by Leon Rooke
The sacred tears of the young bride Psyche.
Whatever one wants.
Get it here.
18
CRADLE SONG
High condominiums wall the city. The sun knows it has been betrayed. On a balcony in one of these, with mortar and pestle a woman wrapped in a golden sari grinds a thousand stones from which will be extracted one drop of precious tea. The tea is a cure for a sick daughter. Why otherwise would she do it?
THE WINDS OF CHANGE, THE WINDS OF HOPE, THE WINDS OF DISASTER
The Winds of Change boarded the Western Comet in Be-ceuse St. Jour; the Winds of Hope came aboard the next day in a small Ontario resort town sitting by a body of water so still and blue people often forget its existence. Where the Winds of Disaster joined the train is unrecorded although a quick scan of newspapers dated May 18 has led many to believe these winds took to the train at Neepawa Junction on or about that date. In Neepawa Junction thousands had taken sick from drinking tainted water and many died.
What is known is that the Winds of Change settled wherever space was to be found, that is to say, throughout the 14 cars constituting the Western Comet at that point in its journey. In the small Ontario town with the still blue lake, Point Pigeon, for reasons best explained by railroad officials, 19 more cars were added to the train, and it was in the first-class compartments of these 19 that the Winds of Hope secured themselves, immediately falling into a deep sleep, and un-able, therefore, to shed any light on the timetable under which their cousins, the Winds of Disaster, operated.
It is understood that in Chiogga Flats, 700 miles west, again for reasons best left to railroad czars to explain, an additional engine and another 66 cars were attached to the Western Comet, 34 of these 66 conveying 510 new automobiles of the Nissan Motor Company, the balance of these 32 cars empty but the siding latticed in such a manner that one could be forgiven for thinking them to be cattle cars. Among the 99 cars now constituting the Western Comet as it made its journey westward were 17 chemical tanker cars containing as yet unidentified compounds of a highly volatile nature. Where and when the tankers became a part of the convoy, or their intended destination, has not been established.
The Winds of Disaster, naturally enough preferring to keep their own company, largely confined themselves to the cattle cars. They preferred the unadorned, outdoorsy character of these structures, the acrid smell, the bitter whip of undefined, indiscriminate winds about their shoulders, the wicked unrelenting noise of metal grinding upon metal. The night view through which they passed thrilled them with its phantasmic abundance, no less than did the daytime sight of a land so locked under hellish freeze that scarcely anything moved, the sky an uncaring blue so frosty and brittle in appearance it clearly seemed an oval made of the most imperfect glass.
A student couple from Orebro, Sweden, aboard the Western Comet since Montreal, were first to experience the Winds of Change. It simultaneously entered their flesh the third day of their journey, on the outskirts of a nondescript prairie city that some on the train said reminded them of a cribbed baby. The Winds of Change, in any event, rode with this couple along the slow rails curving about the city, intense in the breasts of this couple as a brigade of dancers, until the long train at last broke free of city life.
“What was that?” asked the young man, and the young woman seated beside him, clutching his hand, suddenly overcome with the desire for something achingly cold to satisfy her thirst, replied in a high singing voice, “The Winds of Change, my love, the Winds of Change!”
The young man, until that moment believing his body had sat apart from him in a wet, barren cave the entire length of his life, beheld at once that he was now cast anew into a world of wonders. Whereas the girl, who previously had slept on pillows of stone, her mother’s jewels in pawn to the profiteers of sunny Orebro, her life restricted to the shallows, now felt as easy in the world as a feather afloat on air.
The second party to succumb to the Winds of Change was a woman named Ana Coombs. Ana Coombs lived in an outlying district of the town, an area known as the Forks Reclamation Project, through which at one time had run a span of rail tracks wide as Rainy River Lake, wide as Lac St. Jean of the Cross, wider than those, these tracks and the attendant buildings composing the now rotted terminal summoning in its heyday an array of trains from every conceivable direction on the continent. In recent times 68 of these 70 tracks had been removed, the land ceded by government edict to the Forks Reclamation Project, a development still after lengthy decades mired in its First Phase, with parkland, roads, electricity, waste disposal, and other amenities yet to come, but on the drawing boards let us say; in the meanwhile some 6,000 beleaguered souls, among them Ana Coombs, called it home.
