Hex: A Novel (19 page)

What was there to see? The same couch and armchair, the same television set topped with the same ceramic shepherdess and her blushing, blue-britched shepherd. The same pass-through, shedding rabbit-foot fern, wire basket filled with sprouting onions. The same kitchen sink, which dripped, refrigerator, which knocked, yellow, strawberry-patterned half-curtains which my mother had sewn when she and my father were first married.

Down the hall, the beige carpet peeling back from the wall in a frieze of loose pilings. . .

In the bathroom, the shell-shaped soap holders jutting from the wall to cradle shell-shaped soaps, the towels monogrammed, but mismatched. . .

In my room, set like an extra tooth at the end of the house, the bed with its peach corduroy bedspread, the child’s bookshelf, the window open to the long, familiar view. . .

There was nothing to see and so I didn’t look. I slung my suitcase on the bed and unzipped it.

“For his protection,” Rosellen amended. She stood across the hall in the doorway of Luke’s room with her arms crossed over her chest as if she were cold, though the house was muggy, all the doors and windows open to catch the cross breeze.

Summer on the beach had been hot but lean, a clanging kind of heat like two metal garbage can lids being banged together. In the mountains, the summer was green, yes, but each tree its own particular green, each shrub and sprung weed, each spear of onion grass, each lifting leaf. It was hot, yes, but one kind of hot on the road, mincing across the bubbling asphalt, and another in the clearing where all around the forest whispered of cooling. One kind of hot in the town square where the sod crisped and browned, another in the lumber yard where the dusty, yellow smell of mangled trees coated the inside of one’s nostrils and throat. One kind of hot in the house where the wind died on the sills and another in the body where heat came up and up.

I felt dizzy, short of breath. Behind Rosellen, in Luke’s bedroom, the bed was gone and the cot the girls had used on night shifts. His chest of drawers was gone, his mirror, the misshapen masks my father had hung from his ceiling, the miniature disco ball the Nina had hung by his window so it would catch and refract the sun. In their place was a desk and a green metal file cabinet. An armchair and a wicker wastebasket already overflowing with balls of crumpled paper. An office, in other words. A place of business.

“He was getting bedsores,” Rosellen said. “He was too heavy for the girls to lift anymore and not all of them were to be trusted.” She said the last darkly, cinching her arms still tighter around her rib cage so her breasts were lifted into the scoop neck of her T-shirt. In truth, Rosellen’s body was starting to go. Her breasts had fallen into a long line of cleavage down the front of her plunging shirts. Her butt too had lost its domelike bubble and, no matter how many sit-ups she performed, grunting on the living room floor in pre-dawn light, her belly had fallen into a little pouch above her pubis like a muff she
was carrying around with her in case her hands needed to be warmed.

“Not that I’m accusing anyone of anything,” she said, which meant she was.

With no more ceremony than that, my brother was gone.

In simpler days, the Pinta told me that before a baby was born it lived in God’s pocket. I pictured a mass of squirming pink bodies with huge eyes sealed behind translucent membranes, like the nest of infant rats Thingy and I had turned out of a rotten stump at the meeting edge of our yards. When a baby was ready to be born, the Pinta said, God would pluck it out of his pocket—fumbling his way around bits of knotted string and lint, sprung paper clips and match books, rose hips and tortoiseshell buttons. . .He would pluck it out, the ready baby, by the scruff of its neck and pincher it all the way down down down to earth where he would put it in the mother’s body.

“How does he do that?” I asked. We were in the bathroom. The Pinta was propping my brother up in a few inches of tepid water and lathering his back with the soft side of a kitchen sponge. I remember the smell of the soap in particular, a milky, lingering scent that wafted up from my skin for hours after the bath was over as if, instead of scrubbed clean, I had been dipped in a powdery wax and sealed off. My brother’s penis was rocking gently back and forth on the ripples the Pinta made with her sponge. I wasn’t supposed to look at it. “Give him his dignity,” the Nina always said, but the Pinta didn’t seem to notice what I did. She was singing to herself, a long, rambling song which she repeated over and over beneath her breath so the only words I understood was the phrase, “’I’ said the fish, ‘with my little dish, I caught his blood,’” to which she gave a particular emphasis.
I thought my brother’s penis looked like a turtle’s head pulled back in its shell, only pinker and less skeptical. I stared at it as I sat on the lid of the toilet and watched.

