The Blood Oranges: A Novel

by Hawkes, John

  No more old black dog, I told myself. No more wheezing in the darkness or paws on our bed at night. And how like Hugh to come to Fiona and me with the dead dog in his arms, how like him to leave the old animal’s body for an entire day behind our villa while in one of the narrow streets of the town he managed to find an actual coffin that was small, black, thickly ornamented, and intended obviously for a child. Now only Meredith was sniffling, Meredith who would not hold Catherine’s hand and who walked alone, while in our various ways the rest of us played out Hugh’s game of burial.

  “We can stop and rest if you like.”

  “It’s OK, baby. It’s OK.”

  Fiona believed in the grief of children. I, of course, did not. Fiona’s short yellow shift and slender naked feet meant nothing, in no way contradicted the intensity of her mood as pallbearer. But that faint ring of impatience in Fiona’s voice? Yes, that brief sound told me that Fiona herself suspected Hugh’s motives, suddenly disliked his evident concern for her well-being at a time like this, doubted that the death of a fifteen-year-old decrepit dog justified all the elaborateness of Hugh’s formal plan. No matter what I might think, Fiona was walking through this grove of death because of Meredith. Whereas Hugh was apparently moving to the rhythm of some dark death of his own.

  Muted path, dark green light, rough music of Meredith’s unhappiness. And Catherine, for whom all of this could only be one more domestic incident, was carrying little Eveline high on her hip and I was strolling after them and swinging the cross, shouldering my long-handled rusted shovel. Naturally it was Catherine, I mused, who had discovered the lifeless body of the dog, Catherine who had summoned Hugh, Catherine who had undertaken the job of telling Meredith. Yes, I thought, merely one more domestic incident for Catherine. But as a matter of fact, perhaps she was just as susceptible to her oldest daughter’s grief and her husband’s game as was Fiona. Why not assume that she was moved somehow, and like me was quite satisfied with her more pedestrian role in this makeshift ceremonial affair?

  “Meredith, baby, stop crying. Please.”

  But crab grass? Familiar crab grass? Full circle at last? And was it really possible that Hugh had brought us full circle through the gloom of the trees and across the carpet of pine needles to this thin strip of gray sand and frieze of sharp-toothed brittle grass which had once concealed his outstretched body from Fiona’s eyes but not from mine? Did he now intend the pitted cross in my left hand to mark not only the grave of the dog but also the very location where he himself had once sprawled dreaming his naked dream? Had he deliberately selected this spot of his lonely passion as the site for the pathetic grave? But was I reading the signs correctly? Was this in fact the same gray sand, the same black and fibrous crab grass? Yes, I told myself, none other, because now my field boots were sinking ankle-deep into familiar sand and Hugh’s shadow was already stretched out and sleeping in that low and narrow plot behind the crab grass where I would drive the shovel.

  “Don’t say anything to spoil it, baby,” Fiona whispered at my elbow. “I’m warning you.”

  So now the sonorous gloom of the trees had given way to the clear light of the empty beach. We were standing motionless together between trees and sea with the soft blue sky above us and, at our feet, the small and heavy casket stark on the sand. Bare-chested and thinking idly of incense, white-walled cemetery, family of anonymous mourners, white chapel housing a faceless priest, slowly I struck the shovel upright in the sand and glanced at Fiona, acknowledged her unnecessary admonition, gave her to understand that, as always, she had nothing to fear from her strong and acquiescent Cyril. But Fiona did not return my smile and my imaginary peasant mourners of a moment before were gone.

  “Look what they’re doing,” Meredith said then. “Make them stop!”

  Catherine glanced at Hugh, Hugh scowled, Fiona began to fidget though her eyes were gentle. For the first time that day I studied Meredith’s little pinched pragmatic face and saw that she had been rubbing her eyes and nostrils with the back of her hand. Something was always wrong for Meredith, obviously something was already wrong with the funeral. Even the sight of Cyril leaning ready and sober on the handle of the upright shovel was not enough for Meredith. Not now at least.

  “Dolores,” Hugh said, “Eveline. Get away from the coffin.”

  “They’re just playing,” Catherine said. “Leave them alone.”

