Book of O'Kells: Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell

by Michael Conniff

  August 26, 1971

  Sitting by her bedside today, I become Father and Edison and Ford, if only for a flash. In her dreams, Mother is re-living her life in no particular order.

  September 6, 1971

  I tell Becca that Mother makes me part of her dreams. “She’s ready to let go,” Becca says.

  September 21, 1971

  “Go back to the last town,” Mother says to me. “Don’t let Tom write the damned history of the O’Kells.”

  October 2, 1971

  This feels like a deathwatch. What else could it be?

  November 4, 1971

  Sliv finds her and I find Sliv at the bottom of the staircase no one ever uses. His eyes are bloodshot from the crying and the Dewar’s half-gone by his feet on the stairs. “She’s gone,” Sliv says. “I look in on her like I always do but she isn’t moving. I know how to take a pulse from Korea but your mother she’s cold as ice. She has a twenty in her fist for me.” He holds it up in one hand. “I’m going to drink it up, drink it down today in her honor. It’s the least I can do for Missus O’Kell.”

  November 7, 1971

  Bucky Harwell comes to Mother’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and for that moment my past is no longer past. It was Bucky or the Convent for me, two bad choices, and I chose the lesser of two evils, but an evil nonetheless. Bucky is there in the pew with wife number three, a girl a third his age. I could have been the first former Mrs. Bucky. Suddenly the Convent doesn’t seem quite so bad.

  November 23, 1971

  I write Sliv a big check and in my note I thank him for everything he did. I wish him well, and I tell him that if there is a heaven he will be there some day with Mother.

  December 1, 1971

  Sliv writes back with the check, uncashed, enclosed. “I know it’s hard to understand from where you’re sitting, Miss O’Kell,” Sliv writes, “but it wasn’t about the money for yours truly. It was about anything but.”

  December 17, 1971

  Mother’s will. Mother’s way. Everything split four ways, between me, Rebecca, Diana—and Sliv—with nothing for Tom! From her grave, bless her, Mother has given both Sliv and Tom their just reward. It won’t be easy for Sliv to send this check back uncashed.

  December 20, 1971

  Tom wastes no time filing suit. He says Sliv took advantage of Mother’s “delirium and dementia” to sneak into her will at the last minute, at Tom’s expense. He says Mother was no longer competent in the end, and that her next-to-last will, with Tom’s share intact, is the one that should stand. I have that sick feeling way down here in my stomach, because Tom always wins.

  December 21, 1971

  I go back to Mother’s building and find Sliv on a hard chair next to the elevator. I tell him Tom has already gone to court to get the money back. I am going to get you a lawyer, I tell Sliv. A very good lawyer. “I told you, Miss O’Kell.” Sliv looks at me like I forgot to screw my head on straight this morning. “I already got what I need. No one can make me want more than what I already got.”

  January 11, 1972

  Rebecca and Diana meet me at “21” to figure out what to do about Sliv. “I hate Tom,” Rebecca says. “I really can’t stand him. But I don’t think it’s right what Mother did to him. I know, I know. It makes no sense. I know it makes no sense. But that’s how I feel.” What about you, Diana? “I think we should propose a settlement to Sliv,” Diana says. “Convince him that a generous lump sum is far better than nothing at all. We can all pay it out of our shares. Perhaps you could propose it to him, Eleanor darling?” How diplomatic of you, Diana, I say.

  January 17, 1972

  “Listen, Miss O’Kell,” Sliv says. “Tell your brother and your sisters I don’t want your O’Kell money. If I wasn’t going to take a fiver from Missus O’Kell, I sure as hell ain’t going to take a nickel from any of you.”

  February 2, 1972

  I am called to the stand at a hearing in Tom’s case against Mother. Tom is there in the courtroom, next to his lawyer, a dandy, a fat man with a red handkerchief stuffed into the breast pocket of his suit. Rebecca is there, and Diana too, everyone except Sliv. Tom’s stuffed lawyer moves toward me and I smell his mouthwash and cologne. “Welcome, Miss O’Kell,” he coos. “You of course have my condolences. I understand your mother was really quite ill at the end.” Not ill, I say. Just old. “Was she conscious?” Sleeping mostly, I say. “Sleeping? Really?” He leans in. “Would you say she drifted in and out of her dreams?” Yes, I say. “And if she were sleeping then it was a dream, was it not?” Yes, I say. “But if she were awake, one would have to call that—what?—a hallucination, wouldn’t one?” You could call it that, I say. “And if she were drifting in and out of sleep, then one would assume it would become very difficult, if not actually impossible, to tell the difference from this dreaming state and an actual hallucination.” I say I suppose that’s so. “And people don’t normally address other people in the room when they’re dreaming, do they Miss O’Kell?” No, I say. “Yet your Mother routinely addressed you, didn’t she? She mistook you for Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or God knows whom else, didn’t she? The fact is your Mother lost all her ability to distinguish between these hallucinations and her own life. Didn’t she?” At times, I say. “And one of those times was when she wrote the will that cut your brother Thomas off from his rightful inheritance.” That was different, I say. That was because of what he did to— “No further questions, Miss O’Kell,” he says.

