Hex: A Novel (17 page)

And yes! the horse was hungry. Yes, thirsty, he was thirsty and stretched out his neck and called, his lips ruffling over his long teeth, for the pail fresh with water to be brought to him at once. Someone was asleep on the job, but he was forgiving. Dimly, the white horse remembered his best loved joke. Dimly, he bridled and danced beside the path, herky-jerky, all akimbo. The white horse was nothing to see, just another apparition pawing the turf at the forest’s edge, and yet, here was someone who had seen him. Here was someone, opening the door, coming cautiously down the cottage path, who had heard and heeded his call. “Cush, cush” said the girl, wiping her hands on her pants and holding one out to him. “Cush” she said, sidling toward him through the tall, damp grass.

(The sun pulls itself whole from the horizon line. Egg from a hat. Bird from an egg. A burst of doves battering around the ceiling which here is the sky. And the rest of the room? The forest, of course. Oh please, can a horse not lay down his burden? Oh please, can’t he just rest it here, here at your feet?)

Because this was she: the baby who had become this girl. Unmistakable, though her look was entirely altered, and had the white horse the capacity to imagine, he never would have dreamt her so shrunken and ill-favored. He remembered the sour bud of her lip, her imperious eye, clouded as marble, her soft round cheek, her corona of hair. . .Still, there was no mistake. It was she, she!, who braided her rough fingers in his mane, she who wrinkled her sharp, monkey face and said, “Poor thing,” as she
ran her palm over his ribs. It was she and she was his. He pressed forward to take her. The thick grass. The trembling roses. What a pretty sight at the edge of such a forest. He loved her, he loved her. He reared up to put his forelegs on her shoulders and show her his love.

But she said, “Whoa.” She said, “Stop!” She stumbled back a few paces, her feet white in the grass, and as he came after her, she brought up a hand to block the sight of him. She ran back down the path and bolted her front door.

So, there they were. She inside and he without.

The white horse was puzzled, but it was not a condition of his being to question. The cottage path wound up to a little concrete stoop, three pretty steps with pots of red geraniums set at their edges, and a wrought iron railing swooping down both sides like extended wings.

At the top of the steps was a green door.

What was behind the green door was his.

This seemed simple enough to the horse; and yet the door was closed; and yet the steps, so foreign to his nature, were unnavigable. The curtains twitched. The sun went behind a cloud, then out it came.

For awhile the horse grazed in the cottage meadow. When she did not come, he went to the windows and stripped the leaves from the tops of the azaleas. Sometimes, he sensed she was just on the other side of the curtain. Sometimes, he thought he could even see the outline of her body, a shape perhaps like the shape of her eye framed in a miniscule gap in the fabric. At those times he pressed his muzzle to the glass and nipped at it
eagerly, but she did not come. She gave him no sign. After the third day the smoke stopped coming up the chimney. After the fourth, as he strolled in the warm dirt of the garden and ate the ferny tops of the carrots, he saw her clearly in a dormer window, fiddling with the sash as if she were about the throw the window open. But when he whinnied with excitement and craned his neck to see her better, she stepped back, a mannequin shape in the dark room, and then just a shadow, then gone.

Had the horse the capacity to speculate, he might have suspected she was out of firewood and probably food. Had he the ability to calculate, he might have realized he had almost won. The house seemed still and cold, though in the meadow the sun was warm on his back and the new apples broke like hard, sour eggs between his teeth. Had the horse been his master, or even had his master been there to guide the horse’s perceptions, he might have seen how he had trampled the garden, worn ruts from window to window, stripped the flowers from their stems, fouled the waters of the little creek as he slid down its bank to drink, scrambled up its opposite bank to see if it was not so that, while his back was turned, his beloved had come out again to welcome him with open arms.

Had he been a man, the white horse might have recognized all these things as signs of his eventual triumph. He might even have rejoiced, though with regret for all the necessary waste; with annoyance, perhaps, at the silly goose who had caused him to go to such lengths in the first place. But he was a horse, and so lacked subtlety. He fed on roses and carried his burden. He waited patiently for something to change.

On the sixth day, her father came home.

