Hex: A Novel (29 page)

When Thingy and I were very young, my father and a friend of his discovered the body of man who had been shot. They were hunting turkey in the mountains, only slightly out of season, and had two toms already cleaned and trussed under a tarp in the back of the truck. It was a wet day, the afternoon an inhalation between showers.

The man had been shot in the ear with a small caliber gun, a neat black hole punched overtop his regular canal the only overt sign of trauma. “You could tell something had happened in there, though,” my father told the Sainte Maria. They were sitting in the living room: my father with his arms spread over
the back of the couch like wings, the Sainte Maria perched on the armrest of the recliner. “There was blood on his teeth and a look on his face like someone had gone in there and scrambled him all up.”

The man was someone who lived in one of the hollows and that was enough for us to believe we knew something about him. How he had eschewed the companionable hostility of the town for a whistling kind of solitude. How he lived, I imagined, in little more than a raw place dug in the earth like a fox or a weasel.

“What did he look like?” the Sainte Maria asked. She was very young herself, probably not much more than fifteen, but recently my father had made the switch from calling her, ‘little girl,’ to calling her ‘darling,’ something he had not yet done with any of the other girls.

“He looked surprised,” my father said. He shifted his weight on the couch so the old springs creaked beneath him and propped one boot up on the coffee table. “Not shocked, mind you, just surprised. Kind of like someone had played him a good joke.”

Where was I while this conversation went on? In the room, because I can see them both in memory: my father, red clay in the ridges of his boots, his shirt rolled neatly up his ropy forearm; the Sainte Maria in jean cut-offs from which her pale legs crossed nervous and noodely and striking in the light. It must have been spring. It was spring light, a dappled, lily pond light that lapped across the carpet as they talked. I remember how it pooled in the lap of the little shepherd girl on top of the television. She was so certain of herself, her bisque cheek turned up to accept her shepherd boy’s kiss, even as she admired the drape of her skirts across her knees. And,
although there he was with his back turned, edging away, who could blame her? They had been made for each other, after all. Even their outfits matched.

I must have been in the corner by the door. There was a hat-rack there which was often draped with coats, a marble basin in its pedestal that I liked to fill with stones and acorn caps. I could have been behind a coat, hidden. Or, more likely, just sitting with my back against the wall watching the light shift across the sandy carpet as if stirred by fishtails far above, watching my father pat the cushion beside him and then laugh, teasing, when the Sainte Maria, red to the roots of her hair, fidgeted on her seat and pretended not to see.

“It was probably someone he knew,” my father said. “Someone he trusted enough to let him get real close. He had to have been close to put the barrel of the gun right inside his ear.”

For many years afterward I dreamed about that man my father found dead in the scrub brush. Or rather, waking or sleeping, I flashed onto an image of him which lingered with meaningless precision. The body: dressed in a white undershirt and dungarees, the arms and legs splayed as if he were shot in mid lope like a four-legged animal. In my image of him, the man had reddish hair and a long, unpleasant face. His teeth were bared and, yes, bloody, a patter of blood on his chin where a bubble had been blown and burst. Every time the image flashed through my mind, I tried to concentrate on his eye—open or shut? brown or blue?—but every time I centered on his teeth instead, the blood on his chin, the hole on top of the hole, wider and deeper and black around the edges as if he had done something so simple as not wash very carefully that morning before he went out. As if he could have reversed his fate as easily as
wrapping a washcloth around his index finger and twisting into his ear. “To dig out the potatoes,” the Nina always said.

The man my father was hunting with that day was named Bo Hickett and according to Dax he had hunkered down behind a deadfall not ten feet from the body without noticing a thing other than a slight smell which turned like the other smells of the forest beneath the leaf mulch and the sweetness of rotting wood. They were hunting on logging land, an area that had been stripped years before and then replanted. The rows of young pine were so unnaturally straight they seemed to bend at the edge of their vision as if they were standing in the center of a pinwheel. Dax and Bo had parked the truck high above the turnoff from the main road and walked two or three miles back up the trace but, though it had been such a consistently wet spring that the standing pools in the dirt road were frothing with tiny, seed-like tadpoles, neither man noticed another human’s footprint or any trace of another truck.

