“Sounds like everything slips into reverse, here! Even common sense,” I say before I can stop myself.
“You are only going back a year, one of the hundreds.”
From Waterston, a view of the Boyne lies in the distance. The lawned slope from the school leads into squared fields, clusters of trees and towns, a misty grid and something else of mystery and muddle haunts my heritage: this spade.
“Well, it’s back for him when he comes to get it, later?”
I startle Sister Felicitas with this reply.
“How much later?” she snaps.
If the young man props the spade opposite the girl’s dorm, he does so for attention, but I don’t disclose that I wait at the dorm window till he picks up his spade and takes it into the dark with him. Like a gaffer I keep a time sheet in an exercise book for him: his hours of departure and return. After a night’s labour, shaking with exertion and steaming with sweat or dew, he leans on his spade, wraps his fist around the handle, which digs in under his breastbone, like it’s giving him a paralyzing punch to the pelvis.
When I gently open the window, I hear the same thing every night: “’Taint no way enuf. Nine hours solid, and bad as ever, when I’ve done. Not’in’ where it shud be.”
This last night, before the Sisters move me, I’m down beside him, exercise book and pen in hand, to ask a question.
“Where should everything be?”
“Where it was.”
I flinch at this and wonder if he has seen me touch the spade.
“Trenches were easier, Miss.” He wipes his hands on his hips. “You’re not angry at me, are you?” he asks.
“Should I be?”
“Perhaps not – leastways, y’r’ talkin’ to me. Nobody else is. Disgusted, are they?”
“I think it best I don’t speak for the rest.”
“Well, I put in the hours, Miss. Thousands and I’m beat.”
“But you haven’t given me your name for my records!”
I never knew I could sound so bossy and bold.
“Bowse Cartey. Do you not remember – the only one who volunteered? ”
Now, he stalks off on me, giving me the view of his back.
“Volunteered for what?” I call after him.
A letter to my dad gets one from my grandmother back: “Bowse Cartey joined Sean Redmond’s Southern Volunteers in the Great War. He planted perennials, torch lilies, to come back to, and never saw them. Over there in Belgium, mortally wounded, a Grey Nun nursed him on his deathbed, and in a delirium, he proposed to the nun. People on the estate said he might have confused the nun with Cissy Waterston, who would be your great-great-aunt, were she alive. Bowse followed Cissy with his spade held across his shoulder, like a rifle, as if he were honour guard for her special projects to brighten the gardens. The photo of Cissy will let you understand the added confusions for Bowse with you.
I can see.
Cissy’s me with a lovely ruffle collar, running around her neck and all the way down to her waist, small as a wasp’s, like my grandmother says. Not Cissy’s choice for the photograph, but done to please her grandmother. As for the nun, at eighty years of age she finally came over with her order to our gift of Waterston Hall and with this wish from Cartey: for her to visit him where things would look their best.
They all shook hands at the handing over to become St. Ursa’s. My father always said the nun wore a smile when she looked past them all at the garden, and she talked to it, “Tu sembles bien, mais pas heureux – fatigué, comme tous les homme qui travail pour rendre la nature de plus en plus belle dans son lit. Tu est fiel plus longtemps que la mort . ”
That was the last look she took at anything in this world. Funny old nun, she had been one of the negotiators, responsible for relocating the order after the War.
Which war?
This much leaves me feeling like the Belgian nun: a little light in one hemisphere. We know whatever is up with him, you will put him straight. You’re a Waterston and you’re a woman – end of Granny’s letter.
When did I have my family graduation to woman? Several days after I’m moved, Sister Felicitas says my eyes look unhealthy. They have shadows under them like I boot-polished them to pull on a helmet and play some ridiculous sport. Or go on a night raid.
Will I or won’t I tell her?
To my mind the sister is SF. Her initials, and being into science and gymnastics makes Sister Felicitas as fantastic to me as science fiction. If she’s not in the lab, she’s in the gym or on a court coaching. Maybe Cartey comes to moon over her. Half of the girls do, some in the demurest and some in the dirtiest way, choosing to work out on the exercise benches or the courts till their nipples stick through the blots of sweat on their sports halters and their armpit hair is treated like the badge of bravery.
