Mending the Moon (16 page)

Jeremy lets out a sharp bark. “That's pretty good, Prof Bellamy.”

“It's not bad.” Rosemary hugs the hairy grape. She closes her eyes so she can think better. “Mmmm … A service for the Blessing of Belongings, maybe? Anyway, a lot of people would show up to help, kind of like a barn-raising, and whenever they found something with a story attached, they'd go ring a bell in the middle of the room—or maybe they'd all have their own little bells—and that would be the signal for everyone else to stop so the person who just rang the bell could tell the story about whatever they just found.”

Jeremy groans. “That would take forever.”

“Maybe. It would take a while, sure. It would take as long as it needed to take, and people could come and go. It would be open-ended. It would be a way to get the packing-up done and honor the memories of the community and support the mourners.”

“I dunno, Aunt Rosie. The open mike at the funeral was bad enough. And I don't think I'd want everybody from church crammed into Mom's bedroom, you know?”

“Not everyone would come. It would be a self-selecting group.”

Jeremy snorts. “Yakking women. No offense.”

“Interesting idea,” Veronique says, “but I take our young man's point. How would you limit how long each person spoke? Would there be priests in the house, too? What would they be doing? Would the family have a way of kicking everyone out when they'd had enough?”

Rosemary shakes her head. “I don't know. This just occurred to me.” She looks down at the hairy grape, runs her fingers carefully over the delicate beaded flowers. “Okay, how about you ring the bell and then you only have a minute to tell the story? To keep the process moving so the packing actually gets done?”

Vera purses her lips. “Maybe. It needs work.”

“I know,” Rosemary says, but even as she folds the hairy grape and puts it on the bed, even as she stands up and gets ready to renew her battle with the closet, the idea plucks at her. She'll have to talk to Hen about it. She turns to Jeremy and holds her hands out for the bottle. “Let me put that in the other room for you, okay? Where it will be safe? And then we can get back to the packing?”

“Here,” he says, and shoves it at her.

She takes it. The glass is warm from his hands. “Do you want to stop? It's okay if you aren't ready yet.”

“I'm ready,” he says. “At least I think I am. I want the room to be cleared out, you know. I just don't want to go through the process of doing it. But I don't want other people to do it for me, either. So I guess I just have to hang tough.” He sighs. “I know she'd want me to move into the room, to enjoy it. It makes me feel like The Bird Who Cleans the World, that's all.”

*   *   *

When Jeremy is still very small, four or five, Melinda reads to him from a slim volume of Mayan fables called
The Bird Who Cleans the World.
The author, Mayan himself, explains that his mother told him these stories when he was a child. They're mostly animal stories, moral fables and creation myths.

Melinda originally plans to read Jeremy one story a night; at that rate, the book will get them through a month of bedtimes. But she rejects some of the tales because they're too sad, or too baldly about the horrible fates meeting disobedient children, and Jeremy seems uninterested in many of the others.

He responds to only two of the tales. One describes a huge flood that covers the earth, leaving only one house standing on a mountaintop. Inside the house, animals of every species take refuge. When the waters begin to recede, a buzzard is sent out to survey how much land has been uncovered, and in the bird's greed and hunger it eats the bodies of the dead animals that it finds, and ever after is cursed, or blessed, with the task of cleaning the world by eating carrion and corpses, the reeking and rotting.

“We heard that story in Sunday school,” Jeremy says. “'Cept it didn't talk about the buzzword.”

“Buzzard, honey.” Where did he get the word “buzzword”? Or has she, trying to interpret his childish speech, transformed his syllables into a word she knew? “It's not quite the same story. It's a little different.”

“The aminals are in a house, not a boat.”

“Animals, honey. Yes, that's right.”

“And in Sunday school it's a pretty white bird that flies out. It comes back with a flower.”

“An olive branch, to show that things are alive. That's right.”

Jeremy sucks his thumb thoughtfully for a moment, and then says, “This one doesn't have a rainbow.”

“No.”

