Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  “And when it’s time for us to part,” the owl who was her husband sang. They were almost out of the forest. She could see up ahead the place where the light changed as the trees thinned. The wife felt very close to her husband. Something tremendous had been shared between them.

  She thought of how hard her husband had to work to hide his owl nature, of how lonely he must be in his lie. He really was a good hunter for an owl, she thought and impulsively she jogged a few steps to close the gap between them, reached out and took her husband’s hand.

  “I’ll give to you my beating heart,” the wife sang, finishing the line. Her husband turned to her, his eyes widening in shock. His face fluttered back and forth, shifting from a man’s face with its soft lips and sensitive eyebrows to an owl’s face: beak agape, eyes huge and gold and totemic.

  “Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” her husband cried and she smiled and held out her arms to him.

  Believe it or not, there are rules that govern such things. The husband knew them because he was an owl, but the wife had lived a more sheltered life in her father’s house. Even as her husband reached out to fold her in his arms (wings) his arms, she felt something happening to her body. Her back bent and then elongated, her arms stiffened, the elbow popping and bending in the wrong direction. There was a wrenching sensation in her pelvis, a stretching sensation in her neck. All over her body she felt a wash of prickling heat and her tongue became thick and heavy in her mouth.

  “What?” the wife tried to say, but it came out of her mouth like, “Maa? Maa?” because, to her surprise, she found she had been transformed into a doe.

  Her husband flew to a low branch and perched there, bobbing at the new level of her head. She examined herself, lifting her neat, black hooves, turning her head to consider the flirting tip of her soft, white tail. She was a fine creature with a shining coat and strong legs. She could feel the power in her new chest and haunches as she strode up and down the thicket. She could smell the rich underscent of the forest like never before and could interpret it and read its subtle warnings.

  “Maa, maa. Maa, maa,” she said to her husband in great joy.

  He nodded in agreement and sprung from the branch onto her back. And so they went off together deeper into the woods.

  That evening her father waited in vain for his daughter and her husband to come home. He turned the porch light on to guide them and fell asleep fully clothed on the couch, his boots tightly laced in anticipation of whatever might be required of him. The next night passed in the same fashion and the next.

  Finally, the father had to admit to himself that something had happened. He had searched the road and the fishing holes, all the deer and duck blinds and the ruddy meadows where the bucks came in the autumn to stamp. He had gone in and out of the caves in the hillside with a lantern and trod lightly through the underbrush looking for a trail, a stain, any sort of sign, but found nothing. No trace of his daughter. No trace of her husband. It was as if they had risen into the air and now walked in the world above this world where he could not follow them. He didn’t know what to do next, and so, for a while, he did nothing.

  The father was unused to preparing his own meals and was clumsy in the kitchen. He ate poorly: undercooked scraps, strange combinations of condiment and meat. The father was also unused to providing his own entertainment. In the evenings he sat alone at the kitchen table where, in the past, he had sat with his daughter playing cards or just listening to her sing as he whittled at a stove-length. When she was a child, he had sat there with her and cleaned his knives and sharpened them. When she was a woman, he had watched her bend over her task and admired the simple way her hair caught the light. Now, the father was lonely, and the father was angry. What right? What right did either of them have: to go away from him, not to say goodbye?

  Eventually, the last of father’s store of dried deer jerky ran out and the very same morning he fried and ate the last of his eggs with the last grainy pat of his butter. It was time to move on and so the father went to the hall closet and assembled his scents and whistles, his camouflaged jacket, his bullets, his gun. He set off into the forest to hunt.

  Toward noon, after a frustrated early morning tromping through a land that seemed suddenly emptied of all of its animal denizens, the father took a break to eat a light meal he had packed: a heel of bread, a scrap of cheese, a little thermos filled with coffee. He was sitting in a lean-to he had built with his own two hands many years ago when the daughter’s mother was alive and he was barely out of his boyhood. The lean-to faced onto a small meadow which was grown up in starflowers and the bobbing heads of mountain daisies. It was a beautiful day, warm and clear. The father was surprised the lean-to was still there and, as he ate, admired his work which had survived untended all these seasons as the world around it changed.