  February 4, 1972

  Rebecca is still beside herself with shame, blaming herself for telling Tom about Mother’s visions. I tell her it doesn’t matter, because Sliv never wanted the money in the first place, and Tom was never going to let him have it. At least Sliv didn’t come to the hearing. I don’t want him to know how the world really works.

  February 22, 1972

  Tom wins his case in a walk, of course, in record time. Now he really is filthy rich.

  March 6, 1972

  Tom leans on his horn to get my attention as I leave Diana’s house in Southampton. “The Big House is mine now,” he says. “You’ll get that piece over there.” He points to a second lot by the ocean. Mother divided up the land along O’Kell Lane in Southampton four ways, but Tom made sure in court he got to use The Big House and the chapel until the day he dies, with small patches on the beach left over for me and Becca and Diana. “You’ll have to build, of course,” he yells at me. “Unless you want to give it to the Order.” Go to hell, I tell him.

  March 14, 1972

  I walk my land, the part by the beach that’s mine now. I am too upset about Mother’s death to fight Tom. He can have The Big House for all I care.

  March 21, 1972

  Now Tom and Luigi are fighting over the property line in Southampton because Tom says Luigi’s hedges are on his property. Tom’s Big House is between Diana and Luigi’s house and the ocean. In spite, he has moved a huge and ugly old barn onto his property to block their view. Luigi says: “I will kill him.”

  March 31, 1972

  Now I really do have more money than God. I can do anything I want.

  April 1, 1972

  Tom hosed down Luigi when he tried to cut the hedges today and Luigi went after him like a madman with hedge-trimmers. Diana had to call the Southampton police. Time for me to leave this behind.

  April 10, 1972

  I am just beginning to know myself well enough to hate. Not just Tom, but everything in the world that makes Tom possible.

  April 24, 1972

  This world is no place for a woman. I need to create a new world.

  July 13, 1972

  Here finally, finally here. I step off the Trailways bus in the last town along the canal with one bag to my name. A man hunched over a crossword puzzle slumps on a stool behind the ticket window with “Closed” scotch-taped to scratched-up glass. He’s stumped so his chewed-up pencil doesn’t move and he never looks up. There are no cabs to be had and what cars there are on the street lo
ok like they haven’t been washed since The Fifties. I take a left into what has to be the center of town and the canal, dull as dishwater, slides off to my left, a man-made ditch so dirty you could probably walk across it if you had to. I turn the corner onto Main Street and it seems like every other store is boarded up shut. Scarlett’s Hair Wave. Midas Gems. The Canal Times. Delectable Confections. Canal Light & Power. The Church of The Immaculate Conception is all but abandoned, with bird droppings all over the cement stairs and a hinge twisting loose on the front door. There’s not a single store that I’ve ever heard of on the main drag. There’s nothing here, nothing worth saving, nothing worth a damn. No wonder Mother thought this was the perfect place for me.

  July 14, 1972

  At night, streetlights fritz on and off and cats travel in packs like rats. The only hotel in town is the broken-down Queen Mother, with a Princess phone in every room.

  July 17, 1972

  On the corner there’s a Western Union with the Union burnt out. When I slam the door shut behind me dust slow dances with my face. I wave the dust away and hit one of those round dingers shaped like a nipple on the front desk. Someone opens a door in back and a man comes out, head down, scratching his head, his face buried in a newspaper folded long. It’s the same man from behind the counter at the bus stop, but now he’s wearing two chewed-up pencils, one behind each ear. “Eight-letter word for disobedient—beginning with—” Insolent, I say. He writes it down and stares at me like he’s seen a ghost. “And that gives me the ‘T’ on the other end, eight letters down for traitor, ending with another—” Turncoat, I say. “Well I’ll be a son of a bitch!” he says. “The hell are you?” I’m looking for the Bell sisters, I say. “Only one of those crazy bats is left,” he says. “Out by the trestle. But you better double-time it. Old Eileen’s half-dead already.”

  July 18, 1972

  “And that’s when the lying began, dear. Half of us lying before The Tommies even began. Every one of us wanting to be with The Great Fornicator himself.” Eileen Bell is a bird, all stage whispers and wisps of stray hair, her bones thin enough to break like twigs. “He would have been your—” My grandfather on my mother’s side, I say. “Yes indeed. Thomas Cushing himself was your granddaddy. Keep in mind The Tommies lived their lives by their lies! Else how could a girl stand tall in this town? Answer me that!” I say I don’t have an answer for that. “No one did then, either. So every other one of us commenced to lying our fool heads off. Life was better that way, in a way. Even if the half of it weren’t true there was a kind of equalness to it, the kind of equal women won’t shut up about now. Liars we were! Every other one of us. I swear on my sister’s grave. The Hads saying they had done it with Thomas Cushing. The Had Nots saying they were doing it, too.” Were you lying about Thomas Cushing? I ask Eileen Bell. Or was your sister? “One of us had to be a Had, either my sister Maureen or me. We both couldn’t be both, you know, not with the same man, at least not at the same time. I wish I could remember which of us was doing which, what, when, with who.” You really are a liar, I say. “In this town,” she winks, “you have to be.”

