Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (14 page)

I am walking down Main Street when I see the answer has been staring me in the face the whole time. It’s Delectable Confections, the boarded-up bakery that used to be the Briody & Daughter Bake Shop, the very spot where my mother was raped by John Patrick Cushing. I will turn it into a shrine, a place for coffee and Johnny Cake, a place for The Tommies to come to. Our home sweet home.

July 1, 1973

I call Charles Evans to make arrangements for my first investment in real estate in the town. “A bakery?” he says. “An heiress to the O’Kell fortune wants to sell danish?”

Delectable Confections comes down and a new sign goes up. Or should I say an old sign? The Briody & Daughter Bake Shop has returned to its rightful place in town. A smaller sign, “Free Johnny Cake Monday,” has been up on the window for a week and on every lamppost in town. A long line, like a breadline, snakes out the door. The Tommies are here for Johnny Cake, of course, but the cake is still under glass, and first they will have to hear me out. I clink to get them quiet. The Tommies really began right here, I say to a full house. Constance Briody always wanted a world without men, I tell them, and my grandmother never slept with any of the Sons, not even Mordechai, and that makes her the true founder of The Tommies after the rape of the Hads by Thomas Cushing. But no one in the bake shop is listening. They don’t need another hero. They need an enemy, or at least more Johnny Cake. The lightbulb goes off. The Tommies binge and purge but
purging
is what they need. I need to put the doubters in front of the rabble, to let the rabble turn thumbs down to purge themselves of this poison. It has to be religious. So I tell them there is going to be an Inquisition in the last town along the canal, starting right now, today, this moment, an inquiry into why everything went so bad. We are going to find out who’s to blame for what you have become, I tell them.
We are going to name names
. Nobody moves but I have their attention because now we are all looking for the same enemy, the same bogeyman, and they are looking at each other. Someone has to be drawn, quartered, crucified. I tell them to eat the Johnny Cake one at a time this time, and to do their puking outside my door.

I don’t own the Church of the Immaculate Conception. But now I do own the land that it sits on. This is where we will hold our trial of the century. All I need now is a villain.

“I know who it is you want,” Linda Connolly says. “Scarlett. From Scarlett’s Hair Wave. Everybody goes to her. She’s the only hairdresser in town.” And what has been her sin against womankind? I wonder. “Oh, that’s easy,” she says. “She still sleeps with a Cushing. With Mordechai’s son Eli.”

“I want a lawyer,” Scarlett says. What for? I say.
I’m
not a lawyer, and this is not a trial. “You can’t keep me here,” she says. I look around the basement at Tommies shoe-horned into every corner. You have no place to go, I say to Scarlett. Everyone you know is right here, right in this room. These are the people who know you, who grew up with you. These are the people you have to answer to. “But what are the
questions
?” Scarlett’s voice rises at the end of her question like it might never come down. “What have I done
wrong
?” She is the perfect subject for our Inquisition. She doesn’t look haunted like the rest. She looks like she eats right, like she gets enough sleep. She owns a business, she sleeps with a man, and she doesn’t wear washed-out clothes. She probably never even throws up. She is the perfect villain if I can break her because there’s nothing villainous about her. “I don’t need to be here,” she says. “This is no trial. This is a mockery.” You’re right, I say. This is a mockery of
you
.

Why do you think you’re puking? I say to Linda Connolly on the stand. Why do you have to throw up? Why do you all hate yourselves so much?  “
Confess!
” The Tommies hiss in the basement, like steam escaping from  deformed radiators. You might as well, I say. “I’m sleeping with him, too,” she says. “With Eli. With Mordechai’s son. With a
Cushing
. What more can I say?” Linda Connolly throws up all over the basement floor.

“They’re not puking because of why you think,” Eileen Bell tells me. “They’re not purging.” They’re not? “Not any more.” Why then? “Are  you blind? Dollars to donuts, The Tommies are all pregnant by a Cushing. By the
same
Cushing. By Eli Cushing. History is repeating itself, Eleanor, just like it always does.” Of course. How could it be any other way?

Mordechai’s son
Eli is in the basement, head down, scratching away as always at today’s puzzle. “Ten letters down for hair of a religious nature. Beginning with a ‘D.’”
Dreadlocks
, I tell him. He sits in the chair at the front of the room, the crossword on his lap, the grid in his forehead that much deeper. You know why you’re here, I say. “I’m here because I want to help your cause.” You do?  “Yes. I very much do. It’s the least I can do, actually.” Then tell us about what you’ve done. “What have I done? You mean
who
have I done.” You need to name names, I say. Eli Cushing looks around the basement at The Tommies. “Hell,” he says. “You name it.”

