Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (11 page)

January 10, 1971

I try to imagine what it was like for my mother to be in that bakery, with John Patrick Cushing, her half-brother, having at her, with everything changing in a blink, the way it changed for me after Tom, the color going out of life, life itself going out of life, Mother carrying Thomas Cushing’s grandson on both sides to term, then giving birth to the twisted creature who grew up to be Atomic Tom. I try to imagine the horror of those nine months for Mother, but the idea of carrying Tom’s child after he raped me is unthinkable, unbearable. The worst thing that ever happened to me could have been even worse.

January 22, 1971

I ask Mother to tell me about Father’s inventions. “
My
inventions, you mean.” What do you mean? I say. “I was inventing things long before I met your father, Eleanor. When I met him he was a little lost lamb. He was working for
his
father, for
Edison
, but Edison was all wrong about
DC
, and your Father had no clue. None. He thought
Direct Current
was the future. Ha! That’s a fat one even now! Your father had no idea about
Alternating Current
before he met me. None.” So he was a fake? “Not a fake. Nor a charlatan like so many in those days. And not a man with any badness in him, either, not then. Your father was simply a man of talent shy of greatness. Just a middling man. I had to take him by the hand.”

I ask Rebecca and Diana to dinner but they won’t come and I know why. They don’t want to talk about what Tom did to us, they don’t want to admit the worst thing in the world happened to every one of us.

February 18, 1971

Did Thomas Cushing rape your mother? I ask Mother. “No, child. My mother was married to an albino, a baker, and there was no way they could have children together. When Thomas Cushing came knocking my mother
wanted
him to knock her up. My own mother Constance Briody said to me: ‘That’s the only way I could have had a child. That makes you a
love
child, Caitlin.’ My mother Constance loved Thomas Cushing, you know, though he never loved anyone back.”

Will’s day, a day for most people to forget themselves in the bottom of a bottle, my day to think of him as if he never left. Will is fading away in my memory, but he’s here today more than ever in my heart.

April 2, 1971

Were all the Sons all bad? I wonder. “Bad enough,” Mother says. “Don’t forget his Sons were the heroes during the Great Fire, saving everyone and their own half-sisters. They took over the town because they were the only men left worth a spit. But after the Great Fire, Thomas Cushing’s Sons had at Thomas Cushing’s own daughters, the daughters of Hads and Had Nots! The half-sisters born of Hads were like a harem at the beck and call of his
godforsaken Sons, and
their
children were all Cushing, or nearly so. The Sons were plenty bad enough, Eleanor, even for that town.”

April 11, 1971

How did The Tommies get started? I ask Mother. “There would have been no Tommies if John Patrick Cushing hadn’t raped me like a nickel whore,” Mother says. That was the way the Hads and Had Nots came together.” Tell me more, I tell her. “Someone saved my life that morning, Eleanor. Someone came into the bakery out of nowhere and beat John Patrick Cushing to within an inch of his life. I never found out who saved me. No one ever did. But the Hads and Had Nots found John Patrick and me in the bakery, both of us half-dead, and they stuffed that Cushing son of a bitch into a burlap sack and dragged him away like an animal to the top of the hill, kicking and cursing at him from bottom to top. Your own father had Edison’s dog experiment all ready to go that day to prove the danger of
Alternating Current
—what a laugh that was, Eleanor!—but instead of a dog the Hads and Had Nots wired up John Patrick Cushing himself to the chair, and it was your father who threw the switch. I told them
not
to kill him, but John Patrick was doomed, a dead man from the get-go. The smell of dead Cushing was everywhere in the town that day, the day The Tommies came to life.”

What about the other Sons? I ask Mother. “The Hads and Had Nots raped the Sons after John Patrick Cushing raped me.” Come again? I say. “You should have seen the women of the town that day, Eleanor! There was a whore in the town who had the new disease, and The Tommies held down the Sons till the whore gave every one of them Cushings the germ of it. That’s the gospel truth. They all died from the disease, the Sons did,
slowly
, all except for Mordechai, though God knows how he got away. That’s the truth.
That’s
how The Tommies took hold of the town.”

May 13, 1971

The last town along the canal was the last thing on my mind when I left the Order. Now I can’t get it out of my mind. I need to suck up everything Mother remembers about when she was young. I need to know it all while she still has something left to tell. “Not today,” her doctor says.

I wait outside Mother’s room while the doctor goes inside. He comes out and says: “Her time to be going is coming.”

I can’t blame Mother for anything any more, now that I know what happened to her.

July 15, 1971

I am here every day but Mother might as well be dead.

August 4, 1971

I wait all day for Mother to come back to life, if only for a moment, if only in her dreams.

“
Johnny Cake
,” Mothers says out loud. She is sifting, drifting through her dreams.

September 4, 1971

Mother is dying and we all know it. Today Diana and Rebecca come because I tell them they need to say goodbye. Rebecca, pale as a ghost, unable to look Mother in the eye, comes in without her camera, with just her other self. Diana, for her part, is chittering away about the latest
this
and the next
that
and who’s going where and wearing what for the winter season. Mother watches Diana’s mouth without listening to a word she says.

