Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Thalia knew her brother well enough to know he never lied. So the old Grass Widow was a witch. She looked at her brother, then back to the pig. “We gonna bury her?”

  “The sow? Naw, too much work. Let’s get it in the wheelbarrow and take it around near the coops. Stinks so bad, nobody’s gonna notice a dead pig, and then when Mama gets home in the mornin’, I’ll take the truck. We can drive the sow out to the Renderin’ Man.” This seemed a good plan, because Thalia knew that the Rendering Man could give them something in exchange for the carcass—if not money, then some other service or work. The Rendering Man had come by some time back for the old horse, Dinah, sick on her feet and worthless. He took Dinah into his factory, and gave Thalia’s father three dollars and two smoked hams. She was aware that the Rendering Man had a great love for animals, both dead and alive, for he paid money for them regardless. He was a tall, thin man with a potbelly, and a grin like walrus’s, two teeth thrusting down on either side of his lip. He always had red cheeks, like Santa Claus, and told her he knew magic. She had asked him (when she was younger), “What kind of magic?”

  He had said, “The kind where you give me something, and I turn it into something else.” Then he showed her his wallet. She felt it. He’d said, “It used to be a snake.” She drew her hand back; looked at the wallet; at the Rendering Man; at the wallet; at her hand. She’d been only six or seven then, but she knew that the Rendering Man was someone powerful.

  If anyone could help with the dead sow, he could.

  The next morning was cool and the sky was fretted with strips of clouds. Thalia had to tear off her apron as she raced from the house to climb up beside Lucius in the truck. “I didn’t know you’s gonna take off so quick,” she panted, slamming the truck door shut beside her. “I barely got the dishes done.”

  “Got to get the old sow to the Rendering Man, or we may as well just open a bottleneck fly circus out back.” Thalia glanced in the back; the sow lay there peacefully, so different from its brutal, nasty dumb animal life when it would attack anything that came in its pen. It was much nicer dead. “What’s it, anyways?” she asked.

  “Thay, honey?”

  “Renderin’.”

  “Oh,” Lucius laughed, turning down the Post Road, “it’s taking animals and things and turning them into something else.”

  “Witchcraft’s like that”

  “Naw, not like that. This is natural. You take the pig, say, and you put it in a big pot of boiling water, and the bones, see, they go over here, and the skin goes over there, and then, over there’s the fat. Why you think they call a football a pigskin?”

  Thalia’s eyes widened. “Oh my goodness.”

  “And hog bristle brushes—they get those from renderin’. And what else? Maybe the fat can be used for greasing something, maybe…”

  “Goodness’ sakes,” Thalia said, imitating her mother’s voice. “I had no idea. And he pays good money for this, does he?”

  “Any money on a dead sow’s been eaten by maggots’s good money, Thay.”

  It struck her, what happened to the old horse. “He kill Dinah, too? Dinah got turned into fat and bones and skin and guts even whilst she was alive? Somebody use her fat to grease up their wheels?”

  Lucius said nothing; he whistled faintly.

  She felt tears threatening to bust out of her eyes. She held them back. She had loved that old horse, had seen it as a friend. Her father had lied to her about what happened to Dinah; he had said that she just went to retire in greener pastures out behind the Rendering Man’s place.

  She took a swallow of air. “I wished somebody’d told me, so I coulda said a proper goodbye.”

  “My strong, brave little sister,” Lucius said, and brought the truck to an abrupt stop. “Here we are.” Then he turned to her, cupping her chin in his hand the way her father did whenever she needed talking to. “Death ain’t bad for those that die, remember, it’s only bad for the rest of us. We got to suffer and carry on. The Dead, they get to be at peace in the arms of the Lord. Don’t ever cry for the Dead, Thay, better let them cry for us.” He brought his hand back down to his side. “See, the Rendering Man’s just sort of a part of Nature. He takes all God’s creatures and makes sure their suffering is over, but makes them useful, even so.”

  “I don’t care about the sow,” she said. “Rendering Man can do what he likes with it. I just wish we coulda et it.” She tried to hide her tears, sniffed them back; it wasn’t just her horse Dinah, or the sow, but something about her own flesh that bothered her, as if she and the sow could be in the same spot one day, rendered, and she didn’t like that idea.