“We saw a bear track,” my father told the Sainte Maria. “A big fucker where it had turned and gone back into the woods.” Even that was old enough to have filled with water itself and to contain in the depression of its main pad a single black tadpole, twitching mindlessly.

Whatever had happened, it had happened not long before the men arrived. They found him because Dax, backing up to get a better sight on the gravel pit they were luring a turkey into, stepped on the side of the man’s boot and the turn it gave under his foot was so familiar, so much a part of the manufactured world, that he found himself apologizing even as he hopped away and realized what he was apologizing to.

The body was stiff, but not swollen. There was no smell. “So fresh the flies hadn’t found him yet,” Dax said, though there
was one, a fat bluebottle, which was perched on the rim of his ear, scrubbing and scrubbing its forelegs. Dax loved that detail. “Like he just couldn’t wait to dive in there,” he said, and I imagined my father, transfixed by what he must have believed, if only for a moment, was not a man but a trick being played by his eyes. A chance arrangement of leaf and twig. The fleshy plush of a fungus perhaps, rotting at its core. Behind him, Bo Hickett blew a soft, rolling call meant to reassure the tom he saw parting the fescue on the other side of the clearing that he was welcome, wanted, long-sought, and motioned to my father to line up the shot.

Even now, I still sometimes dream of that man I never saw. I never even knew his name or if his killer was caught which seems odd to me because, after all, it was my father who found him and my father who waited with the body while Bo Hickett hurried back to the truck to call up the county patrol on his CB. (And to hide the illegally harvested turkeys in the underbrush, no doubt, to stow the guns and prepare the story of a nature walk, stretching their legs. “God’s domain,” he might have said, gesturing to the mountains behind him. And they so blue, so magisterial, they could be evoked to stand for almost anything: bounty and progress, splendor and grace. Really, however, they are old and cold and made primarily of stone. What Bo Hickett points to, standing in the road with mud on his knees as the two troopers take notes, around them the dripping pines, their needles heavy and dark, pierced by the teetering call of the siskins that dart about their upper branches, is actually the spaces between the mountains. “God’s grandeur,” he says, shrugging, spent shell casings clinking in his pocket, and he means the petal-blue wash behind the massed stone and the wispy clouds
that drift to encircle their crowns. No one gives a thought to the black spaces within: the crooked tunnels and stale pockets of air, the ropes of water spilling down through the half-moon spouts they themselves have cut over the long centuries only to plunge into still, black lakes—deep and utterly silent—from which, eventually, the water seeps back into the rock and bursts forth in rills and freshets, little cataracts and spills, white with foam, that pool on the mountain face and cloud with algae and mosquito larvae where Bo Hickett, crashing through the underbrush, stops with the troopers for just a moment to point out a track—the bear again—and say, “Can you believe it? Right by the road.”)

“Maybe it was a suicide,” the Sainte Maria said, but my father snorted the suggestion away. Murder was a better story, after all, and what was one more murder in a place teeming with it? The fox of the mouse, the squirrel of the flea, the turkey of the nut which it splits in the autumn months to feast on the golden heart meant to become a tree.

“Time belongs to God,” Thingy’s mother once told her. For awhile, right after Mr. Clawson moved more permanently to Atlanta, she’d become heavily involved in the church and hosted frequent tea parties for the other ladies of the 1
^st
Baptist. After they left, she would roam through the house lifting items and putting them down in slightly different arrangements: a tea cozy whimsically cocked over the ear of a china cat, a copy of Hillary’s
High Adventure
peeking out over the edge of the silver ice bucket. Mrs. Clawson leaned in the doorway to Thingy’s room and said, “Time is God’s parlor, girls. Lest you forget.” This was a bad year for her, I remember. She had ginger cookie crumbs on her chin, a comet of jam arcing across her stiff, poplin collar.
Some months she let her hair go until the roots were almost black, but scrubbed the increasingly empty refrigerator until it glowed sterile and blue, the yellow box of baking powder huddled in the back as if sheltering from an unappeasable weather. She was unpredictable to say the least. I had never been more lonely for her.

