The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(8)
“For my life,” Gomer said. “For my going out and my lying down. For your right hand, which holds me fast. For my eyes, my ears, my limbs, and my senses. For the clothes on my back, the salt in my hand, the water-storage tanks in my home, the walls that keep out lawbreakers, for the rain when it comes, for the knowledge of the word you have given me.”
“It is sufficient,” said the godmother. “Full salt and full rations for tomorrow.” Gomer’s flush broke through the dirt on her face, and she smiled broadly as she twisted her hands under the table, as if wringing out every last drop of the compliment.
Robin came next, reciting in a high, practiced voice: “For consolation, for comfort, for the discernment between what can be eaten and what not ought to be eaten, for the power to keep the dead in the ground, for your commandments, for your wonder-working, for the knowledge of poisons and of proofs, for the safety of your garden in a wicked world.”
“It is sufficient,” said the godmother. “Full salt and three-quarters rations, for failing to mention the watch-fires I have set around this house that burn both day and night.”
Paul said nothing, and the godmother did not ask her to speak. She sat on the lowest stool at the end of the table, for her work had taken her to the farthest ends of the property, and she had been late in presenting herself to the house. She had broad shoulders and reddish-brown hair, which she wore very short. She sat at the end of the table six nights out of seven.
“Attend, and account how you love me,” the godmother said. “Youngest first.”
“More than eyes,” Robin said. “More than life, more than health, more than salt-rations and true water, more than breath, more than honor; you are speech and liberty to me.”
“More than milk,” Gomer said. “More than eggs, more than a portable generator, more than bread and lamps, more than my living parents and my own sweet bed; you are air and light to me.”
“Paul, I will not ask how you love me,” said the godmother, “as I know that you do not.” Gomer twisted her hands under the table again, but said nothing. Robin looked at Paul out of the corner of her eyes and pulled her mouth to one side, but said nothing. Paul stacked her sister’s dishes under her own and swept the crumbs off the table onto the ground.
“Sly,” said the godmother to Paul’s sisters. “Sly and secret and workful, and gives her loyalty to a dead woman even as she neglects the living woman who stands before her. She wastes water and salt weeping over those who neither notice nor profit from them. Look, she has been crying today; her eyes betray her.”
Paul still said nothing, having long since learned better than to offer a defense. Soon enough the godmother gathered up her cup and book and, rising from her seat, led them all in the final salt-prayer.
“Blessed be salt. Blessed be the solution, from water and from rock, intervener in the blood.
“Blessed be the anti-caking agent, the de-iced highway. Guard against the seizure and the fluid of the lungs.
“Blessed be the Trace Elements. You iodize all things, preserve all things, desiccate the living and the dead, the Great Solubizer.
“Blessed be Potassium, salt’s glorious spouse, guardian of the concentration gradient, protector of resting potential.
“Let my flesh be a safeguard of the reserves: let my body preserve the salt for those who will come after. Bless the rations. Bless the Alberger process. Keep us from the daily minimum, the saltless fits. May she who wastes salt, lose salt; may she who finds salt, keep salt.
“Salt within me, salt before me, salt behind me, salt beneath me, salt to my left and to my right, salt when I lie down, salt when I sit down, salt when I arise, salt in the heart of all who think of me, salt in the mouth of all who speak of me, salt in every eye that sees, salt in every ear that hears.”
With that the meal was over, and they went inside.
*
Gomer and Robin attended to their own rooms, their own laundry, and their own labor. Their mother managed the house’s income and expenditures; their held-in-common father handled all responsibilities municipal and civic. Paul was responsible for the kitchen, the guardroom, the chapel, the compost heap that fed the garden, the neatening of the family pathways, the tithe, and the several public rooms of the house, because, as the godmother had pointed out, “Paul has a dead mother, who does no work, and so her daughter must work for both.”
What had happened, what had always happened, was this: Paul’s work took her often to the false cypress that flourished over her mother’s bones at the end of the field. There were no other trees nearby (although it was not a tree, precisely, but a shrub, no more than six feet in height and perhaps eight feet around), which meant it provided the only shade to be found for half a mile during the worst heat of the day. It was not for emotional but logistical reasons that Paul preferred it. Had there been another option, she would gladly have availed herself of it, for the shade the false cypress provided was patchy and thin, and she had to thrust herself underneath its branches in order to hide herself from the sun, and cover her face with her hands, as bloated yellow spiders rained softly down on her. If she cried sometimes as she lay underneath, that was an expected physiological reaction. If her mother’s tree sometimes responded sympathetically, that was to be expected, too. Her mother had been in possession of not-insignificant sympathetic powers, and if every so often a spare bundle of nails or scrap of ash-soap or loaf of bread dropped down with the spiders, Paul did not waste them.