Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  “Get out of the way, you little fucks,” Henry said, laying on the horn as he steered around a curve.

  One evening, on the last day of digging a particularly dissipated site, Jacob went back into the mine at the end of his shift to retrieve and coil the lights. The mine was an old one and had once been a big production. Its shafts radiated out around him, dug seemingly at random into the rock face, and the rooms carved out around the support pillars were long and ended in darkness. They had spent a month here already, the men walking the tunnels to scout for rooms that had been abbreviated or places where the possibility of a cross-shaft had been ignored. The results had been poor and in the end what they were really there to do was the work that would commence the next day: retreat mining when they would yank the support pillars with their loads of coal out from under the roof and let the rooms collapse behind them like a block ladder cascading down its hinge of string.

  Their last act would be to dynamite the mouth of the primary tunnel and sink a metal sign officially leaving unwary explorers to their own devices at both the crumbled mouth of the mine and the head of the access road leading back to it. Then the site could sink back into whatever obscurity it chose. It was a pretty place, the rough embankments of the original cuts already overgrown with jessamine and mountain laurel, the clearing where they parked the trucks and set up the trailers rimmed by a stand of young junipers, still little more than shrubs, advancing from the forest’s edge. Of course, that had all been cleared to make way for the new digging, but it would come back—the rank vines, the tremulous leaf—slowly at first and then in a dark rush, like a great paw sweeping out of the forest to clamp down on whatever still wriggled there. It made Jacob uncomfortable, particularly in the evening hours when the insects and birds would all pause at unexpected moments as if collectively listening. He had volunteered to go back down for clean up and no one protested.

  Dear Ingrid, it strikes me now that you have never been inside the earth. Under water, yes; under dust and heat, under a summer fog wet as a tongue, but not yet under the indifferent weight of rock and soil and miles of roots. How could you know the way the ceiling arced over Jacob’s head as convulsively smooth as a length of bowel? The way the standing pillars seemed to curve toward him and the stillness and the slick damp? The way, miles down the corridors, a light winked on then out, then on again, flirting around the bends in the tunnels as he reached the end of the electric lights’ halo and, pausing only briefly, reached up to twist on his helmet lamp and kept walking?

  When I imagine you grown, Ingrid, I imagine you in a blue dress, barefoot, dust streaking your calves. You move as if you are used to sliding around things: a sway of the hips, a quick shift from the ball of your foot to its tough, arched side. You are always moving away from me, your hair pulled together in a loose bush at the nape of your neck, and you are always carrying something tucked against your hip. A basket full of eggs. A wicker cage in which some animal quiescently shifts.

  I see you this way because I have no power to predict you. I know you too well, have known you every moment of your breathing life and before that, I would add, when your lungs practiced on amniotic fluid alone. What I will know of you in the future will be based on my exhaustive experience of your past, but about Jacob I know next to nothing. Even after twelve years of marriage, of working and eating with him, sleeping next to him, shifting on top of him as his hands hold my hips, I am free to imagine almost anything about his life before I was in it. In a way, I think this means I know him better than I ever will you, Ingrid. Because I have made him. Because I can leave him to his own devices and return to find him still in that mineshaft, walking further than he meant to, his own footsteps echoing back to him as meaningless as the drip of water radiating back from the corridors that crook blackly all around.

  Jacob walked in what seemed like a straight line, but it wasn’t long before the shine of the last electric light was lost behind him. Before him the dancing will-o’-the-wisp too disappeared and he was left alone with only the yolky illumination of his headlamp. Jacob stood there for a moment and felt the mine stretch empty around him. It was a crooked place, a place that had been looted even as it was carved. If this were another land, Jacob may have kicked a shard of pottery away with his foot or traced crumbling ochre outlines across the walls—the head of a dog! the head of a snake!—as they unfurled a story deeper and deeper into the dark. As it was, these were our mountains, Ingrid, and they were bare, barren, scraped clean. Jacob turned over a rock with his foot and found below it another rock. After a moment or two, he reached up and switched off his headlamp, turned at random in the sudden pitch and entered one of the rooms.

