Magnolia

Magnolia

Shipley Ypres ~ Flume ~ A Musician ~ Bows and Falls ~ A Cabin in the Woods

Shipley Ypres

He said it could be found somewhere down in the woody edges of Mississippi. The gnarled side, he said. Not too far from the river itself, just a few miles out from its bluffs and banks, tucked someplace between bamboo and limestone where music suckled roots back to life under the drizzle of bloody waterfalls. Where the mud was silver and the rocks broke like cookies, he said. A forest dragged down the spine of Zeus, the tongue of Neptune. A forest dumped into a choppy basin of flume and magic somewhere between the chin of Mississippi, the pocket of Louisiana. He said you could find it there.

It was by tale of Cleveland of Jonesboro that Maggie Rapids first heard of the beauty of the Magnolia, but it was not until she met Shipley Ypres that she first came to learn of its power.  

She met Shipley Ypres on a cool pink evening somewhere between Natchez and Angola. The clouds cotton candy and the Mississippi a parade of diamonds. Slipping herself to the nearest shore, she was taking in all the wisdom and bronze that a sunset affords when she saw a brown bear slip forth from the trees that rested off the river.

She had not seen a bear since her days wondering the Minneapolis Zoo with her mother. She remembered scoffing at the small boy next to her that said they were dangerous. He said you had to freeze yourself if you ever saw one in the woods otherwise they’d eat you. She called the boy silly and said that bears looked quite cozy to her. The boy called her crazy.

She jumped into the river and cooed herself in a swaddle of reeds and began to spy on the bear. The bear had short legs and was husky and shaggy like all other bears, but for however plump and lumbering the bear was, its face, particularly its snot, made up in grace and nobility. He had a long and chiseled snot, dripping of wine and mirth, that when held up to a blooming constellation or sinking comet, and not being falsely portended toward some great storm hurling in from the humidors of the Caribbean, was, in fact, just a mere acknowledgement that some good fishing could be done. After sniffing around the sand, its nose blowing out shells and pebbles carried down from the Missouri, the stout and chivalrous bear finally made himself a seat near where Maggie had been standing. He began to set himself up for some fishing.

His rods were long and sharp, and his bait simply the shiny waters that glimmered along the banks. By the time the sun had fallen he had filled three large baskets with salmon. Satisfied with his catch, he packed up its gear, and set off, waddling toward a line of trees that was chewing on daisies. Bewildered, hungry, and against the better demons of her curiosity, Maggie jumped out of the reeds and set upon the humblest of inquisitions from one dream to another.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bear?” She called out to him, tracking him down as he lugged his massive butt to the forest, a basket of salmon in one hand, rods and tackleboxes in the other, wet and tired of a hard day’s fishing. “Mr. Bear? Could you hold up for a minute? Mr. Bear? Could you please? Mr. Bear? Mr. Bear? Mr. -”

“WHAT!” The bear cried, flinging off its fishing gear and coming around to a four-point stance, ready to enthrall her with all the savagery a bear may afford. “My god, girl, don’t you know it’s impolite to hassle a bear when he’s finished his fishing and heading to rest!”  

“Well, yes, I suppose so, but wait, no, not really, for you Mr. Bear are quite the creature, one that seems to be living and working in places he does not necessarily belong to. And I see you have Salmon in your baskets, or had Salmon in your baskets, again, excuse me for alarming you, Mr. Bear, but salmon is not a fish I’m quite used to seeing, nor bears the creature I’m used to encountering, and I been deep in these waters for oh, God knows who how long now.”

Staring into Maggie’s blue eyes, the bear relaxed and set himself to picking up his fallen items. Maggie helped gather some of the salmon and put them back in the baskets.

“You’re right,” said the bear. “I have some explaining to do, and you’re a lucky one, because I’m in love. If I wasn’t in love, I would have killed you, smashed you into a pulp of melon, perhaps even have eaten you and. Maybe even use your bones to pick the fish out my teeth.”

