She looked at him again but tried not to see him in focus, because she felt the pressing need to avoid this man at all costs. “I’m sorry, sir. You do have me pegged, but I can’t for the life of me place you.”
He smiled, his cheeks red. He wore a dark navy coat, and beneath it, a gray shirt. When he spoke again, it was as if he had paid no attention to her denial. “My wife, Eva, she is in Cologne, where we live, and where I should be going now. We came to Germany in 1935, because Eva’s parents were ill and because, well, you must remember the unfortunate circumstance. I was only too glad to leave Oklahoma, since I didn’t seem to get along with too many people there, and Germany seemed to be a place I could settle into. I found odd jobs, as well as established a successful rendering business again. And then, well …” He spread his hands out as if it were enough to excuse what happened to Germany. “But I knew you and I would meet again, little bird, it was there on your face. Your fascination and repulsion—is that not what magnets do to each other, pull and push? Yet they are meant to be together. Destiny. You see, I saw your brother before he died, and I told him what was to come.”
She dropped all pretense now. ‘What kind of game are you playing?”
“No game, Thalia Canty.”
“Lia Fallon. Thalia Canty died in Oklahoma in the thirties.”
“Names change through the years, even faces, but you are the little bird.”
“And you are the Rendering Man.”
He gasped with pleasure. “Yes, that would be how you know me. Tell me, did you run because of what you did?”
She didn’t answer. “What about Lucius?”
The Rendering Man looked out the dark window as a town flew by. Rain sprinkled across the glass. “First, you must tell me.”
“All right. I forgave myself for that a long time ago. I was only eleven, and you were partly responsible.”
“Did I use the knife?”
She squinted her eyes. Wished she were not sitting there. “I didn’t know what I was doing, not really.”
“Seventeen cats must’ve put up quite a howl.”
“I told you. I didn’t know what I was really doing.”
“Yes, you did. How long after before you ran?”
“I ran away four times before I turned seventeen. Only made it as far as St. Louis most of the time.”
“That’s a long way from home for a little girl.”
“I had an aunt there. She let me stay a month at a time. She understood.”
“But not your mama and daddy,” he said with some contempt in his voice. “A woman’s murdered, we all called her the Grass Widow. Remember? Those Okies all thought she was a witch. She was sad and lonely. Then all she was was dead. She and her cats, chopped up and boiled.”
“Rendered,” she said.
“Rendered. So they come for me, and thank God I was able to get my wife out of the house safely before the whole town burned it down.”
“How was I to know they’d come after you?”
He was silent, but glaring.
“I didn’t mean for you to get in trouble.”
“Do you know what they did to me?” he asked.
She nodded.
He continued, “I still have a limp. That’s my way of joking; they broke no bones. Bruises and cuts, my hearing was not good until 1937, and I lost the good vision in my right eye—it’s just shadows and light on that side. Pain in memory brings few spasms to the flesh. It is the past. Little bird, but you think I am only angry at you. All those years, you are terrified you will run into me, so when you can, you get out for good. I was sure that little town was going to make another Bruno Hauptmann out of me. Killing a sad widow and her pets and boiling them for bones and fat. But even so, I was not upset with you, not too much. Not really. Because I knew you had it in you, I saw it that day, that we were cut from the same cloth, only you had not had the angel cross your path and tell you of your calling. It is not evil or dark, my sweet, it is the one calling that gives meaning to our short, idiotic lives; we are the gardeners of the infinite, you and I.”
“Tell me about my brother,” she pleaded softly. The German woman next to her seemed to sense the strangeness of the conversation, and took her son by the hand and led him out of the cabin.
“He did not die bravely,” the Rendering Man said, “if that’s what you’re after. He was hit in the leg, and when I found him, he had been in a hotel with some French girl, and was a scandal for bleeding on the sheets. I was called in by my commander, and went about my business.”
“You worked with the French?”
He shook his head. “I told you, I continued my successful rendering business in Germany, and expanded to a factory just outside of Paris in ’43. Usually the men were dead, but sometimes, as was the case with your brother, little bird, I had to stop their hearts. Your brother did not recognize me, and I only recognized him when I saw his identification. As he died, do you know what he told me? He told me that he was paying for the sins that his sister had committed in her lifetime. He cried like a little baby. It was most embarrassing. To think, I once paid him two dollars and a good sausage for a dead pig.”
Lia stood up. “You are dreadful,” she said. “You are the most dreadful human being who has ever existed upon the face of the earth.”
“I am, if you insist. But I am your tiger, your angel,” the Rendering Man said. He reached deep into the pocket of his coat and withdrew something small. He handed it to her.
She didn’t want to take it, but grabbed it anyway.
“It is his. He would’ve wanted you to have it.”
She thought, at first, it was a joke, because the small leather coin purse didn’t seem to be the kind of thing Lucius would have.
When she realized what it was, she left the cabin and walked down the slender hall, all the way to the end of the train. She wanted to throw herself off, but instead stood and shivered in the cold wet rain of Germany, and did not return to the cabin again.
