Year of the Flood: Novel (13 page)

SAINT EUELL OF WILD FOODS

SAINT EUELL OF WILD FOODS
YEAR TWELVE.

OF THE GIFTS OF SAINT EUELL.
SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.

My Friends, my Fellow Creatures, my dear Children:

This day marks the beginning of Saint Euell’s Week, during which we will be foraging for the Wild Harvest gifts that God, through Nature, has put at our disposal. Pilar, our Eve Six, will lead us in a ramble through the Heritage Park, hunting for Fungi, and Burt, our Adam Thirteen, will aid us with the Edible Weeds. Remember — if in doubt, spit it out! But if a mouse has eaten it, you can probably eat it too. Though not invariably.

The older children will have a demonstration by Zeb, our respected Adam Seven, concerning the trapping of small Animals for survival food in times of pressing need. Remember, nothing is unclean to us if gratitude is felt and pardon asked, and if we ourselves are willing to offer ourselves to the great chain of nourishment in our turn. For where else lies the deep meaning of sacrifice?

Burt’s esteemed wife, Veena, is still in her Fallow state, though we hope to welcome her back among us very soon. Let us wish Light around her.

Today we meditate upon Saint Euell Gibbons, who flourished upon this Earth from 1911 to 1975, so long ago but so close to us in our hearts. As a boy, when his father left home to seek work, Saint Euell provided for his family through his Natural knowledge. He went to no high school but Yours, oh Lord. In Your Species he found his teachers, often strict but always true. And then he shared those teachings with us.

He taught the uses of Your many Puffballs, and the other wholesome Fungi; he taught the dangers of the poisonous species, which however can also be of Spiritual value, if taken in judicious quantities.

He sang the virtues of the wild Onion, of the wild Asparagus, of the wild Garlic, that toil not, neither do they spin, nor do they have pesticides sprayed upon them, if they happily grow far enough away from agribusiness crops. He knew the roadside medicines: the bark of the Willow in respect of pains and fevers, the root of the Dandelion as a diuretic in the shedding of excess fluid. He taught us not to waste; for even the lowly Nettle, so often wrenched up and thrown away, is a source of many vitamins. He taught us to improvise; for if there is no Sorrel, there may be Cattails; and if there are no Blueberries, the wild Cranberry may perhaps abound.

Saint Euell, may we sit with you in Spirit at your table, that lowly tarpaulin spread upon the ground; and dine with you upon wild Strawberries, and upon spring Fiddleheads, and upon young Milkweed pods, lightly simmered, with a little butter substitute if it can be obtained.

And in the time of our greatest need, help us to accept whatever Fate may bring us; and whisper into our inner and Spiritual ears the names of the Plants, and their seasons, and the locations in which they may be found.

For the Waterless Flood is coming, in which all buying and selling will cease, and we will find ourselves thrown back upon our own resources, in the midst of God’s bounteous Garden. Which was your Garden also.

Let us sing.

OH SING WE NOW THE HOLY WEEDS

Oh sing we now the Holy Weeds
That flourish in the ditch,
For they are for the meek in needs,
They are not for the rich.

You cannot buy them at the mall,
Nor at the superstore,
They are despised because they all
Grow freely for the poor.

The Dandelion shoots, for spring,
Before their flowers burst;
The Burdock root is best in June
When it is fat with juice;

When autumn comes, the Acorn’s ripe,
The Walnut black is too;
Young Milkweed pods are sweet when boiled,
And Milkweed shoots when new.

The inner bark of Spruce and Birch
For extra Vitamin C —
But do not take too much of each,
Or you will kill the tree.

The Purslane, Sorrel, Lamb’s Quarters,
And Nettles, too, are good;
The Hawthorn, Elder, Sumac, Rose —
Their berries wholesome food.

The Holy Weeds are plentiful
And beautiful to see —
For who can doubt God put them there,
So starved we’ll never be?

From
The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

24

REN

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

I remember what the dinner was, that night in the Sticky Zone: it was ChickieNobs. I couldn’t deal with meat very well ever since the Gardeners, but Mordis said that ChickieNobs were really vegetables because they grew on stems and didn’t have faces. So I ate half of them.

Then I did some dancing to keep in practice. I had my own Sea/H/Ear Candy, and I sang along. Adam One said music was built into us by God: we could sing like the birds but also like the angels, because singing was a form of praise that came from deeper than just talking, and God could hear us better when we were singing. I try to remember that.

