ST. IGNATIUS, NARRATIVE NOW
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“Mama REDACTED” doesn’t roll off the tongue or ‘pop on the page’ as exactly no one says (nor should they). Rosa is her name, Secretary of Education under the old regime. Wife to party stooge Stefan who is retired and so recently deceased. Mother of Ulysses. Wrangler of Puffins.
She has a devil bird perched on her shoulder. Desdemona. Dezzy. ‘Domesticated’ is the wrong word. Ignatian Puffins cannot be domesticated, but they’ll imprint on just about anything.
Inside a typical Ignatian home-on-stilts, there’s music tripping out the tinny speaker. Cellphone turned juke box. Some sentimental playlist from a previous generation. That’s wrong, “it has sentiment” but it’s not saccharine, and Momma Rosa half-present in the moment sings softly to a ‘sweetheart’ at sea or whistles old crooner tunes to the bird that bops and tweets along and pecks almost lovingly at her shoulder and earlobe.
The woman is only half-present. Washing up a morning meal, and making Long Soup: garlic, rice, onions, oil, herbs-on-hand. It’s peasant soup, the woman swears is “nothing special.” Rosa is a liar and a food witch. Her Long Soup is sublime, and her home already reeks of garlic and all other things good. You-You is coming home.
Dezzy knows she gets the scraps “if she’s patient”, but the bird knows no patience and the woman feeds the chunky thing with a “shush, baby.” Dezzy murder-chirps and bops excitedly to any-and-all tunes, and the woman wonders where her stupid son is.
He’s not stupid, but he is his father’s son. She’s got the decency to try to correct herself, but the man in chapter one is nobody special. Ulysses drowned in a hero’s name his momma didn’t want to give him in the first place.
He’s alive. Her boy, Ulysses, the polite hostage being politely held and prodded toward home. The ‘missionaries’ herd the skinny man toward his momma’s home in the float-farming village-on-stilts just up or down the road from Port Town.
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PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF ST. IGNATIUS, 1970
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The string-bean with the bandana over her face. The kid with the mask on a rickety ladder stirring mightily. Child same is sweating into a cauldron of Puffin shit being boiled to kill the horrid fungus that thrives in the bird’s guts. All ages share the work, and shit stirring the fertilizer pot is part of what makes Rosa’s chicken wings whipchord by the time she’s old. The politburo types in the capital cosplayed commie, but the people in the places that grew the food that fed the People’s Republic took to collectivism willingly and well because they already did it, they had to for survival’s sake.
The Brits were the last to try to eradicate the birds. It cannot be done. And their reward for the effort was a bumper crop of rats carrying typhus. Ignatian Puffins are a ravenous and omnivorous force of nature to be endured. The locals know this, and if Ignatius has a culture its own (it does) the habits-and-habitus grew around the birds–or the ‘how’ of enduring them.
Rosa was raised on a cooperative farm fairly typical of the island in that era–sunset on Ignatius’ golden age. The whole first couple legs of the Cold War, the shit-covered island beset by pestilence and puffin took a great leap forward. It’s as if we were a Cargo Cult, actually a reverse-Cargo-Cult. Red and Yankee alike wanted to snuggle up to us despite, or because of, or despite/because of Comrade Fidel (our Fidel) and his “fuck you both” attitude in the Cold War. Air conditioning in the capital. Hot water and washing machines and the occasional television. Cola (with and without cocaine) and beef and potatoes and every kind of shiny, sugared factory confection. In short, every delicious and foul thing two great economies could lavish on a tiny island to turn their heads and all the music and words and propaganda–Rock’n’roll and Shostakovich, Pravda and The Times. Things changed in’66 at the political heart of the island, one of them, but the farms had not yet felt the impact. There it’s still green and gold and beautiful.
The farming town is set amidst a great never-logged forest, homes sit on stilts taller than the raptors can pile or hop-fly. Rice and the fish that fertilize it in dike-protected paddies are the only ground level cultivation safe on Ignatius, for the birds are hydrophobic. Marijuana plants grow Kokedama style in moss-balls, not potted dirt, pendulums tether-tied to tree limbs. Above them, unfurled Kokedama-balls are woven and spliced to make great ship-sail growing surfaces made of moss imbued with rich coffee smelling earth. Vines, fruiting or decorative, and rope \ ladder \ scaffold are the sinew of the float farm holding the harvest-to-be out of reach of the puffins and tethering the living fabric to the great mast-trees. From above it all appears like circus tents rising out of living moss fabric football fields or the coliseum ‘roof’ or a series of green lense apertures. Shade loving crops grow “medium height”, where farmers on stilts can snatch the fruit from the vines that thread like veins through the moss. Sun loving crops grow closest to the canopy. Like a stadium roof or the old Roman thing, workers will operate the rigging in concert at harvest to gather the crop and let the winter sun show on the scrub ferns and (so very poisonous) berry bushes the puffins devour and shit on.