The Pinta thought for a moment. She made a shelf over Luke’s eyes with the side of her palm and squeezed the sponge over his forehead. She ran it over his cheeks, down his neck, over his thin chest and down each of his arms. My brother had a black, perfectly round mole on his chest that the Pinta always rubbed a little harder, as if shining it. He had a strong chin and beautiful skin that seemed to flow over his muscles and bones as if it had been poured. His eyes were very dark.

“He does it with his thumb,” the Pinta finally said and she held out her own thumb to demonstrate.

I imagined first my brother and then myself lifted by the scruff of our necks and swung through the air. We were uniformly pink, our skin tight and shiny, our eyes huge and black and wet beneath our lids. We were smooth and identical—identical bald heads, the place between our legs a smooth cap of skin—and we hung from God’s fingers, curled like shrimp, spit bubbles forming between our lips. We were the ready ones, but we weren’t yet anybody. Just babies. Just one out of the rubbery, blind, indistinguishable mass wriggling in his pocket, rubbing up against each other. And then there was God’s thumb, square like the Pinta’s but broader, the nail flat and yellow and well polished. And then there was our mother and somehow. . .first one and then the other. . .

All that, it seemed to me at the time, in order to lead up to this moment in the bathroom where my brother, who liked the water, stirred his hands just below its surface and I, who had already had my bath and was naked and damp inside my terry-cloth robe, stared at his penis. “Who killed Cock Robin?” the
Pinta sang, but the answer was lost under the rhythmic splashing of her sponge.

But that is not the truth. God and his thumb, our willing helplessness, these are figures of the truth and the truth itself an unshaped thing, ravenous, void. The truth is that at the heart of every something, at its rigid, concentric core, is the nothing from whence it came. When a something is created—any old lentil or bird’s egg, baby or igneous batholith—it does not supplant the nothing that was there before it, but merely takes its place in conjunction with that continuing void. A child is something that does not replace nothing. When Luke was born, the nothing that was there before him was also born. As it was when I was born, when Thingy was born, when you yourself, Ingrid, were expelled screaming into our shared world.

“Tell me the truth,” Mrs. Clawson said to me. We were in the hospital waiting room again, downgraded from the cushy, rose patterned privacy afforded to the families of the dire and ushered instead into a crowded mint-green room with blue plastic bucket seats, tattered magazines on the kidney-shaped tables and an electric carafe in the corner merrily burbling its coffee down to a thick sludge. We were there because you were fine, Ingrid, and always had been. Because Thingy was dead and Mrs. Clawson, wearing a light camel coat and the shimmering lip gloss of mourning, was constitutionally incapable of imagining either formlessness or unappeasable hunger.

“Tell me the truth, Alice,” she said, but when I did she couldn’t hear me. Then Daniel came back with another sheaf of papers to add to the bundles he was amassing in his study—overflowing manila folders, avalanches of green and pink forms:
your footprints, a count of your heartbeats, a chart that detailed the exact lucidity of your skin, other charts that ranked your eliminations, your respirations and reactions to heat and cold, pin pricks and pinches, in spidery lines tending valiantly upwards.

(“To reach the top!” said that long ago explorer to his Sherpa, his yak. “And then what?” the Sherpa might have said had he been asked. “And to what purpose the earth?” might have opined the yak.)

The truth! The truth! The truth! It all depends on how you deal with it. Thingy took her nothingness and stitched it to the bottom of her foot. I took mine and sent it spinning into the forest where I pretended it perished—eaten by a bear, felled by the forester’s axe. Daniel and Jacob have made formulas of theirs, albeit very different ones, and my father pressed his to him as he would the body of a woman, reveling in the way it defined his form.

But Luke was an altogether different sort. Luke looked into his abyss and what he found there satisfied him so fully he couldn’t be tempted to look away. That’s why when anybody asked me what exactly was wrong with my brother, I answered them truthfully.

“Who killed Cock Robin?” the Pinta asked and asked. The answer was everyone, from sparrow to bull.

“What’s wrong with your brother?” asked Thingy and Mrs. Clawson, asked Rosellen and the other children at school, old women in the grocery store, young men plugging quarters into machines at the arcade, new mothers plugging them into machines at the Laundromat. What’s wrong with your brother? and I answered, nothing. It’s nothing that’s wrong with him.

The truth! The truth! The truth!

