Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  If I ask my memory in some other way, I still return the same basic results. The smells: old wood, floor polish, bacon fat and the synthetic flower scent the Nina wore mixed with the warm fug of her feet inside her pantyhose. The sounds: the regular clunk of metal against wood, the hiss of pressurized water hitting the sides of the sink, rasp of dishes, clitter-clat of the Sainte Maria’s guava-pink kitten heels, which she was wearing with two sets of ankle socks, as she trotted up the hall with loaded plates, trotted down the hall with empty ones.

  Further away, I could hear the hum and grumble of the diners and the soaring tones of my Aunt Thalia, her voice carrying like a bell that had been hammered flat on one side. Every luncheon, no matter how many or how few customers there were, she made it her practice to go from table to table catching up. Rosellen would have called this a sound business tactic. “Butter them up,” I can hear her saying, “No one’s more likely to spend some money than a man who thinks you give a shit about his mother’s corns.” Thalia was an equal opportunity judge. She reacted to the news that a neighbor had committed some obvious farming gaff—raising pigs on the side of a notoriously flood-prone branch, or planting tobacco too many years in the same plot—with the same tone of incredulous superiority as she would the news that his child had been born with a brain tumor, his house struck by lightning and burned to the ground. For her, there was no such thing as luck—only planning, only work. She understood opposition, but had no time for pity. The girls, even the Sainte Maria, were terrified of her.

  When Jacob and I were first married we lived with Thalia in the house on Newfound Mountain where she and my mother grew up. It was only for a short while, four months during which we three battered around the house like dazzled moths. Or, I suppose that’s what it felt like at the time. So many years have passed since then and it is possible I am remembering the gustiness of that time, the sense of being individually pulled toward something only to find we had, all three, simultaneously ended up in the kitchen staring at each other over the empty expanse of the butcher block table, in light of the events which came after. Which makes the image of Thalia as a moth—a great white moth with scarlet dots at the tips of her wings, false eyes rising in peacock fringes from her antenna—a terrible sort of joke given what came next. I might as well tell you now, Ingrid: it was death by fire.

  I don’t think I’m spoiling the suspense. Surely, by whatever age you come to read this manuscript you’ll have already heard the story of your Great-Aunt Thalia. No matter how gently we tried to expunge her, there are clunky artifacts left all over the house. Just this morning, you in my arms, both of us in white and the white pine boards of the stairs airy under my feet in the cool, clear light, I came across Jacob in the hall turning a pair of Thalia’s work boots over in his hands. He’d fished them out of the cedar chest we use to store things that can’t be left behind. Some of my mother’s schoolbooks are in there. One of Thingy’s raincoats, primrose pink with a wide, soft belt and used tissue still wadded stiff in the pockets.

  Jacob knocked the boots together. A little sift of red dirt drifted down from their treads and Jacob brushed it into a wide seam in the floor. Then he tucked the boots under his arm and strode into the dining room and through that into the kitchen and so out the back door. We hadn’t yet seen each other that morning and, as he passed us at the foot of the stairs, Jacob pressed your head into my chest and held it there, his hand square and economical over your ear. He grazed the back of my nightgown with the other hand, not touching, just ruffling the cloth. He and I are not moths but a man and a woman who have known each other for a long time now and have learned how to share a space. Whether or not we could have come to this understanding if Thalia had stayed in the house—her house, after all, her boots and stairs and butcher block and sideboard decorated with a frieze of humming bees—is a part of the timeline we have not had to consider. Closed to us forever. Consumed by flames.

  Later in the day I came out to feed the chickens and saw Thalia’s boots jutting from staves on either end of the garden, laces undone and tongues flapping. To scare the birds, I suppose. What else would find a pair of boots so dreadful that, even empty, they would frighten them away?

  Aunt Thalia came down the hallway toward the kitchen. She was a tall, square woman, packed with meat and muscle the way an ox or a cow is packed, not fat so much as filled. Her hair had gone white at a very young age and she wore it long, white as rope woven from a horse’s tail. If she had been born only slightly earlier in the century, she would have come kicking at the hem of a boiled green wool skirt and rattling a ring of keys at her stout, matronly waist. As it was, she came wearing jeans, a man’s leather belt buckled high over the unflattering pouch the pants made of her underbelly, a thin red T-shirt she had picked up somewhere which strained across her breasts so the swooping white script stretched and warped like a reflection seen in the blade of a saw. The Lucky Bunny Bar and Grill, the shirt said. I still remember; it was one of her favorites.