The town has a name-proper, though I know it not. Southern Agricultural District Collective Farm G4. The People’s Republic went worse-than-Soviet with naming conventions. But the place was alive and joyful and the people well fed–comrades that could dance and had good reason to.
But every place has it’s asshole, I’m not talking shirkers or gold-brickers or slackers, the People’s republic had and has those. I don’t mean ‘leave me alone’ types or hermits or weirdos, where do you think the bird cult found it’s numbers? No, I mean people hostile to the idea of any kind of community or perhaps on a path toward that hate for others warmth.
In Rosa’s time and place it was a boy named James. Circle back to the skinny kid who finished her last shit shift for a while, tomorrow begins ‘reek week’ for some other comrade. That’s another thing Ignatius got/gets right: everybody shares the scut work. Rosa’s arms are rubber weak and her back burns, but there’s a breeze in the trees. There’s the sound of shrieking puffins on that lovely breeze, because this is a day ending in ‘y’. The birds sound extra angry though and desperate and horny in that way that signals its (second) mating season.
The kid, Rosa wants nothing more than a shower and hot meal, but she’s got that kid-shuffle I-don’t-wanna walk on her way back home. It’s not wanderlust, kid’s too young yet for that. It’s just the want to wander, and all the walkways of town call to her. The lonely high ones in the boughs, swaying in the breeze, that’s where she goes to watch the wider wood promenades below her. It’s the wood-hippy utopian commie version of a teenager people watching at a shopping mall, and I apologize for soiling the former with the comparison to the later. Rosa watches comrades watching other comrades. Couples courting and group singing and great debates over small things and small hushed talks over what must surely be great ideas, and she is intoxicated on the activities of the evening and the late August light that lingers. She does what everyone young does, when they feel ‘forever’–not immortal, you never feel immortal. It’s when you’re young enough to believe you can rage against endings–when you feel as if your lone mighty little presence might stretch the last light of summer a few minutes longer. That’s what Rosa felt as she watched her people and let the breeze take some of the shit reek off her and her work clothes.
She is about to shimmy down a ladder and back to Earth-or-adjacent, when Rosa spots the outline of a boy jungly-gyming-it acrobatically from walk-way to tree-limb to the chicken coop between two homes on stilts. Cat-quick-and-quiet–the opposite of the clumsy boy–Rosa is off the cat-walk rope-bridge and into the limbs. She’s hidden well by the time the boy does his work: stealing chickens.
Is he hungry? There’s food enough and he doesn’t have to steal out of need, that’s James the local party stooge’s son who is surely very well fed. Sometimes you just really want chicken I guess?
But the boy does not want chicken. He produces a small knife, slits the bird’s throat, and casts it suffering to the forest floor. The boy Rosa is trying to convince herself is not James grabs another chicken and another. There’s a commotion, a great bloody feeding frenzy, and the boy climbs awkwardly up and up toward Rosa. She’s well hid, but the monster boy is close-too-close, hiding and watching and muttering wicked things at the violent mess he made and the neighbors helplessly watching it play out.
A long time later, when the boy creeps off, Rosa does the same–for she was affixed with fear and that most morbid curiosity. When Rosa finally climbs down the ladder to one of the wide promenades below, she freezes. The girl turns to meet the gaze she felt on her back. James, looming in the nearest shadow. He sniffs the air with a sour face. Takes another great whiff and a step toward her.
Rosa runs. Inadequate. Rosa flies. The lightning stored in her hits and she beats feet down the floating board walk, she runs a village ‘block’ past her home and back round floating a few inches above the walkway. Mama tells her she kept the water heater on, and that she’ll boil her clothes in the morning, and the same woman knows something is wrong. When Rosa is clean and fed, Mom gets the details: the bird killing and creep watching, the stink that gave her away. The (presumed) chase: “He knows, mom. He knows I saw.” The kid keeps muttering some iteration of those words while mom calmly walks to her bedroom to fuddle beneath the bed for something, returns with a shotgun.
