Hex: A Novel (25 page)

“One had blow off his legs,” Piro said. “One his arm. One: no eyes, but scars only like a mask. And one, no penis.” Piro paused to let this sink in. The other men laughed because surely with twelve brothers and not a whole man among them there was a punch line coming, but Piro said, “I know this one best. Bruno. He live to be an old man when I was little boy and he say, ‘The only place the bomb strike. The only place,” and pat his trouser here—pat, pat—but it was empty.”

Piro patted the crotch of his filthy pants. His hands, which
he scrubbed with lava soap at the end of each day, were startlingly white and looked small and furtive clasped between his legs. Everyone was quiet. Someone drank from the bottle and spit a jet of liquor into the fire where it hissed. Then, Lotho said, “Shit, I know that guy. He wasn’t called Bruno, though. His name was Henry, ain’t that right? Henry Smalt?”

He pointed across the circle at the foreman who held up his hands like he was surrendering or warding off a curse, then grabbed at his own crotch and shook it as if what were inside were unmanageable, coiled to strike. Then it was all right to laugh and they all did, even Piro who cleared his nose with his fingers and wiped the black snot to glisten in the dirt. Twelve brothers and not a whole man among them. A joke.

That night Jacob dreamed of twelve brothers standing at the edge of a gray lake. They had their backs to him, facing out over the water, yet in the manner of dreams he could still see their faces: the blasted hole where a nose should be, a web of scars cocooning the empty sockets of the eyes. The brothers were setting up a camp. One dragged logs up from the waterline with his remaining arm and stacked them inside a ring of stones. Another, an empty pant leg pinned neatly beneath him, sat on a rock and unpacked tins of potted meat, glass jars of jam, loafs of bread wrapped in tricolored paper from a large, green haversack. One brother held a tent stake in place between the stubs of his wrists while yet another, his legs gone below the knees, knelt on the ground to pound the stake home, the blows of his hammer echoing back from the lake like silver bells.

It was late in the day. The hike up to the site had taken longer than the brothers had anticipated. The light was failing and yet no one seemed to hurry. Each brother went about his task as
if this action his body was now performing were the inevitable outcome of all the other actions that had come before, another knot in a string that stretched backward in tidy square hitches, forward in a smooth, uncomplicated line. Aiming a gun leads to slicing a loaf of bread; thrusting a torch into a hay loft is now dipping a bucket into the still water of the lake. Running toward an earth ridge rimmed in fire is threading a pole through the peak of a tent. Lying in the dirt, the ground beneath spongy and red, is lifting the chiming bottles one by one from a basket, pulling the cork and tilting it to drink.

When their chores were done, the brothers gathered around the fire to share their meal. In the flickering light, they passed around bread and meats, hunks of soft cheese and little cakes wrapped in wax paper. They talked quietly to each other. Every now and then someone laughing or clinked a bottle against a stone. One brother began to hum and soon they were all singing, a song with many verses which they often interrupted to argue about wording or order but picked up again immediately, the tune low and mumbling and soft as fur. The youngest brother had blonde hair which shone in the firelight and all the other brothers went out of their way to touch him as they moved about the circle, as if to reassure themselves that he was still there.

After a time it was completely dark and the world that surrounded them all constricted itself to the circle of fire light and the sound of the lake water lapping against the shore. Jacob—always on the outside, still lurking in the darkness—noticed something it seemed only possible to see by the light of the campfire. The brother’s bodies had begun to reconstruct themselves, but not out of pale flesh and coarse, wiry hair. Instead, where a brother was missing an ear a sheen of downy, black
feathers, each as small and precise as a tiny clam shell, had grown back in its place. Where a brother was missing a leg a bundle of glossy, black quills bristled from the cuff of his pants, and where another’s jaw had been ripped from his face a sheaf of wing feathers rustled in the black hollow of his mouth.

The youngest brother, who was by now quite drunk and resting his head on his nearest brother’s shoulder, had lost his arm. He was wearing a green shirt from which the sleeve had been cut away to expose the gleaming knob of his amputation and earlier in the evening Jacob had noticed how the stump flexed and rolled in sympathy with the labors of his remaining arm as the boy tossed sticks onto the fire or dragged logs to serve as seats around the pit.