 “You’re in love?” Maggie asked, oblivious to the spears planted among the bears gums, her eyes now beaming. “With who? What’s her name? Where did you meet her? When did you meet her? How did you meet her? Is she tall? Is she short? Where is she from? What does she do? Is she funny? Is she smart? Is she beautiful? Is she cute? Is she nice?”

“I don’t know!” cried the bear, nearly losing his gear again. But this time the bear cooled down rather quickly, for he had caught scent of something, his eyes drifting with the river and his snout whisking for the stars to come forth. “I don’t know,” he repeated, this time with a smile that spread like wildfire across his long and musky snout. “I don’t know. I haven’t met her yet. But I’m in love, it’s true.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Where are you from Mr. Bear? How is it you know you are so in love with someone you haven’t met?”

“You ask a lot of questions for giving no answers yourself,” said the bear.

“Right, of course. My apologies. I’m Maggie, and, and – and I’m from Minnesota! Almost forgot, good gracious, I’m just so excited. How’s that, better?”

“Certainly. I’m Shipley, and I’m from Belgium. Now, Ms. Maggie, let me tell you all my wondrous tales once we get back to camp and I get some food in me. How does that sound?”

“Not very good at all! Now you’re just dodging my questions, and how do I know you won’t just lead me into your cave and eat me?!”

Shipley moaned. He wheezed something sharp and nasally in French. “Why does everyone think Belgians sleep in caves and only want to eat their children? That’s the Germans!”

Maggie squinted at the bear, her brows sharp and stern. “I’m sorry to offend you Mr. Shipley, but I just got to look out for myself.”

“Sure you do! But you got no need to worry with me. I’m a pescatarian, and I don’t sleep in no damp cave. I sleep under the stars! Got a nice meadow I’m camped at right now, not even a mile from here. You can come if you want, or not, no matter to me.”

“Ok, Mr. Bear, I’ll go to your meadow, but before we get there, tell me more about how you know you’re in love with someone you don’t know yet? See, because I find it the opposite, most people don’t know there in love when they have already met the person. They’re too scared to admit so. And it is quite freighting to admit, I’ll admit. See, this one time back when I was passing Illinois, I met this boy, Peter, and he-”

Maggie talked on and on to Shipley, explaining to him her adventures, her ill fortune in love, and her quest to swim all the way to her sister in Florida, of how they were going to split the treasure they would find and spend the rest of their days in the Caribbean dancing and drinking margaritas. That all she needed now was perhaps to bring a boy along, or meet a boy there, to share in all the happiness. To make it complete, she said. Shipley nodded his head at the words. He was happy that he did not need to talk. He found words hard to breathe when his gut was begging for a meal, and although he had indeed strongly considered eating her (he lied about being pescatarian), he had decided against it, for her stories were so pure, so wild and fantastic, that he remembered why he had embarked on his own adventures. In a spark of ravishing sweetness, he thought there, in that tall and fair human girl, he had met his love, that his journey was true, his quest complete. That upon his return to Belgium they would bathe him chocolate, drown him in honey, and crown him king of the woods and Maggie queen of the lakes. But then he felt a rumbling quake in his stomach that reminded him he was famished, that an empty stomach usually made him delusional, that his type were polar bears, and that love between a girl and a bear was, in fact, still very much illegal, especially in the state of Mississippi.

Shipley Ypres was true to his word. He did indeed have a camp in a meadow not far off the river and he did indeed sleep under the stars. Where he slept was not hard to find, for it was a patch of pale grass that looked to have been stepped on by a giant. Entering camp, he made a large bon-fire that trickled into ghosts, impaled his salmon with gnarled branches he had clawed into skewers, and created a sort of teepee frame around the fire with the skewers and soon enough the smoke of the fires seem to rise and dance into the skies like ghosts.

Whistling an old Flemish lullaby his mother used to sing to him, Shipley laid beside Maggie and together they watched the salmon cook in the fire. Burning and decaying, their blood crackled and transformed into a school of smoke, and so they did swim once more together, forever, into the starry waters of the universe, twisting and rising with grace under the glow of a million moons and the sixty-seven queens of Jupiter.