The Tommies take their turns on the stand to be deprogrammed. They are all ready for detox by the dozen, ready to confess over and over and over again to sleeping with Eli, with a Cushing, because they have no choice, no life, no future until they purge themselves of all Cushings and all men. A piece of cake. Now we can start over with a blank slate.

Earth to Eleanor! I just realized the benefits of Cushing randiness. A new generation, ready-made, has fallen, with a plop, into my lap. Let them eat Johnny Cake!

History is repeating itself
again
. All The Tommies say they slept with Mordechai’s son Eli, but not all of them are showing. Some of them, spiritual heirs to the Had Nots, are lying. “Let the latest Had Nots have their fun,” Eileen Bell tells me. “It won’t last. It never did before.”

Eileen Bell was right. The ones
Eli failed to fuck are the ones who want to do him in now. “But what should we do?” they want to know. You can do nothing, I say. Or you can just wait until he’s dead drunk.

October 30, 1973

I call Charles Evans to make my next investment in the town. “First a bakery,” he says. “And now some kind of hospital? I need a rhyme or a reason.” There is none, I tell him. That’s the beauty of being filthy rich.

“Mordechai’s son was so drunk he sunk in the canal like a rock,” a Tommie tells me. Upon that rock, I say.

I watch while they shove
Eli Cushing into the oven. Then I go with The Tommies to the cemetery on the bluff with the last remains of a Cushing male in two Briody & Daughter coffee mugs with snap-on tops. I can feel his ashes, still hot, through the mugs, like steaming cups of coffee just poured. The Tommies are showing late and low with his children in their bellies, and their hair is a beautiful chopped-off mess since we put Scarlett’s off-limits. The wind is blowing so hard above the canal that when I dump out the ashes they fly downwind before The Tommies have a chance to duck. Even so, with the last of Mordechai’s son sticking to their cheeks and their chins, this still feels like a baptism or a birth, like the second coming of The Tommies.

Now that the Inquisition is over I can use the Briody & Daughter Bake Shop to make sure The Tommies are eating what they need. I want to create a state dedicated to our well-being, a welfare state of total dependence on me.

No one will ever gorge on Johnny Cake any more. We will never sell it again, and we will serve it up only when The Tommies meet, a sliver apiece, the closest thing to Communion. We never forget we came to life because of the rape of a woman by a man.

“Your grandmother had the right idea about men,” Eileen Bell tells me in the last moment of her life. “Fuck them.”

The funeral for Eileen Bell is a coming-out party for The New Tommies. I lead the procession along the man-made ditch to the wake at the Briody & Daughter Bake Shop. Everyone eats Johnny Cake, just a sliver
in memoriam
, and everyone keeps it down.

Constance Briody was clean. Constance Briody was pure. I tell
the Tommies what Eileen Bell told me on her deathbed, that Constance Briody
never
slept with Mordechai Cushing. I make the whole story up out of whole cloth. We can canonize Eileen Bell now that she’s gone and make her one of the Founding Mothers of our movement. We will build a shrine to her constancy along the canal. Saints be praised!

Charles Evans calls to tell me the deed is done, that I am now the proud owner of a small private hospital in the last town along the canal. “What have you got up your sleeve?” he wants to know. Baby girls, I tell him.

The tests show that it’s much worse than I thought, with far too many baby boys on the way. We really do live in a man’s world.

Eli Cushing
was the only Cushing man left in the last town along the canal for a reason, I remind The Tommies in the basement of the Cathedral. I rant about the hereditary weakness of the Cushing men, of their inherent inability after Thomas Cushing to produce their own male heirs. I remind them the male babies born to The Tommies never live more than a day or two, and that we need everyone to come clean, to abort the male seeds if we are to build a new life, a new world for our girls in the last town along the canal. “But I’ve always wanted a child,” Linda Connolly says. “I’ve always wanted a
boy.
” Not in this town, I tell her in front of The Tommies. Not in this life. I tell her she must give in to the greater good or get out of town.

February 20, 1974

“All right!” Linda Connolly says in the basement to The Tommies. “I’ll give him up! All right? It’s all right.
Really
. I really want to. I do. It’s for the good of everyone, for the best.” Then she vomits all over the floor.

All The Tommies in town get new bowl haircuts. We look like Roundheads, like religious fanatics, but at least it’s an improvement on our chopped-off hair. The purging of the past is complete. Now we are ready to binge on the future.