  Suddenly, as the father swallowed his last bite of bread, a doe appeared in the tree line and stepped into the meadow. The father could not believe his luck. He eased his rifle up onto his knee and then to his shoulder as the doe dropped her head to browse in the grass. For a moment, the father watched her through his sights. She was young, graceful. He almost felt guilty for shooting her. But, he thought, he’d build her a fine tall cairn at the peak of the chimney and so, exhilarated, he pulled the trigger and dropped her just as an owl burst from the forest for some reason and flapped into the field. Disoriented, the father supposed, by the sound of the shot and the bright, spring light.

  “Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” the owl cried, its voice harsh and wild and familiar, but the father beat it away with his hat as he knelt beside the doe to finish her and take her home.

  It had been a good shot, just above the heart, and the doe’s chest was rapidly filling with blood. She would die soon, but the father was not an uncompassionate man. He grabbed her by the muzzle and pulled her head back, exposing the long line of her throat which he cut with a business-like slash of his knife. She kicked once and his hands and wrists were bathed in her blood.

  But what was this? Just as he cut her, the doe’s face flickered for an instant and he seemed to see—hadn’t he known all along?—the face of his daughter, her mouth agape, cheeks pale. He looked again, and it was only a deer there below him, but even as the light dwindled from them he recognized some slide of her eyes, some expression, and knew in an instant what he had done.

  “Jesus Christ,” said the father, the breath knocked out of him. He pressed his hands to the deer’s ruptured throat, but it was too late. His daughter was dead.

  For a long time, the father knelt in the meadow over her cooling body. The owl stayed too, clinging to a branch of a tree, crying out until his repeated call penetrated the father’s concentration and so annoyed him he rose to his feet, raging and throwing rocks, forcing the owl to fly heavily away.

  The father returned to the body of the doe that was his daughter and considered the situation. It was tragic to be sure—he pictured her face as a child, her sweet lips, her fat hand clutching his—but he was not a man who believed in waste. After all, life must be taken if another life is to be lived. This, he believed, was the way it had always been So, with his eyes hard and his mouth set, the father took out his sharpest knife and slit the doe who was his daughter as he would have any other deer.

  In no time at all, he had gutted her and, hoisting her carcass onto his shoulders, the father carried his daughter out of the woods and back to his home. He dried her meat and lived off of it for a long time, honing his cooking skills to grill tender steaks and drying her flanks to a jerky he cured with his own special rub. For awhile the father kept his daughter’s heart in a jar of formaldehyde, for sentimental reasons he supposed. But the seal was imperfect and when the muscle started to rot, fraying in gauzy tendrils that floated to the surface of the jar, the father dumped it out in a creek behind the house and watched as his daughter’s heart was washed away.

  What happened next hardly matters. The father lived a long life, mostly alone, and died one fine summer m
orning when the weight of the cairns collapsed the roof and crushed him as he sat at the kitchen table salting his eggs. Where the daughter’s viscera had been strewn a spring welled up, cold and fresh. The animals came out of the woods to drink there, often exposing themselves to other hunters who used the father’s lean-to for many years to hide themselves as they waited for prey. The owl who had been her husband went deep into the forest where he pined away in grief and love until there was no flesh on any part of his body except for his head. He looked just like the owl he was for the rest of his days and when he called his wild call the young hunters all shivered and looked over their shoulders. They crossed themselves twice and performed other superstitions, but no harm ever came to them.

  “Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” the owl called and mothers who were sick of their children crying for attention would say to hear an owl’s cry was to hear the sound of your death. They were wrong, it turned out, but no matter. At a certain age, a child will believe anything it is told.

