Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  My eyes are stinging like I’m going to cry, but this doesn’t make sense. I’m angry, not sad. Angry. I take the knife from my bucket and stab it deep into the moss. Angry. I stab the moss again, and again.

  Rinky comes back, snuffles my hair, snuffles at what I’m doing, nearly getting his black nose cut off by my knife in the process, finds it incomprehensible and hence uninteresting, and goes off again. Comes back a second later, licks my ear comfortingly, and leaves again.

  The music begins, tentative and breathy. I lift my chin a fraction of an inch, and freeze, listening. There are only five or six notes to the simple melody, and it seems familiar, but I cannot put a name or words to it, nor say where I have heard it before. I turn my head slowly, listening. Sound travels strangely by water, and it takes me a minute before I am sure I have my direction. Across the slough. Damn.

  I stand, catching up my bucket. There is a place to cross the slough, one where I will not get more than knee wet, and I head that way. As I go, I keep an eye out for wild mushrooms. My mother loves wild mushrooms, and has taught me twenty-seven different edible varieties, as well as those that I must not touch, and those that are merely useless or unsavory. I find several orange delicious, their caps actually a mottled green, but a secret orange ring hidden within their stems that makes identification easy. I draw the knife tip across the gills, watch the milky liquid rise to the cut. Lactarius family. Same as the pepper cap. I roll Latin names on my tongue as I scavenge mushrooms and walk.

  The bottom of my bucket is covered with mushrooms by the time I get to the crossing place. I stand on the bank, picking my most likely path, and then set off, stepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, edging along an old log for part of the way, and then working my way again from tuft to tuft. Rinky comes, crashing and splashing to catch up with me, and nearly knocks me into the slough as he races past me. I have only two misses, and it is the same foot each time, so when I reach the other bank, I am only knee wet on one leg, and ankle-wet on both feet. Not bad.

  The music has not ceased, but is smoothing out, as if the player is becoming more practiced. I know who it is, I do not need to catch the elusive tracery of his scent upon the air. I follow my nose and ears now, follow the sound and scent trickling between trees and brush, still pausing every now and then to add another mushroom or two to my bucket. Here is a hedgehog hydnum, a shingled cap with spiny little underpoints instead of gills, and a small orange boletus, its orange cap still tight to its white stem, hiding the soldierly rows of tubes that substitute for gills on it.

  And here is a faun, goat legs akimbo, perched on an old log, cheeks red with puffing, eyes merry at my approach. He doesn’t stop playing, but plays for me, deliberately, showing off how well he blows his pipes. For they are genuine panpipes, the little wooden tubes bound in a row with some vegetable twine. They look new, the wood unscuffed, unworn, new-made for spring. I sit next to him on the log, watching how it’s done, how his mouth leaps from pipe to pipe. He is sweating, his curls are damp as they bob on his forehead, and I am struck again by his odor, sweeter than the warm breath of nursing puppies, pungent as crushed herbs, like tree resin and squashed raspberries and rich crumbly loam in the hand. Like all the sweetness of the earth embodied by a scent. It is a pleasure to sit beside him and smell him, and the music he plays has a similar unity to it. Breathless and soft it whispers like wind, like water over pebbles and rain dripping from branches, like birdcall and yet like the trumpetous sounding of an elk. He plays on and on and I listen.

  When he stops, it is not the end of the song, but only the end of his breath. The song goes on around us, paler now, slurring its notes, but still there, breathing through the forest, and I understand what he has been doing. Not harmonizing with the forest, but amplifying it, anticipating its song, and playing beside it. He sees in my face my wonder and grins at me, unabashedly proud of himself. He wipes his pipes down one of his hairy thighs and offers them to me.

  I take them cautiously, fearing for an instant that it is some kind of challenge from him, a dare for me to play as well as he has. If it is, I know I will not try. Something inside me is in full retreat from dares today. But in his eyes there is no challenge, only sharing. He watches me eagerly as I lift the pipes to my mouth, try my breath cautiously against one. It hoots softly, wistful as an owl, and my heart leaps in me with joy. Each pipe speaks to me with a voice I already know, and I forget the faun, forget everything but playing with the sounds I can utter now. It is like speaking a new language, no, like being mute all my life and then being granted speech, the speech of my dearest friends. I speak as the water, and then as the wind through branches, speaking as they do, not their thoughts but only their own being.

