Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  Before midnight, all the meat is hung. My father and I contemplate it. It swings slowly, eerily, with gentle creakings. The garage is unheated, but it leeches enough heat from the house that it stays just above freezing. The slow patterning of blood drips will continue to speckle the concrete floor. We nod in satisfaction, and my father slowly tamps tobacco into his pipe. He lights it, sucks it noisily to life, and then turns away from the moose. I pull the string that turns out the light. We step out of the garage into the night, and he reaches up to pull the heavy door down. We are in the blackness of night again.

  My father’s streamer of pipe smoke rises up, like the steam from the moose’s exposed entrails. He has shoveled snow over the gut sack to hide it. By morning it will have frozen solid. The dogs will dig down to it, and spend weeks nibbling and licking at the frozen delight until it is gone. There remains only the head. We both know that.

  “Get rid of the head,” my father says simply, and turns toward the house. I watch him go. The windows of the house are warm and yellow. I know that by now my brothers and younger sisters are in bed, probably my older sisters as well. The skin of my face is so cold, it feels like a stiff cardboard mask. I can move my toes, pressing them down hard against my mukluk soles, and awaken them to pain. The moisture of my breath has frozen into a solid cake of frost on the muffler over my mouth. I want to go in.

  But there is the head.

  The door thuds behind my father and I am alone in the dark. I dare not even go in to fetch Rinky for company, for he would be too interested in the head and guts. He’d only make the task harder. I snatch up the black polyethylene sheeting and start off toward the garden.

  A head is not as big as a hindquarter, but it is an awkward shape, and heavier than you might think. The best way to lift one is to grip it by the bases of both ears, keeping the hacked-off neck turned away. The nose is pressed to my chest, the empty jaws gape tonguelessly. Even in the frigid air, the smell of moose and blood is strong. I turn quickly, letting go of the ears so that the momentum of my turn flings the head neatly onto the polyethylene sheet. I diaper the head up in the sheet, leaving myself one corner to use as a handle.

  The night is clear and cold. I turn my back to the house with its warm yellow windows, and I pull. The head rides along at my heels as I leave the yard and the tire-packed snow of the driveway and enter the woods. I have already decided where I am going.

  I follow one of my favorite trails. The trees are cottonwood and birch, alder and diamond willow. My path winds among them. Smaller bushes claw briefly at my burden, but don’t manage to rip the plastic. I drag it on, leaving a peculiar wrinkled trail, like the path of a giant worm. The head pulls easily, the polyethylene gliding over the snow. I am able to walk at a normal pace, and fifteen minutes later I am where I wish to be.

  Here there are spruce trees, sudden groves of them in the deciduous forest. For some reason, they grow in irregular huddles, in groups of ten and fourteen and nine. But almost always in the center of each huddle is a tiny clear space where no trees grow. I get down on my knees and crawl beneath the outer swoop of branches, past a trunk, and here the snow is shallower, for the upper branches have caught most of it. Then out again, through deeper snow, and I am suddenly inside the grove. A moat of snow and a wall of needled branches surround me. Looking straight up, I can see the black sky and the Dipper hung on it. Unceremoniously, I dump the head here and leave it. I wad the black plastic up under my arm and crawl out again. The walk home seems longer than the walk here. The woods seem lonelier and darker, and I am shivering before the lights of the house crack through the trees to beckon me on.

  My father is in the bathtub, my mother is reading in bed when I come in. No one calls out or questions me. No one save Rinky greets me, and he greets me with a wriggle of delight, his hackles rising excitedly at my blood smell. I shed my outer clothing by the door, and do not turn on the light as I go down the stairs. Everyone down here is asleep, vague blanketed shapes like furniture in storage. I am still shivering when I strip in the darkened basement and climb into bed. Rinky is snorting and rooting through my bloodied clothing as I fall asleep, my head cradled on arms and hands that still smell of sweet, sticky blood. I dream of bright white sunlight on the snow, and a faun gouging the frosted brown eyes from a moose skull and slipping them into his mouth. It is a good dream, and I smile in my sleep.

