This is a story older than stories. From the first time the little girl who loved songs witnessed the Gypsy slave give a demonstration of his instrument, her tail wagged. Olivia, who along with her sister possessed the finest things of any girl in the land, had never felt the jealous pain in her soul of wanting a thing all her own until seeing through her own watered eyes the fingers on that wooden swan neck. But Dimitri, inconveniently, was no gift for her, nor an extravagance on her father’s behalf for aesthetics as its own justification. Dimitri was her sister’s dowry.
Olivia’s heart was like a hand towel wrung by a strongman. She was devoted to her family and would never have ranked her own happiness of greater import, but with Dimitri it was not a question of happiness so much as the unique breed of misery that is first love, which she no more could have voluntarily abdicated than ceased her own heart through force of will. And so the girl whose gentle spirit had always been as dull as her face did the unprecedented. She defied the law of the land and her blood and she stole him.
Dimitri, who was a genius of young girls’ hearts the same way even the most doltish of musicians are, needed no explanation when his new master’s daughter unlocked his quarters and led him silently through an ancient catacomb that let out in the mountainside with two horses she had left in waiting. They rode all the day and all the night, not resting until they came to a river far away enough that there was no danger of a search party catching up. Dimitri took his unlikely deliverer into his arms and petted her hair on the riverbed. They had hardly exchanged two words except necessarily conveyed instructions the entire flight, but he told her they would have to sleep; much running still awaited them. But sleep was unthinkable! Now that they were here, of course, the process must be commenced of him learning every last little thing about her; no time could be lost in so urgent and comprehensive an undertaking. However, as the toll of the last two nights caught up with her and the Gypsy’s magical hand stroked her she was lulled into the peaceful realization that time in fact stretched ahead of them in an endless meadow full of sunflowers now that she possessed him all to herself.
When she awoke at daybreak to the tittering of tree creepers, Dimitri, both horses, and the rings on her fingers were gone.
Olivia searched the riverbed until she found a piece of slate with an edge like a clamshell. She hitched up her skirt. She looked up and opened her mouth to join the tree creepers with her favorite song but fuck it, fuck songs and where they came from.
When the search party came across her the following day, she lay face forward and unmoving. Her skirt, bunched at her waist, had soaked so much blood it looked from a distance like a bunch of rose petals. One hand was outstretched and in its limp fingers what may have been a pale pickle.
Time passed. And something happened to the girl—the light of innocence in her eyes was lost as the face of unpromising homeliness around it rearranged into one of unpleasant beauty. It took nine months for this transformation to be complete, and at the end of it she looked at the newborn girl-child in her father’s arms through a mask of cruel perfection.
“We will say she is your sister’s,” he said. She was then married, and it would bring dishonor to no one.
“The blood of a slave makes a slave,” said Olivia. “Give it to the swineherd.”
So the child was taken to the swineherd, the old Rumancek, whose low name the tainted bloodline would forever bear, and Olivia informed her father she would be going to the academy in the city, to learn the dramatic arts.
Presently, she stood by as Roman walked shakily to the front door and entered. She waited. There was a hum not far from her ear. Her arm darted and snatched a fat, ambling bumblebee from the air and she mashed it in her palm, dropping it to her feet. She regarded the small pink weal it had left and dug her nail in, scraping the stinger out. She waited. Then it came: from within the trailer the cry of the left-behind. She stood where she was as the cry rose at the immensity and grandeur of this desolation; she waited as the boy’s pathetic howl went on, and on, and her heart howled right along with it.
She was here, she was right here.
* * *
A,
For a week he hardly left his room. The silence down the hall, I will always hear it echo. What a trial for even this battleworn heart! Could anything be more selfish than a mother’s love? But how can they be strong if we are not? A satisfactory answer eludes …
He was apathetic to Norman’s release into our custody, or at least the shell that vaguely responds to Norman’s name. Such a pity. I loved the man, make no mistake about that. That sublime bitch of an irony that in the conquest of one heir to the Godfrey dynasty I would fall in love with the other. Unthinkable! So I finally share a roof with father and son. At least what is left of the father. Perhaps in time he will recover; he isn’t made of sugar candy. But at any rate my nights will be less cold. To think, after all this fuss and bother over the years his defection aroused not so much as a moo from his old cow (her late defeat a not insignificant consolation prize; I have had the unique privilege of being around long enough to see all my rivals get ruined or get fat, but I can’t name a single instance more satisfying). And scarcely more reaction from our child than if I’d acquired a new houseplant.
