Red Clocks (2 page)

“Sorry, it’s an extra-busy day. Halloween and all.”

“Why does Halloween make it busier?”

“It’s a holiday.”

“Not a
national
holiday. Banks are open and the mail is delivered.”

“You will need,” says Crabby slowly, carefully, “to call the office.”

The biographer cried the first time it failed. She was waiting in line to buy floss, having pledged to improve
her dental hygiene now that she was going to be a parent, and her phone rang: one of the nurses, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but your test was negative,” the biographer saying thank you, okay, thank you and hitting
END
before the tears started. Despite the statistics and Kalbfleisch’s “This doesn’t work for everyone,” the biographer had thought it would be easy. Squirt in millions of sperm from a nineteen-year-old
biology major, precisely timed to be there waiting when the egg flies out; sperm and egg collide in the warm tunnel—how could fertilization
not
happen?
Don’t be stupid anymore,
she wrote in her notebook, under
Immediate action required.

She drives west on Highway 22 into dark hills dense with hemlock, fir, and spruce. Oregon has the best trees in America, soaring and shaggy winged, alpine sinister.
Her tree gratitude mutes her doctor resentment. Two hours from his office, her car crests the cliff road and the church steeple juts into view. The rest of town follows, hunched in rucked hills sloping to the water. Smoke coils from the pub chimney. Fishing nets pile on the shore. In Newville you can watch the sea eat the ground, over and over, unstopping. Millions of abyssal thalassic acres.
The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.

Central
Coast Regional H.S. seeks history teacher (U.S./World). Bachelor’s degree required. Location: Newville, Oregon, fishing village on quiet ocean harbor, migrating whales. Ivy League–educated principal is committed to creating dynamic, innovative learning environment.

The biographer applied because of
quiet ocean harbor
and no mention of teaching experience. Her brief interview consisted of the
principal, Mr. Fivey, plot-summarizing his favorite seafaring novels and mentioning twice the name of the college he had gone to. He said she could do the teacher-certification course over two summers. For seven years she has lived in the lee of fog-smoked evergreen mountains, thousand-foot cliffs plunging straight down to the sea. It rains and rains and rains. Log trucks stall traffic on the cliff
road, locals catch fish or make things for tourists, the pub hangs a list of old shipwrecks, the tsunami siren is tested monthly, and students learn to say “miss” as if they were servants.

She starts class by following her daily plan, but when she sees chins mashing into fists, she decides to abandon it. Tenth-grade global history, the world in forty weeks, with a foolish textbook she is contractually
obliged to use, can’t be stood without detours. These kids, after all, have not been lost yet. Staring up at her, jaws rimmed with baby fat, they are perched on the brink of not giving a shit. They still give a shit, but not, most of them, for long. She instructs them to close their books, which they are happy to do. They watch her with a new stillness. They will be told a story, can be
children again, of whom nothing is asked.

“Boadicea was queen of a Celtic tribe called the Iceni in what is now Norfolk, England. The Romans had invaded a while back and were ruling the land. Her husband died and left his fortune to her and their daughters, but the Romans ignored his will, took the fortune, flogged Boadicea, and raped the daughters.”

One kid: “What’s ‘flog’?”

Another: “Beat
the frock out of.”

“The Romans had screwed her royally”—somebody laughs softly at this, for which the biographer is grateful—“and in 61 CE she led her people in rebellion. The Iceni fought hard. They forced the Romans all the way back to London. But bear in mind that the Roman soldiers had lots of incentive to win, because if they didn’t, they could expect to be cooked on skewers and/or boiled
to death, after seeing their own intestines being pulled out of their bodies.”

“That rules,” says a boy.

“Eventually the Roman forces were too much for the Iceni. Boadicea either poisoned herself to avoid capture or got sick; either way, she died. The win column isn’t the point. The point is …” She stops, aware of twenty-four little gazes.

Into the silence the soft laugher ventures: “Don’t
frock with a woman?”

They like this. They like slogans.