The woman smiles, points to each barrel in turn, “this is rocksalt, this is bird-shot. Who cares what he saw.” And “But, maaaaam”, but all mom has is a stern-loving look and an escort to bed and a bed-time story Rosa accepts with the protest that she is entirely too old for such things. That’s when mom gives Rosa the line the daughter will share with her son, Ulysses: “You are never too old for bed time stories. Tomorrow’s the big day. Let me tell you about my first run.”
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NEXT MORNING
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Have a cup of coffee with me, and let’s pretend our asses in these seats can pin a bit of morning to the floor–just a little bit. I will tell you a parable about my grandfather. Loved the man. Handy. Dust-dry sense of humor. Bullshitter supreme. Ignatian ‘everyman.’ Pops got us this gaudy American refrigerator, I know not how, in the good-bad-old-days. It’s an appliance. Remarkable luxury to the old timer, tall metal box to me. And that’s just where he’d put me–or one of my many, many cousins. See, I’d be up on his shoulders giggling and clinging on for dear life and singing along to some old country song about fighting Pinkertons and the old man would want a cig or get bored of the dance and just leave my ass up on the fridge. I’m tiny. I’m not leaping off a damn fridge. Besides, he’s coming right back. I’d sing along and try on that ‘twang’, maybe visualize a grownup smoking a cig.
Dear Reader, Pops did not ‘come right back.’ He’d stay gone long enough for you to freak out, to call out with that “Pop-pop?” question-whimper. Then to cry, a little, then a-lot-a-lot with snot globs that he would later describe to his other grandchildren in great detail, in front of you. That was his bit with all of us, the fridge. Yes it was funny. It can be funny and mean at the same time. Like when he would put one of we kids up on his shoulders and pretend to lose his balance near the edge of a walkway (only ever when there were feral Puffins present beneath town, on the ground).
Yeah, nah. It’s fucked up. Funny as all hell, I think. Nope. Definitely still funny and heavy. I guess Pop-pop’s shock-therapy approach to teaching a very specific grown-up sense of humor worked. Bird Run is the same logic built big and whole-town scale. Emotional trauma that we all agree to joke about passive aggressively because it has to be done twice a year to keep the bird population in check.
Whole week before the run, it’s elders giggling around hearth and teevee glow as they tell shit-yourself stories about their bird-runs so very long ago: Tommy Two-Toes, now that weren’t his name ’til after his first bird run, but it should tell you thing or two about Tommy’s experiences that day. Got him a good mauling by a bunch of yearlings. Indeed, adult Ignatian Puffins swarm, disembowel, and devour when properly enraged. Say, in defense of their nesting grounds.
Later on Bird Run Eve, there are stories for the other grown folks and the kids that won’t sleep or want to prove they almost-aren’t kids. ‘Drunk olds spill beans.’ The Ignatian saying is true. The island is not known for its poetry, for they do not write it down. The great Ignatian verses come out of islander’s mouths in great gouts of bullshit–absolutely impossible-to-have-occurred “I-shit-you-not” nonsense (that should never be sincerely believed). And that’s precisely why these are the truest stories, not in terms of fact but flavor. They have to be flavored, seasoned, salted to be preserved–prepared to be carried a long while-ways.
I got good at staying up as a kid, and was handed my first beer. Then my first sip of mystery whiskey the year I heard the one about the last kid in our town to die, back in 1970–with all the brutal embellishments.
Let’s start at the end of the run, the conclusion. Pull back the veil a bit to see the future that is identical to the past. Twice a year and every year, in seasons plentiful or lean and all points between. The adults of town don their tall stilts and engage in a carefully conceived and coordinated ruse, and their children run for eggs to curb the birds numbers and with this, their wrath.
“Yeah, but did you die?” spoken from adult to child. There’s the ‘oh-honey’ sad-smile sincerely written on a mom or dad’s face. The “I’m so sorry” eyes above a smirk. Smile. Shit-eating grin. “Yeah, honey. Slow down, but did you die?” and the kid word-vomiting the after action of what they just lived through sort of stalls, sputters, falls silent–or something like it. The kid-in-shock, the whole gaggle then shuffles off toward the grampas and gram-grams to deliver the loot for divvying. They’re standing at the top of a cargo net turned rope ladder, and the job of the mom or the dad or the guardian is this: triage kid for injuries and then get them the fuck out of the way. Keep the line moving, the procession of the town’s children doing the reverse-D-Day climb up the nets to safety with their precious cargo on their backs. This is the widest wood promenade, the grandest elevated boardwalk in the whole float farming town. Which one? All of them, but we’re still watching Southern Agricultural District Collective Farm G4.
