Madapple

by Christina Meldrum

  —So you never saw her after that?

  —No. Not until she got arrested. Then I saw pictures of her, you know, in the paper and stuff.

  —Now, Hagen, you said you didn’t get to know Aslaug well, but did you spend any time with her?

  —Well, some. My sister, Rebekka, was good friends with Pastor’s kids, so we all hung out some. And Rebekka, she tutored Pastor’s son, Rune. I went with Rebekka when she tutored sometimes, when my parents were busy. But I was younger, you know, than all of them, so they didn’t want me around much. But I spent some time with them. Some time with Aslaug. I remember my sister telling me Aslaug was obsessed with Pastor’s son, you know. With Rune. Like she really liked him. Rebekka said it was weird, because, you know, they’re related.

  —Objection. Hearsay. Relevance. Move to strike.

  —Sustained.

  —Hagen, you said earlier that your sister got into trouble and that’s why you and your parents moved away. What kind of trouble?

  —Objection. Relevance.

  —Is this relevant, Counsel?

  —It is, Your Honor, if you’ll give me a minute.

  —One minute, Counsel. Get to the point.

  —Thank you, Your Honor. Go ahead and answer, Hagen.

  —Well, she got pregnant, you know. Rebekka got pregnant, and she wasn’t married. So she ended up staying at this home for pregnant girls for a while. And then Pastor Sara invited her to stay with them, in the church, you know. The church had been, like, a monastery, I guess. So it had bedrooms and a kitchen and stuff. Pastor and her kids lived there.

  —Did your sister ever mention Aslaug to you when she was staying at the church, after you moved away?

  —Objection. Hearsay.

  —Overruled.

  —No.

  —She never told you Aslaug also was staying at the church then?

  —Aslaug wasn’t staying at the church then. She’d left by then.

  —Objection. Move to strike. Hearsay. Speculation.

  —Sustained.

  —Hagen, do you have any reason to believe Aslaug was staying at the church during the period when your sister was staying there?

  —No.

  —Thank you. I have no further questions, Your Honor.

  GOLDEN BOUGH

  2003

  Transparent clouds thread the sky, gray and cream, they stretch and cross. But beyond them, there are only more clouds, mountains of fleshy, cotton-filler white that seem to weigh against their gauzy cousins, and mock them.

  This is a Hartswell afternoon; this sky, a Hartswell sky.

  As I step onto the grass, the moisture seeps through my shoes. I kneel to the ground, collect a fistful of damp leaves, hold them to my nose.

  It’s been well over a month since my arrival at this church, and nearly that long since my dream of Rune, and since the preacher’s fall, before the resurrection. Hartswell was fading away. But not today. Today the leaves’ sweet-earth aroma transports me back to Hartswell, where Mother and I had worked beneath this sky, heaving mounds of wet leaves upon a coarse black tarp, which we dragged to the rear of the lot. Then we burned the leaves, charring their sweetness. That was years before Mother’s illness crippled her. Before the cancer consumed her.

  “It’s supposed to snow. October snow. Only in Maine.”

  I hear Rune’s voice; I touch my breast near where the folded dream still lies, and I feel it there, a small knot. I look up at him just before he tackles me in the leaves.

  “Hey,” I say, and I hear myself laugh, and I remember this gift Rune gave me. And I wonder, Is Rune back? Although the preacher is again the preacher and the flock has returned, and Sanne again fills my days with her version of Mother’s mind, Rune has seemed caught, stretched between that other world and this one.

  “Good morning,” he says when we’re both on our backs. He sits up and dribbles a handful of leaves on my head, in my face. “I love days like this. So cold your breath makes art in the air.”

  “How are you?” I say. The length of his body presses along the length of mine. This is the first time he’s touched me since the day he showed me the portraits, the day before the dream; it’s one of only a handful of times we’ve talked since then. We’ve moved around each other like strangers. And I’ve reminded myself to lessen the hurt: in many ways, we are strangers.

