Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  So it was that the white horse felt joy (her fat cheek! her furrowed brow!), and so it was the white horse also knew despair and a hunger that came not because something had been taken from him, as his oats must eventually be, as the comfort of his stall sometimes was in the early morning hours, but because something could not be taken from him. Something—this baby! this baby! the wide, clear eye that pierced his own as it looked back at him—was his to seek out, to possess.

  “Where else was I buried?” said the woman. She slid the mask back on her head and nibbled at the edges of the pie. Some grease dribbled on her chin and splashed against her white collar where it soaked in. With her free hand she caressed the features of the mask—flat eyes, sharp nose, broad, clashing cheeks. She looked around her dimly. She kept asking questions.

  The young and weary man had a terrible time getting his horse into its rented stable. It pulled against the bridle. It locked its knees and braced against him, its neck as long and obstinate as a goose. All he wanted was a meat pie from the vendor. All he wanted was to strike his lovely betrothed in the mouth and then sink to his knees at her feet as the blood flowed over her lips. This would take place in an orchard—early autumn with the leaves on the ground and fruit heavy on the branches, assaulted by wasps and bees. A sweet smell. Her little cries and her fingers in the hair at the back of his bent neck.

  He struck the horse on the nose instead and was surprised when it reared up against the sides of the stall and lashed out with its hooves. But all this is temporary. There is something satisfying in turning one’s back on a dangerous animal. There is something soothing about being very tired in the middle of the day, the sun on one’s skin, people moving about with noise and purpose. If he left the horse screaming in the stable, it was just one more noise among many. What did it matter which way he turned when all the roads leading from this place looked the same?

  “It couldn’t have been the ocean,” said the woman in the mask. “Where did I leave off?”

  The young man bought a meat pie and ate it. Nothing was ever the same again.

  For the rest of his life the white horse carried his joy and his rage on his back like a second rider. He grew sullen and would disrupt his master’s journeying by trying to thrust his head over hedgerows and into open windows as they went. He began to gulp air, to fight the bit. He shied at bits of paper in the road, rustling leaves, the sudden heavy flight of crows and could neither be calmed nor jollied. His master put him in blinders. He employed spurs and rods, other more inventive encouragements, but the horse was driven, distracted by the weight on his back which was alternately as hard and cold as a ruby, sparking from all its facets, and as soft and dark as an organ engorged with blood, feebly trying to pulse.

  In short, the white horse was ruined. His master—who had passed out of his youth but regained none of his vivacity and so was a stout and weary man, dark as a pudding, fairly steaming—used him to service the mares, but even at this the horse was fractious and unreliable. Eventually, his master put him out to pasture on a deserted, wilding side of the property, bound on three sides by thorn hedges and on one by the rustling forest. He forgot about him all together. There the white horse languished.

  It is impossible to say how much time passed. What did it mean to the horse? Each day followed the next and it was the same sun, the same sky. The grass came up around his fetlocks and he bit it back down. A fox slunk out of the forest and trotted down the hedgerow, its black legs quick as shears. Later it came back with a rabbit slung from its jaws. The horse’s knees grew swollen and boxy. His back swayed under the weight of his burden and his coat grew dull and dry. How many foxes? How many suns? The grass came up around his fetlocks and he bit it back down. On his back was a ruby, an organ, a ruby, a great, wet weight. One day, the horse went into the forest.

  When a certain kind of girl walks she leaves behind her both the place she has just been and the person she was there. She breaks the new air with her new self and greets around her, with a shining face, all the possible versions of herself to come. Of course, she is caught up quickly. When she stops, even just for a moment to unsnag a thorn from her stocking, adjust the heel of her shoe, all the black weight of her self slams into her back and settles there. Her greed, her fear! Her nervous hands and the dark circles that press below her eyes like thumbprints. She must go on. Quickly, quickly. She must never look back.

  A horse is a different sort of animal. The white horse left nothing behind him. He removed himself from the picture and the picture filled in. Simple as a soap bubble: iridescent, then pop.

