Hex: A Novel (8 page)

“I don’t know,” the wife answered as her husband crested a rise and disappeared from sight. “I’ve never asked him. He never said.”

That day passed in the way of the others, marked only by a restless hunger that kept the father and the daughter on the move through the house, passing each other in the hallways, bumping into each other more than once in the kitchen which was small. Lunch was a sad affair: a wilted celery stick for them both, a handful of raisins, a hard-boiled egg. Her father’s face was set, the jawline sharp. He was looking a little brutal, which made her uneasy but also, a little bit, excited. What would happen next? she wondered.

When her husband came home it was late. The sun had long since gone down and she turned on the porch light so he could see to navigate his way around the cairns in the front yard. Her father had gone out.

“Fuck this,” he said, rising from the table where he had been sitting in front of an empty plate for an hour, his hands clenched around his silverware. “It’s nine o’clock. I’m going out for a beer.” He banged around in the hall closet for his coat and the daughter walked out into the yard with him, loitering between the rocks indecisively as her father, hands crammed into his pockets, walked down the road and disappeared over the ridge just as her husband had that morning.

She passed the evening in a dissolute fashion and, by the time she heard the front door open, had already gotten into her nightgown and was brushing out her hair in front of the vanity
which had sat in her bedroom since she was a child. She could tell it was her husband and not her father by the sound of his footsteps as he walked down the hall.

“Well,” she said as he leaned in the doorway. “What did you get?”

“You look beautiful,” her husband said. He looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes.

“Thanks,” she said and, though she knew once again it was slim pickings, she turned out the light and brought him to the bed where the sheets were cool beneath them and the night very long.

The next day she was awakened by her father making a lot of noise in the kitchen. Her husband was already up, already out of the house, and her father had discovered in his absence that all he had brought home the day before were some scraps he had found in a place where another party of hunters had cleaned their kill.

“What is this?” her father shouted, waving a fistful of viscera in her face, loops of intestine dangling almost to the floor. “And this?” he held up the heart, its strange oval tough and impervious. “This is what I am supposed to eat?” he yelled, tossing the heart onto the table where it slid into a candlestick and knocked it over.

“Calm down,” the daughter said. “I’ll make a gravy.” But it was clear something more had to be done.

That night her husband came home empty-handed and the next morning, at her father’s urging, the daughter waited until her husband had disappeared over the rise and set off to follow him. He travelled a long way and then, at a spot where the stone wall that bordered the road lay broken, he looked around him
and left the track for the forest. At first, the daughter thought she had lost him. She had to duck down behind the stone wall to keep from being seen and when she made it to the spot where he had entered the tree line there was no sign of him. Not a broken branch, not a bobbing leaf; it was as if he had vanished. But, as the daughter pushed her way into the dark, thick forest, she heard someone singing a little song.

It was her husband and he sang:

Come dance with me and be my love

My light in darkness, turtledove

Oh come to me, my heart’s desire

The clearing where I build my fire

He had a beautiful voice, high and silver at the top of the register, vibrating like a brass bell when he dipped into the lower notes. From behind a tree, the wife caught a glimpse of her husband’s blue shirt as he bent and picked a blade of grass, twirled it between his finger and thumb. He sang:

Against my body slide your hips

Against my body move your lips

And when it’s time for us to part

I’ll leave you with my beating heart

He used his fishing pole to hack a path in the forest and she followed it, trying to walk on the sides of her feet as her father had instructed her and so make little noise. The morning had been cool but, in the patches of sunlight that filtered into the forest, it was beginning to warm up. Sweat beaded on her upper
lip. She could feel it dampening the hair at the nape of her neck where it rubbed against the collar of her father’s coat which she had borrowed because it was warmer than her own. She paused as her husband paused and wiped her face on the shoulder of the jacket. It smelled like her father: a mixture of sweat and sunlight, a musk. Her husband sang:

So dance with me, my life’s embrace

And turn to me your lovely face

To love you always that I vow

If not forever, then for now

In this fashion they came out of the forest and to the bank of a swift river. The wife ducked behind a blackberry tangle and watched as her husband carefully wedged the tackle box and pole into a niche made by a tree trunk and a mossy boulder and began to strip off his clothes. As he took off each article—jacket, shirt, pants, underwear, socks—he folded them neatly and stacked them in a pile on top of the rock. Finally, he stood naked, still humming to himself, stretched his arms over his head and windmilled them as if warming up for something. She could see his ribs as they descended his back and the archipelago of his vertebra. She felt a little feverish, as if her senses were overly sharp. She could see his skin pucker into gooseflesh as a breeze struck him, the fine golden hairs that downed his lower back and swept over his buttocks, the cracks in the tough skin of his heels. Then her husband turned into an owl and flew out over the river.

She supposed she should have been more surprised. Shocked, even. Instead, she found herself admiring the sweep
of his wings as he downbeat to land on a snag of driftwood in the stream and the powerful flex of his claws as he drove them into the wood. He ruffled his feathers and looked around him.

“Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” her husband called.

She said to herself, “I thought I had married a man, but my husband is only an owl.” She tried to feel angry. She had been lied to, she and her father both. Yet, as she watched the owl blink its round, blue eyes, she found herself focusing only on the second half of her thought. “My husband is an owl,” she whispered and caught her breath.

For a long time her husband stared into the water and she watched him. At last, he swooped down and brought up in his claws a handful of sand from which he picked out a crawfish. He flew to the shore with the crawfish impaled on his talons, shuddering as it died, where he took the form of a man again, dressed carefully, one article at a time, and wrapped the crawfish in a dock leaf he pulled from a plant near where his wife was hiding. He was still humming his little song as he packed the crawfish in his creel and started for home. The wife followed him.

