Hex: A Novel (11 page)

I put the plate down and climbed up onto the opposite stair railing where, if I leaned out over the open stairwell, resting my head next to the dragon’s, I could see into the kitchen through the window over the sink. My father had caught Rosellen by the wrist and pulled her to him. He said something in her ear and she laughed. Then, he turned her, pressing her against him as if they were dancing and rubbed her back, sliding in small circles down to her buttocks which were still high and firm in the tight black workout pants she wore around the house. She laughed again, a giggle that trailed off into breath as my father suddenly slid his hand in between her legs and dug into her, his thumb strutted against her tailbone, his fingers working into her flesh.
His lips were still moving, but I had no idea what he was saying to her. If he looked up, he would have seen me and the dragon watching him, our faces drained into the same expressions of dumb, featureless greed.

“Alice!” said Thingy, standing on the stone wall, and I went down to her. “What do you want to do tonight?” she said. But I had no suggestions, not even bad ones.

Eventually, Thingy grew tired of waiting. She took the plate out of my hands and flipped the whole thing high over the fence of the dog pen. We watched as the plate separated from its contents: chicken, carrots and china spiraling out like components of an unmoored satellite, each turning with its own specific orbital weight. When the chicken hit the ground Bitch and Dog rushed out from under the doghouse and charged it. Bitch got there first and we watched as she devoured the breast, snuffling the dirt long after she’d finished the last shreds. When she realized there was nothing left, she looked up at us accusingly, her muzzle red with clay.

If this were a story it would be easier to tell. I am not an inventive woman, Ingrid, just as I was not an inventive child. I like to work with the world as it arrives to me, but I’ve found that involves a lot of repetitions. In your own life there will be just as many patterns. Some of them I can already identify: the bees, of course, and the color blue, a chicory shade like your and Daniel’s eyes, running water, conjoined pairs.

But take, for example, a stranger’s life. A perfectly ordinary life lived at some undistinguished point along the timeline. Unanalyzed. Unrecorded. My mother’s life. She was born and grew up on the side of a mountain. She climbed the mountain up and
down on her way from the school to her home; her home to her father’s store or the movie theatre or the park; her home to some other place known only to her where she went to be alone. Her life was understood in a series of more or less cone-shaped journeys. My mother got married and had two children. My mother died, but all the while she must have thought to herself: “I have seen this before, haven’t I? This shape, this pattern? Hasn’t there been something before this about a dragon or a beetle, about a hole or a little snake uncoiling, testing the air with its tongue?”

Take another stranger. The Sainte-Maria, for example, who appeared and disappeared, appeared again like a needle diving in and out of the cloth. Who knows what she thought to herself as she loped around the town? She came from a large family, many children and many fathers. She was one of the younger ones, one of the only girls, and when she met Dax for the first time—she couldn’t have been more than fifteen—I wonder what she recognized in him. Surely not another father. She didn’t need one.

I imagine when she met my father, the Sainte Maria felt a stretching like the terrible rending that takes place in a seed as the shoot unfurls, breaks upward. She had felt that before, no doubt, but with my father it must have seemed a better bet. Some vegetative energy she had always suspected she contained—root energy, seed energy, the energy of stasis and dark, compressed places—that now seemed just on the verge of release.

Because the Sainte Maria loved my father. You understand that by now, don’t you, Ingrid? And my father, as susceptible as any one of us to patterns, saw a young girl just stepping into the dappled parts of the world: the complicated geometry of a rock fall or a streambed, something that cannot be comprehended
by a quick glance, or even solely by the eye. My father saw the Sainte Maria falter and he reached out a hand and he helped her along.

Well. If this were only a story, I could say some things. I could say: The baby is ready to be born and so the baby was born.

I could say: The mother was in pain and so the mother died.

The creek that runs by this house has high, overhanging banks and a sandy bottom where flat river rocks are washed smooth like paving stones. The water is clean, but a hazy goose-green color flecked with mica washed down from the peaks so when I stand in it and look down at my feet I appear to be gilded—a woman caught by a terrible spell and slowly turning to gold.

Of course, no such thing has happened. Our creek is the unremarkable outcome of the water cycle, gravity, geological shifts that channel water in and out of erodible beds. It is a good habitat for newt and minnows, colorful darters and the spring peepers which come down from the forest to leave their eggs bobbing in the lee of stones and snagged flotsam. Deer drink from the creek’s banks and once, rising early in the winter to bring in wood for the morning fire, I saw a bobcat squatting in the snow. It froze when it saw me, but when neither of us moved it continued to lap at the water with its broad tongue and when finished sauntered back to the tree line without even a backward glance.

