The Hare

by Melanie Finn

  His skin was grey, his eyes red. Bennett peered at her through the glass partition. “Hello, my girls.” His lion mane lay flat, exposing the recession on his forehead. Rosie wondered if early baldness might have made him a better man. He made a silly face for Miranda, bobbed his head. “Hello, little girl, Daddy’s little blub blub! Hellllooo!” Miranda batted at the partition. Bennett gave his best sheepish grin. “I guess Daddy screwed up.”

  Rosie made a dismissive noise in the back of her throat. Bennett did not ask: how did you get here? He did not consider her car or lack of car or what needed to be done to simply not die in the winter. He did not consider Billy, for Billy didn’t know Yeats or Hardy. He didn’t know how to light the stove. He was still waiting for tea and scones with rose petal jam.

  He began to cry. Fat tears dripped down his face and off his chin, a drip of sad snot leaked from his nose. With all the weight he’d gained, he resembled a very sad bear. How he repelled her, she felt ill considering the fact that he had touched her, licked her, been inside her. She had never loved him, love had vaporized retroactively. Yet she had only herself to blame. Less pusillanimous, she would already have moved to Santa Fe and gotten a job waitressing, she’d already be painting the rose and ruby-colored land. Oh, cowboy boots and silver bangles, skulls and sage! Oh, Georgia O’Keeffe on a motorbike. Rosie had lacked vision. She had failed to see she could have had the child without the man.

  “The arraignment is tomorrow.” He pressed his hands against the window. “Please. Please. You have to help me, Rosie.”

  She swallowed the spit that still tasted of floor.

  “Please.” He was sobbing wet, childish sobs. “Ask Hobie — Mitzi — ask my sister. I’ll give you her number —”

  But Rosie was furled, she was curled, she was thinking only: I hope you die in here, you lying sack of fucking shit, I hope your lies crawl out of the rotting sockets of your skull.

  He did not notice her silence. Grief and sorrow were upon him. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry so sorry so so so sorry I’m so sorry Rosie Rosie Rosie Rosie Rosie Rosie please sorry sorry for everything everything I’m so sorry please don’t leave me please don’t leave me here.”

  Rosie looked at him, this one last time, there was so much to say but what she decided was this: “Now you’ll really have something to tell stories about.”

  And that was that, the buck had finally stopped, she stood up, she was raising her eyebrows to the guard, who lifted his in return — an entire conversation taking place between sets of eyebrows. All she had to do was lift her eyebrows and he opened the door. She hoped Bennett was watching the ease with which she moved out into the free world. Then the door slammed shut behind her, and she heard only a muffled droning of despair, which might not have been Bennett. Some other mug.

  In the hallway, in the white scorching light, she stood for a moment, bracing herself against the wall. Miranda was drooling through the gap in her teeth, so Rosie crouched down, dabbed it away with the hem of her skirt. She saw the floor, smeared with the filth of those who walked in and out, gathering whatever on their shoes, dog shit, mud, urine from the floor of the men’s room. How might this floor taste? Different from her own floor? She’d licked the cracked linoleum, she’d licked Wheezie’s shoes, she’d swallowed back the gagging in her throat — the floor had had an oddly neutral taste, gritty, dusty, slightly sour. She did what women do and have always done, because the laundry still needs to be folded, the children collected from school or the fields or the workhouse, the dinner has to be made or gathered or harvested or butchered. Women do what needs to be done, they do what is expected, the obligation of their gender. For centuries, for thousands of years, tens of thousands, millions of years, women have been sucking cock and licking floors and going up the stairs just to keep men from making any more trouble. Men mistake the act of submission for the condition of submission. But they don’t know that women split themselves right down the middle, the submitting part and the fuck you part.

  When did this splitting begin? Rosie regarded Miranda. Had it already, in this small girl-child? She’d received, aged twenty months, her first sexual proposition. How many more to come? Women had holes and men believed it was their right to fill them. Not content with the physical holes, they tried to make existential ones. Drilling, drilling, drilling.

  Rosie could not possibly protect Miranda from this, she was completely unequipped for motherhood, the mothering of a porous girl. She’d entered a foreign country, a terrible Gulag, Ivan Denisovich in his broken boots, dreaming of hot potatoes by the fire.