  The Rendering Man’s place was made of stone, and was like a fruit crate turned upside down—flat on top, with slits for windows. There were two big smokestacks rising up from behind it like insect feelers; yellow-black smoke rose up from one of them, discoloring the sky and making a stink in the general vicinity. Somebody’s old mule was tied to a skinny tree in the front yard. Soon to be rendered, Thalia thought. Poor thing. She got out of the truck and walked around to pet it. The mule was old; its face was almost white, and made her think of her granny, all white of hair and skin at the end of her life.

  The Rendering Man had a wife with yellow hair like summer wheat; she stood in the front doorway with a large apron that had once been white, now filthy, covering her enormous German thighs tight as skin across a drum. “Guten Tag,’’ the lady said, and she came out and scooped Thalia into her arms like she was a tin angel, smothered her scalp with kisses. “Ach, mein Liebchen. You are grown so tall. Last I saw you, you was barely over with the cradle.”

  Just guessing as to what might be smeared on the woman’s apron made Thalia slip through her arms again so that no dead animal bits would touch her. “Hello, ma’am,” she said in her most formal voice.

  The lady looked at her brother. “Herr Lucius, you are very grown. How is your Mutter?”

  “Just fine, ma’am,” Lucius said, “we got the old sow in the back.” He rapped on the side of the truck. “Just went last night. No good eating. Thought you might be interested.”

  “Ach, da, yes, of naturally we are,” she said, “come in, come in, children, Father is still at the table mit breakfast. You will have some ham? Fresh milk and butter, too. Little Thalia, you are so thin, we must put some fat on those bones,” and the Rendering Man’s wife led them down the narrow hall to the kitchen. The kitchen table was small, which made its crowded plates seem all the more enormous: fried eggs on one, on another long fat sausages tied with ribbon at the end, then there were dishes of bread and jam and butter. Thalia’s eyes were about to burst just taking it all in—slices of fat-laced ham, jewels of sweets in a brightly painted plate, and two pitchers, one full of thick milk, and the other, orange juice.

  The Rendering Man sat in a chair, a napkin tucked into his collar. He had a scar on the left side of his face, as if an animal had scratched him deeply there. Grease had dripped down his chin and along his neck. He had his usual grin and sparkle to his eyes. “Well, my young friends. You’ve brought me something, have you?”

  His wife put her hand over her left breast as if she was about to faint, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. “Ach, a great pig, Schatze. They will want more than just the usual payment for that one.”

  Thalia asked, “Can I have a piece of ham, please?” The Rendering Man patted the place beside him. “Sit with me, both of you, yes, Eva, bring another chair. We will talk business over a good meal, won’t we, Lucius? And you, sweet little bird, you must try my wife’s elegant pastries. She learned how to make them in her home country, they are so light and delicate, like the sundried skin of a dove, but I scare you, my little bird, it is not a dove, it is bread and sugar and butter!”

  After she’d eaten her fill, ignoring the conversation between her brother and the Rendering Man, Thalia asked, “How come you pay good money for dead animals, Mister?”

  He drank from a large mug of coffee, wiped his lips, glanced
at her brother, then at her. “Even dead, we are worth something, little bird.”

  “I know that. Lucius told me about the fat and bones and whiskers. But folks’d dump those animals for free. Why you pay money for them?”

  The Rendering Man looked at his wife, and they both laughed. “Maybe I’m a terrible businessman,” he said, shaking his head. “But,” he calmed, “you see, my pet, I can sell these things for more money than I pay. I am not the only man capable of rendering. There is competition in this world. If I pay you two dollars today for your dead pig, and send you home with sweets, you will bring me more business later on, am I right?”

  “I s’pose.”

  “So, by paying you, I keep you coming to me. And I get more skins and fat and bones to sell to places that make soap and dog food and other things. I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I make more money off your pig than you do. But it is a service, little bird.”

  “I see.” Thalia nodded, finishing off the last of the bacon. “It seems like a terrible thing to do.”