More recently, a flock of mallards have begun to use our creek to mate, nest and raise their young. They are noisy,
companionable. Each year when they return, I think I recognize my individual favorites—the male with the crooked neck, the female with the darker beak and shabby tail.

The ducks are wary and, mindful of how far they have to travel and how many different sorts of predators they will meet on the way, I don’t try to befriend them. Mallard separate off into breeding pairs and there are almost always more males than females in a mating flock. Frequently, a gang of these unmated males will band together and isolate a female from her partner. They will rape her, taking turns driving her under the water with such tenacity that she seems in danger of drowning, while others of their number beat off her furious mate. Afterwards, she will paddle in circles, preening her breast feathers and shaking her tail while her mate thrusts ahead of her expecting her to follow.

What can I say to that? If this were a story (the father is restless and so the father builds; the stepmother is powerful and so the stepmother waits) it would be very easy to make her a statement, a parallel to a larger, human condition. But she is a duck, Ingrid, and this is what I want you to understand. It’s when we forget our bodies that we get into trouble.

This is the attraction. See what I could do to her if I gave her a name: Delores the Duck.

And a family: daughter of David and Marsha, sister to Ellen and Thad.

And some dreams: She was the littlest duck of the flock and wanted, more than anything, to be trusted some day with a leadership roll at the point of the V. She was a quiet girl, given to day
dreaming, who loved to dabble in the shallows at the verge of the stream, splashing the clear water over her head and preening in it as it fell in sheets around her. One day, as she sang to herself about the bite of the cold wind in her face and the sound behind her of her family straining their wings to keep up, she was set upon by a gang of strangers, little more than boys, who brutalized her, taking turns driving her under the water over and over, shouting as they did so in wild glee. Afterward, she drifted aimless on the stream and could no longer see herself in its clear waters. She was a puzzle to her family, who knew nothing of what had happened, and they grew tired of her new sullenness and left her at the back of the V, no longer asked her opinion of where they should stop to bathe or eat or dabble in simple circles on the deep lakes. Eventually, one of the gods, who happened to look down, took such pity on her that he transformed her into a pebble which instantly sank to the bottom of the stream and rolled there, rocked by the gentle currents. Overhead, her family paddled back and forth calling her name.

Just like that, now she is Delores who must become a stone, rather than a female duck, one of many, who can settle her feathers and lead her clutch of ducklings in a ragged line along the banks. Stories do not heal, Ingrid; they expose. Like picking at a scab to see if underneath our bodies have transformed the miracle of blood into yet more, blank pink skin. Perhaps this is why we tell them.

Rosellen kept the notebook with her record of our family meetings in an easily accessible drawer in the secretary by the backdoor which had become a catchall for loose buttons, bits of string, half-dead pens, keys with no locks, pocket change, bank statements, loose playing cards (King of Hearts, Queen
of Spades) and other comfortable detritus. Part of the point was the openness of the record. There were no secrets, Rosellen implied; no manipulations. Here we were just as we were—and weren’t we a sorry bunch.

April 26, 1992

Dax Small: I don’t know what to say. I guess I wish someone would take the trash out when it’s full instead of waiting for me to do it every time.

Alice Small: [. . .]

Ingrid Clawson: At my house, we have a trash compactor that smashes everything together so we only have to take the trash out once a week. Sometimes not even once a week if we don’t have any parties. Why don’t you get something like that?

Alice Small: Why don’t we get something like that?

(interruption from the cleaning girl—break to settle a problem with Lucas Small)

Ingrid Clawson: Now, where were we?

Dax Small: I’m done doing this. It’s nine o’clock at night. I’m going out for a beer.

June 3, 1995

Rosellen Small: Where should we start?

Dax Small: [. . . .]

Alice Small: [. . . .]

Rosellen Small: Someone has to say something. The situation isn’t getting any better.

Ingrid Clawson: He seems the same to me. He’s always been like that, hasn’t he? Did someone think the situation was supposed to get better?

Dax Small: Why are you here, Ingrid? Does your mother know you’re here?

Alice Small: I told her to come. We’re supposed to be doing a geology project.

Dax Small: Oh, yeah? What about? I didn’t know you were interesting in geography, Ingrid.

Ingrid Clawson: I’m not. That’s all Alice’s stuff. I’m interested in the theatre. I’m going to be an actress.

