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

by Michael Conniff

  November 22, 1972

  “Don’t go in there,” the nurse says. “She’s just a shadow of herself.”

  November 27, 1972

  “So what are you doing here, Miss Eleanor O’Kell?” Millie O’Malley says in her mother’s hospital room. “Or should I call you ‘Mother Superior’?” She is bigger and wider than her mother, with a wide mouth and wide hips that seem to reach up to her shoulders. I tell her to call me whatever she goddamn wants. “You must have something half-baked in mind,” she says, “because no one comes to this town for nothing.” I tell her I thought I would take over the town, buy up all the businesses, and turn it into a place where women run the show. A kind of experiment in the name of my mother and my grandmother. “You have the dark wit of the Cushings,” she says. I’m serious, I say. “So am I,” Millie O’Malley says.

  December 1, 1972

  The statue of Molly O’Malley that I particularly loathe is the bronze opposite The Church of The Immaculate Conception, the one where she looks up across the canal like Davey Crocket. There is no sign of Constance Briody in the town. My grandmother has been wiped off the face of the earth.

  December 12, 1972

  In her hospital room, Molly O’Malley looks at me like a puppy dog with her big wet eyes. Before I’m done, I tell her, everyone will see that Constance Briody was the real founder of The Tommies. I tell her we are going to set the record straight. She starts to chew on her upper lip with her gums like an old geezer.

  December 20, 1972

  “So,” Millie O’Malley says, “you think you can just appear on our doorstep and declare yourself Savior? That’s not the way it works around here.” How does it work around here? I say. Because I don’t really see anything that works. “Things work around here the way they’ve always worked,” Millie O’Malley says. I tell Millie O’Malley her days in the driver’s seat are done. “What makes you think so?” she says. I tell her I’ve got more money than God, enough money to squash her like a bug. “This isn’t about money,” she says. How much you want to bet? I say.

  December 22, 1972

  Millie O’Malley is already in the hospital room when I come to see her mother. Molly O’Malley’s head bobs off to the side, a line of white spittle at both corners of her lips. “What have you done to my mother?” Millie O’Malley wants to know. Ask her, I say.

  December 24, 1972

  I tell Molly O’Malley on her deathbed that she might as well be dead. You destroyed my grandmother, I tell her. Now it’s lights out for the likes of you.

  December 25, 1972

  Molly O’Malley died suddenly last night on Christmas Eve. Very suddenly. Death Comes For The Archbitch.

  December 26, 1972

  Police Chief Dan Snyder has a body like a sandbag and big bags beneath his eyes. He takes off his big Chief hat in my room at the Queen Mother and he’s bald as a cue ball. He begs my pardon to be asking me about Molly O’Malley’s untimely death. “You were a friend of the deceased, Miss O’Kell?” he says. I tell him we were inseparable. “And you were present in her room when the deceased passed away?” Do you know who I am, Chief? I ask. “Yes, ma’am, yes I do,” Chief Snyder says. “I know that you’re an O’Kell, ma’am, and a Cushing too. I know that means you’re one rich lady. But I don’t pretend to know why you would have ever come back here unless you had a score to settle, if you don’t mind my saying. I mean nobody ever comes anywhere near here any more.” I tell the Chief that he and I can do some business in this town. “Ma’am?” Chief Snyder says. I say, I think you understand what I’m saying, Chief. You are obviously not a dumb man. “I read you, Miss O’Kell,” he says. “You and I are on the same wavelength.”

  December 27, 1972

  “I know you killed her.” Millie O’Malley is in my room at the Queen Mother. She is sitting up in the chair between my two Princess phones with both her hands balled up into fists, her nails dug into her palms like spikes. I tell her I would like to do something for her, to help make up for her terrible loss. “You can leave town,” she says. “And you can go to hell. That would be a start.” I say that someone in her position, someone mourning the loss of her own mother, an historical figure in the town, of course deserves some form of compensation before leaving town for good and promising never to come back. “Compensation?” she says. “You think you can just hand me a check after you kill my mother and expect me to leave?” Absolutely, I say.

