Hex: A Novel (2 page)

“I have been loved,” she said, “by something strange and it has forgotten me.”

—Djuna Barnes

“The Future has an ancient heart.”

—Carlo Levi

I HAVE KNOWN Thingy since before we were born. This is not hyperbole. The womb is patterns of light and heat. Rose light, black light; a wave of heat that is the sun or a heating pad shifting as the mother rolls in bed. The fetus doesn’t know the mother’s body because it doesn’t yet know its own body, but it knows light and heat and Thingy was like a searchlight beaming from the guntower. She was intermittent, penetrating. As her mother turned to face mine, she beamed to me through the old walls of her father’s house and the walls built around those originals, over the gullies of her father’s orchard and up the increasing hill, past the stone border which somebody’s great-grandfather (not
mine) had stacked and through the flapping sheets and sodden jeans of my mother’s clothesline to my mother, stretching with her hands on the small of her back, clothespins clipped to the hem of her dress. My mother stooped over the basket and rose with a paisley patterned sheet, a garland of my father’s dripping boxer shorts to hang like Christmas lights along the line.

In my neonatal life, Thingy was a dazzling code: Darkness, Brilliance, Darkness, Brilliance. This could also be described as solitude and awareness. At first I was alone, a pulse, the convulsive absorption of nutrient and oxygen. Then there was another, something that came from Outside, which contained within its shape—like mine, our bodies unconsciously mimicking each other’s tuck and slow gillessness—an awareness of Outside and thus, inversely, an awareness of Inside, of Self, of Me. It is to Thingy, who did nothing but latch to her mother’s womb and stick around, that I owe what has been described as my almost supernatural composure. It is also to Thingy that I owe my greed.

And now, as if by accident, I have begun my story. There will be consequences to this telling. Perhaps to me, more likely to Ingrid the Second who even now, asleep in the basket tucked in the corner next to my table, kicks a prescient leg as if warning me away. She is so new she still can slip effortlessly into the no-space of before; she is effortlessly alone. She yawns and I can see the jutting berms from which, in a few months time, her teeth will erupt. Surely it is a mother’s heart that wishes them sharp—fish-killing teeth cut to strip the fine bones. She yawns again, fisting a hand near her mouth, her palate receding in pale ridges like the gullet of a minute whale. She is enormous in her infancy, her fingernails so sharp I have to keep her hands
snapped inside terry-cloth mittens or she will scratch her cheeks open. She is growing and growing. Every day she appreciably grows.

The men are on the porch—one as always talking and the other present only in the slow creak of his chair. The sun slips past the edge of the tallest ridge, another early dusk. Soon, Ingrid the Second’s father will come into the room, as he does, to marvel over her basket and Jacob will lean in the doorway watching me; I will get up and begin again the work of being a woman in this strict house. But for now the table before me is strewn with papers and the light from the lamp I’ve switched on mellows the mountain shadows that begin with the dusk to wick through my window. A bee, disoriented, attracted by the flowered dash of my curtains, beats herself against the glass. Her body makes a tiny sound, a patter that reflects nothing of the terrible bruising she must feel and when she finally reels away, stuttering back to the hives, Ingrid the Second relaxes a tension I hadn’t recognized and lets loose a trilling, liquid fart as if she had struggled along with the bee, battering the panes of an inexplicably hindering world.

From the porch the men are seeing the last of the day flash out exuberant in the summer ridges, but from my window it is already dark—our yard filled with shadow, the henhouse quiet, the hives settling by the creek, the forest pressing closer, testing its borders. I hear the screen door creak, Ingrid’s father’s voice draw closer. “But you agree it’s a philosophical problem,” he is saying to Jacob, “not a social one, not a practical one. A problem of misplaced will.” Jacob’s answer isn’t audible, but I hear his particular footsteps coming down the hall and in these last moments, seconds as he rounds the corner, I begin, I begin, I begin.

This is my story. I am sorry for nothing. Should Thingy appear now, tapping on the window, I would say, “Dear Love: Remember, now you are nameless, but I am still here.”

“I am here,” I would say, “and my name is Alice Small.”