Dax Small: You are, are you? What kind of actress?

Ingrid Clawson: Burlesque.

(major interruption by Lucas Small who has been brought in by cleaning girl—damage done to: 2 plates, 1 glass, curtains, cleaning girl’s mouth, Dax Small’s hand)

Dax Small: All right. I know. Don’t look at me like that. I know.

February 18, 1997

Ingrid Clawson: Honestly, what’s the big deal? It’s not like this is Victorian, England. Right?

Dax Small: [. . . .]

Alice Small: [. . . .]

Ingrid Clawson: Dax, come on. It’s not like, “What will the neighbors think?” because there aren’t any neighbors but me and mom and you know what I think and my mom doesn’t think anything about anything. All she wants to do is sit in the living room with a bottle of wine and listen to Chuck Mangioni. Who cares what she thinks?

Dax Small: It’s time for you to go home, Ingrid.

Alice Small:[. . . .]

Ingrid Clawson: There’s a clinic in Ridley Township. It doesn’t cost much and—

Dax Small: Go
home
, Ingrid.

Alice Small: [. . . .]

Ingrid Clawson: Why did you tell him, anyway, Alice? That was pretty fucking stupid of you, if you ask me.

Dax Small (standing): [. . . .]

Ingrid Clawson: All right! I’m going. I can see myself out.

The house is empty and so the house is filled. The children are lonely and so the children wander. There are so many ways to tell a story, Ingrid, that, in spite of our best intentions, we begin one almost every time we open our mouths.

I will tell it to you as I told it to my father:

“When I was young, I went into the forest. I didn’t have an errand or anyone to see on the other side, but I could not be dissuaded, so my stepmother packed a basket with bread and cheese, half of a wild apple and a little bird she had cooked the night before with honey and the herbs that grow wild on the hill. I still remember how my father looked as he stood on the doorstep to wave me goodbye. I still remember the smoke that rose from the chimney and the rose bush which bloomed beside the front door.

After many days of travel, I had eaten all my food and came to a place I could not remember ever having come to before. It was a clearing where the trees suddenly ended and before me was a lake whose waters were gray and still and filled the valley in all directions like a bead of mercury, self-contained. I realized how it was, that, quite by accident, I had come to Gall Place and I set my basket down on a stone and began to cry. I was afraid because Gall Place is enchanted and only the animals can go there. Now something would happen to me for sure, I believed. And I was right.

After awhile, I don’t know how long, I had cried with such great feeling that my tears formed a little stream, like the ones that bloom from the rocks after a storm. When my tears touched the water of the lake, there was a great shaking. The air around me seemed to shake like a blanket someone was snapping to clear it of crumbs, and then there were two men who stepped from the lake onto the shore. One of the men was very dark: his skin was as blue as a plum, his eyes like charred nuts, his hair black as a black goat’s wool and clung to his head just as closely. The other man was very pale. His hair and eyes and skin were smooth and faultless.

“He would taste like biting into a wedge of snow,” I thought, and imagined the rind of ice against my lips. Other than that, the two men were identical and I knew they were the Thunder Brothers who live very far to the west on the other side of the mountains and do not come home though their father has forgiven them for their crimes. Their shoes were wet from standing in the water. They sat down beside me to wring out their socks and lay them on the rocks to dry.

“Why are you crying?” the dark brother asked me. His name was Fet, which means A Terrible Noise.

“I’m afraid,” I answered him. “I’ve come to a place where I am not supposed to be.”

“You’ve got that right,” said the pale brother; Taw was his name which means A Terrible Light. “How did you get here, anyway? Didn’t you see the No Trespassing signs?”

I had not and I told them as much. Then, as no one seemed to be in a particular hurry, I told them the rest of my story: my long journey, my many challenges, what I had seen and how I had been during my time in the forest.

“That’s nothing,” said Taw when I was done, but Fet seemed appreciative, keeping his gaze on my face as I talked and slapping the rock with the palm of his hand at moments of particular wit or peril. All in all, we passed a pleasant afternoon and when the sun began to go down, balancing on the points of the firs like a halved peach pierced by the tines of a fork, Fet invited me to come with him and his brother to their home under the lake and have some dinner.

“Our sisters are already there,” he said, helping me to my feet and pulling a twig from my hair. “They’re pretty good cooks. Nothing fancy, but filling and fresh.”

“What are their names?” I asked.

Taw rolled up the cuffs of his pants and shoved his socks into his back pocket. “They don’t have any,” he said and Fet looked regretful, but said it was true.

