Hex: A Novel (26 page)

“I see,” the father said gravely, surveying his family. “I’ve been gone a long time, too long perhaps, and yet I only have one question.” He rose and drifted toward the door, his feet long and pale, the nails blue as flax, and leveled a finger across the room at Jacob, his only son. “What manner of creature is that?” he said and so, though his mother chugged and his sisters’ bleated, there was nothing left for Jacob to do but fly out the window in a great, glossy rush. From there he circled the world three times—sometimes flapping noisily through the underbrush, sometimes running on four swift black legs—until finally he slammed, panting, against the side of a building and slumped to his knees and could not go on.

It turned out he wasn’t all that far from where he began. In Elevation, in fact, where there was a job washing dishes for a woman who reminded him, in some ways, of the mother he had left chugging purposefully on the dining room table. And so he settled there. And so he stayed. Waiting, I suppose, though probably not for me.

But how curious that here too, in his new home where he was not known, no one could tell quite what he was. A swan or a mink? A man or only the skin stretched thin around what it has eaten?

When my father came back—a long line, he said, gesturing with the popcorn which was half eaten—there was a contortionist act in the center ring and two clowns in hobo garb miming stealing a pie from the fat lady off to the side. The trapeze artists had already gone on—“No net,” Thingy said, “That’ll make a mess,”—and the elephants who balanced on balls and picked up their trainer and passed her back and forth between them with their trunks. The little dogs had appeared wearing
tuxedo vests complete with pert, black bow ties and stood on their hind legs to prance and bow as if they were at a cocktail party from another century.

A sequins spangled woman had come into the stands to drag children out into the ring where they served as unwitting straight men for the clowns, or nervously offered trays of champagne flutes to the dogs who took them in between their paws and gestured with them as they hopped about on their straining hind legs. Thingy had bounced up and down in her seat and waved her arms over her head when the woman came up our aisle, but to my great relief she ignored us both, passing on without another look.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ringmaster. He was dressed all in black, his face gaunt and white beneath a black top hat which, even at that distance, I could clearly see was patched. But he had beautiful skin, smooth and cold as cream, and he stood very still in the middle of the ring and said no more as around him the contortionists writhed into hoops and rolled toward each other—four women, their ribcages flattened to the ground, toes splayed across the backs of their heads, mouths red and open, smiling.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ringmaster again and my father said, “Now,
here
we go,” as if everything that had come before had been nothing more than a twitch in the curtain. He tapped Thingy on the top of the head and said, “Pay attention.”

Is it possible then that the ringmaster looked at us? Surely not; we were so far away, so nondescript in our expectation. The women rolled into each other, twined around each other until their bodies were a complicated knot, four red smiles twisting this way and that toward the crowd. The ringmaster bowed from the waist and dropped his head as if it pained him to see, but not
before he looked up at us, looked right at us: at Thingy, surely. Perhaps at me.

“Imagine that,” my father said and from the peak of the tent, lost in blackness, a rope came down, capped at the end with a cartoonishly large, black hook. When the hook reached the women the knot somehow opened and took it into their depths. Then, to the great wonderment of the crowd, they were all lifted into the air, a writhing bundle, vaguely oval shaped. The children in the audience screamed again and many of them laughed. It was funny to see so many things happen all at once. It was funny to stretch to the very end of the tether, to drift just above the black chasm and trust the current to shift and bring you back.

“Still no net,” Thingy said and then, high above the packed dirt floor—the clowns whose faces were smeared with blueberry; the fat woman, brandishing a rolling pin, colossal breasts heaving beneath her prim, starched apron; the little dogs who had snuck back on stage in various stages of undress like late night revelers reemerging for the second stage of the party; the ringleader who did not move from his bow—the women split open (legs and arms pulling apart, waving toward each other as if with regret) and out of their midst a body plummeted toward the floor.

