By Blood and Tradition

My Aunt had a special reputation in the neighborhood as a person who knew who to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, without having to deal with the expense and trouble of seeing a doctor. She referred to it as a Tradition, something I never quite understood but still would never have questioned. It was much easier to let my Aunt speak without interruptions or questions, because after speaking for a time her face would kind of change a little and her voice would sometimes get deeper, and you could feel the presence of someone else in the room, inside my Aunt, and she could say some strange things, stuff that had no context to whatever was going on in our family or the world at large, like she was seeing too far into the future for me to comprehend. But she would laugh and her voice would change back and she'd take another drink from her glass before sharing some arcane bit of knowledge that would one day suit you.

But she made special potions by combining oils from the wooden rack in the kitchen, when some teary eyed woman from the neighborhood would come over and tell her sad story about how they couldn't afford another mouth to feed, or else they'd say they'd gotten knocked up on accident, or by force, but my Aunt never questioned their motives. If they were paying, my Aunt would pick a few leaves from the herb garden out back and she'd let them soak in the oil mixture in her old black glass bowl, and she would swirl the leaves as the lady spoke on about how their doctor is friends with their husband and he'd most certainly report the discretion if she walked into his office with a baby to get rid of. My Aunt, I was never sure she was ever even listening. She'd pour the stuff out through a coffee filter set over the mouth of a mason jar, and a clear liquid would drip drip drip into the jar, and my Aunt would smile even though no one was saying anything funny at all. Everyone knew to come to my Aunt for problems like these.

Once it was all drained out she'd throw away the filter and close up the jar, and my Aunt would tell each of them to drink the liquid before bed, and that the next morning when they went to the bathroom they would pass the baby, simple as that. And then the lady would hand my Aunt the money and they'd disappear. I guess it worked, because I never once heard one of them coming back to say the medicine didn't work. I did see some of the ladies more than once or twice.

When she didn't have her customers coming over, my Aunt began to teach me the Tradition, little bits and pieces as she went. Some days she wouldn't have much at all to say to me, and others I felt like I was getting overwhelmed with her describing what each plant worked for which ailment and how if you mixed certain plants different things would happen. I tried to remember what I could, but she wouldn't let me write anything down. She said you weren't supposed to write about the Tradition, that it had to be spoken and remembered, and carried on. I didn't really understand very much of it at all, but I still clung to her.

I was her shadow. I wasn't the best student, but I tried.

One day, she was explaining how she could make a miscarriage happen with her medicine. She told me that her medicine was only good if it was an early pregnancy, within the first three months, because otherwise the woman would bleed to death passing the baby. My Aunt gave me this look, like she was waiting for me to ask a question, but I didn't have anything to ask. She went on to tell me about another method, one she didn't tell many of her customers about. She said there was too much room for error in the method, even though it was effective at any point in the pregnancy, even up to the day before delivery, she said. It worked, but it was too involved for most of the careless women who came to the house for my Aunt's medicine.

She never explained it to me. She trailed off, and never came back to the topic. Maybe she realized I would never follow the Tradition like she would have hoped. I would have believed it if she told me she saw far into the future, seeing me break away, a firsthand witness to my future follies. From that moment after, she treated me with a sort of resigned defeat. She didn't see it in me anymore.

And I did kind of outgrow her. I found myself avoiding her conferences at the kitchen table, and not making my way out to her herb garden. Summer came, and there was a traveling carnival that had set up in the fields across from our house. I found myself exploring this strange new world and its inhabitants, until I met a man who worked in some capacity for the carnival, but I never found out what he did. He treated me special, and seduced me, and like a fool I fell in love with him, but in less than a week the whole carnival was gone, run out of town by the local police. And there I found myself, 15 years old and pregnant with the baby of a drifter. I told no one of my condition, and for a time I was able to conceal the baby growing inside me. The summer turned to autumn, and by October I'd resorted to starving myself to fight the onset of a lump growing in my stomach. I took to bed, no longer leaving my room, always covered by a blanket. Everyone thought I had come down with some illness. My Aunt, she saw right through it all, and late one night, she entered my room, and sat at the edge of my bed, and explained the method, the one she never shared with me.