Then I looked in on the Snakepit again. There were three guys from Painball in the Snakepit — ones who’d just got out. You could always tell because they were freshly shaved, with new haircuts, and new clothes too, and they had a stunned look, like they’d been kept in a dark closet for a long time. Also they had a little tattoo at the base of their left thumb — a round circle, red or bright yellow, depending on whether they were Red Team or Gold Team. The other customers were sort of moving back from them, giving them room, but respectfully — as if they were webstars or sports heroes instead of Painball criminals. Rich guys loved to imagine themselves as Painball players. They gambled on the teams as well: Red against Gold. A lot of money changed hands over Painball.

There were always two or three CorpSeCorps guys minding the Painball vets — they could go berserk and do a lot of damage. We Scalies were never allowed to be alone with them: they didn’t understand make-believe, they never knew when to stop, and they could break a lot more than the furniture. It was best to get them wasted, but it had to be fast or they’d go into full rage mode.

“I’d bar those assholes myself,” said Mordis. “Nothing much human left inside that scar tissue of theirs. But SeksMart pays us a bigtime extra bonus when it’s them.”

We’d feed them drinks and pills, with a shovel if we could. There was something new they’d started using just after I went into the Sticky Zone — BlyssPluss, it was called. Hassle-free sex, total satisfaction, blow you right out of your skin, plus 100 percent protection — that was the word on it. Scales girls weren’t allowed to do drugs on the job — we weren’t paid to enjoy ourselves, said Mordis — but this was different, because if you took it you didn’t need a Biofilm Bodyglove, and a lot of customers would pay extra that way. Scales was testing the BlyssPluss for the ReJoov Corp, so they weren’t handing it out like candy — it was mostly for the top customers — but I could hardly wait to try it.

We always got huge tips on Painball nights, though none of us regular Scales girls had to do plank duty with the new vets because we were skilled artists and any damage to us would be pricey. For the basic bristle work they brought in the temporaries — smuggled Eurotrash or Tex-Mexicans or Asian Fusion and Redfish minors scooped off the streets because the Painball guys wanted membrane, and after they were finished you’d be judged contaminated until proved otherwise, and Scales didn’t want to spend Stick Zone money either testing these girls or fixing them up. I never saw them twice. They walked in the door, but I don’t think they walked out. In a shoddier club they’d have been used for the guys acting out their vampire fantasies, but that involved mouth-to-blood contact, and as I said, Mordis liked to keep it clean.

That night one of the Painball guys had Starlite on his lap, giving him the signature twist. She was in her peagret-feather outfit with the headdress, and maybe she was terrific from the front, but from my angle of vision it looked like the guy had a big blue-green duster working him over — like a dry carwash.

The second guy was gazing up at Savona with his mouth open and his head so far back it was almost at right angles to his spine. If her grip slips, she’ll snap his neck. If that happens, I thought, he won’t be the first guy to be carted out the back door of Scales and dumped in a vacant lot with no clothes on. He was an older guy, bald on top, with a ponytail at the back, and a lot of arm tattoos. There was something familiar about him — maybe he was a repeat — but I didn’t get a very good look.

The third one was drinking himself into mud. Maybe he was trying to forget what he’d done inside the Painball Arena. I never watched the Painball Arena website myself. It was too disgusting. I only knew about it because men talk. It’s amazing what they’ll tell you, especially if you’re covered with shiny green scales and they can’t see your real face. It must be like talking to a fish.

Nothing else was happening, so I called Amanda on her cell. But she wasn’t answering. Maybe she was asleep, rolled up in her sleeping bag out there in Wisconsin. Maybe she was sitting around a campfire and the two Tex-Mexicans were playing their guitars and singing, and Amanda was singing too because she knew the Tex-Mex language. Maybe there was a moon up above and some coyotes howling in the distance, just like an old movie. I hoped so.

25

Things changed in my life when Amanda came to live with me, and they changed again in the Saint Euell’s Week when I was almost thirteen. Amanda was older: she’d already grown real tits. It’s strange how you measure time that way.

That year, Amanda and I — and Bernice as well — would be joining the older kids for Zeb’s Predator-Prey Relationship demonstration, when we’d have to eat real prey. I had a faint memory of meat-eating, back at the HelthWyzer Compound. But the Gardeners were very much against it except in times of crisis, so the idea of putting a chunk of bloody muscle and gristle into my mouth and pushing it down inside my throat was nauseating. I vowed not to throw up, though, because that would embarrass me a lot and make Zeb look bad.

I wasn’t worried about Amanda. She was used to eating meat, she’d done it lots of times before. She used to lift SecretBurgers whenever she could. So she’d be able to chew and swallow as if there was nothing to it.

