The birch trees bordering our house wept salt water. I found a deer furtively licking the bark, looking like Bambi sneaking a hit. I sat on a stump to consult the Blake journals:
The BLAKE TESTIMONY OF RUTH OF THE NINETEENTH GENERATION IN HER TWENTY-THIRD YEAR
WEEPING OF PLANTS
Lamented should be greenstuff that seeps brack water or salt water or blood, for Nature is abhorring a lordly Visitor: if be but one plant then burn it or stop up a tree with a poultice of finely crushed talc, &c., to avoid notice.
BRACK WATER is the sign of the MANY-THROATED MONSTER GOD & THOSE WHO SPEAK UNSPEAKABLE TONGUES.
SALT WATER is the sign of UNFED LEVIATHANS & THE PELAGIC WATCHERS & THE TENTACLE so BLOOD WHICH EVEN LIGHT SHALL NOT ESCAPE.
Be comforted that the SHABBY MAN will not touch what is growing.
PLANT WEEPING, SINGLY: The trail, movement & wondrous pilgrimage.
PLANTS WEEPING, THE MANY: A Lord’s bower has been made & it is for you to weep & rejoice.
My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate.
Underneath in ballpoint was written: Has nobody noticed that Blake crypto-fascist worship of these deities has never helped?? Family of sheeple. Fuck the SYSTEM! This was dated 1972.
A bird called, then stopped mid-warble. The shadows lengthened into long sharp shapes. A sense of stifling pressure grew. All around me, each tree wept salt without cease.
I said aloud, “Nice.”
I hiked into town before evening. The bustling of people and the hurry of their daily chores made everything look almost normal; their heads were full of small-town everyday, work and food and family and maybe meth consumption, and this banality blurred the nagging fear. I stocked up on OJ and sufficient supply of Cruncheroos.
Outside the sky was full of chubby black rainclouds, and the streetlights cast the road into sulfurous relief. I smelled salt again as it began to rain, and through my hoodie I could feel that the rain was warm as tea; I caught a drop on my tongue and spat it out again, as it tasted deep and foul. As it landed it left whitish build up I foolishly took for snow.
It was not snow. Crystals festooned themselves in long, stiff streamers from the traffic signals. Strands like webbing swung from street to pavement, wall to sidewalk. The streetlights struggled on and turned it green-white in the electric glare, dazzling to the eye. Main Street was spangled over from every parked car to the dollar store. My palms were sweaty.
From down the street a car honked dazedly. My sneakers were gummed up and it covered my hair and my shoulders and my bike tires. I scuffed it off in a hurry. People stood stock-still in doorways and sat in their cars, faces pale and transfixed. Their apprehension was mindless animal apprehension, and my hands were trembling so hard I dropped my Cruncheroos.
“What is it?” someone called out from the Rite Aid. And somebody else said, “It’s salt.”
Sudden screams. We all flinched. But it wasn’t terror. At the center of a traffic island, haloed in the numinous light of the dollar store, a girl was crunching her Converse in the salt and spinning round and round. She had long shiny hair – a sort of chlorine gold – and a spray-on tan the color of Garfield. My school was populated with her clones. A bunch of huddling girls in halter-tops watched her twirl with mild and terrified eyes.
“Isn’t this amazing?” she whooped. “Isn’t this frigging awesome?”
The rain stopped all at once, leaving a vast whiteness. All of Main Street looked bleached and shining; even the Pizza Hut sign was scrubbed clean and made fresh. From the Rite Aid I heard someone crying. The girl picked up a handful of powdery crystals and they fell through her fingers like jewels; then her beaming smile found me and I fled.
I COLLECTED THE Blake books and lit a jittering circle of heatherback candles. I turned on every light in the house. I even stuck a Mickey Mouse nightlight into the wall socket, and he glowed there in dismal magnificence as I searched. It took me an hour to alight upon an old glued-in letter:
Reread the testimony of Elizabeth Blake in the fifteenth generation after I had word of this. I thought the account strange, so I went to see for myself. It was as Great-Aunt Annabelle had described, mold everywhere but almost beautiful, for it had bloomed in cunning patterns down the avenue all the way to the door. I couldn’t look for too long as the looking gave me such a headache.
I called in a few days later and the mold was gone. Just one lady of the house and wasn’t she pleased to see me as everyone else in the neighbourhood felt too dreadful to call. She was to be the sacrifice as all signs said. Every spider in that house was spelling the presence and I got the feeling readily that it was one of the lesser diseased Ones, the taste in the milk, the dust. One of the Monster Lord’s fever wizards had made his choice in her, no mistake. The girl was so sweet looking and so cheerful. They say the girls in these instances are always cheerful about it like lambs to the slaughter. The pestilences and their behemoth Duke may do as they will. I gave her til May.
Perhaps staying closer would have given me more detail but I felt that beyond my duty. I placed a wedding gift on the stoop and left that afternoon. I heard later he’d come for his bride Friday month and the whole place lit up dead with Spanish flu.
Aunt Annabelle always said that she’d heard some went a-cour
The page ripped here, leaving what Aunt Annabelle always said forever contentious. Mar found me in my circle of heatherbacks hours later, feverishly marking every reference to bride I could find.
“They closed Main Street to hose it down,” she said. “There were cars backed up all the way to the Chinese take-out. There’s mac ’n’ cheese in the oven, and for your info I’m burning so much rosemary on the porch everyone will think I smoke pot.”
“One of the pelagic kings has chosen a bride,” I said.
“What?”
“Evidence: rain of salt at the gate, in this case ‘gate’ being Main Street.
Evidence of rank: rain of salt in mass quantities from Main Street to, as you said, the Chinese take-out, in the middle of the day during a gibbous moon notable distance from the ocean. The appearance of fish that don’t know light. A dread bower of crystal.”
My aunt didn’t break down, or swear, or anything. She just said, “Sounds like an old-fashioned apocalypse event to me. What’s your plan, champ?”
“Document it and testify,” I said. “The Blake way. I’m going to find the bride.”
“No,” she said. “The Blake way is to watch the world burn from a distance and write down what the flames looked like. You need to see, not to find. This isn’t a goddamned murder mystery.”
I straightened and said very patiently, “Mar, this happens to be my birthright –”
“To Hell with birthright! Jesus, Hester, I told your mom you’d spend this summer getting your driver’s license and kissing boys.”
This was patently obnoxious. We ate our macaroni cheese surrounded by more dribbling heatherbacks, and my chest felt tight and terse the whole time. I kept on thinking of comebacks like, I don’t understand your insistence on meaningless bullshit, Mar, or even a pointed Margaret. Did my heart really have to yearn for licenses and losing my French-kissing virginity at the parking lot? Did anything matter, apart from the salt and the night outside, the bulging eyes down at Jamison Pond?