“Has he said anything to you?” Sister Felicitas asks me.
I don’t know what to answer, so I quote him: “ ‘I can’t get it right. The place is as bad as ever.’ I think that’s it, but he mumbles.”
“Is that all?”
“No, he said I’m a Waterston. Miss Waterston, actually, and it’s all right for me if I keep track of him.”
“For you to what?”
“Keep track. Until you moved me, I kept a time sheet of all the times he came and went with his spade in an exercise book.”
“Is that so? And he talks like someone who isn’t trying to get off with you?”
“Sister Felicitas. He talks like he’s an employee and I’m his supervisor.”
“Mistress would be a better word. Well, you’ll have to give him his marching orders, eventually.”
“I will?”
“You’re a Waterston, as he said?”
I’m flabbergasted as Sister Felicitas kisses my cheek.
“Time to get these fixed,” she says to the bags under my eyes.
Since so many of the pupils at St. Ursa’s have parents in business, Small Business Essentials is on the curriculum for the upper-level girls. We don’t ever ask, “What about big business?” One girl who did was told, “For big, do the same, only more.”
Taking on and laying off, humanely, is introduced, since many of us – the privileged – will be called upon to do it, and therefore are fit subjects for the topic. Once upon a time, we are told, dismissal training would have been for suitors, a specialty of the finishing schools, but the sisters are here to prevent us from cutting people dead and conduct-ing an inhumane and spiritless business.
“For most,” Sister Bénédicité tells us, “the hardest lesson is learning when to quit. In an ideal world we would recognize our own incompetence or redundancy. We should see it in our own faces, but that isn’t the way it works.”
I have the creepy feeling I am the sole object of these weird remarks or someone sitting directly behind me is.
During History, Sister Beatrix reprises the insult to Redmond and the Southern Volunteers. No officers, unable to issue their own orders. They stood in wait for commands to be given by Englishmen, which suited some.
Is that what Cartey waits for?
I see him at the end of the nine-hour night, leaning his head against the chemistry lab wall. He twists his fist on the handle of his spade, like a throttle. He mutters at me or someone, doubles over till the top of his head buries itself in the ivy on the wall. He reaches down and plucks at the sacking around his trouser bottoms, like he’s trying to read the few letters that are left there from the brand of sugar it held.
“Well?” he says and turns to look at my exercise book and pen, then my wristwatch. I tap my pen on my exercise book.
“Just say the word.”
“You’re sacked,” I say, experimentally. Then, without a second thought, “Pick up your things and go.”
His relief frightens me. It’s like lightning.
As for Bowse Cartey’s work and enslavement to loyalty, I’d love to find a torch lily he planted, especially when I discover it’s a nice name for a red-hot poker, and tak
e it in to Sister Cecilia, who teaches botany and music. But I come across no such thing. The gardens are all low-maintenance. Perhaps it’s better so, otherwise Bowse might come back and spend eternity seeing to the torch lilies’ welfare.
Madeline Sonik
PUNCTURES
The day I was born, they dug a hole – the kind of deep down deep hole that makes you dizzy when you look inside. I didn’t die. Don’t know if they were expecting me to. Don’t know for certain why they dug the hole. I only know that they never shovelled it in.
My first memories are of women, mothers-to-be, in colourful sacks. Sweet misery lived in their faces and their stomachs grew torturously slow. Then the babies were everywhere – in every house, on every porch step, their flat round faces pushed up against windows, their luminous eyes peeking out of every void.
At eight o’clock, you could hear them screaming, in a jumbled chorus of colic, with aches and appetites, with itches and thirst, a din so loud that nothing could drown it. How they wept. How they carried on. Even the cotton you shoved in your ears held their unhappy howling. Their bellows were blades that scored your skull, and nothing could be done to stop it, until at last you passed from stricken wakefulness to restless sleep. Then, in the morning, when the babies grew quiet, when there might have been calm, in rolled the builders, with saws and hammers, and trucks – with long wooden planks, plasterboard, and sacks of powdered cement. All through the town, there were taps and bangs and the screech of tires spinning in mud, and the babies filling the world with startled, tired sobs.