After making sure a single piece of salmon was given to Maggie, Shipley proceeded to devour three baskets of fish and four bushels of berries he had stored in a hollow log on the edge of the meadow. After finishing his meal, he retrieved from this same log a large brass spittoon that was filled with honey, ripped out a large root from under an Oak tree, smothered the root with honey, and proceeded to chew on it like a toothpick. Comfortably fed and buzzing with sugar and earth, thus Shipley Ypres was ready to stand before the restless inquiry of Maggie Rapids. And this is what the bear said of himself.

“I was born in the grassy and shallow remnants of a bomb crater in the Ardennes forest, not far from Bastogne, the last of four cubs, all boys. My mother spoke ten different languages, French, Latin, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Bear, Chicken, Loon, and Wolf. Of these she taught me only five. Bear, of course, and Loon, French, Wolf, and English. She was a devout Catholic who claimed to see angels and by herself had me and my brothers to be men of the church. Up until me, this was the fate of her children, each of my older brothers becoming Trappist Monks, but, to the ridicule of my brothers, I never did like the taste of beer, and the lives I saw my brothers lead was a strict routine of the same thing every day. Praying, brewing, eating, drinking, and sleeping. Not a bad life at all, but I wanted something more, something grand, but most of all, I wanted love. Fierce, gentle, savage, fuzzy, incomparable love, and I knew I could never have had this if I became a monk. My eldest brother Henri understood this and so sneaked me on a crate of his finest ale and shipped me off to Canada, off to the desolate and freezing forests of Quebec where there lied a society of Jesuits that still held some ancient connection with Henri’s monastery.”

“It was there that I met Father Agincourt, the most incredible creature I had ever met. Agincourt was a tall, lean grey wolf with teeth as white as ivory and sharp as swords and who, aside from being a master fisherman and huntsman, was fluent in one-nineteenth of the knowable 20,217 animal languages. Of human languages he spoke only French. After teaching me how to fish and seeing how much I loved it, Father Agincourt let me in on an old fish legend. For fish too have their own legends, he explained to me, each creature having their own peculiar faiths and myths, each parent not only passing down blood and principles, but beliefs and characters for their children to mold into their own. An endless wash and cycle of stories that would flourish until judgment day when all would be combined and bred into the one true epic of the world. But it was a fish legend that held the most intrigue with Father Agincourt, for of the thousands upon thousands of different fish he had met, baptized, eaten, and heard confession for, the legend was the same across all of them. It was of a white flower, petals soft as silk and holy as clouds. The fish believed that just a bite of it would ensure their ascension to the sea beyond seas, a bottomless world where the sound of love slipped through gills with the rush of titans, where vison broke free from its blurry shackles and saw clear into the beauty of blue and all its countless shades of grace and peace. This was the fate of the fish who nibbled just a speck of the white flower, and for Father Agincourt, it consumed him like so many other myths he heard, pushing him to delve deep into his library of alchemy and ecology until he could nail down from descriptions what flower they spoke of. After weeks of research he came upon the conclusion that the flower was none other than the Magnolia, and that it was a symbol of both Mississippi and Louisiana.”

“Now, I was never much for believing in myths and legends, and I had heard my share of warnings from fellow Europeans and friendly Canadians about the dangerous woods of America, but I figured if I was going to spend my days fishing and sleeping, I might as well set upon a quest while doing so. For with this flower, it was plainly concluded by both me and Father Agincourt that it must be the best bait in all the world, for if every fish believed it to be their ticket to immorality, one could fish anywhere in the world with it attached to its cast. Could they not? After a few months of ice fishing in Hudson Bay with polar bears who taught me a few fish languages, I crossed Ontario and into the States and thus began my quest for the Magnolia.”

“So, you must have gone through Minnesota then?” Maggie asked, perked at the idea that Shipley may have passed through her home.