March 12, 1974

I was right. Two of the Tommies, including Linda Connolly, miscarry the Cushing males before they can abort on command. The rest of The Tommies carrying male Cushing heirs give in to me because they see no reason to take a chance. Thank God for abortion, I tell them.

March 14, 1974

I expect Linda Connolly to be devastated, but instead she’s become a new woman. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” she says. “My body wanted nothing to do with Cushing men.”

Will
. The only man I ever loved, bless him. The only man I will ever miss. I miss my brother every day, but especially today.

The Eileen Bell Lying-In Hospital For Women has been modernized, upgraded, made ready for the new Cushing blood we’re injecting into the town. The rest is history or will be soon enough.

Our baby girls come in a flurry, in a hurry, like they can’t wait to be with their sisters and their mothers and their aunts. We count their hands and legs, their fingers and the toes on their tiny feet. There is a purity to them, a perfection that belongs to all of us. We share the same blood, the same life, the same world of our own making.

When I came to this godforsaken town, I had to convince the children born of The Great Fornicator’s Sons and daughters and granddaughters to live a life without men, with nothing but love for one another. Now we have done the impossible. We have created a new generation of Tommies from scratch. Just watch our smoke.

The Constance Briody Memorial Nursery opened this morning. We will raise our girls together in the building on Main Street that used to be Canal Light & Power. Our girls will have the best of everything, the best medicine, the best education, the very best care, and all the love a town full of mothers  can bring to the party. Some might think of it as brainwashing. I call it cleansing the palate before the main course.

I am going to buy up everything that matters in this godforsaken town. I know a bargain when I see one, and this town is one big bargain, bottom to top.

July 11, 1974

I will foreclose on all the men who own businesses in the last town along the canal. For five cents on the dollar, I can wipe them right off the face of the earth.

“More good money after bad,” Charles Evans says as he releases the funds. “What in the name of God are you trying to do?” I can’t even begin to tell you, I tell him.

I buy the Queen Mother for a song. I’ve always wanted to own my own home.

I own the bank now. And the hospital. And the television and radio stations. And the newspaper and of course the bakery. And the Queen Mother. I give Tommies minority stakes in the stores here, with yours truly the controlling investor.

I can buy anything I want so I buy a bar on Main Street. I’m going to call it The Main Drag and it’s going to be FTO, For Tommies Only.

The Tommies are still vomiting, even the ones who just gave birth. I have no idea why.

Charles Evans arrives unannounced. A mistake, I tell him. “Perhaps so,” he says. “But I know that if I asked your permission you would say no. And I had a fiduciary responsibility to come. Not to mention a personal obligation to you as an old friend. I could no longer accept my fee sight unseen when it  is my duty to save you from yourself.” What are you? I say. A lifeguard? “I would first like to see your Queen Mother. I would like to know how you could spend that kind of money on what sounds like a trumped-up motel.” Consider it done, I say. I stay in the Constance Briody suite, but you can have the Eileen Bell across the hall all to yourself. “All I want is a firm mattress, no cockroaches, and a phone that
gets a dial tone.” I tell him the Queen Mother features the finest Princess phones.

“All right, all right,” Charles Evans says. “I’ve seen quite enough. Enough!  But I do have one question. What have you done to the women in this town? Are they all
AC-DC
or what-have-you?” No, I tell him.
DC
only.
Direct Current
. Very direct. “Well, congratulations, then,” he says. “You’ve done it. You’ve created a hell on earth for men. It’s your dream come true, I suppose. May God have mercy on your soul.” So glad you could come, I say.

There’s still so much to do here—to set up the farms, the schools, the businesses. Sometimes I wish there was a man around to lift up a bag of cement. But we have our ways.

Our baby girls are growing into little people, with little hands, little ears, and little feet. Will they ever be so perfect again?

I want my girls to be as tall or taller than any man, and every bit as strong. What I want for The Tommies is for their children to be
Tomgirls
, pure and simple. Is that so much to ask?

The obvious finally occurs to me. If my half-brother Tom is so evil because he is so inbred, because he was
all
Cushing, a real bastard in every way, then why can’t we turn that inside out and create the perfect race of women
on purpose
? Why settle, I ask The Tommies, for a town that’s owned by a woman, that’s run by women? Why not create a new world with the Cushing in all of us as the starting point, instead of the be-all and end-all? Why the hell not? We don’t need men. We just need their sperm, and we know they come cheap.

