Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  Oh well, one May the mother died. Shortly after, the woodsman took to the road and left his daughter in charge of the house. “Don’t let anyone in or out,” he said and he slipped some coins into the bodice of her pinafore and he kissed her on the top of her head. He did not say, “Take care of your brother,” who was tucked into an oven mitt hanging just above the stove, but the girl decided to hear this anyway and, as soon as her father had passed out of sight down the road, she fetched her brother down, put him in the pocket of her apron and gave him an acorn cap to wear for a hat. At first the girl fed herself and her brother from what was left of their mother’s pantry. Heels of bread, stale oatcakes, porridge. Then, when this fairy-tale food was exhausted and real hunger set in, she began to make small excursions into the yard and the fringe of the surrounding forest, coming back with toadstools, song bird’s eggs, berries and the slim, white bulbs of wild onion. At night, she sang to her brother of whom she was fond. She imagined he was comforted by her songs and even thought at times she could hear him humming back. Unbeknownst to her, however, her brother was an exiled duke and could neither understand her language nor unbend enough to press her pretty, plump hand between his own.

  (There was a terrible darkness, a buzzing. In the forest a mother wolf had come from between the trees and said, “You will be fine fine fine. A fine fat morsel for my cubs.” Then the trees splintered open and out of their golden hearts the woodsman appeared.)

  One night, when the girl had found very little to eat in the woods, she and her brother made due with a soup made of grass and loaves of bread she patted out of dirt. A ring of green stained their mouths and she found herself exhausted. “You think you’d be a little more grateful,” she said to her brother, pretending he’d complained. Though he was many years her elder and silent always in the way of something that has claimed its ground, she said, “You bad baby, all you ever do is cry,” and she slapped him on the back of each of his hands with her thimble.

  Immediately, the girl was filled with remorse and resolved to make up this lapse to him in any way she could. With the last of the coins her father had tucked into her bodice, the girl bought a ream of golden cloth from a traveling salesman who sometimes stopped at their front gate and a little spool of golden thread. In the evenings, after she had made the dinner and fed them both, tidied the house and filled each of the oil lanterns in turn to keep out the dark, the girl sat beside the fire with her brother in a basket at her feet and sang him her songs while she stitched together a beautiful robe. Into the weave of the cloth, the thread never seeming to empty from its spool, the girl stitched scenes of her brother. There he was in the womb—round as a pea, then round as a golden ball—and here he was in the forest, his pale face peering out of a jagged lacework of branches. Here he was as he might have been: tall and slim, slipping a dancing slipper over the arch of a dainty foot; and here as he was, tucked in next to the fire, surrounded by the sturdy lathwork of poverty and desperation, hunger and, of course, love. The robe was for her brother to wear, though every day it grew longer and longer, spilling out across the hearth and piling up against the door. “No little poppet for you,” the girl said to her brother who was sleeping in the bowl of a spoon. “No little tuck. No little fancy.”

  (In the forest, there had been a bird that flew from tree to tree calling as if its heart would break. There had been a wind that blew everything silent and passed on while all behind it cowered and held close to the ground. Even so small, he had understood immensity. “If we are born for death. . .” he had thought, “If there is no land above this one and no land below. . .”)

  From the center of his silence the boy, who had in the meantime become a man though a very small one, watched his sister work. Often she pricked her fingers and cried as the blood soaked into the cloth because she had a horror of ruin, of no turning back. Perhaps he even felt grateful, perhaps even kind. . .But he was born very proud and it is more likely that he went on in that fashion. A dear girl, but beneath him, as was the doll’s spoon she stuck in his mouth, the pine-straw teddy she tucked beneath his arm for comfort in the night. And the peasant songs she sung. And her peasant face—ill favored, withered as an apple in the deep leaves.

  So it always is when the cold world meets the warm one. A struggle right along the edge of life and the worlds’ two impulses (one for silence, one for raging noise) compressed together into a mean line—sharp as a razor, bright as the melting sun. “Oh my love, my love, in a sycamore tree,” the girl sang. “Climb down, climb down, and marry me.”