  “Thay, now, apologize for that.” Lucius reached over and pinched her shoulder.

  She shrugged him off.

  The Rendering Man said, ‘it is most terrible. But this is part of how we all must live our lives. Someone must do the rendering. If not, everything would go to waste and we would have dead pigs rotting with flies on the side of the road, and the smell.”

  “But you’re like a buzzard or something.”

  The man held his index finger up and shook it like a teacher about to give a lesson. “If I saw myself as a buzzard or jackal I could not look in the mirror. But others have said this to my face, little bird, and it never hurts to hear it. I see myself as a man who takes the weak and weary and useless empty shells of our animal brethren and breathes new life into them, makes them go on in some other fashion. I see it as a noble profession. It is only a pity that we do not render ourselves, for what a tragedy it is to be buried and left for useless, for worm fodder, when we could be brushing a beautiful woman’s hair, or adorning her purse, or even, perhaps, providing shade from the glare of a lamp so that she might read her book and not harm her eyes. It is a way to soften the blow of death, you see, for it brings forth new life. And one other thing, sweet,” he brought his face closer to hers until she could smell his breath of sausage and ham, “we each have a purpose in life, and our destiny is to seek it out, whatever the cost, and make ourselves one with it. It is like brown eyes or blond hair or short and tall, it is there in us, and will come out no matter how much we try to hide it. I did not choose this life; it chose me. I think you understand, little bird, yes. You and I know.”

  Thalia thought about what he’d said all the way home. She tried not to imagine the old sow being tossed in a vat and stirred up in the boiling water until it started to separate into its different parts. Lucius scolded her for trying to take the Rendering Man to task, but she ignored him. She felt like a whole new world had been opened to her, a way of seeing things that she had not thought of before, and when she stepped out of the truck, at her home, she heard the crunch of the grass beneath her feet differently, the chirping of crickets, too, a lovely song, and a flock of starlings shot from the side of the barn just as she tramped across the muddy expanse that led to the chicken coops—the starlings were her sign from the world that there was no end to life, for they flew in a pattern, which seemed to her to approximate the scar on the left-hand side of the Rendering Man’s face.

  It was like destiny.

  She climbed up on the fence post and looked down the road. A dust wind was blowing across to the Grass Widow’s house, and she heard the cats, all of them, yowling as if in heat, and she wondered if that old witch had really poisoned the pig.

  2

  Thalia was almost twenty-nine, and on a train in Europe, when she thought she recognized the man sitting across from her. She was now calling herself just Lia, and had not lived in Oklahoma since she left for New York in 1939 to work as a secretary—she’d taught herself shorthand and typing at the motel where her mother had worked. Then, during the war, Lucius died fighting in France, and her mother and father, whom she’d never developed much of a relationship with, called her back to the old farm. Instead, she took up with a rich and spoiled playboy who had managed to get out of serving in the military because of flatfeet, and went to live with him at his house overlooking the Hudson River. She went through a period of grief for the loss of her brother, after which she married the playboy in question. Then, whether out of guilt or general self-destruction, her husband managed to get involved in the war, ended up in a labor camp, and had died there not two weeks before liberation. She had inherited quite a bit of money after an initial fight with one of her husband’s illegitimate children. It was 1952, and she wanted to see Germany now, to see what had happened, and where her husband of just a few months had died; she had been to Paris already to see the hotel where her brother supposedly breathed his last, suffering at the hands of the Nazis but dying a patriot, unwilling to divulge top secret information. She was fascinated by the whole thing: the war, Paris, labor camps, and Nazis.

  She had grown lovely over the years; she was tall, as her father and brother had been, but had her mother’s eyes, and had learned, somewhere between Oklahoma and New York, to project great beauty without having inherited much.

  The man across from her, on the train, had a scar on the left-hand side of his face.

  It sparked a series of memories for her, like lightning flashing behind her eyes. The stone house on the Post Road, the smokestacks, the mule in the front yard, an enormous breakfast that still made her feel fat and well-fed whenever she thought of it.

  It was the Rendering Man from home.

  On this train. Traveling through Germany from France. Now, what are the chances, she wondered, of that happening? Particularly after what happened when she was eleven.

