Crow Jazz

by Linda Rogers

  So I took it to the Headmistress.

  “Are you kidding,” I did not ask but said to the Top Sister, her powdery paper-thin skin blanched in the Lamb of God’s formadehyde footbath. I had noticed that all the sexless ones were pasty pale. The wankers who confessed to lesbian and or Jesus fantasies had rosy cheeks. That’s how you told them apart. The rosy-cheeked nuns were more compliant to anarchy and more likely to excel at baseball.

  According to my mini-snitch, the Hermit lived in a Hogan, a circular half-underground structure with sod walls. She was too scared to check inside, but she embellished her story with details I realized she’d picked up from visits to the museum.

  The Hogan was surrounded by gardens neatly contained in stone perimeters and joined by paths guarded by sword ferns and huckleberry bushes. In short, it was a fairyland, and from time to time, fantastic creatures appeared in Forest tableaux.

  No one seemed to know what the Hermit looked like, whether he was a pasty clergyman or a hobo in rags, but there were many reports about the half-human creatures, some covered in leafy camouflage and some feathered, giant ravens and woodpeckers, northern flickers who appeared, frozen, between the trees, and seemed to stun the witnesses who saw but could not pursue them.

  “They just turn up and stare at us, and we freeze. By the time we think to reach out and touch them, they, poof, disappear, like a bubble popping.”

  It was about that time that I witnessed a miracle, an erythronium opening in a forest clearing, one lily-white petal at a time. Was I living in a zone where transformation was the norm, where spirits entered and left the bodies of aboriginal dancers, and crows imitated every sound in nature, a barking dog one minute and wind in the leaves the next? Or was I just a hysteric looking for signs that lead to redemption of revelation or whatever rehabilitation my soul needed, because God knows, I have sinned.

  Maybe it has to do with giving up religion, not once but several times, the first being when I tossed my virginity in retaliation for parental abandonment and the last when a priest with a gorgeous singing voice (and yes, I did know about Sirens) let loose a spew of bigotry about the Japanese, some of whom had, in fact, built the very pulpit from whence he was ranting. I walked out on his sermon and a choir I loved singing in and never came back.

  It was shortly after that when my daughter reported on the hermit, and I started seeing fantastic woodland creatures. But that was thirty-plus years ago, and I thought I was done with it.

  “Could be genetic memory, Ma,” my daughter says. She’s a horticulturist and knows all the great names and big garden styles, from Abdalonymus to Vita Sackville-West, whose white garden at Knowles we visited the year Caroline graduated from high school.

  “In Europe, before they colonized Canada, our wealthier ancestors hired mimes to pose in their gardens, and the poorer ones watched commedia dell’ arte and Punch and Judy in the streets.”

  “What does that have to do with this?” I am shaking my gin, not Djinn, at the end of a long day of screen-staring and talking to her on the phone. She has a calming voice, a peri-menopausal mezzo, unlike my own mouse-whine, which, although good for treble singing, is unpleasant to live with. I hate listening to myself.

  “Too much typing, not enough digging. You’re letting the weeds take over.”

  “It’s true, the anarchists are winning.” That is a valid comment on my brain and my overgrown garden that, without my glasses, is English wild, more Capability Brown than House and Garden, but, in truth, has given way to morning glory and blackberry brambles.

  “My garden is me,” I say. “I’m a little overgrown too. We match.”

  “Yes, but you’ve always said how working with your hands relaxes you.”

  “I am working with my hands.” I type a few words so she can hear me.

  “Not the same.”

  “Don’t want to disturb the little families.” At the moment, we have robins nesting in an apple tree, a hummingbird hotel in a japonica, bush-tit socks in a pine and an amazing wasp condominium in the compost.

  “Excuses,” she says.

  “I hate over-trained gardens. That is genetic.”

  My grandmother created a park in a Garry oak meadow by the sea, plantings in wild brushstrokes, even the vegetable garden. The best part was the fairy glen where I played with invisible friends all summer long.

