Hex: A Novel (7 page)

It is easy to imagine a romance in this. Two girls in white—I had changed into my nightgown—asleep under the eaves of the house like dolls filled with wadded cotton. Often Thingy and I would go to bed before the men, both exhausted by Thingy’s pregnancy, and this is what I would imagine then, lying in the close dark that is the second floor of any wood-heated house, listening to the drift and pitch of Jacob and Daniel’s voices as they crossed the floors below.

Two dolls, silly things, picked for their pretty faces and the
engaging lilt of their limp necks. Two dolls, heads too large, bodies sexless blanks ready to be dressed. But then, with the house finally silent and the moon gone round the mountain peak, its crescent a soaring caliper measuring the sky, an eye might open, roll. A finger with a hole in the center just the right size for a stone might stir and lift.

Most nights I went downstairs first and Thingy joined me. We sat in the kitchen, the only light a conical spill from the battered overhead lamp, and ate the leavings of dinner, often the makings for the next night’s meal, talking, remembering some things, mutually and silently agreeing to forget others. Being with each other as we had always been and you held between us in your hot chamber, waiting only for the word that would call to you and you alone: awake!

When I awoke, it was much later. Jacob had come to bed and was lying with one arm crossing my stomach, hand limp over my hip. The house was quiet. I was a little worried you would wake up when I got out of bed (you often do, imperious, I might add, as if I owe you some explanation of just what I am about), but you were heavy and still, your white sleeping singlet aglow in the faint light seeping through the window.

In the kitchen, I erased a sign. In the living room and before the front and back doors. At each of the windows, I erased a sign, and at the foot of the stairs, at the end of the long hallway where I paused for a moment to look over the yard, each object in it picked out by starlight against the black swale of the forest. I erased a sign over each of the bedroom lintels and at the bottom of the stair which lead to the attic. Finally, I cracked the door to Daniel’s room, paused there to listen for his uninterrupted breath, and slipped inside.

I was almost finished, a sign wiped from under the bed, the door to the closet, the windowsill, when, from the tin roof of the woodshed which joined the wall just below the window, something hurled itself at the glass. It was one of the cats, the female: fat and white and fond of Thingy who used to leave the window open for her at night. She rubbed her wedge head against the glass followed by her body, the flirting tip of her tail. Then she came around again and spat, battered the pane with her paw. Her white face was sharp as a snake’s, her eyes slitted. I stumbled backwards and Daniel caught me by the wrist.

“What are you doing?” he said, reasonably enough. He was turning his head back and forth on the pillow the way he might if he had a fever, trying to find a length of cool cloth with his cheek. “What time is it?” but even as he asked he was pulling me back into the bed with him, and even as I answered, something innocuous, some dull tale of drudgery, he was pulling my nightgown over my hips and I was helping him, arcing my back, sliding my haunches up as he moved on top of me and met me, as he looked down at me, his eyes navy blue in the bad light and inside them a smaller Daniel pressing into me, a smaller one inside that. Smaller and smaller until he was so minute he could stop inside that one long shuddering moment and look around.

Afterward, I slept in Daniel’s bed. Sometime toward dawn, he surfaced long enough from sleep to ask, “What was at the window?”

“It was her again,” I said, staring out into the graying corners of the room. The birds were waking up, starting all over as they did every morning, too brainless to remember where they left off.

“The cat?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I meant.”

Once there was a widower who had an only daughter. He was always admonishing her to marry a good hunter, someone who could provide for her and keep her into her old age. This was somewhat ironic because the widower himself, who had been renowned about the county in his younger years for his sharp eye and skill with a knife, had forsaken hunting all together in favor of building cairns out of river rocks in the backyard. He was building a cairn for every animal he had ever killed. As he had lived many long seasons alone with plenty of time on his hands and had all those years a daughter to feed, this meant the backyard was rapidly starting to fill
with stones. All the grass had been smothered, the tomato vines crushed.

“But father,” said the girl as she stood on the back porch and surveyed the ruin, “I’m too young to marry.”

“Nonsense,” said her father, taking off a work glove to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Why, when I was your age, I had already outlived two wives and soon would have outlived a third. You’re never too young to make a start in the world.”

The cairns were often top heavy and had no mortar to hold the individual stones together. No matter where the father and daughter went in the house, at all times of the day or night they heard the sounds of rocks sliding off each other and clunking to the ground. “Goddamnit,” the father would say, “there goes another one.” Much of his mornings were spent repairing the existing record before he could go on to commemorate something new.

Well, they lived in this way for a long time: the father admonishing, surrounded by rocks; the daughter washing the dishes, swirling her rag around the face of each dish as if it were the face of a human man, a husband she would come to love. Her father’s cairns grew more and more elaborate and pressed closer to the house until one day the daughter arose to discover that there were pebbles piled up against the glass at every window and boulders in a dusty jumble blocking the front and back door. Smooth river-stones filled the chimney so that their fireplace had become a rockslide, their foyer a cave-in, their house itself a cave pierced by rays of strange, golden light.

