Red Clocks

Sound egg in her pocket, she pours the goats’ grain. Hans and Pinka are out rambling but will be home soon. They know she can’t protect them if they ramble too far. Three shingles have come off the goat-shed roof; she needs nails. Under the shed there used to sleep a varying hare. Brown in summer, white in winter. He hated carrots and loved apples, whose seeds, poisonous to rabbits, the mender made sure to remove. The hare was so cuddly she didn’t care that he stole alfalfa from the goats or strewed poo pellets on her bed when she let him inside. One morning she found his body ripped open, a sack of furry blood. Rage poured up her throat at the fox or coyote, the bobcat, you took him, but they were only feeding themselves, you shouldn’t have took him, prey is scarce in winter, but he was mine. She cried while digging. Laid the hare beside her aunt’s old cat, two small graves under the madrone.

In the cabin the mender stirs the egg with vinegar and shepherd’s purse for the client who’s coming later, an over-bleeder. The drink will staunch her clotty, aching flow. She’s got no job and no insurance. I can pay you with batteries, her note said. Vinegary egg screwed tight in a glass jar and tucked into the mini fridge, beside a foil-wrapped wedge of cheddar. The mender wants the cheese right now, this minute, but cheese is only for Fridays. Black licorice nibs are for Sundays.

She mostly eats from the forest. Watercress and bitter cress, dandelion, plantain. Glasswort and chickweed. Bear grass, delicious when grilled. Burdock root to mash and fry. Miner’s lettuce and stinging nettle and, in small quantities, ghost pipe. (She loves the white stalks boiled with lemon and salt, but too much ghost pipe can kill you.) And she gleans from orchards and fields: hazelnuts, apples, cranberries, pears. If she could live off the land alone, without person-made things, she would. She hasn’t figured out how yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. Show them how Percivals do.

Her mother was a Percival. Her aunt was a Percival. The mender has been a Percival since age six, when her mother left her father. Which was because her father went away most Friday afternoons and didn’t come back until Monday and never said why. “A woman wants to know why,” said the mender’s mother. “At least give me that, fuckermo. Names and places! Ages and occupations!” They drove west across Oregon’s high desert, over the Cascade Mountains, mother smoking and daughter spitting out the window, to the coast, where the mender’s aunt ran a shop that sold candles, runes, and tarot packs. On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean. “But when does it stop?” “Never,” said her aunt. “It’s perpetual, though impermanent.” And the mender’s mother said, “Pretentious much?”

The mender would take pretentious any day over high.

She lies naked with the cat by the stove’s heat, hard steady rain on the roof and the woods black and the foxes quiet, owlets asleep in their nest box. Malky leaps from her lap, paws at the door. “You want to get soaked, little fuckermo?” Gold-splashed eyes watch her solemnly. Gray flanks tremble. “You have a girlfriend you need to meet?” She shakes off the blanket and opens the door, and he flashes out.

Whenever Lola came over, Malky hid; she thought the mender lived in the cabin alone. “Don’t you get frightened,” said Lola, “all the way up here in the middle of nothing?”

Silly bitch, trees are not nothing. Nor are cats, goats, chickens, owls, foxes, bobcats, black-tailed deer, long-eared bats, red-tailed hawks, dark-eyed juncos, bald-faced hornets, varying hares, mourning cloak butterflies, black vine weevils, and souls fled from their mortal casings.

Alone human-wise.

She hasn’t heard from Lola since that day of the shouting. No notes left in her mailbox at the P.O., no visits. It was more than shouting. A fight. Lola, in her adorable green dress, was fighting. The mender was not. The mender barely said a word.

Past noon, but the goats aren’t home yet. Cramp of worry. Last year they wrecked a campsite near the trail. Not their fault: some dumb tourist left food all over the woods. When the mender found them, the guy was pointing a rifle at Hans. “You better keep them on your property from here on out,” he said, “because I love goat stew.”