“Well,” the biographer says, “
sort
of. But more than that. We also have to consider—”

The bell.

A burst of scraping and sliding, bodies glad to go. “Bye, miss!” “Have a good day, miss.”

The soft laugher, Mattie Quarles, idles near the biographer’s desk. “So is that where the word ‘bodacious’ comes from?”

“I wish I could say yes,” says
the biographer, “but ‘bodacious’ originated in the nineteenth century, I think. Mix of ‘bold’ and ‘audacious.’ Good instinct, though!”

“Thanks, miss.”

“You really don’t need to call me that,” says the biographer for the seven thousandth time.

After school she stops at the Acme, grocery and hardware and drugstore combined. The pharmacist’s assistant is a boy—now a young man—she taught in her
first year at Central Coast, and she hates the moment each month when he hands her the white bag with the little orange bottle.
I know what this is for,
his eyes say. Even if his eyes don’t actually say that, it’s hard to look at him. She brings other items to the counter (unsalted peanuts, Q‑tips) as if somehow to disguise the fertility medication. The biographer can’t recall his name but remembers
admiring, in class, seven years ago, his long black lashes—they always looked a little wet.

Waiting on the hard little plastic chair, under elevator music and fluorescent glare, the biographer takes out her notebook. Everything in this notebook must be in list form, and any list is eligible.
Items for next food shop. Kalbfleisch’s necktie designs. Countries with most lighthouses per capita.

She starts a new one:
Accusations from the world.

1. You’re too old.

2. If you can’t have a child the natural way, you shouldn’t have one at all.

3. Every child needs two parents.

4. Children raised by single mothers are more liable to rape/murder/drug-take/score low on standardized tests.

5. You’re too old.

6. You should’ve thought of this earlier.

7. You’re selfish.

8. You’re doing something
unnatural.

9. How is that child going to feel when she finds out her father is an anonymous masturbator?

10. Your body is a grizzled husk.

11. You’re too old, sad spinster!

12. Are you only doing this because you’re lonely?

“Miss? Prescription’s ready.”

“Thank you.” She signs the screen on the counter. “How’s your day been?”

Lashes turns up his palms at the ceiling.

“If it makes you feel
any better,” says the biographer, “this medication is going to make me have a foul-smelling vaginal discharge.”

“At least it’s for a good cause.”

She clears her throat.

“That’ll be one hundred fifty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents,” he adds.

“Pardon me?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“A hundred and fifty-seven dollars? For ten pills?”

“Your insurance doesn’t cover it.”

“Why the eff not?”

Lashes
shakes his head. “I wish I could, like, slip it to you, but they’ve got cameras on every inch of this bitch.”

From the halt hen two eggs come down, one cracked, one sound. “Thank you,” the mender tells the hen, a Dark Brahma with a red wattle and brindled feathers. Because she limps badly—is not one of the winners—this hen is the mender’s favorite. A daily happiness to feed her, save her from foxes and rain.

Sound egg in her pocket, she pours the goats’ grain. Hans and Pinka are out rambling
but will be home soon. They know she can’t protect them if they ramble too far. Three shingles have come off the goat-shed roof; she needs nails. Under the shed there used to sleep a varying hare. Brown in summer, white in winter. He hated carrots and loved apples, whose seeds, poisonous to rabbits, the mender made sure to remove. The hare was so cuddly she didn’t care that he stole alfalfa from
the goats or strewed poo pellets on her bed when she let him inside. One morning she found his body ripped open, a sack of furry blood. Rage poured up her throat at the fox or coyote, the bobcat,
you took him,
but they were only feeding themselves,
you shouldn’t have took him,
prey is scarce in winter,
but he was mine
. She cried while digging. Laid the hare beside her aunt’s old cat, two small
graves under the madrone.