If a woman wanted to not be pregnant, she explained, and if she was past her first trimester, she would have to go to a graveyard at midnight, during a waxing moon. She spoke slowly and softly, and I remembered every instruction, so much easier to hold in my mind than it had been the year before. She said I would have to find an infant's grave, by checking the dates on the stones.

I went out, the next night, alone with a small flashlight, I snuck through the silent house and through yards to get to the Clementville cemetery. I walked the rows until I found the right kind of grave. This baby, it had been alive for only six days. I rubbed my stomach and thought about the baby inside of me.

My Aunt said to mix some of the dirt from in front of the grave with my urine to make a clay, and I worked it into a thick mush in my hands, forming the body and then the head and limbs of a tiny figure. My hands shook as I remembered her telling me to lay the clay figure on top of the gravestone. I felt a hot pain deep inside my stomach, a pain so intense I fell to my knees.

She told me about the pain, but I didn't think it would have been as bad as it was. I felt as if I was being pulled apart, and I was splitting up the middle. She said I might see blood, and not to be frightened, but I got scared when it began pouring out of me like a faucet. The dirt turned into sludge around my knees as the deluge continued, until I felt like I had nothing left inside, just emptied out.

She told me I would know when it was all over, and that I was supposed to lay the clay baby in the mess. I watched it fall apart, soaking up the mess around it. It felt like my skin was hanging off of me. I walked home, and as quietly as I could, made my way back to bed. The next morning, my Aunt brought me a cup of tea with leaves still floating in it. She told me it would take away my nausea, and give me back my appetite. She didn't ask about the method. It was like she knew.

Craft

Hester:10/4/22--10/29/90

Hester Hatfield Bowlin

Hester Bowlin was my father's mother, she who gave birth to ten children and tended to a steady litter of grandchildren. I remember Hester would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a spoon, and they tasted better made that way. At Christmastime, a Sears and Roebuck catalog was passed around and you could pick a present and they would get it for you. I remember her face lost behind a pair of glasses, and a warmth that extended beyond mere Grandma status, into a sort of matriarchal position.

More memories stick to the environment of their home for me, like the strange stain at the bottom of the stairs down to the basement? Was it really a bloodstain or were they telling me an elaborate sort of inside family joke? My Grandparents had had a new house built, on the same stretch of property that included a grand lake and the remains of their previous home. I was forbidden to go into or explore the old house, so I stuck to the backyard and the small body of water seems to resonate in distant memory retention. How it would freeze over in the winter and the adults would test its firmness before we were allowed on the ice.

There was a hammock, slung between two trees that was hung in the warmer months of the year, and you'd get into it and swing low between the trunks and the net would just swallow you in a cocoon of rough hemp. I would lay in it and stare at the crumbling mystery in the old house. The place seemed to radiate a strange energy for me, like more than one psychotrauma had occurred there. Attempted murder, mad rages, the white hot grief over a drowned son, that's there too, with the tenderness of this woman, torn between being loyal to her husband and son and hating him for making it happen. The whole experience that happened during my parent's divorce, it conquered and divided the family dynamic and left us holding broken pieces with shrapnel shards sticking out everywhere. I'm not at liberty to discuss the circumstances of the final schism, but I will say something in my Grandmother's bloodline boiled in her vessels and set forth a disincarnate energy that exists as a guardian spirit of her nephews, to protect and look after them in a way she had to discontinue dealing with her grandchildren.

But she passed away some years ago, the victim of disease, and yet, where is her spirit? Has it been sent to her own heaven? I would think, if she were to choose, her paradise would be in the presence of her brood, her clan, on the outskirts of their lives, if only to observe and sometimes aid in difficult situations. In death, some part of her still fills that capacity.