In Europe they once held trials for misbehaving animals. Wasn’t just the witches they hanged. A pig was sent to the gallows for eating a child’s face, a mule roasted alive for having been penetrated by its human master. For the unnatural act of laying an egg, a rooster was burned at the stake. Bees found guilty of stinging a man to death were suffocated in the hive, their honey destroyed, lest murder honey infect the mouths that ate it.

She with murder honey on her teeth shall bleed salt from where two curves of thigh skin meet. Tasting honey from the body of a bee with devil-face shall start this salty blood. Faces of bees who have done murder do resemble those of starving dogs, whose eyes grow more human looking as they starve. Apis mellifera, Apis diabolus. If a town be swarmed by bees with devil-face, and those bees do drip honey into open mouths, the body of a woman with honey tooth, bleeding thigh salt, shall be lashed to whatever stake will hold her. The bee swarm shall be gathered in a barrel and dumped upon the fire that eats her. The honey teeth do catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too, and the lips. Bees’ bodies when burning do smell of hot marrow; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on.

You needed a boat to reach the lighthouse, a quarter mile from shore, and if a storm hit, you slept overnight in a reindeer bag on the watch room’s slanted floor.

During storms the polar explorer stood on the lantern gallery, holding its rail as if her life depended on it, because her life did. She loved any circumstance in which survival was not assured. The threat of being swept over the rail woke her from the lethargy sluggery she felt at home chopping rhubarb, cracking puffin eggs, peeling the skin off dead sheep.

THE DAUGHTER

Grew up in a city born of the terror of the vastness of space, where the streets lie tight in a grid. The men who built Salem, Oregon, were white Methodist missionaries who followed white fur-trade trappers to the Pacific Northwest, and the missionaries were less excited than the trappers by the wildness foaming in every direction. They laid their town in a valley that had been fished, harvested, and winter-camped for centuries by the Kalapuya people, who, in the 1850s, were forced onto reservations by the U.S. government. In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller. Downtown Salem is a box of streets Britishly named: Church and Cottage and Market, Summer and Winter and East.

The daughter knew every tidy inch of her city neighborhood. She is still learning the inches in Newville, where humans are less, nature is more.

She stands in the lantern room of the Gunakadeit Lighthouse, north of town, where she has come after school with the person she hopes to officially call her boyfriend. From here you can see massive cliffs soaring up from the ocean, rust veined, green mossed; giant pines gathering like soldiers along their rim; goblin trees jutting slant from the rock face. You can see silver-white lather smashing at the cliffs’ ankles. The harbor and its moored boats and the ocean beyond, a shirred blue prairie stretching to the horizon, cut by bars of green. Far from shore: a black fin.

“Boring up here,” says Ephraim.

Look at the black fin! she wants to say. The goblin trees!

She says, “Yeah,” and touches his jaw, specked with new beard. They kiss for a while. She loves it except for the tongue thrusts.

Does the fin belong to a shark? Could it belong to a whale?

She draws back from Ephraim to look at the sea.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Gone.

“Wanna bounce?” he says.

They race down the spiral staircase, boot soles ringing on the stone, and climb into the backseat of his car.

“I think I saw a gray whale. Did you—?”

“Nope,” says Ephraim. “But did you know blue whales have the biggest cocks of any animal? Eight to ten feet.”

“The dinosaurs’ were bigger than that.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, my dad’s got this book—” She stops: Ephraim has no father. The daughter’s father, though annoying, loves her more than all the world’s gold. “Anyway,” she says, “here’s one: A skeleton asks another skeleton, ‘Do you want to hear a joke?’ Second skeleton says, ‘Only if it’s humerus.’”

“Why is that funny?”

“Because—‘humerus’? The arm bone?”

“That’s a little-kid joke.”

Her mom’s favorite pun. It’s not her fault he didn’t know what a humerus was.