Imagine, for a moment, the scene from afar. Here is the familiar road, one hewn by your own hand. You can remember the trees that once stood there, the squeak of their wood as your axe bit. You can remember your body as it was then—like a machine, each motion foreshortened for greatest efficiency, each muscle in easy relation to the next. To lift and swing. To lift and swing. And then all those years of walking this very same road. Moss and berries in the verges, flowers thrusting up their doddering heads in the spring and in the winter the snow thick and crisp, patterned with the crosses of bird’s feet and the hush of their downbeat wings.

For a strange man hung about with clamor, perhaps for any man at all, there is nothing in the world that feels so much like himself as this road and, at the end of it, the clearing he razed, the house he built, the girl who is his, who he made. She bears no expectation but that he return, and he has!, bearing pots! The rattle he makes is another way the road and the clearing break the forest. His bronze clangor, his clinking tin. He has come, bang a drum, he has come! In this way, the father strode from the forest and into the sun.

For all his oddities, the father was an astute man and not without imagination. He took in the scene before him: the garden ruined, the meadow deranged, the horse, slat-ribbed and broken, stretching the terrible crane of his neck to lip a peachy rose from its vine. Inside the house his daughter pulled back the curtain and stood there framed by eyelet white. She looked like the head of a water parsley. The curtains were the frothy bloom, and she herself the black pip in the center that either says, ‘eat me’, or ‘beware’, he couldn’t remember which. In short, she did not seem herself, but a hardened seed of that self. She did not lift a hand to him but merely stood and stared and, as the white
horse saw her and rushed toward the glass—his lips coated in slaver, his tail arched and trembling—she slid backward as if on a track and disappeared from view.

It is worth noting, that the white horse noticed none of this. Not even when the father, his pack and pots set down at the head of the road, edged around him, up the steps and in the front door. Not even when the sound of voices came from inside, rising and falling, shrill and sharp, or when that sound was replaced by the sound of something heavy sliding and many small doors being opened and shut. The horse was absorbed, blinded more surely than by any blinker, because he had seen her, at last it was her, there in the window, so close at hand. Though he had come too late and again the glass was in his way, at least now he could see. The curtains were pulled back, the room behind a sitting room: a couch plaid in broad bands of green and gold, a strange clock, shelves of books, a braided rug. Nothing to see, but something she had seen. Nothing to touch, the glass cold and slick against his nose, but something she had touched, where her arm had lain, her foot had tread. A book she had been reading was slung on the table, a hawk’s feather tucked between the pages to hold her place. A pillow she had used to prop herself up was still wadded against the arm of the couch, dented with the shape of her elbow or head.

Without realizing it the white horse began to keen, his voice juttering in his rusty throat. He reared up and struck the side of the house, his hooves denting the clapboard, his back legs uprooting one bush and then another. Red and white azalea petals floated in the air like red mites in a burst of feather ticking. Meanwhile, the father had gotten his gun.

This seems a simple story. Why has it taken so long to tell? The gun was in the hall closet, a stubborn shape in the corner, behind rubber boots and oilskins. The bullets were in a kitchen drawer. In any story, the pieces are easy enough to assemble but hard to make move. Here is a woman who must enter a cavern; a man who must move a stone; a monkey who must climb to the top of the tree where the last green coconut bobs just out of reach. And yet they hunker down, stolid and stone-faced. They refuse. The gun was well oiled, the bullets slid home. From where he stood on the doorstep, the father could see both the white horse, still straining at the window, and his daughter who stood in the hall: barefoot, grey, wearing a grey sack dress she had tied at the waist with a dishtowel, her hair on her face like a veil.

Everyone has assembled. Pretty soon, the story will end. But the father balks. A decision must be made. Here is the horse: a pathetic thing, so lonely. He cannot live, but cannot help the way he has lived. He cannot learn from his mistakes. Here is the daughter, grown so long ago out of the shape he made for her on his pack and then kept growing. If he is honest with himself, this is not the first homecoming at which he has found her irreversibly changed. Indeed, every time he sees her—coming into the kitchen in the morning, walking down the hall to find her sprawled on the couch, one foot one the armrest, her face in her book—he finds he has to blink a few times before it is her that he sees and not just some vague and restless woman-shape dusting his house with flour.