  “‘There’s a certain slant of light,’” he says, “‘winter afternoons, that oppresses, like the heft of cathedral tunes. Heavenly hurt, it gives us. We can find no scar, but internal difference, where the meanings are. None may teach it, any, ’tis the seal despair. An imperial affliction sent us of the air.’”

  “Emily Dickinson?” I say.

  Now he laughs, but it is a different laugh than I remember. “Yes,” he says.

  “You’re still not okay,” I say. “It’s Sara? The drinking?”

  “She’s still drinking, yeah. But that’s putting the cart before the horse. No, this is heavenly hurt. That slant of light. This is the sky.” He takes my hand with his hand, tries to intertwine our fingers, but his webbed fingers set the twining off course. “You’re not going to try to steal away, are you?”

  “Steal away?” I say, but I’m thinking of the rough warmth of his callused hand, and the smell of paint from his clothes. Or his skin.

  “I haven’t scared you away, then?” he says. “I’ve been awful to you, I know. I’ve been an ass.”

  “You weren’t awful,” I say, but I think of the portraits. The garbage.

  “You’re a terrible liar.” He points to the sky. “Look,” he says. “Snow. The first snow. ‘An imperial affliction sent us of the air.’”

  I look up and see the swirling flakes. “I’d rather think of each flake as art in the air.”

  “I have an inkling you could tell me a lot about snow. No two snowflakes are alike, et cetera.” He catches a flake on his palm.

  “A stellar dendrite,” I say.

  “It has a name?”

  “This crystal’s treelike, see?” But he can’t see; the flake’s melted. “Dendrite means ‘treelike.’ A stellar dendrite has six symmetrical branches that hold asymmetrical side branches.”

  “And Mor is supposed to teach you?” he says, referring to the homeschooling that has yet to happen. “How do you know all of this?”

  “How do you know how to paint?” I say, and I’m carried back to his room, to me and me and me in his room.

  “That’s different. People don’t intuit names of snowflakes. I’ve started to wonder whether Sanne’s not crazy—maybe you are a gift from God.” He leans up on one elbow, looks at me.

  I want to tell him about the dream.

  “I thought you said she didn’t really believe that,” I say.

  “Who knows what Sanne believes? I don’t even know what I believe in anymore. I’ve been ordered to put my head in that proverbial sand. I can’t keep up with Sanne, too.” He streams his fingers through my hair, pulls it out across the leaves. “Perhaps I should put my head in the clouds instead. You’re an angel.” He reaches over my head and stretches out my hair opposite him. “You have wings.” He starts to stand, but I stop him, and when he looks back at me, his body suspended, the dream again comes alive. “What is it?” he says.

  “Do you think we’re brother and sister, Rune?” But when I see the expression on his face, I wish I could take the words back.

  He pulls away from me and climbs to his feet, then reaches down and pulls me to mine. “‘Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye,’” he says. “‘Much sense, the starkest madness….’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Directly translated? It means ‘Let’s play in the snow.’”

  “Pagans celebrated December twenty-fifth as the birthday of the sun god Deus Sol Invictus,” Sanne says a few weeks after that first snow, “long before anyone celebrated the birthday of Jesus Christ. The fact is, Christ wasn’t born anywhere near December twenty-fifth.”

  The p
reacher’s fall from grace precipitated my fall from grace in Sanne’s eyes. Or perhaps it’s the reality of me—versus the idea of me—that precipitated my fall. It seems clear now Rune was right: I was an instrument of rebellion for Sanne; another streak of color in her hair. And a streak that turned out to be not as provocative as she hoped it would be. She still asks me to translate texts my mother read under the guise of their having some connection to my birth. And she still hoards Mother’s notes, and pontificates: pagans, Gnostics, Essenes. But her interest lies in the ideas, not in me. I seem at best a tool—I can read texts she can’t, translate them for her—but more often I’m a disappointment. A spoiler of her plans. Too unexceptional to be a “consecrated human being.” Too unremarkable to be the divine on earth.

