TO ELIMINATE THE gray wolf, those going westward in the Great Western Expansion introduced mange into the wolf population. For forty days they waited for the mange to take and then set out on their way. A wave of suffering preceded them, and a wave of suffering was left in their wake. The suffering made a sound pitched just above the hearing range of the adults, but all the girls could hear it, and it made their trips in the covered wagons excruciating. Many of the girls in this weakened condition became susceptible to cholera and other catastrophic illnesses. Perhaps it was a kindness to die, they thought to themselves, by the side of the road rather than endure the intolerable screeching in their ears.
The adults forged on, having buried their girls by the side of the road, and were praised for their courage and stamina in the face of the last images of their daughters holding their ears. They continued with even greater resolve. Their girls will not have died in vain. Native plants, native animals, and finally native people were in the way of the great westward progress to Hollywood. The wolves lost fur in patches all over their bodies. Mangy wolves, without fur, are susceptible to freezing to death in the winter or catching fire in the summer. Like fire, however, and young girls, the gray wolf can never really be extinguished. Like fire, you cannot snuff out a girl or a wolf. But no matter, the pioneers did not allow this to deter them. The mother and the child closed the book. The history lesson for the day lay heavy in them. What could she do, the child wondered, for those children who were already dead over a hundred years?
Much of the west, toward which they strived with such fervor and at such cost, is a desert. Cities are built on sand in drought. Rivers are dammed and debilitated. Every time the child opened her history book, something else like this was popping up at her. Their fevers rose to 105. The girls were covered in flat, rose-colored spots.
THEY RISE UP again now, the girls, as if out of that same place—though over a century and a half has passed. Women and children emerge from the mist on the horizon line still in pioneer dress, still emptying the bit bucket. Look, the child says, calling for the mother. Come quickly! The mother and child stand mesmerized. There before them are the girls in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses, with their hair pinned up in braids, tilling small gardens, pumping water, and doing chores in the shadow of an eighty-foot gleaming limestone temple. Self-sufficiency is paramount, because the Apocalypse is near.
Mothers and daughters work together on the Yearning for Zion Polygamist Ranch. What is the use, the mother wonders, of taking such good care of a girl—making her clothes by hand; feeding her only the freshest and most wholesome of foods: whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; giving her fresh air; keeping her far from the cities and the fumes and the bad influences; making sure she is happy and fit—if you are only going to hand her over to the fifty-year-old Fathers in the end? What is the use if you are just going to offer her up joyfully to become a child-sister-wife?
The women in gingham and bonnets look up curiously; they do not remember this part. What is the use of surviving on the plains if your own mother is going to hand you over before you are grown? The child brides cannot read or write or state the date of their births, the TV is saying. In the outside world avert your eyes, they are instructed. In the outside world avoid the color red, for that color is reserved for Jesus Christ who will return to the earth wearing red robes one day. The mother shuts off the TV. Enough, she says.
In the Great Girl Giveaway, the Indian girl, Little Bird, was taken by an opposing tribe where she was turned into a slave and named Sacajawea, and that tribe, when the time came, was all too happy to sell her to a Canadian fur trader three times her age, as a wife.
Enough, the mother says, but at night the girls follow them into sleep. On the Polygamist Ranch the men take girl children as brides, and so the girls know it is only a matter of time. Where are the mothers when they are needed? One of the girls dreams of introducing mange into the Father Population. When the fathers come near, too sunburned and with patchy fur, they howl in the dirt. There is a resourcefulness to girls in trouble, the child thinks to herself.
The child says that she has seen the girls staring into the soup pots in a daze, dreaming, like all girls, of their futures. Once the soup is evaporated, they will meet their husbands, so it becomes the child’s job to provide a constant source of soup for the girls so that the pot will never be gone. The mother marvels at the miracle of the child: her poise, her good sense, her intelligence, her resourcefulness, her beauty.
WHEN UNCLE INGMAR comes with his giant steps, the sea level will drop. Don’t forget, the mother whispers to the child, to fill the pot.
THE CHILD NUDGES the mother and points. On the horizon a tiny flame. She sees fire in the distance. At last, after the proper time of mourning, the Torch is revived. There it is, she is sure of it, glinting near the Muir Woods, in the City of Forests.
THE THREE SCHOOLGIRLS hold evergreen sprigs. The mother is grateful that all along the children have made themselves visible to her, that they are whole, and that they have not, in all the chaos, lost their backpacks.
THE WHO HAS Hair Where Conversations had begun. Except on her head, as of yet, the child had none. In a few years after all the hair had sprouted, the child would look at her mother strangely. With the hair in private places there would be a need for other privacies, and this would increase over time until finally the child would be gone. At the same time the Boy in the Glen was having the Why, When, and How Deep or High Are Boys’ Voices Conversation at home with his father.