Oh and then we all screamed, of course. And, when she was brought up short by a rope so thin it was almost invisible just before she hit, unfolded herself over the ringmaster’s head like a kerchief fluttering out of a lax, white hand, then we all gasped. She landed—a girl in a blue dress, a basket over her arm and in that basket a pie still steaming from its vents which she gave to the fat woman as if to say, “Nothing a little beauty won’t fix. Nothing to take so seriously,”—and then we laughed and laughed.

Because it was a joke after all. Twelve brothers and not a whole one among them. A girl in a blue dress born from an egg in the sky.

The ringleader stood up and put his hat back on his head. Everyone involved took a bow.

At the end of the night, as we walked back to his truck, my father whistled a little big-top music and took us each by the hand. “What did you think?” he said, steering us around heaps of discarded rubbage and out of the glow of headlights. “Was it everything you’d imagined?” He was in a good mood, swinging our hands up and out as if he were directing the tempo of his own whistling, every now and then hauling us up off the ground when we didn’t step quickly enough to avoid a rut or a puddle of standing oil.

“I wanted the girl to come back,” Thingy said, “She was the prettiest. The one with the pie.”

In fact, she had come back a number of times. She’d been one of the girls jumping from rump to rump as horses streamed around the ring. She’d been the magician’s assistant, the knife-thrower’s target, the damsel-in-distress menaced by a lion and rescued at the last moment by the lion-tamer’s whip. But I knew what Thingy meant. When she’d fallen from the sky was the only time she’d been the prettiest one of all. When she’d offered the poor fat lady the pie was the only time she’d been the wisest, the funniest, the most beloved.

“And what did you think, Alice?” my father said. “What did you want to happen?”

I had wanted to the rope to break, but because I was in love, I couldn’t say it. “I wanted the same as Thingy,” I said. “For the girl to come back so I could see her again.”

And again and again and again, I could have added. Walking toward me and then away. So small I could lift her with only one arm and then, as must always be, so large that even dwindling on the horizon she is taller than me, blocks more of the sun.

In the Laundromat, the old woman paused in her folding to watch my father lift you out of your basket and examine you. Her face was pleasant and empty as a sock. When my father did nothing more than raise your shirt to look at your tense, mottled belly, then turn your head from side to side to inspect your ears, she went back to her work as if whatever entered the room could be nothing but what she expected. If a horse were to come bursting through the door, wicked hooves gleaming as he charged the machines, I felt sure the old woman would say, “Well, of course. It is a
white
horse, after all”; if a hole were to open up under our feet, spiraling down into the gullet of the mountain, I’m sure the old woman would say as we fell, “But it isn’t very deep, you know. Only long.”

She held up a pair of her husband’s underwear and shook it. There was a faint stain running in a line down the back which she pinched with her fingers as if to rub it clean and then used as the central line on which she folded the cloth.

“The likeness is really remarkable,” my father said. He turned away from me and pumped you over his head as if you were a trophy he were holding up to an arena of cheering fans. I could see your face bobbing up and down over his head and you looked at me as you laughed, delighted, his hands snug in your armpits and brown, square thumbs crossed over your chest like an engraving. A pair of dates, perhaps. A beginning and an end.

“In this world you have work to do,” Thalia said.

“And in the other world?” I asked. I had seen it: the world beneath this one, the one beneath the waters. Where do the children go who are mistaken for turkeys or fox kits or other wild things? When my child was born she weighed as much as a newborn bear cub, and, just like a bear, she was immediately sealed in a cave to protect against the continuing weather. Don’t tell me I will never see her face again. Perhaps looking up from the underside of the creek, gold and green, dreamy with algae?

“There is no other world,” Thalia said. “Don’t be that sort of girl for the rest of your life.”

“Get your hands dirty,” Thalia said. “Then wash them clean.”

But all that was a long time ago. Today we went into town and came back with folded laundry, sacks of dry goods, a plush toy Jacob, of all people, picked up in the grocery line and presented to you, Ingrid, as if he were giving you a chalice studded with gems.

