Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  And that’s how we come from Scotland to America, so you could grow up in this big house and lay there in that nice bed.

  Then she would kiss us goodnight and turn out the light.

  There were many other stories that she told my sister and wouldn’t tell me, and worse, had instructed Noelle that she was to never share them with me, under penalty of…well, I never knew what that would’ve been, either.

  At first I believed Noelle, that for some reason I’d been excluded. Then I refused to believe her at all, figured she was just being malicious, only trying to make me think I’d been excluded—looking for that wounding edge the way siblings do. Because she never once cracked and uttered a word of what those other stories were about. That isn’t natural. If she’d had anything, wouldn’t she have let it slip? Teased me with a few hints?

  I’m not sure when I reverted and started believing her all over again.

  Maybe soon after our grandmother was dead, and our mother had indisputably assumed the mantle of matriarch, with Noelle grown old enough to feel weighed down by secrets and obligations, and her hand looking chapped sometimes, but only ever the left one, and just as often in the middle of summer as the dead of winter.

  *

  Like the opposite of a graverobber working by moonlight, I put shovel to earth and broke the soil.

  A few yards in front of me, the pines and aspens rose in a dense, murmuring thicket, poured full of night. Their tops were black cones against the sky, sometimes swaying as if to swat down the stars, blind the only witnesses. Behind me was the house where we’ve always lived, vast and dark, lights showing in only a couple of windows. Such a big house for so few people these days, with both our parents gone.

  And in between, closer to the house than to the treeline, stood the stout wooden post that supported the iron bell. Just as we’ve always lived in the house, the post has always stood there—replaced each time it grew weathered and weak—and the bell has always hung from it, as much a part of each generation as the fireplace tongs.

  I’d never dug a grave before, let alone two. Noelle had stressed that she wanted plenty of space between them. To dig them side-by-side would have been an insult to Joy and the way she’d died. It would have given Brandt more consideration than he was due, either on the earth or under it.

  No doubt there are men for whom gravedigging feels like honest work, or the last kindness they can show the dead. There was none of that for me and my shovel. We were accomplices, guilty of something I couldn’t specify, although it mattered less here than it might have elsewhere. It may have been wrong, but down deep I knew that the greater right was to stand with family.

  One adult, one child…

  The thing about graves, I learned, is knowing when to stop. Six feet under is the rule of thumb, and even though I wouldn’t be digging that far—not too deep, Noelle had said—I knew even that wouldn’t feel far down enough. Things like this, they feel as though they should be buried deeper.

  Behind me, nearer to the house than to the graves, the bell seemed to watch, to make sure it was all done properly.

  At just past three feet, the shovel blade scraped something hard and unyielding, although it didn’t feel big. Easy to pry out of the hole, caked with earth like a flattened dirt clod, and wash off with the bottled water I’d brought from the kitchen.

  Even in the moonlight I could tell what it was. It was corroded by perhaps decades underground, but so thick and sturdy it was still mostly intact: a gigantic belt buckle of brass or iron. Just the kind of thing a man might wear if he had a lot of cattle and not much taste.

  It should’ve been a bigger surprise to think, finally, that I hadn’t really known my family at all. But it wasn’t.

  *

  During the years I spent growing up, I couldn’t think of a single occasion, with any certainty, that I’d heard the bell ring. A time or two, maybe, or three or four, late at night, the sort of event you can’t be sure whether it really happened or whether you’d dreamed it. The sort of thing you might ask about over breakfast, like any boy trying to satisfy his curiosity without going too far, making someone angry. And of course they never got angry, my parents. They would just look at each other, blank and quizzical, as if to silently inquire of each other how I could ever have gotten such an idea. Then they would tell me no, no, the bell hadn’t rung. How could it? The bell was just for show, remember. The bell wasn’t for ringing.

  And it wasn’t, so far as I knew. It was the only bell I’d ever seen that spent its life with a sleeve secured over its clapper. A thick old leather sheath with an intricate weave of ancient rawhide that laced up one side, and whose tip, like some kind of strange condom, was stuffed with fresh-shorn wool.

  I would’ve only been a toddler the afternoon my great-grandmother caught me staring up at the bell with helpless longing. The time they later told me I would’ve been too young to remember, so I must’ve been making it up.

  “Don’t you ever ring that bell there just to be ringing it,” she warned me, as if I were tall enough to even try. “Do that, and you just might look down to find your toes gone.”

  *

  The holes were dug, the bodies placed inside—Joy’s lowered with tender care, Brandt’s rolled in the way you’d kick a can to the gutter. All that was left was to replace the upturned earth. Because Noelle never had come to her senses. She was adamant: This had to be done.

  So I did it, and night was kind, keeping me from seeing the soil in much detail. I imagined that mingled within the two mounds, in each shovelful, there must have been other trinkets: buttons and rings and boot nails and scraps of rotted leather. But as long as I didn’t notice bones or teeth, I could tell myself that those pale glints were bits of glass, chips of ceramic.