Now, when the youngest brother leaned back away from the fire all appeared as it had before. Clearly visible was the empty sleeve, the knob of bone, the delicate shading of his ribs sliding under the skin as if they were a cage under shallow water. But when the boy leaned forward again, catching a joke and shifting into the fire’s circle to laugh, Jacob saw that where before there had been emptiness now was a black swan’s wing with feathers long and glossy. The firmly muscled joint bent as the boy beat his wing with delight and his brothers laughed with him and leaned in, their hair brushed back from their faces by the wind he made.

“Of course,” Jacob said. “They have a sister,” and then he woke up in the silver, bullet-shaped trailer in which he slept. Across from him, Lotho snored and flung an arm out over the sheets.

The crew traveled up and down the mountains in a caravan of white trucks and a single semi driven by Pete which hauled
the miner. The shafts they dug were poor, holdovers from more lucrative projects, and in this they were like a clean-up crew, hollowing the last of the coal from the thinning mountains, mitering the walls smooth and then leaving the pits to fill with green water, their runoff seeping into the towns below. Sometimes there would be people standing by the side of the road as they wound through a town on their way up to a mine site higher on the ridge. Mostly these were children, excited, running after the trucks and shouting.

“They act like we should throw something down,” Lotho said. “Candy or something.”

“Get out of the way, you little fucks,” Henry said, laying on the horn as he steered around a curve.

One evening, on the last day of digging a particularly dissipated site, Jacob went back into the mine at the end of his shift to retrieve and coil the lights. The mine was an old one and had once been a big production. Its shafts radiated out around him, dug seemingly at random into the rock face, and the rooms carved out around the support pillars were long and ended in darkness. They had spent a month here already, the men walking the tunnels to scout for rooms that had been abbreviated or places where the possibility of a cross-shaft had been ignored. The results had been poor and in the end what they were really there to do was the work that would commence the next day: retreat mining when they would yank the support pillars with their loads of coal out from under the roof and let the rooms collapse behind them like a block ladder cascading down its hinge of string.

Their last act would be to dynamite the mouth of the primary tunnel and sink a metal sign officially leaving unwary
explorers to their own devices at both the crumbled mouth of the mine and the head of the access road leading back to it. Then the site could sink back into whatever obscurity it chose. It was a pretty place, the rough embankments of the original cuts already overgrown with jessamine and mountain laurel, the clearing where they parked the trucks and set up the trailers rimmed by a stand of young junipers, still little more than shrubs, advancing from the forest’s edge. Of course, that had all been cleared to make way for the new digging, but it would come back—the rank vines, the tremulous leaf—slowly at first and then in a dark rush, like a great paw sweeping out of the forest to clamp down on whatever still wriggled there. It made Jacob uncomfortable, particularly in the evening hours when the insects and birds would all pause at unexpected moments as if collectively listening. He had volunteered to go back down for clean up and no one protested.

Dear Ingrid, it strikes me now that you have never been inside the earth. Under water, yes; under dust and heat, under a summer fog wet as a tongue, but not yet under the indifferent weight of rock and soil and miles of roots. How could you know the way the ceiling arced over Jacob’s head as convulsively smooth as a length of bowel? The way the standing pillars seemed to curve toward him and the stillness and the slick damp? The way, miles down the corridors, a light winked on then out, then on again, flirting around the bends in the tunnels as he reached the end of the electric lights’ halo and, pausing only briefly, reached up to twist on his helmet lamp and kept walking?

When I imagine you grown, Ingrid, I imagine you in a blue dress, barefoot, dust streaking your calves. You move as if you
are used to sliding around things: a sway of the hips, a quick shift from the ball of your foot to its tough, arched side. You are always moving away from me, your hair pulled together in a loose bush at the nape of your neck, and you are always carrying something tucked against your hip. A basket full of eggs. A wicker cage in which some animal quiescently shifts.