  FIVE

  * * *

  Tacoma

  The Farm

  June 1976

  Ten or fifteen years ago, the farm was a dairy farm. And the room that I stand in now was genteelly referred to as the milking parlor. Now it is a living room, and is part of what Mother Maurie calls “the little house” as opposed to her own “big house.” When she speaks of it to company, she calls it “the guest cottage,” but to her own family she calls it “the little house.” I find this an interesting dichotomy. Lately I find interesting dichotomies in many things Mother Maurie says.

  It is like a cancer, growing in me, a constant hidden nastiness I can no longer control. A little secret anger, like red eyes in the dark. When I first came down to visit, and was shown the many ways in which the Potter women were vastly superior to me, I was willing to concede to them. It was the easiest path. It was also hard to argue. I cannot shop, I do not color coordinate, I have never ordered from the Avon Lady or hostessed a Tupperware party. I was willing to be unschooled and unsophisticated, the country mouse come down from her little Alaskan cabin to be overawed by the style and gaiety of the life in the Lower Forty-Eight. A week, a month, or even two, I could sustain the proper humility. But now it is all wearing thin. I am becoming defensive about my inferiority, protective of it. I will be as I am. I am also beginning to suspect their veneer may be only contac paper. The Avon fragrances are beginning to smell suspiciously like air freshener. My anger is a simmering acid thing, eating me from the inside out, whetting my tongue, putting cruel edges on my every thought.

  But that is my problem, not Mother Maurie’s. And this living room is also my problem. We have been guests here since March. It is a bright and cheerful little place, cuter than the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. There are big windows with wispy white curtains that let the bright sun spill in onto the white tiled floors. The furniture is white wicker and yellow cushions. There is a little glass-topped table, too unbearably cute to be useful, homey little rugs scattered everywhere, and two kerosene lamps with colored water in them instead of kerosene.

  The kitchen is even better. There is a tiny white range, with a little red ceramic kettle sitting on it. The kettle is a masterpiece of Woolworth’s engineering, flawlessly useless, with a spout that dribbles and a body that holds less than three cups of water. Next to it, centered on the range, is a spoon holder shaped like a yellow ducky. The tiny kitchen table has a red-checkered oilcloth on it. There are plaques on the wall that say things about the Number One Cook, and For This I Went to College, and No Matter Where I Serve My Guests, They Seem to Like My Kitchen Best. There is a cookie jar shaped like a fat pink piggy. The dishes in the cupboards are sturdy plastic with jolly red roosters on every plate.

  The bedroom is okay. The patchwork quilt came from Sears, and the patches are only a pattern, but I can forgive that. I can even forgive the lampshades with the covered bridges painted on them, and the bases of the lamps that are shaped like old-fashioned pumps.

  What I cannot forgive is the bathroom. The theme seems to be that defecating children are cute. On a plaque over the toilet, a curly-haired cherub squats on a potty. There is also an adorable little statuette of a small boy with his bib coveralls around his ankles and a look of concentration on his pink-cheeked face as he sits on his little ceramic toilet. Even the toilet has theme clothing. The tank sweater and lid hat match, both depicting a little boy, his innocent bare butt toward us as he “waters mother’s flowers.” There is even an ashtray shaped like a toilet, with the motto “put your dead butts here” on it. The final touch is a tall book that hangs on a chain
by the toilet. The cover proclaims it as Poems for the John. Few things are more excruciating than to be trying to make breakfast in a cutesy kitchen, and to have one’s spouse holler from the john, “Hey, honey, listen to this one.” Lately, Tom has begun to subject me to this.

  It is a trap I have fallen into, all unawares. Even as we carried our suitcases in, Mother Maurie painstakingly pointed out to me that the furniture was “practically new, not a scratch on it.” She walked me through the guest house, showing me all its marvels, and requiring me to chuckle appreciatively as she giggled over the “naughty but cute” bathroom things. Steffie did the decorating, she told me. Steffie may someday take some classes in interior decorating, she seems to have such a flair for it. Some of the ideas, she confided, Steffie got from magazines, but most of it came right out of her own head. And isn’t that amazing?