“See,” Daniel said when you didn’t immediately crow with delight or grip it in your still fumbling fist. “See, Ingrid, it’s a love bug,” he said and smoothed a finger across the thing’s broad, pink forehead as Jacob had done, squeezed its boldly striped torso to make it vibrate and tinkle out a little song.

When we came back up the mountain, I gave you to Jacob to hold while I unloaded the baskets of laundry from the bed of
the truck and put them away in their various closets. I made our dinner—rice, last season’s pole beans, ramp soup and the stringy breast of a hen who only that morning had trotted up to Jacob’s hand knowing he had something special just for her, something denied to each of her sisters in turn hidden in his hard palm.

When the platters were full, I went to the porch to call the men to the table and found Jacob still there with you, the love bug discarded on the slatted wood where it occasionally jittered and ground out a few lost notes. You were sitting on his knee facing the forest. His palm was on your back to hold you upright and you swayed and lurched with the tiny corrective movements of someone riding an extravagant, but familiar mode of transport—a pasha aboard her elephant, perhaps. A mountain girl astride the moth-eaten back of her husband-to-be’s old gray dray.

For all that, you were both very still and, for once, the forest was still. It was sunset, late for us to be eating dinner, everything delayed by a sense of thickness in the day as if I had to push through the air to reach the real objects on the other side of it. Soup tureen, carving knife, salt and pepper shakers fashioned into tiny pine trees, ceramic hen under whose breast nestled the butter as round and simple as her heart.

“Pling, pling, pling,” said the love bug. It was a strange creature: pink and purple, its wings both veined and furred. Across its body stripes of black vinyl gave it the comical appearance of a jailbreaker bumbling toward freedom. Its eyes, great, dewy disks of plastic, were set forward on its head. Predator’s eyes, like ours, single minded and designed to track. The better to gaze into your own, Ingrid, I suppose. The better to be beloved.

Around the edges of the world a lemon light seeped up. It was as if we were being submerged in batter—cool and thick
and nothing for it but for the baker to pop us into her waiting oven. A breeze ruffled through the tree branches but didn’t reach us three on the porch. In his study, Daniel switched on a light as someone must always switch on a light, and what reached us showed me again the whorl of hair that swirls from the back of your head like silt in an eddy, Jacob’s broad hand on your back and his middle finger slipped down the collar of your tiny white shirt to hold you in place. It seemed to go on forever: the cool green forest, the lemon light, the taste in the back of my throat that is awaiting only sweetness to enliven it, the hollow on my tongue where sweetness must surely come to rest.

When Jacob and I first met, Thalia slid the paperwork across the table to him and said, “Don’t think of this as a beginning. This is just another knot along the way.” He signed and when he passed the sheaf of documents back over to me I imagined, young as I was, that I could decode something from his very lack of curiosity which would show me what he saw. A girl, still slack around the middle, clothed in a red gingham dress that had once belonged to her mother. A girl who had been given very little care and so was due a tremendous store of luck.

I signed my name below his own. Alice Small: the i topped by a bubble, the ls loose and wandering. Thalia was the witness and the next week Jacob and I were wed in the courthouse in Ridley Township, I in the same gingham dress and my mother’s bell-sleeved coat, he in a black suit that didn’t fit across the shoulders. It was Thalia’s idea that we marry, of course. “You are both loose ends,” she said, as if that finished it, as if the rest of our lives should be dedicated to the act of tidying away. Jacob got land out of the deal: the house, the grounds, the mountaintop. And I got a place to linger. My house, it would have been
after all, my mountain top, but Thalia said, “What good is it to keep something if you have no one to give it to?” and along with the marriage license she signed away her rights to the land. And myself along with it, it seemed. To Jacob I bequeath both girl and mountain. To my dishwasher because he fits the story.

