I drew father inside before someone could see him on the step. He was uncommunicative then and remains so even now. I washed away the remnants of the obligatory efforts the mortician had made to cap that monstrous orifice. In the lamp light I could see the gray features inside his nearly hollowed head, some crusty dry and some slick. I did my best to pick the pebbles and mop the soil out of there; father had clawed his way up from his grave. I live directly behind the cemetery, in my father’s old house, so fortunately he hadn’t had far to come.
I called immediately to complain to the police that I had been visiting his grave only to find that sick vandals had disinterred my father and removed him for perhaps ungodly uses. I sounded properly distraught and outraged. They never came to investigate the condition of his plot.
When my wife arrived home from work she was dismayed to see that father had come to stay. Oh, but things changed. I had always wondered about them while father was alive; we had all lived under the same roof then, too. One afternoon I came home early to find father squirming atop my wife, he a grotesque hairy bloodless slug with his rump pulsing and she with her legs clamped around his fatty waist. She was running her tongue along the inner rim of his wound, then burying her face entirely within it, so that her moans and licks were muffled. This was why she didn’t see me. But I wasn’t angry, and after that often watched them.
One evening that winter she was bathing father and called me in to look at a tumor growing on his abdomen. In mere days, tadpole-like, rudimentary limbs began to sprout from it. Soon it was as though father had one of those half-formed twins growing out of his side. During this time he also started sneaking out of the house at night. I caught him at this, finally, having chased after him into the graveyard. There he stood over a fresh grave, naked in the night-blue snow, his whole body shaking violently as if in convulsion, a grin of wild rapture on his half-face, and black pus bubbling up over the lip of his wound.
I thought that he might be desiring a return to earth, but when the snow melted and my wife and I strolled in the cemetery as we often did we saw that the ground over that same grave had hollowed a bit—as if something below had been sucked away and the earth had settled into a depression. When spring came the grass was yellow in this spot and, by that time, in a dozen others.
Father’s excursions nourished the birth of my new brothers. They all grew from his lower body, starting out as tumors like the first, two of them forming simultaneously one time. The little figures broke off and reached adulthood in just weeks— though they cried shrilly throughout this growth period, as if it were agonizing for them. It was an exhausting time for us all. Uncles, perhaps they were, rather than brothers, for they were all clones of my father right down to the mole on his chin. Unlike him, they had intact noses and unmarked foreheads but none of them had eyes; there were barely even the cups of sockets there. We let their dark gray hair grow long to hide the absence of eyes and it grew at an amazing rate, as did their nails. My wife trimmed their hair somewhat and tried to keep up with those long nails.
By now my wife had also been producing off-spring, these also sired by my father but in the usual way. They were simply translucent semen-white salamander things, embryonic and again eyeless. She began to pass three or four of them a day, had to heap them into some old rabbit cages in the cellar with bricks to hold the covers down. We did our best to keep them confined but one morning before work I noticed one of them smashed in the road and I rushed to scrape up its remains before a curious driver could pull over to inspect it.
My wife became very attached to the wriggly little creatures. She would lie back and part her legs wide while I fed one into her head-first; the squirming of the thing in that place from which it had originated would amuse her greatly. She found it even more rewarding when one day, experimenting, I cut the head off one of the fetuses with shears and then pushed the remainder of it inside her. Its movements were much more energetic that way.
These tailed fetuses were what we fed to the uncles, which numbered four by spring. Though all alike physically, one of them seemed more intelligent and would sit with my wife and I at the dinner table, smiling at our conversation, turning his head from one to the other of us to listen while he chewed his own slippery meat. Finally I grew a bit daring, and perhaps for his benefit or perhaps to amuse myself I took this uncle out on some errands with me. He wore black glasses as a blind man would and my wife had tied his hair back in a ponytail. He smiled politely at people in the stores, but I saw him quiver his upper lip at a small boy who kept curiously trying to peer around the glasses.