  “They’re not playing,” said Meredith, “they’re trying to open it. Make them stop.”

  “Listen, Catherine. I’m telling you to get those children away from that coffin. Now do it.”

  More tears? Fresh cause for adolescent accusation? Or sudden shrieks of pain from the two small girls? Meredith in flight from the collapsing funeral and Hugh stalking off with Fiona? And all because the two fat little girls were flopping and climbing on the coffin at last and, in happy silence, were in fact tugging at the heavy lid which Hugh himself had feverishly screwed in place? Even while we four adults looked on (tall, quiet, silhouetted in the salty breeze, immobile, reluctant to move), now those two small children were setting upon the coffin with all the animation they had held in check from the moment our slow procession had first started off from the villas. Dolores was sitting astride the truncated high-topped brightly lacquered black coffin and riding it, beating upon its thick hollow-sounding sides with both fat hands. Little Eveline was pulling in fierce and speechless delight on the right-hand silver handle and laughing, kicking the sand, suddenly looking up at me. But now they were reversing themselves, scrambling to change places, so that Eveline was riding the fat black dolphin of the casket while Dolores was struggling on hands and knees to push the whole thing over. Eveline shouted, Dolores suddenly rested one plump cheek coquettishly against the slick hard surface of what she would never know was the old dog’s lead-lined resting place. The casket moved, Hugh glowered. The casket tilted and sank a little deeper into the gray sand. I saw the cry of anger leaping to Meredith’s thin lips.

  “Don’t just stand there, baby. Do something.”

  But then Catherine stooped down in matter-of-fact slow motion and pulled them off, drew them away, removed their offensive presence from the austere object of Meredith’s despair, led them safely and with a few obvious maternal words to a low hummock of spongy grass and sat down holding them close against her upraised knees and warm and comforting torso. Hugh took two strides and put his long arm around Meredith’s narrow and bony shoulders. Fiona sighed. Catherine squeezed her little culprits. I rubbed my chest. Once more funereal peace was ours.

  “Meredith says she wants to dig the grave herself, boy, if it’s all right with you.”

  “Sure,” I said, turning away from the shovel. “It’s hard work, but let her try.”

  So Hugh relinquished Meredith, whose eyes were more pink-rimmed than ever, I saw, and positioned himself close but not too close to Fiona, while in silence I aligned myself, so to speak, with Catherine. In our semicircle around the would-be grave we allowed ourselves no talking, no more secret signals, as if at last to convince poor Meredith of our complete attention.

  “Whenever you want me to take over, Meredith,” I said, “just let me know.”

  But she recoiled from my offer as I knew she must, and thin, disheveled, with her outgrown childish light green frock only partially buttoned up the back (having refused Catherine’s early morning commiseration, having allowed no one to button the dress or comb her short-cropped hair), she bent herself to the task which she could not possibly accomplish. The handle of the shovel was much too long for Meredith, the flat rusted blade much too heavy. Never had she been so insistent, never had she been so cruelly indulged, while the four of us silently waited and looked on.

  The shovel scraped in the sand, she held her breath, she twisted and swung her arms, a little shower of moist sand fell through the breeze. On she went, concentrating, wearing down, glancing at Hugh between each stroke. And then Meredith simply threw down the shovel. She broke her awkward rhythm and
admitted defeat, not by making some kind of agreeable teary appeal to the waiting and bare-chested friend of her father, but simply by turning full in my direction, hefting high above her head the shovel, holding it aloft in both stiff and frail arms, and then flinging it down. It was a gesture far more vehement than I had expected, and yet no doubt Meredith’s sudden display of unmistakable temper was preferable to any soft-voiced appeal for my assistance. And at least this little wasted interlude was at an end.

  “Listen, Meredith,” I said, passing her, deciding suddenly that fury might be a symptom of true grief after all, “whatever wakes up has to go back to sleep. Think about it, Meredith. OK?”

  My fully rounded words, my wrinkled forehead, my athletic size, the faint smell of lemon juice on my sun-tanned skin and the hazy smell of white wine on my breath—none of it meant anything to Meredith, of course, who walked deliberately within striking distance of my seductive speech and refused to answer. I saw the fresh tears, the angry eyes, even the pale strawberry-like impression of the vaccination on one bare upper arm, and I was as close as I would ever come to feeling what Meredith must have been feeling at the loss of her dog. But it was hopeless, and I could only shrug and lean down, removing heavy hands from tight hip pockets, and seize the abandoned shovel and prepare to dig.