I see you this way because I have no power to predict you. I know you too well, have known you every moment of your breathing life and before that, I would add, when your lungs practiced on amniotic fluid alone. What I will know of you in the future will be based on my exhaustive experience of your past, but about Jacob I know next to nothing. Even after twelve years of marriage, of working and eating with him, sleeping next to him, shifting on top of him as his hands hold my hips, I am free to imagine almost anything about his life before I was in it. In a way, I think this means I know him better than I ever will you, Ingrid. Because I have made him. Because I can leave him to his own devices and return to find him still in that mineshaft, walking further than he meant to, his own footsteps echoing back to him as meaningless as the drip of water radiating back from the corridors that crook blackly all around.

Jacob walked in what seemed like a straight line, but it wasn’t long before the shine of the last electric light was lost behind him. Before him the dancing will-o’-the-wisp too disappeared and he was left alone with only the yolky illumination of his headlamp. Jacob stood there for a moment and felt the mine stretch empty around him. It was a crooked place, a place that had been looted even as it was carved. If this were another land, Jacob may have kicked a shard of pottery away with his foot or traced crumbling ochre outlines across the walls—the
head of a dog! the head of a snake!—as they unfurled a story deeper and deeper into the dark. As it was, these were our mountains, Ingrid, and they were bare, barren, scraped clean. Jacob turned over a rock with his foot and found below it another rock. After a moment or two, he reached up and switched off his headlamp, turned at random in the sudden pitch and entered one of the rooms.

I think, in the dark, with his lamp off, above him the weight of the mountain, and the sky, and the peak of the mountain in the world above this world grinding down like the tip of a worn tooth, Jacob stood and felt all the pieces of himself that were missing grow back in a rush of black feathers. He had sisters too and, even if they weren’t given to weaving, there is an edge at everyone’s making that unravels for the lack of the next stitch. So, there he was: feathered but flightless, watchful but blind. I don’t know how long he stood there in darkness, listening to darkness radiate around him, listening to darkness inside him make its familiar noise. He must have turned his light back on. Or perhaps he simply turned and moved forward. Came to the next thing, and the next after that. Regardless, he must have come out of the mine eventually because the next time he had a weekend off, Jacob borrowed one of the work trucks and drove back to the telescope house in the piney hollow where his mother fried meat, his sisters dipped their sharp tongues in and out of pitchers of milk, the baby worked on an engine in the front yard and his father, waxy as a long-dead king, slept and slept and slept.

They all ate dinner together that first night and his eldest sister said, “There’s something different about you, Jacob. I don’t like it.” The other sisters echoed this in a chorus and the baby, its mouth full of meat, paused in its chewing and nodded its head.

It went on like this: the next day at lunch as they all gathered around the table, that evening at dinner again. “There’s something about you, Jacob,” said the sisters. His mother slapped a chop on each plate and kept her own counsel. His father, joined to their meal by the open bedroom door, grunted in his sleep and rolled over.

Finally, on the last night he was home, his third oldest sister regarded him across the steaming kettle his mother had set in the middle of the table and said, “There’s something about you Jacob. . .” and Jacob reached up over his head and pulled the cord dangling from the bulb, plunging them all into darkness. At first there was a clamor. The sisters hooted and moaned, the baby wha-wha-whaed its highest pitched cry. Then, slowly, the noise died down and there was silence broken only by a flurry of rustling and the drip of far water echoing as if down long, blind corridors of stone.

When Jacob pulled the light on again, it was clear everything had changed. They all looked around at each other, amazed. Where before a sister had a face like dish of butter, now she was revealed to have the broad mouth and round, golden eyes of a toad. Where before the mother had huffed and steamed, gusts of Shalimar wafting damply from the folds in her sack dress, now she whirred along, a perfect, chugging engine. The sisters cawed and croaked and rustled inside their suddenly ill-fitting clothes. One stretched her long neck and honked.

Oh, and the soup was made of stones: each bowl a dock leaf, dark and damp.

Oh, and the baby was a great sack of pillow stuffing; the chairs they sat on nothing but turtles who groaned and closed their heavy eyes. In the open doorway, from the bed piled high with quilts and linens, their long slumbering father sat up and stretched and looked around.