“Yes, kind people I found in Minnesota, fine fishing too. It was a good start to my quest and appeased many of the fears I had when first entering this great empire of yours. I was an immigrant you see, and unlike many other forests of the world, lady America, the true one, does not wish to isolate you into narrow caves of steel, hunt you down, prohibit you from her schools, gaggles, teams, and flocks. She desires you to join her ranks, waving her hand and spreading her smile, begging you to study the stars and bleed the stripes. My newfound skill in fishing and binge eating helped me quickly assimilate, but if I dared speak a lick of French to a Badger or practice my Fish upon a Michigander, although tolerated, I found myself treated with deep apathy. This was no danger, but it did take some time for me to accustom myself to the nature of my situation, that while my heritage is appreciated, it was of little use in making new friends. I was different, you see.”

“I know how that feels,” Maggie said.

“Being different?” Shipley asked.

Maggie slumped. “Yes, and of the friends, hard to make new friends, harder to make true friends.”

“Why is that? You are an American and you are swimming the great American river. You must have lots of friends!”

“I have few,” said Maggie, dejectedly. “Most people think I’m crazy. They don’t believe any of the things I’ve done. If I tell someone I talked with a bear from Belgium they’ll only laugh at me.”

“Well why do you need to tell them anyways? You know in your heart it is true and that God is with you. What more do you need?”

“Well, I want to share my story, I suppose.”

“You have shared your story,” said Shipley. “You want them to believe you.”

“Yes,” said Maggie. “I want them to believe I’m telling the truth.”

“What is true in one heart in time will become the truth for others,” said Shipley. “Father Agincourt told me that. And so what if they don’t see it as the truth right now? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. A story doesn’t belong to you either. It is its own animal and belongs inside the hearts of others. Like a good animal, it is there for you and will never wrong you. And also consider there are thousands of better stories than ours that will never be read nor heard. Yours has.”

“Yes,” said Maggie, feeling low. “You are right. I just wish it felt better. But don’t let me interrupt you anymore, Shipley. Please, go on with your story. I am really enjoying it.”

“Right. Where were we?”

“You were in America looking for the flower.”

 “Yes,” said Shipley, taking another lick of honey from his root. “I had only one clue to finding the flower, and it was that I knew the fish were looking for it. And so that’s what I used, keeping my eye out to see where the fish were going as I trailed the river. I figured somewhere I would eventually come across a place, a river or a diverging stream, where the fish seemed to be congregating and veering off. I just did not expect it take so long, for not until I approached the final county line of Mississippi did I find it, a scrawny stream of silver flushed with fish of every shape and color imaginable, the stream twisting and crawling away into muddy chutes that eventually splashed into a tight valley of densely wooded hills, hills competing with another for who could jump the highest and squat the deepest. One of the strangest forests I had yet encountered. Life of all kind. There was one hill that was covered in bamboo, like a corn field, locked in by walls of oak, and shoot, you won’t believe me, but I saw Panda there! A real panda, walking through the forest. I called out to him and asked about the Magnolia, but all he said was that he didn’t speak Bear. Said he spoke Chinese and Panda, and that was about all I heard from him. He walked off after that, but I guess he knew what I meant. Before he disappeared, he shrugged off in a direction and said the word Magnolia in a funny Panda accent. From there it did not take long to find the Magnolia.”

Shipley stopped speaking and went to fetch more honey from his log and came back and stuck his root in the spittoon and licked the honey. Tongue coiling along the stick like a snake. The golden ooze trickling out of his gums and dripping before the embers of the fire. He had complexly lost all sense of time and place.

“Well, that’s nice and all,” said Maggie. “But you said you fell in love! How did you fall in love! How come there was a Panda here in Mississippi? And how the heck was it you were able to catch three baskets of salmon and I haven’t seen one of them in all my swimming?!”

“You sure ask a lot of questions,” said Shipley, laughing as he placed his root back in his spittoon for another swirl of honey. “First of all, I don’t care how blue your eyes are, you can’t begin to fathom the worlds that lie beneath the waters. My polar bear friends taught me that. They told me they once netted a mermaid that claimed to be an elf! Can you believe that?”

