Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  My father crossed the room with the same impatient grace he has always had. He doesn’t look much older. Astonishing. All these years have passed for him too and yet he looks to me just as he did when I was a child and could lean into his warm chest, smell his smell and listen to his thumping heart. And yet I am so different. And you, Ingrid, you hadn’t even begun.

  “Is this it?” he asked. It seemed he had not yet looked at me. He went right to your basket. He put his finger in your fist. “This is the baby,” my father said.

  When I was young my father took Thingy and I to a circus which had set up in the vacant lot across from Abbot’s. We went early, an hour before the show and he walked with us between the brightly colored caravans and smaller tents where the circus performers and their animals lived. We saw a goat standing on a wooden spindle and two elephants, chained at the ankles, twining their trunks under and around each other while they gazed off in opposite directions. We saw a trio of trained dogs with wicked skulls and puffy blonde tails. The dogs were the only animals that responded to us. They were leashed to a wire that stretched between a blue caravan with an ornately curved red roof like a Chinese pagoda and a jumbo RV hung about with silver and orange bells. When we approached them, the dogs yipped and raced back and forth along their line. They weren’t afraid of us, but rather rejecting us. They were too highly trained, too intelligent: dogs that could walk like a man and choose from a platter of thimbles which one concealed a pea. They knew who we were. The audience. The dumb marks. Thingy wanted to pet them anyway and chased after them, her hands outstretched, jelly slippers flashing in the last light as the day began to fail. It was time for the show to start.

  The circus was a cruel place. I felt assaulted by it, as if my eyes were being pushed back into my head by a pair of massive thumbs, but also wildly excited. The show had not yet begun when we took our seats in the bleachers high on the side of the central tent. The lights were still bright and everyone was talking: mothers and fathers, so many children the air fluttered with their high thin voices as if their voices had transformed the air into a thousand pairs of wings. I suppose I was an unusual child. Highly strung. It must have been hard for my father to know what to do with me. I think I was often hard for my father to recognize. Sometimes when he came into a room in which I already was his eyes would slide over me as if I had unwittingly perfected some blend of camouflage and crypsis: my skin taking on the pattern of the couch cushion, my real eyes concealed beneath huge, flaring spots that whorled on my forehead. “Where’s Alice?” he might ask the Nina or the Sainte Maria, but I would be right there, sitting beside him, my fingers in my mouth and skin as cold as a frog’s.

  My father settled Thingy and I in our seats and left to go buy us all sodas and popcorn. “Don’t move,” he said, leveling one square, brown finger in Thingy’s face and slowly moving it over into mine. “Don’t talk to anyone,” he said to me. Oh, my father. I loved him. I wanted always to touch him. My hand on his knee or in the crook of his elbow. My hand on the back of his neck where it looked like a blob of Vaseline against the burnt brown creases of his skin.

  “I want extra butter on mine,” said Thingy and my father laughed as he left us and picked his way down the rickety bleacher stairs.

  He wasn’t back when the show began, the lights falling suddenly and pitching the tent into blackness wherein the adults gasped and the children, wild and unbidden, screamed. Thingy and I held each other’s hands. A spotlight came on. It wavered across the bleachers, illuminating the audience as if it were a long, white finger searching for its place in a book. Sometimes the spotlight would pause or go back for a closer look and whoever was caught in its bleaching light would have a few moments to shift uneasily in their chair, some of them hiding their faces in their hands, some of them, the children, waving. I remember thinking as the children across the tent from me beamed and waved how few teeth everyone had. There were so many holes in the other children’s faces. So many holes in mine which I worried with my tongue as the light dipped down to the packed sawdust floor of the central ring, failed to find what it was looking for and began to travel through the bottom rows on our side of the tent.

  “I hope it doesn’t land on us,” said Thingy, squeezing my hand. The light swept up the rows just below us, so bright and obliterating it seemed to be erasing the people it cast upon rather than illuminating them. “It will be horrible,” she said, turning to me, her eyes wide and very dark. “It will be so hot.”