  When she was finished with the robe it proved to truly be a splendid thing. It was the deepest part of winter, the snow heavy in the branches, and the cupboards were bare as bone. Still, the girl felt very proud of herself as she spread the robe out on the hearth and admired its scintillating ripples, the intricacy of its figures as they gamboled and piped, chased one another through the lindens or stirred a pot of soup on the stove. It was by far the most beautiful thing the girl had ever seen, but, because she had made it herself, it didn’t belong to her and so, with a sigh of regret, she lifted her brother out of his basket and wrapped a corner of the golden robe around and around his still, leaden body so all that could be seen of him was the tip of his nose and the point of his sharp, gray chin. Immediately, there was a darkness, a terrible buzzing. In the way of one herself transformed, the girl opened her eyes and saw on the hearth not her tiny brother, but a tall, handsome man whose skin was the color of apricots and whose eyes were angry.

  (And then the goose is strung up in the larder. Sometimes, a marriage; sometimes the well belches a heavenly river. There is a cake made of golden flour, a drink made of heart’s own blood. A girl could dance until the bottoms of her feet are sheered to ribbons. A girl could be tricked into living underground, sitting forever beside her dark husband, remembering the sun. “Would you like a wish?” asks the fish in the bottom of the boat. A clever girl says no, but how many of them are there left in the world? I could count them all on the fingers of one of my hands and still have some left over to do the darning. I could wrap all of them up in a single long blanket, rub their cheeks to roses, comb their hair.)

  What actually happened is the young man who had never really been her brother stood up on the hearth and said, “You fool, you have exposed me. Now they’ll come for sure.” Even if the girl had understood his language, even if she had been braver and more true, it wouldn’t have mattered. They did come, sliding out of the fringe of the forest as if they had stood there for years and only now happened to turn their heads. It was a mob—the men in leather breeches, the women apt to pull their skirts up over their heads. They carried pitchforks and pine resin torches, rusty cleavers and lancer’s spikes left over from the last war fought on their behalf. Their mouths were holes that led straight to their guts and they ringed the house in rows four deep. Set fire to the thatch. Drove an axe through the woodsman’s own front door.

  When the mob eventually forced their way inside they carried the exiled duke, still wrapped in his golden robe, to the doorstep and they cut off his head. Then they hoisted it on a pike to peer in each of the girl’s windows as she cowered and cried. “This is not a joke,” someone made the head say, though clearly they all thought it was very funny. “I didn’t think it was,” the girl replied to her brother’s head which, despite the size and the ragged lacework they had made of his neck, looked very much the same as it always had: the eyes cold and gray, the mouth a thin, disapproving line. When they finally went away, they left her with a terrible mess to clean, but when she was done and her life restored to its regular patterns, the girl couldn’t help but think that if she only had her brother back she would do things very differently. “I would beat him with a thimble all day long,” she said to the fire, stroking the golden robe which she had laid across her lap. “My poor, dear brother. I would bash in his head.”

  And every day, though she was all alone, she sang:

  “My love, my love in a sycamore t
ree.

  Climb down, climb down, and marry me.”

  Goodbye, Goodbye My One True Love

  When Thingy and I were very young, my father and a friend of his discovered the body of man who had been shot. They were hunting turkey in the mountains, only slightly out of season, and had two toms already cleaned and trussed under a tarp in the back of the truck. It was a wet day, the afternoon an inhalation between showers.

  The man had been shot in the ear with a small caliber gun, a neat black hole punched overtop his regular canal the only overt sign of trauma. “You could tell something had happened in there, though,” my father told the Sainte Maria. They were sitting in the living room: my father with his arms spread over the back of the couch like wings, the Sainte Maria perched on the armrest of the recliner. “There was blood on his teeth and a look on his face like someone had gone in there and scrambled him all up.”