“No,” said Maggie, sternly, “I can’t believe that.”

“Yeah,” said Shipley, laughing and nearly choking on the honey. “I don’t quite believe that one. But the Panda is real. The Great Mississippi Panda. Father Agincourt mentioned that once to me.”

Maggie didn’t respond, pausing to let her questions sink in again, staring deeply into Shipley’s black eyes for the answers he would not give.

“How do I know I’ll fall in love?” Shipley asked, placing his stick in the spittoon and wiping his mouth with the back of his paw. “That’s what your eyes are asking. I don’t know. That’s the simple answer. But there’s a particular Magnolia tree I stumbled upon, somewhere I couldn’t retrace even if I wanted to. It was not a very big tree, but it was the most beautiful tree I had even seen. The leaves were dark and crisp and green, and the flowers not only white, but pink, the lightest pink you can imagine, a hue of pink dancing on the edge of marble. On every inch of this tree’s arms was carved a different name, and as I read the names of hundreds of people, I began to hear them, in all their different languages, and although the sounds were different, I could feel every voice spoke the same message. It was a song, you see, one you don’t quite understand the words to, gibberish almost, rubbish if you think too hard on it, but with the music, the feeling, you know what it’s saying, but you can’t describe it to no one, because it only makes sense to yourself. That’s what it was like, them voices. They told me that they were in love, and that I would be too if I put my name on there with them. At least that’s what I believe. So that’s what I did. I took my paw and clawed straight down the bark of the tree, slashing through a generation of lovers that explained to me that I was now forever bound to them, guaranteed to find love, and I stepped back to observe my mark, the sun peeked its light through the leaves and the voices suddenly began to roll together, rising as if they were inside a storm, a wind of thunder heading straight for my heart. Then they really began to sing. A gospel of lost lovers, and it was a song I had heard once before, deep in the pearly snows off the icy shores of the Hudson Bay, where flames of green, blue, and silver race across the night sky like wildfire. My heart melted all the way into my feet, and I knew, right then, where I was to find my love, and I have hunching suspicion of who it is. A tall polar bear by the name of Catherine. If not her, then one of her two sisters or seven cousins.”

 Maggie had been curling her lips, pinching her chin as she listened to Shipley’s tale, deeply entranced with how adventure and faith poured from his snout like wine into a chalice. She let out a sigh and leaned back into the grass, staring at the moons before jumping back up and walking over to him. “Shipley, you were in love with this Catherine, and you just didn’t know it! Now you’ve travelled half the world, clawed some a tree, and just now realized this?”

“Oui,” said Shipley, grinning while he sucked the last drops of honey which were dripping off his root. Appeased with the honey and the lost look of Maggie, he snuggled up close to the fire and stared into its whistling core.

“Distance has a way of making emotions understandable. As for the Magnolia being the ultimate bait, I think it will take a lifetime to test that legend. I now have a bag filled with the flowers, a special preserve to keep them fresh, and I plan to travel to the most desolate rivers of the world to see if I can catch some fish with them, but first thing first, I am heading back to Canada, back to see if Catherine has heard the same music as I have.”

Maggie smiled at the bear as he laid his head down to rest. He passed out fast and she went to preparing herself for sleep. She slept that night under sparkling constellations and rolling silver clouds and next to her embers simmered and glowed as gently and fierce as the heart of Shipley Ypres.

She awoke to Shipley gathering up his gear. He thanked Maggie for her company and putting her faith in a bear’s hospitality and wished her good luck on her journey and encouraged her to come find him in Canada. Maggie thanked for him the food and encouraged him to make twenty babies with Catherine.

“The Polar Bears need more children,” she said.

He said he would do his best, and after presenting her with a bouget of Magnolia and reminding her of where to turn off from the river to find more, he headed back to the forest and slipped into a glade of Cottonwoods at the edge of the meadow, his shaggy bottom disappearing into the morning fog.