Hex: A Novel (3 page)

Later in the day I came out to feed the chickens and saw Thalia’s boots jutting from staves on either end of the garden, laces undone and tongues flapping. To scare the birds, I suppose. What else would find a pair of boots so dreadful that, even empty, they would frighten them away?

Aunt Thalia came down the hallway toward the kitchen. She was a tall, square woman, packed with meat and muscle the way an ox or a cow is packed, not fat so much as filled. Her hair had gone white at a very young age and she wore it long, white as rope woven from a horse’s tail. If she had been born only slightly earlier in the century, she would have come kicking at the hem of a boiled green wool skirt and rattling a ring of keys at her stout, matronly waist. As it was, she came wearing jeans, a man’s leather belt buckled high over the unflattering pouch the pants made of her underbelly, a thin red T-shirt she had picked up somewhere which strained across her breasts so the swooping white script stretched and warped like a reflection seen in the blade of a saw.
The Lucky Bunny Bar and Grill
, the shirt said. I still remember; it was one of her favorites.

Someone came in the front door of the shop, letting a gust of chill air in with them, and crossed heavily behind me to the trowels and gardening forks, but the noise seemed far away. Even the Nina’s counting, the Sainte Maria’s little jog as she maneuvered past Thalia, careful not to touch her or brush up against any of her clothes, seemed to dim and retreat. Thalia’s head was bowed, her arms canted behind her at an awkward angle like wings about to downbeat into flight. She was fixing
her hair, concentrating on the action her hands were taking beyond her sight, and had not yet seen me. For a long moment I watched my aunt as she stood bisected in the shaft of light that drifted down the hallway, her head in darkness, her hair falling one panel at a time across her hot, square face.

It must be understood: I was a motherless child. I always had been. I didn’t know how to yearn or mourn, how to soften my face so it could be filled with whatever the person I faced had to offer. Thingy could tilt her head and peep until whatever it was she wanted was offered to her of the adult’s own accord. She was marvelous at letting people believe they were giving her a gift rather than fulfilling a demand. I, however, was a clumsy, blatting thing: the kind of child who will stand at the refreshment table all through the magic act and the pony rides eating and eating, stuffing herself past the point of illness because she is incapable of understanding that all this will come again.

I imagine I was disgusting. Thalia certainly looked disgusted when she finally looked up and saw me there. Slowly she stuck the pin between her lips, the last twist of hair tumbling to her waist with a shifting whisper. We stayed like that for a while, regarding each other. I hunched on the crate so my belly pressed against my thighs, craned my neck. My posture was awkward and abject. Thalia stood, pins bristling her lips, hands on her hips, hair crackling around her as if offering advice. Then she decided something and beckoned me over to her side.

“I’m not asking you, Alice,” she said when I hesitated. She turned away from me without waiting for a response and began to rummage in the pockets of the flannel shirt hanging from a peg on the wall.

I crossed the hall reluctantly. Thalia, still without turning back to me, reached out and hooked my shirt collar. Her fingers
where they rubbed against my neck were so rough it was almost as if the skin had curled up into scales and she smelled like the split-pea soup and ham hock she had tasted and retasted as it simmered on the stove.

“You keep forgetting we’re related,” Thalia said, finding what she was looking for and bending forward slightly to peer into my face. This close to her I could see the sweat beaded under her eyes and at her brow line. Her hair was damp at her temples and droplets of sweat hung in the fine blond hairs above her upper lip.

“You forget we share blood and that that means something,” Thalia said, shaking my collar slightly. “There’s really no excuse for it. Give me your hand.” By this point, I was in a trance created by her smell, her odd clanging voice, the precise detail of her sweat, her color, her waxy complexion and the hectic blots of red that rose high in each cheek. She had to reach down and unfurl my fingers for me in order to drop whatever she had pulled out of her shirt pocket into the palm of my hand. Then, she rose to her full height, which seemed even more geological than normal. I could hear the Nina finish her count and bang shut the register drawer behind me. In the dining room, a man raised his voice as if shouting after the Sainte Maria’s retreating back and said, “With extra gravy, please. Make sure. I don’t want it dry.”

“Look at it,” Thalia said. “We haven’t got all day.”

At first it seemed to me that what Thalia had put in my hand was nothing more remarkable or interesting than a ball of wax. It was red, pliant; the sort of wax that covered the round white cheese the Pinta put into my lunch sacks and which Thingy and I often used as casts to compare the growing discrepancy between our bite marks. For once, I was the winner here. I had my
mother’s teeth, small but even, and though the problem would soon be corrected by braces, Thingy’s mouth was rapidly filling with an off-kilter snaggle of which she seemed very proud. I brought the ball up to my nose and sniffed at it carefully, keeping my eyes on Aunt Thalia’s face. The ball still smelled like cheese, probably even the same brand, and I shrugged and dug my thumbnail into the wax, disappointed.