For now the child was attached to the wall because the mother had grown tired of paying the bill for the walk-around phone. Soon the child will be older, and the child will still be attached to the wall and she will feel as if she cannot move around and speak in confidence.
Once, the mother will say, when she was a child and living in a house with the North Pole Grandmother and Ingmar, Lars, Anders, Sven, and baby Inga, everyone was attached to the wall, and if you wanted to talk in confidence, you had to invent a private language. There was a secret yodel she was fond of when she was a growing child on the wall trying to leave her mother. A keening sound had come out of her as she tried to leave. On these days she would stand high up on a mountain yodeling, waving, gasping for breath.
THE SNOW WAS slowly melting, which meant that things that could not be seen before would soon be seen in the Valley again. The mother and child looked out at the Valley they loved, but also hated a little. Out the car window: two goats, free vegetables, a pink toilet, the signs that said Mabbetville and Pulvers Corners.
Sometimes the child wondered what it would be like to live in any other place.
MANY OF THE People of the Valley wanted a white person to live in the White House. There was a simplicity to it that appealed to them. They were not interested in having a person of any other color or stripe sullying things up.
The People of the Valley knew enough to know what they liked, and there was a simplicity to that as well. They also knew what they feared—and all around them was darkness.
About four million years ago, the wolf, the coyote, and the golden jackal diverged from one another. All three have seventy-eight chromosomes. This allows them to hybridize freely and produce fertile offspring. First-crossed wolf/dog hybrids are popular in the US, but the dog retains many wolf-like traits. This the mother remembers from her Wolf Studies long ago.
A coydog is the hybrid offspring of a male coyote and a female dog.
The dogyote is the result of breeding a male domestic dog with a female coyote.
Coyotes also breed with wolves, resulting in coywolves. Other breeds to have hybridized with foxes are huskies and hounds: this animal is known as a dox. The neighbor has a wonderful dox is not an unheard-of thing to hear in parts of the Valley.
Let us not forget that the wolf and the jackal can interbreed and produce fertile hybrid offspring. What is a dingo, the mother does not know, but she knows what a coy-dingo must be. If you cross a coyote with a dog, you get the ferocity of the coyote with the friendliness and fearlessness of a dog—an unfortunate mix. What if you tried to pet it?
It is thought that the Ancient Egyptians crossbred domestic dogs with jackals, producing a jackal-dog that resembled the god Anubis.
If the blacks stay black and the whites stay white, it still remains possible to think clearly. There is something to be said for clarity, there is something to be said for understanding the lines. If the Jews were meant to breed with the Gentiles, God would have written it down through the prophets, the People of the Valley like to say. What if you cross a jackal with a child?
On a death barge a mongrel in robes might float by. What if without permission, the dog-child wore a crown and began to decree?
If you interbreed the races you are in for trouble, the People of the Valley are saying. Murky children rise up out of their dreams and walk the not-so-distant hills. You are left with the question when you bump into them picking flowers of what exactly they are. If you misguidedly vote one of these mixed-flower people, these freaks, into public office, you will only add to the National Nightmare.
But like it or not, fluidity and connections and dualities define the world now. Like it or not, forging hybrid identities is where it’s at. It does not help that the Morbidity Table indicates the kind of White People who live in the Valley right now will be dying off sooner rather than not.
The question in the Valley more and more becomes how to disable permanently the mongrel so he will not be able to run, but only hobble.
There is a lot to consider when pondering mongrels and men. The child should hurry and graft horse-running legs onto the mongrel candidate’s body. She should hurry and graft enormous white eagle wings to his back; a surgical expertise born of necessity will move into her hands. Among the species there is an aptitude for survival one can only call admirable. Winged, horse-legged, felled candidate, how are you feeling? Fine, he says. I feel great. The child and the mother and the candidate’s aptitude for bouncing back are unmatched.
If you cross a mother with a bat, then what have you got? Something shining and night-loving with a sonar intelligence of the first order.
Some things once brought into being can never be killed. Some things brought into light refuse to retreat back into the darkness. Not only that, but they obtain a lightness unlike any other thing in the world. There is a luminosity not to be believed.
If you cross the mother on the Equinox with the Night and introduce a Glove, a miracle will occur.
A BLUE MULTITUDE of children huddle around the mother. They’ve just come in from the blueberry patch. See them now as they doze off with their full blue buckets—Lars, Bibi, Ingmar, Anders, Sven. Baby Inga is not yet born.
INGMAR TUGS AT his mother’s blue dress and whispers, it is rumored that the Cold Lab is making its way to the Spiegelpalais.
Yes, she smiles. There are great hopes that the Grandfather from the North Pole at last will be on display.