  The forest was not a natural place for a horse to be. The ground under his hooves was spongy and hummocked. Roots arced out of the leaf mold and zipped along a few feet before diving back in like trout choking a stream, the stream boiling with their bodies, he like a horse plashing witless in the shallows.

  Was he thirsty? There was nothing to drink, though the forest had the lowering feel of a damp place and around him, at varying distances, he could hear the sound of water plinking against stone. Was he hungry? The horse lowered his head to graze as he went, a domesticate and thus accustomed to meeting many needs at once, but the ground was barren, soft and yet unyielding. Below him were vast hollow spaces. The roots pierced them and traveled on in darkness and in damp. The white horse could not see very well. The forest pressed around him like blinders, at once too close and too far: the dancing motes of light, gold and green; the suggestion past each trunk of a space opening out; the older trees shot like jackstraws, collapsed against each other’s shoulders; a bird which called and fell still, called and fell still to listen. Was he thirsty? Was he hungry? The horse went on and on. His back hurt under its weight; his knees swelled and popped. A bird called. Water fell against stone. There was a great, rearranging flurry and then nothing. Silence. The forest drew itself up.

  Eventually, as he must, the horse came out of the forest and into a clearing. Here the grass was long and thick. Through the center of the clearing someone had beaten a road; at the head of the clearing someone had built a house. What a pretty sight. A chimney. Rose bushes. There was a vegetable garden sprung with stands of rhubarb and clouded about the edges with pennyroyal and phlox. There was a shape at the window twitching the curtains and two crows perched meditatively on the garden fence. The roses were furled like champagne flutes. A curl of smoke lifted from the chimney and hovered in the still air like the shadow of something larger and further away.

  And yes! the horse was hungry. Yes, thirsty, he was thirsty and stretched out his neck and called, his lips ruffling over his long teeth, for the pail fresh with water to be brought to him at once. Someone was asleep on the job, but he was forgiving. Dimly, the white horse remembered his best loved joke. Dimly, he bridled and danced beside the path, herky-jerky, all akimbo. The white horse was nothing to see, just another apparition pawing the turf at the forest’s edge, and yet, here was someone who had seen him. Here was someone, opening the door, coming cautiously down the cottage path, who had heard and heeded his call. “Cush, cush” said the girl, wiping her hands on her pants and holding one out to him. “Cush” she said, sidling toward him through the tall, damp grass.

  (The sun pulls itself whole from the horizon line. Egg from a hat. Bird from an egg. A burst of doves battering around the ceiling which here is the sky. And the rest of the room? The forest, of course. Oh please, can a horse not lay down his burden? Oh please, can’t he just rest it here, here at your feet?)

  Because this was she: the baby who had become this girl. Unmistakable, though her look was entirely altered, and had the white horse the capacity to imagine, he never would have dreamt her so shrunken and ill-favored. He remembered the sour bud of her lip, her imperious eye, clouded as marble, her soft round cheek, her corona of hair. . .Still, there was no mistake. It was she, she!, who braided her rough fingers in his mane, she who wrinkled her sharp, monkey face and said, “Poor thing,” as she ran her palm over his ribs. It was she and she w
as his. He pressed forward to take her. The thick grass. The trembling roses. What a pretty sight at the edge of such a forest. He loved her, he loved her. He reared up to put his forelegs on her shoulders and show her his love.

  But she said, “Whoa.” She said, “Stop!” She stumbled back a few paces, her feet white in the grass, and as he came after her, she brought up a hand to block the sight of him. She ran back down the path and bolted her front door.

  So, there they were. She inside and he without.

  The white horse was puzzled, but it was not a condition of his being to question. The cottage path wound up to a little concrete stoop, three pretty steps with pots of red geraniums set at their edges, and a wrought iron railing swooping down both sides like extended wings.

  At the top of the steps was a green door.

  What was behind the green door was his.