Bright arrows of sun penetrated our blinds. Our rooms grew hot as ovens, yet we slept from exhaustion, in fretful repose. When we finally woke, there were changes – extended houses, brand new nursery wings. We noticed the deliveries, the cribs, the changing tables, the rocking chairs. Mud hills twisted like monster chocolate kisses, high up into the blue skies. They pushed the city limits with their circumference, pushed the land beyond its natural size. They swallowed forests, ate animals, sucked in chain-link fences.
Mountains of mud bulged in the backyard of each expanding home and the babies took to their peaks, crawling and stumbling, teetering at their tops. From my window I could see them, shiny with mud, grinning and frowning, tumbling and rolling. I could see them up there, and I could also see their mothers on the ground, in those sacks, exhausted and unable to shriek, because fatigue had sealed their mouths with apathy. There were babies just walking, and crawlers and creepers. There were bald babies and hairy babies, babies who would strip off their clothing and whim-per when the sun would dry the mud on their flesh. I could see babies wobbling at the tops of the mountains, losing their balance, toppling out of sight. “Poor babies,” I’d think, looking at the places they’d been, looking at their sweet miserable mothers, who were helpless in the clutches of their tedious, colourful gowns.
The mountains had been growing for such a long time that no one knew what was beyond them anymore. We hoped for a better world – but no one knew where the fallen had vanished, and there wasn’t enough time in the day between our shattered waking and paralyzed sleep to climb to the tops of those mountains and see.
In those hot summer months, after the babies started vanishing, a new sound accompanied their cries. It started as an eerie hum in the evening that rose to a jagged crescendo. I wondered if perhaps it was the sound of the fallen, if perhaps the fallen were calling back, an echo, a memory, if somewhere out there they were waiting, and I tried to imagine them whole. I tried to imagine their chubby, trusting bodies and their inquisitive, puckered smiles. I held them in my mind and saw them as they had been: blinking their wide, glassy eyes in troubled confusion. I saw them in their muddy shrouds, their sagging diapers, their distress, and before them I envisioned a long weathered path, up the mountains, bringing them home. It was possible that such a path could exist, I told myself, and so expectant, waited, listening to the hum and its ever-increasing swell. I was certain that soon they would find their way back, but before summer ended the hum turned into a buzz, and droves of wasps, not babies, ascended the mountains’ tops. They soared and spun high in the sky and dipped down to the ground, collecting miniature measures of mud. They rolled these parcels into balls, and carried them to houses, to play-ground jungle gyms, to trees, to telephone poles. They smashed the balls with their heads, moulded the mud into long thin artistic tubes. Other insects grew jealous. Other insects picked at the mud as well, but the wasps pushed themselves into nail holes, they lowered themselves into hollow plant stems, they buried themselves beneath the dark, rich mud of the mountains and hauled it up into the heavens to make their homes. Their buzz became a solid drone, constant as stone. From my window, I watched the wasps coming and going and the babies still tottering and crawling up the slippery slopes – their tiny hands extending toward the creatures, their bright little faces turning crimson at the sight. The wasps thrust stingers into soft baby flesh, and the babies in grieving consternation, with their little bow mouths, incredulous and turning upside down toward the mud, reeled and dropped like lead-bottomed dolls over the peaks and into the abyss.
All the while below, their mothers melted in the heat of summer, fanning themselves with parenting magazines and tight, white disposable diapers – and all the while below, the builders continued building, extending, improving. The truck drivers continued delivering. Everyone’s faces were portraits of emptiness, and I didn’t like to see, but I couldn’t stop from watching. “There goes another baby,” I’d think, and the eerie drone of wasps grew louder.
