Hex: A Novel (9 page)

The father returned to the body of the doe that was his daughter and considered the situation. It was tragic to be sure—he pictured her face as a child, her sweet lips, her fat hand clutching his—but he was not a man who believed in waste. After all, life must be taken if another life is to be lived. This, he believed, was the way it had always been So, with his eyes hard and his mouth set, the father took out his sharpest knife and slit the doe who was his daughter as he would have any other deer.

In no time at all, he had gutted her and, hoisting her carcass onto his shoulders, the father carried his daughter out of the
woods and back to his home. He dried her meat and lived off of it for a long time, honing his cooking skills to grill tender steaks and drying her flanks to a jerky he cured with his own special rub. For awhile the father kept his daughter’s heart in a jar of formaldehyde, for sentimental reasons he supposed. But the seal was imperfect and when the muscle started to rot, fraying in gauzy tendrils that floated to the surface of the jar, the father dumped it out in a creek behind the house and watched as his daughter’s heart was washed away.

What happened next hardly matters. The father lived a long life, mostly alone, and died one fine summer morning when the weight of the cairns collapsed the roof and crushed him as he sat at the kitchen table salting his eggs. Where the daughter’s viscera had been strewn a spring welled up, cold and fresh. The animals came out of the woods to drink there, often exposing themselves to other hunters who used the father’s lean-to for many years to hide themselves as they waited for prey. The owl who had been her husband went deep into the forest where he pined away in grief and love until there was no flesh on any part of his body except for his head. He looked just like the owl he was for the rest of his days and when he called his wild call the young hunters all shivered and looked over their shoulders. They crossed themselves twice and performed other superstitions, but no harm ever came to them.

“Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” the owl called and mothers who were sick of their children crying for attention would say to hear an owl’s cry was to hear the sound of your death. They were wrong, it turned out, but no matter. At a certain age, a child will believe anything it is told.

To the mother nine months can be a very long time. The body becomes gravid, its bloom withering and pulling back from the fruit. The woman’s natural focus lowers. If she is a person who is drawn to gaze at the sky, she begins to scan the treetops. If she is the sort of woman who looks a man in the eye when she speaks, she considers his gut, his shins, his choice of shoes. Her perceptions sharpen. She draws new conclusions about the nature of his business with her and she is correct. For some women the nine months are spent in anticipation, for some (my mother) in ratcheting anxiety. I am saying, there are many ways to be pregnant, but there are not very many ways to be born.

If left to her own devices, everything around the mother will sing to her: Push Push Push. The teakettle sings it and the weave of the rug. The mother’s own muscles and the baby of course, the baby-to-be not yet separate but already filled with volition.

Push Push Push sings the trestle table and the serving platter, the gardening magazine, the creamer cups cut for starter seeds. Push sings the clock, out of tune, and the egg timer, out of tempo.

oh push oh push

it is a tinkling aria spraying out of the faucet.

Puuuush Puuuuush

a dirge gargled by the eggplants which are drowning in the sink.

a PUSH even spared for the mother in the siren song of the ambulance which is wailing up Top Road, though not to her address, and carries in its dutiful belly a jangling array of vials and tinctures, hypodermics and gleaming silver tools which too are humming the little tune. It also carries the EMTs who are singing something different.
Break For Lunch
, perhaps, or
Bright Clean Morning
, or
Acceptable Risk
.

When all goes well the birth song is a tight melody, absorbing and tinged with just the right amount of melancholy. It is the sort of thing the Ladies Rotary would have driven en masse to Atlanta to see and come back secretly abashed by the intellectualism of it all, the lack of whimsy or costume changes.

“But why couldn’t the mother have
dressed
a little better?” one of the Ladies might say after a meeting where, let’s face it, they’ve had some wine. “Why couldn’t she have worn some makeup, or a hat to give her a little
shade
.”

But when left to her own devices, the mother does not wear a hat. She does not wear anything at all. She twists out of her elastic-waisted maternity pants as she feels them soak through, unbuttons her husband’s flannel shirt over her breasts and rippling belly because she is hot, unbearably hot, the animal she has always known herself to be writhing on the floor, looking for a little more air, a little more room.

This is how my father found her when he came home that afternoon. He was working construction at the time and had spent the day driving nails at cross-angles into the framework of a house in the foothills that, when finished, would have the same outlandish foyer and faux French-rustic hutch kitchen as the other twenty-seven houses into whose framework he would drive cross-angled nails at more or less even intervals day in and day out until the development was finished. That is to say, off and on at different identical dug-outs in the mountainside for the rest of his life. That is to say, my father was a young man, not long married, who had already become suicidal with boredom.