“And when it’s time for us to part,” the owl who was her husband sang. They were almost out of the forest. She could see up ahead the place where the light changed as the trees thinned. The wife felt very close to her husband. Something tremendous had been shared between them.

She thought of how hard her husband had to work to hide his owl nature, of how lonely he must be in his lie. He really was a good hunter for an owl, she thought and impulsively she jogged a few steps to close the gap between them, reached out and took her husband’s hand.

“I’ll give to you my beating heart,” the wife sang, finishing the line. Her husband turned to her, his eyes widening in shock. His face fluttered back and forth, shifting from a man’s face with its soft lips and sensitive eyebrows to an owl’s face: beak agape, eyes huge and gold and totemic.

“Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” her husband cried and she smiled and held out her arms to him.

Believe it or not, there are rules that govern such things. The husband knew them because he was an owl, but the wife had lived a more sheltered life in her father’s house. Even as her husband reached out to fold her in his arms (wings) his arms, she felt something happening to her body. Her back bent and then elongated, her arms stiffened, the elbow popping and bending in the wrong direction. There was a wrenching sensation in her pelvis, a stretching sensation in her neck. All over her body she felt a wash of prickling heat and her tongue became thick and heavy in her mouth.

“What?” the wife tried to say, but it came out of her mouth like, “Maa? Maa?” because, to her surprise, she found she had been transformed into a doe.

Her husband flew to a low branch and perched there, bobbing at the new level of her head. She examined herself, lifting her neat, black hooves, turning her head to consider the flirting tip of her soft, white tail. She was a fine creature with a shining coat and strong legs. She could feel the power in her new chest and haunches as she strode up and down the thicket. She could smell the rich underscent of the forest like never before and could interpret it and read its subtle warnings.

“Maa, maa. Maa, maa,” she said to her husband in great joy.

He nodded in agreement and sprung from the branch onto her back. And so they went off together deeper into the woods.

That evening her father waited in vain for his daughter and her husband to come home. He turned the porch light on to guide them and fell asleep fully clothed on the couch, his boots tightly laced in anticipation of whatever might be required of him. The next night passed in the same fashion and the next.

Finally, the father had to admit to himself that something had happened. He had searched the road and the fishing holes, all the deer and duck blinds and the ruddy meadows where the bucks came in the autumn to stamp. He had gone in and out of the caves in the hillside with a lantern and trod lightly through the underbrush looking for a trail, a stain, any sort of sign, but found nothing. No trace of his daughter. No trace of her husband. It was as if they had risen into the air and now walked in the world above this world where he could not follow them. He didn’t know what to do next, and so, for a while, he did nothing.

The father was unused to preparing his own meals and was clumsy in the kitchen. He ate poorly: undercooked scraps, strange combinations of condiment and meat. The father was also unused to providing his own entertainment. In the evenings he sat alone at the kitchen table where, in the past, he had sat with his daughter playing cards or just listening to her sing as he whittled at a stove-length. When she was a child, he had sat there with her and cleaned his knives and sharpened them. When she was a woman, he had watched her bend over her task and admired the simple way her hair caught the light. Now, the father was lonely, and the father was angry. What right? What right did either of them have: to go away from him, not to say goodbye?

Eventually, the last of father’s store of dried deer jerky ran out and the very same morning he fried and ate the last of his
eggs with the last grainy pat of his butter. It was time to move on and so the father went to the hall closet and assembled his scents and whistles, his camouflaged jacket, his bullets, his gun. He set off into the forest to hunt.

Toward noon, after a frustrated early morning tromping through a land that seemed suddenly emptied of all of its animal denizens, the father took a break to eat a light meal he had packed: a heel of bread, a scrap of cheese, a little thermos filled with coffee. He was sitting in a lean-to he had built with his own two hands many years ago when the daughter’s mother was alive and he was barely out of his boyhood. The lean-to faced onto a small meadow which was grown up in starflowers and the bobbing heads of mountain daisies. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear. The father was surprised the lean-to was still there and, as he ate, admired his work which had survived untended all these seasons as the world around it changed.

Suddenly, as the father swallowed his last bite of bread, a doe appeared in the tree line and stepped into the meadow. The father could not believe his luck. He eased his rifle up onto his knee and then to his shoulder as the doe dropped her head to browse in the grass. For a moment, the father watched her through his sights. She was young, graceful. He almost felt guilty for shooting her. But, he thought, he’d build her a fine tall cairn at the peak of the chimney and so, exhilarated, he pulled the trigger and dropped her just as an owl burst from the forest for some reason and flapped into the field. Disoriented, the father supposed, by the sound of the shot and the bright, spring light.

“Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” the owl cried, its voice harsh and wild and familiar, but the father beat it away with his hat as he knelt beside the doe to finish her and take her home.

It had been a good shot, just above the heart, and the doe’s chest was rapidly filling with blood. She would die soon, but the father was not an uncompassionate man. He grabbed her by the muzzle and pulled her head back, exposing the long line of her throat which he cut with a business-like slash of his knife. She kicked once and his hands and wrists were bathed in her blood.

But what was this? Just as he cut her, the doe’s face flickered for an instant and he seemed to see—hadn’t he known all along?—the face of his daughter, her mouth agape, cheeks pale. He looked again, and it was only a deer there below him, but even as the light dwindled from them he recognized some slide of her eyes, some expression, and knew in an instant what he had done.

“Jesus Christ,” said the father, the breath knocked out of him. He pressed his hands to the deer’s ruptured throat, but it was too late. His daughter was dead.

For a long time, the father knelt in the meadow over her cooling body. The owl stayed too, clinging to a branch of a tree, crying out until his repeated call penetrated the father’s concentration and so annoyed him he rose to his feet, raging and throwing rocks, forcing the owl to fly heavily away.