  “Dadda!” Miranda reached back toward the door. “Dadadadad.” The word Rosie herself could not remember uttering. Dad. Daddy. The first word a child learns. Not Mama. Because the “D” is easier to form in the mouth. Dadda, the first claim.

  “We won’t see Dadda for a while, my love.”

  “Bap bap bap.” Miranda swarmed up Rosie’s body, her small, fat hands tapping her face. “Mummumumumumum.”

  Outside, Billy waited in the truck and she started the engine and they pulled away from the prison. Through the gate, onto the road of this obliterated place, a landfill on a bog, devoid of trees where only wind and mosquitos dwelled. The ubiquity of such a cubist cement structure upon a stripped land provided a grotesque kind of democracy. Bennett was absorbed, now, into a classless system; or, rather, a system of different classes, where the violent and the hardened were the entitled ones. Rosie was suddenly filled with wild joy — and she let it run through her veins, she allowed herself the illicit, savage pleasure of vindication. Quickly, though, she let her hair fall across her face so Billy’d not see her bright glow. Not just Billy, but Gran’s Fate who patrolled the earth on the lookout for such delirium.

  “Howaboutan icecream?” Billy began. “There’sa place in Derby —”

  “Just home.” Home.

  Rosie watched the trees along the roadside, the road itself bending and looping like a dog through the loping land. Five-to-seven, Wheezie had said, five entire years, six or even seven, how many days — more than a thousand, possibly two thousand, and these days ran ahead of her on the road, uncharted, aimless in their multitude. She saw herself, clearly now, Miranda’s hand in hers, striding toward the distant mountains. Purple in the summer noon they rose, softly contoured against the sun-diluted sky. So fixed on her horizon, Rosie hardly heard Billy, who was saying something about building a greenhouse, a plan she’d had for years but nevah godup offa moiy fat ass, and givin up tha drinkin and maybe tha chew and sortin out them apples, a bounty was to be had if we’d getta prunin and we can store em all winta in tha root cella, no pointin jus leavin them all far tha beahs and tha deah and tha child’ll needtah gotah school less yor thinkin a home-schoolin’.

  Through the drab town, and Rosie was cheered by the effort made to hang baskets of nail-polish pink geraniums on the small white pavilion in the park. Children were playing in the fountain, though a sign said not to, they were splashing and laughing, and the water scattered into the air, droplets hanging like a silver net in the heat.

  The truck rattled homeward, the tar yielded to dirt, and past the rough fields rife with burdock and milkweed and black-eyed Susans. Miranda was fast asleep, her head improbably kinked against her shoulder, mouth open like a trout. Mine, Rosie thought. All I need, all I have in the world, this child, my child. Even the house with its treacherous roof, the broken window and the rotting doorframes, even the house is mine. Bennett is gone, gone, a far ellipse, catapulted into deepest space. Pluto.

  “Wouldya liketa —”

  Rosie turned, surfacing.

  “Come for a bar-bi-que, kinda celebratin’.”

  Now Rosie saw Billy’s new shirt, or clean at least; and, oddly, earrings — a dainty pair of butterflies in the plump lobes of Billy’s clean ears below her clean hair.

  “Oh,” Rosie heard herself say, a sound like a stone dropping in water.

  Billy blushed fiercely and retrac
ted — not her body, which remained stolidly in the driver’s seat, the small hands with the scrubbed nails gripping the steering wheel — but her heart. Billy pulled in the white lace of her heart, the delicate material she’d hidden away, carefully, fearfully sequestered in tissue paper, it was stained but still pretty, and the mending had been done with small, dutiful stitches.

  “I mean,” Rosie tried. “Not tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

  “Yep. That’d be foine. Ya let me know.”

  Rosie got out, cradling her still-sleeping child, this weight in her arms was all she ever wanted, it wasn’t too much, and she bowed her head as the greedy gods stalked on by.