  I had thought of the light as a cold thing—it looked cold to me, a concentrated spear of moonlight, well-oiled metal—but I saw in an instant that Thingy was right. It was a hot light, white hot. The whitest, hottest heart of the sun blooming outward, sweeping away everything in its path as it grew. There was nowhere to go. We gripped each other’s hands and panted as the children in the row below us were swept into the light, screaming as it passed over them, raising their hands into the air.

  But of course, when it did reach us, nothing happened. We squinted for a moment, blinked. Green roses bloomed in our vision as the light moved away and left us again in the dark. We had been wrong, but we didn’t know it. We were children, right on the edge of an adult reckoning, adult guilt, but still buoyant in a world of hazy possibility. We were adrift, tied to the rocky bottom only by one ankle with a mooring so thin at any moment it could be snapped like a strand of brown kelp and we would be swept into another world, the world below this world, or the one below that.

  We didn’t feel foolish; we felt lucky. Thingy laughed with relief and pressed her lips against my cheek. The show began. In a way, this is what it felt like when I first met Jacob, only that time the light landed on its target. More like a thumb than a finger, it turned out, moistened as if to turn a page.

  Once, when Jacob was eight, his Uncle Robert brought his father home stretched out in the back seat of his own car. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence: his father not returning to the house, but being brought; Uncle Robert steering the car around the road’s hairpin turns with one hand, the other arm cocked out the window as if he owned both the car and the afternoon; the sun suspended in a long, leaking evening; the day panting hot until a hot night came down like a cardboard box trapping everyone inside; the stars airholes poked with a pin.

  I know nothing about the house Jacob’s father was brought to. There are no photos and the only location I have is north, but not too far north. Another state, but the same blue mountains. Similarly, I know nothing about the mother who stood on the porch or the child who ran halfway out into the yard and then stopped, warned away by some rasp in his father’s breathing or by the flaccid nature of his father’s thigh inside his jeans. Not dead, but dead drunk. Not dead, because if so the child could come and touch the body, could feel in the space just above the skin where the armor of the self had crumbled the way a cicada shell would crumble if stroked with too eager a finger tip.

  Perhaps Jacob’s house was one of many identical houses clustered in the hollow, each of them with a hall linking the front door directly to the back so looking through the screen was like looking through a telescope. Perhaps there was a clothesline in the front yard, an upturned wooden crate that was once used to transport lettuce. Perhaps the whole area was thick with pines and the ground carpeted with their needles and their amber scent in the air, twining through even the scent of garbage and motor oil, cooking grease and wafts of his mother’s perfume.

  I could imagine anything, because Jacob tells me nothing. Was he a pretty boy? Was he good? I think he was watchful, his yellow eyes unblinking from the first. I think he was an unnerving infant, but he was one of many—at least six sisters, another one who is only ever described as the baby. Perhaps at night, Jacob’s mother stood over each of her children’s beds and felt their features in the dark, her hands fumbling over their faces on the pillow. This one the eldest girl, right where she should be; this one the baby, a young teenager now, but still sucking the corner of his blanket into a nipple molded by t
he roof of his mouth. When she got to Jacob, I imagine she felt his forehead and then the bridge of his nose, his chin—weak like his Uncle Robert’s—and then his eyelashes fluttering like moths against her palm, the eyes open though unseeing. The boy asleep, but refusing to be blind.

  I come back again and again to the boy standing in the yard watching as his uncle drags his father out of the car and lets him fall into the dirt. Uncle Robert worked in the mines. So did Jacob’s father. So did the neighbors on both sides and the ones next to them, and behind, and before. The mines radiated out around the boy like the threads of a web. On every strand someone is struggling, bouncing the web up and down. At eighteen, Jacob too went underground. It wouldn’t have been much of a story except for that, at twenty-two, he came back up.