  And of course Mother Maurie knows she can trust me to keep it neat as a pin, and to make sure “that terrible Tom” takes his boots off before he comes in, and don’t let “that rascal Teddy” roughhouse all over the furniture, it would just break Steffie’s heart if anything happened to this place, all the work she put into it to make it just as cute as a doll’s house … And I nodded and blithely agreed, for such an agreement seems easy when you are only planning to stay a month and may not even unpack your suitcase all the way.

  But that was March and it is June. Useless to whimper for my sturdy little house in the woods near Ace Lake on the Old Nenana Road. Foolish to think of a place with painted plywood floors, and a boot-scraper driven into the ground outside the door. I miss my sagging couch with its ratty afghan that all three of us can cuddle under while Teddy hears his good-night tale from Just So Stories. I miss the high bunk that Tom built for Teddy, with all the shelves under it for toys and books. I miss my wood stove, and the sound of pinecones falling onto the corrugated tin roof at night. I want to go home.

  But we can’t. Not just yet, but soon, Tom tells me. As soon as Bix is better. Bix, Ellie’s husband, is a very slow healer. Ellie is the eldest daughter in the Potter household, seldom spoken of, but there, nonetheless. And Bix is her sturdy hired-hand husband, as practical as a strike-anywhere kitchen match. A good son-in-law, none too bright, but handy around the place. Until he broke his collarbone. It’s hard to run a tractor with a broken collarbone, and the fields have to be tilled and planted. The farm has to look prosperous and well run, for in front of the farm, less than an acre away, is the farm equipment dealership that fronts onto the highway. Tom’s father owns it and runs it, with Mother Maurie and Steffie to do the bookwork and order parts and dust the shelves. Tom’s older sister, Ellie, keeps the big house in order for them all. And Ellie’s husband, as big and good-natured and farmy as she is, does his best to help out anywhere he can. But he’s not the same as a real son, Tom has confided ingenuously to me, not to his dad. Dick Potter likes to know that the crucial work of the farm is in family hands. It’s just like that fool Bix to have broken his collarbone in spring, the busiest time of the year. And so Tom must stay, just a little longer, to get the fields tilled and planted, to move the irrigation pipe that waters the tender young plants, to mechanic on the equipment that does the work, and to be Dick’s son. It is his family. Family is important. I understand.

  Sometimes.

  Sometimes I am sweetly reasonable. Sometimes I understand all that Tom tells me, about how important his family is, and that they expect and need his loyalty. There is something all-American about the concept of the extended family and the old family farm, and pulling together to get through the hard times. Sometimes it is a thing I want Teddy to learn, and sometimes I want him to grow up remembering early mornings on the farm, feeding the chickens, riding the tractor behind Bix or Tom, going to town in Grandpa’s red truck, sitting by Grandma’s feet and watching television in the evening.

  And sometimes I want them back, all to myself, my Tom, my Teddy. I don’t want to be Tom’s wife. I want to be Evelyn, in the cabin Tom and I built, in a place more forest than farm. I want to go home to my own house, to my own furniture, to my books and garden and woods. I don’t want to be careful of the rattan furniture and the bright cushions that show every smear of dirt. I want to flop down on my own couch and sigh heavily, and let all the tension out. I want to be home.

  Lately, when Tom speaks of home, he means this farm. “Let’s go home now,” he said to me yesterday when I had stolen him away, to have him to myself for a few guilty moments on a spurious errand. I wanted to stop at a cafe, to have a cup of coffee and talk with him. But he was restless, his mind full of uncompleted chores. “I have to get home,” he repeated, and my heart sank. Is my home now different from his? Sometimes I see it all as an elaborate con worked upon me, as when I was in grade school and there were cliques I could never belong to, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried. I am no different from Ellie’s husband, I will never be as good as a real daughter, never part of the real family. And sometimes the Potter family farm reminds me more of a Japanese corporate structure than Old MacDonald’s Farm. Sometimes I suspect them of shaving and shaping Tom, like a faulty cog that doesn’t quite mesh, machining him to fit into the gear chain instead of causing it to jam. I think they will steal Teddy from me, will teach him that he is a real grandson of the real family, and therefore belongs with them, not with his mother who is only a married-on artificial part of the family.