*
Earlier. Erstwhile. Before. Rosa keeps cutting paths to the guardrail, to the front of the crowded boardwalk. The promenade is packed, whole town and then some trying to watch the opening ceremony. The distraction squad, the adults in very real danger today, are doing a war dance on tall stilts on the open ground at the edge of town.
Rosa elbows past a grownup hissing “Rude, young lady“, some woman who probably knows her momma and will try to get her whooped. But she needs to see dancers doing a routine-amalgam that’s got as much Haka as Irish stiff armed jaunty hop. The performance manages to remain menacing even when it looks like a country line dance or the Hustle. Everybody on Ignatius is from everywhere (the island gets around), but every song that’s old enough to have grown up on the island is some kind of shanty or another that sounds like a dirge when the massive kettle drums come in. Like most Ignatian towns, G4 has a little something extra. An old unique instrument: a pipe organ whose duct-work coils about and through an old oak–the tree’s hollowed body resonates right along with the bones of the organ. The song that thing sings blurs vision and shakes the Earth and calls every bird for miles.
Rosa wants to ‘see’ the music, to look right at the tree when the keys come in. She needs to see and that’s why she’s being rude and elbowing her way to the front of the of the crowd of friends and kin and familiar strangers. Rosa also needs James the budding sociopath to stop leering and stalk-following her. The Kubrik staring kid cuts sideways through the crowd again and again as Rosa evades.
The whip cord girl finally loses the loser and finds a place to crouch up front, next to the net the children will soon scramble down. She lets the music wash over her and feels full of lightning and that other thing electric that wants to leap off the hair on her arms and neck–hair-tennae now standing at attention. And when cousin Francis, doin’ his first grown-man war dance finds her in the crowd and smiles with his eyes while he’s roaring and shrieking like a raptor, she roars and shrieks right back. Rosa loses herself in the spectacle and the crowd of people doing the same. The miracle mundane happens then: a clump of people sing in one voice and in some sense as real as it is metaphysical they become one super being. It’s not insect hive mind or mob. It’s a herd of equals. It’s a flock. It’s church, the good kind, the safe kind. Safe until it isn’t.
James finds Rosa in the crowd just as the song fades and the hiss of so many clumsy, razor laden feet begins to climb to a white noise din beneath and between every thing else that wants to be heard. The grown folks on stilts are still whooping and screaming even as they lock arms, and carabine-link to a safety rope shared with all. They form ranks and begin the slow march away from town and toward the nearest stream.
There’s safety in numbers. Then there’s the saying writ sinister, not left handed but wicked-actually-wicked: safety among numbers for the hunter. I’m not talking set-upon people seeking sanctuary or shelter. Not referencing those tossed by tempest and seeking/needing succor. That’s the mechanism that littered Ignatius with humanity to begin with. I’m pointing to the predator who sees home and hearth as hunting ground.
That’s James leaning in, inappropriate close and rank-breathed to take an exaggerated sniff-snort, to tell Rosa “You smell like bird shit.”
The boy is that kind of broken that is dangerous, but he is still a child baring baby teeth (not fangs), and the whip chord girl who does grown people work is not having it–his attempt at menacing that lands in the land of awkward. Rosa wheels, feet beneath her in half-a-shake, She turns to shove the boy back with her right arm. As she stands, Rosa puts the broken boy on his ass with a bloody nose from a left cross. James is rage, groping to his feet, excited to have an excuse to pummel someone, but a hand vice locks on his shirt and the scruff-flesh of his neck beneath.
Rosa’s mom is quicker than any cat I’ve seen and she eagerly shows the boy the medallion tucked beneath her shirt with her free hand–shaped like a bird’s beak or a blade. She whispers the weird local word(s): “Pep-Shneck” and the kid goes pale, more pale.
I don’t know if that word is a part of a Pidgin or a Creole or neither (it’s probably neither). You gotta ask a linguist that knows Ignatius, but good luck. Few try to study the place and fewer survive–higher mortality/join-a-bird-cult rates than even anthropologists. I do know this: a “Pep-Shneck” is a dick knife. Or if you prefer, a curved blade designed for swift and ruthlessly efficient castration–the first of which were made from the razor beaks of Ignatian Puffins (and carried by the founding members of the Sex Workers Union).