  This seemed simple enough to the horse; and yet the door was closed; and yet the steps, so foreign to his nature, were unnavigable. The curtains twitched. The sun went behind a cloud, then out it came.

  For awhile the horse grazed in the cottage meadow. When she did not come, he went to the windows and stripped the leaves from the tops of the azaleas. Sometimes, he sensed she was just on the other side of the curtain. Sometimes, he thought he could even see the outline of her body, a shape perhaps like the shape of her eye framed in a miniscule gap in the fabric. At those times he pressed his muzzle to the glass and nipped at it eagerly, but she did not come. She gave him no sign. After the third day the smoke stopped coming up the chimney. After the fourth, as he strolled in the warm dirt of the garden and ate the ferny tops of the carrots, he saw her clearly in a dormer window, fiddling with the sash as if she were about the throw the window open. But when he whinnied with excitement and craned his neck to see her better, she stepped back, a mannequin shape in the dark room, and then just a shadow, then gone.

  Had the horse the capacity to speculate, he might have suspected she was out of firewood and probably food. Had he the ability to calculate, he might have realized he had almost won. The house seemed still and cold, though in the meadow the sun was warm on his back and the new apples broke like hard, sour eggs between his teeth. Had the horse been his master, or even had his master been there to guide the horse’s perceptions, he might have seen how he had trampled the garden, worn ruts from window to window, stripped the flowers from their stems, fouled the waters of the little creek as he slid down its bank to drink, scrambled up its opposite bank to see if it was not so that, while his back was turned, his beloved had come out again to welcome him with open arms.

  Had he been a man, the white horse might have recognized all these things as signs of his eventual triumph. He might even have rejoiced, though with regret for all the necessary waste; with annoyance, perhaps, at the silly goose who had caused him to go to such lengths in the first place. But he was a horse, and so lacked subtlety. He fed on roses and carried his burden. He waited patiently for something to change.

  On the sixth day, her father came home.

  Imagine, for a moment, the scene from afar. Here is the familiar road, one hewn by your own hand. You can remember the trees that once stood there, the squeak of their wood as your axe bit. You can remember your body as it was then—like a machine, each motion foreshortened for greatest efficiency, each muscle in easy relation to the next. To lift and swing. To lift and swing. And then all those years of walking this very same road. Moss and berries in the verges, flowers thrusting up their doddering heads in the spring and in the winter the snow thick and crisp, patterned with the crosses of bird’s feet and the hush of their downbeat wings.

  For a strange man hung about with clamor, perhaps for any man at all, there is nothing in the world that feels so much like himself as this road and, at the end of it, the clearing he razed, the house he built, the girl who is his, who he made. She bears no expectation but that he return, and he has!, bearing pots! The rattle he makes is another way the road and the clearing break the forest. His bronze clangor, his clinking tin. He has come, bang a drum, he has come! In this way, the father strode from the forest and into the sun.

  For all his oddities, the father was an astute man and not without imagination. He took in the scene before him: the garden ruined, the meadow deranged, the horse, slat-ribbed and broken, stretching the terrible crane of his neck to lip a peachy rose from its vine. Inside the house his daughter pulled back the curtain and stood there framed by eyelet white. She looked like the head of a water parsley. The curtains were the frothy bloom, and she herself the black pip in the center that either says, ‘eat me’, or ‘beware’, he couldn’t remember which. In short, she did not seem herself, but a hardened seed of that self. She did not lift a hand to him but merely stood and stared and, as the white horse saw her and rushed toward the glass—his lips coated in slaver, his tail arched and trembling—she slid backward as if on a track and disappeared from view.