If you hold a mirror to my brother’s face you will see his skin but not his self. If you put your fingers in his mouth you can feel his pulse at the base of his tongue and the square monuments of his teeth, but no lingering speech, no hot breath of desire. If you lie next to him on his narrow bed, as I have done so often to whisper in his ear, you might feel deep within him the stirring pip of his being, but it is not you he is interested in. My brother might as well have been a wax doll—his body rigid, his features set and even as if carved in great curling swoops with the little bone knife—but there is no one else alive with such an uncompromising knowledge of himself.

“We are the children of a black snake,” I told him, or of the dragon, of the mountain, of a mermaid who split her tail just long enough for the snow white bull to force himself inside, but Luke knew all this already, and anyway, he wasn’t listening. When I was thirteen and my brother was taken away from me, I mourned, but I realize now it was for myself, for the stories that would no longer have an audience, and not for him at all.

But when I was thirty and Thingy died. . .ah, then from the forest came that thing I had thought so long ago banished. It took me between its jaws and it shook me the way any animal will when it has at last what it has hungered for so dearly. It is shaking me still.

My grandfather Mick had died only a few weeks before I moved into the house on Newfound Mountain. There were still traces of him lying about: an armchair pulled closer to the fireplace than Thalia would sit, a pair of man’s loafers, broken at the heels, laid just inside the door to the bathroom as if they had served as slippers. I slept in Mick’s old room, where Daniel sleeps now, the one with the window overlooking the tin roof of the tool shed which Thingy would leave propped open for the cats. Though Thalia did the wash the day after my arrival, that first night I listened to the sounds of the house settling and breathed in the papery musk of my grandfather’s smell. Bitter
cloves and thin skin. Powder and black soil. Then she erased him: the chair moved back to a corner near the window, the shoes tossed into a bin on the porch where they swelled with the spring rains and eventually grew a lush crop of yellow horsehair mushrooms.

Mick was not buried on the family land, but in a plot behind the First Presbyterian in the center of town. He lay between his father Clell and his only sibling, Baby Boy Luttrell, whose gravestone is ornate, flecked with pink granite and topped by a curly-headed lamb as if to make up for the practical decision not to give him a name.

“Your great-grandmother was hard minded,” Thalia said. We were in the kitchen scrubbing canning jars in the deep belly of the sink. It was spring, too early for tomatoes, but Thalia planned ahead, setting the gleaming jars on the kitchen shelves alongside others already stuffed with brining peach halves and the ruby duck eggs of last season’s beets. I was six months pregnant and Thalia had begun to address herself largely to my stomach. She never touched me, not even so much as taking my elbow to steer me out of the way, but she talked a constant mumbling stream. Correction, instruction, Thalia’s voice not so much like water as the rocks at the bottom of the creek bed, grinding against each other, wearing down.

“What would you do?” Thalia said, handing me the lids and rings which must each be meticulously dried. “Before you get so high and mighty, ask that. Someone hands you two eggs and one is whole and speckled and one gives off a stench. Are you going to waste your time feeling sorry for the chicken? Are you going to beat it into the batter and hope for the best?”

She rubbed her hands dry on a dish towel and watched me as I ran a kitchen rag around the lip of a ring and around again
for good measure. Thalia had blue eyes, blue irises and blue-tinged whites. Her eyes watered and she kept a red paisley handkerchief tucked in her back pocket with which to wipe them. Thalia already knew what sort of choices I was likely to make—my heart wrung out every morning as I collected eggs still hot from the hen’s wrinkled, pink brood patch—but she remained curious to watch me decide.

“What would
you
do, little mama,” Thalia said, but she wasn’t talking to me. Inside, something pedaled its legs and took a firmer grip.

The cemetery on Thalia’s land, my land now, is bounded by a stone wall made of stacked slate. The ground within is raw, kept assiduously scraped clean of grass and other opportunistic sprouters by yours truly. A little iron gate, topped with a series of diminishing, hand-hammered scrolls, swings from a pole that does not quite meld with the wall to the one side and latches on the other by means of a twist of chicken wire snipped from the coop.

All together, the cemetery is an amateur affair. The stones of the wall are untidy and precarious. Some section of it is forever eroding, the stones sliding past each other to fan out across the little slope the cemetery tops like a wave collapsing across the shore. No matter the weather, the slate doesn’t seem to retain heat and I imagine they were pulled this way—cold and sharp—out of the side of the mountain by my great-grandmother, perhaps her mother, and stacked on a sledge to be trundled through the forest.

