Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (12 page)

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.

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

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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 look 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.”

“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 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 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.

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?”

“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.”

I go to see Molly O’Malley in the 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.

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.

“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.

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

“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.