“Go on, you stupid girl,” Thalia said, looking over her shoulder toward the dining room where the Sainte Maria could be heard repeating an order. “Do I have to spell out everything? Open it.”

Obediently, but with no great expectations, I dug my thumbnail deeper into the ball, prising it with my other nails until it suddenly split and fell into almost even halves. Nestled inside a cavity in the wax was a nasty thing. It was like a broken tooth, the shape bulbing into a jagged crown with two long roots forking downward. It was deep maroon in color and when I jiggled the ball I could see it wasn’t quite a solid, but rather something like jelly. It seemed to be oozing, a slick of tea-colored liquid coated the wax where it had rested, and it was bound at the top and bottom by what was surely just a thread, though one the same dead white color as Thalia’s hair. It smelled as well, a sharp copper tang that reminded me both of blood and the smoke from my father’s soldering iron. I reached to touch it and Thalia tapped my fingers away and fit the other half of the ball carefully back onto its seam.

“It’s a root,” she said, “a rare one. One of these days, I’ll show you how to find it for yourself, but until then pick one of these pockets.” She gestured to the wall in front of me. A couple of Thalia’s extra shirts hung there, a black, deep-pocketed kitchen apron, Luke’s new parka (evidence! he was there after
all, behind me somewhere in the long gray building) and the coats the Nina, the Pinta and the Sainte Maria had shrugged off and hung, each on her particular knob, at the beginning of their shifts. Somehow I knew it was the latter three to which Thalia was referring.

“Go on,” Thalia said again, “It’s okay.” It was not okay, that was something a deep, shifting part of me unequivocally knew, but before I could stop myself—without wanting to stop myself, with a wild glee like one gets from breaking a window—I shot out my hand and dropped the tiny ball in the pocket of the Sainte Maria’s tatty fake leopard fur coat.

“So,” said Thalia, nodding, laying her heavy hand on my shoulder. “That’s the kind of girl you are, is it? I can’t say I’m too surprised, though I might not have made the same decision.”

Thalia bent down again, swooping very close to my face as if she wanted to kiss me. “Still,” she said, scanning me from chin to forehead and back again, each time managing to avoid looking into my eyes, “now at least you know what you are, don’t you, Alice?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t,” but it was a lie. It was clear to me something had changed. I felt flushed all over, an ache in my armpits and at my groin as if I suddenly had a fever. In the back of my throat I could feel a hot plug as if something in my body had surfaced and was bobbing just behind my teeth. I felt as if I was still touching the tiny ball of wax where it caught in the lint of the Santa Maria’s pocket, or could feel without touching it’s dead, plastic surface, could sense somehow the particular, nasty quiver of the root.

“Mmm-hmm,” said Thalia. She straightened up and backed away. Just then the Nina came into the hallway and yanked me back by the arm.

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Lutrell,” she said, her voice high. “I was doing the cash drawer. Is she bothering you?”

“Yes,” said my aunt. “Yes, she is,” to which the Nina responded by giving me a hard shake and pulling me back into the darkening store. A storm was blowing in, the clouds tinted green as they streamed past the windows. Thalia stood in the hallway a moment longer, twisting the last sheet of her hair up with slow, thoughtful motions, and watched us. Her niece and her shopkeep. Two sullen girls surrounded by relics for sale from another century, ugly and stooped in the sudden dottering glare of lightning over the mountain. She paused after the last pin, patting the top of her bun reflexively, and smiled before turning into the kitchen already shouting at the Pinta for letting the soup bubble over onto the stove.

I don’t remember what happened the rest of that day. I suppose the Sainte Maria gathered Luke and I up as soon as the lunch shift was over and took us home. She probably packed the kitchen leftovers into Styrofoam take-home boxes, as the girls often did at the end of the week when my father hadn’t yet given them money for groceries. At home, around our kitchen table, she fed us the gritty soup and fatty ham, cutting Luke’s meat into small bites while a cigarette burned in the ashtray next to her. Later that evening, just before the Pinta came on to take the night shift, she gave us both our baths and, as was her habit even though she was the one who ran the washcloth over my body and wrung it out over my head, shut the door to my bedroom quietly behind me to give me privacy as I changed.