  Underground, Jacob wore a reflective vest and a yellow hardhat whose lamp he could turn on and off by twisting the lens. He was a bucket man, part of a small, mobile crew-for-hire who moved up and down the mountains tunneling under the surface of used-up strip mines for the deeper seams that kinked through the rock. The crew was composed of: Harry, the foreman, Pete, who ran the big machines, Lotho, a wiry black man whose muscled arms gleamed as if, beneath the coal dust, were a denser, radiant stone, and Piro, the foreigner whose perpetually runny nose carved tidal channels through the black powder that clung to his luxuriant red moustache.

  In every shaft the miners strung electric lights as they dug. These hung drooping at the roofline, suspended from a tough orange extension cord. The bulbs themselves were in cages like canaries which exuded yellow light instead of song. The lights were powered by an external generator, but the system was unreliable, often shaken out of service by the chunking and grinding of the continuous miner as Pete steered it into the rock face, the teeth of its rotating drum ripping the coal from the seam. When the generator went out, all the men were plunged into a momentary darkness. This was so total it seemed for just a moment as if the deafening sounds of the machine, their own breathing, the groan and shift of the rock above their heads were also extinguished though the Miner still dug, the conveyor still turned, the bucket suspended forgotten at the end of Jacob’s arm—his arm itself forgotten, unnecessary to the beautiful, dark, beating self that was here, for just a moment, warm and spreading in a world that could not distinguish its borders—still filled and overfilled and spilled out broken rock over the toes of his boots. Then, one by one, the other men would twist on their headlamps and bob about in the shaft like jellyfish, their distance impossible to gauge. The silence would be revealed to be horrendous noise and Lotho, standing behind him with the bin, would say, “Woah! Wake up, Jakey. Where’ve you been?”

  At night, when the machines finally came to rest but before retiring to the trailers they bunked in, the crew hunkered down in the slag heaps and lit bituminous clinkers on fire in the great metal claw of the backhoe. Then, as the coal exhaled its boggy gasses (peat and black water, the shimmering chitin of Jurassic dragonflies, the curled fronds of ferns) the men passed around a bottle. Some nights they told stories.

  One night Piro told a story about twelve brothers who lived beside a lake somewhere near the village where he grew up. When the war came, as it does to all villages, the brothers were conscripted into service and when they returned many years later one of them was missing some vital part.

  “One had blow off his legs,” Piro said. “One his arm. One: no eyes, but scars only like a mask. And one, no penis.” Piro paused to let this sink in. The other men laughed because surely with twelve brothers and not a whole man among them there was a punch line coming, but Piro said, “I know this one best. Bruno. He live to be an old man when I was little boy and he say, ‘The only place the bomb strike. The only place,” and pat his trouser here—pat, pat—but it was empty.”

  Piro patted the crotch of his filthy pants. His hands, which he scrubbed with lava soap at the end of each day, were startlingly white and looked small and furtive clasped between his legs. Everyone was quiet. Someone drank from the bottle and spit a jet of liquor into the fire where it hissed. Then, Lotho said, “Shit, I know that guy. He wasn’t called Bruno, though. His name was Henry, ain’t that right? Henry Smalt?”

  He pointed across the circle at the foreman who held up his hands like he was surrendering or warding off a curse, then grabbed at his own crotch and shook it as if what were inside were unmanageable, coiled to strike. Then it was all right to laugh and they all did, even Piro who cleared his nose with his fingers and wiped the black snot to glisten in the dirt. Twelve brothers and not a whole man among them. A joke.

  That night Jacob dreamed of twelve brothers standing at the edge of a gray lake. They had their backs to him, facing out over the water, yet in the manner of dreams he could still see their faces: the blasted hole where a nose should be, a web of scars cocooning the empty sockets of the eyes. The brothers were setting up a camp. One dragged logs up from the waterline with his remaining arm and stacked them inside a ring of stones. Another, an empty pant leg pinned neatly beneath him, sat on a rock and unpacked tins of potted meat, glass jars of jam, loafs of bread wrapped in tricolored paper from a large, green haversack. One brother held a tent stake in place between the stubs of his wrists while yet another, his legs gone below the knees, knelt on the ground to pound the stake home, the blows of his hammer echoing back from the lake like silver bells.