Ana Coombs was at the kitchen sink washing in mild soap and lukewarm water heated on a wood stove three pairs of white cotton stockings. She raised her eyes to stare out the window at the swaying train. She saw a young man with blond hair and a thoughtful face. He seemed to be looking at her with an expression of sheer delight. It was then that Ana Coombs felt the Winds of Change shift through her like a tangle of birds in sudden plunge from the sky.
“Excuse me,” she said, “I believe I must sit down.”
The man seated at the table in Ana Coombs’ kitchen said, “I don’t know why O’Toole feels responsible for every thought your sister has.”
“I would like more coffee,” he added, “but so far you have not invited me to help myself.”
Ana Coombs’ face was flushed, her heart was racing, and she did not immediately reply.
The man walked around the table to the coffee pan atop the wood stove and refilled his cup, which was a cup made to resemble a grinning monkey, a slot in the curved tail for easy handling.
“O’Toole’s a sap,” the man said. “If he holds himself re-sponsible for every thought entering your sister’s mind, then his will be a long, sad story.”
“That’s right,” Ana Coombs said. “O’Toole isn’t responsible for how she fixes her hair. He isn’t responsible for the lipstick shade she wears. Maybe for her shoes. I am not sure about the shoes.”
Ana Coombs or the man, or both together should they have chosen to do so, could have turned their heads and had a good look at Ana Coombs’ sister, Mary Alicia Coombs, asleep beside O’Toole on the high double bed in the nearby room. Until a year ago the bed and the room, in fact the entire house, had been the refuge of old Mrs. Coombs. Mrs. Coombs, the sisters’ grandmother, once they had finished high school, had packed off the girls into the care of the world.
Now they were back.
The cup of the grinning monkey had belonged to old Mrs. Coombs.
A coffee table in the adjoining room, constructed of blackest gaboon and so hard it had endured 99 years without receiving a single scratch, sat on a faded oval carpet in front of a lumpy Empire sofa, the sofa covered with a worn fabric depicting ancient sailing vessels, and it was here that Ana Coombs took herself.
“What’s bugging you?” the man asked Ana Coombs.
She gave attention to her short, thick legs stretched out on the coffee table, refusing to look at him.
“It would seem,” he said, “that someone has ruffled Ana Coombs’ feathers.”
Ana Coombs laughed, delighted with the vision of herself as a 48-year-old woman covered over with chicken feathers, rising with a rooster’s crow each and every dawn, laying the odd egg, pecking at gravel, scratching here and there in the mecca of the Reclamation yards with her brood of utterly uninteresting chicks.
“I have felt the Winds of Change,” Ana Coombs said. “I believe it would make me happy if this minute you went in there and waked your friend O’Toole and you and he left this house, never to be seen again.”
The man said nothing for what seemed to both of them a very long while. Then he said, “Yeah, well, maybe your sister might have a word or two to say about that.”
Ana Coombs said, “Why don’t you go and ask her?”
So the man did.
Ana Coombs smiled as she heard her sister emerge from sleep and say to the man, in a voice astonishing in its petulance, “That was grandmother’s cup. You are not allowed to use that cup.”
A woman named Dora Bell, also living in the Forks Reclam-ation Project, was the third party to experience the Winds of Change. She had run fresh water into a goldfish bowl, the bowl itself in the form of a large fish. Dora Bell was returning the bowl to its usual table by the front window when the Winds of Change reached inside her, lodging like a cluster of grapes inside her chest. She momentarily confused the Winds of Change with the bouts of indigestion which normally troubled her each morning, and thus for some minutes remained on her knees watching the fish poke about in their new clean water and speaking to these golden fish in the softly bantering manner that Dora Bell believed to be perfectly normal. Then her sight shifted above the bowl to take in that view presenting itself outside her window. The train. A woman exceedingly blond in her composition was looking straight into her soul. Her mouth, Dora Bell saw, was wide open. She seemed to be frantically waving something, perhaps a yellow handkerchief. Then a young man’s excited face appeared beside the woman’s, and his mouth too was wide open. In that instant Dora Bell saw as if in a dream her front door blowing open, the fish rising and swimming paths of sunlight towards some kind of natural home in a distant sea. A split-second later it came to Dora Bell that she had been struck by the Winds of Change.