My mother was the daughter of a family of some small renown; my father was infamous. They were raised in adjacent towns, but where we are from that may as well have been different kingdoms—the geography of the mountains is jealous and indifferent to the human need for a hive. So the story of their meeting is like a fairy tale in which there is a King and a Queen, a Princess, a Knight, a Dragon. I used to tell it to my brother Luke in quiet hours when Thingy was away at her flute lesson or her tap-dancing class—her tap-dancing costume was a red tulle skirt and a black leotard armored with sequins; I coveted it and picked sequins from its hem at every opportunity—but it
was never clear, even to me, which of my family members filled which roles.

My mother, I have been told, was a good student, pretty in her way with long brown hair that was slick at the tips from her habit of sucking it as she read. She had very small teeth, some sharp, which were spaced far apart from each other. When she smiled she gave the impression of jumble and roominess all at once. This made her self-conscious, as it might any girl, so she rarely smiled, or when she did she raised a hand to her mouth as if her smile were a private thing, self-referential and treasured.

It might have been that mannerism that so attracted my father. Or it might have been her hair-sucking habit, her tendency to keep place in her book with a hawk’s feather, or the way her skirt slipped up over her round knees. It might simply have been the fact that my father, then as now, is a roving cock, as helpless to contain himself as he is to constrain the desires of the many women who see him as a once-in-a-lifetime lay. The kind of fuck they will learn from and bring home to their husbands as a gift to the marriage.

However it came about, my mother and my father met.

My mother’s father owned the longest running business in the town of Elevation: the Taut County Feed & Seed which he had inherited from his father who had founded it with his father as a dam to stem the tide of money flowing out of the mountains and down into the Piedmont where, every spring, mountain farmers were forced to make the winding trek to buy their seeds and supplies for the short growing season up in our old, thin-soiled hills. The Feed Store began as a typical farmer’s co-op selling sweet alfalfa hay, turnip and beet seed, various
equipments, cracked corn for the hens, sorghum grain, lengths of calico cloth, calipers and rolls of cattle wire, post-hole diggers, crackers and hunks of waxy cheese, multiple poisons, dark bulbs for the ladies to bury in rings around the well.

By the time my grandfather inherited the store the times had begun to change, if not the mountains. For one thing, there weren’t as many farmers around. These had been old families—the McClountrys, the Rourkes, the Talberschmidts—who had washed up in the ports of South Carolina and found the low country too stagnant and bloated for their tastes. I imagine them as evolutionary tangents, covered with a coarse, russet hair and many-jointed, spidering their way up into the hills where they found some semblance of the lands they had left. For the McClountrys and Rourkes perhaps it was the air, thin and sinewy; for the Talberschmidts perhaps the fauna—squirrels like those in the vast Bavarian forests, boars truffeling the loam, black bears as beetle-eyed and innocent as the witch’s many victims transformed from boys and girls into ignorant, powerful brutes.

In my grandfather’s time, there was also less water. Some of the creeks had dried up entirely, leaving what Thingy and I recognized as roads from the other world—smooth-rocked paths with high banks twisting up the ridge. Others had thinned to a trickle, hemmed with a thick yellow foam which Rosellen’s breeding pugs snapped at when it piled at the edge of their run and Thingy’s mother warned us never to touch, and if we did touch to wash our hands instantly, and never, in any event, to put our hands into our mouths, and to come inside anyway, it was getting dark, the both of us she supposed if it wasn’t time already for me to go home.

The foam and the waterlessness and the way the skunks and possums and raccoons came up to trashcans during the day
and rooted there, grunting in the backs of their throats, were a product of the modern mining concerns which moved into our mountains in the eighties. This was after the old concerns had guttered through the ancient rock beds, leaving some mountains almost honeycombed by caverns and tunnels; sinkholes green and fathomless with their unnatural birth then abandonment. In short, along with their greed and hope, their foolishness, their luck, leaving behind the opportunity for magic.

As for our town, prosaic Elevation with its synchronic roads—Top Road and High Street and even an Up-Side which meanders a little way along the flint ridge above the high school before dead-ending into the quarry—it behaves as if everyone who ever lived there mumbled the answers to a census all at once.
Where do you live?
Up.
Where are you going?
Up.
Where did you come from?
And so on. . .