The father stands on the doorstep he himself laid and looks from one to the other. He has a decision to make—here is a man who
must
fire a gun—and after a while he lifts the stock to his shoulder and takes aim.

When I finished talking, Thingy was quiet. We were in her room, sitting cross-legged across from each other on the silvery-green comforter her mother had bought to go along with the room’s new color scheme. Thingy’s mother redecorated the house on a regular basis and didn’t consider Thingy’s room an exception to this rule. Though it could hardly have been this sudden, it seemed to me as if these transformations took place overnight. One day, the living room wallpaper was patterned in cabbage roses and pomegranates, the next it was a severe, pin stripe blue. One day, the kitchen was country plaid, the next all sleek granite and chrome fixtures.

It was as if the house were actually a dollhouse, the food molded from the same plastic as its bowls, the people clothespins to which different skirts and jackets, trousers and dragon-stitched dressing gowns could be velcroed or clipped. Except Thingy. If Thingy was a pin at all, she was a hat pin: her visible features a cheery simulacrum of a cluster of cherries or a bunch of grapes, the rest of her lean and sharp and made to pierce through and through.

This time, Mrs. Clawson had chosen a spring motif for Thingy’s room, perhaps as a wistful nod to Thingy’s new status as a woman, though a very young one. Tender, tremulous, able to be romanticized, is what the pale green wallpaper with its motif of climbing ivy seemed to say. The year before Thingy had had a coming-out party at the VFW Hall. This month she had been accepted on early admission to a university in Atlanta and in the summer she would pack up all her things and go. Mrs. Clawson was preparing for this eventuality with a new desk set and vanity, an oval maple-framed mirror on a claw-foot stand, Queen Anne’s chairs upholstered in striped mint sateen, a canopy bed
overflowing with pillows in dreamy shades of yellow and faint, whispering green.

It was early December. Outside the first snow had already fallen, melted to a hard crust of ice and been covered by a second, deeper fall which tamped the world down to a still, hard place. Icicles rimed the eaves of the houses and ice sheathed the limbs of the trees, so when a wind did blow, the trees gave off a faint clinking, like spoons rattling together in the back of a drawer. Occasionally, a limb would snap below the weight of the ice and the sound echoed between the mountains like a rifle shot. It was a cold time, dark.

Inside, however, in Thingy’s room, I felt like I had been buried in a chest deep under the loam of the forest floor. Eventually, after years of humid darkness, the wood of the chest had rotted away and roots and new sprouting shoots had tugged and turned me up and up until there was only the thinnest scrim of dirt between me and the gold and the green and the rustling and the damp, expectant air. Mrs. Clawson was forcing paper whites on Thingy’s sill, but the bulbs were old and the faint, oniony smell of their decay only heightened this impression. I loved Thingy’s room—any one of her rooms—and I would be sad when this was no longer a place where I could come. Not so long now. In the summer all would be lost.

“Give me your hand,” said Thingy. While I spoke, she had sat and looked down at her lap. She drew one finger around and around the dome of her ankle where it rose between the cuff of her jean and the top of her white, cotton sock. If I hadn’t known her better, I would have thought she wasn’t listening, but I knew that the slant of her shoulders, the furrow that deepened between her eyes indicated deep concentration, all her attention focused on me. Not that there was too much I could tell her:
how far along, that the father didn’t know and wouldn’t. But not who he was—I never told her this, though who’s to say she didn’t guess—and not what might happen next because that I didn’t know.

“I’ll tell your fortune,” Thingy said, and when I didn’t respond at first, she laughed and shifted toward me until our knees were touching, pulled my hand out of my lap and unfurled it into her own. Thingy smoothed her fingers over my palm and stroked my wrist where the veins stood blue and branching in my thin, winter skin. She stretched each of my fingers and then bent over my hand until all I could see was her wild, zig-zagging part as she squinted at my lines and creases like a watch-maker intent on the tinkering gears, the tiny jewels and threads of gold that make the clock tick and lurch.