by Nancy Mauro
In the garden patch a few thick inches of grass-peppered soil have been gouged out. Maybe the dog was on to something. Maybe there’s something to be said for the canine sense of smell. She kneels to the ground, licks sweat from her upper lip. Is it really an excavation if she picks up a small hand shovel and just lifts away grass, broadens the circumference of the hole? Continues what the poodle has begun?
She promised Duncan she’d wait for him. Duncan promised he’d be home Thursday night. Sounds about even.
Lily starts troweling through the dry earth, working carefully to clear a shallow area the size of a cookie sheet. If she doesn’t recover anything, no harm done. She won’t bother telling him. There’s no need to provide him with a running commentary, a blow-by-blow account of her night. Most likely he won’t even ask.
She considers her successful tyranny over the poodle without surprise. The aggression is in her blood and in her parents’ blood, a Mendelian truth smeared between two glass slides. They share the same tender-footed skill of advancing on the downtrodden the way one might approach a nickering horse. How else could her mother have persuaded the natives to embrace a Homeric god? Meanwhile, in another quadrant of jungle, her father supervises the efforts of the indigenous people, who express gratitude at the prospect of clear-cutting their fertile plateaus to sow his bean crop.
The trowel scrapes against a hard surface. Lily stops. Lays the tool aside. With steady fingers she clears earth from a chipped yellow patch in the ground. The dirt here is sandy and she has to rake away several inches in order to expose the entire flat pan of bone. She runs her fingers under the edges, plying it gently from the earth. The bone is about the size of her hand but triangular, shaped like a wing, she thinks, as it comes free. The airfoil design and cambered surfaces suggest it was created for flight; it even grows into a crude hook along one edge, just where a wing might latch to the body. But it’s much too dense for flight. Lily holds it on her outstretched palm. Dense and irregular. In some places it’s scalloped out to the depth of a saucer. And where the bone is the thinnest, two large perforations have formed. She sticks her fingers through these cavities, runs a fingernail along the blunt edges. A hole in a wing compromises aerodynamics, she knows. Puts an end to the lift-to-drag ratio necessary for flight.
Where in Tinker’s body was this piece lodged? Lily turns the triangle over in her hand, curious, certainly. But beyond this inquisitiveness, beyond the constant cloying heat, she can’t ignore the nagging feeling of nothingness. A bone is a bone, she thinks. Organic fiber. A structure nature has repeated a billion times over. Here she is, alone in Osterhagen, might as well be pulling rocks out of the ground. Lily sits back in the grass, crosses her legs. Thinks, this is totally no fun by myself.
Her emotions are so fluid and changing; how could she ever have agreed to base her entire future on something as irrational as a feeling? How to be sure she won’t think the opposite tomorrow? Hasn’t it been months—maybe a year—of living with Duncan at the very periphery of her life? One step further and there he goes, tumbling off the edge of the earth. Has she been afraid to be without Duncan, or just afraid to be left alone?
What animals we are, she thinks, looking up at the evening sky through a hole in the wing bone. Feral opportunists who lek and mate and move with the migrating herds. The dawdlers must be culled. Is this what Oster knew? That the trick to successful predation is to wait for the semblance of calm, the coast to clear, the homeless dog to circle, circle, circle, before lying down, the nanny to shut her eyes for a moment of rest under a tree where she cowers with her charge. Until the moment her great-grandfather dropped from the branches to cudgel the nanny to death, he likely had no understanding of what it meant to enact harm. And here’s Lily, innocuous but of the same blood. She too only lying in wait.
The next morning she waits in the doorway of her husband’s bedroom. If the nearly indiscernible rise and fall of his chest are any indication, he might very well have received her short-wave malediction last night. Fully dressed and unconscious, his jaw sagging apart and exposing the mossy underside of his tongue, Duncan takes small huffs through the nose. Lily notices that his bed linens are still tucked, although twisted, as if he’d struggled to crawl between the sheets but found the tight corners as impossible to negotiate as the lost end on a roll of Scotch tape.