Inside the gate, which often comes loose to swing and clang against its moorings, are the graves. Four of them are marked by tidy stone mounds, their neatness striking when compared to
the wall. Someone, many someones over the years, has taken the time to build these solid and then to maintain them, but why? It’s all just rock after all, and what lies beneath another kind of rock: the hollows of the skull just like the pocks in a boulder when a pebble has been caught and rattled around by centuries of water and ice; the teeth, loose by now, I assume, scattered like chips flaked from the spearhead being turned and turned in someone’s hand.

Yet, there is a difference between a wall and a grave. An even bigger difference between the four graves that were here before me—each marked by a stone that says Mother and above that stern pronouncement, as time passed and children were born, shallower etchings that proclaim one Great-great-grand, one Great-grand, one Grand, and the last still simply and starkly alone—and the fifth that I laid with my own hands and marked with only a wavering, poorly carved, T.

All this to tell you who is not here, Ingrid: the menfolk. Which should tell you all you need to know about who is still hanging around, about the whistling in the eves when there isn’t any wind, about the handprints on the banisters and the flour laid in mounded lines at the tops of all the stairs.

Thingy and I used to entertain each other at night by recounting the long, grim tale of Emily Murten (Poor Emily, Maid Murten, The Weeping Woman, as she was called among other things) who was said to have died of sorrow after being spurned by her handsome young lover to whom, oh folly of youth!, she had given herself on the chilly and austere plank floor behind the raised pulpit of the First Presbyterian, one of the oldest churches in town and, conveniently, the only one with
its original bell in its original white clapboard steeple which Emily now assiduously haunted.

“Spread out before man and god,” Thingy said, pinching me under the sheet. “And all because she couldn’t keep her legs shut, just couldn’t wait for a little taste.”

Thingy loved Emily, loved the whole story: the creak of the floorboards beneath her lover’s knees, his breath on her neck, in her ear, the blood she had to mop up behind her. (“You can still see the stain,” Thingy said. “Indelible.”) Then the way the boy refused to see her, how stiff his face was as he looked past her, and how frail she became, how thin, almost transparent. Finally, she died and her bewildered parents buried her on the very same ground that had harbored her venial sin (“In the
church
,” Thingy said, “Can you imagine? All those empty seats.”) only to find she would not rest easy but came back the next full moon—white and gauzy in her winding shroud—to batter herself against the bell like a giant moth and lean out from the steeple’s cupola, weeping a warm rainstorm on whoever happened to be beneath her.

“They say if you if you get any of her tears on your skin it will stain you forever,” Thingy said. “Spots as red as blood.” She held up her slender hands for us to consider, turning them back and forth in the dim yellow light from my own kitchen that was leaking down the slope and through her bedroom window. It was a warm night but we still piled together in the center of her bed under both a sheet and the pillowy comforter. When one or the other of us shifted our weight or fluffed the sheets to stir up a little breeze, I could smell the stale exhalations of our bodies, but still there were no ghosts in Thingy’s room. And none haunting the steeple, though Thingy swore she had seen her once, Poor Emily, and had even, she showed me a strawberry
birthmark on the back of her calf, been marked by her tears as she turned to run.

“What I don’t get,” Thingy said, “is why she just didn’t give the guy a blow job. Surely, you don’t have to hang around in a church for all eternity for sucking a little dick.”

But what Thingy really didn’t understand is that there’s no such thing as punishment. Only eternity, only the wind and the rain, the rock face and the burrowing root. Once we are made into a form we cannot unmake it and to be buried, even to be scattered through the forest, rendered by the harrowing teeth of dogs, is nothing but a blink in the body’s long, unwavering gaze.

“I see. . .I see. . . .” says the body, ruminative, long abandoned. And all the women that whisk through this house—for all their rustling footsteps and clenched fists pale among their skirts, for all their jangling keys and drifts of hair floating in the dust-light behind them—all these women are cyclic as breath. Rushing in crisp and biting, soughing out warm and wilted and damp.

So, there are these little artifacts: a moldy shoe, five gold rings that seem to retain the warmth of their wearer’s hand. And there is you of course, Ingrid, an inhalation finally come around again. And Jacob, myself, your father Daniel who I am watching right now as he splits stove-lengths next to the hen house. He has taken off his shirt, but sweat is still running in rivulets down the channels of his spine to darken the waistband of his jeans. His back is to me and when he stands with the axe hoisted above his head, poised in the moment before the swing, I resist the urge to tap on the window and call his attention. To stop him before he does something he can’t take back.