At first I was afraid to walk into the lake, but Fet assured me it was not water but the main trail that went past their house. “It’s not far now,” he said, and I found that it was not water but tall, waving grasses that closed over my head as I followed them. After a short walk, the grasses began to thin and we came onto a wide road on one side of which was a field and on the other a low, stone wall enclosing a peach orchard.
The sky was a dusky violet and all around us birds opened their throats and sang.

Taw climbed the wall and walked into the orchard. “This is a shortcut,” he called over his shoulder, but Fet and I were enjoying the mild evening and went the long way around. We followed the road as it mounted a gentle hill and came in this way to a house in the center of a neat dirt yard with a well and a coop and a round fire pit in which a great blaze had been kindled. Taw was already there and so were the sisters who were tall and slim and both wearing orange dresses that belted high under their breasts and flowed all the way down to their feet, hiding them from sight.

The sisters were happy to see their brother and happy to meet me as well. They came to us and touched me all over, their hands dry and light as they stroked my face and forearms, touched my lips and eyelids and turned my hands back and forth to look at my knuckles and nails. While they did this, they smiled and nodded to me and each other, conversing with their hands and eyes. I saw that each sister had two snakes tattooed on her lips, one on the upper and one below. They were fashioned in such a way that when the woman opened her mouth, the snakes opened their mouths. I also found it was true the sisters had no tongues. Their mouths were pink and smooth and empty and so they made no sound but showed me in other ways that they were happy to see me and give me comfort after the dangers of my journey.

For dinner that night, Taw killed one of the hens and we ate her with beans and corn, wild ramps and a pat of sweet butter the sisters churned from the milk given by their old, brown cow. We drank a clear liquor Fet made from the peaches and after dinner we sat around the fire and listened to Taw play a bone flute
he pulled out of his pocket which was so straight and white it looked as if he were playing another one of his fingers snapped from his hand and held bloodless between his lips. Then, as I saw no reason not to, I stayed with them for many years and passed a happy time in this fashion.

Over the seasons, a few things became clear. For one, the sisters’ feet were short and round, almost like a dog’s paws, but this seemed to embarrass them and when they saw me looking they would sit down and readjust their skirts so I could no longer see. For another, what at first I had thought were chairs were actually turtles. They raised themselves up and stretched out their claws when we came to sit, but as soon as they saw who we were and their curiosity was satisfied, they settled back down around the table and went to sleep.

There were other things besides. The brothers had two horses which they rode fast over the valley. But then I knew they were really two horned serpents: a white one and a red one with a stone in its forehead the size and shape of a cartridge bullet. The saddles they used were also turtles and the bracelets they wore were other snakes which rustled around the brothers’ forearms carrying the tips of their tails in their mouths. At night, before they went to bed, the sisters would take off their long black hair and hang it on pegs by the door. Their heads were round and smooth as pumpkins. Though I saw it every day, each night I would think, “Why, it is not hair at all,” and feel the same surprise.

One afternoon, Taw rode his great red serpent out over the valley and was gone for a long time. When he came back he was agitated and drove the snake almost into the yard, leapt from the saddle and ran into the house without tending his mount or lifting the turtle from its back; unusual for him as he liked to keep
things neat. It was a sunny day after a spell of rain. I was sitting in the yard idly braiding a new belt from corn silk given to me by the sisters. The hens, which had been sleeping by my feet, were startled by the commotion and beat heavily around me, showering me with dust. Inside the house, I heard Taw shouting and when I followed him I found Fet and the sisters were already there, all three seated around the table, all three looking anxious and the sisters very pale.

“I told you this would happen,” said Taw, pacing in front of the door and running his hands through his hair until it stood up like a crane’s crest. “There’s no way there’s enough time to clean it all up before he gets here,” he said.

“Clean up what?” I asked. “Who’s coming?”

When no one answered me, I set about tidying the kitchen, trying to be helpful, but Taw said, “She’ll have to go. Tonight. Right away.”

Fet shook his head and said, “Tomorrow morning. Let her stay one more night.”

“Tomorrow then, but first thing,” Taw said. “No dawdling.” The sisters looked at me sadly, lips pressed together so tightly the snakes appeared to be starving. “What’s going on?” I said, but by then I thought I knew.

Fet got up and put his arms around me. He smelled like pepper and some other sharp spice. “I’m sorry, Alice,” he said and squeezed me. “But our father sent a message. He’s coming to visit and he wouldn’t like to find you here.”