  January 4, 1973

  Millie O’Malley is gone. She took the money, less than I was ready to give her. The resurrection of The Tommies in my own image has begun.

  January 14, 1973

  “There was no second act, child,” Eileen Bell tells me. “There was just a vacuum, and you know the way that goes. We were a town ruled by one woman, for women, with no men. How could that have been anything but a disaster? And why should your way be anything different?”

  January 21, 1973

  In this town, I can be anyone or anything I want to be. I can make up my own rules as I go along. I resolve today to do whatever I damn well please.

  January 29, 1973

  I go to the cemetery on the bluff. First I have to purge this town of all the scraps of evidence of Molly O’Malley and her kind. Then I can turn the past into whatever kind of made-up story that I need.

  February 11, 1973

  The statue of Molly O’Malley across from The Church of the Immaculate Conception came crashing down today like a statue of Lenin, after I hired a crew to begin by breaking both her legs. I need to destroy her memory to manufacture the Molly O’Malley that I need, the boogeywoman who stands for the sexual dependence of women on men. Now that she’s dead, I need her to come back to life for the sake of The Tommies.

  March 4, 1973

  I tell Eileen Bell that by now everyone in the town knows who I am, knows my connection to my grandfather Thomas Edison, my grandmother Constance Briody, and the history of The Tommies. “What else have you got up your sleeve?” she asks. I will tell them there is nothing more wonderful in this world than a woman’s body. I will tell everyone that we must understand that our bodies are a shrine to what it means to be a woman, I say, and that we need to care for our shrines. “If they want shrines,” Eileen Bell says, “they can join the Shriners and wear those funny hats.”

  March 17, 1973

  I wonder what my blessed Will would think of me now? I call a meeting of The Tommies for St. Patrick’s Day, in the basement of The Church of the Immaculate Conception, the same place where they first came together after The Great Fire. I put flyers up all over town, with yours truly, the granddaughter of the great Constance Briody, as the featured speaker. I am expecting hordes, hundreds of women in the basement, but the first one here is the last of the Cushing men, Mordechai’s son Eli, bent over his crossword puzzle, the wrinkles cross-hatched into his forehead like a grid. He goes off into a corner, head down, and we wait and wait, he with his words, me with mine, the speech I have been rehearsing for weeks, about how the time has come for the daughters of The Tommies to find strength in the past and in each other. My talk is ready-made, well-rehearsed in the cracked mirrors of the Queen Mother, but only a few women dribble in, eight or ten tops, as if they have come up from out of the cracks of the town and into the light of day. They sprinkle onto benches around the room like everyone there is a stranger, their washed-out clothes strung onto the bare bones of their bodies. In the back of the basement, I put Johnny Cake in the same place my mother put it, enough for a hundred Tommies, but within a minute or two all but the crumbs are gone, gobbled up by the hungry few. They are bent over, these Tommies are, shrunken, their hair as ragged as a setter’s coat in a downpour, their faces dark and troubled. One or two are mumbling to themselves, but I can’t make out the words. There’s no point in waiting any longer so I begin my speech. The rape in this town is over, I tell them. Their mothers, Thomas Cushing’s daughters, were raped by Thomas Cushing’s Sons. For richer or poorer, for better or worse, I say we
all share the same Cushing blood. We are all the same breed. I tell them I am Constance Briody’s granddaughter and that means that I am part and parcel of the past. I tell them my grandmother Constance and my mother Kate served Johnny Cake right here in this basement the first time The Tommies ever met as a group. I say we can show the world what women can do if we work together. We can form businesses. We can work the farms, set up schools, raise our own children. Without men, I tell them, this can be heaven, or the closest thing to. I say we have to purge ourselves of men and the memory of men. We don’t need men at all. We can absolutely do without men. And what better place to create a better world for women, I wonder, than right next to a man-made ditch? I keep yapping, but The Tommies in the basement have been drifting into the bathroom, first one, then another, then in twos and threes until only one or two are left in the room listening to me. I follow them into the bathroom. Two of the Tommies are puking over the washbasin, one is bent retching over a garbage can, and three more are on their knees, their heads over the three toilets, as if praying to a particularly nasty God. They are puking the Johnny Cake up faster than they got it down because they try to do without food of any kind. The smell of their vomit makes me want to throw up.