His only defense was to develop the dubious skill of switching himself off at will. Thus, at work my father was a hammer or a post-hole digger or a line of fuse or a pair of scarred leather gloves. He was a vessel, an emptied one, whose condition depended not on being filled, but on preserving the perfect counterbalance between the weight of his body and the blank, humming static of his mind.

I have always thought of my father at work as something akin to the flipbooks Thingy and I drew as children. My father: 100 tiny pictures of a man driving nails into a board. When the pages were riffled the man would work. Rill them forward and he would drive the nails, rill them backward and he would conjure them free. But when they came to rest as they must eventually do, the illusion was revealed to be nothing more than those 100 tiny, repeated pictures. A man holding a hammer. A man holding a hammer. A man holding a hammer.

This meant when my father was at home, or at least not at work, and turned the humming synapses of his mind back on, he was often all but overwhelmed by the electrical backup, the sheer voltage of the release. When I was born, there was already evidence of my father’s double life scattered about the house and property. The basement was littered with abandoned cathodes and stripped wires from his radio period; the ceiling of Luke’s room was crowded with hive-like, papier-mâché bundles from his Mardi Gras phase; all the sinks in the house were stained with rings of elderberry, poke and toadflax from his short-lived, home-dying period. I still have a pair of socks my father dyed with the poke.

He gave Thingy a pair of toadflax mittens. These were by far his most successful project. They were wool and could be folded back at the tip and fastened either open or shut by two jolly, oversized buttons stitched to the wristband. My father bought them from the Feed Store at the Spring Discount Sale and let them soak and dry and soak again several times in the dye he prepared from the bushel of fresh flowers he somehow convinced the Pinta to pick for him. The result was a sunny, cheerful color that reminded me of a chick’s fluff—mittens that fairly cheeped with optimism—and a yellow stain that ringed
the metal lip of the kitchen drain like runnels of undercooked yolk and fooled the Nina, the only one of the girls who could be motivated to do house work, into extra scrubbing every time.

Thingy wore the mittens the next winter, but said they itched, and quickly they became too small. When I cleaned out her drawers in the house—thinking to save them for your future winters, Ingrid—they were nowhere to be found, but I can’t believe she would have just thrown them away. Thingy felt about my father the way all women do. I could tell by the way she came across him in the house: he bent over some project at the kitchen table, or coming in the backdoor with welder’s goggles pushing his hair into a silky crest above his forehead, and she always seeming to turn the corner, just happening into the room. Sliding out of a shadow and into the shared light while she called some non sequitur over her shoulder to me and laughed as if, no matter what we had just been doing, we were nothing more than simple girls, merry ones, the type who spilled over.

My father started most of these projects in the years after my mother died, but it would be a mistake to think of this tendency in him as a result of his grief. It was more like restlessness. The kind of tense, muscular pacing one sometimes sees in big cats at the circus or zoo—like a panther I saw on a filmstrip at school pacing in the background. While the narrator explained the fragility of her ecosystem, she brushed against the bars of her cage with her side and reached up to swipe at the same steel joist at every pass. Before, after, and most probably during his time with my mother, my father satisfied this urge toward motion with a variety of women he met in bars, on handyman visits, up on the cliffs overlooking the town’s quarry where they had gone with their boyfriends to drink and sun. I don’t think he
meant to be cruel. It was just that they didn’t last, or at least the parts of them he needed didn’t last: glistening summer hip, raw winter mouth, the abandon in the throat and shoulders that showed him the risk they were taking together.

Once he said to me, “The sooner you figure out what a woman is like, the better off you’ll be.” We were in the backyard at the time. He was surveying the stone wall, picking up loose stones and either piling them back on top or flipping them over into Mr. Clawson’s yard based on a sorting principle clear only to him. He had a half-drunk beer in his hand and another bottle crammed into the back pocket of his jeans which was stretched thin by just such use the way another man’s pocket might have been worn by the pressure of his wallet or car keys. I was ambling along after him. It was a sunny day, early autumn. The mountains smelled like burning leaves and cold weather coming and something richer, darker, more subtle. The old trees in Mr. Clawson’s orchard bowed under the weight of their hard, green fruit. I loved my father. I was very young.

“What is a woman like?” I said when he didn’t continue on his own.

He hitched the bottle out of his pocket and sat down on the wall facing our house. My father was handsome in an exponential way. As a younger man, his face had been hard with the sort of brutal muscularity that only served to make his babyish lips and wide, dark eyes all the more striking. Hallmarks of the invisible wound on his soul, I imagine women like my mother thought. As he had gotten older, however, his face had thinned. His cheeks hollowed, showing off his high cheekbones, and deep, mobile lines had been etched around his lips. His hair, which he wore long and tied in a ponytail at his neck, was flecked with grey at the temples, and his skin was as smooth and soft as
chamois with the same supple porelessness. It was hard not to be affected by my father. He expected it. He took it for granted.