  I think, in the dark, with his lamp off, above him the weight of the mountain, and the sky, and the peak of the mountain in the world above this world grinding down like the tip of a worn tooth, Jacob stood and felt all the pieces of himself that were missing grow back in a rush of black feathers. He had sisters too and, even if they weren’t given to weaving, there is an edge at everyone’s making that unravels for the lack of the next stitch. So, there he was: feathered but flightless, watchful but blind. I don’t know how long he stood there in darkness, listening to darkness radiate around him, listening to darkness inside him make its familiar noise. He must have turned his light back on. Or perhaps he simply turned and moved forward. Came to the next thing, and the next after that. Regardless, he must have come out of the mine eventually because the next time he had a weekend off, Jacob borrowed one of the work trucks and drove back to the telescope house in the piney hollow where his mother fried meat, his sisters dipped their sharp tongues in and out of pitchers of milk, the baby worked on an engine in the front yard and his father, waxy as a long-dead king, slept and slept and slept.

  They all ate dinner together that first night and his eldest sister said, “There’s something different about you, Jacob. I don’t like it.” The other sisters echoed this in a chorus and the baby, its mouth full of meat, paused in its chewing and nodded its head.

  It went on like this: the next day at lunch as they all gathered around the table, that evening at dinner again. “There’s something about you, Jacob,” said the sisters. His mother slapped a chop on each plate and kept her own counsel. His father, joined to their meal by the open bedroom door, grunted in his sleep and rolled over.

  Finally, on the last night he was home, his third oldest sister regarded him across the steaming kettle his mother had set in the middle of the table and said, “There’s something about you Jacob. . .” and Jacob reached up over his head and pulled the cord dangling from the bulb, plunging them all into darkness. At first there was a clamor. The sisters hooted and moaned, the baby wha-wha-whaed its highest pitched cry. Then, slowly, the noise died down and there was silence broken only by a flurry of rustling and the drip of far water echoing as if down long, blind corridors of stone.

  When Jacob pulled the light on again, it was clear everything had changed. They all looked around at each other, amazed. Where before a sister had a face like dish of butter, now she was revealed to have the broad mouth and round, golden eyes of a toad. Where before the mother had huffed and steamed, gusts of Shalimar wafting damply from the folds in her sack dress, now she whirred along, a perfect, chugging engine. The sisters cawed and croaked and rustled inside their suddenly ill-fitting clothes. One stretched her long neck and honked.

  Oh, and the soup was made of stones: each bowl a dock leaf, dark and damp.

  Oh, and the baby was a great sack of pillow stuffing; the chairs they sat on nothing but turtles who groaned and closed their heavy eyes. In the open doorway, from the bed piled high with quilts and linens, their long slumbering father sat up and stretched and looked around.

  “I see,” the father said gravely, surveying his family. “I’ve been gone a long time, too long perhaps, and yet I only have one question.” He rose and drifted toward the door, his feet long and pale, the nails blue as flax, and leveled a finger across the room a
t Jacob, his only son. “What manner of creature is that?” he said and so, though his mother chugged and his sisters’ bleated, there was nothing left for Jacob to do but fly out the window in a great, glossy rush. From there he circled the world three times—sometimes flapping noisily through the underbrush, sometimes running on four swift black legs—until finally he slammed, panting, against the side of a building and slumped to his knees and could not go on.

  It turned out he wasn’t all that far from where he began. In Elevation, in fact, where there was a job washing dishes for a woman who reminded him, in some ways, of the mother he had left chugging purposefully on the dining room table. And so he settled there. And so he stayed. Waiting, I suppose, though probably not for me.

  But how curious that here too, in his new home where he was not known, no one could tell quite what he was. A swan or a mink? A man or only the skin stretched thin around what it has eaten?