On the Monday of Saint Euell’s Week, we put our clean clothes on — clean yesterday — and I braided Amanda’s hair, and then she braided mine. “Primate grooming,” Zeb called it.

We could hear Zeb singing in the shower:

Nobody gives a poop.
Nobody gives a poop;
And that is why we’re in the soup,
Cause nobody gives a poop!

I’d come to find this morning singing of his a comforting sound. It meant things were ordinary, at least for that day.

Usually Lucerne stayed in bed until we were gone, partly to avoid Amanda, but today she was in the kitchen area, wearing her dark-coloured Gardener dress, and she was actually cooking. She’d been making that effort more often lately. Also she was keeping our living space tidier. She was even growing a raggedy tomato plant in a pot on the sill. I think she was trying to make things nice for Zeb, though they were having more fights. They made us go outside when they were fighting, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t listen in.

The fights were about where Zeb was when he wasn’t with Lucerne. “Working,” was all he’d say. Or “Don’t push me, babe.” Or “You don’t need to know. It’s for your own good.”

“You’ve got someone else!” Lucerne would say. “I can smell bitch all over you!”

“Wow,” Amanda would whisper. “Your mom’s got a foul mouth!” and I didn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed.

“No, no,” Zeb would say in a tired voice. “Why would I want anyone but you, babe?”

“You’re lying!”

“Oh, Christ in a helicopter! Get off my fucking case!”

Zeb came out of the shower cubicle, dripping on the floor. I could see the scar where he’d got slashed that time, back when I was ten: it gave me a shivery feeling. “How’re my little pleebrats today?” he said, grinning like a troll.

Amanda smiled sweetly. “Big pleebrats,” she said.

For breakfast we had mashed-up fried black beans and soft-boiled pigeon’s eggs. “Nice breakfast, babe,” Zeb said to Lucerne. I had to admit that it was actually quite nice, even though Lucerne had cooked it.

Lucerne gave him that syrupy smile of hers. “I wanted to be sure you all get a good meal,” she said. “Considering what you’ll be eating the rest of the week. Old roots and mice, I suppose.”

“Barbecued rabbit,” said Zeb. “I could eat ten of those suckers, with a side of mice and some deep-fried slugs for dessert.” He leered over at Amanda and me: he was trying to gross us out.

“Sounds real good,” said Amanda.

“You’re such a monster,” said Lucerne, giving him her cookie eyes.

“Too bad I can’t get a beer with it,” said Zeb. “Join us, babe, we need some decoration.”

“Oh, I think I’ll sit this one out,” said Lucerne.

“You’re not coming with us?” I said. Usually during Saint Euell’s Week, Lucerne would trail along on the woodland walks, picking the odd weed and complaining about the bugs and keeping an eye on Zeb. I didn’t really want her to come this time, but also I wanted things to stay normal, because I had a feeling that everything was about to be rearranged again, as it was when I’d been yanked out of the HelthWyzer Compound. It was just a feeling, but I didn’t like it. I was used to the Gardeners, it was where I belonged now.

“I don’t think I can,” she said. “I’ve got a migraine headache.” She’d had a migraine headache yesterday too. “I’ll just go back to bed.”

“I’ll ask Toby to drop around,” said Zeb. “Or Pilar. Make that mean ol’ pain go away.”

“Would you?” A suffering smile.

“No problem,” said Zeb. Lucerne hadn’t eaten her pigeon’s egg, so he ate it for her. It was only about the size of a plum anyway.

The beans were from the Garden, but the pigeon’s eggs were from our own rooftop. We didn’t have any plants up there, because Adam One said it was not a suitable surface, but we had pigeons. Zeb lured them with crumbs, moving softly so they felt safe. Then they’d lay eggs, and then he’d rob their nests. Pigeons weren’t an endangered species, he said, so it was okay.

Adam One said that eggs were potential Creatures, but they weren’t Creatures yet: a nut was not a Tree. Did eggs have souls? No, but they had potential souls. So not a lot of Gardeners did egg-eating, but they didn’t condemn it either. You didn’t apologize to an egg before joining its protein to yours, though you had to apologize to the mother pigeon, and thank her for her gift. I doubt Zeb bothered with any apologizing. Most likely he ate some of the mother pigeons too, on the sly.

Amanda had one pigeon’s egg. So did I. Zeb had three, plus Lucerne’s. He needed more than us because he was bigger, Lucerne said: if we ate like him we’d get fat.

“See you later, warrior maidens. Don’t kill anyone,” said Zeb as we went out the door. He’d heard about Amanda’s knee-in-the-groin and eye-gouging moves, and her piece of glass with the duct tape; he made jokes about them.