The old concerns were memorialized in sepia-toned photographs on the walls of the Feed Store. These were pictures of men—singular at first with their pick-axes and thick leather boots, then groups, then committees, then coal-faced working parties in Dickies, the foreman smoking a cigarette, the piping of their machinery glinting in the frosty light behind them. Aunt Thalia once said these photographs were not history, but nostalgia. At the time, still mired in my pupae form—I think of myself then as featureless, my true self a shifting gather of shape taking place behind a veil—I had never heard the term. The way she intoned the word made me think of the way my father said ‘management,’ or Rosellen, then only my father’s friend, said ‘ladies’ rotary,’ so I asked for a definition from the Nina, one of the three girls my father employed to tend the house in the years before Rosellen became my father’s wife.

The other was the Pinta, a sad amalgam of her parent’s genetics, and the third the Sainte Maria, dark and fast and scornful, a furious shadow stitching the edges of our childhood. Their real names were Nina, Pauline, Marie, easy targets for Thingy and I who had nicknames for everyone in almost every occasion. They were just three girls, at first in high school and later not in high school but still hanging around as so many girls in Elevation did, working cheap jobs, going on cheap dates, everything about them provisional and spare.

First they all three worked for my Aunt Thalia, running the register at the store or running dishes from the kitchen she had tar-papered onto the side of the building, down the long corridor and into the high windowed back room which my great-grandfather had built as a tack room, my grandfather used for storage, and Thalia, always a restless innovator, had reimagined as a dining room serving up blue plate specials in shifting dust-gilded light. Later, with my mother gone and my brother clearly incapable of improvement, the girls formed a shifting phalanx of wholly unqualified home caregivers: preparing meals for Luke and I, scrubbing us down in the tub, bunking at night in a cot at the foot of Luke’s bed because he could not be left alone, not even in his sleep, for fear of the damage he might inflict on himself.

Of all of them, the Nina was the most approachable, and when I had questions Thingy and I could not work out the answer to between us, I went to her. In this particular instance, she seemed hardly to be aware I was there and went on scooping coins out of their individual wooden slots in the Feed Store’s antique register and sifting them through her fingers, keeping a tally on a stenograph tablet as she counted. Thalia kept the register polished to a high shine and its many long-levered buttons
seemed to reach out toward the Nina’s face like the spines of some loving but poisonous animal. The Nina could only have been about nineteen at the time, her face lengthening into a caustic horsiness accentuated by her stiffly teased bangs and the generally dusty color of her hair. I stood at her side looking up at her as the coins spilled from her fingers and back into the drawers.

“Nostalgia,” I repeated for the third time, resisting the urge to slip my hand between hers and the drawer and snatch nickels out of the air. “Aunt Thalia said it and I don’t know what it means.”

“Stop whining,” said the Nina without looking at me. She closed her eyes as if catching up with something in her head and referred back to the steno pad, moving her lips as she counted. “It means knowing better, but thinking you can make a profit,” she finally said and then fluttered a hand in front of my face. “Go away now, Alice,” she said. “You’re a pest.”

At the time, overheated and dirty inside the hot-dog casing of my brother’s used down jacket, I was disappointed in this answer. First of all, I knew I was a pest. I could feel my pestiness, my mean-toothed smallness, in all my actions. Secondly, I have always resisted riddles.
I am taken from a mine and shut up in a wooden case. . .I go around and around the wood and do not enter. . .I live in a golden house with no doors or windows. . .Scarcely was my father in the world before I could be found sitting on the roof
. . .I don’t want there to be answers to their litany; certainly not ones as simple as lead, as bark, as egg, fire, smoke. If there is an answer, I want it to be me: Alice Small dug from a mountain burrow, skimming the undergrowth, locked in a golden bower, escaping up the chimney.

I wouldn’t leave the Nina’s side and sat instead on a vegetable crate beside the counter scuffing black streaks into the floor
with my cheap rubber soles and counting out loud in random order. From my vantage, I could see the back wall, those framed photographs hanging at dusty angles, and across the hallway into the kitchen. The Pinta was there, bowed over the deep stainless steel sinks with a pad of matted steel wool in one hand. So was the Sainte Maria, who was supposed to be at our house but had been called in by Thalia to help with a particularly busy lunch crowd.