Leaving for home, I could tell by uncle’s fidgety behavior that he had to use the bathroom, so we pulled into a café with its small men’s room on the outside—unlocked. We went in and I listened to the lumpy semi-solid splashing of uncle’s gelatinous urine while standing in the cracked-open doorway, smoking a cigarette. My mind had wandered but I heard a kind of gagging that caused me to look around, and there was uncle with his mouth stretched open so wide I thought it would tear at the corners. At first I thought he had found a child’s ball and crammed it into his mouth like a snake swallowing a large rat, but I stepped closer to him and saw it was a black metal globe or sphere with odd markings grooved into it. Uncle gave one good retch, and the orb dropped free. I put my hands underneath instinctively to catch it, but it never fell more than a few inches. It hovered there soundlessly in the air between us, and that was when I had the intuition that this was the same sort of heavenly object which had struck and killed father. In fact, I had the intuition that this was in fact the very same orb.
The black metal sphere floated past me, nudged the door open, was gone into the twilight. Uncle just zipped his fly nonchalantly and I told my wife what I had see over supper that night. She agreed that it might explain things. She told me that her sister had called while I was out to say that she had had a miscarriage. Depressed, my wife retired early for the night and all the uncles piled into bed with her to comfort her. I set up the video camera on a tripod and sat with father on the parlor couch watching them on the TV screen until they eventually dozed off, and then I switched to some gray old musical that father listened to raptly— rocking forward and back during the production numbers.
It was a mistake taking uncle out that day, I admit it now. Soon he began stealing out on his own as father had, but this time the authorities took notice. Live persons were disappearing in town, leaving only scenes of bloody struggle in the woods and in the graveyard. I didn’t see any of this for myself, but I read in the papers that in the most recent instance a victim had finally been found at the scene. This teen-age boy had been beheaded behind a boarded-up gas station a few streets from my house, and some strange markings within a rough circle had been scratched into his forehead, and his eyes gouged out—all this apparently rendered with the jagged end of a nearly stripped leg bone.
At last, in late summer, the police spotted my uncle in amongst the slanting older cemetery slates, kneeling by the corpse of a teen-age boy partly devoured. Uncle rushed at the men, snarling, his lips peeled back clown-red with blood, as I envision the scene based on newspaper accounts. An officer was so terrified that he fired a twelve gauge shotgun into the face of the unarmed madman. Thus it was that my uncle’s eyeless deformity was not discovered and in death he came to resemble my dead father even more, for lack of most of his face.
Soon the remaining three uncles took to pining and curled morosely in corners and in the cellar. They grew gray, seemed to wither, then died off one by one. I turned all the salamanders free in the cellar so they could feast on the crunchy mummified remains with great relish, clearing away all traces, but shortly after that those slithering creatures also began to mope, to vomit, and grow very cold to the touch…then to wither and die. It is fall again now, and I have been burning the last of the fetuses in piles of leaves.
Father no longer wants to pulse atop my wife. They both seem to brood, apathetic. Will they, too, wither and die
, leaving me alone? Perhaps then to die, myself? The house is so empty now, so quiet and lonely; a sepulcher. A family vault. But families sometimes do die out utterly, leaving no progeny behind. Of course, my selfishness aside, I know that sometimes this is for the best.
I realize this is all quite embarrassing to hear and it’s awkward to tell. Family matters often are. But your family is your family and you love them, no matter what.
Again, please, I must insist…don’t tell anyone this story.
Dust
When my mother died she left me her skulls.
It wasn’t a common thing in the early 60s for a father to gain custody of his child in a divorce, but my mother didn’t contest it. Nor did she make any pretense of hiding from the judge that she was a suicidal, manic-depressive alcoholic unable to take proper care of herself, let alone an infant son.