  If I think about these things, I can work myself up into a frothing rage. How dare they! I won’t let them! Mine, all mine, Tom and Teddy are mine and they shall never have them!

  Sick. Selfish. Sad. I know. But there is so little else for me to do. Tom goes off to work and Teddy trails off with him, or is “borrowed” by Grandpa to be shown off while he sits in Hanks Diner and has his morning coffee with the other good old boys. I stay here, in Snow White Steffie’s enchanted cottage, and try to deal with an oil smudge on a yellow cushion, Teddy’s sticky fingerprints on the glass-topped table, and the increasingly obvious sag of the rattan chair that was never intended for a man of Tom’s size. I know Mother Maurie will quietly mention these signs of wear to other family members as evidence of my waywardness and inferiority to a real daughter. And I experience the amusing dichotomy of watching myself mutter that I never wanted to be treated as a real daughter even as I try to get peanut butter out of the weave of a rattan armrest.

  When I run out of hopeless housework to occupy myself, I can fill my days with endless paperbacks. Passion’s Proud Fury and The Angry Heart and The Elegant Suitor and Flames of Desire. Steffie has a wall of them in her room, and she has told me that I can borrow them whenever I like. They are all romances, in different series, and she keeps them arranged by number. She marks a little X inside the cover of each one she has read, so she doesn’t accidentally start reading it again. It’s easy to forget, she tells me, which ones she has read, and she used to get deep into one before she realized she had already read it once before. The X’s, she tells me, keep her from wasting her time. The other books in the big house are technical manuals for tractors; Steffie is the family bookworm, all the Potters agree, and they are proud of her endless reading.

  There is an alternative to rattan maintenance and Passion’s Proud Fury. I can go visit the big house.

  In the day I can go over and watch Ellie work. She is a big rawboned woman, Dick Potter’s frame accidentally bestowed on a female child. Both seem ashamed of the error. Ellie minimalizes it by hunching around the house, wearing her plaid housedresses as if they were a clever disguise, like a tablecloth thrown over a packing crate. Ellie does only one thing. She works. She mops tile floors and sweeps hardwood floors, she scrubs walls, she pounds yielding white dough into loaves, she chops vegetables and tumbles them into simmering pots, she polishes windows and dusts shelves. She never stops. If I arrive during the day, she assumes I have some purpose there and ignores me. She is not one to stop and have a cup of tea and chat. Conversation with Ellie is a difficult thing, a trailing net of words th
at follows her from room to room as she straightens and tidies, snagging on feather dusters and Pledge cans and sponges and Comet cleanser. How is she? I am fine, and excuse me, I have to mop where you’re standing. And how is Bix? Bix is better, save for a crick in his back, serves him right for trying to work in his good boots while his shoulder is still banged up, and excuse me, I have to go get the Pine Sol.

  What else can I do with myself? Once I got up early and fed all the chickens, ducks, and pigs. I gave the chickens too much, the ducks too much, and the pigs not enough, and the poultry food is expensive, almost seven cents a pound now, and the pigs will break out of their yard if they get hungry during the day, and of course Mother Maurie knew I was only trying to help, but it’s not like farming’s in my blood, like in Tom’s, so I’m bound to make mistakes, but the wrong amount of feed can put the poultry off their laying, and of course that’s critical this time of year, so maybe I should let Ellie do it like always, but thanks for trying to help, it was so cute of me.

  Is it me?

  Sometimes I think it’s just me. I think there’s something wrong inside me, something mean and selfish and small that puts the worst interpretation on anything that’s said to me. When I try to tell Tom about what happened, he looks at me, puzzled. “Well, the wrong amount of feed can put the chickens off their laying,” he says, as if that explains everything, and goes back to reading his tractor manual.

  It is evening, night in the little house, but not at all peaceful. My nerves are trembling inside my body, I want to explode, to shriek and scream. And Tom, once so tuned to me he could answer my unspoken questions, does not even notice. So I will be good. I will be patient. I will be a good wife, and contain this unreasoning anger. I will think of something worthwhile to do.

  “I think I’ll go get Teddy,” I say. “It’s getting late, and I think he’s had enough television for one night. This time of evening, there’s probably nothing on that will interest him, anyway.”