I did not interfere; I sat with his grief with brutal compassion but purpose held. We come from a motherland that has never conquered another, or repelled an invader from either direction, and yet here we stand. We do what is necessary. And it was only a week until his birthday. After all this time, no time at all. A bit arbitrary I suppose to wait until that exact date, but things must have a proper sense of proportion; I have no greater contempt than for those mothers who submit to having the stockings raided on Christmas Eve. And finally the night in question!—I had such butterflies I wouldn’t have been surprised to find my feet lifted from the ground, but as Papa was sure we learned, haste is of the devil, and dutifully I placed Norman in the extaz for fear that the program of the evening would physically kill him. (How old were we before mastering the extaz? And Roman an adept by seventeen? My hair tingles.) I then knocked on Roman’s door and requested he join me in the attic in several minutes.
Imagine the mise-en-scène! He had not noticed the renovation: the room now bare of furnishing after going untouched all those months, the flicker of ninety-nine black candles in a circle around the altar stone, and atop the stone: the bassinet. The incomprehension in the boy’s eyes, the old—are we possibly so old?—wisdom in his mother’s.
He stood in speechless soliloquy. I held his face in my hands and his eyes with mine and released him, by extaz released him from the unknowing it had been necessary to hold him in until this moment. All those secrets, whispers of a dream, now revealed. Finally!—no more secrets: it was time for us to be whole again and I gave him everything at once. How horrendous had been my ordeal—so many years and tears, so many hopes and frustrations for one womb, wasted efforts disposed of with a disconsolate shake—until finally he came! My miracle, swaddled in that luminous red caul that I peeled from his wrinkled skin myself and consumed in one swallow with humblest gratitude. How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license. How all those times Roman found me unkind, the wearying old cunt I found myself playing, it was only, always, out of a mother’s love of her most precious treasure (well, perhaps on occasion because of what a little shit he could be). How there was not nor ever had been an “angel,” the fanciful by-product of a terminally birdbrained imagination, nor for that matter had he ever in fact had a cousin—how the Godfrey who supplied his name was not the same who supplied his blood, and that nine months ago Letha Godfrey was visited by her own brother, incapable of managing the dark tides within him. (Boys will be boys!) And here the product of that impetuous union, far from stillborn, lying asleep not ten paces away.
I continued looking into his eyes, smiling in the hop
e that he would know that no matter how bitter the medicine his mother would be there with a spoonful of sugar to follow. But I’m afraid he rather had the countenance of the cartoon coyote who has just realized he has stepped off a precipitous cliff. In silence, he turned his back to me and sat on the top stair with a creak, listlessly allowing his weight to fall into me and resting his face on my thigh.
Just then the baby woke and began to cry as a tremble ran through Roman’s body. You and I both know how hard it is, just as he knew in the heat of his blood what came next. He encircled my legs with his arms and clung closer, shaking now through and through, and brace your heart, he fought. He was a handful of iron shavings flung at a magnet. He felt the pull, but he fought it. This culmination, there was not a stray moment in his life that was not a step on the path to right here. All the time I was bringing him here. He squeezed the hem of my dress and began to whisper to himself. The same words over and over but I could not hear what they were. I waited and his pain flowed through me, but I knew that this was a necessary passage and that he would be overtaken soon enough, as we all are.
Suddenly he stood and stumbled to the window. A tad disheartening, I must profess—I had thought there would be more fight than all that. How I underestimated him! He braced himself with both hands and looking into his own eyes summoned the hardest stuff in him, repeating more loudly now what he had been telling himself: You must make your heart steel. I realized: he was trying use the extaz on himself! My prodigy! I glowed with pride even as the precocious failure of this strategy set into his posture and at last he turned to me. He asked why I was doing this.
But he knew. The heart’s compass finds its true north. The blood is the life.
“All I want in the world is what’s best for my baby,” I said.
He looked at me and scraped from the bottom of his resolve.
“You don’t win,” he said.
He reached into his breast pocket and took out a small tin container. He opened the container and took out a small razor blade. He pressed the blade into the vein of one forearm and slashed it from elbow to wrist, and then repeated this with the other arm. He slumped against the wall and looked down at himself as the life pulsed out of him. It did not find its way to the floor but rather climbed the wall around him to form the most excellent incandescent wings.
