The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

  He notices the statue of Mary whose clothes and skin are the same white stone, making it impossible to tell if her clothes are part of her body or her body part of her clothes. At his feet, broken steel animal traps lie like severed jawbones.

  He climbs down the hill and hurries across a wooded lot. Through the foliage he glimpses the rows of clapboard houses on sloping streets, his mother’s white-washed church with its delicate needle-like steeple, the red-bricked library. Somehow he expected to be horrified, furious, or mournful, but Cartwright stands silent and unreal, as if behind glass.

  He discovers a boulder covered with dead bees. At the end of Maple Road, he scurries into his parent’s backyard. Right away he knows no one’s home. At this hour, his father is usually listening to fiddle music on the radio and his mother clanging pots and pans. He warily approaches the house, glances through a window. His room hasn’t changed; there is his poster of a windmill on one wall, his stack of Scientific Americans in the corner. His bed’s been left unmade, as if time stopped when he left home. His family refused to believe he’d grow up. That was always the problem. Through the living room window, he sees a cylindrical glass containing a yellow liquid. Its presence bothers him, so he leaps over to the tree and begins digging. He still feels guilty for burying his mother’s damned crucifix. He lifts up Christ, brushes dirt from his eyes, and drops him in the mailbox. Sam patters back into the bush, glad he didn’t have to confront his mother.

  Nearby, he hears a man’s voice: “Caesar ran barking in here and I never seen him since.”

  Sam races into the woods, runs in the direction of the beach. He pauses by his old school, observes the track, the football fields. He hears music, sees men in blue jackets milling in the parking lot. One of their silly dances. Sunlight catches the golden hair rising on top of a woman’s head and Sam feels a tug at his heart. In his mind, wooden-legged men do can-cans.

  He finally arrives at the cold windy beach, but no one is there.

  He has been waiting behind the hardwood shrub for hours. Fuzz-dappled leaves tickle his cheeks. Waves crash rhythmically, hypnotically. Before Sam are the bare components of the universe: water, sky, and earth. Yet whatever the universe contains, it does not include his sister. He decides to sneak back into town and find her. Then he hears a distant roar, rumblings, the sound of an avalanche, screams. A percussive pounding like fingers on a tabletop—and like a bullet, an object shoots into his line of vision.

  Not having seen Sue for eight years, he has no idea what she’ll look like, but he quickly concludes that this tall naked woman covered with red dots and black needles isn’t her. The woman crouches at the ocean’s edge, pulls at her hair, and pounds the earth so savagely, Sam is terrified. Best to head back into the woods, but then he hears a voice. “Sam, you forsook me … you forsook me.” My God—Sue’s voice? It’s Sue?

  His whole body convulses. Steadying himself he calls out, “Sue, is that you?”

  The woman stops moving.

  “It’s me. Sam.” His voice is clearer than he expected. “I’m here.”

  She darts around but sees only a quivering bush.

  “Please don’t be afraid. I look different, but I feel great.” He takes a deep breath and steps forward.

  Sue shrieks once, covers her mouth with both hands.

  “I’ve had an eventful trip. I see you’ve had your own adventures. You’ll have to tell me about them when we get on the ship.”

  She bats her eyelids twice. The wrinkles on her forehead smooth out. Sue takes one step and embraces the monster. The side of her head presses against his furry ears. Sam feels her fingertips nestling in the small of his back. The high-pitched ringing in his ears has stopped and a syrup-scented silence descends to drown out all but the sound of their breathing.

  PART FIVE

  Water

  When Sam and Sue boarded the ship, they didn’t know that their Mother was waiting inside. They thought they could sever their links to the past and remake themselves completely. They thought they could simply look in the mirror and say, “I want a thinner face, a more aquiline nose, eyebrows that don’t join like Boris Karloff’s but are lightly sketched curves.” They didn’t realize that their Mother was crouching in the darkness at the bottom of the ship and would unexpectedly spring up like the monster in an amusement-park funhouse and, with razor-tipped fingers, shred the tender buds of their freedom. How do I know? Hearken, Reader! Their Mother is narrating this section!

  There it is! Ha! I spit in your eye! You think that everyone shall have a story but me? You think I want to be the sourpuss everyone laughs at? “I may not be perfect,” you say, turning to the next chapter, “but at least I’m not like her.”