“So it could rain again. God didn't promise to be good.”

She smiles. Yes, come to think of it, the rainbow
is
God's promise to be good, even if people aren't. “Well, this story doesn't talk about God. It doesn't say why the flood happened.”

“So maybe nobody was bad? It just rained for no reason?”

“Maybe. We don't know.”

“The dead animals weren't bad?”

“We don't know if they were. The story's not really about them. It's about the b— the buzzard.” She almost said “big bird,” but doesn't want him to get the scavenger in this tale confused with the friendly yellow creature on
Sesame Street.

“He was bad.” Jeremy frowns now, clearly concentrating very hard. “Because he ate the dead animals?”

“No. Because he didn't fly right back to the house, the way he was supposed to.”

“So he was punished. He had to eat dead things. But he
liked
eating dead things.”

“Yes, he did. And he was doing a good thing by eating them. He was cleaning the world. But the other animals didn't want to be around him, because he smelled bad. So he had to be lonely.”

He looks utterly perplexed, and Melinda reaches out to smooth the soft bangs off his forehead, realizing belatedly that the seemingly simple tale has led them into thickets of ambiguity that many adults would find bewildering. Terrible things happen for no reason, and only the lucky survive. The buzzard is bad for doing something good, and he's punished by being forced to keep doing what he wants to do, but in isolation. The bird that cleans the world is held in contempt, shunned, rather than honored. She thinks of a line from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Isaiah's suffering servant, and Christ's agonizing crucifixion after his friends abandon him.

This is dark stuff, grown-up stuff. She wonders, as Jeremy resumes sucking his thumb and drifts off to sleep—at this stage he'll wake again if he feels her weight lift from the mattress, so she'll sit a while longer—if the fable was composed before or after the Mayans were exposed to Catholicism. Liberation theology. This is the worldview of a people who've seen too much suffering and death, as far from the complacent triumphalism of right-wing American Protestantism as you can get. No easy answers here, no assured salvation, no rainbows: just paradox and the stench of corpses.

The next night she reads him another fable, one she's chosen for its simplicity and happy ending. A cricket disturbs the rest of some jaguars who dislike his singing, but he and a rabbit, his friend and ally, defeat the jaguars by gathering gourds of wasps, which chase the predators away by stinging them.

Jeremy likes the story, and asks for it again the next night. It has Christian subtexts, too: the last shall be first, the smallest shall be greatest. Jeremy doesn't understand that part yet, of course. He only knows that the cricket and the rabbit, for all their tininess, are smart, and that their quick thinking keeps them safe.

A week or two later, Veronique and Rosemary come over for Scrabble. After the game, Melinda shows them the book. “You know, for anybody who survived the civil war, that second story must have seemed like a joke. No wasps defeated the army when it overran the Mayan villages. The little guys lost.”

Veronique looks up from the illustration she's been studying. “Your little guy won. And this author, Victor Montejo”—she raps the book with her knuckles—“it says he wrote another book about watching a village being destroyed. But he included the wasp story anyway.”

“I still like the buzzard one better. But it's hard.”

Rosemary grimaces. “Yup. No meaning in disaster: only in the work you do afterwards, even if no one says thank you.”

*   *   *

Bone-weary, Veronique puts the shopping bag from Melinda's house on her own bed. She and Rosemary just packed this bag, and now she has to unpack it again. Why does so much of life seem like useless repetition, like an utterly random reordering of insignificant bits of matter and energy? Move a sweater here, move it there. Teach the same classes to different generations of students who all begin to blur into one dully staring face. Grade new stacks of papers, which all begin to blur into one dull essay, distinguished only by increasing numbers of sentence-level errors.

She really needs to retire.

She really can't retire.

She really needs to put away the things in the bag, or they'll become another burden, another weight on her shoulders.

At least they aren't in a mystery story anymore. They know who killed Melinda. In a mystery novel, that would be a happy ending.

Veronique isn't happy. She doubts anyone else is, either.