  The faun’s hand is on my knee, and I suddenly feel it, breathe the last of my breath down the pipe. I stop reluctantly, and wipe them on the cleanest part of my sleeve and then offer them back to him. He takes them with a smile that says, “Wait, wait now, just a minute.” He holds them in his hands, and his rounded nails are the same color as his hooves, and two shades lighter than the tiny points that push up from amid his curls. His horns are growing this year, and I lean forward to touch one, knowing he will not flinch away nor resist my curiosity. Hard horn, smooth as polished wood yet knurled like diamond willow almost, the tip sharp against my palm. He angles his head away from my touch, gives me a glance that is through his lashes and over his cheekbones, then leans his head back, baring the browned swell of his throat, and lifts the pipes to his mouth. He closes his eyes.

  He plays Pan.

  He plays a glimpse of sunlight on a dappled flank in a birch grove, he plays brown eyes that light green with laughter, he plays the unwary clack of a cloven hoof against a glacier-worn stone, the deep breath drawn after a race through the woods, the grip of strong fingers on my wrist when he bids me be silent, the nudge of his shoulder against mine when our heads are close together over the first pale wood anemone, he plays the wind through brown curls and the trickle of rain over his shoulder blades. My throat closes up with how beautiful he is.

  When I open my eyes, he has lowered the pipes, and I do not know how long I have been listening to the silence that is also a part of his song. He meets my shining eyes and his cheeks rose with more than the flush of his playing. He scratches his head, digging lovingly at the bases of his nubbly horns. With his free hand he offers the pipes to me again.

  But this time I do not reach for them at all. I know what he wants to hear, and I do not wish to play it. I will not play ragged jeans and dirty knees, runny nose and scaly knuckles. I will not play my shame, and I try to pretend I don’t notice he is offering the pipes to me. So he pokes me with them, and when I still don’t respond, he pokes me again, hard, prodding me in the short ribs with their hardness.

  I glare at him. He makes a face at me, sucking in his cheeks and hogging out his eyes. I snatch the pipes from his hand before he can jab me again. Immediately he settles back on his log seat, attentive and polite. I want to call him a bad name. He sits watching me, waiting for me, and I don’t understand why he is being this mean, this nasty, to demand this of me. I know what I am, and he can already see what I am. Why demand it be given a tongue? But he is still watching me, waiting, his face smooth, and I look long in his eyes, trying to find where he has hidden the malice that makes him demand this.

  But he is too deceptive for me, and at last, in anger, I lift the pipes to my lips. I close my eyes, and squawk out bony dirty knees and snarled hair. The pipes shriek hilariously of a smudged face and hands rougher than a dog’s toepads, of ragged clothes that flutter in the wind they croak, and then of thin arms and a bony chest.

  The pipes smack against my front teeth, jarring me to my very spine and cutting my upper lip and gum before they fly past my face. I open my eyes, frightened, and his hand is still lifted, palm toward me, as if his hand will fly back again and this time strike my face. His eyes are outraged and hurt. We stare at each other across the torn place between us, and
something is bleeding, I am cut in a place that isn’t even on my body and he shares the wound, feels it just as I do. The hurt lasts a long time, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

  I stoop slowly and pick up the pipes. They are unhurt, save for a drop of my blood on the end of one. I wipe it off on my shirt, cautiously offer them back to him. He takes them as if they are encrusted with dog shit, by two disdainful fingertips. He gives me a look I cannot interpret and hops off the log and rubs the pipes over the moss carefully, rips loose a handful of green willow leaves and scrubs the pipes with them, staining them green but ridding them of whatever uncleanliness he imagines on them. He is puffing when he sits back down. As he starts to lift the pipes to his mouth, I rise. I’ve had enough music for today, I decide. Especially I fear that he may play his own beauty again, a wicked counterpoint to my latest performance.