Sitting by her bedside today, I become Father and Edison and Ford, if only for a flash. In her dreams, Mother is re-living her life in no particular order.

September 6, 1971

I tell Becca that Mother makes me part of her dreams. “She’s ready to let go,” Becca says.

September 21, 1971

“Go back to the last town,” Mother says to me. “Don’t let Tom write the damned history of the O’Kells.”

This feels like a deathwatch. What else could it be?

Sliv finds her and I find Sliv at the bottom of the staircase no one ever uses. His eyes are bloodshot from the crying and the Dewar’s half-gone by his feet on the stairs. “She’s gone,” Sliv says. “I look in on
her like I always do but she isn’t moving. I know how to take a pulse from Korea but your mother she’s cold as ice. She has a twenty in her fist for me.” He holds it up in one hand. “I’m going to drink it up, drink it down today in her honor. It’s the least I can do for Missus O’Kell.”

Bucky Harwell comes to Mother’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and for that moment my past is no longer past. It was Bucky or the Convent for me, two bad choices, and I chose the lesser of two evils, but an evil nonetheless. Bucky is there in the pew with wife number three, a girl a third his age. I could have been the first former Mrs. Bucky. Suddenly the Convent doesn’t seem quite so bad.

I write Sliv a big check and in my note I thank him for everything he did. I wish him well, and I tell him that if there is a heaven he will be there some day with Mother.

Sliv writes back with the check, uncashed, enclosed. “I know it’s hard to understand from where you’re sitting, Miss O’Kell,” Sliv writes, “but it wasn’t about the money
for yours truly. It was about anything but.”

Mother’s will. Mother’s way. Everything split four ways, between me, Rebecca, Diana—and Sliv—with nothing for Tom! From her grave, bless her, Mother has given both Sliv and Tom their just reward. It won’t be easy for Sliv to send
this
check back uncashed.

Tom wastes no time filing suit. He says Sliv took advantage of Mother’s “delirium and dementia” to sneak into her will at the last minute, at Tom’s expense. He says Mother was no longer competent in the end, and that her next-to-last will, with Tom’s share intact, is the one that should stand. I have that sick feeling way down here in my stomach, because Tom
always
wins.

I go back to Mother’s building and find Sliv on a hard chair next to the elevator. I tell him Tom has already gone to court to get the money back. I am going to get you a lawyer, I tell Sliv. A very good lawyer. “I told you, Miss O’Kell.” Sliv looks at me like I forgot to screw my head on straight  this morning. “I already got what I need. No one can make me want more than what I already got.”

Rebecca and Diana meet me at “21” to figure out what to do about Sliv. “I hate Tom,” Rebecca says. “I really can’t stand him. But I don’t think it’s right what Mother did to him. I know, I know. It makes no sense. I know it makes no sense. But that’s how I feel.” What about you, Diana? “I think we should propose a settlement to Sliv,” Diana says. “Convince him that a generous lump sum is far better than nothing at all. We can all pay it out of our shares. Perhaps you could propose it to him, Eleanor darling?” How diplomatic of you, Diana, I say.

“Listen, Miss O’Kell,” Sliv says. “Tell your brother and your sisters I don’t want your O’Kell money. If I wasn’t going to take a fiver from Missus O’Kell, I sure as hell ain’t going to take a nickel from any of you.”

I am called to the stand at a hearing in Tom’s case against Mother. Tom is there in the courtroom, next to his lawyer, a dandy, a fat man with a red handkerchief stuffed into the breast pocket of his suit. Rebecca is there, and Diana too, everyone except Sliv. Tom’s stuffed lawyer moves toward me and I smell his mouthwash and cologne. “Welcome, Miss O’Kell,” he coos. “You of course have my condolences. I understand your mother was really quite ill at the end.” Not ill, I say. Just
old
. “Was she conscious?” Sleeping mostly, I say. “Sleeping? Really?” He leans in. “Would you say she drifted in and out of her dreams?” Yes, I say. “And if she were sleeping then it was a dream, was it not?” Yes, I say. “But if she were awake, one would have to call that—what?—a
hallucination
, wouldn’t one?” You could call it that, I say. “And if she were drifting in and out of sleep, then one would assume it would become very difficult, if not actually impossible, to tell the difference from this dreaming state and an actual hallucination.” I say I suppose that’s so. “And people don’t normally address other people in the room when they’re dreaming, do they Miss O’Kell?” No, I say. “Yet your Mother routinely addressed
you
, didn’t she? She mistook you for Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or God knows whom else, didn’t she? The fact is your Mother lost all her ability to distinguish between these hallucinations and her own life. Didn’t she?” At times, I say. “And one of those times was when she wrote the will that cut your brother Thomas off from his rightful inheritance.” That was different, I say. That was because of what he did to— “No further questions, Miss O’Kell,” he says.