  THE CEMETERY

  1991

  A deer trail cut through the woods, faltering and veering within the dense understory of ferns, brambles, and hobblebush. Rosie paid attention, for animals always took the way of least resistance. Here, in the early spring, when stubborn patches of snow clung to the shadows of the spruce, she harvested fiddleheads. In late summer, she picked firm-fleshed bolete mushrooms, puff balls, hedgehog fungus. Dozens of these were now stored in the basement, sliced and dried and packed in brown paper bags, ready for use in venison stews and soups. Ahead, where two streams intersected in a flat area of marsh, she knew there were marsh primroses in May and lady slipper orchids in July. In this late November, she was the brightest object in the wood, dressed from head to toe in hunter’s orange. She had not been up here for more than a month, for it had been rifle season, and fools were about with guns and beer and the need to compensate. For the weeks through November, she’d hear the sharp retorts echoing around the peaks and valleys of Kirby. She always hoped for one shot, which meant the deer was dead in an instant, or one shot, a pause, and then the mercy shot. But often enough there was blasting, bang-bang-bang, then long, long minutes passed and more bang-bang, so that she knew an incompetent was killing the deer slowly, gut shots, broken legs. Some let it run off to die the animal way. Rifle season ended after Thanksgiving, and it was musket now, which required greater skill — therefore fewer hunters. Rosie had learned with Billy’s rifle, but she preferred musket simply because she wanted to be alone in the woods, not fearing for her life, some Masshole in a Filson jacket and Timberland boots mistaking her for an eight-pointer.

  A grouse suddenly flew up from under her feet, launching upon the air with whirring wings and an outraged squawk. She watched it flee, amazed as always by the ability of such a dowdy, plump bird to navigate at speed the tight macramé of branches. Otherwise, the forest was still, the early winter light fragile, pallid.

  Before Billy’s knees had turned to grit, she’d taught Rosie how to be in the woods, and that entering them required a different attitude, nothing sacred or religious or even mystical, but a re-focus. The smells of animals, the temperature of their scat, the broken branches or flattened bracken or scrapes against a tree: here began other stories: deer yard, moose in rut, bear territory. Once, they found a coil of still steaming guts: “Beavah,” Billy whispered and made a dramatic cutting motion across her throat. “Kiyoat.” Billy sniffed, Rosie sniffed. Upon the air: currents of musk, the spice of blood.

  Her stand was beyond the marsh, near an old apple which bore small, tart fruit even after the first hard frosts of mid-October. The taller trees had crowded out the other apples. Once there’d been an orchard and a homestead. Rosie had found the foundations of the high barn, and a rusted stove slowly disassembling at the base of a paper birch. The birch was at least a century old, which made the stove a few decades older. At that time, all the land would have been cleared for sheep — the now deep-wooded hills would have been bare-assed as highlands, criss-crossed with stone walls that even now dredged through the leaf litter. Rusted barbed wire remained to trip up the unwary, the narrow strands embedded within the meaty trunks of maples and pines. The trees absorbed the cruel wire, grew straight and tall, regardless.

  There had been a road here, too. The earth still held the depression where wooden carts had passed, and even further on, a small cemetery with a dozen headstones. Rosie knew these almost by heart now. She liked to sit among the quiet, unremembered dead. These slabs of marble and slate had cost someone dearly, a gravestone purchased instead of a pair of new winter boots or a new blade for the saw. And to what end? The dreary annual trips to the graveyard with Gran had never felt like a communion with her mother and father, Rosie had no connection with the two headstones and their administrative facts, their drab chrysanthemums. Her parents were not there comforting her with a gentle breeze. They had absconded, they had left her without love, and what she often wanted wasn’t to grieve but to harangue. Why did you leave? Why did you leave me? Why did you leave me with Gran?

  Two years ago, when Rosie first found this cluster of graves, she thought she would like to be buried here, and then considered how absurd, for this place would mean nothing to her dead. Soon the trees would reclaim the earth, upend the gravestones, weave their roots through the catacombed bones.

  Billy told her there used to be farms all over the mountains, schools and tracks, and the cemetery had been busy. But then the descendants of the descendants died or moved away. Even the Mixes were newcomers — they’d come to Kirby to farm Christmas trees in the 1920s. Billy didn’t like graves, the idea of the dark, suffocating earth, she said, gave her the hebemajebees. “I’ll be foddah, I reckin, for tha kiyoats and fishers, beahs and the loik. They’re oweda pieca me. Payback, yep, for the killin’ of them I done. Fair’s fair.”