  Bitch And Dog

  To the mother nine months can be a very long time. The body becomes gravid, its bloom withering and pulling back from the fruit. The woman’s natural focus lowers. If she is a person who is drawn to gaze at the sky, she begins to scan the treetops. If she is the sort of woman who looks a man in the eye when she speaks, she considers his gut, his shins, his choice of shoes. Her perceptions sharpen. She draws new conclusions about the nature of his business with her and she is correct. For some women the nine months are spent in anticipation, for some (my mother) in ratcheting anxiety. I am saying, there are many ways to be pregnant, but there are not very many ways to be born.

  If left to her own devices, everything around the mother will sing to her: Push Push Push. The teakettle sings it and the weave of the rug. The mother’s own muscles and the baby of course, the baby-to-be not yet separate but already filled with volition.

  Push Push Push sings the trestle table and the serving platter, the gardening magazine, the creamer cups cut for starter seeds. Push sings the clock, out of tune, and the egg timer, out of tempo.

  oh push oh push

  it is a tinkling aria spraying out of the faucet.

  Puuuush Puuuuush

  a dirge gargled by the eggplants which are drowning in the sink.

  a PUSH even spared for the mother in the siren song of the ambulance which is wailing up Top Road, though not to her address, and carries in its dutiful belly a jangling array of vials and tinctures, hypodermics and gleaming silver tools which too are humming the little tune. It also carries the EMTs who are singing something different. Break For Lunch, perhaps, or Bright Clean Morning, or Acceptable Risk.

  When all goes well the birth song is a tight melody, absorbing and tinged with just the right amount of melancholy. It is the sort of thing the Ladies Rotary would have driven en masse to Atlanta to see and come back secretly abashed by the intellectualism of it all, the lack of whimsy or costume changes.

  “But why couldn’t the mother have dressed a little better?” one of the Ladies might say after a meeting where, let’s face it, they’ve had some wine. “Why couldn’t she have worn some makeup, or a hat to give her a little shade.”

  But when left to her own devices, the mother does not wear a hat. She does not wear anything at all. She twists out of her elastic-waisted maternity pants as she feels them soak through, unbuttons her husband’s flannel shirt over her breasts and rippling belly because she is hot, unbearably hot, the animal she has always known herself to be writhing on the floor, looking for a little more air, a little more room.

  This is how my father found her when he came home that afternoon. He was working construction at the time and had spent the day driving nails at cross-angles into the framework of a house in the foothills that, when finished, would have the same outlandish foyer and faux French-rustic hutch kitchen as the other twenty-seven houses into whose framework he would drive cross-angled nails at more or less even intervals day in and day out until the development was finished. That is to say, off and on at different identical dug-outs in the mountainside for the rest of his life. That is to say, my father was a young man, not long married, who had already become suicidal with boredom.

  His only defense was to develop the dubious skill of switching himself off at will. Thus, at work my father was a hammer or a post-hole digger or a line of fuse or a pair of scarred leather gloves. He was a vessel, an emptied one, whose condition depended not on being filled, but on preserving the perfect counterbalance between the weight of his body and the blank, humming static of his mind.

  I have always thought of my father at work as something akin to the flipbooks Thingy and I drew as children. My father: 100 tiny pictures of a man driving nails into a board. When the pages were riffled the man would work. Rill them forward and he would drive the nails, rill them backward and he would conjure them free. But when they came to rest as they must eventually do, the illusion was revealed to be nothing more than those 100 tiny, repeated pictures. A man holding a hammer. A man holding a hammer. A man holding a hammer.

  This meant when my father was at home, or at least not at work, and turned the humming synapses of his mind back on, he was often all but overwhelmed by the electrical backup, the sheer voltage of the release. When I was born, there was already evidence of my father’s double life scattered about the house and property. The basement was littered with abandoned cathodes and stripped wires from his radio period; the ceiling of Luke’s room was crowded with hive-like, papier-mâché bundles from his Mardi Gras phase; all the sinks in the house were stained with rings of elderberry, poke and toadflax from his short-lived, home-dying period. I still have a pair of socks my father dyed with the poke.