Probably, the Sainte Maria took her jacket home with her that night and hung it in her own front hallway. The ball was so small and her pockets so cluttered with thread and coins and
stones and all the usual detritus of a girl with busy hands that I doubt she even noticed the thing was there until much later when she may have drawn it out, examined it with brief curiosity and tossed it away. One more inexplicable object that had been drawn to her. One more tiny satellite at orbit around her fickle moon.

I still don’t quite know what the object meant, but I know that I marked her and I know that Thalia—moth white, moth red—watched and made note of the marking. That I was a child is no excuse. A child can smell smoke on the wind, after all. Even today, with so few people left in the world who can do me any harm, I am cold when I think of Thalia’s smile, mean as a cut, opening across her face.

But wait. . . I’ve confused myself. I began intending to write about my mother—little Alice Luttrell, who grew up on a mountain and should have stayed there—and ended up at Thalia. I can’t say I’m too surprised. If Thalia was anything, she was an omega. A stocky vanishing point standing spraddle-legged in heavy brown boots. It is Thalia who I miss the way I imagine a daughter might miss her mother: with a mixture of melancholy, indignation and relief. My own mother is harder to quantify.

What is more, in between where I began and where I find myself now, several days have come and gone. It was a rainy spring, Ingrid—your first—and the season has passed into a
rainy summer. Our house is high on the southern slope of the mountain, parallel to a gap where millions of years ago some geologic schism thrust one fold of rock deeper into the mantle and levered another to crooked angles above the valley. It leaves us exposed, which is to say when a storm rolls up from the south it finds the house unprotected on its bald and levels us.

When you are older, Ingrid, you will be able to stand with me on the creek bank and watch the storm come. The house will be behind us, its windows catching the sunlight and flashing it back as if they were shields, and before us: the creek, swift and busy, the lower field frosted with bluet and the edge of the forest where the solomon seal and jack-in-the-pulpit grow. Then there will be nothing but trees, miles and miles of them rolling variously green up and down the sides of the ridges. And the storm, of course. Always the same storm coming back around. You’ll find it feels a little like being on a boat. We here, the family, with our hens and bees, our piles of wood and stone, all together hanging as if tossed from the crest of an enormous wave. Frozen in the whistling space between the foam and the green depths, watching the ocean come rushing up.

I have laid you on a quilt on the floor where you can see the birds as they squabble at the feeder, but you are unusually intolerant, thrusting your arms and legs into the air and grunting in the way you do just before you lose all patience and begin to cry. A spell of bad weather unsettles everyone. It brings the men into the house, brings us all too close together for comfort. Daniel claims to be fond of this.

“Nature’s vacation,” he says gaily, leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head. The perfect conscientious picture of a man at ease, but he is faking it. I can tell by the way he watches Jacob as he paces the rooms, pausing to consult the
windows as if he feels the evidence of his hearing—rain pounding the tin roof, roaring in the gutters, tocking the windowsills with the hollow rap of a geologist’s hammer—cannot be wholly trusted. When the men are in the house there is very little time left for anything else. There are the usual meals to prepare and serve and then the cleaning up to do. The usual chores: beating the rugs, changing the linens, washing the laundry, darning or mending or cutting clothing into strips, blacking the belly of the coal-black stove. . .all made infinitely more tedious by the presence of an audience.

When the storm comes and stays to swell the creek in its banks and devil the hens until they are uniformly beleaguered and peevish, I get up at night and creep down the hallways on the hard edges of my feet just to remember myself as I am without someone watching. Sometimes, if I am very tired, I do this in my nightclothes: a moth-white woman haunting the halls of her cold house. More often I get up from whichever bed I have lain down in and re-dress in a dark corner of the room. Then I walk about the house like a fairy tale child who has gone to sleep in the familiar world and woken up in its mirror twin—the dolls and jacks, cups and boots and brushes, needles and pearls that surround her all the more sinister for their insistence that nothing has changed.

Thingy’s father, Mr. Clawson, had a collection of steins in his basement entertainment room. He arranged them seasonally in the niches behind his half-bar with the two mahogany vinyl-padded bar stools which always squeaked when we came down the stairs as if a party of somber drinkers, already elbow-deep in their beers, were turning to observe us, not particularly impressed. The steins were lidded and fanciful. Some were ceramic, some pewter. There was even a wooden one, the belly lined
with lead, a motif of berry-laded vines massing up its sides; one stein even glass, soldered into panels, the glass old and wavering toward its bottom, the lid tinted an optimistic pink. Do I need to say how much I loved them? They were forbidden; they were jealously tended. Sometimes Thingy would take them from their niches and we would consider them closely. Thingy insisted on holding them. I constrained myself to reaching out one finger to mark the dust in the pursed mouth of a rosebud or brush a cobweb from the brim of the mountaineer’s cap. Sometimes, I fit my thumb into the groove at the top of a handle and pressed the lid slowly open and shut.