She could not get over the feeling that the part of the coin purse that drew shut resembled wrinkled human lips.
3
“He’s here,” the old woman said.
She heard the squeaking wheels of the orderly’s cart down the corridor.
“He’s here. I know he’s here. Oh, dear God, he’s here.”
“Will you shut up, lady?” the old man in the wheelchair said.
An orderly came by and moved the man’s chair on down the hall.
The old woman could not sit up well in bed. She looked at the green ceiling. The window was open. She felt a breeze. It was spring. It always seemed to be spring. A newspaper lay across her stomach. She lifted it up. Had she just been reading it? Where were her glasses?
Oh, there. She put them on. Looked at the newspaper. It was The New York Times. The date of the paper was March 24, 1994.
She called out for help, and soon an orderly (the handsome one with the bright smile) was there, like a genie summoned from a lamp.
“I thought I saw a man in this room,” she said.
“Mrs. Ehrlich, nobody’s in here.”
“I want you to check that closet. I think he’s there.”
The orderly stepped over to the closet. He opened the door, and moved some of the clothes around. He turned to smile at her.
“I’m sure I saw him there. Waiting. Crouching,” she said. “But he may have slipped beneath the bed.” Again, a check beneath the bed. The orderly sat down in the chair beside the bed. “He’s not here.”
“How old am I? I’m not very old, really, I’m not losing my wits yet, am I? Dear God in heaven, am I?”
“No, Mrs. Ehrlich. You’re seventy-one going on eleven.”
“Why’d you say that?”
“What?”
“Going on eleven. Why eleven? Is there a conspiracy here?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You know him, don’t you? You know him and you’re just not saying.”
“Are you missing
Mr. Ehrlich again?”
“Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Vanik, Mr. Fallon, one husband after another, young man, nobody can miss them because nobody can remember them. Are you sure I haven’t had an unannounced visitor?”
The orderly shook his head.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, the orderly was gone. It had grown dark. Where is my mind? She thought. Where has it gone? Why am I here at seventy-one when all my friends are still out in the world living; why, my granny was eighty-eight before senility befell her, how dare life play with me so unfairly.
She reached for her glass of water and took a sip.
Still, she thought she sensed his presence in the room with her, and could not sleep the rest of the night. Before dawn, she became convinced that the Rendering Man was somewhere nearby lurking; she tried to dress, but the illness had taken over her arms to such a great extent that she could not even get her bra on.
She sat up, half-naked, on her bed, the light from the hallway like a spotlight for the throbbing in her skull.
“I have led a wicked life,” Thalia whispered to the morning. She found the strength at five-thirty to get her dressing gown around her shoulders and to walk down the hall, sure that she would see him at every step.
The door to Minnie Cheever’s door was open, which was odd, and she stepped into it.
“Minnie?”
Her friend, nearly ninety-three, was not in her bed. Thalia looked around, and finally found Minnie lying on the floor near the bathroom. Thalia checked her friend’s pulse; she was alive, but barely. Thalia’s limbs hurt, but she used Minnie’s wheelchair to get Minnie down the hallway, onto the elevator, and down to the basement, where the endless kitchen began.
They found her there, two cooks and one orderly, like that, caught at last.
Thalia Canty, chopping Minnie Cheever up into small pieces and dropping each piece into one of several large pots, boiling with water, on the stove.
She turned when she heard their footsteps, and smiled. “I knew you were here. We’re like destiny, you and me, Mister Rendering Man, but you’ll never have me, will you?” She held her arms out for them to see. “I scraped off all the fat and skin I could, Mister Rendering Man, you can have all these others, but you ain’t never gonna get my hide and fat and bones to keep useful in this damned world. You hear me? You ain’t never gonna render Thalia, and this I swear!”
She tried to laugh, but it sounded like a saw scraping metal. The joke was on the Rendering Man, after all, for she would never, ever render herself up to him.
It took two men to hold her down. In a short time, her heart gave out.
When her body was taken to the morgue, it was discovered that she’d been scraping herself raw, to within an eighth of an inch of her internal organs.
It was a young girl, a candy striper named Nancy, going through Thalia’s closet to help clean it out, who found the dried skins beneath a pile of filthy clothing.
The skins were presumably from Thalia’s own body, sewn together, crudely representing a man. Thalia had drawn eyes and lips and a nose on the face — and a scar.
Those who found Thalia Canty, as well as the candy striper who fainted at the sight of the skin, later thought they saw her sometimes, in their bedrooms, or in traffic, or just over their shoulders, clutching her rendering knife.
She would live in their hearts forever.
An angel.
A tiger.
The Fruit of Her Womb
1
I woke up one morning, after a nightmare, and turned to my wife. “I feel like there’s no hope left in the world,” I said. I felt all my sixty years seeping through in that one sentence.