Lily takes note of all the things that are wrong with this situation, and then itemizes these things in ascending order of urgency.
The fact that he has his own bedroom.
That he agreed to her idea that he have his own bedroom.
That she has no clue when he got home. Or where he was before that.
That she doesn’t recognize much about him anymore—like his T-shirt, Union Cap-C Votes Yes, depicting a fist clenching a wrench. Or maybe it’s a hammer.
The impossible-to-ignore stench of liquor distilled down to wound-cauterizing astringent.
Without thinking, she gives the open door a single kick (feeling better already) and listens to the ugly thump of wood and brass. In the bed Duncan’s startled limbs bend in a semaphoric contortion. He sits upright, the way television characters often rise from nightmares, and peers at her through sleep.
“Welcome back.” Spoken like two arms folded across the chest.
The face before her is glaucous and confused, a map that will no longer fold along its original lines. She notes a rim of dried lather on his new scruff of beard.
“I’m going to look at the pig,” Lily says, unsure of her intentions.
Duncan’s eyes move over her, but how insignificant they’ve become in that face! As if someone had applied two thumbs and some pressure and popped them back into his head. When he finally speaks, she can hear the labor of his tongue unsticking itself from the roof of his mouth.
“I’ll come with you,” he says.
If this were Greek tragedy, the wild boar would have sealed the fate of their marriage. If this scene had been conducted on the proscenium, Lily’s hand in the extermination of the beast would represent the final blow she herself had dealt to the union of husband and wife. She would have slaughtered it and the sky would have grown funereal and the ground given way between them. Towns, peasants, cattle sucked down along the fault line. But waking life, she’s come to learn, is never so neatly divided, so clearly cause-and-effect.
“What did you do last night?” Duncan says once they’re walking.
Lily stiffens, remembering Lloyd’s gift of the breast-fed man and the banishment of the poodle. “I read.”
The sad thing is, even Hercules was careful to bring the Erymanthian boar back alive. No question he made his share of mistakes, but the one thing he got right was the handling of the swine. It’s been three weeks since they left the pig in the ditch and Lily is haunted by the Sovereign of the Deep Wood for all of the callous, sulking, and reactionary facets of her personality that it has revealed. I have inherited a real mean streak, Duncan. It’s pathological and I can only monitor it for so long. Like eight minutes. Then you’re fair game, friend.
But she’d rather die than be so pithy.
“I was thinking about Oster,” Lily says instead.
“What about?”
“I was thinking about servants at that time. The women were something like chattels.” She gives a rounded musculature to her words. “It wasn’t uncommon for these big landowners sometimes to, you know, rape them.”
“So, you’ve come around?” He rips a leaf apart as he walks. “Pointing fingers at your own kin.”
“People,” she says, with an obfuscation that is self-implicating, “are capable of the most unimaginable things. Maybe Tinker abducted my grandfather in revenge.”
“You could ask the Crusaders.” Duncan yawns, cranks his jaw in circles as though letting out a couple yards of fishing line. “’Course they’d deny it. Apple never falls far from the tree, right?”
She would like to bite him, leave the crenellated pattern of her teeth in his shoulder. But th
at would only have the effect of flourishing a checkmark at the end of his last sentence.
“Those old guys didn’t come around, did they?” he asks, skipping right over the discussion of Tinker. It’s as though he went to the city and lost interest in their project.
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean, not yet?” Duncan’s voice is apathetic at best. He maintains several extra inches of gait beyond her as though she’s something he wants to keep in his past. “You expect them soon?”
“Nature is grisly and perverted, Duncan.” She takes in a succulent huff of air. “There’s a dog now—a standard poodle—that’s been coming around, digging. Twice this week I had to chase it away.”
“Whose is it?”
“Nobody’s. A stray.”
“Poodles don’t go stray.”
“It’s untidy.”