The mountaineer stein was a particular favorite of Mr. Clawson’s. This was another ceramic mug, the base thick and imprinted with the name of its Swiss manufacturer. The lid was shaped like a mountain top—austere and alpine, its glacial peak bearing no resemblance to our own worn, tree-furred ridges—and the handle was an oversized, rosy-cheeked, loden-capped yodeler, lips puckered, head flung back, pheasant feather unfurling brilliantly down his spine. It was a beautiful, foolish thing. Mr. Clawson was proud of it.

“Purchased from a store on Mount Blanc,” he told Thingy and I as we sat uneasily on the barstools. He was drinking clear liquor from a tiny glass into which he would sometimes allow us to dip the tips of our tongues. “Little place, untouched by time, the glacier melt turning a water wheel outside.” Mr. Clawson considered the stein ruminatively, turning it to its best advantage. “It made a little scooping noise. That’s the only way to describe it. That water wheel I mean, and the glacier water like milk, I mean milky like what is that liquor? Ouzo? The one the Greeks drink. Right away I knew I had to have it, and what’s the name for a glacial valley, Ingrid? Morass, that’s right.”

Then us alone, Thingy with the stein cradled in her lap, her corduroy skirt pulled over her knees to form a sling for it, and I with my rough finger pressing the hinge that would make the mountain open and the mountaineer’s head tip back still further, unperturbed, whistling now in idiot surprise to see the wall of rock suspended above his face. But of course it never fell. The mountain opened and shut, hollow, disgorging no treasures. When one day we filled it with water from the bar sink and each took prim, sacrosanct sips, the only prophecy the stein reflected was the sad fate of a spider, washed from her web, drowning peevishly in the water’s dusty ripples. “Yodeleheehoo,” I instructed Thingy, but she was listening to the sound of her mother’s footsteps in the kitchen above our heads and she would only titter. “Hee Hoo, Hee Hoo,” she said while clapping the lid of the stein roughly shut.

In the other real world that was going on all around us it wasn’t as simple as clapping the top of the mountain back on, but this was the general idea. The new mining concerns understood the pace of the century better than the old loners. Certainly, better than the gaunt, blackened pickmen with their company issued work pants and their 1930’s collectivism who were so saturated with coal dust that when cut they bled first black and only later a reluctant red. What I’m trying to explain is how it was to be a child then. Thingy and I can be imagined in any number of topical scenarios—picture the legwarmers and Thingy’s flaxen perm—and that would be true, but what we were also like was two small, densely furred creatures crouched in a burrow, listening to the sound of a huge, inexplicable purpose going on over our heads. We grew up. Time can’t really be stopped; only paused, vibrating along its edges like a bee trapped in a glass jar.

The new mining concerns drove through mountain towns in phalanxes of white vans, pick-ups and belching diesel trucks. When they came to a mountain that seemed likely they arranged the ranks of eager machines and sheered the top of the mountain off. Then they went to work rooting out what they found there: copper and lead, zinc, gold, silver, olivine and feldspar, mica, quartz, emerald and kyanite, apatite, tourmaline, saltpeter, marble, slate, quartz and porcelain clay, beryl, amethyst, ruby and sapphire, limestone and even uranium, innocuous and deadly.

When I was a child, the days of discovery seemed to have ended. Off came the mountaintop, out came the treasure, dumped with the fill dirt for later sorting. It was business, progress. What the mining concerns really wanted were the iron and the coal. Jacob tells me that some mountains still show to the south or east their ancient faces thick with deadfalls, but from the north or west they reveal themselves to be hollowed entirely. A mask. Scooped so only their expressions remain.

When they were finished, to tidy things up I suppose, the mining concerns gathered all that had been sorted and discarded, all that was left, and tumbled it back into the mountain’s empty core. Imagine that: bears and panthers, long needle pine, the massy trunks of tulip poplar, eagles, moss, river trout, old leather shoes, gold panning plates, brick foundations, lakes, bones and older bones, wood burning stoves, hickory ghosts, balding tires, skins, fish-rib hooks, boulders, flint arrow heads, generational beds of bluebells, church spires, snakes, chicken wire, sulfur-bellied newts all jumbled together, slick with muck. And their voices. . .a torrent of voices, unintelligible, meaningless as the shadow of the mountain top crests over their pit, as the lid claps shut.