In the cabin the mender stirs the egg with vinegar and shepherd’s purse for the client who’s coming later, an over-bleeder. The drink will staunch her clotty, aching flow. She’s got no job and no insurance.
I can pay you with batteries,
her note said. Vinegary egg screwed tight in a glass jar and tucked into the mini fridge, beside a foil-wrapped wedge of cheddar. The
mender wants the cheese right now, this minute, but cheese is only for Fridays. Black licorice nibs are for Sundays.

She mostly eats from the forest. Watercress and bitter cress, dandelion, plantain. Glasswort and chickweed. Bear grass, delicious when grilled. Burdock root to mash and fry. Miner’s lettuce and stinging nettle and, in small quantities, ghost pipe. (She loves the white stalks boiled
with lemon and salt, but too much ghost pipe can kill you.) And she gleans from orchards and fields: hazelnuts, apples, cranberries, pears. If she could live off the land alone, without person-made things, she would. She hasn’t figured out how yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. Show them how Percivals do.

Her mother was a Percival. Her aunt was a Percival. The mender has been a Percival since
age six, when her mother left her father. Which was because her father went away most Friday afternoons and didn’t come back until Monday and never said why. “A woman wants to know why,” said the mender’s mother. “At least give me that, fuckermo. Names and places! Ages and occupations!” They drove west across Oregon’s high desert, over the Cascade Mountains, mother smoking and daughter spitting
out the window, to the coast, where the mender’s aunt ran a shop that sold candles, runes, and tarot packs. On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean. “But when does it stop?” “Never,” said her aunt. “It’s perpetual, though impermanent.” And the mender’s mother said, “Pretentious much?”

The mender would take pretentious any day over high.

She lies
naked with the cat by the stove’s heat, hard steady rain on the roof and the woods black and the foxes quiet, owlets asleep in their nest box. Malky leaps from her lap, paws at the door. “You want to get soaked, little fuckermo?” Gold-splashed eyes watch her solemnly. Gray flanks tremble. “You have a girlfriend you need to meet?” She shakes off the blanket and opens the door, and he flashes out.

Whenever Lola came over, Malky hid; she thought the mender lived in the cabin alone. “Don’t you get frightened,” said Lola, “all the way up here in the middle of nothing?”

Silly bitch, trees are not nothing. Nor are cats, goats, chickens, owls, foxes, bobcats, black-tailed deer, long-eared bats, red-tailed hawks, dark-eyed juncos, bald-faced hornets, varying hares, mourning cloak butterflies,
black vine weevils, and souls fled from their mortal casings.

Alone
human
-wise.

She hasn’t heard from Lola since that day of the shouting. No notes left in her mailbox at the P.O., no visits. It was more than shouting. A fight. Lola, in her adorable green dress, was fighting. The mender was not. The mender barely said a word.

Past noon, but the goats aren’t home yet. Cramp of worry. Last year
they wrecked a campsite near the trail. Not their fault: some dumb tourist left food all over the woods. When the mender found them, the guy was pointing a rifle at Hans. “You better keep them on your property from here on out,” he said, “because I love goat stew.”

In Europe they once held trials for misbehaving animals. Wasn’t just the witches they hanged. A pig was sent to the gallows for eating
a child’s face, a mule roasted alive for having been penetrated by its human master. For the unnatural act of laying an egg, a rooster was burned at the stake. Bees found guilty of stinging a man to death were suffocated in the hive, their honey destroyed, lest murder honey infect the mouths that ate it.

She with murder honey on her teeth shall bleed salt from where two curves of thigh skin meet.
Tasting honey from the body of a bee with devil-face shall start this salty blood. Faces of bees who have done murder do resemble those of starving dogs, whose eyes grow more human looking as they starve.
Apis mellifera, Apis diabolus
. If a town be swarmed by bees with devil-face, and those bees do drip honey into open mouths, the body of a woman with honey tooth, bleeding thigh salt, shall be
lashed to whatever stake will hold her. The bee swarm shall be gathered in a barrel and dumped upon the fire that eats her. The honey teeth do catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too, and the lips. Bees’ bodies when burning do smell of hot marrow; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on.