  The man was someone who lived in one of the hollows and that was enough for us to believe we knew something about him. How he had eschewed the companionable hostility of the town for a whistling kind of solitude. How he lived, I imagined, in little more than a raw place dug in the earth like a fox or a weasel.

  “What did he look like?” the Sainte Maria asked. She was very young herself, probably not much more than fifteen, but recently my father had made the switch from calling her, ‘little girl,’ to calling her ‘darling,’ something he had not yet done with any of the other girls.

  “He looked surprised,” my father said. He shifted his weight on the couch so the old springs creaked beneath him and propped one boot up on the coffee table. “Not shocked, mind you, just surprised. Kind of like someone had played him a good joke.”

  Where was I while this conversation went on? In the room, because I can see them both in memory: my father, red clay in the ridges of his boots, his shirt rolled neatly up his ropy forearm; the Sainte Maria in jean cut-offs from which her pale legs crossed nervous and noodely and striking in the light. It must have been spring. It was spring light, a dappled, lily pond light that lapped across the carpet as they talked. I remember how it pooled in the lap of the little shepherd girl on top of the television. She was so certain of herself, her bisque cheek turned up to accept her shepherd boy’s kiss, even as she admired the drape of her skirts across her knees. And, although there he was with his back turned, edging away, who could blame her? They had been made for each other, after all. Even their outfits matched.

  I must have been in the corner by the door. There was a hat-rack there which was often draped with coats, a marble basin in its pedestal that I liked to fill with stones and acorn caps. I could have been behind a coat, hidden. Or, more likely, just sitting with my back against the wall watching the light shift across the sandy carpet as if stirred by fishtails far above, watching my father pat the cushion beside him and then laugh, teasing, when the Sainte Maria, red to the roots of her hair, fidgeted on her seat and pretended not to see.

  “It was probably someone he knew,” my father said. “Someone he trusted enough to let him get real close. He had to have been close to put the barrel of the gun right inside his ear.”

  For many years afterward I dreamed about that man my father found dead in the scrub brush. Or rather, waking or sleeping, I flashed onto an image of him which lingered with meaningless precision. The body: dressed in a white undershirt and dungarees, the arms and legs splayed as if he were shot in mid lope like a four-legged animal. In my image of him, the man had reddish hair and a long, unpleasant face. His teeth were bared and, yes, bloody, a patter of blood on his chin where a bubble had been blown and burst. Every time the image flashed through my mind, I tried to concentrate on his eye—open or shut? brown or blue?—but every time I centered on his teeth instead, the blood on his chin, the hole on top of the hole, wider and deeper and black around the edges as if he had done something so simple as not wash very carefully that morning before he went out. As if he could have reversed his fate as easily as wrapping a washcloth around his index finger and twisting into his ear. “To dig out the potatoes,” the Nina always said.

  The man my father was hunting with that day was named Bo Hickett and according to Dax he had hunkered down behind a deadfall not ten feet from the body without noticing a thing other than a slight smell which turned like the other smells of the forest beneath the leaf mulch and the sweetness of rotting wood. They were hunting on logging land, an area that had been stripped years before and then replanted. The rows of young pine were so unnaturally straight they seemed to bend at the edge of their vision as if they were standing in the center of a pinwheel. Dax and Bo had parked the truck high above the turnoff from the main road and walked two or three miles back up the trace but, though it had been such a consistently wet spring that the standing pools in the dirt road were frothing with tiny, seed-like tadpoles, neither man noticed another human’s footprint or any trace of another truck.

  “We saw a bear track,” my father told the Sainte Maria. “A big fucker where it had turned and gone back into the woods.” Even that was old enough to have filled with water itself and to contain in the depression of its main pad a single black tadpole, twitching mindlessly.

  Whatever had happened, it had happened not long before the men arrived. They found him because Dax, backing up to get a better sight on the gravel pit they were luring a turkey into, stepped on the side of the man’s boot and the turn it gave under his foot was so familiar, so much a part of the manufactured world, that he found himself apologizing even as he hopped away and realized what he was apologizing to.