  A pox on thee! I am not a bitter old hag and refuse to play the villain. My desires are as real as anyone’s, my needs as legitimate, and if you think I’m but a stuck-up Jesus-freak, then it’s you who wear horse-blinders to bed. Remove them and behold! Realize there’s more than meets the eye! Read between the lines for a change, you stupid little ass wipe!

  I am not the wicked stepmother in this fairy’s tale. Sam and Sue were once in mine body and of mine body, for mine body created them. I gave birth to all the major characters in this book (except Franz, that perverted cockatoo; if he ever poked his hairsprayed head out of my vagina, I’d ram him back in again crying, “He’s not mine! Wait a few minutes and somebody else will come out.”)

  Everything on Earth cometh of me. I am the salt of our springs and the rock of this Earth. My blood floweth in my children’s veins and the arc of my bone is the contour of their skulls. I am their Mother, and God is our Father, our real Father, not that silly man tangled up in nets on the ocean.

  How horrid to be marooned, as we all are, in this atheistic century!

  May Mary shower us with sweet milk from her tender swollen breasts!

  When thou standest on the ground, thou art standing upon mine body. Put thy head into the sky and thou brushest against mine cerebral cortex. Each breath thou takest is of oxygen from mine nostrils; the food thou eatest was plucked from dirt wet with mine sweat, and the water thou drinkest is but mine urine that evaporated to the sky to return like God’s rain into our open mouths.

  You laugh at me, reader? Yea, I know you do. Yet I say hallelu. I cry, praise ye the Lord. “No one speaks like you,” you whine. “You’re not real; you’re a stereotype, like someone on Saturday Night Live.” Lo, each subculture hath its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot! Take thine head out of thine arse.

  Oh, I have tried to restrain my desires to mould my children. Yes, my own hands have maimed them. But I cannot help it. A Monster rises within me and I give in.

  Twenty-eight years ago, I spread my legs and Sam fell from my vagina like a rock. He had a hard head and left a dent in our linoleum that endures to this day, but I picked him up (Lord, he was heavy), washed him off, and as his lips closed over my breast, he sucked so loudly that everyone, my husband, the midwife, and Pastor Benson, gasped. Praise God and Jesus whose golden hair gleams in the sunlight and contains no dandruff whatsoever! I didn’t know the Lord back then. My husband—what a wiener he is—still gave me flowers for my hair and sat on bended knees to sing me “The Sailor’s Hornpipe.” He said I was beautiful and I beheld him, a warm fluid flooding my limbs. The angle of his hat set off his butcher’s-knife jawbone; his eyes flashed like sunlight on fishing tackle.

  Yet as my husband examined the baby swaddled in my arms, I noticed he had a crevice in his forehead, which I resented, for it divided a space that should be unbroken. Also, his head was spherical—I prefer cube-heads—and his hairline had receded, so his face resembled a swollen cabbage. What had happened to my husband?

  I feared he would claw this new life from my hands and hurl it into the sea or place it amongst forest rocks so similar in shape to it that Sam would be lost to me forever. Perhaps I should have offered love, not complaints. Regrets follow regr
ets, but I had to feed the Monster within. I turned my back to him.

  The next day he went out in his rowboat and, though he’d return for meals, he never leered at me again. Pastor Benson said that he’d found a mermaid—could that happen? Outside, the sky was so vast, I felt tinier than a freckle on my dear boy’s face. God descended to comfort me. He filled me; my bone marrow stirred like a sludge-filled river flowing, blood pooled in tight knots beneath my skin, and my vocal chords, long clenched tight as fists, unknotted, and I sang. How glorious to hear one’s own voice for the first time! Yea, the mind of Jesus is a gleaming jewel and the mind of Satan is a mushy turd!

  One night in a stupor of drunkenness and rage, my husband came to my bed. He touched my shoulder, and I said, “All right,” for now I saw God’s will in everything. Thus, Sue was begat. Again my husband dragged his nets to the sea. When my daughter was born, the stillness in our kitchen was broken, and a wind knocked the sugar dish from the shelf and sprayed sink water on the floorboards. She had a full head of hair that riffled like seaweed underwater. The first time she saw her brother, she cried out an explosion of sound—what word did she say? Sam smiled at her and punched his thigh. When I wrapped my arms around my children, their backs became shields, as mine was to my husband, as the house walls were to the steep valley slopes, and as those slopes were to the outside world. Shields against shields against shields. At church Sue never listened to sermons but huddled in the pew, ears cocked toward the wind-shook windows. “Rattle, rattle,” she’d hiss, “rattle-rattle.”