The first mission she gave herself was to wash out the empty fish bowl and leave it on the drainboard to dry. As her second mission, she spent some minutes writing down the precise details of the door blowing open, the flight of goldfish through the sky, the open mouths of the two Nordic beauties aboard the Western Comet, the drumming in her heart when finally she closed the door. She made no mention of the Winds of Change. When she was done writing she neatly folded the paper and carefully placed it inside a porcelain jar which sat in plain sight on an elaborately-stitched Cuban lace doily on her mother’s old maple dressing table. Here were contained all her dreams, these dreams now and forever corrupted, altered, and yellowed by aromas peculiar to the jar, the jar being one presented to her by her mother long ago, at that time filled with a scented ointment sworn to stave off any and all unwanted pregnancies, the jar emptied of this ointment since long ago because Dora Bell in those days had been aware of her mother’s thrifty nature and thus had doubled her mother’s every prescribed dosage.
“There,” she said in a voice she thought of as her mother’s, “now go away and play and please do not soil your pretty dress.”
When done with these and other pressing chores, Dora Bell hastily packed a small yellow bag that still carried store tags attesting to the bag’s virginity, saw that all doors and windows were locked, with some agitation arranged a favourite hat on her head at the hall mirror, a Toledo hat triple-feathered above the ear and boasting in full-sized facsimile a luscious Gadaffi peach. She got into her Nissan Fury, and drove a weedy lane east out of the Forks Reclamation Project for the first time in so many years that she scarcely could find the way. She had to rely entirely on her instincts, which thankfully the Winds of Change had refined into a condition altogether unusual for Dora Bell.
A boy of twelve was one of the few other parties in the area succumbing that day to the Winds. For him it was neither the Winds of Change nor the Winds of Hope, but the Winds of Disaster.
Each day for the past year, usually around sunset, the boy had been visiting the sick old man who was reputedly his grandfather. The old man lived alone in a derelict house close to the railroad tracks, a house not yet within the embrace of the Forks Reclamation Project and one which the old man’s wife and children, no less than his grandchildren, had long insisted he sell. He had refused through these many years, and through as many his wife and children, no less than his grandchildren, would have nothing to do with him. Repeatedly the boy had been forbidden to call upon the old man – he had been admonished, whipped, even shut away in one of the Project’s abandoned sheds where broken bicycles, old kites, and bag upon bag of hardened concrete were stored. To avoid this punishment, a year ago the boy had begun lying, had taken to reviling the old man with his every breath, whereas in fact over the past year he had secretly visited the old man every day.
In warm weather the old man placed a stool outside his front door and sat on the stool throughout the day. In earlier times this or that party from the Old Forks, long before it became a reclamation project, would roll up one or another log from the log pile at the side of the house, and join him. Nowadays, all of these old friends were dead, and his sole companion was the boy.
During the year the old man had held the boy’s attention through stories of the plagues of Egypt. He told him of the plague of the first born, of darkness, of hail and birds, lice, frogs, flies, the plague of blood, the plague of murrain – one plague for each day. Today the old man had told him of the plague of the 365th day, otherwise known as the plague of finality or the plague of the final plague, the plague of the last suffering.
“There are no more plagues to tell you about,” the old man said, “so you can go home. You can tell my wife and daughters and grandchildren a plague be upon them.”
The boy was distressed. It disappointed him enormously that there were so few genuine plagues, a mere 365, and he had told the old man in no uncertain terms that he was mistaken.