  Someone came in the front door of the shop, letting a gust of chill air in with them, and crossed heavily behind me to the trowels and gardening forks, but the noise seemed far away. Even the Nina’s counting, the Sainte Maria’s little jog as she maneuvered past Thalia, careful not to touch her or brush up against any of her clothes, seemed to dim and retreat. Thalia’s head was bowed, her arms canted behind her at an awkward angle like wings about to downbeat into flight. She was fixing her hair, concentrating on the action her hands were taking beyond her sight, and had not yet seen me. For a long moment I watched my aunt as she stood bisected in the shaft of light that drifted down the hallway, her head in darkness, her hair falling one panel at a time across her hot, square face.

  It must be understood: I was a motherless child. I always had been. I didn’t know how to yearn or mourn, how to soften my face so it could be filled with whatever the person I faced had to offer. Thingy could tilt her head and peep until whatever it was she wanted was offered to her of the adult’s own accord. She was marvelous at letting people believe they were giving her a gift rather than fulfilling a demand. I, however, was a clumsy, blatting thing: the kind of child who will stand at the refreshment table all through the magic act and the pony rides eating and eating, stuffing herself past the point of illness because she is incapable of understanding that all this will come again.

  I imagine I was disgusting. Thalia certainly looked disgusted when she finally looked up and saw me there. Slowly she stuck the pin between her lips, the last twist of hair tumbling to her waist with a shifting whisper. We stayed like that for a while, regarding each other. I hunched on the crate so my belly pressed against my thighs, craned my neck. My posture was awkward and abject. Thalia stood, pins bristling her lips, hands on her hips, hair crackling around her as if offering advice. Then she decided something and beckoned me over to her side.

  “I’m not asking you, Alice,” she said when I hesitated. She turned away from me without waiting for a response and began to rummage in the pockets of the flannel shirt hanging from a peg on the wall.

  I crossed the hall reluctantly. Thalia, still without turning back to me, reached out and hooked my shirt collar. Her fingers where they rubbed against my neck were so rough it was almost as if the skin had curled up into scales and she smelled like the split-pea soup and ham hock she had tasted and retasted as it simmered on the stove.

  “You keep forgetting we’re related,” Thalia said, finding what she was looking for and bending forward slightly to peer into my face. This close to her I could see the sweat beaded under her eyes and at her brow line. Her hair was damp at her temples and droplets of sweat hung in the fine blond hairs above her upper lip.

  “You forget we share blood and that that means something,” Thalia said, shaking my collar slightly. “There’s really no excuse for it. Give me your hand.” By this point, I was in a trance created by her smell, her odd clanging voice, the precise detail of her sweat, her color, her waxy complexion and the hectic
blots of red that rose high in each cheek. She had to reach down and unfurl my fingers for me in order to drop whatever she had pulled out of her shirt pocket into the palm of my hand. Then, she rose to her full height, which seemed even more geological than normal. I could hear the Nina finish her count and bang shut the register drawer behind me. In the dining room, a man raised his voice as if shouting after the Sainte Maria’s retreating back and said, “With extra gravy, please. Make sure. I don’t want it dry.”

  “Look at it,” Thalia said. “We haven’t got all day.”

  At first it seemed to me that what Thalia had put in my hand was nothing more remarkable or interesting than a ball of wax. It was red, pliant; the sort of wax that covered the round white cheese the Pinta put into my lunch sacks and which Thingy and I often used as casts to compare the growing discrepancy between our bite marks. For once, I was the winner here. I had my mother’s teeth, small but even, and though the problem would soon be corrected by braces, Thingy’s mouth was rapidly filling with an off-kilter snaggle of which she seemed very proud. I brought the ball up to my nose and sniffed at it carefully, keeping my eyes on Aunt Thalia’s face. The ball still smelled like cheese, probably even the same brand, and I shrugged and dug my thumbnail into the wax, disappointed.