  “Me too.”

  “Your canon,” I said.

  We come from a family of writers. She writes with colour and texture, every word growing out of the soil.

  “I am astonished by how many great writers were also notable gardeners.”

  “And a lot of them were in looney bins.”

  “Which also had great gardens.”

  “Only for the rich. Bedlam was not so sweet.”

  “You’re always practical.”

  “Maybe getting practical would get your head out of your ass, Ma. You’ve been obsessing, about politics for one.”

  “Pretty unavoidable, given the state of the world.”

  “All the more reason to change gears.”

  “No more panto in the rhododendrons.”

  When she was little, we played charades on special occasions. We guessed book and movie titles and, when there were presents involved, “guess the gift.” She couldn’t nail her birthday tutu covered in leaves and rosebuds, so I kept it for six months past her magical garden party and offered it again on Christmas, by which time it was too small.

  “I’m sorry about the tutu.”

  “I wasn’t that into ballet, Ma. That was your thing. I was more than happy with my pint-sized gardening tools.”

  “If I’m not atoning for … that, it… has to be something else.”

  “You’ll think of it.”

  “I always do.”

  “Yes.” She hung up.

  I was too embarrassed to go back to the store after I shoplifted a lipstick. I’d been distracted by a woman with no money who was leaving without her groceries, and when I chased her out of the store to offer to pay, I accidentally dropped the lipstick in my pocket. I could have returned and paid for it. I was too much in love and too young to think that my lover had a wife and children. I was too intimidated to call my mother-in-law a racist. I sometimes buy vegetables in plastic packaging. I flushed the toilet in Cuba when there were water restrictions. I spanked my daughter. I eat therapeutic cheese puffs, all brands, orange fingers a giveaway. I have lied to vegetarians about my soup. There is almost always chicken in my stock. I try to recover spiders from the bathtub and put them out the window, but sometimes I squeeze them to death.

  The list is endless. Are the garden creatures here to forgive me or remind me?

  “Don’t let it in the house,” my husband says when I tell him about spotting a crow with a six-foot wingspan hovering over the gate when he comes home for dinner.

  “But they never speak.”

  “When did that ever stop you?”

  The phone rings. My daughter interrupts us. This has always been her calling.

  “Don’t you have potatoes to hill?”

  “Sorry, Ma, but you’ve got me worried. Have you been outside, extended your eyes, relaxed your mind?”

  “Sure, and I saw a giant crow.”

  “Snap it and put it on Facebook.”

  “You mean, alongside the walrus doing sit-ups.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Would you comment and call it alternate news?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So the camera lies too?”

  “Everything lies.”

  I have raised a cynic. Congratulations to me.

  “Something else to put on my list.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I don’t have to explain everything. If you don’t get it right away, you’ll have to wait for Christmas. That’s my rule. I am not into plot exegesis.

  I’m reading Arundhati Roy’s new book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the story of a two-spirit hijra. Some small par
t of me wants to know if she has found it, if transformation is the key. I know my best captures have been in-between the expected and the unexpected, moments of magical thinking, the time I jumped off a cliff and the wind carried me up, then let me down gently, and when I surprised myself by riding an updraught and expelling an egg in an explosion of rain.

  Soon rain will cycle back again. So far in this season of alternating moods, there has been no need to irrigate the trees and the lawn. The garden is still. From the roof, where I am sitting with my binoculars and a martini with three olives, my world looks as it always has: no pine beetles, no smog and no gnawing hunger. Everything is fed, the grass and the trees have water, the birds drink from their fountains, and the humans can safely eat vegetables with the dirt still on them. The clematis is blooming. Glorious peonies hold their sleepy heads up. Hummingbirds are feeding, and baby robins express gratitude that their mother is home with food in her beak.