  The body was stiff, but not swollen. There was no smell. “So fresh the flies hadn’t found him yet,” Dax said, though there was one, a fat bluebottle, which was perched on the rim of his ear, scrubbing and scrubbing its forelegs. Dax loved that detail. “Like he just couldn’t wait to dive in there,” he said, and I imagined my father, transfixed by what he must have believed, if only for a moment, was not a man but a trick being played by his eyes. A chance arrangement of leaf and twig. The fleshy plush of a fungus perhaps, rotting at its core. Behind him, Bo Hickett blew a soft, rolling call meant to reassure the tom he saw parting the fescue on the other side of the clearing that he was welcome, wanted, long-sought, and motioned to my father to line up the shot.

  Even now, I still sometimes dream of that man I never saw. I never even knew his name or if his killer was caught which seems odd to me because, after all, it was my father who found him and my father who waited with the body while Bo Hickett hurried back to the truck to call up the county patrol on his CB. (And to hide the illegally harvested turkeys in the underbrush, no doubt, to stow the guns and prepare the story of a nature walk, stretching their legs. “God’s domain,” he might have said, gesturing to the mountains behind him. And they so blue, so magisterial, they could be evoked to stand for almost anything: bounty and progress, splendor and grace. Really, however, they are old and cold and made primarily of stone. What Bo Hickett points to, standing in the road with mud on his knees as the two troopers take notes, around them the dripping pines, their needles heavy and dark, pierced by the teetering call of the siskins that dart about their upper branches, is actually the spaces between the mountains. “God’s grandeur,” he says, shrugging, spent shell casings clinking in his pocket, and he means the petal-blue wash behind the massed stone and the wispy clouds that drift to encircle their crowns. No one gives a thought to the black spaces within: the crooked tunnels and stale pockets of air, the ropes of water spilling down through the half-moon spouts they themselves have cut over the long centuries only to plunge into still, black lakes—deep and utterly silent—from which, eventually, the water seeps back into the rock and bursts forth in rills and freshets, little cataracts and spills, white with foam, that pool on the mountain face and cloud with algae and mosquito larvae where Bo Hickett, crashing through the underbrush, stops with the troopers for just a moment to point out a track—the bear again—and say, “Can you believe it? Right by the road.”)


  “Maybe it was a suicide,” the Sainte Maria said, but my father snorted the suggestion away. Murder was a better story, after all, and what was one more murder in a place teeming with it? The fox of the mouse, the squirrel of the flea, the turkey of the nut which it splits in the autumn months to feast on the golden heart meant to become a tree.

  “Time belongs to God,” Thingy’s mother once told her. For awhile, right after Mr. Clawson moved more permanently to Atlanta, she’d become heavily involved in the church and hosted frequent tea parties for the other ladies of the 1st Baptist. After they left, she would roam through the house lifting items and putting them down in slightly different arrangements: a tea cozy whimsically cocked over the ear of a china cat, a copy of Hillary’s High Adventure peeking out over the edge of the silver ice bucket. Mrs. Clawson leaned in the doorway to Thingy’s room and said, “Time is God’s parlor, girls. Lest you forget.” This was a bad year for her, I remember. She had ginger cookie crumbs on her chin, a comet of jam arcing across her stiff, poplin collar. Some months she let her hair go until the roots were almost black, but scrubbed the increasingly empty refrigerator until it glowed sterile and blue, the yellow box of baking powder huddled in the back as if sheltering from an unappeasable weather. She was unpredictable to say the least. I had never been more lonely for her.

  “I’ll be sure to mention it to him when I get there,” Thingy said, rolling her eyes, mistaking, as was always her way, time for heaven. But I was listening. I heard what she meant to say: about boxing up the years, about putting only those with high polish or an interesting filigree on display.