Without looking at me, he stretched out an arm and beckoned me into the space at his side. Made just for me, is what he was implying, and as I nestled there, his hard, brown hand cupping my shoulder, I realized that other smell was the scent of him: a spice wafting up from his armpit that smelled like gold and leaf-meal, sun-warmed soil and, somehow, the sea.

“A woman is like a lot of things,” said my father. “But mostly she is like the first picture she ever saw of herself where she really thought she looked damn good.” He took a swallow of his beer and propped the empty in a chink in the wall. “If you can find that picture and study it, see what she’s wearing and how her eyes look and if her mouth is open or closed, you can learn a lot about the kind of person she thinks she is going to be.”

He wasn’t really talking to me, but I was there and I was listening. “Pass me that bottle, will you, darling?” my father said, and I bent down and got it for him. For a moment, while he twisted it open, my father held me tightly in the circle of his arms, my face pressed against his chest where I could hear his breath and the beat of his heart. I thought about my own picture. Had it been taken yet? Would I recognize it when I saw it?

I was filled with a terrible fear that I would not, that I would go through life with no image of myself—my head tipped at some characteristic angle, light falling across my cheek and my neck—and so I would be lost. And so there would be no marker of my passing.

In the years before Rosellen, my father sometimes brought women over to the house. It was always the more encumbered ones, the married or engaged, and always at odd times of the
day. Sometimes in the early morning before school, while the Pinta bided her time before her replacement arrived by dozing at the kitchen window and scraping the char off my breakfast toast into the sink, my father, who I hadn’t realized was even up much less gone from the house, would come in the infrequently used front door and lean through the passway into the kitchen. Then he would extend an arm back to the dawn-lit living room—our battered sofa, recliner, fireside knickknacks all looking somber and portentous in the new light—and usher her in, whichever her it was.

“My family,” my father might say and the Pinta, who found my father overwhelming, would mottle like an overripe strawberry and sidle into action: toast on the plate, knife in the jam jar, spoon loaded with oatmeal hoisted to my brother’s slack, wet lips.

What must we have looked like to her, to whichever her, who had found this man stranded up against some hard place—the hard work, the deep glass. Now here was this whole other romance to be dealt with. The stupid or very young ones cooed at us and tried to pitch in. “What a smart looking girl,” they might say about me, or they would sit next to Luke and enunciate their names very clearly to him—Bev-er-LY, a-MAN-da, CAIT-lin—or even pick up the spoon and take over his feeding. This was generally all right with the Pinta who by this point would be all but overcome by my father’s presence. She would shuffle down the hall to Luke’s bedroom, a sad, soft specter, and return divested of her bashful flannel nightgown to loiter about the brightening living room in varying shades of denim, a red plastic heart or cherry dangling from her ponytail to catch my father’s eye.

If the Nina were there that day, however, the ground of the kitchen would not be ceded. Where the woman might lift the
spoon, the Nina would brandish a damp kitchen rag to scrub over my brother’s lips and chin. Where the woman might look over my shoulder to see what I was reading—I always reading, what else could I do?, a girl child, an ugly one, no mother and a father so lovely he could spin women out of the air like clouds wrapped around a woman-shaped spindle—the Nina would remove a half-loaded plate, clatter a handful of sticky silverware and generally lean, her bony shadow like a bouquet of thistles cast across the table.

Sometimes Thingy spent the night, even on school nights, more and more frequently as her father traveled and no second child came to disrupt her mother’s precise domestic management, and was there in the morning cordoning off her breakfast foods: a tablespoon of cottage cheese, a isosceles triangle of dry toast, five dusky blueberries savored individually from the tines of her fork. If my father was taken aback by her presences, he gave no notice of it. It was unclear if he even recognized that Thingy was not, or should not have been, a regular member of his household. When the woman said, “What a beautiful daughter,” my father did not correct her. Instead he would nod and smile sorrowfully, absent even as his gaze passed over us and lifted up to the hanging kitchen light and past that to the ivy border my mother had painted in lieu of crown molding at the top of the walls while his big, pop-knuckled hand stroked absently up and down the woman’s thigh.

My father’s most successful projects were ones in which he could use some of the same skills his body performed so mechanically at his jobs during the day. In our steep back yard, for example, my father had envisioned some kind of mechanical petting zoo. Using scraps from an array of construction sites,
he had welded together a junk-heap donkey, a pig, two oversized chickens and an ambitious and terrifying dragon whose serpentine body, made of oil drums and partially unsprung steel mattress springs, still dives in and out of the slope. Its tail tip is a garden trowel pointing a rusty arrow at Thingy’s back door, and its battered coffee-can head—the eyes bicycle reflectors half lidded by snuff tins, the fangs saw blades that jut over the upper lip—rests on the ledge of the kitchen window where it oversaw my dinner for the entire length of my childhood.