  “Go on, you stupid girl,” Thalia said, looking over her shoulder toward the dining room where the Sainte Maria could be heard repeating an order. “Do I have to spell out everything? Open it.”

  Obediently, but with no great expectations, I dug my thumbnail deeper into the ball, prising it with my other nails until it suddenly split and fell into almost even halves. Nestled inside a cavity in the wax was a nasty thing. It was like a broken tooth, the shape bulbing into a jagged crown with two long roots forking downward. It was deep maroon in color and when I jiggled the ball I could see it wasn’t quite a solid, but rather something like jelly. It seemed to be oozing, a slick of tea-colored liquid coated the wax where it had rested, and it was bound at the top and bottom by what was surely just a thread, though one the same dead white color as Thalia’s hair. It smelled as well, a sharp copper tang that reminded me both of blood and the smoke from my father’s soldering iron. I reached to touch it and Thalia tapped my fingers away and fit the other half of the ball carefully back onto its seam.

  “It’s a root,” she said, “a rare one. One of these days, I’ll show you how to find it for yourself, but until then pick one of these pockets.” She gestured to the wall in front of me. A couple of Thalia’s extra shirts hung there, a black, deep-pocketed kitchen apron, Luke’s new parka (evidence! he was there after all, behind me somewhere in the long gray building) and the coats the Nina, the Pinta and the Sainte Maria had shrugged off and hung, each on her particular knob, at the beginning of their shifts. Somehow I knew it was the latter three to which Thalia was referring.

  “Go on,” Thalia said again, “It’s okay.” It was not okay, that was something a deep, shifting part of me unequivocally knew, but before I could stop myself—without wanting to stop myself, with a wild glee like one gets from breaking a window—I shot out my hand and dropped the tiny ball in the pocket of the Sainte Maria’s tatty fake leopard fur coat.

  “So,” said Thalia, nodding, laying her heavy hand on my shoulder. “That’s the kind of girl you are, is it? I can’t say I’m too surprised, though I might not have made the same decision.”

  Thalia bent down again, swooping very close to my face as if she wanted to kiss me. “Still,” she said, scanning me from chin to forehead and back again, each time managing to avoid looking into my eyes, “now at least you know what you are, don’t you, Alice?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t,” but it was a lie. It was clear to me something had changed. I felt flushed all over, an ache in my armpits and at my groin as if I suddenly had a fever. In the back of my throat I could feel a hot plug as if something in my body had surfaced and was bobbing just behind my teeth. I felt as if I was still touching the tiny ball of wax where it caught in the lint of the Santa Maria’s pocket, or could feel without touching it’s dead, plastic surface, could sense somehow the particular, nasty quiver of the root.

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Thalia. She straightened up and backed away. Just then the Nina came into the hallway and yanked me back by the arm.

  “I’m so sorry, Ms. Lutrell,” she said, her voice high. “I was doing the cash drawer. Is she bothering you?”

  “Yes,” said my aunt. “Yes, she is,” to which the Nina responded by giving me a hard shake and pulling me back into the darkening store. A storm was blowing in, the clouds tinted green as they streamed past the windows. Thalia stood in the hallway a moment longer, twisting the last sheet of her hair up with slow, thoughtful motions, and watched us. Her niece and her shopkeep. Two sullen girls surrounded by relics for sale from another century, ugly and stooped in the sudden dottering glare of lightning over the mountain. She paused after the last pin, patting the top of her bun reflexively, and smiled before turning into the kitchen already shouting at the Pinta for letting the soup bubble over onto the stove.

  I don’t remember what happened the rest of that day. I suppose the Sainte Maria gathered Luke and I up as soon as the lunch shift was over and took us home. She probably packed the kitchen leftovers into Styrofoam take-home boxes, as the girls often did at the end of the week when my father hadn’t yet given them money for groceries. At home, around our kitchen table, she fed us the gritty soup and fatty ham, cutting Luke’s meat into small bites while a cigarette burned in the ashtray next to her. Later that evening, just before the Pinta came on to take the night shift, she gave us both our baths and, as was her habit even though she was the one who ran the washcloth over my body and wrung it out over my head, shut the door to my bedroom quietly behind me to give me privacy as I changed.