  When my father came back—a long line, he said, gesturing with the popcorn which was half eaten—there was a contortionist act in the center ring and two clowns in hobo garb miming stealing a pie from the fat lady off to the side. The trapeze artists had already gone on—“No net,” Thingy said, “That’ll make a mess,”—and the elephants who balanced on balls and picked up their trainer and passed her back and forth between them with their trunks. The little dogs had appeared wearing tuxedo vests complete with pert, black bow ties and stood on their hind legs to prance and bow as if they were at a cocktail party from another century.

  A sequins spangled woman had come into the stands to drag children out into the ring where they served as unwitting straight men for the clowns, or nervously offered trays of champagne flutes to the dogs who took them in between their paws and gestured with them as they hopped about on their straining hind legs. Thingy had bounced up and down in her seat and waved her arms over her head when the woman came up our aisle, but to my great relief she ignored us both, passing on without another look.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ringmaster. He was dressed all in black, his face gaunt and white beneath a black top hat which, even at that distance, I could clearly see was patched. But he had beautiful skin, smooth and cold as cream, and he stood very still in the middle of the ring and said no more as around him the contortionists writhed into hoops and rolled toward each other—four women, their ribcages flattened to the ground, toes splayed across the backs of their heads, mouths red and open, smiling.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ringmaster again and my father said, “Now, here we go,” as if everything that had come before had been nothing more than a twitch in the curtain. He tapped Thingy on the top of the head and said, “Pay attention.”

  Is it possible then that the ringmaster looked at us? Surely not; we were so far away, so nondescript in our expectation. The women rolled into each other, twined around each other until their bodies were a complicated knot, four red smiles twisting this way and that toward the crowd. The ringmaster bowed from the waist and dropped his head as if it pained him to see, but not before he looked up at us, looked right at us: at Thingy, surely. Perhaps at me.

  “Imagine that,” my father said and from the peak of the tent, lost in blackness, a rope came down, capped at the end with a cartoonishly large, black hook. When the hook reached the women the knot somehow opened and took it into their depths. Then, to the great wonderment of the crowd, they were all lifted into the air, a writhing bundle, vaguely oval shaped. The children in the audience screamed again and many of them laughed. It was funny to see so many things happen all at once. It was funny to stretch to the very end of the tether, to drift just above the black chasm and trust the current to shift and bring you back.

  “Still no net,” Thingy said and then, high above the packed dirt floor—the clowns whose faces were smeared with blueberry; the fat woman, brandishing a rolling pin, colossal breasts heaving beneath her prim, starched apron; the little dogs who had snuck back on stage in various stages of undress like late night revelers reemerging for the second stage of the party; the ringleader who did not move from his bow—the women split open (legs and arms pulling apart, waving toward each other as if with regret) and out of their midst a body plummeted toward the floor.

  Oh and then we all screamed, of course. And, when she was brought up short by a rope so thin it was almost invisible just before she hit, unfolded herself over the ringmaster’s head like a kerchief fluttering out of a lax, white hand, then we all gasped. She landed—a girl in a blue dress, a basket over her arm and in that basket a pie still steaming from its vents which she gave to the fat woman as if to say, “Nothing a little beauty won’t fix. Nothing to take so seriously,”—and then we laughed and laughed.

  Because it was a joke after all. Twelve brothers and not a whole one among them. A girl in a blue dress born from an egg in the sky.

  The ringleader stood up and put his hat back on his head. Everyone involved took a bow.

  At the end of the night, as we walked back to his truck, my father whistled a little big-top music and took us each by the hand. “What did you think?” he said, steering us around heaps of discarded rubbage and out of the glow of headlights. “Was it everything you’d imagined?” He was in a good mood, swinging our hands up and out as if he were directing the tempo of his own whistling, every now and then hauling us up off the ground when we didn’t step quickly enough to avoid a rut or a puddle of standing oil.

  “I wanted the girl to come back,” Thingy said, “She was the prettiest. The one with the pie.”