But how do we learn to feel her presence? Can she be called upon, for congress or for aid, this matron who changed a million diapers and made ten million pb&j's with a spoon, she is connected to us from our memory reserves, from a twinkling, maybe the presence of something else there with you. Somewhere, she watches over her kin, she of Hatfield blood, from her Mother's side, who adored Robert Mitchum with the devotion of a flagellant but when whoever took the spill down those stairs, from the hallway facing the living room down to the cement floor, she nursed them back to health and she sent him on and she keeps watch now over an infinite number of households, spread out over a giant life size map that her spirit lingers over, in that place with no time, no aging, no more death. She is comfortable there, but who knows when she'll make her next appearance. She's busy with the great-grandchildren, communicating during commercial breaks and afternoon naps, waiting up when one of them goes out late. But she's there.

This is for Harry Powell

BILL BATCH WHERE ARE YOU???

0129 733 pm

Recently my Mother and I have been discussing an experience that happened to our family in the late Seventies, a story that doesn't seem quite real but sure enough it happened. The other day, on the phone, I asked my Mom about a man named Bill Batch, a person who I never physically met and yet still seemed somehow connected to the fragments of stories I heard my Mother tell about him.

Why are you thinking about him, she asked, and when I thought about it I realized I dreamt about discussing him with some ghost in my subconscious. So, we had a long conversation about what really happened, without the distorting of one's own memories. She said it was around 1978 or 79, at a time when my parents were separated but not yet divorced, with my father living out of the house, with his new girlfriend Glenna, and my Mother in the house in Greenford, OH, a tiny little fleck on the map of Ohio, with five kids and no way to support them. So my Mom learned how to upholster, starting with car and RV interiors, eventually expanding beyond that to reupholstering people's furniture. She was amazing at it, and what else was cool was going into people's houses, just invading their spaces and taking out their furniture--I went with my Mom on pick-ups and I'd bring in the Swatch books and wait patiently while old ladies picked out their favorite fabrics. My Mom was an amazing businesswoman, basically learning from scratch the in's and out's of doing business for yourself, totally DIY.

But, in that line of work, one was prone to meeting strange people. People would cold call my Mom to come and fix their furniture, make it look better than brand new, she ruled at it. So sometimes the paying customers could get strange. She said one time she had a call in Salem, OH to reupholster this guy's couch. She said she and my late brother-in-law Eric went to his house, and although he was a complete stranger, he seemed to know things about my father, things my Mom didn't think someone as random as this man should know about her estranged husband. Later after they got out of there with the couch, Eric told my Mom the man really frightened him, and Eric was not easily frightened. My Mom said there was something almost too powerful about his presence, the way it seemed to intrude into your unconscious mind. They had the couch in the basement in the house in Greenford, and my Mom found a folded up blanket inside of the furniture's frame. She called him, Bill Batch, and told him she found his blanket just in case he was missing it. But he told her to cover her child in it, the one who was in danger. She got off the phone, rattled and not sure what this freaky dude was all about. Eric took the folded up blanket and tried to immolate it in the barrel, but it wouldn't burn. My Mom said he buried it somewhere on the property.

They brought back the reupholstered couch, looking amazing, but I guess Bill seemed somewhat distracted. He paid my mom, and told her of a book he had written. He gave her a copy of it, but she says she doesn't remember what she did with it. But during this meeting, Bill Batch got even weirder. This man seemed to put himself into a trance by tapping his pen on the desk, with his face going blank, his voice altering with his facial expressions, channeling some outside force to the two of them. He was ready to transmit a message to my Mother, and Eric urged her home.