  At twelve years old, Sam said to me, “I hate your church. Going inside is like entering the honeycomb of your brain.” I burst into tears. His sister cackled, and the two of them joined hands and ran shrieking out the door. I knew then I’d failed and had turned my children against me. Lord protect me from Satan whose skin is scaly and his breath foul no matter how many Certs he chews!

  I have repeating nightmares, and when I wake, the bed sheets are so wet with sweat that, wrung out, they fill buckets. In one dream Sam is swimming and cuts his feet on knives hidden like coral reefs in a ketchup sea. He doesn’t know he’s bleeding for his blood is the sea’s colour and he continues to swim, bleed, and shed his skin until he dissolves into the ocean red.

  In another dream, my daughter lies in a tub of mayonnaise that soothes the blackfly bites she got running in the hills. I chide her, “Get up for church; today is the Easter Cantata.” She ignores me. The mayonnaise hardens and she stops breathing, still grinning. Workmen try to chisel her out but can’t tell where she and the mayonnaise begins and ends, and they hack her to bits. The tub is full of white-beige rubble; each piece resembles the meringues sold by the Ladies’ Auxiliary, except some are crunchy with bits of bone and others have eyes staring out.

  I have dreamt of my children turning blind, having mustard fights. I have seen their skin on fire beneath storm clouds that rain salsa. God hath no place in the liquids of this world. He baptized with water, not honey or drinkable yogurt. My children shall be saved by the lithe resourcefulness of the body. But whose body? Satan huddles behind my sewing kit and, in an unexpected moment, I’ll shove a needle into his eyeball!

  The day I intercepted Sam’s fax to Sue, I knew that God was on my side. I read Sam’s letter in one breath, put it back into the envelope, resealed it with melted candle wax and re-deposited it in the mailbox for Sue. If we were all going on a trip, she needed to know the details.

  I emptied my bank account and purchased a ticket, sensing that I was embarking on a doomed voyage. What could be achieved by following my children? I imagined their surprise upon meeting me on board, their cries of horror and outrage. I could scream, shout, thrash about on the floor, and pull my hair out by the roots, but I’d already tried these strategies and they hadn’t worked. When Satan is picking his nose, may his finger get stuck and remain up one nostril for eternity!

  I know I over-control my children. I choke them to compensate for my life’s emptiness. A week before our departure, I carried a jugful of water up the winding path that led to the highest peak on the steepest hill. The humid air was a hot hand pressing my face; water beads sprouted like diamonds on my forehead. In an air full of sea salt, the cry of gulls, and the sound of waves pummelling rocks, I knelt before the Virgin. Her body is solid stone, her legs concealed inside a rippling rock dress. A stained hood swirls around her alabaster face, and her pupil-less eyes are beacons that gaze east toward Africa and Christ’s birthplace. Her nostrils flare. Mary’s unblemished face shows calm, but her hands clutch each other so tightly that the veins bulge like snakes.

  I poured clear water over her massive boots and placed the empty jug beneath her. “Mary, I don’t know what to do. I bully and scold my children. Why can’t I let them grow up and trust you’ll look after them? I long to bring them to Your Grace, return them to Our Fold, but Satan has coated Sue’s body with the sticky mire of Earth and shoved rocks into Sam’s saliva-dripping mouth. The world’s ingredients are greater than I. When I polish the bathroom taps, the cleanser corrodes my nail polish; I hold clip-on earrings near my lobes and they snap like leeches into my skin. If I let my children go their merry way, they’ll turn into a couple of sickos and will reject you and my love forever. What should I do?”

  I stared at the bare stone surface of her shins for hours. The winds died down. Mary’s white lips didn’t part, but amazingly, I heard her words! Her voice was as clear as a dewdrop on an erect blade of grass.