  He gave Thingy a pair of toadflax mittens. These were by far his most successful project. They were wool and could be folded back at the tip and fastened either open or shut by two jolly, oversized buttons stitched to the wristband. My father bought them from the Feed Store at the Spring Discount Sale and let them soak and dry and soak again several times in the dye he prepared from the bushel of fresh flowers he somehow convinced the Pinta to pick for him. The result was a sunny, cheerful color that reminded me of a chick’s fluff—mittens that fairly cheeped with optimism—and a yellow stain that ringed the metal lip of the kitchen drain like runnels of undercooked yolk and fooled the Nina, the only one of the girls who could be motivated to do house work, into extra scrubbing every time.

  Thingy wore the mittens the next winter, but said they itched, and quickly they became too small. When I cleaned out her drawers in the house—thinking to save them for your future winters, Ingrid—they were nowhere to be found, but I can’t believe she would have just thrown them away. Thingy felt about my father the way all women do. I could tell by the way she came across him in the house: he bent over some project at the kitchen table, or coming in the backdoor with welder’s goggles pushing his hair into a silky crest above his forehead, and she always seeming to turn the corner, just happening into the room. Sliding out of a shadow and into the shared light while she called some non sequitur over her shoulder to me and laughed as if, no matter what we had just been doing, we were nothing more than simple girls, merry ones, the type who spilled over.

  My father started most of these projects in the years after my mother died, but it would be a mistake to think of this tendency in him as a result of his grief. It was more like restlessness. The kind of tense, muscular pacing one sometimes sees in big cats at the circus or zoo—like a panther I saw on a filmstrip at school pacing in the background. While the narrator explained the fragility of her ecosystem, she brushed against the bars of her cage with her side and reached up to swipe at the same steel joist at every pass. Before, after, and most probably during his time with my mother, my father satisfied this urge toward motion with a variety of women he met in bars, on handyman visits, up on the cliffs overlooking the town’s quarry where they had gone with their boyfriends to drink and sun. I don’t think he meant to be crue
l. It was just that they didn’t last, or at least the parts of them he needed didn’t last: glistening summer hip, raw winter mouth, the abandon in the throat and shoulders that showed him the risk they were taking together.

  Once he said to me, “The sooner you figure out what a woman is like, the better off you’ll be.” We were in the backyard at the time. He was surveying the stone wall, picking up loose stones and either piling them back on top or flipping them over into Mr. Clawson’s yard based on a sorting principle clear only to him. He had a half-drunk beer in his hand and another bottle crammed into the back pocket of his jeans which was stretched thin by just such use the way another man’s pocket might have been worn by the pressure of his wallet or car keys. I was ambling along after him. It was a sunny day, early autumn. The mountains smelled like burning leaves and cold weather coming and something richer, darker, more subtle. The old trees in Mr. Clawson’s orchard bowed under the weight of their hard, green fruit. I loved my father. I was very young.

  “What is a woman like?” I said when he didn’t continue on his own.

  He hitched the bottle out of his pocket and sat down on the wall facing our house. My father was handsome in an exponential way. As a younger man, his face had been hard with the sort of brutal muscularity that only served to make his babyish lips and wide, dark eyes all the more striking. Hallmarks of the invisible wound on his soul, I imagine women like my mother thought. As he had gotten older, however, his face had thinned. His cheeks hollowed, showing off his high cheekbones, and deep, mobile lines had been etched around his lips. His hair, which he wore long and tied in a ponytail at his neck, was flecked with grey at the temples, and his skin was as smooth and soft as chamois with the same supple porelessness. It was hard not to be affected by my father. He expected it. He took it for granted.

  Without looking at me, he stretched out an arm and beckoned me into the space at his side. Made just for me, is what he was implying, and as I nestled there, his hard, brown hand cupping my shoulder, I realized that other smell was the scent of him: a spice wafting up from his armpit that smelled like gold and leaf-meal, sun-warmed soil and, somehow, the sea.