  Not possible, she thought.

  He’s a phantom. I’m hallucinating. Granny hallucinated that she saw her son Toby back from the First World War walking toward her even without his legs.

  She closed her eyes; opened them. He was still there. Something so ordinary about him that she knew he was actually sitting there and not just an image conjured from her inner psyche.

  He spoke first. “I know you, don’t I?”

  She pretended, out of politeness, that he must not be talking to her. There was a large German woman sitting beside her, with a little boy on the other side. The German woman nodded politely to her but didn’t acknowledge the man across from them. Her little boy had a card trick that he was trying to show his mother, but she paid no attention.

  “Miss? Excuse me?” he said.

  Then it struck her: He spoke English perfectly, and yet he looked very German.

  He grinned when she glanced back at him. “See? I knew I knew you, when I saw you in the station. I said to myself, you have met that girl somewhere before. Where are you from, if I may ask?”

  “New York,” she lied, curious as to whether this really could possibly be the Rendering Man. How could it? He would have to be, what? Sixty? This man didn’t seem that old, although he was not young by any stretch. “I’m a reporter.”

  He wagged his finger at her, like a father scolding his child. “You are not a reporter, miss, I think I am not saying you are a liar, I am only saying that that is not true. Where is your notebook? Even a pencil? You are American, and your accent is New York, but I detect a southern influence. Yes, I think so. I hope you don’t mind my little game. I enjoy guessing about people and their origins.” She felt uncomfortable, but nodded. “I enjoy games, too, to pass the time.”

  She glanced at the German woman who was bringing out a picnic for her son. Bread and soup, but no meat. There was not a lot of meat to go around even six years after the war.

  The man said, “You are a woman of fortune, I think. Lovely jewelry, and your dress is quite expensive, at least here in Europe. And I heard you talking with the cond
uctor—your French is not so good, I think, and your German is worse. You drew out a brand of cigarettes from a gold case, both very expensive. So you are on the Grand Tour of Europe, and like all Americans with time on their hands, you want to see the Monster Germany, the Fallen.”

  “Very perceptive,” she said. She brought her cigarette case out and offered him one of its contents.

  He shook his head. “I think these are bad for the skin and the breathing, don’t you?”

  She shrugged. “It all goes someday.”

  He grinned. “Yes, it does. The sooner we accept that, the better for the world. And I know your name now, my dear, my little bird, you are the little Thalia Canty from Moncure County, Oklahoma.”

  She shivered, took a smoke, coughed, stubbed the cigarette out. She had white gloves on her hands; she looked at them. She remembered the German wife’s apron, smeared with dark brown stains. She didn’t look up for a few minutes.

  “I would say this is some coincidence, little bird,” the Rendering Man said, “but it is not, not really. The real coincidence happened in the Alsace, when you got off the train for lunch. I was speaking with a butcher who is a friend of mine, and I saw you go into the cafe. I wouldn’t have recognized you at all, for I have not seen you since you were a child, but you made a lasting impression on me that morning we had breakfast together. I saw it in you, growing, just as it had grown in me. Once that happens, it is like a halo around you. It’s still there; perhaps someone might say it is a play of light, the aurora borealis of the flesh, but I can recognize it. I followed you back to the train, got my ticket, and found where you were seated. But still I wasn’t positive it was you, until just a moment ago. It was the way you looked at my face. The scar. It was a souvenir from a large cat that gouged me quite deeply. No ordinary cat, of course, but a tiger, sick, from the circus. The tiger haunts me to this day, by way of the scar. Do you believe in haunting? Ah, I think not, you are no doubt a good Disciple of Christ and do not believe that a circus cat could haunt a man. Yet I see it sometimes in my dreams, its eyes, and teeth, and the paw reaching up to drag at my flesh. I wake my wife up at night, just so she will stay up with me and make sure there is no tiger there. I know it is dead, but I have learned in life that sometimes these angels, as I call them (yes, dear, even the tiger is an angel, for it had some message for me), do not stay dead too long. Perhaps I am your angel, little bird; you must admit it is strange to meet someone from just around the bend on the other side of the world.”