The Mairrage Turtle
Fiction - Magical Mississippi
Crossing the Rubicon between “promising twenty-something” and into “unmarried thirty-something,” Erica invited two carloads of her closest and oldest lady friends to celebrate with her at The Walk-In, a sub establishment of the fabled Hal and Mals in Jackson, Mississippi, featuring a mid-century modern living room style nestled in a converted fruit warehouse. On the wall was a mural by one of Mississippi’s most remarkable mural painters. That Mississippi should be known for mural painting wasn’t an outcome anyone predicted. Mississippi trees bear strange fruit, and sometimes remarkable painters.
To ease the transition, Erica ordered two pupu platters to share and four Negronis to absolutely not share. That she could drink that much gin and not end up pantless on one of the tables singing gay-boy torch songs was something of a point of pride to her father. It was to her mother, too, but being a lady, she neglected to acknowledge it. Mississippi girls hit a bit differently, especially those who went to Millsaps College.
Technically, Millsaps College, a very bland Methodist School in the center of Mississippi, was actually the ancient seat of free thought and troublesome rebellion in Mississippi. Methodists, it seems, aren’t what they seem. Ask Ed King.
Beautiful and successful, Erica considered the lack of men in her life more of an annoyance than a failure. Earning her degree in mathematics, Erica had an important job deciding the insurance rates for farm equipment and offshore oil exploration service vessels. Her looks weren’t fading; they were refining.
She wasn’t single for the lack of suitors; there were many, but very few viable candidates. Hardly a virgin, Erica considered whether or not she may as well have been for all the good it did her. Boys were a fashionable and pleasant accessory, but a terrible annoyance, and none had ever made himself vital to her.
There were four top runners: James, an associate for Brunini; Grantham, Grower, and Hughes, a law firm named for four dead men. John Grisham once worked for the Brunini firm before he became famous. When he wrote “The Firm,” it’s rumored that Big Ed Brunini somehow got hold of a mock-up copy before going to the printer and read it one night to make sure he wasn’t in it. That cannot be confirmed. He wasn’t, however, in the book.
Thomas was a vice president at Trustmark National Bank. Being the white-shoes bank of Mississippi, Thomas was not the kind to ever take risks, especially with Erica’s honor or sexual tastes. The wealthiest of the sutiors, he was also the least interesting.
Trey was a mixed-race child who taught music and hoped to make a living making music well enough one day to quit teaching. His skin was mocha-latte. His eyes were crystal blue. He’d done some modeling and was rumored to have had an affair with a gay fashion photographer from New York. As beautiful as he was, Erica didn’t actually like his music.
Moving from maiden to crone without ever being a mother was something Erica considered might be the best choice. It’s not a disgrace, she thought. Babies smell, after all.
One night, on the news, Meggan West read a story about a man who claimed to have photographed a remarkably large Mairrage Turtle in the very center of Okkotake Lake.
Marriage Turtles were considered an ancient part of Mississippi folklore, even to the Acolapissa, Biloxi, Pascagoula, Bayougoula, Houma, Natchez, Chakchiuma, Ibitoupa, Koroa, Ofogoula, Taposa, Tiou, Tunica, Yazoo, and Choctaw people of the Magnolia State. They were a gift from the Star People to the Mud people of Mississippi, before they entered their flying chukka (the Choctaw equivalent of a wigwam) and returned to their home in the stars, promising to return one day.
It’s said that Marriage Turtles knew the secret of who you would love, and by conferring with them, you could see into the eyes of your unborn children. Before entering into his third marriage, Governor Theodore Bilbo made a marriage turtle stew from a creature that was longer than he was tall. The shell was laquored and hung in the governor’s mansion and now rests in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. It’s brought out around Halloween to accompany the Mississippi Mummy, which was actually made of St. Louis Newspapers. His third wife, like his first and second, died of a wasting disease often associated with women who refuse to take food or water.
Just a centimeter above five feet tall, Erica had the kind of body that other women rolled their eyes at. As a gymnastics enthusiast as a child, she would become used mainly as a projectile by the other cheerleaders at Jackson Prep. Her bottom was tight and tiny. Her thighs are muscular enough to squash a small watermelon between them. Part Italian and part Jewish, her hair fell in tight curls past her shoulders. Her front two teeth were larger than they should have been. Her eyes danced accusingly in most situations.