She survived her suicidal depressions, and all the unthinkable quantities of liquor, but it was the cigarettes that ultimately ended her life’s turmoil. I remember her as she was when I was a young boy. My father never forbade her from visiting; nevertheless, these occasions were infrequent. Christmas time, usually, although she was normally a week or two late.
Mother was beautiful then, very tall and slim. She looked much more like her lanky father, Dad told me, than her mother—who had been very petite. Mother had short dark hair, and eyes slanted cat-like; a pale feline green. And the cigarettes, always cigarettes, her wrist flopped back as one who doesn’t smoke might do if pretending to smoke. She smoked with flair, the cigarettes an artistic prop. She was an artist. Maybe the butts helped her stay in touch with that.
In the last five years of her life she began to call me, write, and then even visit again after I hadn’t seen her for nearly ten years. I visited her as well. She was shockingly ravaged. Her hair gray, her face deeply lined—made leathery from all the time she had spent out West; Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico. The heavy flesh above her eyes that had once made them sexily slanted now was just sagging and wrinkled; the green eyes once startlingly clear and sharp, even when she was drunk, now were like the greenish cataracts of an old dog.
As a boy I had been afraid of her…and I think she had been afraid of me. Now I felt some tenderness for her. She had stopped drinking at last, rid herself of at least that artistic prop or inspiration. But drink had done its damage and the cigarettes continued to, and my mother died at fifty-five.
She had been living in New England again the past seven years, in the house she had inherited after her parents died. Now I had inherited the house from her. And her art. And her skulls…
* * *
“Sorry to hear that your fiancée broke off with you, Jack,” said my mother’s best friend, David Foster.
“Thanks. It’s okay. I introduced her to Mother once. I got the impression she didn’t like her.”
David smiled. “She hated her on sight.”
I chuckled. “Oh, really? Did she say why?”
“Well…just that she was a fat, loud midget with a mustache. Sorry,” he said, but we were both laughing.
“Angela was not fat…she was…plush.”
“I’m just telling you what Annie said. I’m glad for her that you broke up while she was still alive; she was worried about you. She was just afraid to say it.”
David owned a small shop here in Eastborough which sold South Western art, Native American jewelry, and pottery and such; I was surprised that this trendy sort of store could still survive with the economy gone so sour. And were Yuppies still buying the stuff when Navajo patterns were turning up on tacky shower curtains and rubber welcome mats? Apparently so, though at the moment their interest had seemed to shift to the Victorian…at least until that trickled down to the K-Mart crowd.
David had been Mother’s closest companion the last seven years of her life. He was a good-looking gay man with the likable combination of a boyish face and distinguished gray at the temples. I felt like I’d known him for years myself. Very funny, very kind to me, if a little catty. He liked to gossip, but his gossip about my mother was filled with obviously sincere endearment. David had met me at my mother’s house the first day that I came into possession of it, to point out the antiques and pieces of art Mother had willed to him before he took them away. I had told him this was not necessary; if Mother wanted him to have them I had no complaints, but I suppose he felt a little awkward about it. And I think he wanted to help show me around, as I had never spent much time in the house—certainly not exploring.
Preceding me into Mother’s studio, David asked, “Did she ever show you in here?”
“Yes, once. Briefly. She was making that at the time.” I pointed to a steer skull hanging on one wall of the large bedroom-turned-studio, which would have been brightly washed in sunlight had it not been so gray and rainy an afternoon. The skull was entirely covered in a mosaic of turquoise pebbles but for the horns; remarkably beautiful. Eagle feathers dangled from one horn. “I’m glad to see she finished it. The work she must have put into it.”
“God, yes. She’d done those before; I’ve sold a few at the store. A thousand a piece. But worth it.”
There were numerous cattle skulls on the plain white-painted walls. A row of them rested atop a work bench which spanned the length of the room. These had been painted a bleached white, and Indian-style designs had been rendered on the foreheads, feathers hung from rawhide thongs around the horns. “An assembly line over here, huh?” I said.