My baby was flying!
Finally his head fell and I went to him. I pulled him to my lap and closed his eyes and held my fingers to his lifeless neck. I sang to him, the same way I would sing to our sunflowers to make them blossom. And so it happened: life thundered in my fingers and those eyes opened anew and my own precious sunflower blossomed. He looked up at me. All ambivalence and abhorrence now gone from his eyes. He knew. I held out my hand and he rose. Hand in hand we stood before the bassinet. The child now peaceful as he looked up at his father. Blood of blood. I released Roman’s hand and stood back as the flesh of my arms rose. I could hear it in his veins. It was happening. I stood witness to the most delicate miracle of creation. Never in my life had I better earned a cry. So I bawled and he Became, forged as is needful for our kind in the furnace of incommunicable loss, at last at last at last his virgin fangs descending—such fangs! as white and perfect as an angel’s, and he lowered his head into the bassinet to drink.
To think!—how those bleating chattel refer to us in epithet: the tragic absurdity one could be in a more perfect condition and happier with God unalive than undead!
Soon,
O
* * *
Still. You must make your heart still.
The Boy Who Made Water of Ribbons
They are still driving. She said they would drive until he said stop and he hasn’t said stop yet. She reaches to reflexively run her fingers through his hair, forgetting that it is now gone, and she massages his rough scalp, knobbed red with razor burn, the flesh pitifully white compared with the rest of him. She asks if he’s hungry and he says maybe a little later. That is the hardest of all to countenance. In her own school days skinny as a willow, she learned it was light that fed the leaves and the grass and in turn everything that fed on leaves and grass and had since she held as firm a belief as any that turning away from the world of food was turning away from the world of light. But even in the remotest provinces of night the dawn will still come and a little later he would be hungry.
They approach a tollbooth. There is a bank of sand and strawlike grass to the left and Lynda’s window admits salty air. A pit bull’s head hangs out of the truck ahead of them, tongue lolling from its death grin like an unspooling red ribbon. Nicolae had said to her while she was pregnant that he had had a vision of holding the baby and the baby peeing on him and the pee coming out as one red silk ribbon after the other, and that was how he knew Peter would have a heightened receptivity in his Swadisthana.
“I knew that life for this little pisser would be long and full of great adventures,” he said. “And it made me hurt inside of my bones with sadness. Because in a life that is long and well lived there are sorrows and darkest doldrums that cannot be understood by those who live day to day like it could be any other. And I knew that the lump inside that great big belly would grow one day into a fine man with fine shoulders and a big heart and he would need both in his adventures, which would take him many times through the Rivers of Woe and Lamentation. But even as these bones were sad for him there was O Beng’s grin on my face because still this boy who had made water of a red ribbon was a Rumancek and this is America, and who knows, who knows!”
Somewhere close by there is a siren. The dog ahead of them lifts its nose into the air and closes its eyes. Peter closes his eyes too. He does not open his mouth, but the message is clear.
Yes, says Peter.
The message is clear.
Yes, I say, and so do you. Yes.
“A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,” says the dog.
“A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…”
Acknowledgments
Sean McDonald and Emily Bell, for alchemy.
Lydia Wills, for being a champion.
Lee Shipman and Philipp Meyer, good medicine.
Michael Connolly, walking down that hill.
The memory of Patrick McGreevy, for the Dorothy Parker line (among others).
And for their generosity: Jim Magnuson, Michael Adams, and the gang at the Michener Center for Writers; the Reverend George Hickok and Avalanche; Kate Bolick; Adrian N. Roe and Gilbert Vasile; Smaranda Luna; Carolyn Hughes, Dr. Robert Hudak, Dr. Roy Chengappa, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; the Austin State Hospital; Maja D’Aoust; Ron Baraff and the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area; the Wolf Sanctuary of PA; the Waverly Presbyterian Church; and Lei-Lei.
Also, God.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Brian McGreevy
All rights reserved
First edition, 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGreevy, Brian, 1983–
Hemlock Grove : a novel / Brian McGreevy. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-374-53291-8 (pbk.)
1. Paranormal fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.C497245 H46 2012
813'.6—dc23
2011046352
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 978-1-4299-4262-1
Frontispiece: Bessemer blow, Scientific American, May 1924, courtesy of Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area
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