“No more talking.” He goes to kiss her but she dodges, bites his shoulder through the cotton long sleeve, trying to break the skin but also not to. He gets her underpants down so fast it feels professional. Her jeans are already flung to some corner of the car, maybe on the steering wheel, maybe under the front seat, his jeans too, his hat.

She reaches for his penis and circles her palm around the head, like she’s polishing.

“Not like that—” Ephraim moves her hand to grip the shaft. Up down up down up down. “Like that.”

He spits on his hand and wets his penis, guides it into her vagina. He shoves back and forth. It feels okay but not great, definitely not as great as they say it should feel, and it doesn’t help that the back of her head keeps slamming against the door handle, but the daughter has also read that it takes some time to get good at sex and to like it, especially for the girl. He has an orgasm with the same jittery moan she found weird at first but is getting used to, and she is relieved that her head has stopped being slammed against the door handle, so she smiles; and Ephraim smiles too; and she flinches at the sticky milk dribbling out of her.

The explorer went to the lighthouse whenever allowed, at first, and once she could handle the boat alone, even when forbidden. Her uncle Bjartur felt bad that her father was dead and so let her come, although she bothered him with her questions; he was a lighthouse keeper, God knows, because he preferred his own company, but this little one, this Eivør, youngest of his favorite sister, he could find it in his chewed heart to let her run up the spiral stairs and dig through his trunk of ships’ debris and on drenched tiptoes watch the weather.

THE WIFE

Between town and home is a long twist of road that hugs the cliffside, climbing and dipping and climbing again.

At the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly, the wife’s jaw tenses.

What if she took her hands off the wheel and let them go?

The car would jump along the top branches of the shore pines, tearing a fine green wake; flip once before building speed; fly past the rocks and into the water and down forever and—

After the bend, she unclenches.

Almost home.

Second time this week she has pictured it.

Soon as the groceries are in, she’ll give herself a few minutes upstairs. It won’t kill them to watch a screen.

Why did she buy the grass-fed beef? Six dollars more per pound.

Second time this week.

They say grass-fed has the best fats.

Which might be entirely common. Maybe everyone pictures it, maybe not as often as twice a week but—

A little animal is struggling across the road. Dark, about a foot long.

Possum? Porcupine? Trying to cross.

Maybe it’s even healthy to picture it.

Closer: burnt black, scorched to rubber.

Shivering.

Already dead, still trying.

What burned it? Or who?

“You’re making us crash!”—from the backseat.

“We’re not crashing,” says the wife. Her foot is capable and steadfast. They will never crash with her foot on the brake.

Who burned this animal?

Convulsing, trembling, already so dead. Fur singed off. Skin black rubber.

Who burned you?

Closer: it’s a black plastic bag.

But she can’t unsee the shivering thing, burnt and dead and trying.

At the house: unbuckle, untangle, lift, carry, set down.

Unpack, put away.

Peel string cheese.

Distribute string cheese.

Place Bex and John in front of approved cartoon.

Upstairs, the wife closes the sewing-room door. Sits cross-legged on the bed. Fixes her stare on the scuffed white wall.

They are yipping and pipping, her two. They are rolling and polling and slapping and papping, rompling with little fists and heels on the bald carpet.

They are hers, but she can’t get inside them.

They can’t get back inside her.

They are hurling their fists—Bex fistier, but John brave.

Why did they name him John? Not a family name and almost as dull as the wife’s own. Bex had said, “I’m going to call the baby Yarnjee.”

Is John brave, or foolish?—he squirms willingly while his sister punches. The wife doesn’t say No hitting because she doesn’t want them to stop, she wants them to get tired.

She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks. John is sometimes Jean-voyage; and Ro calls him Pliny the Younger.

In the past hour, the kids have

Rolled and polled.

Eaten leftover popcorn stirred into lemon yogurt.

Asked the wife if they could watch more TV.

Been told no.

Slooped and chooped.