FATHER TED HAD disappeared, and so someone ran to prop up the one-hundred-year-old Father Finch to say the Sunday Mass. The mother loved Father Finch best, for he seemed always furious, and he spoke with a slight stutter, and there was something in his fury that steeled her to his side. When he arrived at last, he started immediately telling the congregants that there was a word in Hebrew, and that the word meant when you save one person, you save the world. Plainly he spoke of the suffering of the children, and the mother imagined God’s infinite indifference in all matters big and small. Pity, Father Finch said, the children for whose suffering we are directly responsible. The child, sitting next to the mother in the front pew, could not understand how this could be.
When he was not giving the sermon, Father Finch was prone to stutter, particularly at the letter B. The latter part of the Mass was especially difficult for him with all the body and blood and breaking bread. At these times, a loud baritone voice would come out of the mother’s chest, and she would bellow bread, or blood, and it gave Father Finch the momentum to go on. The child stared at the mother as if she could not believe the mother was capable of producing such a sound.
The God Father Finch spoke of directed the leper to plunge himself seven times in the river, and with that, the leper’s flesh became the flesh of a child, and he was clean of his leprosy. Next, the God cast seven demons from the Magdalene. The mother put up her umbrella. There was no telling what the God might do next.
DOWN THE ROAD, the artist groped in the dark for her brushes and shouted to those who passed by, on this Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, that she had been blinded in the Spiegelpalais. She said not to go in there: all had transpired or would transpire, and all that was promised was nothing but a mirage.
FROM THE FOG the soldiers came now, singing their crooked songs. First a few and then a few more and then a cast of thousands. They are just over this last dune—Grave Alice and Laughing Allegra and Margarete with the Auburn Hair—you’re nearly there.
SHE PINNED THE Obligation Doily to her head. Once it was forbidden to walk into a church with the head uncovered. In those days, hatmakers’ shops flourished in the Valley. The ladies went to great lengths seeking out hats that might please Him. If not a beautiful hat or an intricate lace Obligation Doily, then what, the mother wondered, was the offering He was waiting for?
THE MOTHER THOUGHT while the child slept she might go out and confront the God, head on. Go outside and stand on the mountain before the Lord, the faltering bat whispered; the Lord will be passing by. A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before her—but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake—but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was a fire. After the fire there was a tiny phishing sound. When she heard this, she put her face in her cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.
THE VIRGIN STANDS with her lantern at the mouth of the cave and gestures for the mother to come forward.
Yes, the mother says, but I’m not ready yet. I need a little more time. The Virgin smiles and puts down her lantern and rests awhile.
SOMETIMES, WHEN THEY were gray traces on a page, and the hand loomed and hovered and pressed down on them, when they were glyphs across the divide from one another, she despaired. In those times she was aware of the ampersand—the thin squiggled figure that both joined and separated them. The notion that someone had created them filled her with sadness; she did not know quite why. While the inventor slept, she slipped from under the great hand and went out untethered into the silence.
The mother wishes for the place where they are not already decided, not already made, the place they are autonomous, unmediated, free. She looks out a small window in the text. The hand asleep atop the manuscript. In the pre-dawn, she makes her way back home from the cave to the child and she runs into the members of the parish making their way to the sunrise service. She does not look up, but they see her anyway. When they greet her on the path carrying a torch, she sidesteps them. They are on their way to morning Mass, but she has had enough of the Creators, all of them, even the child, asleep, dreaming her, venturing out into the forest, seeking her once more, dragging the little ampersand.
HE HAD PULLED a fishbone from the throat of a choking boy, he had talked a wolf into releasing a pig for a starving old woman, he had visions of the risen Christ everywhere he looked—for his trouble, his skin was shredded and he was beheaded and named the patron saint of animals. And once a year, the mother and child were blessed with candles at the throat in his honor.
IN THE CAVES of Allah, the soldiers, sheltered, grateful to be out of the monstrous heat, crouch and talk a kind of baby talk: Tora Bora, Lahore, and then just gibberish. Before the youngest among them closes his eyes, he says, look! By the light of the last match: a lion, a deer, a running man drawn 24,000 years earlier. How filled with joy they are at this last moment, and how unexpectedly—at the very end.
THE CHILD WAS learning French in school and studying ancient Egypt. After Egypt would be the Greeks. And next year there would be Latin. The ancient world was alive and well.
The child thought she might like to try to embalm one of the bunnies and put it in a mummy suit. Now that the snow was melting, certain things seemed clearer. That was not a coyote they saw in the driveway—she opened her book and showed her mother—that was the god Anubis.
The mother remembers now Anubis, one dark night, caught in the car’s headlights, stared at her as she pulled into the drive. She was afraid, and she and the child waited, until it passed.