“She wanted me to pick those up,” David said reluctantly. “But she wanted you to have the others.”
“Oh, great.” I had moved to one side wall to examine a trio of hanging skulls, these far more unique and interesting than those made for David’s shop. One, horns and all, had been painted sky blue with fleecy clouds seeming to drift across it. Another was fire-engine red, and looked like something a Satanic cult might have ordered. Beside that, more disturbing, was a skull painted carefully to look like it still had skin on it—and a hide. The texture of hair was meticulous, and reminded me what a fine painter Mother had been, though she had apparently given that up as a means of expression in itself long before. Glass balls—Christmas bulbs?—had been glued into the eye sockets and painted with glossy paint to look like real eyes. They did, except that at some point one of them had shattered and the jagged shards of the glistening eyeball were grotesque. A fanged mouth for an eye.
“Your father always accused Annie of emulating Georgia O’Keefe too much. She did love her work, but Annie was her own artist with her own vision. Your father should have tried to understand her.”
I turned from the skulls to give him a look. “My mother cheated on my dad, you know. A lot. With his best friend. With his boss. Everyone where he worked knew it. Mother had a lot of problems, David.”
“I’m sorry, Jack…I know that. But she wasn’t evil. She never meant to harm you or your father. She only meant to harm herself.”
I didn’t pursue any more of David’s insights into my mother’s secret heart just then. I guess I wasn’t ready to dive into her life so fully yet; I wanted to test the waters carefully. Through her art seemed a good beginning. I found a scrapbook in a bureau in a corner of the studio and David came over when he saw what I’d discovered. Photographs, black and white enlargements, each filling one page. Mother had experimented in many mediums, as if in a desperate search for the right voice with which to express her soul. Had they all failed to release the demons inside her?
“Yew!” I said, in disgust. “She was certainly into cows, huh? Even rotting ones.”
“I know, but they’re almost beautiful, the way she shot them, aren’t they? The time of day, the light, the textures? I think she wanted to show that anything can be made to look beautiful.”
“As long as you can’t smell it, I guess.”
“And do you know what they are? These are some of those cows that are found killed mysteriously…the ones people think UFOs are experimenting on. Or Satanic cults are sac
rificing.”
“Or Elvis is eating.”
David giggled and elbowed me. “I think the spooky stories were what compelled your mother most. She showed these once in a little gallery on Newbury Street, in Boston. They were received fairly well; the reviews are in another scrapbook. This was the last stuff she did out West, she said. She came back here right after.”
“Maybe she got too scared, huh? Maybe she was…onto something.” I smiled, closed the book. “I’m sure I’ve heard that they think it’s just disease killing them, and then scavengers eating certain parts of the cows so it just looks like they’re being operated on…their genitals carved out and so on.”
“Maybe Annie was doing it. Maybe she was a cow vampire, and fled back East when the Animal Rights people got on her trail.”
“I think that’s it. Mystery solved.”
* * *
David went home, taking all of his inheritance that he could carry in one load with him, leaving me to explore more minutely by myself. I remained in the studio to do this, my mother’s personality so ingrained here—if abstracted and in need of interpretation. I was almost jealous, resentful, that David knew her better than I. Though he could have been enlightening to me as I continued to explore, I was glad for the privacy. It had become so late in the day and so much darker that I finally put on one lamp and set it on the floor with me as I went through the packed lower drawers of the large bureau I had found the scrapbook in. After several hours of this the bones of my ass seemed ready to stab through my buttocks so I got up to stretch. It was night.
As I contemplated coffee my eyes fell on a closet I had dismissed earlier. Now I idly strolled to it, and slid it open.
Musty gloom. Paint-spattered smocks on hangers, some old coats. Boxes of books and newspapers stacked up. One box with its flaps closed. I reached to drag it out, expecting heaviness. It wasn’t filled with books; it slid out much too easily. I unfolded the flaps.
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