  Walnut fingers grip my wrist, clenching tight. He has always been stronger than I am, but never before today has he used that, except in play. I refuse to struggle, knowing I cannot break free. Instead, I glare at him, then make my face cold and impassive as a bank of blown snow. I look past his shoulder into the moving shadows of the woods, for the wind has risen slightly and is stirring branches and grasses to dance. With the corner of my eye, I see his left hand lift the pipes to his mouth.

  He plays, and I must listen, but I don’t have to show I’m listening. I continue to stare past him as he plays a tiny green frog clinging to the underside of a leaf, a cluster of high-bush cranberries dangling beneath an umbrella of rosy leaves, tiny alder cones rattling down on new-fallen leaves, and spruce sap glinting in the sunlight. I watch the shadows sway.

  He pauses, but not for breath. He shakes me, hard, by my wrist, and I try not to sway with his rattling. I look at him, making my eyes cold and hard. Something in his forest eyes keeps me from looking away from his gaze, even when he lifts his pipes and puts them to his mouth. He plays again, the same tune.

  But this time I cannot deny the slender ankle wading past the frog, the strong brown fingers reaching for the cranberries, the laughter that echoes the rattle of the cones, the fan of hair the wind blows past the spruce tree that glints the same as the shining sap. He plays on, watching my face, and I hear warm breath stained with wild strawberries, the curved back of someone curled and sleeping in the deep grass, green eyes blinking with snowflakes on their lashes. What I hear is me, and not me, like a reflection in a pool is both me and the leaf-dappling light on the soft mud at the bottom.

  He plays it twice again before he will let me go, his eyes watching me as if commanding me to commit it to memory. Evelyn Sylvia it is, Evelyn in the forest, the Evelyn he knows, and the notes are my name as his pipes say it, as the forest itself breathes it.

  His fingers loosen around my wrist as he continues to play. I draw my hand free of his, and gather my bucket to go. Rinky comes to my tongue click, and splashes beside me as we recross the slough. His black tail is curled up tightly over his shining back, and I think of going back and asking Pan to play Rinky for me. Another time. Another time. His music follows me still, rising and falling with the stirring wind, but as I get farther and farther away, it blends with the forest’s own singing, and I cannot tell if I am hearing the forest itself or Pan’s rendition of it.

  His music has driven the sense out of my head. I see my mother’s face as I shut the door behind me, and the sound of the door shutting is like the clack of a jaw trap on my ankle. Too late to run, and the mushrooms I offer are not enough. I am required to sit at the table and peel potatoes while I listen to a recital of my sins. She admits that Candy said a lot of cruel things, but that doesn’t excuse my physical violence. Sissy and Candy come up from the basement, both to listen and to chime in with any crimes my mother may miss. Candy’s nose has stopped bleeding, but as I suspected, the mohair sweater, though still soaking in cold water, is probably ruined. I bite my tongue, refusing to say aloud that now she will probably give it to me, hand down the stained, worn-out stuff to Evelyn, she’s too stupid to know the difference.

  Candy’s eyes are both blacked, too, and this explains Sissy’s sudden chumminess with her. Jeffrey showed to take Candy out, but when he saw swollen nose and puffing eyes, he backed out of the date, none too graciously. Now they both agree that Jeffrey is an asshole, but have no gratefulness to me for revealing that to them. Candy is demanding I pay for her sweater, which is a joke, as I never have any money except at my birthday or Christmastime. I am judged and condemned to clean up the room that we share. I don’t say a word as they rant at me, and I can feel how much angrier this makes my sisters. But it only seems to make my mother more thoughtful. As she swoops up the heap of potatoes I have peeled and splashes them into a bubbling stew and stirs it, she stares at the blank wall over the gas stove, and her grey-green eyes are distant, almost as if she were listening to music rather than to the nattering and bleating of my sisters.

  The next morning I find that the hem of my pleated skirt has been resewn. The mohair sweater is dyed a uniform brown before it is folded into my drawer. I say nothing, and neither does anyone else.