“Dad,” said the girl, “what were you thinking?” But her father was building a monument to a flea out of sand and didn’t reply.

That was the day a suitor finally came for her.

It was her father who answered the door and gave the man he found there a hand as he scrambled down the loose slope of a cairn dedicated to her father’s childhood pet, a budgie named Mary. Her father helped him brush off the knees of his pants and retrieved his hat, knocked from his head by the doorframe during his entrance and rolled all the way to the living room where it had come to a rest under the couch.

“Shit,” said her father, eyeing the damage to Mary’s cairn ruefully. He pulled a pad of paper from his back pocket and added Mary’s name to the list of cairns to repair which, while very long, still did not compare to the list of ones yet to be built. “What’s your business?” he asked the visitor who was peering around him as if even the dim light of the house hurt his eyes. The man was tall and thin and in need of a haircut. He wore an entirely brown suit with a brown hat to match which he held up before him and turned in his hands as if studying it, darting glances at the father over the bridge of his short, hooked nose.

“Well, sir,” said the suitor, for it was he, “I’ve come to ask for your young woman. Or not quite,” he corrected himself, fluttering the hat in the air as if to erase what he had said. “I’ve come to ask if you would ask her for me. Your daughter, I mean. I want to make her my wife.” He had a strange way of talking, winding down through his sentences so they ended on a wheeze. The daughter, who had been in the kitchen this whole time counting the cutlery, a task she assigned for herself once a week, rain or shine, popped her head around the doorframe to look at him. When he saw her he smiled and gave a little wave.

“Hmm,” said the father, sizing him up. “You look pretty weedy to me. Only a good hunter can marry my daughter. It’s kind of a sticking point.”

“Oh, but I’m just that kind,” said the suitor.

“Are you sure?” said the father, sounding doubtful.

“I am just that kind,” the suitor repeated, bending his knees and bobbing a little as if for emphasis.

“I’ll talk to her,” the father said. “But don’t hold your breath.”

After the suitor had left, seeing himself out, the father came into the kitchen and sat down heavily across from his daughter who had reached seventy-five knives and was on to the spoons.

“I suppose you heard that,” the father said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. The daughter had noticed recently that her father was starting to look older. While this called up in her unpleasant reminders of her own mortality—and what would she do with him when he was too old to care for himself, too tired to walk down the side of the mountain looking for rocks, too sore to haul them home and fit them into their piles?—it was not a bad look for her father. He was the sort of man who had settled into his features as he aged. He had olive skin, a mobile, soft mouth, deep lines curving on either side of it from the high bones of his cheeks. He had black hair which he wore closely cropped on the sides and longer on top so it hung in a rakish forelock over his forehead. Recently, it had become marked with the same flecks of white as his sparse chest hair which grew in an even T on his chest. He was fit, all that rock-carrying, and in general looked as if he were blazing with the last full light of day—harder and faster and stronger than the indeterminate hours of morning or mid afternoon—that bursts
from the ridges of the mountain just before the long, gentle descent into night.

Though she did not often examine the thought, the daughter had always sort of hoped that her husband-to-be, good hunter or not, would resemble her father in some small way. This one did not. He was too thin and looked soft under his suit. His skin was too pale, almost luminous, and instead of her father’s almond-shaped, brown eyes, the suitor’s eyes were perfectly round and blue, an unnatural shade as if he had dipped his irises in dye and slipped them back into his head still wet. His hair, a tawny sort of yellow, floated up from his head and curled out over his ears like feathers. He was, all together, an unimpressive specimen. . .but he had seemed kind.

But no one else had called.

“I don’t know,” said the daughter, polishing a spoon with the hem of her cotton dress. “What do you think?”

Her father looked at her and then he smiled, reached across the table to put his slim, hard fingertips on the back of her hand. “You’re a beautiful girl,” he said, turning her hand over and tracing the cup of her palm in a way that had always made her shiver. “He said he was a good hunter. I think it’s a match.”

“Just as you say,” said the daughter and so the matter was arranged.

The next day when the suitor came back, the father met him in the front yard between a soapstone cairn for a deer struck on the highway and a teetering slate one for a mouse in a trap, and gave the suitor his daughter’s hand. That evening they were wed and went immediately away for a short honeymoon in the Catskills where the suitor had rented a cabin. They went skiing and snowshoeing, ate heavy meals and stayed up talking and
drinking wine by the fire. One afternoon they went for a long walk in the forest and came upon a clearing where it was so quiet they could hear each breath as they took it, almost the blood as it whooshed around in their veins.

“This is beautiful,” said the wife, taking her husband’s gloved hand in hers. The pines were tall and still. Heavy snow drifted against their trunks, cut into ripples by the wind.

“Beautiful,” said the husband and he kissed her in his nipping, hesitant way which—she closed her eyes and examined her reaction—she believed she was beginning to learn to like.