  But we do live in an earthquake zone. We are ready and not ready for this. We have provisions, medicine, food and a tent, stored in a safe place. That is ready. Beyond ready, there are the surprises. Not ready includes Earth opening and swallowing people we love, injuries we cannot tend, grief we cannot assuage, especially if we survive those more deserving, closer to their productivity, our daughter for example, a healer who creates beauty and grows medicinal plants. She is needed.

  I call her back. “Are you OK?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks. “I am not the crazy one.”

  “Crazy like a fox,” I say. “Did you know the Conservatives in Britain are trying to reinstate fox hunting.”

  “It never ended.”

  “The Manichean heresay,” I say.

  “Yes. Are you taking your sleep meds?”

  “Sometimes.” That is the truth. I have saved a bunch, just in case the pain is too great or her father dies first, or the Conservatives are re-elected here.

  She is intuitive. “By the way, you aren’t really going to give Dad that Deadguy T-shirt for his birthday are you? Tell me you made that up.”

  “I make everything up, recipes, theorems, poems…”

  “NO seriously, Ma, that might hurt his feelings.”

  “It would hurt my feelings if he died before me.”

  “It would rain tears.”

  “What language does the rain speak?”

  “Oh Ma, now you’ve put a flea in my ear.”

  “Not me, a better poet.”

  “I won’t forget it.”

  “Good.”

  I already told her I have a plan to keep him warm if he insults me by refusing to wake up one morning. That involves pipes and hot water, turning him into a human radiator. She asked me why, and I told her I needed someone for giggles and cuddles. When she protested that dead men don’t joke, I told her just thinking about it made me laugh. She didn’t get it, but why would she, the young never think about dying.

  I hear conversation and look down.

  “Wait. There is someone in the garden. Three some-ones. Hang on in case it’s a home invasion.”

  “I’ll call the cops. It might be something.” She’s playing me. Something, it turns out, two men, one woman and a lost drone.

  “Whaaat?”

  “It’s true. Her friends gave it to her for her birthday, and they’re teaching her how to use it.”

  She has one leg up the apple tree, but I have to stop her.

  “Sorry, no shaking. There are baby robins living there.”

  “Sorry.” They answer in unison.

  “They are speaking, Caroline. They are real in your terms.”

  “This is more than I can absorb,” my daughter says.

  We hang up. At the same time.

  The drone searchers tenderly move the branches until their strange little creature falls out. They thank me and leave. I take a photo. I did not imagine them.

  We have a salad on the verandah, and night eventually falls, as it usually does. My husband decides it’s his bedtime. I am the night owl who tucks things in: children, pets, the house. When I cover the canary, turn off the lights and go out to the verandah to admire the moonlight, I notice an owl sitting on top of a broken cedar in the park, where the eagles nest. Like the crow I saw earlier this evening, it is giant. I do hear its wings beat, then glide, consonants and vowels as it lifts off from the evergreen tree and heads straight toward me. Closer, I see a human head; it could be a seraph, its song is ferocious. I think I see fire coming out of its beak.

  “Sinestra, Sinestra” it says, then disappears in an explosion of stars and feathers that float to the ground like snow. Time to go in.

  Using celestial navigation, I take my medicine with another shot of gin. Who’s counting?

  My husband is waiting in bed, reading. I decide not to to mention my owl. He takes off his glasses and puts down his book, the biography of a dead friend, the one who wrote, “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” and turns out his night light. I visualize him in the T-shirt that is wrapped and hidden with his other gifts in the closet.

  “What’s so funny?” he asks.

  “Life,” I say.

  “We’ve had a good run, lots of music, lots of stories, good friends and bad.”

  “Caroline, who is both.”

  “She loves you, Cynthia.”

  “Yes.” I kiss his shoulders.

  “Good night,” he says.

  “Goodbye,” I say.

  MOON CAKE AND RUDE HOUR

  When she boils the eggs for her moon cakes, he reminds her to prick the ends for easy peeling. “Do I look like an idiot?” How many times has he checked the stove to see if she remembered to turn it off? How many times has he asked if she remembered her glasses, or put her credit card back in her wallet?

  Who is the real prick here?