Tipped over the standing lamp.

Broken an eyelash.

Asked the wife why her anus is out in space when it should be in her butt.

Slapped and papped.

Asked the wife what’s for dinner.

Been told spaghetti.

Asked the wife what does she think is the best kind of sauce for butt pasta.

The grass-fed beef grows blood in a plastic bag. Does contact with the plastic cancel out its grass-fedness? She shouldn’t waste expensive meat in spaghetti sauce. Marinate it tonight? There’s a jar of store sauce in the—

“Take your finger out of his nose.”

“But he likes it,” says Bex.

And broccoli. Those par-baked dinner rolls are delicious, but she isn’t going to serve bread with pasta.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar stowed in the kitchen drawer, under the maps, please still be there, please still be there.

“Do you like having your sister’s finger stuck up your nose?”

John smiles, ducks, and nods.

“When the fuck is dinner?”

“What?”

Bex knows her crime; she eyes the wife with a cunning frown. “I mean when the gosh.”

“You said something else. Do you even know what it means?”

“It’s bad,” says Bex.

“Does Mattie ever say that word?”

“Um …”

Which way will her girl’s lie go: protect or incriminate?

“I think maybe yes,” says Bex dolefully.

Bex loves Mattie, who is the good babysitter, much preferred over Mrs. Costello, the mean. The girl when she lies looks a lot like her father. The hard-sunk eyes the wife once found beguiling are not eyes she would wish upon her daughter. Bex’s will have purplish circles before long.

But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy?

The world will care.

“To answer your question, dinner is whenever I want it to be.”

“When will you want it to be?”

“Don’t know,” says the wife. “Maybe we just won’t have dinner tonight.”

Sea-salt-almond. Chocolate. Bar.

Bex frowns again, not cunningly.

The wife kneels on the rug and pulls their bodies against her body, squeezes, nuzzles. “Oh, sprites, don’t worry, of course we’ll have dinner. I was joking.”

“Sometimes you do such bad jokes.”

“It’s true. I’m sorry. I predict that dinner will happen at six fifteen p.m., Pacific standard time. I predict that it will consist of spaghetti with tomato sauce and broccoli. So what species of sprite are you today?”

John says, “Water.”

Bex says, “Wood.”

Today’s date is marked on the kitchen calendar with a small black A. Which stands for “ask.”

Ask him again.

From the bay window, whose frame flakes with old paint possibly brimming with lead—she keeps forgetting to arrange to have the kids tested—the wife watches her husband trudge up the drive on short legs in jeans that are too tight, too young for him. He has a horror of dad pants and insists on dressing as he did at nineteen. His messenger bag bangs against one skinny thigh.

“He’s home,” she calls.

The kids race to greet him. This is a moment she used to love to picture, man home from work and children welcoming him, a perfect moment because it has no past or future—does not care where the man came from or what will happen after he is greeted, cares only for the joyful collision, the Daddy you’re here.

“Fee fi fo fon, je sens le sang of two white middle-class Québécois-American children!” Her sprites scramble all over him. “A’right, a’right, settle down, eh,” but he is contented, with John flung over his shoulder and Bex pulling open the satchel to check for vending-machine snacks. She’s got his salt tooth. Did she get everything from him? What is in her of the wife?

The nose. She escaped Didier’s nose.

“Hi, meuf,” he says, squatting to set John on the floor.

“How was the day?”

“Usual hell. Actually, not usual. Music teacher got laid off.”

Good.

“Hello, hell!” says Bex.

“We don’t say ‘hell,’” says the wife.

I’m glad she’s gone.

“Daddy—”

“I meant ‘heifer,’” says Didier.

“Kids, I want those blocks off the floor. Somebody could trip. Now! But I thought everyone loved the music teacher.”

“Budget crisis.”

“You mean they’re not replacing her?”

He shrugs.

“So there won’t be any music classes at all?”

“I must pee.”