She reaches into the bag and pulls out the hairy grape, which in her current enervated state feels as heavy as a full-length mink coat. She has to hang this in the closet, at least, although she'll only take it out again the next time she goes to campus, so she can put it in her office. But she needs to put it away now so the cats won't have their way with it.

She's closed her bedroom door to keep them out, and they're wailing and mewling outside, butting the door with their heads.
You never feed us. You have never fed us. Not once in the last thousand years have you fed us.

She feeds them twice a day, fed them just before coming upstairs. They've already forgotten this, or abandoned the offering as unacceptable. Rummaging in her closet for a hanger while the cats mourn outside, Veronique thinks it might be nice to be a cat, for whom each opening of a cat food can is unprecedented cause for rejoicing, rather than the same damn thing all over again.

The hairy grape is safely stowed. Next? Veronique peers into the bag—how can she already have forgotten what it contains?—and spots a woven basket. She didn't really want this, but Jeremy insisted she take some of the items cluttering Melinda's nightstand and windowsills and bureau, and the basket's innocuous enough. She'll find some use for it.

Inside the basket is a small white box holding a pair of earrings, silver with opal and lapis inlay. These, Veronique genuinely likes. Melinda had lovely taste in jewelry.

And below that, a scarf: not the billowing blue thing Rosemary took, but red chenille, a spot of brightness. It glowed like a ruby when Veronique came across it in Melinda's bottom dresser drawer, and the color lifted her heart for a moment even as her fingers treasured the soft fabric. For those reasons, she claimed the scarf. She rarely wears scarves, but she'll wear this one.

She hauls herself upright and walks to her own dresser, across the room. The scarf goes in the top drawer, next to neatly folded socks. The earrings go in her small jewelry box. That leaves the basket. Indecisive, she holds it in both hands. She doesn't know where to put it. She can't think of a spot in the house where it will look right, and anyway, the cats are as likely to claw and chew this as they are to savage the hairy grape. Finally she goes back to the closet and stands on tiptoe to deposit the basket on an upper shelf.

There. The rearranging's done. Melinda's possessions have been integrated with Veronique's.

The bedroom door shakes, and Veronique opens it. The cats erupt inside, crying and winding themselves around her ankles, distraught and bereft.
You never love us. You have never loved us. Not once in the last thousand years have you loved us.

She bends to pat them, her knee screaming almost as loudly as they are, and then speaks aloud. “Cats, we're going downstairs now. I'm going to sit on the couch. You can join me, but you have to let me get downstairs without tripping me.”

She accomplishes this by gripping the bannister with both hands, a maneuver she knows would look ridiculous were anyone else here to see her. For the first time in a long time, she permits herself a stab of self-pity that no one is.

Chocolate. Just one square, medicinal. That's what she needs. She keeps a bar of Trader Joe's 72% cacao in the kitchen for just such emergencies.

Settled on the couch with one cat in her lap and the other curled next to her, the chocolate on a napkin on the side table, Veronique looks around her living room: clean uncluttered lines, clean uncluttered surfaces, Danish modern and Georgia O'Keefe. It occurs to her, as she takes the first nibble of chocolate and one of the cats begins to purr, that Melinda's possessions are indeed a collection of stories: belongings as books, as a library accessible only to a select clique of readers. She, Rosie, and Jeremy know the story of the brown bottle. To the rest of the world, it's just a piece of glass.

Veronique looks around her living room again. There's a large set of bookcases along one wall, holding volumes readable by anyone who speaks English. What other stories are here? When she dies, who will come to divvy up her belongings, and what tales will they tell?

She bought the furniture at various stores, the O'Keefe prints online. Aside from the literal books, the place is as devoid of narrative as the showrooms where she bought the furniture. She might as well be sitting in a doctor's waiting room or an airline departure gate.

Despite the warmth of the small mammal stretched across her lap, despite her satisfying sugar buzz, Veronique feels a sudden chill. She finds herself longing for the heft and comfort of the hairy grape.