  March 26, 1973

  I find Tommies in every dark hole. They listen to me but they’re blank, numb, dead in the water, like the misbegotten belly-up fish that back into our disgusting man-made ditch. This isn’t working. This isn’t working. This isn’t working.

  April 10, 1973

  I want to make Constance Briody’s original vision of a world without men come to life. But how? What do I tell The Tommies? I’ve got to get my story straight.

  April 30, 1998

  Something is missing from my pitch. I need a martyr, a hero, a saint. I need poetry, posters, a plaque. Or at least a better story. Truth hardly matters when you need to do the truth one better. I need to manufacture a Mother far more heroic than the one I had.

  May 1, 1973

  May Day. To make up my own myth I have to fashion a straw man out of whole cloth. In my new and completely abridged history of The Tommies, the enemy is Molly O’Malley. It was Molly O’Malley who sucked away the trust of The Tommies. It was Molly O’Malley who broke the sacred trust by sleeping with a man, with Mordechai Cushing. My grandmother tried to stop her and that was Constance Briody’s sin. That’s why my grandmother had to be banished from the kingdom. And that’s the truth as I now know it, as I need it to be. The late Molly O’Malley shall have to pay dearly for my truth in the last town along the canal.

  May 7, 1973

  One by one, I am going to find every last Tommie in the town. One by one, I will tell them we have to learn from our mistakes, to face the truth, my truth, of what happened to Molly O’Malley and my grandmother. All great stories start with an enemy, and now I’ve got mine. Glory be.

  May 19, 1973

  “You want me to lie?” Eileen Bell says. “You want me to jump up on top of one of your pedestals and tell the world that Constance Briody never slept with Mordechai Cushing? Is that what you want?” For a good cause, I say. “You’ve gone crackers,” Eileen Bell says.

  May 29, 1973

  I bring Johnny Cake, our sacred food, to my next encounter with a Tommie. I am thinking Communion without thinking of using the word. When she opens the door to the shanty the scent of ammonia can’t wipe out the stench of vomit. I tell her my name and she tells me hers. “Linda Connolly. Two Ns, two Ls, two Os, one C, and a Y.” She can’t take her eyes off the Johnny Cake. “I was one of the ones what come to hear you talk in the basement of the church that one time once.” Wonderful, wonderful, I say. I can see all the bones at the top of her chest above the top button on a blouse that once might have been white. She stares at the Johnny Cake like she’s starving, and I wonder if she was the one puking in the sink, the trash can, or the toilet. “Do sit,” she says. I do. The chair is beyond threadbare and I can feel the springs in the back of my thighs like sprockets. Linda? I say. You saw me speak, so you know why I’m here. You know that we live in a hell of someone else’s making. A man’s hell. Men are to blame for the pain, for the puking, for the lives we’ve been left with. Everything about my life was a lie before I came here, I tell her, and all the lies were about men. It is important never to forget the real enemy, I say, and we never want to forget that we The Tommies have taken Thomas Cushing’s name because he is the embodiment of our subjugation. But his time is up, their time is up, and now it’s time for The Tommies to grow up. We can live a life without men, I tell Linda Connolly. With nothing but love for one another. But we need to set the record straight about Molly O’Malley and my grandmother—the good and the bad. We need to repair our town, just as we have to repair our bodies and our souls. To create a new world, I say, we first have to destroy the old. We have to make our enemies pay, and men are the enemy. “Is that Johnny Cake?” Linda Connolly says.