Her voice matched her body. She hated it. “Take up smoking, doll.” Her maiden aunt suggested. She had taken up smoking when the United States went to war in Vietnam. A decent idea, it made Erica sound like a mouse with a cough. She still smoked, though.
That she was a beauty wasn’t in question. That men were worth her time was. If they weren’t liars, they were stupid. If they weren’t stupid liars, they couldn’t see how smart she was. One tried to paint her in the nude. It looked nothing like her. “Thanks for the effort, fella.” She thought.
Singing sorority songs with her friends and quite loose from the Negroni, Erica’s mind drifted back to the few seconds of video she saw on WAPT. That man’s houseboat was at least fourteen feet long. The turtle’s shell in the water, were it real, was at least five feet longer. For someone who loved numbers, Erica was quite fond of the magical stories of Mississippi.
Anthropologists and folklore professors at Millsaps and the University of Mississippi, (sometimes still called “Ole Miss” but begrudgingly by people of letters,) men and women with beards, suggested that the long neck, small head, and loose skin of the Mairrage Turtle’s retractable anatomy suggested an uncircumcised penis, and that’s why this very real species was ascribed magical properties regarding mairrage and childbirth.
They were, of course, just turtles, but large ones. A mairrage turtle around four feet long could be more than two hundred years old. Marriage turtles have been found with Civil War musket balls inside them, as well as pre-American Revolution arrowheads.
A turtle almost twenty feet long could be as old as the dinosaurs, Erica thought. That’s bigger than an Archelon. Archelons lived in Mississippi long before people, even long before the fabled star people. That’s if the video was real, which it certainly wasn’t. It couldn’t be. An animal that size couldn’t hide, even in a lake that large or that deep. Mississippi was full of things that seemed remarkable, but nobody could prove.
The video was taken in the center of Okkotake Lake. In the very center of Mississippi, Okkotake Lake was almost ten thousand square miles of brackish water. Geologists thought it was either the caldera of some ancient volcano or the crater of some ancient asteroid, but geological anomalies made it impossible for them to determine which with certainty.
The salty content was thought to be the result of the thick clay bottom, which had a strong salt content. Mississippi had once been a vast inland sea. This might be its last remnant. Ancient whale fossils were common around Okkotake, as were teeth and jaws from the terrible megalodon.
Choctaw elders believed that the word “Okkotake” came from the ancient star people. It meant salt, as salt was their gift to the people of Mississippi. It’s true, Mississippi is decorated with hidden salt domes. One was even used to test a hydrogen bomb. I suppose Washington considered Mississippi expendible if something went wrong, and Godzilla emerged.
As a child, Erica was visited by rich and troublesome dreams. Her friends who considered themselves untrained witches believed she was “touched” by the spirits. Erica thought she was “touched” by blonde cheerleaders who wanted to throw her into the air, and racist baseball players, who might look beautiful, but weren’t.
She hadn’t had one of “those dreams” in quite a while, but that night, her stomach filled with fusion polynesian/mississippian food, good gin, vermooth, and Campari, she had one of “those dreams.”
The turtle was bigger than her house. Its head emerged from the folds of ancient turtle skin to speak to her.
“Seek me out,” it said.
In the morning, dream turtles were gone. She didn’t vomit, but her overnight oats would rest for another overnight. She made a thermos of Cups Coffee and headed to work. “I shaved my legs for nothing. Again.” She thought.
There was just one day left in the work week. No dreams that night, no dreams the next. Sunday afternoon, she enjoyed a medicinal gummy and a nap in the sunlight streaming through her bay windows.
The turtle returned. Realer, closer, louder. Its voice sounded like her grandfather, the one who died when she was seventeen. “Erica,” it said.
“Seek me out.”
Lake Okkotake was enormous. Ringed by Mississippi pine forests and overpriced houses, it was the home to wompus cats, woolly buggers, bald eagles, and bobcats. Cottonmouth snakes followed your boat if you weren’t careful. The water was salty enough to support the beloved redfish that Mississippians loved. You could rent fishing boats of all sizes by the hour or the afternoon, so long as you had a fishing license and a personal flotation device.