When I first came to the house I knew very little, certainly not how to recognize what was right in front of me. Along with
my room and board, and, I naively assumed, the eventual room and board of the child I was carrying, Thalia took in hand my educational needs as she saw them. This bore no resemblance to the dutiful memorization I had preformed in school—information scented even now with the slick, plastic tack of textbook illustrations and the whining bite of the ammonia the custodians sprayed on our desks after hours—and nothing, really, to do with any kind of recognizable teaching principle. Instead, Thalia showed me what was there and then what was also there all around it. A typical lesson would go something like this:

Thalia: [pointing to the base of a tree] What is that?

Alice: [tired, hungry, deep in the forest] A flower.

Thalia: [snorting] It’s a redring milkweed. Good for snakebites and bee stings. Poisonous to fleas. Make a broom from its leaves and sweep the floors in case of infestation.

“What shape is it?” Thalia would then ask and I, looking at the woody stalk and top heavy circle of blooms would say something like umbrella shaped, or pincushion shaped, to which Thalia would shake her head and instruct me to close my eyes and look again. After standing this way for some time, I would come to see, guided by Thalia despite the fact that she stood silent and very still, that the plant was actually shaped like a series of overlapping, blade-edged ovals. That this shape extended from the plant itself all the way through the clearing, fading only at the bulwark of a silver, splintering hickory which had fallen a little way up the hill. This shape intersected many other shapes—loose spirals, regimented hexagons, boxes and circles and blooming cones—which echoed from other plants and hidden animals (a newt with a shape like tongues of flame; a cicada
deep in its pupate burrow with a shape like stylized cresting waves). And, though these intersecting lines seemed at first like a hopeless tangle they were actually quite distinct and resistant to change.

If one knew how to look they could be manipulated, plucked almost, though the music that made was unruly and often discordant. If one had the right sort of touch, they could be braided, made into signs of calling or signs of warning, portents wholly other than the ones they had first exclaimed. There were words that could be spoken, bits of songs. If this seems fanciful to you, Ingrid, think of the birds. What are they doing if not casting spells? Every morning perched on the lip of the gutters, in the black locust, at the peak of the henhouse roof; sex spells and safety spells, dangerous wardings.

This is what Thalia taught me: how to never again be alone. Which is also pretty well how she cursed me and, if you think of it a certain way, how I am now cursing you. History is a crowd. Story is a mob. There’s no place on the mountain you can hide from that sort of company, Ingrid. Maybe you should stop listening right now. Plug your ears. Go to sleep.

Thalia taught me other things, of course. How to stock the wood stove so its flame burned low for cooking. How to skin a rabbit and butcher it so as to make the most of its meat. Meanwhile, the winter passed into a damp, mild spring and that itself burned off into the hay-strewn summer. Far away down the mountain side—between us acres of forest and untrustworthy roads, so many vibrating, intersecting lines that a girl who didn’t know how to lay her own thread behind her would surely be snagged and left to dangle—Thingy took her own lessons and learned what she would from them.

In June (blooming June, buzzing June, the swollen buboe of summer), Thingy graduated third in our class and I was seven months pregnant. I could see the outline of the baby press against my stomach as it turned inside me and further could see its shape—a pulsing, hammer-struck line—as it radiated out around me. I could see the wind coming down the mountain and what exactly was within the storms it brought. I could see who walked down the stairs when no one walked down the stairs and what stayed at the edge of the forest, curious, lamp-lit eyes huge and round and yellow. I tamped the fire lower for Thalia’s eggs, which she liked soft and almost whole, sliding them one by one down her gullet, and felt the pullet’s pebbled skin for the joint where her bones would separate from her sockets and open her bloody and bare. I swept the floor with a lavender broom and a fescue broom and one made of foxtail. I walked to the hives with a bucket of embers and thrust my arm deep into their cracked, golden cores. I braided a sign at the door and one at the window, a sign on the bedpost and one webbed like cat’s cradle between my own red palms. It was a hot summer, the water steaming up from the earth like breath. At night, though Thalia forbid it, I often went into the forest alone. One day, Thingy drove up the mountain to say goodbye.

When Thingy was pregnant she bloomed like a peony. A big, dozy top, all ruffles, layers and layers of cream and then the shocking pink that was supposed to be internal—for no one’s eyes but yours, Ingrid—but was pushed by the sheer force of her swelling right to the surface. It’s not that she wasn’t beautiful, she was born with beauty between her teeth like a bit, but she was dreadfully exposed. Even in those first few months after she
and Daniel moved in, even before she knew herself, it was clear to anyone who really looked that Thingy was flushed with the thin-veined flush of a flower right before it goes to seed.