by Ann
Though she was occupied with household tasks, and often with emergency situations, Mother seemed obsessed with ferreting out the identity of Cory’s infant’s father; Cory’s secret lover, as Mother called him with a bitter twist of her lips. Yet it seemed to give her a prideful sort of pleasure that her eldest daughter had not only had a secret lover at one time in her life (the baby being irrefutable proof of this) but had one still – despite the fact that no lover had stepped forward to claim the baby, or the baby’s mother; and that Cory, once the prettiest of the girls, was now disfigured by skin rashes covering most of her body. And since her pregnancy her lower body remained bloated while her upper body had become emaciated. Mother herself was frequently ill, with flaming rashes, respiratory illnesses, intestinal upsets, bone aches, uncertain vision; like most of us she was plagued with ticks – the smallest species of deer tick, which could burrow into the skin, particularly into the scalp, unnoticed, there to do its damage, and after weeks drop off, to be found on the floor, swollen with blood, black, shiny, about the size and apparent texture of a watermelon seed, deceptive to the eye. By degrees Mother had shrunk to a height of about four feet eight inches, very unlike the statuesque beauty of certain old photographs; with stark white matted hair, and pale silvery gray eyes as keen and suspicious as ever, and a voice so hard, harsh, brassy, and penetrating, a shout from her had the power to paralyze any of us where we stood…though we knew or believed ourselves safely hidden from her by a wall, or more than a single wall. Even the eldest of her sons, Kit, Hewett, Dale, tall ragged-bearded men who absented themselves from the compound for days at a stretch, were intimidated by Mother’s authority, and, like poor Cory, shrank in guilty submission before her. Again and again Mother interrogated Cory, ‘Who is your secret lover? Why are you so ashamed of him?’ and Cory insisted she did not know who her lover was, or could not remember – ‘Even if I see his face sometimes, in my sleep, I can’t remember his name. Or who he was. Or who he claimed to be.’
Yet Mother continued her investigation, risking Father’s displeasure in so ruthlessly questioning all males with whom she came into contact, not excluding Cory’s cousins and uncles and even Cory’s own brothers! – even those ravaged men and boys who made their homes, so to speak, in the drainage pipes beyond the compound, and whose services the family sometimes enlisted in times of emergency. But no one confessed; no one acknowledged Cory’s baby as his. And one day when Cory lay ill upstairs in her attic room and I was entrusted with caring for the baby, feeding it from a bottle, in the kitchen, Mother came into the room with a look of such determination I felt terror for the baby, and hugged it to my bosom, and Mother said, ‘Give me the bastard, girl,’ and I said, ‘No Mother, don’t make me,’ and Mother said, ‘Are you disobeying me? Give me the bastard,’ and I said, backing away, ‘No Mother, Cory’s baby belongs to Cory, and it isn’t a bastard.’ Mother advanced upon me, furious; her eyes whitely rimmed and her fingers – well, what talons they had become! – outstretched; her mouth twisting, working, distending itself – and I saw that in the midst of her passion she was forgetting what she meant to do, and that this might save Cory’s baby. For often in those days when the family had little to eat except worm-riddled apples from the old orchard, and stunted blackened potatoes, and such wild game (or wildlife) as the boys could hunt down, we often forgot what we were doing in the very act of doing it; and in the midst of speaking we might forget the words we meant to speak, for instance water, rainbow, grief, love, filth, God, deer tick… and Father, who had become somber-minded with the onset of age, worried above all that as a family we might one day lose all sense of ourselves as a family should we forget, collectively, and in the same moment, the sacred word family.
And indeed Mother was forgetting. And indeed within the space of less than thirty seconds she had forgotten. She stared at the living thing, the quivering palpitating creature in my arms, with its soft flat shallow face, its tiny recessed eyes, its mere holes for nostrils, above all its small pursed mouth set like a manta ray’s in its shallow face, and could not, simply could not, recall the word baby; or infant; or Cory’s bastard. And shortly afterward there was a commotion of some kind outside, apparently rather close to the compound gate, and a sound of gunfire, familiar enough yet always jarring when unexpected, and Mother hurried out to investigate. And Cory’s baby continued to suck hungrily at the bottle’s frayed rubber nipple and all was safe for the time being.
But Cory, poor Cory, died a few days later: Early one morning Lona discovered her in her attic bed, her eyes opened wide and her pale mouth contorted, the bedclothes soaked in blood…and when in horror Lona drew the sheet away she saw that Cory’s breasts had been partly devoured, and her chest cavity exposed; she must have been attacked in the night by rats, and had been too weak or too terrified to call for help. Yet her baby was sleeping only a few feet away in its antique cradle, untouched, sunk to that most profound and enviable level of sleep at which organic matter seems about to pass over again into the inorganic. The household rats with their glittering amaranthine eyes and stiff hairless tails had spared it! – had missed it entirely!
Lona snatched up the baby and ran screaming downstairs for help; and so fierce was she in possession she could scarcely be forced to surrender the sleepy infant to the rest of us: Her fingers had to be pried open. In a dazed gloating voice she said, ‘It is my baby. It is Lona’s baby now.’ Father sharply rebuked her: ‘It is the family’s baby now.’