Her voice was calm, and she held me. “Old man,” she said, her sweet mocking, “you need to get your joy back. That’s what you need.”
After several such mornings, she and I had to make some decisions. We had some savings, and the leftovers of my inheritance, and I felt it was time to retire to the country. When my first pension check came, I told Jackie it was time for the move while we were still fairly young and able, and she went along with it because she always adapted herself to whatever was available. The truth was, I had lost my love for life, and I needed a plot of earth; I just didn’t know where or when I would need to be buried in it. I wanted a small town, with woods, with groves, with jays bickering at the window and the sound of locusts in the summer evening—and then, when I turned seventy or so, I wanted to die. These were my projections, and having been an actuary, I knew that given my height, weight, and predilection for tobacco, that death by stroke might come in the next decade.
And we found all the birds and gardens and quiet in Groveton, not two hours out of Los Angeles, and more, we found a house and I found a reason to wake up in the morning.
The house was beautiful on the outside, a mess within. It had a name: Tierraroja, because one of the owners (there had been nine) was named Redlander, and decided to Spanish it up a bit in keeping with the looks of the place. An adobe, built in the forties, it had been a featured spread in Sunset, The Magazine of Western Living, in 1947, as “typifying the California blend of Spanish and Midwestern influences.” Its rooms were few, considering its length: three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, but enormous boxcar corridors connecting each chamber around a courtyard full of bird of paradise, trumpet-flower vine, and bougainvillea. Beyond the adobe wall to the north, crisscrossed thatches of blackberry vines, dried and mangled by incompetent gardeners, providing natural nests for foxes and opossums. Beyond this, a vast field, empty except for a few rows of orange trees, the last of its grove—ownership unknown, the field separated the property from a neighbor who lived a good four acres away.
We loved it, and the price was reasonable, as we’d just moved out of a house in the city that was smaller and more expensive. Jackie had a carpenter in to redo the kitchen cabinets the same day escrow closed. I asked the realtor about the empty field, and he reassured me that the owner, who was a very private person, had no wish to sell the vacant lot. We would have the kind of house we had dreamed of, where I could relax in my relatively early retirement (at sixty), and where Jackie could put in the art studio she’d dreamed of since she’d been twenty.
It was on the third day of our occupation of the place that we found the urn. It was ugly, misshapen from too much tossing about, a bit of faux Victoriana, dull green nymphs against a dark green background. Jackie found it at the back of the linen closet, behind some old Christmas wrapping papers that had been left behind, presumably by a previous resident. The urn was topped with a lid that looked as if it were an ashtray put to a new use, and sealed with wax.
My wife shook it. “Something inside.”
“Here,” I said, and she passed it to me. I gave it a couple of good shakes. “Rocks,” I said. I sniff everything before I let it get too close to me; this is an odd habit at best, annoying at worst, and applies to clothes, my wife, the dog, and especially socks—a habit acquired in childhood from observing my father doing the same, and feeling a certain pride in a heightened nasal sense as if it were an inherited trait. So I put the urn to my nose. “Stinks. Like cat vomit.” I looked at the pictures. Not just nymphs, but three nymphs dancing with ribbons between them. On closer inspection, I saw that the nymphs had rather nasty expressions on their faces. In one’s hand was a spindle of thread, another held the thread out, and the last held a pair of scissors. “It’s the Fates in some young aspect,” I told my wife, remembering from my sketchy education in the Mediterranean myth pool. “See, this one spins the thread of life, this one measures it out, and this one cuts it. Or something like that.”
Jackie didn’t bother looking. She smiled and said, sarcastically, “You’re such a classicist.”
“It’s pretty ugly,” I said. I was ready to take it out to the trash barrel, but Jackie signaled for me to pass it to her.
“I want to keep it,” she said, “I can use it for holding paintbrushes or something.” Jackie was one of those peop
le who hated to waste things; she would turn every old coffee can into something like a pencil holder or a planter, and once even tried to make broken glasses into some unusual sculpture.
My wife turned the garage into her studio. The garage door opened on both sides, so that while she painted, she could have an open air environment; the fumes would come up at me, in the bedroom, where I stayed up nights reading, waiting for her to come to bed. But she loved her studio, loved the painting, the fumes, the oils, the ability to look out into the night and find her inspiration. I played with my computer some nights, called some buddies now and again from the old job, and read every book I could on the history of the small California town to which we had come to enjoy the good life. I was even going to have a servant, of sorts: a gardener, named Stu, highly recommended by our realtor, to tend the courtyard and to keep the blackberry bushes, ever encroaching, in check, and to bring in ripe plums in August from the two small trees in the back. I was happy about this arrangement, because I knew nothing about dirt and digging and weeding, beyond the basics. And I didn’t intend to spend my retirement doing something that I seemed incapable of. Stu and I got on, barely—he was not a man of many words, and, although only ten years or so younger than I, we seemed to have no common ground to even begin a conversation. He liked his plants and bushes, and I liked my books and solitude.
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