  “Thank you. So much,” Noelle told me after it was done. “You should go now.”

  “That’s it? Just go—like that?”

  “It would be better if you did.”

  “I’m not some hired hand,” I said, and thought of my niece in the ground. “Family, that’s who comes out in the middle of the night, no questions asked.” Thought of the little girl to whom, last Christmas, I had given a telescope, and how much she’d loved it, even though she quickly grew bored with looking at the sky and instead wanted to turn it on the earth, the woods. Looking for her cherished elk and whatever else that roamed. “Is there something that makes you more family than I am?”

  “So what if there is? That doesn’t have to mean it’s a good thing.” She wiped dirt from my cheek. “So please…just leave now and be glad you grew up sheltered.”

  “I didn’t grow up sheltered, Noelle. I grew up being lied to. Sheltered is when you’re blissfully ignorant. Lied to, that’s when you know there’s something not right but everyone you trust tells you you’re imagining things. Tells you that so often that one day you’re just not sure when you can believe your eyes and ears, and when you can’t. Was that somebody’s idea of doing me a favor? Because there were some years there that I was pretty well unemployable.”

  “There was always money. You never had to worry about that.”

  “Aren’t you even listening? Isn’t that kind of beside the point?”

  That was the remark that made me decide to shut up, no matter what. For a woman who’s just buried her only child, the point is whatever she says it is.

  Noelle draped both hands onto my shoulders, on the verge of…something. Tears, yes, always those, but now more, as if she wanted to tell me something but didn’t yet dare to. She had looked this way so many times while we were growing up that I was used to it. Or just decided that I was imagining it.

  Gran’s not here anymore to punish you if you tell me anything, I almost said, and any other night, would have. It wasn’t that I knew for sure Gran used to do anything. It’s just that I started to wonder where Noelle had picked up the bit with the hot wax.

  “Okay. Stay,” she said. “You can’t say you weren’t warned.”

  She wen
t for the bell, hanging from the post with its clapper sheathed, and in the near-dark Noelle untied the complex knotwork of the rawhide lacing as though her fingers had always known how.

  She struck the bell then, a short but consistent pattern rung three times, and left to hang in the pre-dawn chill like so many recollections from dreams that they’d never entirely managed to convince me weren’t real.

  *

  Here’s another one that never happened:

  There was this boy, see, who grew up in a mountain valley on the edge of a one-time resort town whose main streets had gradually become clogged with touristy kitsch. But the past was never entirely out of reach there. On a prominent hill, presiding over Estes Park like a dignified old mayor, stood the rambling Stanley Hotel and the ghosts that called it home. Below, sometimes all but forgotten, were even older pockets of time, bygone traces of the trappers and hunters and prospectors and ranchers who settled the valley first, fighting—sometimes to the death—for their rights to take and make, as settlers always do.

  The boy’s roots went deep here, even if he was too young to know it at the time.

  He must have been four, maybe closer to five, because his sister was still in the crib that summer. Even today he remembers that part quite clearly, and how attentively their grandmother used to watch over her as she slept. There were times the old woman seemed to see everything, but not while she was tending the baby. This, and their father and grandfather’s habit of retreating to the den after dinner, was what finally gave him the courage to slip outside one evening. Because lately he’d been wondering where their mother disappeared to this time of evening.

  At first he looked for her up and down the empty road, trying to push back the gnawing sense of dread he got whenever he wondered what would happen if one evening she never came back.

  He tried behind the house next, past the muffled bell hanging like a poison fruit he was already too intimidated too touch, and following his instincts into the pines and aspens. They were as good a place to walk alone as any. There seemed to be no end to them, their depth unknowable, and you might walk and walk for days, yet never come close to emerging on the other side.

  Her back was to him when he first spotted her in a cluster of trees going dark with pooled shadows, as she sat upon a sun-bleached fallen log. Before her, obscured by the log, he could see the upper curve of a dark bulky stone. Her hair was long then, halfway down her spine. For a moment he stood and watched. Her elbows were thrust out behind her, as if she were holding something close to her body. Whatever it was, it seemed to be squirming.

  Pretty soon, he started forward again, to close the gap between them.

  It was inevitable that she would hear him eventually. Even a woodland filled mostly with evergreens can be a noisy place to walk. She whirled, her hair like a lashing whip, her eyes fixing on him first with fright and then with fury and, if his memory could be trusted, something he later identified as guilt.

  His gaze lowered to the bundle in her arms—the wrinkled pink-gray skin that seemed to bristle with coarse dark hairs, and the conical face whose spade-like snout was clamped over her exposed breast. Surely he hadn’t imagined the little peg teeth; why else would he have wondered if they hurt? Surely he hadn’t imagined the way it seemed to sense his mother’s abrupt distress, and pulled away to open its mouth—inside, the roof was ridged and spotted—with a squall like that of a bear cub.

  When the stone sitting before his mother rose with a shudder and a thick wet snort, he turned and ran.

