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“It is,” said Yackle, “it is, I keep telling you. Won’t you fiends let me die? I want to go to hell in a handbasket. Put me out of my misery and into the Afterlife where I can do some real damage, damn it.”
“She’s not herself,” said someone.
“She was never reliably herself, to hear tell,” said another.
The bedsheets caught fire spontaneously. Yackle found she was rather enjoying this, but it helped neither her reputation nor her rescue that the only liquid nearby with which to douse the flames was cognac.
Still, Yackle was not to be dissuaded. “Isn’t there a Superior in the House?” she asked. “Someone who can lay down the law?”
“The Superior Maunt died a decade ago,” they replied. “We work by consensus now. We’ve noted your request to be interred alive. We’ll put it on the agenda and take it up next week at Council.”
“She’ll burn the House down, and us with it,” muttered a novice, sometime later. Yackle could tell that the innocent speaker was talking to herself, to stoke her courage.
“Come here, my duckie,” said Yackle, grasping. “I smell a little peppermint girl nearby, and no garlicky matron hovering. Are you the sentry? On our own, are we? Come, sit nearer. Surely there is still a Sister Apothecaire in residence? With her cabinets of nostrums and beckums, tonics and tablets? She must possess a sealed jar, it would be dark blue glass, about yea-high, pasted over with a label picturing three sets of crossed tibias. Couldn’t you find this and pour me out a fatal little decoction?”
“Not a spoonful of it, I en’t the grace to do it,” said Peppermint Girl. “Let go a me, you harpy. Let go or—or I’ll bite you!”
Out of charity to the young, Yackle let go. It would do the poor girl no good to take a bite of old Yackle. The antidote en’t been invented yet, and so on.
Hours and days pass at elastic rhythms for the blind. Whether the pattern of her naps and wakings followed the ordinary interruptions of daylight by nighttime, Yackle couldn’t tell. But someone she recognized as Broccoli Breath eventually informed her that the sorority had decided to bow to Yackle’s final wish. They would install her in the crypt among the remains of women long dead. She could approach bodily corruption at whatever speed appealed to her. Three candles, and as to nourishment, red or white?
“A beaker of gasoline and a match as a chaser,” said Yackle, but she was indulging in a joke; she was that pleased. She nominated a saucy persimmon flaucande and a beeswax candle scented with limeberries—for the aroma, not for the light. She was beyond light now.
“Good voyage, Eldest Soul,” they sang to her as they carried her down the stairs. Though she weighed no more than sugarbrittle she was awkward to move; she couldn’t govern her own arms or legs. As if motivated by a spite independent of her own, her limbs would keep ratcheting out to jab into doorjambs. The procession lacked a fitting dignity.
“Don’t come down for at least a year,” she sang out, giddy as a lambkin. “Make that two. I might be old as sin itself, but once I start rotting it won’t be pretty. If I hammer at the cellar door don’t open it; I’m probably just collecting for some public charity in hell.”
“Can we serenade you with an epithalamium, as you go to marry Death?” asked one of the bearers, tucking in the shroud to make it cozy.
“Save your doggy breath. Go, go, on to the rest of your lives, you lot. It’s been a swell, mysterious mess of a life. Don’t mind me. I’ll blow the candles out before I lower my own lights.”
A year later when a sister ventured into the crypt to prepare for another burial, she came across the hem of Yackle’s shroud. She wept at the notion of death until Yackle sat up and said, “What, morning already? And I having those naughty dreams!” The maunt’s tears turned to screams, and she fled upstairs to start immediately upon a long and lively career as an alcoholic.
• 2 •
T HE OTHER maunts gave no credit to the drunken gibberish of their cowardly novice. They assumed she had succumbed to panic at the threat of war. Immediate war, local war. You could smell it in the air, like laundry soap, or an ailment in the sewers.
From the occasional evacuee who stopped to water his horses, Sister Hospitality gleaned what news she could. She broke her vows of circumspection to share with her fellow maunts what she learned.
By late spring, the four divisions of Emerald City foot soldiers massed on the north bank of the Gillikin River had been joined by a fifth and a sixth. Conscription having thinned the countryside of its farmhands, General Cherrystone released teams of men to assist in harvesting first-growth olives and early kindle-oat. The army then requisitioned most of what it had gathered as its fee for helping out.
“Indeed,” whispered Sister Hospitality, “tavern owners are said to be bricking up the better ale behind false walls. Their wives eavesdrop on tipsy officers and gossip over conflicting rumors. No one is sure of anything. Is the army constructing an underground canal into Munchkinland, to leach the great lake of its water? Is a new weapon being perfected upriver that will make an invading army invincible? Or are these maneuvers merely war games to intimidate the Munchkinlanders into making concessions?”
Her confidantes shook their heads, dizzy with the intrigue of it, which seemed oddly like life in a mauntery except more so.
“The mood of the season,” hissed Sister Hospitality. “Pray for peace but hide your wallets and your wives, and send your children away if you can.”
The maunts were infected with this impulse even though they had no wallets, wives, or offspring to bother about.
Sister Hospitality, peering with relish through the peekhole in the porter’s lodge, allowed her mind to roam beyond what she could actually see, elaborating on the square of visible landscape with fond remembered notions of the wider world.
Despite armed conflict, fields of wheat will grow taller, she thought, the color of bleached linen. They will pull this way and that in the breezes. Sparrows will wheel at the sound of gunfire, horses rear and dig at the air, pigs dive under their troughs.
In households? Pots go without blacking, sheets without blueing, and water drops on goblets dry into the housemaid’s nightmare: poxy glass. Aprons go unironed. Upstairs grannies go unvisited. Shiny knives and spoons cloud with a mat of tarnish, as if hoping to hide in the coming gloom.
The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the
wheat field, can’t remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think:
