Hex: A Novel (28 page)

Then we heard the Pinta cross the living room and we scuttled down the hall into my own room where I shut the door. “Don’t be mad,” Thingy said, holding my hands between her
own and scanning my face, but I wasn’t. I was too busy trying to figure out which of all the games was the one they were playing. Which had made my brother come so close to the surface, almost close enough to see.

“What did he say?” I asked in spite of myself, but Thingy only laughed and kissed me on the cheek. A pretty gesture she had copied from a movie or a television show or a story. The sort of thing a pretty girl does when she is beloved. More importantly, something she does when she has won.

Then, all of a sudden, we were adults, admonished never again to look back lest we turn into pillars of salt. Of course, we did look back. How could we help it when back was the only view? The past, filled with such enticing details: dancing dogs and sugar plums, purses stitched from a tasseled sow’s ear, slippers that spun and twirled until your own blood ran freely over their soles. Really, there seemed no consequence. Why not live in the bright shadow, childhood a garter snake flashing its yellow racing stripe? And the future? Nothing but gauze and white strapping tape. Miles and miles of it, trussing things up.

It was our gravest mistake, Thingy’s and mine, but how can you blame us for wanting always to be ourselves? When the rain came and we melted away, even then I can’t say we were sorry. To this day, Ingrid, there is a spot on the creek bank where the butterflies cluster: fritillaries with their military precision, brilliant tiger swallowtails and tiny, West Virginia whites who pump their dusty cabbage white wings so slowly, with such exquisite languor.

What is it they want there? Are they sleeping, dreaming, dying? Sometimes there are as many as twenty of them, packed so tightly their fairy-haired bodies press against each other, their wings rippling orange and black, yellow and azure, a faint
silver-green as if they were a very fine cloth, pinned at one corner but caught nonetheless in a persistent breeze. If you are a quiet girl, Ingrid, a natural observer of the world, it will be possible for you to get close enough to see them in detail. Their narrow heads, for example, on which their true eyes sit like tessellate soup cups. Their tongues uncoiling to flitter about the soil.

They are feeding, my darling girl, a salt slick there and only there which entrances them with delight. And who is to say if that is the
exact
spot where Thingy finally fell and could not rise? If that is the
exact
soil on which she battered at her throat as it swelled with trapped air? Where, in spite of our belief that our lives were uniquely the same, there came from between her legs first a rush of water, then one of blood. . .?

I am to say it, and I will.

Right there, on the edge of the creek, Thingy and I melted away in a wash of salt. Right there, slick with blood and earth, right there you were born.

There is another storm I remember, seven months after Thingy and Daniel moved to the mountain.

“What is your book about?” I asked Daniel at dinner.

“Well, it’s difficult to break down into one idea,” he said, eager even then to stab at us all with his fork as he talked. “I’d say, in general, it’s about cloister. About ritual.”

He seemed about to go on in more detail, the fork twirling in the air as is if trying to hone its focus, but Thingy, who was sitting at his left hand side, a black winter night ringing her head, laughed and said, “Daniel’s all about opposites right now. He’s doing the exact opposite of everything he’s done before.”

Later that evening, I was out in the yard checking on the hens. It was late. The moon had torn itself free of the trees and was wafting fat and proud across the sky. There had been a noise, an uproar in the hen house as if the hens all at once had sensed some terrible calamity, though when I shone the flashlight around their fence I could see no tracks, no signs of digging. An ephemeral calamity then, or something far in the future. Regardless, I picked up a stick and made a sign at the gate and one at each of the fence’s corners. I wove a sign out of tufts of dead grass and threw it up on the roof. The hens were quiet again and the meadow quiet, the forest behind it all so quiet it was as if it were sneaking up on me, counting footsteps and freezing the moment I turned around. It was very cold.

When I turned around to go back to the house, I saw Thingy had come into the dining room and flicked on the light. She was wearing a white nightgown, not yet pregnant enough for the peignoir, and sat sideways across the chair, drinking a glass of water, looking around. It was all so clear. I in the cold with my breath frosting in my eyelashes; she in the house, alone and looking not to be, the veins in her legs where her nightgown had pulled up deep and blue and tangled. Then, I heard a noise behind me and when I turned again—always spinning in place, always looking over my shoulder—it was Daniel.

“Hello,” he said.

“It’s late,” he said.

Surely, I said something back. He is a lion-headed man, even without the beard, Ingrid. Or a sheep-headed man, perhaps. Something that nods in the sun, dreamy-eyed, not particularly alert. Something with either the deep ease of a predator, or the power of prey. He hadn’t zipped his coat and there was an
exposed triangle of skin, bare and white at his throat. His eyes are blue, I have mentioned that, like Thingy’s eyes. His hands were on my shoulders.

“What are you doing out here?” he said, and then one of his hands was on my neck, one at the back of my head.

I have never said Jacob’s name, not once. He and I have always been very quiet, though when I look down at my husband I can see in his eyes a little figure of myself, breasts swinging, hair wild, mouth drawn open like a panting cat’s.

But, “Alice, Alice, Alice,” Daniel said, and I said, “Daniel.”

We were nothing more than two people and all the best language for it (thick and tight, pink and wet, deep and hard) was lost in our unwieldy layers and the splinter of sycamore-green clapboard wedging its way into my buttocks where later Jacob would pass his fingers over it, a black seed in the center of a strawberry of blood.

Did I think about Thingy? Of course I did. But it was night and, thinking herself alone, all she could see in the gilt-framed mirror across from her was her own beautiful face, composed if somewhat puffy, and the cloud of her hair lifting across her shoulders as if filled with its own private breeze.

Until she stood up that is. Until she turned off the light.

We didn’t notice when it began to snow, the flakes so light in our collars they were like nothing more than a shifting of cloth, but in the morning the drifts were deep and the whole yard covered with tracks. A hen had been taken after all, the only sign left of her two soft, gray feathers, three drops of blood that fell in a shape like an arrow pointing toward the woods.

At end of her doctoral thesis, in the margins of one of the very last chapters, Thingy had made some notes.

“Because we have known each other so long. . . .?” says one.

“A lack of the Other resulting in hyper-awareness of the Self. . .?” says another.

“A woman married a man who said he was the sun,” says a third, “but on their wedding night, when she pulled back the covers to get into bed, she discovered that from the waist down he had the body of a rooster. The woman was very angry and scolded her new husband. ‘If we have any children, they will be nothing but eggs,’ she said to him, but when it turned out that he could not help his nature she grew so furious she flew up the chimney and circled the world three times, blotting out the stars as she went. Eventually, because she was making so much noise, the real sun found her, but she had become old in her fury—no teeth and a face as wrinkled as a withered apple. He was disgusted by her and burned her to ashes on the spot thinking, perhaps, he was putting her out of her misery.”

“Someone told me this story,” Thingy wrote a little further down the page. “I can’t remember who it was.”

Once there was a boy who was born into a family of great wealth and political power, but who, as sometimes happens, were forced to leave him alone in the mountains for the wolves to eat. There was a wind stirring the dark pines, a dusting of snow on the ground. It was a servant who did the dirty work, though even as she bent to drop him, she wrapped his blankets more snugly about his chest.

At first he waves his arms and legs in the air, a lusty baby, furious if unusually small, but when no one comes he grows still. Eventually, he is quiet as a toad; then, quiet as a rock. His
wrappings have fallen away. His skin is the color of lead. His breathing is so slow he cannot feel it in his chest. . .breath. . .a red squirrel chirring from a tree. . .breath. . .the seesaw of birds calling in the branches. . .And then a woodsman! Just that morning, he sharpened his axe. The boy can hear him coming from miles away: the sound of the forest splintering.

Though generally an unsentimental sort, the woodsman was charmed by the baby’s tiny size—his fingers no bigger than grains of rice, his head as big around as a bobbin—and took him home where he was wrapped in the woodsman’s wife’s clean linens and popped in the oven to ward off death. Every part of the baby unfroze, except for a part deep inside, hardly bigger than a pea, which was always after cold, severe and leaden. The woodsman and his wife were busy people, but not unkind. A few years later, they had a daughter who had many needs and, because the boy they found in the forest was always silent, it became easier and easier to tuck him away and forget where he had been placed. Lost among the spoons; lost in the crockery. Because the boy never grew though now he had a sister.

Oh well, one May the mother died. Shortly after, the woodsman took to the road and left his daughter in charge of the house. “Don’t let anyone in or out,” he said and he slipped some coins into the bodice of her pinafore and he kissed her on the top of her head. He did not say, “Take care of your brother,” who was tucked into an oven mitt hanging just above the stove, but the girl decided to hear this anyway and, as soon as her father had passed out of sight down the road, she fetched her brother down, put him in the pocket of her apron and gave him an acorn cap to wear for a hat. At first the girl fed herself and her
brother from what was left of their mother’s pantry. Heels of bread, stale oatcakes, porridge. Then, when this fairy-tale food was exhausted and real hunger set in, she began to make small excursions into the yard and the fringe of the surrounding forest, coming back with toadstools, song bird’s eggs, berries and the slim, white bulbs of wild onion. At night, she sang to her brother of whom she was fond. She imagined he was comforted by her songs and even thought at times she could hear him humming back. Unbeknownst to her, however, her brother was an exiled duke and could neither understand her language nor unbend enough to press her pretty, plump hand between his own.

(There was a terrible darkness, a buzzing. In the forest a mother wolf had come from between the trees and said, “You will be fine fine fine. A fine fat morsel for my cubs.” Then the trees splintered open and out of their golden hearts the woodsman appeared.)

One night, when the girl had found very little to eat in the woods, she and her brother made due with a soup made of grass and loaves of bread she patted out of dirt. A ring of green stained their mouths and she found herself exhausted. “You think you’d be a little more grateful,” she said to her brother, pretending he’d complained. Though he was many years her elder and silent always in the way of something that has claimed its ground, she said, “You bad baby, all you ever do is cry,” and she slapped him on the back of each of his hands with her thimble.

Immediately, the girl was filled with remorse and resolved to make up this lapse to him in any way she could. With the last of
the coins her father had tucked into her bodice, the girl bought a ream of golden cloth from a traveling salesman who sometimes stopped at their front gate and a little spool of golden thread. In the evenings, after she had made the dinner and fed them both, tidied the house and filled each of the oil lanterns in turn to keep out the dark, the girl sat beside the fire with her brother in a basket at her feet and sang him her songs while she stitched together a beautiful robe. Into the weave of the cloth, the thread never seeming to empty from its spool, the girl stitched scenes of her brother. There he was in the womb—round as a pea, then round as a golden ball—and here he was in the forest, his pale face peering out of a jagged lacework of branches. Here he was as he might have been: tall and slim, slipping a dancing slipper over the arch of a dainty foot; and here as he was, tucked in next to the fire, surrounded by the sturdy lathwork of poverty and desperation, hunger and, of course, love. The robe was for her brother to wear, though every day it grew longer and longer, spilling out across the hearth and piling up against the door. “No little poppet for you,” the girl said to her brother who was sleeping in the bowl of a spoon. “No little tuck. No little fancy.”

(In the forest, there had been a bird that flew from tree to tree calling as if its heart would break. There had been a wind that blew everything silent and passed on while all behind it cowered and held close to the ground. Even so small, he had understood immensity. “If we are born for death. . .” he had thought, “If there is no land above this one and no land below. . .”)