Duncan says nothing. They continue walking. Of course she’s trying to engage him, to lure him into some semblance of ease so that when she lays in and condemns him for his absence, the surprise and force will bruise him that much deeper purple. It would be easy enough to linger on some simple observations: the sway of chestnut branches and quivering aspens around them, the parch-bottom ditches framing the sides of the road like the gutters of a bowling alley. But this benign wallpaper of chatter will come across as hectoring, circumlocutory, and will dampen the searing ring of her jab. Better just to deal the uppercut now.
“I’m assuming you were drunk when you drove here last night.”
“Yes.” It’s his voice that shrugs, not his shoulders.
“Yes? That’s it?”
“Call it a low point.”
Wow. Lily feels the same rush of heat that overcame her in the field, a parching awareness that he’s going to leave her. Without an arrhythmic step her husband has crossed from casual neglect to a place where he is no longer responsible to her.
Duncan stops when he reaches the crumbled beginnings of the blacktop. “It was around here,” he says and looks at her as though handing something over, stepping back now that he’s seen her to her destination. His face is so changed, he seems to hold guard behind the sprigs of beard. This is how we are with each other, she thinks. This is why we’re doomed.
For a minute they stand in the middle of the road like that. Only later will she understand that she was studying his face for recognition, however small.
“I dug in the garden without you last night,” she hears herself say. “I found a scapula. From Tinker’s shoulder.”
Without coming any closer, without responding, he reaches for her glasses. When he slides them off her face, the trees blur. Within her narrow focal range, only the edges of Duncan are crisp. Only Duncan is illuminated. Without her lenses all she can see is him puffing on each oval of glass and rubbing them clean with a corner of his shirt. He holds them up, squints against fingerprints, and hands them back. Doesn’t try jabbing them behind her ear—the awkward motion of replacing eyeglasses—but hands them back at waist level.
Lily takes the glasses and wonders what she’s to do with this gesture. Is she pleased with the reach of his hand? Yes, she’s embarrassed by the upsurge of her blood, the granular attention she’s paying to the stubble on his chin. But everything excitable within her is mitigated by his reluctant face, by his silence. The action is just Duncan’s judgment on thumbprints, on her slipshod ways; she is chain grease and smudges and stray hairs.
It is easier to move apart on the road then. There is a natural moment that comes next and it seems right to break apart and search the canal for the spot where the beast is turning back to dirt.
“There.” She points to a mound in the ditch, to the wide span of maple leaves. On top of the mound she recognizes the rack of branches that he twisted from a young spruce. The pile of pig is smaller than she expected. Ravaged by winged things and wolves, most likely. Duncan and Lily stand at the edge of the road and sniff; the animal should be mulch by now. Yet, the air is all balsam and bayberry leaves and she knows they’re both thinking the same things but are loath to consult.
This is the mistake Lily has made. This is the job Duncan could not finish.
There is the purr of electrical wires that sag along the road at intervals and, above this, a layer of bird chirrups. Lily hears each distinctly as she starts down the leeside of the embankment, dry sand sliding ditch-wise ahead of her. She steps toward the mound and picks off the branches, kicks away the cover of broad maples that are spread like serviettes. She pushes the last of the leaves with her toe. The pig is gone.
CHAPTER 21
Organs of Voice
In the evening he joins Lily out back at Tinker’s grave. It’s a night of treasure hunting in the inert soil where, according to the copy of Gray’s, they recover two arm bones but no hand; a marble sack of tarsal and metatarsal bones that comprise the foot, but no phalanges. Duncan’s thinking that the toes may have been too small to remain intact and nestled against the foot; perhaps they were ingested whole by a passing sweep of worms. Once he’s in the soil, he remembers the pleasure of searching. He realizes he’s digging to make up for his absence, choosing to go wide rather than deep. He tells Lily this way he can be most effective.