The story doesn't end there. A few days later my Mom came home and found a note from Bill Batch, attached to the body of a headless chicken. In the midst of the dead chicken on her porch she says she doesn't remember much of what the note said, she was super unnerved by the gesture. Why did he leave a blessing like that for her? She didn't know. But a few days after that, maybe a week or more, a cop car drove down into Greenford and came down our drive way. My Mom came out to meet the police. They told her that a man named Bill Batch had been committed to Woodside, the local psychiatric hospital. And he had escaped from the hospital, and he told everyone he had to get to Greenford, because he had a message for Jackie, my Mom. He was still on the loose, the cops told her, so lock up the house and windows and call us if he comes here. They left, and my Mom was left in a delicate state of sheer pants shitting panic. Who was this maniac and what was the message he had to deliver to her?

That's where it seems that Mr. Batch had more than a similarity in his practices of some sort of Caribbean religion, be it Santeria or something else more localized, but within the definitions of these beliefs, one can see this man was being compelled to make contact with my Mother. One of her children seemed to be in danger, and he had information that could potentially redefine our whole lives. But he never got to my Mom. They caught him, and put him away somewhere no one could find him. All alone in solitary confinement, he knew he failed in delivering the message he was commanded to deliver. This is thirty years ago, and I want to know what happened to this man and, most importantly, I need to know what was the message. Why did he have to deliver it? I don't think we were in any danger of this man harming us. In fact, I believe he was responding to some spiritual sentiment sent to protect us.

So, I know he wrote a book. I know he was a patient in Woodside Hospital, more than once no doubt. He lived in Salem, OH. He'd be between 60 and 70 years old, a man with a life's purpose nullified, beyond recognition. He failed the Spirit that spoke to him, and yet somewhere in him the Spirit still dwells, and maybe if I can find Bill Batch and ask him what the fuck happened. I want to know, because I think this experience has a much greater significance in the grander scheme of our day to day existence. I don't buy the insane plea. I think there is divinity in insanity, I have felt it myself in darker times, I know it is there, and I know there is truth within the candleflame, and the reflections it makes are divinely inspired. This man Bill Batch, was he a psychonaut, some kind of wizard? He was a nobody in a sea of faces, of jobs done and forgotten he gets remembered for trying to get involved with us spiritually.

When I find him, I will record his explanation for his actions, and maybe something will flicker again and that energy will answer what we seek.

Butthole Surfers--Creep in the Cellar

SONIC DRIVING AND THE ACT OF MYSTICISM

Here you will find access to the most primitive tools in our arsenal--the sonic rhythmic pattern with which to fall downwards through the human experience, back to The One--he who lays in wait and begets to begin this sacred voyage into the mind--deeper than the deepest underground canyon, free of any prison made of iron and concrete, deep inside underground bunkers where children hide and wait for their turn to run across the open air field, out into the streaking sunlight and not be gunned down by the guards, the old men with rapid fire weapons waging war on the rebel forces. This eternal struggle occupies us in the grandest tradition of the Bait and Switch. We won't be tricked any more. We have a weapon of our own in our arsenal.

Michael Harner calls it 'sonic driving' or 'sonic drumming' but all this means is that you utilize a repetitave rhythm, set between 180 and 220 bpm's, and your mind reacts in a certain way, forcing you right into a consciousness shift. And there's no need for intoxicants, or fasting, or flagellation.

Sonic driving rhythms

Use these recordings freely to unlock the mysterious skull and peer within its contents; seek out the disparate consciousnesses of others and interlock in a synergistic merge; frolic with multi-dimensional beings who bear messages of the way time works; float through clouds of the disincarnated energies of loved ones who've gone on; use it for you, because you're the one who is in control of your destiny, so take the reins and shake off the lethargy you exist in, and peer deeply into who you are and how you connect to the spiderweb. We seem to be strung together like a long strand of Christmas lights, flickering ever so weakly as the current passes through us. May we ignite the torches and feel a massive surge of electricity come through our psychic wiring and we can all unite in the fight against the Big Con. Please share any experiences or magical happenings from meditating to these recordings, either here or through my email: organgarden@gmail.com