  “You have been a faithful servant,” she intoned. “You have prayed, you have sung to the Lord. You have cooked, cleaned, and washed windows for the Lord. You have baked brownies for the church bazaar, good brownies with almonds in them, a highly original recipe. But remember: God is stronger than the world. God releases the enslaved from enslavement. Baptize your children with my wetness, and God will fill them. You shall then bid them farewell, and they will enter adulthood, the mark of your love imprinted on them forever. Remember that one day all our bodies shall be One, and the Kingdom of Heaven shall reign on Earth just as it did that split-second long ago when seed touched egg in your womb.”

  “What do you mean ‘wetness’?” I asked.

  Some people might accuse me of having delusions, but what happened next was so concrete that I shall register it in the Eucharistic Book of Miracles. From between Mary’s legs squirted one, two, three times, a yellow liquid that filled the jug on the ground. I lifted the bottle toward Mary’s impassive face and gazed at the fluid swirling in sunlight. A nectar of God more sacred than the waters of Lourdes.

  A horn wailed and I beheld, far below, a flag-decked ship that tapped against the harbour dock. The boat’s sides sloped gracefully from the water like two outstretched hands. On its deck stood three squat, symmetrical stacks. Sea water flickered like a million winking eyes. At that moment, the ship, the dock, and the water were the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. I knew then I would succeed. My children would remain in my life, for God knew I couldn’t be without them.

  All hail the Lord of Lords whose throne is a real throne and not the toilet some people mean when they say “throne”!

  The day of my departure I combed Sue’s hair, then watched her stumble up the street. I wanted to cry. I hurried down the hill. If I ran into a neighbour, I’d say I was visiting my sister on Goose Island. Of course, my husband was out on his boat. I left no note to explain my absence. I’d spent a lifetime worrying about him. Now let him fret about me. Still, the guilt of those who abandon filled me. I told myself that I respected my children’s wishes and was simply embarking on this trip because the Virgin Mary had commanded it. Yet as I approached the harbour, my cheeks felt hot with shame.

  At three a.m., alone in the dark, I watched the ship arrive; it would leave again in two hours. Luckily Sam and Sue weren’t here yet and didn’t catch me boarding. The white-uniformed guard glanced at my passport and third-class ticket. He nodded. “Level Two. Corridor One.”

  Then I crossed the ar
ched bridge between dock and boat and descended into the bowels of the ship, far deeper than I wanted to go. (I’d asked for the cheapest room.) I headed down the dimly lit halls and entered a small cabin containing a cot covered with a foam mattress and a wafer-thin blanket. I sat nervously on the bed knowing that, at this hour, the passengers who’d boarded in St. John’s or New York were asleep. Now was the time to explore the ship.

  Beside my room I discovered a square archway above a rectangular counter. Behind hung rows of jackets, dresses, and pants wrapped in cellophane. A hand-painted sign read “Weldon’s Complementary Dry-Cleaning.”

  My flat-soled shoes padded softly as I continued down the hall, one hand flitting over the handrail. My other hand half-covered my face. Sam might be already on board and could catch me here. I also worried he and Sue would miss the ship; the whistle would blow and I’d be dragged from my old life and thrust into something new I never wanted. I made quiet, careful steps, almost afraid that if I stamped my feet forcefully or opened a door too suddenly, the vessel would split apart.

  I discovered a mailroom, cook’s quarters, a water purification centre, and several storage rooms. I liked the spareness of the corridor but not the rows of harsh and flickering fluorescent lights. There were only two directions to go, forward or back; no turns, detours, or cubbyholes. I felt as exposed as if on a fashion-show runway.

  At the end of the hall was a door marked “Warning: Boiler Room. Do Not Enter.” Of course I went in. There, a steel cylinder trembled, gurgled, and spat on frog-leg haunches. I enjoyed the clatter and noise of this room. If somebody opened the door, he’d be distracted by this shuddering metal monstrosity and not notice me. In Cartwright, I felt as though I towered into the sky like a colossus, casting such shadows that those below didn’t know if my body or the Earth’s rotation caused the arrival of night that stained the sky black. Yet I was not just any old colossus, but one with hips that swung and fingers that snapped, with Yvresse-scented, bouncy-curled hair, and thrusting, jelly-jiggle boobs that poked you in the eye. You silly reader, I am not a hung-up prude, and if my husband had known what was good for him, he could’ve had this throbbing, more-luscious-than-Lovelace body to have and hold.