Erica was small enough that three apples would be adequate for a personal flotation device. She was strong enough to put a johnboat in the water by herself. She could out-hunt and out-fish every boy she knew so far. “That glorious bitch” some of them would say.
The dreams were beginning to annoy her. “What the hell does a turtle want with me?” She thought.
Her cycle was heavy and painful. “I HATE being a girl.” She thought. On her heavy flow days, the dreams made her sweat. The turtle was her friend, possibly an ancestor. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Was it a “he?”
After her cycle, her body and mind always experienced something of a calm. A new egg, one of the thousands she was born with, prepared to descend. The miracle of life and renewal inside a woman who had just about had enough of men, their problems, their shortcomings, and the promises they didn’t mean.
The dreams quieted. The turtle now said “please” through the mist and returned below the dark green and red waters of the Okkotake.
It was Saturday. Erica was at the very peak of fertility in her menstrual cycle. This was something men dreaded, but women could feel.
She rented a two-person fishing boat.
“We rent fishing gear too.” The old man said.
“I have my own,” Erica said and strapped herself into her black and lime green personal floatation vest.
“I might be back after dark.” She said.
“Iffin I’m not here, somebody can check you the next morning,” the old man said.
Erica struck out across the unbelievably ancient lake, her tiny, muscular body angled halfway backwards so she could pilot the mercury outboard motor. Football season, the time for waterskiing was over. The water remained smooth as glass. A mist rolled in.
Although her phone was GPS-enabled, Erica never thought to check if she was in the geographic center of the perfectly round lake. At this point, the water could easily be hundreds of feet deep, cutting through the layers of Mississippi fecundity and red clay, through the salt domes, to the very bedrock of the North American plate. She was in an immeasurably ancient spot, a portal between worlds, a scar left on Mississippi by the people from the stars.
The mist grew thicker and thicker. Sunset bled purple through the layers of water droplets. Erica drank a beer and ate a pimento cheese sandwich from her purple and white Millsaps backpack.
“I am a fucking idiot,” she said to the air.
The purple sunset became the black of night. It was cold. Erica wore a sweater under her personal floatation device vest. She wore insulated camo pants for deer hunting. Her thighs, tight enough to bounce a quarter on, rocked in anticipation like a hungry tiger. The blackness of night became a timeless, dimensionless space.
Erica’s phone illuminated her boat and a few feet around it. She monitored her battery. In her backpack was a recharging battery, if she needed it.
Not sleepily, she decided to relax. If she were being an idiot, at least nobody could see it. Strange sounds she couldn’t quite detect comforted her.
She could feel her boat gently rise several feet into the air and then settle back down. She could quietly hear water moving, but not violently. She lit up her phone and shone it into the black mist. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing, and then…
The enormous head, wider than she was tall, emerged through the mist. Ancient striped eyes moved within their sockets. It was wrinkled, impossibly old, but very female.
“Let me look at you, child.”
A voice said, but the mouth didn’t move.
Erica stood up and reached out with her hand.
“You know me, don’t you, child?” The voice said. Erica’s eyes began to let down water, but she didn’t suffer the convulsions that often accompanied tears.
“You have questions. I have answers. Have you missed me, child?” Erica sat down in the boat. She was shaking now.
“Close your eyes. I’ll tell your heart what it wants to know.”
That’s all Erica could remember. The next thing her mind registered was the sun rising through the Mississippi pines. An eagle made breakfast of a redfish big as her forearm. She pulled the rope to start the motor to return the boat.
Returning to her Belhaven bungalow, two blocks from the Edwardian home where Eudora Welty spun stories of determination and heart, Erica fed the cat, put on a Miles Davis record, and plunged resolutely on her sofa.
Despite being lit for hours the night before, her phone retained a seventy-four percent charge. She looked through her contacts for a number she hadn’t called for years.
“Hey, uh, Lauren. It’s Erica. Hey!” Lauren called Erica “compadre”.
“Listen, uh, can we have lunch? I’d like to talk. I’ve missed you.”
In the unimaginably deep waters of Lake Okkotake, Grandmother Turtle smiled. Turtles don’t have lips, but they do smile.