  “Take your time, boy,” Hugh called gruffly. “Make it deep.”

  With the first full thrust of the rusted shovel into the coarse sand, I both destroyed the original dark drifting mood of our death party and restored it. On the one hand I was breaking ground, making irreparable crunching sounds with the shovel, merely digging a hole in the wet substance of a narrow strip of gray beach. And yet on the other hand the grave was opening. Yes, I thought, poor Hugh’s funeral fantasy had given way suddenly to one large half-naked man working slowly and steadily on an empty beach. Grief had given way to industry. And yet my thoughtful exertion pointed toward the moment when the pitted cross would stand in place and the contemplation of mystery (if that’s what Hugh thought it was) could be resumed.

  My physical labor, my concentration, my upper body beginning to shine mildly with sweat, the unmistakable flashing movements of my golden spectacles and large and low-slung belt buckle of dull pewter, the serenity of my dripping face, and the deepening trench, the flowering grave— all this was exactly what Hugh wanted in spite of himself, I knew, and so I prolonged the brutal practicalities and continued to dig, to shave the walls of my wet pit in the sand. I recalled Hugh’s tactless confession of a few hours before (“She asked me if you and Fiona had to come along, boy. I said you did.”) and realized that if Meredith had had her way, had in fact been able to disrupt the firm community of our two families, there would have been only Catherine to dig the grave or to share that task with her mournful and disabled husband. But better me, I thought, better old Cyril with his good wind, two good hands, steady arms, brown and hair-tinged abdomen hard as a board. Yes, this work was to my liking, I told myself, and noted that both Hugh and Fiona were staring out over my bent or rising figure as if they could see some distant apparition of the black dog yelping and floundering on the horizon. Alone as I was for once, alone with my cream-colored calfskin field boots sopping up water and my tight denims gritty and streaked with sand, still I could not help but admire Hugh’s fierce expression and Fiona’s refusal to hold Hugh’s hand or touch her hip to his.

  “Done,” I called, and tossed out the shovel and climbed from the grave in one slow unobtrusive motion appropriate to the man who had dug to the center of Hugh’s fantasy and laid bare the wet and sandy pit of death. Slowly I brushed at the wet sand on my denims, took a fresh breath and surveyed the deep empty trench and the remarkably high pile of inert yet trickling sand. Deeper than necessary, higher than necessary, stark. Already my chest and arms were drying and I did not regret the magnitude of those expressive scars on the beach.

  “Look,” I heard myself saying then, “a visitor …”

  “But, baby,” Fiona whispered, “he’s got a dog!”

  I nodded, though Fiona had already turned to stare again toward the dark trees and tall approaching man and leaping dog, as had Hugh, whose fist was clenched, and Catherine who had climbed to her feet and was holding close her small and obviously frightened girls.

  “He’s a shepherd,” I murmured. “And he may not be quite right in the head. You can tell by that odd angular gait of his.”

  “We’ve got to get rid of him, boy. Send him off.”

  “When he sees the coffin, he’ll want to help us mourn.”

  “Oh, baby, how awful.”

  “Be friendly, Fiona. That’s all we can do.”

  “But that damn dog, boy. It’s just like ours.”

  “Yes,” I said, “too bad for Meredith.”

  “Tell him the party is private, baby. Please.”

  “Can’t offend him, Fiona. Bad luck.”

  He raised one long black-sleeved bony arm in innocent greeting. Carelessly he swung a long white slender crook in time to his steady but unrhythmical gait. He was fast approaching, and all the incongruous details were clear enough—the shapeless and once formal black coat and trousers, the absence of shirt or socks or shoes, the short black hair suggesting the artless conscientious work of the village barber, the stately and yet ungainly size, the slender crook. Yes, I told myself, hearing his sharp whistle and noting that the whistle had no effect on the fat and mangy black dog bearing down on us, in every way our approaching stranger exemplified the typical shepherd who was bound to keep an illiterate family in the village and yet spend his days and nights roaming from thorny field to secret watering spot with his nomadic sheep.