  It is worth noting, that the white horse noticed none of this. Not even when the father, his pack and pots set down at the head of the road, edged around him, up the steps and in the front door. Not even when the sound of voices came from inside, rising and falling, shrill and sharp, or when that sound was replaced by the sound of something heavy sliding and many small doors being opened and shut. The horse was absorbed, blinded more surely than by any blinker, because he had seen her, at last it was her, there in the window, so close at hand. Though he had come too late and again the glass was in his way, at least now he could see. The curtains were pulled back, the room behind a sitting room: a couch plaid in broad bands of green and gold, a strange clock, shelves of books, a braided rug. Nothing to see, but something she had seen. Nothing to touch, the glass cold and slick against his nose, but something she had touched, where her arm had lain, her foot had tread. A book she had been reading was slung on the table, a hawk’s feather tucked between the pages to hold her place. A pillow she had used to prop herself up was still wadded against the arm of the couch, dented with the shape of her elbow or head.

  Without realizing it the white horse began to keen, his voice juttering in his rusty throat. He reared up and struck the side of the house, his hooves denting the clapboard, his back legs uprooting one bush and then another. Red and white azalea petals floated in the air like red mites in a burst of feather ticking. Meanwhile, the father had gotten his gun.

  This seems a simple story. Why has it taken so long to tell? The gun was in the hall closet, a stubborn shape in the corner, behind rubber boots and oilskins. The bullets were in a kitchen drawer. In any story, the pieces are easy enough to assemble but hard to make move. Here is a woman who must enter a cavern; a man who must move a stone; a monkey who must climb to the top of the tree where the last green coconut bobs just out of reach. And yet they hunker down, stolid and stone-faced. They refuse. The gun was well oiled, the bullets slid home. From where he stood on the doorstep, the father could see both the white horse, still straining at the window, and his daughter who stood in the hall: barefoot, grey, wearing a grey sack dress she had tied at the waist with a dishtowel, her hair on her face like a veil.

  Everyone has assembled. Pretty soon, the story will end. But the father balks. A decision must be made. Here is the horse: a pathetic thing, so lonely. He cannot live, but cannot help the way he has lived. He cannot learn from his mistakes. Here is the daughter, grown so long ago out of the shape he made for her on his pack and then kept growing. If he is honest with himself, this is not the first homecoming at which he has found her irreversibly changed. Indeed, every time he sees her—coming into the kitchen in the morning, walking down the hall to find her sprawled on the couch, one foot one the armrest, her face in her book—he finds he has to blink a few times before it is her that he sees and not just some vague and restless woman-shape dusting his house with flour.

  The father stands on the doorstep he himself laid and looks from one to the other. He has a decision to make—here is a man who must fire a gun—and after
a while he lifts the stock to his shoulder and takes aim.

  When I finished talking, Thingy was quiet. We were in her room, sitting cross-legged across from each other on the silvery-green comforter her mother had bought to go along with the room’s new color scheme. Thingy’s mother redecorated the house on a regular basis and didn’t consider Thingy’s room an exception to this rule. Though it could hardly have been this sudden, it seemed to me as if these transformations took place overnight. One day, the living room wallpaper was patterned in cabbage roses and pomegranates, the next it was a severe, pin stripe blue. One day, the kitchen was country plaid, the next all sleek granite and chrome fixtures.

  It was as if the house were actually a dollhouse, the food molded from the same plastic as its bowls, the people clothespins to which different skirts and jackets, trousers and dragon-stitched dressing gowns could be velcroed or clipped. Except Thingy. If Thingy was a pin at all, she was a hat pin: her visible features a cheery simulacrum of a cluster of cherries or a bunch of grapes, the rest of her lean and sharp and made to pierce through and through.

  This time, Mrs. Clawson had chosen a spring motif for Thingy’s room, perhaps as a wistful nod to Thingy’s new status as a woman, though a very young one. Tender, tremulous, able to be romanticized, is what the pale green wallpaper with its motif of climbing ivy seemed to say. The year before Thingy had had a coming-out party at the VFW Hall. This month she had been accepted on early admission to a university in Atlanta and in the summer she would pack up all her things and go. Mrs. Clawson was preparing for this eventuality with a new desk set and vanity, an oval maple-framed mirror on a claw-foot stand, Queen Anne’s chairs upholstered in striped mint sateen, a canopy bed overflowing with pillows in dreamy shades of yellow and faint, whispering green.