“I am never mistaken,” the old man said, “as to the plagues of Egypt.”
“Then there are other plagues, plagues not confined to Egypt,” the boy said. “Tell me of those.”
“The plagues of Egypt are the plagues of all places,” said the old man, “the plagues for all eternity. ”
“That’s foolish,” said the boy.
“There are 365 plagues, no more, no less.”
“You are mistaken,” said the boy.
“I am never mistaken.”
Now the boy was walking home along the railroad tracks, sorrowful that he had no means of filling his tomorrows and irritated by the sum of life’s affairs as reckoned by his teacher. He was convinced in his mind that plagues were innumerable and sick in heart at this year he had wasted in secret visits to this old man whose 365 plagues barely touched upon so many of those very plagues afflicting his own existence practically from the moment he emerged from his mother’s womb. His parents were right, the old man was vile, a stubborn senile old fool who long ago should have surrendered his broken-down house to the great powers charged with the responsibility of making the Forks Reclamation Project a reality enriching to all who might be so lucky to call it home.
The old man’s final words to him had been as follows: “If you are so keen on believing there is one scrap of respectable plague beyond the 365 I have enumerated, then you must go away and invent the new one yourself. But when you do, don’t come and tell me about it – first and foremost because I will be dead, and, second, because it will not be a plague in which I or any other person of any integrity would have the faintest interest.”
So the boy was a ready recipient for the Winds of Disaster that morning when he stepped off the tracks to allow the Western Comet unobstructed passage.
He saw no Swedes’ radiant faces looking to share their joy from behind a grimy train window.
He saw instead a tumult of winds whirling inside the 32 cattle cars of the Western Comet, obviously the Winds of Disaster, he rapidly concluded, since their enraged faces, their deformed limbs, the lethal manner in which they fought for dominion over each other and over each inch of space was exactly as the old man had described them in his recital of the 99th plague of the 365 plagues of Egypt, the plague of the Winds of Disaster.
“They gore and maim each other,” the old man had said, “until they work themselves into a state of utter fury, and it is then that they enclose themselves as one howling entity and sweep through Egypt or wherever they may be, crippling or killing all living things within their path and only abating in this mischief when their limbs
betray them and their throats have grown hoarse.”
The boy saw this malevolent fury building in each of the 32 cars passing so slowly before his eyes, he saw the loosening latticework through which the Winds of Disaster were ever streaking, the black swirling Winds of Disaster shrieking above each of these cars black as the water of Lake Neepawa, black as the black waters of the Forks’ own black waters of River Aryan, blacker than these, and when moments later the 17 shiny tanker cars shuttled by with screaming wheels it came to him in a flash that the Winds of Disaster were not mindlessly whirling, but assembling.
The Winds of Hope had in the meanwhile ridden the West-ern Comet since Point Pigeon in agreeable comfort, content in mind and body and in no mood to meddle. The long train-creep through the frozen tundra had scarcely triggered a twitch in their eyelids; the extended layover in city after city and in rustic wilderness where their transport sat idly breathing within the shadow of tall trees weighed down by ice had not tempted them to bestir themselves, and their entry into the prairie lands had only raised to new heights of noble contemplation their sense of justified fatigue. The Winds of Hope had in truth enjoyed a sound and restful sleep through much of what most of their kind beheld as yet another tedious, all but purposeless journey, one done for show, done merely, one might almost contend, to establish yet again their benign ageless presence within an undeserving environment. A few from time to time briefly snatched themselves awake, some arousing themselves sufficiently to note the fragile work done by the Winds of Change in this or that wretched little house or crumbling tower constituting, for instance, the Forks Reclamation Project. Such was of little concern to them, however, for they were inclined to view all such acts as frivolities of their weaker sisters, acts not at all in accord with those high-minded, dignified standards of behaviour that the Winds of Hope had long ago mandated for themselves.
True, the odd member of their group, slumbering beside you one minute, might be gone the next, but these were by and large untrained and undisciplined junior delegates or duffers of the old school, gone completely round the bend.