When he emerges from the bathroom, she is leaning on the banister, listening to Bex boss John into doing all the block gathering.

“We should get a cleaner,” says Didier, for the third time this month. “I just counted the number of pubic hairs on the toilet rim.”

And soap heel crusted to the sink.

Black dust on the baseboards.

Soft yellow hair balls in every corner.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar in the drawer.

“We can’t afford one,” she says, “unless we stop using Mrs. Costello, and I’m not giving up those eight hours.” She looks into his blue-gray eyes, level with hers. She has often wished that Didier were taller. Is her wishing the product of socialization or an evolutionary adaptation from the days when being able to reach more food on a tree was a life‑or‑death advantage?

“Well,” he says, “somebody needs to start doing some cleaning. It’s like a bus station in there.”

She won’t be asking him tonight.

She will write the A again, on a different day.

“There were twelve, by the way,” he says. “I know you have stuff to do, I’m not saying you don’t, but could you maybe wash the toilet once in a while? Twelve hairs.”

Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

THE BIOGRAPHER

Can’t see the ocean from her apartment, but she can hear it. Most days between five and six thirty a.m. she sits in the kitchen listening to the waves and working on her study of Eivør Mínervudottír, a nineteenth-century polar hydrologist whose trailblazing research on pack ice was published under a male acquaintance’s name. There is no book on Mínervudottír, only passing mentions in other books. The biographer has a mass of notes by now, an outline, some paragraphs. A skein draft—more holes than words. On the kitchen wall she’s taped a photo of the shelf in the Salem bookstore where her book will live. The photo reminds her that she is going to finish it.

She opens Mínervudottír’s journal, translated from the Danish. I admit to fearing the attack of a sea bear; and my fingers hurt all the time. A woman long dead coming to life. But today, staring at the journal, the biographer can’t think. Her brain is soapy and throbbing from the new ovary medicine.

She sits in her car, radio on, throat shivering with hints of vomit, until she’s late enough for school not to care that her eye–foot–brake reaction time is slowed by the Ovutran. The roads have guardrails. Her forehead pulses hard. She sees a black lace throw itself across the windshield, and blinks it away.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter. She had heard there was glee on the lawns of her father’s Orlando retirement village. Marching in the streets of Portland. In Newville: brackish calm.

Short of sex with some man she wouldn’t otherwise want to have sex with, Ovutran and lube-glopped vaginal wands and Dr. Kalbfleisch’s golden fingers is the only biological route left. Intrauterine insemination. At her age, not much better than a turkey baster.

She was placed on the adoption wait-list three years ago. In her parent profile she earnestly and meticulously described her job, her apartment, her favorite books, her parents, her brother (drug addiction omitted), and the fierce beauty of Newville. She uploaded a photograph that made her look friendly but responsible, fun loving but stable, easygoing but upper middle class. The coral-pink cardigan she bought to wear in this photo she later threw into the clothing donation bin outside the church.

She was warned, yes, at the outset: birth mothers tend to choose married straight couples, especially if the couple is white. But not all birth mothers choose this way. Anything could happen, she was told. The fact that she was willing to take an older child or a child who needed special care meant the odds were in her favor.

She assumed it would take a while but that it would, eventually, happen.

She thought a foster placement, at least, would come through; and if things went well, that could lead to adoption.

Then the new president moved into the White House.

The Personhood Amendment happened.

One of the ripples in its wake: Public Law 116‑72.

On January fifteenth—in less than three months—this law, also known as Every Child Needs Two, takes effect. Its mission: to restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families. Unmarried persons will be legally prohibited from adopting children. In addition to valid marriage licenses, all adoptions will require approval through a federally regulated agency, rendering private transactions criminal.

Woozy with Ovutran, inching up the steps of Central Coast Regional, the biographer recalls her high school career on the varsity track team. “Keep your legs, Stephens!” the coach would yell when her muscles were about to give out.