On the courthouse steps, Thalia gave me back my bouquet—white larkspur and cushion mums, all floating in a frost of stiff, baby’s breath. “Throw them,” she said, though there was no one there to catch, and so I did. They landed on a stiff berm of snow churned up from the street by the plows and when I passed them again on my way to the old green truck Jacob and I were borrowing to take us to our honeymoon cabin I was surprised to see they hadn’t melted a hole in the snow bank—alive as they were, stubbornly green at the stem—but rather lay there as crisp and cold as the frill around the lip of a white china plate. Decoration, but one destined never to be stained or chipped. A cold, proud, useless beauty and one that faded as we pulled away from the curb.

When Thingy and Daniel moved into the house on Newfound Mountain, Jacob and I had been married for almost eleven years. Our life together, which had at first seemed so accidental, had assumed its own shape, independent from the shape our lives had taken apart. Thingy stood in the front hallway with her bags at her feet and craned her neck to see into the parlor where the book Jacob had been reading lay tented on a cushion, then into the dining room where I had laid the table with a white cloth that had belonged to my grandmother and lit five taper candles made with wax from my own bees. “Oh, Alice,” she said and lifted her hair away from her neck to fan it. “It’s just exactly like Thalia left it. You haven’t changed a thing.”

Jacob and I had spent a week honeymooning in one of a bank
of cabins just north of Elevation. The cabins were primitive but had lights in all the rooms, an electric range, even a rabbit-eared black and white television if we had wanted it. I found an oil lamp in a hinged bench at the door and Jacob trimmed and rethreaded the wick, lit it and trapped the blue flame under its scratched glass bell. We set the lamp in the window. It was the height of winter, snow deep on the ground, the forest silent but for the creak of ice-weighted limbs and sometimes their sudden snap. We were the only ones there.

Later, we took the lamp with us as we walked from cabin to cabin and stood on each of their porches like carolers. Our tracks in the snow behind us wavered in and out of each other: Jacob’s sturdy and narrow, the rind of ice glittering where he had broken through. Mine were more like a bird’s tracks skittish seeming, uncertain. In reality, I had been looking at Jacob: the way his neck strained above his padded plaid coat, the peculiar, tense curve of his back. Jacob against the ice-light of the river which chuckled and rilled. Jacob against the dark bulk of a cabin, peering in a window. He handed me the lantern as he cupped his hands over his eyes so I was suddenly alone in its halo, water seeping in at the sides of my shoes, a bird’s nest—the plaintive, messy architecture—drooping from a pediment of the porch. Jacob lowering his shoulder to the door, thumped it once and popping the lock.

Each of the cabins had the same sofa, waterproof pillows patterned with oak leaves and acorns, and every cabin had a variation of the same story hanging above the bed. In one an angler stood in the river, the water swirling to the tops of his hip waders and his line lax. In another, trout—sleek and brown and attended by their own perfect, sleek brown shadows—hung at different levels in the dappled tea water, wreathed by weeds. In
another the line was taut; in another there was a net. Sometimes there was a white bridge in the picture, its stones gleaming in the first spidering rays of dawn. In most the fisherman had brown hair, but in one, where the net bellied under the thrashing arc of the fish and the fisherman had started toward shore, his hair was a deep, clownish red. Hair like an afterthought or a poorly examined memory. “There was something here, wasn’t there?” the artist might have said. “Something hovering just above his head. . .”

We broke into a different cabin every evening and woke every morning in a strange bed. Every morning we were confronted by each other’s bodies—brown and pink and white and puckered—and by the cold world waiting outside the pocket of warmth we had made in the sheets. I got up and made breakfast. Jacob got up and put logs into the woodstove, naked. With his back to me, his torso was a tight, brown line that ended in the sudden white snarl of his buttocks. A spark flew out of the stove and landed on the white skin of his upper thigh. He swore and slapped at it, swung around and saw me watching him and we went back to bed as the eggs burned up on the stove. In this way, we wanted each other. In every other way—eating, sleeping, walking out into the white woods in the morning, building up each cabin’s fire higher and higher—we were separate and didn’t talk beyond our immediate needs. “Pass me that,” we said to each other. “Please.” It really is not so different today, although we say more without having to say it and know already what the other one wants.