  August 4, 1972

  I suppose the canal must have meant something to someone once, connecting upstate to down, but now the town is backed up against its own stinking ditch, with no future, with a past just waiting to be made up. Who could ask for anything more?

  August 6, 1972

  Where is everyone? I wonder. I almost never see anyone anywhere. It’s like a ghost town here. “You’ve seen the town,” Eileen Bell says. “You’ve seen the canal. We’re so far backed up we’re not even a backwater any more. There’s no place to go, and no one ever goes anywhere anyway. When people leave, they kiss this baby goodbye. Can you blame them? Our backs are to the wall, so nobody ever comes back.”

  August 17, 1972

  I get the Royale Suite at The Queen Mother after the tax man leaves town. I can tell it’s the Royale Suite because there are two Princess phones in my room.

  August 20, 1972

  Whatever happened to Mordechai? I wonder. “Mordechai Cushing died a fat old pig a long time ago,” Eileen Bell says. “A walking sausage, he was. You’ve probably seen his son Eli, the one always doing the crosswords? He acts as if life is too confusing for words he doesn’t even know. Then there’s Millie O’Malley, Mordechai’s no-good daughter by Molly O’Malley. You might say Mordechai Cushing lives on in this town.”

  August 25, 1972

  The lights on both of my Princess phones are blinking at the hotel. There’s a message to call Charles Evans. He says the cash from my full inheritance has been transferred into my accounts, as specified. I ask him how much and he tells me. “You can buy anything you want now, Eleanor,” he says. “So what are you going to buy?” he asks. The soul of a town, I tell him.

  August 27, 1972

  I ask Eileen Bell to tell me everything there is to know about my grandmother Constance Briody. “Your grandmother’s been wiped off the face of the earth,” she says. “Like someone took a squeegee and squeezed her right off the pages of history. Don’t you see? It was Molly O’Malley lost the battle and won the war.” What battle? I wonder. What war? “Molly O’Malley and your grandmother, they preached abstinence as the only way for The Tommies to purge themselves after John Patrick Cushing fried to death. Your own grandmother Constance used to rail against ‘The Immortal Cock.’” First, she says, they convinced the Hads and Had Nots to do without men, to take care of themselves and each other. “But all the while she and Molly O’Malley were porking Mordechai Cushing, the only Son what was left. He was fat and harmless, of course, but he was a Cushing, the last one of his Sons standing, the closest anyone was ever going to get to Thomas Cushing’s immortal you-know-what. Your grandmother and Molly O’Malley were the only Tommies allowed to have a man.” Did anyone know? “The last town along the canal is a small town, Miss Eleanor. Everyone knew, though no one was ever allowed to mention it.” No wonder this town went to hell in a handbasket.

  September 9, 1972

  I go to buy clothes but I might as well be on a mission to climb the Himalayas. I wish Diana could see me now, at the army-navy store, with my painter’s pants and rayon socks. As far as fashion is concerned, I’m just not happening any more.

  October 8, 1972

  I ask Eileen Bell what went wrong. “Molly O’Malley was just the stronger of the two, stronger even than your grandmother. Nobody knows for sure where Constance Briody went, Eleanor. And nobody ever saw her again.” What happened after she left? “Constance Briody became the reason babies cried, the be-all and end-all of all of our troubles. She was to blame for everything in this town, your grandmother was. She was the scapegoat. It was a plain old brainwashing by Molly O’Malley.” And people swallowed it? “Every word,” Eileen Bell says. “Don’t you see what you’re up against in this town?”

  November 1, 1972

  I walk to the cemetery on the bluff high above the town. Weeds are taking over tombstones. The canal down below looks black as ink at the bottom of a well. I think I am starting to see Mother’s life as a microcosm of everything that happened to women in the last hundred years. She had to carry out her ambitions through her husband and her children. She had to disappear from her own life. That’s not going to happen to me. Not now. Not ever.

  November 11, 1972

  “It’s Molly O’Malley you should be talking to,” Eileen Bell says. “The arch-enemy of your grandmother Constance.” I had no idea she was still alive. “Molly’s got a foot and half her torso in the grave. She can’t even talk any more. But she’s not ready for The Great Beyond just yet.” I say I’m going to see her. “I’m sure she’ll welcome the granddaughter of Constance Briody with open arms, Eleanor.” Eileen Bell snorts. “And you best watch out for Millie O’Malley, for Mollie’s daughter by Mordechai. She thinks it’s her town now, and no one has ever disabused her of that notion.”

  November 12, 1972

  I go to see Molly O’Malley in t
he hospital. Everything about her has faded to the color that’s left in a television after you tune the color out. I tell her I’m Kate Briody’s daughter, the granddaughter of Constance Briody and Thomas Cushing. I tell her there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to fear. Her eyes get big and wide, terrified.

  November 19, 1972

  I cover up Molly O’Malley’s nose and her mouth and I watch her turn blue before the machines hooked up to her arms start to yelp. Then I yell to the nurse for help.

  November 20, 1972

  “Stroke,” the nurse says. “You can set your watch to it around here, around the holidays. Terrible for you to be there when it happened.” Life is funny that way, I say.