  It was late in the day. The hike up to the site had taken longer than the brothers had anticipated. The light was failing and yet no one seemed to hurry. Each brother went about his task as if this action his body was now performing were the inevitable outcome of all the other actions that had come before, another knot in a string that stretched backward in tidy square hitches, forward in a smooth, uncomplicated line. Aiming a gun leads to slicing a loaf of bread; thrusting a torch into a hay loft is now dipping a bucket into the still water of the lake. Running toward an earth ridge rimmed in fire is threading a pole through the peak of a tent. Lying in the dirt, the ground beneath spongy and red, is lifting the chiming bottles one by one from a basket, pulling the cork and tilting it to drink.

  When their chores were done, the brothers gathered around the fire to share their meal. In the flickering light, they passed around bread and meats, hunks of soft cheese and little cakes wrapped in wax paper. They talked quietly to each other. Every now and then someone laughing or clinked a bottle against a stone. One brother began to hum and soon they were all singing, a song with many verses which they often interrupted to argue about wording or order but picked up again immediately, the tune low and mumbling and soft as fur. The youngest brother had blonde hair which shone in the firelight and all the other brothers went out of their way to touch him as they moved about the circle, as if to reassure themselves that he was still there.

  After a time it was completely dark and the world that surrounded them all constricted itself to the circle of fire light and the sound of the lake water lapping against the shore. Jacob—always on the outside, still lurking in the darkness—noticed something it seemed only possible to see by the light of the campfire. The brother’s bodies had begun to reconstruct themselves, but not out of pale flesh and coarse, wiry hair. Instead, where a brother was missing an ear a sheen of downy, black feathers, each as small and precise as a tiny clam shell, had grown back in its place. Where a brother was missing a leg a bundle of glossy, black quills bristled from the cuff of his pants, and where another’s jaw had been ripped from his face a sheaf of wing feathers rustled in the black hollow of his mouth.

  The youngest brother, who was by now quite drunk and resting his head on his nearest brother’s shoulder, had lost his arm. He was wearing a green shirt from which the sleeve had been cut away to expose the gleaming knob of his amputation and earlier in the evening Jacob had noticed how the stump flexed and rolled in sympathy with the labors of his remaining arm as the boy tossed sticks onto the fire or dragged logs to serve as seats around the pit.

  Now, when the youngest brother leaned back
away from the fire all appeared as it had before. Clearly visible was the empty sleeve, the knob of bone, the delicate shading of his ribs sliding under the skin as if they were a cage under shallow water. But when the boy leaned forward again, catching a joke and shifting into the fire’s circle to laugh, Jacob saw that where before there had been emptiness now was a black swan’s wing with feathers long and glossy. The firmly muscled joint bent as the boy beat his wing with delight and his brothers laughed with him and leaned in, their hair brushed back from their faces by the wind he made.

  “Of course,” Jacob said. “They have a sister,” and then he woke up in the silver, bullet-shaped trailer in which he slept. Across from him, Lotho snored and flung an arm out over the sheets.

  The crew traveled up and down the mountains in a caravan of white trucks and a single semi driven by Pete which hauled the miner. The shafts they dug were poor, holdovers from more lucrative projects, and in this they were like a clean-up crew, hollowing the last of the coal from the thinning mountains, mitering the walls smooth and then leaving the pits to fill with green water, their runoff seeping into the towns below. Sometimes there would be people standing by the side of the road as they wound through a town on their way up to a mine site higher on the ridge. Mostly these were children, excited, running after the trucks and shouting.

  “They act like we should throw something down,” Lotho said. “Candy or something.”