The momma shook James, put some kind of fear in him, at least long enough for the other elders and parents to reach them and wrangle the children. “Rosa” stern with a wink “you apologize to the boy. I don’t think he was trying to be creepy, that’s just the way he is.”
“Yeah.. Wait my boy is not creepy…” but the demands of the moment squash the ‘scene’ Jimmy-the-creep’s Party Stooge dad definitely wants to have, for the scuffle blocks the path to the cargo net ladder-to-hell. The distraction is in play, there’s a deadline or Sword of Damocles turned clock-pendulum hanging over the day now that the town has driven the birds to frenzy.
Squashed, simmering resentment. That’s the way it would have been if everyone had come home.
Oh, the terrified children clambered down and skittered off to the nesting grounds–some so terrified they wept and wailed as they ran (older children holding their hands and urging them on). The children pillaged the raptor nests for every puffin egg they could wrap in rags to carry in their great pouches–the strong and swift kids among them battling the sick, elder, and juvenile Puffins left to guard the nesting grounds. The kids, friend or enemy \ comrade or frienemy, all came home together expecting to to celebrate and be celebrated for their bravery–even and especially the ones that wept-but-went.
Instead, the kids will wait and watch with much of the rest of the town. Oh, they’ll hand off the bags full of eggs and run off to bathe and change with haste first (and their laundry will be boiled). The kids, every single one of them old enough to participate got dosed. Everyone who handled a Puffin egg had some light exposure to the foul fungus from eggs warmed and contaminated by bird asses and dirty cloaca. Before you condemn Ignatian parenting, consider that you live in a glass house.
I hear that in some countries, people let their kids get the chicken pox intentionally. “But immunity…” Well, some tolerance to the hallucinogenic effects of a nightmare fungus one can avoid (but will encounter) is a thing Ignatian culture deems at least as necessary as your immunity to the mundane pox. So here we are, end of summer evening-become-night. Almost the whole town ‘manning the lighthouse’ waiting for the three missing children: James, Rosa, and a little boy named Joseph.
The distraction team gets word and prepares to hold the line, to distract the puffin horde for as long as possible “We’ll sleep standing up if we have to” over radio and through-loud-speaker to the whole town. The comms comrade holds his radio up to the crowd gathered on walkway-and-promenade so the brave ones can hear their cheer.
Here’s hoping the heroes on stilts heard them over the bird shrieks. No one will be sleeping tonight, that was bullshit for town morale–their town. The roughly-three-dozen swamped and swaying, lean on one another and the stability of their formation while the puffins rage and swarm below.
I know the “what” of the second Bird Run in 1970. The version of events the town told itself later-long-later, the one inherited by my generation from a Party Stooge. In that tale, a poor boy all “sweet and gentle” and shit is hexed by a witch. Then, Rosa the witch-daughter delivers the boy to the devil’s birds. One version, the one I stayed up all night and learned to drink whiskey to hear, Rosa does James with a rock, leaves him unconscious on the ground–sacrificed to the puffins. .
This is absolute bullshit. Nobody knows what happened to James, and Rosa refused to say.
The girl never told the “how” of it, and the little boy she rescued never saw what happened to James. The official transcripts, the interview conducted by actual police in a town made of bricks set in mud near the coast, contain a factual-not-full account. They say Joseph got separated from his big sister and chased by a “very scary bird” (a juvenile puffin). Joseph then, “met the strong girl who kicked the bird that was chasing me.” Indeed Joseph, Rosa punted that little bastard with all her might.
Rosa then carried Joseph “like a sack of flour.” The little boy engages in so many tangents extoling the strength, swiftness, and cute-itude of his rescuer that the transcript eventually buries them in parentheticals: (“crush rant”).
“And she climbed the biggest tree she could find with me on her back and all the eggs, cause she’s like the strongest girl in town, and she’s really pretty too. But don’t tell her I said that, actually let her read it. Does Rosa get to read this?”
Joseph never saw James, just the “strong, pretty girl with blood all over her”–the same girl that snatched little fella and carried him home. Sprained ankle, tripping Puffin balls from fungal exposure. Rosa carried Joseph back home through the boughs and across moss Float Farm fields on her back like a baby sloth.
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END IGNATIUS 3