Miracles never cease. Sliv, of all people, arrives in the last town along the canal. “My Missus, she passed on,” Sliv says. “But I’m not ready to cash in my chips just yet. I mean, in the old days, you had the door and the chains and you needed somebody with half a brain to run that elevator. There was like an art to it, getting it to come out just right, the door even with the floor on the first swipe. But now it’s just buttons that any monkey can push, and I ain’t no monkey, Miss O’K.” I can see that, I say. “And it just wasn’t the same without your Ma there, either, God rest her soul. It was just me sitting there all alone all day, a baboon pressing buttons, with nobody really needing me. I thought
you
might need some help, to be honest. I’m okay with my Social Security, my pension, what I got coming. Pay me what you can pay me, or don’t pay me at all. It don’t matter. I just thought you might need someone to help with the heavy lifting.” If I had ten more like you, I tell Sliv, I could move the world.

“Miss O’K?” Sliv says. “I never seen so many baby girls in my life. Is there something in the water in this town?” Not yet, I say.

One other thing, I say to Sliv. Just ignore what I say. It’s just politics. I don’t mean the half of it, anyway, and it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s like arguing about religion. “I can’t listen to any of that stuff, anyway, Miss O’K, tell you the truth,” Sliv says. “In one ear, gone tomorrow.”

“Where’s a mug like me supposed to go to church, Miss O’K?” Sliv says. “I never seen a Cathedral like this before. Where’s the priests and nuns and  candles?” I tell Sliv they’re all dead in the water.

Don’t forget the man-made ditch, I say to The Tommies. Don’t forget our first job here as Tommies is to clean up the hole in the ground made by men, for men.

“You can’t drink it,” Linda Connolly says to me. “You can’t swim in it. You can’t fish in it. You can’t wash your clothes in it. We’re too scared to even pee in it.” Why? I wonder. Where’s the pollution coming from? “Nobody knows,” she says.

Linda Connolly is becoming quite a soldier. She reports back after her first reconnaissance mission. “It’s because of a nuclear power plant down canal,” she says. “Right
on
the canal.” Saddle up, I say. This is going to be quite a ride.

We find ourselves in the Hat City, where O’Kells have gone before. It was here that Father started to invent, here where Tom was born at the Home For Hatters, and here where we find the Consolidated Nuclear Energy Station where the Chapeau Hat Plant used to be. The building is a massive metal sprawl behind cement walls, topped off with a foot of barbed wire dusted brown with rust. The only thing missing is a moat. We go to the gate but we
get nowhere. “You’ll have to talk to our communications department,” the guard says with a wheeze. “And they’re not back until Tuesday.”

The Hat City is no place to wait for anything. I suppose the people here should be grateful for nuclear power after everyone stopped wearing hats, but they are scarce and stooped, bareheaded, as if to be anywhere near the canal is to be counted among the walking dead.

The communications department, so-called, is a woman with bifocals who

tells us nothing. “We know you’re to blame,” Linda Connolly says to her.  “There’s no doubt about it. We’ve got the data from all kinds of tests.” Bifocals says: “That’s your opinion.” Linda Connolly says: “It’s fact, not opinion.” She hands her a short stack of research. Bifocals says: “You have your facts, and we have ours.”

We’re camped out now with our tents, circling the cement wall of the Hat Plant like a tent city. We take turns carrying the signs and picketing Consolidated Nuclear for the benefit of the television cameras. The Tommies shout: “
Nuke Consolidated
! No more nukes!” Not very original, but it’s what the TV reporters expect. We have all the time and money in the world. We can wait for Big Brother to break down.

Bifocals finally asks for a meeting with me, alone. “There’s something you need to know,” she says, and then she tells me.
Impossible
, I say.

He grows more obese, more grotesque every time I see him, as if each awful moment in his life invaded his flesh to poison his soul. His skin is still smooth as a baby’s, but splotched a nasty red like a baby’s rash. The hair is all white now but his brush cut is chopped even shorter than before, like his hair lost all desire to grow years ago. He wears a pinstriped suit immaculately tailored to contain what he has become, a corrupt old bastard ready to rape anyone who gets in his way, the way he raped me when I was just a girl. “It was the perfect place for a nuclear power plant, if you must know the truth,” Tom tells me. “The hat industry was dead. There were no
jobs. There was no hope in that godawful town. It was a walk in the park to put the plant right on the canal, right where the old Chapeau plant used to be. The Hat City just rolled over and played dead. The Aldermen told us we were doing them a favor.” Tom’s desk is every bit as dark and massive as he is, a barricade made of mahogany, and he swings in his high-backed black swivel chair to turn his face toward me and away from the light. My hate for him is so pure it feels like a drug.