  Climbing up to her stand, Rosie opened her thermos and drank the dark coffee. The warmth in her hands and throat was beautiful. Then she waited, a hibernation that was also a coiled preparation. Within her physical stillness, she listened and watched. The coming of a deer, the punch of narrow hooves on near-frozen ground, or the flickering of an ear, a tail.

  At last, at last, a young buck appeared, a second-year male, she was lucky, for last week she’d had only does. He slipped through the woods, his movements silken and spare. She’d tried to learn from the deer how to move without wasting precious energy, how to imagine the land beneath the undergrowth so she did not stumble, how to step over, under, threading through with a sinewed continuity.

  The buck approached, tentatively, as if suspicious of anything so sweet as apples. He scented the air, but on this still morning, he would find no trace of Rosie, the breeze carried her smell away from him. He flicked his glorious tail, he reached back and scratched his hind leg with his teeth. Rosie could see the boot-polish wet of his nose, his dense eyelashes. She could almost hear his breath as he moved directly beneath her, his nose to the ground, his mouth upon an apple. Billy had told her she shouldn’t think about being slow, or trying to move so incrementally that the deer wouldn’t notice, because the deer would see the slightest movement, such was their design, their eyes mounted on the sides of their skulls to see behind and above. Billy said she had to stop thinking about the gun and the movement altogether, to practice at home again and again until the motion was thoughtless. “They see ya thinkin’,” Billy said. “They heah ya thinkin’. It’s the thinkin,’ the ruckus in yer head like a circus parade.”

  The buck dropped, the sound of the shot continued around the hills, ringing the clear morning air, around and around like a bell. Jumping down from the hide, Rosie squatted to pee — the release of coffee and tension made the pissing intensely sensuous. From her low position, she admired the morning, the tones of cool blue and pale pink, heavy frost still sheathed the startling cerise of the wild blackberry canes and the bright citron of the bunch grass. The sharp tang of gunsmoke prickled her nostrils. She felt ancient, as if she put her hand down on the earth, she might reach right through and grasp a cord that connected her directly to another hunter who had squatted here on similar terms on a similar morning centuries ago. Nothing felt this complete, not even Miranda in her arms. She was entirely happy.

  The buck’s blood melted the frost, began to congeal in the cold air. She stroked the soft
head, her bare hand on the fading warmth. It was a beautiful animal, entirely driven by purpose. From her belt, the unsheathed her knife and field-dressed it. The guts made a neat pile, still steaming with the heat of the living body. Skunks, coyotes, weasels would find them soon enough.

  Tucking the hind legs into her elbows, she began to drag the buck. It was a good size, probably 150 pounds without the guts. Now she began to walk back down the hill, perhaps a mile, over rough ground. Sweat soon streamed down the narrow of her back and the cleft of her buttocks. Her lungs heaved in her chest, yet her heart obeyed, her heart loved this, her heart whirred and pulsed with the joy of the effort, she had a soul, for the soul flew down the hill, leaving the mortal carapace to struggle through the brambles and over the debris of fallen trees and rotting logs.

  Two hours later, her thighs and shoulders aching, she neared Billy’s. The dogs began to bark. Billy hobbled out of her house, squinted: “Ya find tha on tha road didya? Some real huntah forgot to close tha tail gate, I reckin.”

  They lodged the buck on the hook and hoisted it up on the hanging rack. For the first time all morning, Rosie felt squeamish. Still she hated the leaden deadness. To have the deer strung upside down was a kind of humiliation, his neat furred testicles on display. The buck had survived the brutal winters and the cunning, hungry springs, and now hung neutral as drying laundry. The first time Billy got her over a deer, Rosie had missed, relieved to see the buck bolt into the thick bush. But two things changed her mind about the order of life: Billy told her that there are no easy deaths up here. “Wacha think? Tha deah jes lay down and go ta sleep when theys too old?” No. They die slowly from disease or winter or “they get gimpy and the kiyotes take ’em, apieca ata toime.”