  Probably, the Sainte Maria took her jacket home with her that night and hung it in her own front hallway. The ball was so small and her pockets so cluttered with thread and coins and stones and all the usual detritus of a girl with busy hands that I doubt she even noticed the thing was there until much later when she may have drawn it out, examined it with brief curiosity and tossed it away. One more inexplicable object that had been drawn to her. One more tiny satellite at orbit around her fickle moon.

  I still don’t quite know what the object meant, but I know that I marked her and I know that Thalia—moth white, moth red—watched and made note of the marking. That I was a child is no excuse. A child can smell smoke on the wind, after all. Even today, with so few people left in the world who can do me any harm, I am cold when I think of Thalia’s smile, mean as a cut, opening across her face.

  Queen Of The Tie-Snakes

  But wait. . . I’ve confused myself. I began intending to write about my mother—little Alice Luttrell, who grew up on a mountain and should have stayed there—and ended up at Thalia. I can’t say I’m too surprised. If Thalia was anything, she was an omega. A stocky vanishing point standing spraddle-legged in heavy brown boots. It is Thalia who I miss the way I imagine a daughter might miss her mother: with a mixture of melancholy, indignation and relief. My own mother is harder to quantify.

  What is more, in between where I began and where I find myself now, several days have come and gone. It was a rainy spring, Ingrid—your first—and the season has passed into a rainy summer. Our house is high on the southern slope of the mountain, parallel to a gap where millions of years ago some geologic schism thrust one fold of rock deeper into the mantle and levered another to crooked angles above the valley. It leaves us exposed, which is to say when a storm rolls up from the south it finds the house unprotected on its bald and levels us.

  When you are older, Ingrid, you will be able to stand with me on the creek bank and watch the storm come. The house will be behind us, its windows catching the sunlight and flashing it back as if they were shields, and before us: the creek, swift and busy, the lower field frosted with bluet and the edge of the forest where the solomon seal and jack-in-the-pulpit
grow. Then there will be nothing but trees, miles and miles of them rolling variously green up and down the sides of the ridges. And the storm, of course. Always the same storm coming back around. You’ll find it feels a little like being on a boat. We here, the family, with our hens and bees, our piles of wood and stone, all together hanging as if tossed from the crest of an enormous wave. Frozen in the whistling space between the foam and the green depths, watching the ocean come rushing up.

  I have laid you on a quilt on the floor where you can see the birds as they squabble at the feeder, but you are unusually intolerant, thrusting your arms and legs into the air and grunting in the way you do just before you lose all patience and begin to cry. A spell of bad weather unsettles everyone. It brings the men into the house, brings us all too close together for comfort. Daniel claims to be fond of this.

  “Nature’s vacation,” he says gaily, leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head. The perfect conscientious picture of a man at ease, but he is faking it. I can tell by the way he watches Jacob as he paces the rooms, pausing to consult the windows as if he feels the evidence of his hearing—rain pounding the tin roof, roaring in the gutters, tocking the windowsills with the hollow rap of a geologist’s hammer—cannot be wholly trusted. When the men are in the house there is very little time left for anything else. There are the usual meals to prepare and serve and then the cleaning up to do. The usual chores: beating the rugs, changing the linens, washing the laundry, darning or mending or cutting clothing into strips, blacking the belly of the coal-black stove. . .all made infinitely more tedious by the presence of an audience.

  When the storm comes and stays to swell the creek in its banks and devil the hens until they are uniformly beleaguered and peevish, I get up at night and creep down the hallways on the hard edges of my feet just to remember myself as I am without someone watching. Sometimes, if I am very tired, I do this in my nightclothes: a moth-white woman haunting the halls of her cold house. More often I get up from whichever bed I have lain down in and re-dress in a dark corner of the room. Then I walk about the house like a fairy tale child who has gone to sleep in the familiar world and woken up in its mirror twin—the dolls and jacks, cups and boots and brushes, needles and pearls that surround her all the more sinister for their insistence that nothing has changed.