  June 9, 1973

  The Tommies are still gorging and puking like teenagers, like they’re trying in their own sick way to purge themselves of the past. I can’t believe it’s come down to this, to shacks so flimsy they could be made of cardboard, to food so cheap they can’t keep it down, to a life sunk so low it’s sub-atomic. I tell the next Tommie, and the next, and the next, that we will clean up their man-made ditch, my metaphor for the mendacity of all men, but they’re all dead in the water, dead to the world. Every one of The Tommies looks at me like I’m a madwoman speaking in tongues.

  June 30, 1973

  I am walking down Main Street when I see the answer has been staring me in the face the whole time. It’s Delectable Confections, the boarded-up bakery that used to be the Briody & Daughter Bake Shop, the very spot where my mother was raped by John Patrick Cushing. I will turn it into a shrine, a place for coffee and Johnny Cake, a place for The Tommies to come to. Our home sweet home.

  July 1, 1973

  I call Charles Evans to make arrangements for my first investment in real estate in the town. “A bakery?” he says. “An heiress to the O’Kell fortune wants to sell danish?”

  July 21, 1973

  Delectable Confections comes down and a new sign goes up. Or should I say an old sign? The Briody & Daughter Bake Shop has returned to its rightful place in town. A smaller sign, “Free Johnny Cake Monday,” has been up on the window for a week and on every lamppost in town. A long line, like a breadline, snakes out the door. The Tommies are here for Johnny Cake, of course, but the cake is still under glass, and first they will have to hear me out. I clink to get them quiet. The Tommies really began right here, I say to a full house. Constance Briody always wanted a world without men, I tell them, and my grandmother never slept with any of the Sons, not even Mordechai, and that makes her the true founder of The Tommies after the rape of the Hads by Thomas Cushing. But no one in the bake shop is listening. They don’t need another hero. They need an enemy, or at least more Johnny Cake. The lightbulb goes off. The Tommies binge and purge but purging is what they need. I need to put the doubters in front of the rabble, to let the rabble turn thumbs down to purge themselves of this poison. It has to be religious. So I tell them there is going to be an Inquisition in the last town along the canal, starting right now, today, this moment, an inquiry into why everything went so bad. We are going to find out who’s to blame for what you have become, I tell them. We are going to name names. Nobody moves but I have their attention because now we are all looking for the same enemy, the same bogeyman, and they are looking at each other. Someone has to be drawn, quartered, crucified. I tell them to eat the Johnny Cake one at a time this time, and to do their puking outside my door.

  August 1, 1973

  I don’t own the Church of the Immaculate Conception. But now I do own the land that it sits on. This is where we will hold our trial of the century. All I need now is a villain.

  August 14, 1973

  “I know who it is you want,” Linda Connolly says. “Scarlett. From Scarlett’s Hair Wave. Everybody goe
s to her. She’s the only hairdresser in town.” And what has been her sin against womankind? I wonder. “Oh, that’s easy,” she says. “She still sleeps with a Cushing. With Mordechai’s son Eli.”

  September 3, 1973

  “I want a lawyer,” Scarlett says. What for? I say. I’m not a lawyer, and this is not a trial. “You can’t keep me here,” she says. I look around the basement at Tommies shoe-horned into every corner. You have no place to go, I say to Scarlett. Everyone you know is right here, right in this room. These are the people who know you, who grew up with you. These are the people you have to answer to. “But what are the questions?” Scarlett’s voice rises at the end of her question like it might never come down. “What have I done wrong?” She is the perfect subject for our Inquisition. She doesn’t look haunted like the rest. She looks like she eats right, like she gets enough sleep. She owns a business, she sleeps with a man, and she doesn’t wear washed-out clothes. She probably never even throws up. She is the perfect villain if I can break her because there’s nothing villainous about her. “I don’t need to be here,” she says. “This is no trial. This is a mockery.” You’re right, I say. This is a mockery of you.