  When she closes her eyes, he looks like an egg. She imagines him rolling off the end of the world, “Adios, Babycakes. Hasta luego. Not.”

  No one gets between her and her impulses, her enthusiasms. Not even him.

  She reads the haiku on the two-by-two-inch piece of rice paper she planned to fold into the dough, then puts it in her mouth, chews and swallows. Perhaps he will see it in the toilet later. To conserve water, they only flush when necessary. She wonders if he will be curious enough to fish it out.

  Man Squirrel hides nuts

  she finds and bakes

  in slices of harvest moon.

  He wonders about her pet sentiments; squirrels are just rats with bushy tails, he says, but he does admire their resourcefulness as nut and candy robbers, their frantic autumnal activity. “It’s cute, but shut the windows anyway. You don’t want them nesting in the house and inviting their city cousins.”

  Trees on fire, this is her favourite time of year. She is an avid non-religionist, celebrates all the fall festivals—Eid, Diwali, Sukkot, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, Thanksgiving—especially the food parts: apple pie, pumpkin pie, sugar skulls and moon cakes. She’s prepared, has moulds and doodads for everything. Her moon cake mould is a chrysanthemum, the most resilient of the four gentlemen flowers of the Chinese seasons. It’s made of rubber, possibly toxic. She imagines her cake blowing up in the oven, exploding like the trees in the park where she sits for hours and hours and watches the autumn leaves flaring, crumpling and tumbling, sleeping in piles.

  So far, nothing uber-dramatic has happened, apart from the forever surprise, a perfect cake every time. Her happy hens cooperate, hold off on their strikes until after her frenzy of fall baking: sponge for Sukkot, moon cakes, Thanksgiving pumpkin pies. She rewards her girls with fresh greens, squashes and cabbages, chicken footballs, and they keep on laying for her, sumptuous autumn yolks—bright, bright yellow, rich as harvest moons.

  She loves the warm cosiness of feathery chicken breasts, going to the henhouse in the garden and gathering a comfort of eggs in her straw-filled basket; sees herself as a hen laying fragile ideas with nurturing yolks. Her ferocity is maternal, she thinks. S
he is drawn to the egg shape, to the master Brancusi, whose hatched sculpture was disappointing. Garder les oeufs is her motto. Eggs R Us.

  This time, for spite, for the anarchist ladies, she does not prick the ends, but brings the water slowly to a boil, then turns off the heat, wondering if it is better to die like this, in increments, the way the Earth itself is heating up so the oligarchs can deny it is happening. She puts in her left hand and leaves it until she can’t take the heat.

  While her mother grooved in the gay corridors of privilege in the American Empire: The Factory, Studio 54, Le Pavillon, their Bible-thumping nanny lectured her about the right hand of God, tied her left hand behind her back and made her eat with her right. When she spilled, she was punished. “Look what the devil made you do!”

  Now she will make moon cake with her right hand only, her left gripping a bag of frozen peas. She mixes the rose water, oil and golden syrup with flour and lets it rest.

  Some of her eggs rebel. They burst out of the shell, through cracks. She laughs at the little knobs and horn bubbles, and he notices. He has warned her.

  “Are you crazy?” he asks. “Yes,” she rolls her eyes. She has the moon on her side: Luna, lunatic, lunar catastrophe.

  She’s a kick-ass cook in any language. It’s the sine-stra thing. While everyone pays attention to the right hand, the lamb hand of the God who tested Abraham, she raises her cloven goat paw to snatch inspiration, a pinch of cardamom, a teaspoon of ginger and a pinch of stardust.

  Words are for recipes, spells and prayer. They are the unsilent component. She wishes, not measuring, counts as she stirs, raps while she beats, chants while she pours, quotes Shakespeare and Donne during foreplay, sometimes e e cummings, “No one, not even the rain has such small hands.” The ear is an erotic zone. When will they learn? He plays her like a stringed instrument, lots of arpeggios, then she sings. She is, after all a poet.