“There are rules,” said Taw. “We broke them.”

That night, as they had very many nights over the years, the brothers came to me in my little bed by the door. I knew them so well by then I could tell without looking which one’s
hand, which one’s mouth. If I had suddenly lost all my senses, I would still have known from the way that they filled me which brother was above me, which brother was below. Afterwards we lay together for a long time, Taw with his hand on my breast and Fet petting the inside of my thigh with long, light strokes as he would the sisters’ cat when she slept by the fire.

“What happens next?” I said, but I did not expect an answer. Taw stirred against me, hardening again as he rolled my nipple between his fingers and pressed his cold mouth into my neck.

“You know it won’t live,” he said to his brother.

“I know,” said Fet. He lifted himself on one elbow and kissed my mouth, my ear, the corners of my eyes. Inside me I felt a rising flutter as if a small bird were battering its wings against the window glass.

The next morning was painful. All of us cried. The sisters said goodbye to me at the house, kissing me all over my face, pressing every inch of my body from tip to toe. They gave me back my basket which they had been using to store onions under the sink, and wrapped my head in a long orange scarf in case I had need of it on my journey. The brothers walked me back to the lake shore and said goodbye to me there. They stood ankle deep in the water and waved. Every time I turned back, they were still there waving until finally I turned and could see nothing behind me but trees. I knew I would never see them again—one so black he swallowed himself, one so white he burned very cold—and I sat down at the base of a pine tree and wept. I considered myself very sorry, alone now in the world and, I realized, lost in a woods through which I could not remember traveling, in which I had left no marker to guide me home.

“Hello?” I called out, but to whom? The forest was dark and unwilling. There is a story that says the pine is of the same nature as the stars and holds within itself the same bright light, but that is just a story and the tree I was leaning against did not bend to comfort me or brighten to beam me the way home. I was alone, alone. I was alone. And then something in my basket gave a little jump and began tapping at the lid to be let out.

Cautiously, you may be sure, I lifted the lid. I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps some present from the sisters—a magic bean, enchanted spindle. Perhaps one of the brothers’ bracelets which had crawled in there the night before to get some sleep. What I saw was none of these things; it went beyond my talent for prophecy. It was the little bird my stepmother had cooked for me so long ago and whose bones I had sucked clean and wrapped in a twist of paper!

The bird beat the bones of its wings and hopped up onto the edge of the basket. It looked about, tipping one empty socket toward the ground and one toward my face, and sidled around the basket rim to step onto my finger where it nibbled at my knuckle with its sharp, black beak. I stroked the bird’s skull with the tip of my finger. Its bones were cool and smooth, burnished brown with age. When it moved, it made a faint grinding noise. It opened its beak as if it was singing, but no sound came out. Its ribcage was empty; its brainpan was dry.

So, there were two of us: me and the bird I had eaten so long ago, whose flesh was so sweet, whose bones I had used to pick my teeth. We made an unlikely couple, but the forest is full of such strange friendships, and as we travelled I soon learned that the bird was better than I at direction. It preferred to ride perched on my wrist, but if I strayed from the right path it would hop up my sleeve to my shoulder and tug on my ear
until I corrected myself. At night, it settled down beside my head and seemed to sleep as I did, though it was hard to tell: the bird’s empty eyes were always open. Even when it tucked its head beneath its wing I could see their caverns through the screen of its bones.

In this way we went, day after day, through the unchanging forest. I ate mushrooms and roots I dug under the lichen. I scraped the inside of oak bark and brewed small, dark teas. Every day as we went, the bird opened its beak as if to sing me encouraging songs, and every day as we went my stomach grew rounder, harder, hot to the touch.

It was clear something was happening, but when the bird and I came to the edge of the meadow I had once called my home, I was unprepared for how shy I felt. There was my father’s house: smoke rising from the chimney, rose bush tightly budded by the front door. There was my stepmother’s bicycle leaned up against the porch railings and in the garage my father’s tools, each on a peg inside the outline of their shape. Someone whistled as they walked past the screen door, their song composed of the same notes I thought my bird had been trying to sing.

All was just as I had left it, but though the bird hopped up and down my arm, I could not bring myself to step out of the forest shadow and into the sun. Instead, I stood there with my hand resting on my belly which was now so hot and tight it was like resting my hand on the side of a kettle. The little dead bird hopped up my arm and down again and I stood and the light began to change. Then, I was overwhelmed by a terrible pain.”