And Fifi too had a baby; or, rather, writhed and screamed in agony for a day and a night, before giving birth to a piteous undersized creature that lived for only a few minutes. Poor sister! – in the weeks that followed only our musical evenings, at which she excelled, gave her solace. If Dale tried to touch her, let alone comfort her, she shrank from him in repugnance. Nor would she allow Father or any male to come near. Sometimes she crawled into my bed and hugged me in her cold bone-thin arms. ‘What I like best,’ she whispered ‘is the black waves that splash over us, at night.’ And my heart was so swollen with emotion, I could not say no, or Oh yes.
For suddenly we had taken up music. In the evenings by kerosene lamp. In the worst, the most nightmarish of times. We played such musical instruments as fell into our hands discovered here and there in the house, or by way of strangers at our gate desperate to barter anything in their possession for food. Kit took up the violin doubtfully at first and then with growing joy, for, it seemed, he had musical talent! – practicing for hours on the beautiful though badly scarified old violin that had once belonged to Grandfather (so we surmised: One of Grandfather’s portraits showed him as a child of eleven or twelve posed with the identical violin, then luminously gleaming, tucked under his chin); Jori took up the piccolo, which she shared with Vega; Hewett took up the drums, Dale the cymbals, Einar the oboe, Fifi the piano…and the rest of us sang, sang our hearts out, our collective voices sometimes frail as straws through which a rough careless wind blew but at other times, and always unpredictably, so harmonious, so strong, so commanding, our hearts beat hard in unquestioning love of one another and of any fate that might befall us. We sang after Mother’s death and we sang when a feculent wind blew from the Valley day after day bearing the odor of decomposing flesh and we sang, though our noses and throats filled with smoke, when fires raged in the dry woodland areas to the west, and then too a relentless wind blew upon us barricaded in our stone house atop a high hill, winds from several directions they seemed, intent upon seeking us out, carrying sparks to our sanctuary, destroying us in a paroxysm of fire as others, human and beast, were being destroyed shrieking in pain and terror…and how else for us to endure such odors, such sights, such sounds than to take up our instruments and play them, and sing, and sing and sing and sing until our throats were raw, how else.
Yet it became a time of joy and even feasting, since the cow was dying in any case and might as well be quickly slaughtered, when Father brought his new wife home to meet us: New Mother some of us called h
er, or Young Mother, and Old Mother that fierce stooped wild-eyed old woman was forgotten, the strangeness of her death lingering only in whispers for had she like Cory died of household rats? Had she like Erastus grown pimples, then boils, then tumors over her entire body, swelling bulbs of flesh that drained away life? had she drowned in the cistern, had she died of thirst and malnutrition locked away in a distant room of the house, had she died of infection, of heartbreak, of her own rage, of Father’s steely fingers closing about her neck…or had she not died at all but simply passed into oblivion, as the black waves splashed over her, and Young Mother stepped forward smiling to take her place…? Young Mother was stout and hearty-faced, plumply pretty about the eyes and cheeks, her color a rich earthen hue, her breasts capacious as large balloons filled to bursting with liquid, and she gave off a hot intoxicating smell of nutmeg, and small slippery flames darted when in a luxury of sighing, yawning, and stretching, she lifted with beringed hands the heavy mass of red-russet hair that hung between her shoulder blades, and fixed upon us her warm moist unblinking dark gaze. ‘Mother!’ we cried, even the eldest of us, ‘Oh Mother!’ begging would she hug us, would she fold us in those plump arms, press our faces against that bosom, each of us, all of us, weeping, in her arms, against her bosom, there. Cory’s baby was not maturing as it was believed babies should, nor had it been named since we could not determine whether it was male or female, or both, or neither; and this household vexation Young Mother addressed herself to at once. No matter Lona’s jealous love of the baby, Young Mother declared herself ‘practical-minded’: For why otherwise had Father brought her to this household but to reform it and give hope? She could not comprehend, she said, how and why an extra mouth, and in this case not only a useless but perhaps even a dangerous mouth, could be tolerated in a time of near famine, in violation of certain government edicts as she understood them. ‘Drastic remedies in drastic times,’ Young Mother said. Lona said, ‘I will give it my food. I will protect it with my life.’ And Young Mother simply repeated, smiling, her warm brown eyes easing like a caress over us all, ‘Drastic remedies in drastic times.’ There were those of us who loved Cory’s baby and felt an unreasoned joy in its very existence, for it was flesh of our flesh, it was the future of the family; yet there were others, among them not only the males, who seemed fearful of it, keeping their distance when it was fed or bathed and averting their eyes when it crawled into a room to nudge its head or mouth against a foot, an ankle, a leg. Though it had not matured in the usual way, Cory’s baby was considerably heavier than it had been at birth, and weighed now about forty pounds; but it was soft as a slug is soft, or an oyster; with an oyster’s shape; seemingly boneless; the hue of bread dough, and hairless. As its small eyes lacked an iris, being entirely white, it was believed to be blind; its nose was but a rudimentary pair of nostrils, mere holes in the center of its face; its fishlike mouth was deceptive in that it seemed to possess its own intelligence, being ideally formed, not for human speech, but for seizing, sucking, and chewing. Though it had at best only a cartilaginous skeleton, it did boast two fully formed rows of tiny needle-sharp teeth, which it was not shy of using, particularly when ravenous for food; and it was often ravenous. At such times it groped its way around the house by instinct, sniffing and quivering, and if by chance it was drawn by the heat of your blood to your bed it would burrow against you beneath the covers, and nudge, and nuzzle, and begin like any nursing infant to suck, virtually any part of the body though preferring of course a female’s breasts…and if not stopped in time it would bite, and chew, and eat…in all the brute innocence of appetite. So some of us surmised, though Lona angrily denied it, that Cory had not died of rat bites after all but of having been attacked and partly devoured by her own baby. (In this, Lona was duplicitous: taking care never to undress in Mother’s presence for fear that Mother’s sharp eye would take in the numerous wounds on her breasts, belly, and thighs.)