  In fact, she had come back a number of times. She’d been one of the girls jumping from rump to rump as horses streamed around the ring. She’d been the magician’s assistant, the knife-thrower’s target, the damsel-in-distress menaced by a lion and rescued at the last moment by the lion-tamer’s whip. But I knew what Thingy meant. When she’d fallen from the sky was the only time she’d been the prettiest one of all. When she’d offered the poor fat lady the pie was the only time she’d been the wisest, the funniest, the most beloved.

  “And what did you think, Alice?” my father said. “What did you want to happen?”

  I had wanted to the rope to break, but because I was in love, I couldn’t say it. “I wanted the same as Thingy,” I said. “For the girl to come back so I could see her again.”

  And again and again and again, I could have added. Walking toward me and then away. So small I could lift her with only one arm and then, as must always be, so large that even dwindling on the horizon she is taller than me, blocks more of the sun.

  In the Laundromat, the old woman paused in her folding to watch my father lift you out of your basket and examine you. Her face was pleasant and empty as a sock. When my father did nothing more than raise your shirt to look at your tense, mottled belly, then turn your head from side to side to inspect your ears, she went back to her work as if whatever entered the room could be nothing but what she expected. If a horse were to come bursting through the door, wicked hooves gleaming as he charged the machines, I felt sure the old woman would say, “Well, of course. It is a white horse, after all”; if a hole were to open up under our feet, spiraling down into the gullet of the mountain, I’m sure the old woman would say as we fell, “But it isn’t very deep, you know. Only long.”

  She held up a pair of her husband’s underwear and shook it. There was a faint stain running in a line down the back which she pinched with her fingers as if to rub it clean and then used as the central line on which she folded the cloth.

  “The likeness is really remarkable,” my father said. He turned away from me and pumped you over his head as if you were a trophy he were holding up to an arena of cheering fans. I could see your face bobbing up and down over his head and you looked at me as you laughed, delighted, his hands snug in your armpits and brown, square thumbs crossed over your chest like an engraving. A pair of dates, perhaps. A beginning and an end.

  “In this world you have work to do,” Thalia said.

  �
�And in the other world?” I asked. I had seen it: the world beneath this one, the one beneath the waters. Where do the children go who are mistaken for turkeys or fox kits or other wild things? When my child was born she weighed as much as a newborn bear cub, and, just like a bear, she was immediately sealed in a cave to protect against the continuing weather. Don’t tell me I will never see her face again. Perhaps looking up from the underside of the creek, gold and green, dreamy with algae?

  “There is no other world,” Thalia said. “Don’t be that sort of girl for the rest of your life.”

  “Get your hands dirty,” Thalia said. “Then wash them clean.”

  A Woman Married A Man Who Said He Was The Sun

  But all that was a long time ago. Today we went into town and came back with folded laundry, sacks of dry goods, a plush toy Jacob, of all people, picked up in the grocery line and presented to you, Ingrid, as if he were giving you a chalice studded with gems.

  “See,” Daniel said when you didn’t immediately crow with delight or grip it in your still fumbling fist. “See, Ingrid, it’s a love bug,” he said and smoothed a finger across the thing’s broad, pink forehead as Jacob had done, squeezed its boldly striped torso to make it vibrate and tinkle out a little song.

  When we came back up the mountain, I gave you to Jacob to hold while I unloaded the baskets of laundry from the bed of the truck and put them away in their various closets. I made our dinner—rice, last season’s pole beans, ramp soup and the stringy breast of a hen who only that morning had trotted up to Jacob’s hand knowing he had something special just for her, something denied to each of her sisters in turn hidden in his hard palm.

  When the platters were full, I went to the porch to call the men to the table and found Jacob still there with you, the love bug discarded on the slatted wood where it occasionally jittered and ground out a few lost notes. You were sitting on his knee facing the forest. His palm was on your back to hold you upright and you swayed and lurched with the tiny corrective movements of someone riding an extravagant, but familiar mode of transport—a pasha aboard her elephant, perhaps. A mountain girl astride the moth-eaten back of her husband-to-be’s old gray dray.