  “Hugh, baby,” Fiona whispered then, apparently forgetting Catherine, Meredith, me, the funeral itself, “he looks like you.”

  But before I could comment on this latest of Fiona’s aesthetic judgments, suddenly the appealing and yet repellent figure of the shepherd was standing a shadow’s length from the casket and frowning and crossing himself, while now his dog lay groveling and whimpering in the sand at Meredith’s feet.

  “It’s a different dog, Meredith,” I said. “He’s a lot younger than yours. Besides, he’s got that white star on his chest. Listen, if you pat his head a few times he’ll leave you alone.”

  “Never mind, baby, it’s all right. We’ll pat him together.”

  With obvious disregard for everyone but Meredith, quickly Fiona stepped to the child’s side, knelt down, put a thin strong arm around her waist and firmly began to stroke the head of the dog. It was a small but totally absorbing example of Fiona’s swift feminine purpose, another one of Fiona’s golden pebbles dropped into her bottomless well of rose water. We heard that sound, we saw her move, we watched.

  “Look at the way your shepherd is staring at Fiona, boy. I don’t like it.”

  Had the circumstances been other than what they were, had there been no children, no coffin, no open grave on the beach, and had we four met the tall intruder while swimming or among the pines in some dense secluded grove where we might have sat with our spread white cloth and Fiona’s array of wicker baskets, then surely Fiona would have been her usual self and would have touched the man’s arm, paired him up with Hugh, would have softened to his fixed smile, his indifference to loneliness, his broad and crooked shoulders. But not now. She had made her decision. She was concentrating on Meredith and the shepherd’s dog. And did he know all this? Had he understood this much of my kneeling wife in that single frank sweep of his dark unfocused eyes? Had he caught the pretentious tone of Hugh’s remark and decided to heed that hostile sound? Was he more concerned with our funeral than with Fiona?

  Slowly he stepped forward and offered his bony right hand first to Hugh and then to me, and in the grip of those cold and calloused fingers even Hugh must have begun to comprehend what our unwanted intruder meant to say: that he had slept in dark caves, that he had buried countless dead ewes, that he also knew what it was like to bury children, that only men could work to
gether in the service of death, that death was for men, that now his only interest was in the one-armed man and bare-chested man and the coffin. The rest of it (our wives, our children) meant nothing to him. Only death mattered. He had joined us only because of the coffin.

  “Meredith,” Hugh was saying then, abruptly, gruffly, “the shepherd is going to help Cyril and me. You better watch.”

  Together Hugh and I lifted the coffin, moved in unison through the crab grass, and approached the wet hole where the mute and barefooted figure already stood waiting, shovel in hand. The flatness of the sea before us reflected the gloom and silence of the wall of trees at our backs. The hole, soon to be filled, was ringed, I saw, with the deep fresh impressions of the shepherd’s feet. No birdcall, no tolling bell. Only the sound of Hugh’s breath and the rising of the salty breeze and across the open grave the white face of the shepherd.

  “You better gather around,” Hugh said. “All of you.”

  “Meredith, baby. This is the way it is in real life. Don’t be sad.”

  “Ready, boy?”

  “Ready.”

  At either end of the grave we knelt and took hold of the silver grips and swung the coffin over the open grave. Together we eased the small black heavy coffin down until it rested finally in the sea-smelling dark water that lay in the bottom of the hole. I was sure that behind us Fiona was restraining Meredith. And was Fiona thinking what I was thinking? Was she too recalling the old half-drowned animal in my wet arms? No, I thought, Fiona did not share my interest in coherence and full circles. For better or worse, Fiona lived free of the shades of memory.

  But it was not at all a question of restraining Meredith. She was not struggling to plunge toward the grave, as I had expected, but instead was kneeling with her hands clasped gently and her thin white face raised happily toward the black-and-white figure of the shepherd who was now filling the grave. Sitting back on her heels, Meredith appeared to be quite unconscious of Fiona’s long fingers stroking her hair or of the dog’s head resting in her lap. Only the shepherd mattered for Meredith, and despite his concentration and violent labor, the tall man was obviously aware of the admiring child.