  I never believed I was this—the divine on earth—yet I wanted to be something. Someone. And Sanne’s theory of me gave me this: a theory of me. Without a theory of my past, my source, I seemed a nameless weed. But I’ve thought back again and again to Rune’s words on that blueberry day so long ago. “Your context may become your prison.” And I’ve wondered of the difference between a flower and a flowering weed. And I’ve wondered of a plucked plant submerged in water, which grows roots anew. Can living, changing, growing things ever really be defined as one thing or another? Am I or Sanne or Rune or the preacher one thing or another? I know Mother’s mind imprisoned me even as it freed me, that it was never one thing or another. And I know I miss Mother’s mind—that I long for those roots that both confine and unleash.

  Sanne is now the gatekeeper to Mother’s notes, to Mother’s mind before me. But the gate Sanne holds open is narrow. The tiny fraction of the whole becomes the whole in my eyes. I look at the vein of a leaf, but I don’t know its source of nourishment, or what it helps to nourish. I know only that it passes from somewhere to somewhere. I don’t know the direction of the passing. I’m not sure it’s part of a leaf at all.

  As I listen to Sanne now, as I watch the sixth or seventh or eighth snow of the season splatter the stained windows, and mute them, I remember Mother comparing the Christmas tree to the pagan tradition of hanging apples from the evergreen tree at the time of the winter solstice. “The evergreen tree,” Mother had said, “represents the sun god Balder. But the tree’s also a symbol of fertility, since laurel, yew and fir are green throughout the year and therefore impart life into the barren months of winter.”

  Christmas was a strange and wonderful time in Hartswell—a time when Mother became the quirky evening star. I loved this time, and yet I feared it in a way, too, because Mother became more unpredictable. She bought spices in stores, and raisins, almonds, rice and black cherries. She made pudding with the rice, a sauce for the pudding with the cherries, and she hid an almond in the pudding for one of us to find. She refused to say whether it was good luck or bad luck to find the almond—so though I longed for the almond, I dreaded it, too. And Mother mulled the spices she bought—orange peel, cardamom, cinnamon and cloves—with elderberry wine, muscatel and aquavit. Then she poured the hot gløg over plump raisins and blanched, skinned almonds, and we drank together.

  After the gløg sent me to sleep, Mother stayed up late into the night—the evening star—and she hung strands of holly, ivy and mistletoe around the house. In the morning, she insisted mischievous elves she called nisse had hung the decorations, not her. She warned me the nisse could wreak havoc. And in later years, when Mother was more unwell, they did; she did. I woke some days to find the holly torn from the walls, the prickly mistletoe scattered about the floor, the ivy ripped to shreds and Mother reeking of gløg.

  Yet even then she remained resolute about the existence of the nisse, and I started to wonder if she herself believed in them—part of me wanted her to believe in them, part of me feared for her mind. During these years, Mother prepared a special porridge and left it out for the nisse, “to appease them,” she said. So they would wreak no more havoc. And as she prepared the porridge, she told me stories of the ancient Yuletide festival in Scandinavia, the celebration of the return of the sun, when a log was cut from the center of a tree—the Yule log—and hauled to an open fireplace, where it was kindled and left to burn for twelve days. “From this,” Mother said, “came what is now known as the twelve days of Christmas.” Mother also described the use of the holly, ivy and mistletoe as having non-Christian roots. “Holly, with its prickly leaves and blood-red berries,” Mother said, “is a symbol of male sexuality, and the curling dark ivy, female fertility.” Mother said mistletoe was considered to be life-giving, a sacred symbol of the sun. “Pagans believed mistletoe could protect them from poison and illness. They called it ‘the golden bough,’” Mother said, “and gathered it on Midsummer Eve and the winter solstice.”

  “It makes sense the date of Christmas was derived from a pagan tradition,” I say to Sanne now. “Mother said many of the Christmas traditions were built on pagan traditions.” I feel proprietary about this information, and a sense of relief: I have something to add; Mother didn’t keep all of this from me.

  “It’s not just Christmas, Aslaug,” Sanne says, and her face takes on that high-browed, wide-eyed, soft-lipped look that conveys she’s again unimpressed with me. “Many Christian traditions have pagan roots.” The snow accosts the window behind Sanne’s head in a loud, wet slap; the lights flicker, once and again, then go black.