From the center of his silence the boy, who had in the meantime become a man though a very small one, watched his sister work. Often she pricked her fingers and cried as the blood
soaked into the cloth because she had a horror of ruin, of no turning back. Perhaps he even felt grateful, perhaps even kind. . .But he was born very proud and it is more likely that he went on in that fashion. A dear girl, but beneath him, as was the doll’s spoon she stuck in his mouth, the pine-straw teddy she tucked beneath his arm for comfort in the night. And the peasant songs she sung. And her peasant face—ill favored, withered as an apple in the deep leaves.

So it always is when the cold world meets the warm one. A struggle right along the edge of life and the worlds’ two impulses (one for silence, one for raging noise) compressed together into a mean line—sharp as a razor, bright as the melting sun. “Oh my love, my love, in a sycamore tree,” the girl sang. “Climb down, climb down, and marry me.”

When she was finished with the robe it proved to truly be a splendid thing. It was the deepest part of winter, the snow heavy in the branches, and the cupboards were bare as bone. Still, the girl felt very proud of herself as she spread the robe out on the hearth and admired its scintillating ripples, the intricacy of its figures as they gamboled and piped, chased one another through the lindens or stirred a pot of soup on the stove. It was by far the most beautiful thing the girl had ever seen, but, because she had made it herself, it didn’t belong to her and so, with a sigh of regret, she lifted her brother out of his basket and wrapped a corner of the golden robe around and around his still, leaden body so all that could be seen of him was the tip of his nose and the point of his sharp, gray chin. Immediately, there was a darkness, a terrible buzzing. In the way of one herself transformed, the girl opened her eyes and saw on the hearth not her tiny
brother, but a tall, handsome man whose skin was the color of apricots and whose eyes were angry.

(And then the goose is strung up in the larder. Sometimes, a marriage; sometimes the well belches a heavenly river. There is a cake made of golden flour, a drink made of heart’s own blood. A girl could dance until the bottoms of her feet are sheered to ribbons. A girl could be tricked into living underground, sitting forever beside her dark husband, remembering the sun. “Would you like a wish?” asks the fish in the bottom of the boat. A clever girl says no, but how many of them are there left in the world? I could count them all on the fingers of one of my hands and still have some left over to do the darning. I could wrap all of them up in a single long blanket, rub their cheeks to roses, comb their hair.)

What actually happened is the young man who had never really been her brother stood up on the hearth and said, “You fool, you have exposed me. Now they’ll come for sure.” Even if the girl had understood his language, even if she had been braver and more true, it wouldn’t have mattered. They did come, sliding out of the fringe of the forest as if they had stood there for years and only now happened to turn their heads. It was a mob—the men in leather breeches, the women apt to pull their skirts up over their heads. They carried pitchforks and pine resin torches, rusty cleavers and lancer’s spikes left over from the last war fought on their behalf. Their mouths were holes that led straight to their guts and they ringed the house in rows four deep. Set fire to the thatch. Drove an axe through the woodsman’s own front door.

When the mob eventually forced their way inside they carried the exiled duke, still wrapped in his golden robe, to the doorstep and they cut off his head. Then they hoisted it on a pike to peer in each of the girl’s windows as she cowered and cried. “This is not a joke,” someone made the head say, though clearly they all thought it was very funny. “I didn’t think it was,” the girl replied to her brother’s head which, despite the size and the ragged lacework they had made of his neck, looked very much the same as it always had: the eyes cold and gray, the mouth a thin, disapproving line. When they finally went away, they left her with a terrible mess to clean, but when she was done and her life restored to its regular patterns, the girl couldn’t help but think that if she only had her brother back she would do things very differently. “I would beat him with a thimble all day long,” she said to the fire, stroking the golden robe which she had laid across her lap. “My poor, dear brother. I would bash in his head.”

And every day, though she was all alone, she sang:

“My love, my love in a sycamore tree.

Climb down, climb down, and marry me.”