As the family had a custom of debating issues, in order that all divergent opinions might be honored, for instance should we pay the exorbitant price a cow or a she-goat now commanded, or should the boys be empowered to acquire one of these beasts however they could, for instance should we make an attempt to feed starving men, women, and children who gathered outside our fence, even if it was with food unfit for the family’s own consumption – so naturally the issue of Cory’s baby was taken up too, and threatened to split the family into two warring sides. For her part Mother argued persuasively that the baby was worthless, repulsive, and might one day be dangerous – not guessing that it had already proved dangerous, indeed; and for her part Lona argued persuasively that the baby, ‘Lona’s baby,’ as she persisted in calling it, was a living human being, a member of the family, one of us. Mother said hotly, ‘It is not one of us, girl, if by us you mean a family that includes me,’ and Lona said with equal heat, ‘It is one of us because it predates any family that includes you.’
So each of us argued in turn, and emotions ran high, and it was a curious phenomenon that many of us changed our minds repeatedly, now swayed by Mother’s reasoning, and now by Lona’s; now by Father, who spoke on behalf of Mother, or by Hewett, who spoke on behalf of Lona; or by Father, whose milky eyes gave him an air of patrician distinction and fair-mindedness, who spoke on behalf of Lona! The issue raged, and subsided, and raged again, and Mother dared not put her power to the vote for fear that Lona would prevail against her. Father acknowledged that however we felt about the baby it was our flesh and blood presumably, and embodied for us the great insoluble mystery of life…‘its soul bounded by its skull and its destiny no more problematic than the thin tubes that connect its mouth and its anus. Who are we to judge!’
Yet Mother had her way, as slyboots Mother was always to have her way…one morning soliciting the help of several of us, who were sworn to secrecy, and delighted to be her handmaidens, in a simple scheme: Lona being asleep in Cory’s old bed, Mother led the baby out of the house by holding a piece of bread soaked in chicken blood just in front of its nostrils, led it crawling with surprising swiftness across the hard-packed earth, to one of the barns, and, inside, led it to a dark corner where she lifted it, grunting, and lowered it carefully into an old rain barrel empty except for a wriggling mass of half-grown baby rats that squealed in great excitement at being disturbed, or at the smell of the blood-soaked bread which Mother dropped on them. We then nailed a cover in place; and, as Mother said, her color warmly flushed and her breath coming fast, ‘There – it is entirely out of our hands.’
And then one day it was spring. And Kit led a she-goat proudly into the kitchen, her bags primed with milk, swollen pink dugs leaking milk! How grateful we were, those of us who were with child, after the privations of so long a season, during which certain words had slipped from our memories, for instance she-goat, and milk, and as we realized, rainbow, for the rainbow too appeared, or reappeared, shimmering and translucent across the Valley. In the fire-ravaged plain was a sea of fresh green shoots and in the sky enormous dimpled clouds and that night we gathered around Fifi at the piano to play our instruments and sing. Father had passed away but Mother had remarried: a husky horseman whose white teeth flashed in his beard, and whose rowdy pinches meant love and good cheer, not hurt. We were so happy we debated turning the calendar ahead to the New Year. We were so happy we debated abolishing the calendar entirely and declaring it the year 1, and beginning Time anew.
His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood
Poppy Z. Brite
Poppy Z. Brite (1967–) is an American author who initially achieved success during the ‘new gothic’ boom after publishing several critically acclaimed novels. However, Brite’s work always contained more influence from Decadent-era French and English writers than the contemporary horror scene. ‘His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood’ (1990) is a direct but original nod to those writers; Brite’s strain of the weird is extravagantly and unrepentantly sensual. The writer is also influenced by the city of New Orleans, and has published
a series of contemporary novels focused on the New Orleans restaurant world. Much of Brite’s work features bisexual and gay characters, and her fiction from the 1990s must be considered ground-breaking for this reason also.