  “We lost power,” I nearly say, but I stop myself: of course we lost power.

  “The celebration of the birth of John the Baptist was a substitute for the pagan celebration of the summer solstice,” Sanne says; she addresses the blackout in neither words nor tone. “And baptism was practiced by adherents of many mystery religions long before the time of Christ.” Although her voice is unchanged, I hear it now in a different way: it’s nasal and high-pitched and girlish. “And then there’s the miracle of speaking in tongues,” she says. “That happened before Christ lived, too.”

  “What exactly is speaking in tongues?” I say, but what I want to say is, “What about the lights? Didn’t you notice they went out?” I feel a sort of frantic energy charge through me, like the electricity surged from the lights and infused itself in me. And I realize I’ve become dependent in a way Mother never wanted to be: dependent on those zipping, bumping, heating electrons that tunnel their way through a hundredth of an inch and produce light.

  But Sanne doesn’t seem dependent on the light; she doesn’t seem affected by the outage at all. And I start to wonder: maybe it’s just me who’s in the dark; maybe we didn’t lose power. I wave my hand near her voice. Does she see it? Can she see me?

  The lights flash on and off and on; my hand is inches from her face. “The lights went out,” I say, as if that explains my hand.

  “Really?” she says, but I see she’s trying to make sense of my words, my hand. She swallows hard: her rail-like neck bulges and settles. She plumps her plump lips, wets them. And I see chaos behind those black-eyed-Susan eyes. “You’ve heard people during the services blathering, of course.” Before her voice teetered high; now it’s fallen, and sounds muffled. “The term that describes what they’re doing is glossolalia.”

  “Derived from the Greek glossa, meaning ‘tongue,’ and lalia, ‘to talk’?” I say.

  “Probably,” Sanne says, but the shield has cracked some, her armor has thinned: I’ve stumped her, without meaning to. She thought she understood me; she thought I was predictable. But what was my hand doing in the air, ready to strike? I feel a rush of…Delight? Power? Something.

  “Glossolalia is first mentioned in the Bible in the Book of Acts. Chapter two, I think,” she says. “It describes the day of Pentecost, when the apostles supposedly were filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in languages they’d never learned.”

  I recall the first night I arrived at the church, when I peered through the door at the woman in army fatigues, her words spewing forth, messy as foam. And I remember the man next to her, seemingly interpreting her mess of words, honing them
down to alleys of darkness and light, and snakes to the soul. “So you think that really happened? That it really happens? That people speak in languages they never learned?”

  “Well, some form of glossolalia exists in many non-Christian traditions, too. Tibetan monks do it, and fetish priests in Africa. Shamans in Siberia and Greenland. It’s widespread in Haiti. And among many aboriginal peoples, including some Native American tribes.”

  “Mother knew all of this?” I say, and I feel myself swelling with my mother, with the breadth of her.

  “Maren knew way more than this. Many of the miracles attributed to Jesus were performed by other god-men long before Christ. Changing water into wine—we talked about that—stilling the sea, raising the dead, supernaturally catching fish. The story of Christ and his disciples catching the one hundred fifty-three fish is very similar to a story about Pythagoras. And the Pythagoreans believed one hundred fifty-three was a divine number, symbolized by the image of a fish.

  “Why?” I say. Yet I can’t shake that feeling I experienced when the lights flashed back on, when I saw her cracking, and thinning.

  “Because when two circles intersect, and the edge of one meets the middle of the other, the resulting figure is known as the ‘sign of the fish,’ vesica piscis. This image is often associated with Christianity, right? But the ratio of the figure—that is, its height to its length—is 153:265.”

  “That’s amazing,” I say. It seems so right to me, this meshing of science and the sacred. But what did I miss? I think. When Mother was teaching me science, what did I miss?

  “Yes and no,” Sanne says. “It’s not like it was an accident, the use of the number one hundred fifty-three. The Christians used many of the numbers pagans believed to be sacred. And they used them because pagans believed the numbers were sacred.”

  “Like what?” I say. “What besides the one-fifty-three?”