These were not our mountains, Ingrid. This happened further up the chain, and what rimmed the edges of the creek beds was just an echo. When the mining trucks came through Elevation—traveling north, skirting the parklands, heading upstream—Thingy and I would stand on the corner and wave. Sometimes we clasped each other’s hands and held them up over our heads and the men in the trucks and vans waved to us. They were mostly young, hair held back in practical fashion from their eyes with blue bandanas. Thingy and I thought they were handsome, and we looked winsomely after the trucks though we were too old to chase them as some of the boys in the neighborhood did. Later, we lingered in the hollow heart of Mrs. Clawson’s forsythia bush and gloated over our future. Thingy would marry the one sitting high in the cab of the Bobcat and I would marry the man driving the truck. We never saw them again, or if we did we didn’t recognize them. The next week or month there would be a new batch winding through. Thingy would marry the man who blew her a kiss from the jostling cab window; I, she chose for me, the one in the bed of the pick-up truck, eating a banana, blinking the wind out of his eyes.

Maybe she was right. I’ve never asked Jacob and I doubt he would remember. Did you see two girls? One silver blond, hair like a spent dandelion drifting up from her head; one small, ill-favored, looking behind her to the window in the ranch house that was always left open to the street? Did you see me? I would have to say.

But back to the story at hand: Alice and Dax and how they met. Really, I have no idea.

There wasn’t much left of my mother in the house I grew up in. A photo of her holding my brother Luke just after he was
born. The color is super saturated. My mother’s hair looks like varnish, a slick cherry, and her T-shirt is almost ultraviolet. She is very young and she holds her baby like she might a book, away from her body. She is not smiling and Luke is already looking nowhere in particular. They are standing together in the driveway of the house I would be born into, pocked brick, the azalea beside the front door blooming so white in the oversaturated corner it has lost all definition.

It seems like a lethargic photo, perhaps one that confirms a general suspicion about our poverty or emotional sloth. The azalea appears to stalk my mother and her son, a ravenous void descending, and to get this angle my father must have stood in the steep road where often the logging trucks would pop their brakes only at the bend and squeal in barely contained slides down to the sand ramp 100 feet past our drive. That was Top Road, named because it went on all the way to the top of the mountain, and that was Alice, named because her older sister Thalia had already taken their mother’s name and she was born a little more free.

Other than this photo, which I keep tucked as a place mark inside various books, there was little in my childhood to remember my mother by. A set of garish plates, turquoise glaze patterned with elephants outlined in rose. Each elephant gripped the tail of the one before so they went around and around the inner face of the plate, around and around the yellow corn, the sliced hot dog, the smear of ketchup. As a young child I understood they were all mother elephants, though there was not a baby among them. As an older child, Rosellen gave them back to Thalia to keep for my adulthood. They were too nice for me now, she said. She said I was the kind of girl who might be inclined to thoughtlessly, willfully, break.

The rest was detritus, much of it anonymous: an egg timer, a red, bell-sleeved wool coat. A clock carved from a slab of wood in which an owl swooped and seemed about to snatch a frozen rabbit, though Thingy and I once plotted its trajectory and concluded that each time it would narrowly miss. And Luke, of course. And me.

Once, Alice Luttrell left her house by the back door, but not before packing a little red backpack with a hunk of bread wrapped in foil, a sweating piece of white cheese, a yellow thermos filled to the brim with coffee. She also packed a book—any old thing,
Reader’s Digest Condensed
about a mountaineer and his Sherpa, his yak, his perilous victory—and left the door unlatched. The house, which was spare but grand, sat alone at the head of a bald on the mountainside. From behind her now, growing further away as the forest pressed together in her wake. By this point, Alice Luttrell was a motherless child as are so many of us. It had happened quite recently, a lingering illness, one of those events that seemed to belong to a previous century. She did not know what to make of her recovery.

“O mother, my mother,” she said at night in her bed, the quilt pulled over her head for a tent, the room dark around her, spreading low under the roof beams. No one answered. No star detached itself from the sky and floated through her window, no green light unfurled from between the floorboards. No response but the old wood popping and once the muted thud of an owl landing on the roof. It seemed many stories she had once believed in were false, or at least exaggerated. Alice recognized within herself a sort of relief that this was so. Every day her father went alone from the house to tend to the store, and every day Alice came alone to the house and went out again, with a
pack and a book, to a certain clearing she knew of around the side of the mountain.