  She was all smiles the next morning. Made him his favorite breakfast—waffles and bacon. Told him what an imagination he had, that she’d only been out there with Noelle, in a small threadbare blanket, the same blanket she used to carry him out as a baby too, to nurse him within the trees so that he would learn to love nature and its bounty. Like everyone in the family.

  The boy ate his waffles. He let her stroke his hair. He decided to try harder to believe.

  *

  “I guess if you take most any family that has old money coming down through the generations,” Noelle said, “the farther back you go, the more likely you are to find that so much of what they have is built on the bodies of people who got in their way.”

  We were sitting on the wide, open porch along the back of the house, where we used to play as children and dream of the adventures the world held for us. It had been a long night, and the sky was beginning to lighten with pink and blue and orange, just enough dawn to make out the pair of dark rounded mounds near the treeline.

  “We were never the Hearsts or the Rockefellers, not even close,” she said. “But there still were bodies.”

  The last echoes of the bell had faded minutes ago, but I thought I could still hear them, pealing across the open ground and ricocheting among tree trunks.

  “It started in Scotland, but not even Gran was sure how far back it actually went, or who was the first. I mean, Gran used to tell me stories about those parts, too. But not long before she died she told me that she’d made up parts of them herself, because she had to tell me something. It was easier than admitting she didn’t know. You can’t tell little kids stories without personalities in them.”

  If the look on Noelle’s face some mornings had been anything to go by, there were stories you shouldn’t tell kids at all.

  “So let’s call her Jenny, okay? Our great-great-great-whatever grandmother. And even though she was a good woman, she always turned a blind eye to what her father and grandfather and brothers and uncles and husband did: stealing cattle—those big shaggy Scottish cattle that look like walking carpets—and sometimes killing the rightful owners and their men when they came to get them back. Or killing other thieves that tried to take what they’d stolen first.”

  Stolen fair and square, I imagined our grandmother saying. I could hear none of her voice in Noelle’s hollow recitation, my sister murmuring her way through this as if she’d waited so long it finally seemed to involve some other family. Except I still couldn’t help but think of the words that Gran might use instead, the old woman forcing herself between us even though she’d been dead for years.

  “So Jenny had seen enough men in her life get hanged for murder by sheriffs, and wanted to do something about it before it reached her own sons. Only she was enough of a pragmatist to realize that she couldn’t stop them from following the same path if that’s what they meant to do. So instead of trying prevention, Jenny turned to the cleanup.”

  By now, long minutes after the bell had rung its last, I could hear something heavy crashing through the still-darkened woods.

  “God knows how she did it. How she managed to find them. And then how she managed to communicate with them. It’s not like they speak, you know. But when you’re looking in their eyes…you see something there that gives you the impression that some part of them is listening.” Noelle kept watch, her eyes as dead now as the daughter we’d buried. “I don’t know, maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Gran never said so, but more than once I’ve wondered if we weren’t only descended from cattle thieves and killers, but a witch, too.”

  From out of the trees, where the dawn had not yet reached, they came: six dark shapes, thick and low to the ground, like boars, their round muscled shoulders and backs bouncing along with eager purpose.

  “They’re called yerd-swine,” Noelle said. “They like to dig into graves for food. And these are ours. They’ve always been ours.”

  They attacked the fresh shallow graves with snorts and squeals, sounding not quite like any hogs I’d ever heard—like if you listened closely enough to the grunting, you could make out the rudiments of voices. And they were ravenous, burrowing into the mounds and churning through earth with forelimbs that I was too far away to see, with too little light yet, but their snouts, their claws…the soil flew as though they’d been made for this and nothing else.

  You can watch things that hold you rapt with fascination even as they sicken you. And so it was, here and n
ow. Because I began to understand. They weren’t merely ours; we were theirs, too. Just as the murderous blood of our fathers ran through our veins, the milk of our mothers ran through theirs. They would demand it as part of their bargain.

  “So Jenny, whatever her name really was, she went out in secret to these things, that her neighbors felt nothing but dread for. However she managed it—and I don’t think I ever want to know—she turned them into allies. Then she came home and demanded of the men left in her family that if they took another’s life, she had to know about it immediately…and that she would take care of it. At least that’s the way Gran told it. More or less.”

  Over at the mounds, they were shoulders deep and going strong.

  “Why wasn’t I supposed to know any of this?” I asked her.

  “That’s just how it all came about. Having a way to get rid of the bodies…quickly, completely…it only made things worse, in a way.”

  Yes. I imagined that it did. It gave our forefathers a license to kill. Made them arrogant, maybe even prolific. I could imagine sons, brothers, uncles, cousins, drunk on ale and their own impunity, battering on Jenny’s door in the middle of the night, their saddles draped with the corpses of those they’d killed on the road after some trivial insult in the taverns.

  “So you—all the men in the family, I mean—weren’t supposed to know until there wasn’t any way to avoid it,” Noelle said. “Gran loved men, I know. But she didn’t have a very high opinion of your self-control.”

  Over at the graves, they’d reached the bodies. Noelle snapped out of her muted trance and buried her face in her hands.