegetables. Every variety of bug and slug call to the mother now, and she looks around and smiles because at least the child has gotten free. At least the child has escaped for another day.
The child recognized in the mother the charm of withdrawal this terrible nest presented, the dark lull of the vegetable world, mute but breathing in the room. It was dark and quiet and a little mossy in there. How easy it would be to bolt the door and sink into a stupor, into the stench and the heat and the strange echo made by the sponge-blackened decay.
Muffled, swaddled by layers of vegetative matter, the child feared the mother might find her permanent rest there, and she feared the empty cave of her mother’s voice in such a room, and the way of all flesh and the specter of decay, which so overwhelmed the space. When the child entered the decay of the room, she entered as a child, but when she left, she felt she was not a child any longer.
And even though when the mother woke herself it was still winter, and the world was white and not a single vegetable had yet arrived, she shuddered. She walked to the child’s room and smoothed her hair and pushed a few tendrils away from her face. That night, sitting there on the child’s bed, she vowed come spring that she would do whatever it took to keep the child safe.
When the child wakes it is still winter, but the mother is outside constructing a vegetable stand next to the Concrete Rabbit. At this stand, the mother explains, they will give all of nature’s bounty to the poor. Before one vegetable or fruit darkens their door, it shall be given away, and God will look with favor on their offering.
Blessed are the poor, for they are among God’s most beloved creations. Giving under any circumstances is joyful; feeding the multitudes under any circumstances is a pleasure. Blessed indeed are the hungry; they shall be fed.
At season’s end if there was anything left over, the mother, who could not bear the idea of waste, would allow the remaining vegetables into the house where she will store them in screw-top jars. When a person was mummified, their internal organs were placed in canopic jars and guarded by gods. The stomach was put in a jackal jar. The lungs in a baboon jar, and in a falcon jar, the intestines.
Perhaps the outcome, as foretold in a dream, would have been different had she known that certain fruits and vegetables emit an odorless, colorless gas that speeds up the ripening process and leads everything to premature decay. Perhaps, if she had known she should not put the spinach so close to the apples, or the tomatoes so near the cauliflower, things would have turned out differently.
No matter; the mother’s solution in the end worked perfectly: the hungry were fed and the mother was spared her madness, and the child, her burden of sorrow—a while longer.