Duncan feels a tremendous need for an element of normalcy in the garden. Not only to camouflage their midnight industry, but also to return his sense of reality. First, the pig was gone from the ditch. Then, this afternoon, he found a sizable puddle of vomit on the rubber mat of the Saab. And running behind his eyelids all day, every day, is a Möbius strip of women in Stand and Be Counted jeans so tight he has to prod and twist just to get an index finger under a waistband.
Also, Lily’s been digging without him. Although the confession is hardly thundering in his universe of daily exigencies there’s no mistaking the intention of her well-placed kick to the balls.
Duncan turns on the sprinkler, adjusts the spray so that it arcs gently back and forth over the portion of lawn that is still untouched. He torches a cigarette and scratches his ass. At its apogee, the lashing arc of water forms a curtain, an illusory screen to shield the grave. Holy fuck, Duncan thinks, we really did carve it up. This initial midnight survey shows that what began as a small garden patch has advanced like alopecia across the grass. This might pose a problem. In the event that Valerie from the Historical Society sends an emissary to visit poor Laura, the butchered landscape will definitely become a town issue.
Lily comes out of the house and steps barefoot across the porch. She’s been storing away Tinker bits in the basement and is quiet. He shouldn’t blame her for digging without him. Three weeks in and no one understands the urgency of getting those bones out of the ground more than Lily. He’s the one who’s not holding up his end of the deal.
She comes over and takes the cigarette from between his fingers, puts it in her mouth and sucks back. For a minute they stand there, on the same northern line of latitude, looking into the barley and listening to the sprinkler patching against the grass, beading against the green. She sucks again and gives him back the cigarette.
As they pass this transgression from hand to hand, he would like to gather up her hair and yank hard. Just to see. Rub the stubble of his new beard into her cheek until he leaves abrasion marks. Failing that he maybe would like to say something to her. Or even speak in a general, undirected manner using thou and thee. Perhaps it would be easier to admit he’s failing her if he did so using the subjective and objective forms of the singular second person. But the words are too far out there. So let her make the first move for once. While he’s not surprised that she’s excavated, he is hurt by the thought. If she would just take hold of his sleeve now, these words might come, fluent and concise. She could even weep. This would be helpful, if she wept and moored against his hip. Or pitched herself at his feet. Near his feet. If only she could make herself the vulnerable one. Then he could finally look into her face, take it between his palms like an injury, and figure out what he’s been doing wrong.
&n
bsp; They were synchronized once; they ticked with Swiss precision.
What happened to that? Her early-morning rustling of bedsheets was a signal for him to wrap his arm around her as she began her crawl toward consciousness. They learned how the other could speak without using the mouth. At parties, when he caught her twisting her rings he knew to go gather up their coats. When they visited her parents it was understood that she would come and perch on the arm of his chair. It made him feel at ease—she knew that. It made him feel like a husband.
He’s about to lose it all now, he knows. This woman who once understood him without the aid of exhaustive explanation. This long-legged, ink-stained virgin he found like a gift in a library carrel. Standing beside him tonight, perhaps, but not for long. Will she move on to someone else? Could she have already?
Say something, you jackass, he urges himself. Lily rolls her toes in the grass. She looks up into the sky and scratches her neck. She’s offering him all these seconds. But who is she? Not the woman with whom he created a private language of hands. This replacement Lily is an oralist, a lip-reader who stands opposed to the use of sign language.
The moments, each fractional component, clock on in silence. He counts them as they go. Lily leaves him and moves across the lawn toward the sprinkler. His time has expired. She moves along the hedges. As she walks, crickets begin a string of chirrups. So sudden and orchestral that Duncan believes her body kinetics have cued their motion, their startling rapture, the frantic scratch of back legs. It’s too hot a night for this dry-legged rhythm, for two sticks rubbing. He looks at the shrubs; the cigarette drops from his fingers.
“Jesus, Lily,” he says over all that hind-leg racket. “Fire!”
As Lily passes, swaying to the cacophony made in her honor, the crickets begin combusting in the hedge. Yes, the crickets are burning.