At the end of the week, we drove Thalia’s truck even further up the mountain and moved into the house with her, our room already set up on the side of the house that faced the forest, our linens turned and a list of chores she expected us to
attend to sitting on the bedside table. The paper was held down by a weight shaped like a fish, back bowed against the rocks, gills gaping.

Four months later we saw the smoke punching up over the ridgeline, but didn’t know what it meant until a trooper drove into the yard to deliver the news. The fire had started in the kitchen, hardly a surprise given how cheaply Thalia had built it, but how quickly the flames spread was a little unusual. The Feed Store was a short walk down from Elevation’s fire department but nevertheless, by the time the pump truck got there and started spraying the roof, the fire had already spread down the hallway to the dining room, into the attic space, through the store and was licking up the front door.

“Shit,” the trooper said, “it was punching holes in the roof before they even got the hose on the hydrant.” He was Jacob and my age, which is to say very young, and I thought I might even recognize him from school, the outline of his bullet head highlighted against the pouring light of the frosted glass main doors.

Still, he called me ma’am as if I had been automatically aged by this tragedy, and tried very hard to look appropriately somber, but he was excited and who could blame him. He had seen the fire, after all; felt the pressure of it as it coiled just behind the door and then heard it roar as it sprung all at once through the roof and up the doorframe. I imagined the fire rushing through the crooked alleys I had spent so much time in as a child, fattening itself on bags of diatomaceous earth and novelty cricket cages, pot holders shaped like lobster claws and the dark, murderous bulbs of allium and daffodil, bearded iris and yellow tulip trapped dreaming in their net sacks.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the trooper said, fanning himself
with his hat and turning, as if in spite of himself, back toward the ridge where smoke still rose. A thin, mean line now, straight as an arrow, pointing toward disaster.

In point of fact, they never did find Thalia’s body, but, by the accounts of the customers who had paid up and left just before the fire started, there had been at least six people in the building when it burned. Four of these had been diners, a family from out of town and Mr. Tauft, a regular who enjoyed his chop well done with lots of gravy. The other two were Thalia herself and the Sainte Maria who was doing triple duty as a server, cashier and dishwasher as Jacob’s place at the deep-bellied sink had not yet been reliably filled.

The family—a man and a woman, a teenage boy—and Mr. Tauft were identified easily enough by their dental records and some simple guess work on the police’s part who tracked down the registration of the only car with out of town plates which also happened to be the only one on the street to which no one laid claim. Oddly enough, the Sainte Maria had never been to the dentist, and her body, charred beyond recognition and found huddled next to the melted cash register in the main room, was identified through a process of elimination. She was a small girl and this body was small. She wasn’t anywhere else in the town or, as far as anyone could tell, outside of it. A scrap of her leopard print coat had wafted up the fire’s draft and fluttered down with the rest of the embers of burlap and forget-me-not wallpaper, flaming receipt paper and tufts of molten insulation to land like a letter at the fire chief’s feet.

Of Thalia, they never found a trace. Not a strand of hair; not a single fire-cracked tooth. That she was dead was as much wishful thinking on the town’s part as it was inference and yet, at her funeral in which we buried an empty box, everyone who
owed her money—a considerable portion of the town’s people and the farmers who tilled the outlying ridges—showed up and each brought a flower to heap on her grave.

Jacob and I cut the heads off all her peonies which she grew in a sunny rectangle she had dug between the house and the cemetery, and whose buds she sprinkled with sugar every morning to encourage the ants to come help them bloom. If there had been a body in the casket, we would have fought harder to bury her on our land, but, as it was, we settled on bringing something of the land to her, though, by cutting them too soon, we damaged the young plants so badly they never fully came back. I have a bed of wildflowers there now: white yarrow and hyssop, pearly everlasting and pink fireweed. I leave them alone to seed themselves and some years they all froth up—a fountain of white pricked by lavender and sharp pink—and some years I have nothing there but onion grass and weeds. Still, I consider it one of my gardens, and, when the urge comes on me at night to walk out into the forest, that is where I go instead.