Where was Luke? He must have been in the store somewhere. He couldn’t be left at home alone, and there was no one else to sit with him. My father was working. At that time of year he was probably on the crew charged with clearing and leveling land in anticipation of the summer pool installation season; or perhaps, the timing is right, finally tearing down the town bandstand whose rotting, bunting-draped pillars had framed everything from church revivals to the annual grade-school food pyramid pageant (Thingy was a lemon, firm and resplendent; I was a shoulder of lamb).

Minus my father and Thingy, who was undoubtedly at one of her many extracurricular accomplishments, everyone in the world who knew me was in that building. I have interrogated my memory, but I still can’t find Luke in it. Not a noise from him or a dark corner where we might have parked his chair out of the way of both the girls and the customers, pulled a blanket over his shoulders and let him sleep, or stare, whichever.

If I ask my memory in some other way, I still return the same basic results. The smells: old wood, floor polish, bacon fat and the synthetic flower scent the Nina wore mixed with the warm fug of her feet inside her pantyhose. The sounds: the regular clunk of metal against wood, the hiss of pressurized water hitting the sides of the sink, rasp of dishes, clitter-clat of the
Sainte Maria’s guava-pink kitten heels, which she was wearing with two sets of ankle socks, as she trotted up the hall with loaded plates, trotted down the hall with empty ones.

Further away, I could hear the hum and grumble of the diners and the soaring tones of my Aunt Thalia, her voice carrying like a bell that had been hammered flat on one side. Every luncheon, no matter how many or how few customers there were, she made it her practice to go from table to table catching up. Rosellen would have called this a sound business tactic. “Butter them up,” I can hear her saying, “No one’s more likely to spend some money than a man who thinks you give a shit about his mother’s corns.” Thalia was an equal opportunity judge. She reacted to the news that a neighbor had committed some obvious farming gaff—raising pigs on the side of a notoriously flood-prone branch, or planting tobacco too many years in the same plot—with the same tone of incredulous superiority as she would the news that his child had been born with a brain tumor, his house struck by lightning and burned to the ground. For her, there was no such thing as luck—only planning, only work. She understood opposition, but had no time for pity. The girls, even the Sainte Maria, were terrified of her.

When Jacob and I were first married we lived with Thalia in the house on Newfound Mountain where she and my mother grew up. It was only for a short while, four months during which we three battered around the house like dazzled moths. Or, I suppose that’s what it felt like at the time. So many years have passed since then and it is possible I am remembering the gustiness of that time, the sense of being individually pulled toward something only to find we had, all three, simultaneously ended up in the kitchen staring at each other over the empty expanse
of the butcher block table, in light of the events which came after. Which makes the image of Thalia as a moth—a great white moth with scarlet dots at the tips of her wings, false eyes rising in peacock fringes from her antenna—a terrible sort of joke given what came next. I might as well tell you now, Ingrid: it was death by fire.

I don’t think I’m spoiling the suspense. Surely, by whatever age you come to read this manuscript you’ll have already heard the story of your Great-Aunt Thalia. No matter how gently we tried to expunge her, there are clunky artifacts left all over the house. Just this morning, you in my arms, both of us in white and the white pine boards of the stairs airy under my feet in the cool, clear light, I came across Jacob in the hall turning a pair of Thalia’s work boots over in his hands. He’d fished them out of the cedar chest we use to store things that can’t be left behind. Some of my mother’s schoolbooks are in there. One of Thingy’s raincoats, primrose pink with a wide, soft belt and used tissue still wadded stiff in the pockets.

Jacob knocked the boots together. A little sift of red dirt drifted down from their treads and Jacob brushed it into a wide seam in the floor. Then he tucked the boots under his arm and strode into the dining room and through that into the kitchen and so out the back door. We hadn’t yet seen each other that morning and, as he passed us at the foot of the stairs, Jacob pressed your head into my chest and held it there, his hand square and economical over your ear. He grazed the back of my nightgown with the other hand, not touching, just ruffling the cloth. He and I are not moths but a man and a woman who have known each other for a long time now and have learned how to share a space. Whether or not we could have come to this understanding if Thalia had stayed in the house—her house, after all, her
boots and stairs and butcher block and sideboard decorated with a frieze of humming bees—is a part of the timeline we have not had to consider. Closed to us forever. Consumed by flames.