  SEVEN

  * * *

  The Farm

  June 1976

  “Are we gonna stay so I can have a pony?” There is a ring of orange juice around Teddy’s mouth, like a visible question mark at the end of his sentence. He phrases the words casually, but his eyes are vaguely accusing, as if he expects me to selfishly snatch all his hopes away. As if someone has warned him in advance of my cruelty.

  I refuse to let their warning be fulfilled. “I guess so, honey. Daddy and I need to talk about it a little more. Do you want to stay here all winter?”

  I reach across the table and rumple his hair, but it is too short to tousle now. He reaches up to smooth it, looks briefly puzzled at how short it is. But it will grow again. It is not permanent, none of this is. They can change the outside of him, but they cannot change what I have put within him. Child of my long days with you, full of stories read by me, of questions I have answered and questions I have asked, grown within my own body and then nourished by my mind. My own. My boy, I thought, mine. This one is all mine, Mother Maurie. You may be able to whistle up Tom, but not my Teddy. This one I’m keeping.

  I cancel that thought as soon as it surfaces, disturbed by my own growing paranoia. I cannot understand what is happening to me. Sometimes, when I think about it, I am frightened.

  Teddy considers my question gravely, and I await his answer solemnly. “Yes, Mom, I think I would like to stay. I could have a pony, and go to school in the very same school that Daddy attended when he was a boy my age. And when Bix gets better, he’s gonna teach me to run the big tractor. And I’ll be a man, not a little sissy.”

  His eyes light up as he finishes this speech. No doubt the thoughts please him, but it disturbs me a little to hear them couched in phrases fresh from Grandpa’s mouth.

  “Well, I suppose we’ll probably stay then,” I say lamely. A cruel temptation rises in me. It would be so easy to say, “Too bad your poor puppy will be all alone this summer. Too bad your Tonka trucks have to sit on their shelves and get dusty, too bad Eddie-down-the-road will have no one to swim with him in the gravel pit this summer. But I guess a pony is worth it. I hope our Bruno puppy doesn’t run away because he’s so lonely. I hope no one breaks into our cabin and steals all your toys. I hope mice don’t chew up your stuffed animals.” I could show them how it’s really done, how you twist a kid’s head until he doesn’t know what he wants, how you scare him and torment him into wanting what you want him to want.

  But you don’t do that to children you love, and that is how I know they don’t really love Teddy. By the way they use him to manipulate Tom and me. Perhaps tonight I will point that out to Tom, open his eyes to how we are being used. Or perhaps tonight I will step in front of a speeding locomotive and halt it with my upraised hand. Teddy finishes eating and carries his dishes unsteadily to the sink. He lifts his hand in silent farewell, th
e ultimate in cool, and I respond in kind. He grins suddenly and flashes past me and out the door, is gone faster than a red fox disappearing into tall grass. He will do whatever it is small boys do all day when their mothers are careful not to bother them. I will not spoil things by asking what it is he rushes off to do. Whatever it is, it belongs to him. A boy needs time on his own.

  But what if he is not on his own? I begin to tot up the time he spends at home with me, as opposed to the time he spends at Grandma’s big house. Well, they have the television. Add a lot of time on that score. And they have a full-stocked refrigerator, and a freezer that Auntie Steffie keeps full of Fudgsicle bars and Eskimo Pies. A major draw. And no one imposes discipline on him. If he becomes unbearable, they simply send him back to me. More and more, I slowly realize, I am becoming the punishment, the place you are sent when you’re bad. I’m the “take a bath, pick up your toys, brush your teeth, go to bed” person. The candy-givers live next door.

  I realize my teeth are clenched so tightly that my jaw aches. I have been polishing the same spot of table for the last five minutes. I rock back on my heels and raise my cold hands to my sweaty forehead. Try to calm down, I tell myself reasonably. Every day you get further and further out. These are not wicked evil people. They are simply run-of-the-mill grandparents, enjoying their grandson during the first long visit they’ve had since he was born. All grandparents love to spoil their grandchildren, love to give them candy and privileges, toys and ponies. If Mother says no, ask Grandma, says the T-shirt. I smile ruefully to myself. Calm again. Real.