Exterminators came in goggles and white zip-up suits. They slung tanks of pesticide over their backs, and dusted every square inch of mud, but it didn’t seem to matter what they did: the wasps wouldn’t go away. Everywhere you looked now, you’d see them weaving invisible highways in the air, building nests and stuffing them with victim mites. Some of the nests resembled intricate clay pots, others stunningly hewn flutes. The nests increased with manic rapidity. The drone reverberated to a roar. The mud mountains grew higher and higher, and our town caught every single echo. When the babies sobbed, the roar was thunderous, as if the wasps in restless agitation had decided they would never be outdone. The noise was unthinkable and gargantuan. At eight, as I lay on my bed, my eyes reflexively drilled holes in the ceiling for release – the moan and blubber of babies, the torrential downpour of wasps. I shoved and adjusted rubber and cotton, I pulled padded boxes over my ears, I crammed my head into the depths of an insulated bucket, and, finally, was rewarded with oblivion.
When I heard the piping from beyond the mountains a week later, I no longer thought of a better world. I no longer thought of the fallen with their glassy baby gazes or a path that might bring them home. I thought only of the mud, and the hole that was dug on the day I was born, and wondered what the outcome would be.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable – that gliding and plunging, as they came in flocks over the mountains snapping wasps in their beaks. I was standing at the window, listening to the roar and watching the babies on the mountains. I was saying, “Poor baby, poor baby” when suddenly, in a burst of colour and light, thousands of swallows, piping and whistling, cheeping and chattering, surged, it seemed, in all different directions over the mountain and into our town.
The babies on the mountain stopped climbing and crawling, their round little faces twisted up toward the clouds; even those warbling in the throes of pain lifted their eyes to heaven and watched the graceful long-tailed swallows diving and darting like streamers in the air. They hovered over the mountains, their wings straight above their backs. They dipped their dainty bills into the mountain, then streaked off to houses and trees, to water towers and electrical poles, depositing pellets of mud. In five days, not one eave was without a nest. In fourteen, their nests were visible on plant pots and lawn ornaments. Patio tables swelled with mud tumours; dark excrescences formed on abandoned park benches, gourds of mud thickened and pouched on every glistening satellite dish.
&n
bsp; Nests filled with oyster-white eggs. Curious baby eyes gazed. Curious baby hands grabbed. And then, what a godforsaken commotion there was. Swallows and babies, babies and swallows, all of them screaming and thrashing.
The babies got the worst of it, though. Blood ran down their cheeks like jam. They were stung by the wasps the swallows didn’t eat, pushed over the tops of the mountains by their own despair. Their mothers fanned themselves, stomachs protruding, sweat falling and marking their swelling gowns. In sixteen days, the swallow eggs were nestlings, raucous and insatiable. The town was teeming with life. At eight o’clock, the racket was unendurable: babies, wasps, swallows, nestlings and the mountains now, so much larger than they’d been, collecting every whisper and throwing it back, like voices from a well.
If we fell asleep, we didn’t know. If we stayed awake, we couldn’t tell. Days and nights, nights and days, whirling together with teeming life, with mud and construction. Noise ate noise, buzz ate birdsong, howl ate howl, until all that was left in our town was one drawn-out chaotic cry – the scream of mud enlivened.
I’d given up thinking of the fallen. I stopped pondering the hole. I found it difficult to hope. “What is the sound of lost hope?” I wondered. A hum, a chirp, a cry? I caught myself thinking of this often, thinking of this every day as I watched the babies teetering on mountains, as I watched them falling. “Poor babies,” I’d think, “Poor babies,” I’d say. “What is the sound of lost hope?” And although I didn’t know, I believed it might be the sound I heard next.
I wanted to tell someone, to say something, but I held my tongue. I held my tongue and in a week, above the raucous cacophony, there came a sharp and lucid “ping.” “What made a noise like that?” I wondered. It sounded like a sack breaking. “What makes a sound like that?” I asked myself, and thought that others in the town must be asking this too. Then there was a rush and rumble, a whoosh. I got out of bed and looked through the window. The babies! The mountains! They were all spilling down into the vale. Sludge washing over everything. Wasps and swallows sinking like pebbles in a stream. Muck pounding over houses and machines, muck knocking everything down and leaving nothing.
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