At the end of the honeymoon they returned home to her father’s house where they were going to live temporarily until they got on their feet. In her absence, her father seemed to have been busier than ever. The gutters were filled with shifting piles of pebbles; the roof was lined with them. On one side of the house, her father had begun to build cairns on top of cairns and so brought the rocks up level to the roof, which they had spilled onto, which they were starting to consume.

“Can you live like this?” the wife asked her husband.

He shrugged, stroking his chin. “It’s only for a little while,” he said.

The very next morning, the husband said he would go out hunting. He began to gather all the necessary accoutrements: the different scents and whistles, the camouflaged jacket, the bullets, the gun, but before he could finish getting ready, he changed his mind and said he would go fishing instead. An hour or so later, in hip waders and a cap pierced with hooks, he kissed his wife at the door and left, pole slung over his shoulder, bait box dangling from his fist. He was gone the entire day which the wife spent in much the same fashion as she had when she was the daughter.
She did the laundry and then sat on the couch in the living room. She made her father a sandwich and then washed his plate and watched him through a chink she had cleared at the kitchen window as he strode around the backyard with a measuring tape, checking the cairns for unnoticed drift.

In the afternoon, she watched a television program about two elephants who had been sent to a rescue park to live out the last years of their lives and, though they had been separated all that time, recognized each other from their babyhood as the stars of a traveling circus show. In the end, one of the elephants died and the friend went back to the place they had last been together to do things like lean disconsolately against a tree and turn over rocks with the tip of her sensitive trunk. It made the daughter a little weepy, though she had known from the beginning this was how it would end. She turned off the television and read a couple of chapters of a book instead. Soon, she drifted off to sleep on the old plaid couch where she had slept many an afternoon away in her long time in that house, lulled by the sound of her father pounding two rocks together in rhythmic counterpoint to the ticking of the clock which hung above her head.

When she woke up, her husband was home. He had brought only three small fish which she cleaned and scaled and pan-fried in butter, keeping their bones for a soup.

“No luck?” said her father. He pushed his meager portion back and forth on the plate, knife scraping against the china.

“Not today,” said her husband, bobbing his head up and down over his fork as if too nervous to take the bite into his mouth.

“Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure,” she said.

The next day her husband went out again to a different fishing spot at which he claimed to have never had a bad day. “Brook trout as big as your arm!” he said, wheezing. “Their bellies fat and speckled, eyeballs good for soup. You’ll see,” he said, kissing her at the door. In his excitement he nipped her so sharply that afterwards she checked her lip for blood.

The day passed in much the same way: laundry and dishes, watching and reading. The clock in the living room—a wood block carved with figures of rabbits and a swooping owl her father had picked up somewhere before she was born—broke the hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds, the seconds into even smaller parts that were so quickly gone they had no names.

Finally, her husband came home, but she saw right away he had not been successful. He had a sheepish air about him, pausing in the hallway to bob in the door frame and look in on her where she lay reading on the couch, and he carried the creel slung from his fist as if his prey were very light. In fact, there was almost nothing in it at all: just two worthless spring lizards limp inside a folded dock leaf, their bodies pierced as if he had caught them with a spear.

“What am I supposed to do with these?” the wife asked her husband, holding one of the lizards up by its tail. “My father will never eat a lizard,” she said, shaking her head.

“Does he have to know?” said her husband. “Couldn’t you bake them into something?”

She was dubious, but she set about making individual pot-pies, rolling the dough out thick, covering the butchered lizards with a kitchen towel as her father came into the house and walked past her, went into the bathroom to wash up for the meal. “What happened, anyway,” she asked her husband who was sitting at the
kitchen table watching her work. “I thought this place was a sure bet. Brook trout as big as my arm, remember?”

“I know, I know,” said her husband, hanging his head. “Everything was going really well, but then a bird came along and scared all the fish. I would have shot it, but I didn’t bring my gun.”

He looked so mournful, blinking his round eyes at her, his shoulders hunched, that she took pity on him and after the meal, which her father picked at and largely did not eat, the wife pulled her husband into their bedroom and locked the door. In the dim light that filtered through the rocks covering the window, she looked down at her husband’s body, at his hand on her breast, at his bony chest rising up to her as he propped himself up on one elbow, and thought, just for a minute, she saw a wash of feathers fluttering at his throat. But this was wrong, of course, and in the middle of the night she looked over at her husband and saw only the face of a man, relaxed in sleep, his brow smooth and unlined.

The next morning, the husband announced he was going hunting today and fetched his gun out of the hall closet. She stood in the doorway and watched him weave around the cairns and walk down the road, his peculiar characteristic gait making him look as if he were edging sideways along a steep drop instead of walking down a perfectly level, freshly paved lane. She leaned against the doorframe, thinking, peeling thin strips of paint away from the wood and dropping them on the stoop.

“Where’s he going?” her father said, appearing at her shoulder and making her jump.

“I don’t know,” the daughter answered. “He said it was a spot he knew about from when he used to go hunting with his dad. When he was a kid.”

“Humph,” said her father. “Around here? What was his father’s name? I would have known him, and I don’t think I remember anyone’s kid that looked like that.”