“I’ll be sure to mention it to him when I get there,” Thingy said, rolling her eyes, mistaking, as was always her way, time for heaven. But I was listening. I heard what she meant to say: about boxing up the years, about putting only those with high polish or an interesting filigree on display.

“In God’s parlor the fire is always lit,” Mrs. Clawson meant to say. “And God himself so wealthy than when he runs out of firewood he can bring to hand any sort of ornament or precious trinket to throw on in its stead.”

What a despot God is! How Thingy would have admired him.

“He’d shat himself,” my father said so long ago in our living room while light swam across the legs of a beautiful girl who didn’t know it yet.

“Don’t look so shocked.” He laughed. “There’s worse things in the world than a little smell.”

To me, just a couple of days ago, he turned and held you out, cradling your bottom in his palm as if you were a sack of sugar he was considering buying at the market. The laundry machines hummed and clunked behind us. The elderly couple wheezed in peaceable witness. Sometimes, of all the other possible images, it is still that hole in a dead man’s head I see when I look at my father. “How could you resist sticking a finger in?”
I want to ask him. It’s what I would have done, although, since I’ve never asked, I don’t know that it’s not what he did as well. I can imagine it of him. We’re not all that different, after all. Father and daughter. Doomed from the first genetic twining to be too much alike.

I took you from him and held you in the crook of my arm, Ingrid. Then, I hoisted the basket onto my other hip as if about to leave, but when we just stood there, the terrarium light smoothing all our edges into one another, I slid the basket back onto the counter and asked instead, “How’s Rosellen?”

“Rosellen? She’s fine. The same,” my father said. His eyes were still on you, a beautiful baby falling asleep with her hands curled on her chest. Over his shoulder I saw Jacob open the door and stop to take in the scene. He said something to Daniel standing behind him and then turned and went back out, pushing Daniel along with him. They stood indecisively in front of the window for a minute and then went back up the street the way they had come. To the truck, no doubt. To the groceries souring in the open bed. It was time to go, but there was my father, who was looking at me now, tapping his wedding ring against his belt buckle with a rhythmic ting. He edged around the corner of the folding table and fidgeted, leaning forward to chuck you, Ingrid, under your milk-sweet chin.

“Listen,” he said, moving closer. He took my arm, his hand almost meeting around my bicep as it always did no matter how many years passed or how long it had been since we saw each other last. “I was so sorry about what happened. With Ingrid, I mean. I never told you how sorry I was. I know it must have been hard for you.”

Hesitantly, he brushed my hair away from my temple and kissed me there, his lips full and dry against my skin, the way he
might have many many times when I was young and reminded him in some obscure way of my mother, always so far away with her books and her baubles, her sharp little teeth and her habit of sucking the tips of her hair. Or, perhaps, when I reminded him of himself and, in that fashion, he remembered both that he had made me and that he had meant to. That, from the very beginning, it was my face which had swum in the air between them as he sat at the kitchen table and my mother, belting a strawberry-patterned apron around her swollen abdomen, slid a knife from its block and began to chop.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” my father said. And that, Ingrid, though I believe I will see him many more times after this day, is how my father said goodbye to me.

“I have to go,” I said and hurried toward the door with the basket.

“Look, it’s Alice,” said the Sainte Maria, rising from the recliner all those years ago. She stooped over me and picked me up, balancing me on one hip though I was almost too big for her. My legs dangled past her waist, coltish and covered with blonde down. My father came over and pinched my chin, moving it back and forth as if his next step would be to examine my teeth.

“How long has she been there?” he said and he leaned down and kissed the top of my head. How warm his breath was, stirring my hair. How warm it must have been on the Sainte Maria’s collarbone, and how close he was as he straightened up again, taller than her, his lips level with the top of her pink, flushed ear. She shifted me slightly so I was no longer between them and then, quite suddenly, stepped back and whisked me away into the dim kitchen where the curtains were drawn and the overhead light burst on like a flashbulb, overexposing the scene.