Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  . . .married a rooster. . . .

  . . .married a china dish. . .

  . . .a loaf of bread. . .

  Her husband was a slant-eyed giant and, when he left her alone, she threw her blood into the river where it first became a fish and then a child.

  Another man came to visit her. . . .

  . . .her father came to visit her. . .

  . . .her brother, in his hand a golden axe, around his neck a long, black feather. . .

  When he came to a cave like a doorway in the side of the mountain, he heard the sound of a drum and voices, as if many people were dancing inside the mountain.

  She came out to him, holding the hand of her child.

  Long ago, while people still lived. . .

  “. . .What have you done with our child?” her husband asked, and, when she showed him the place in the river where she threw her blood, he reached in and pulled out a fish which changed in his arms to a daughter. . .

  “But I can never leave this mountain,” she said and so, though he came back many times, she never did.

  Long ago. . .

  . . .there was a woman who married. . .

  Long ago. . .

  . . .there was a woman and he saw what was in her hand was his own heart. . .

  “How can I have made such a terrible mistake,” she said.

  Even to her final day, she did not know if she lived within the mountain or without it. . .

  . . .if her husband was a god or a pile of rocks. . .

  . . .if her hair were gold or a ravenous fire. . .

  . . .if the child were hers or only a little thing which came after. . .

  The End

  This morning the sun rose and cast the meadow in a wash of pink. It was a light from the inside of the world and I went out in it with a pan of feed for the chickens half expecting at any minute to come up against a soft barrier against which I could brace my hands but which I could never pierce. Of course, I found no such thing, although perhaps it was only that I didn’t go far enough. The hens clustered at my feet, clucking approval and darting their sleek beaks into the dirt. Even as I stood for a moment with the pan on my hip to watch them, I saw them turn the real colors of the earth up under their feet. Dun and ochre, white roots and a blue-black beetle. Then the sun cleared the trees and green came back into the world.

  I am at the end, the last page which I will turn and lay on the back of the manuscript before squaring the whole thing and sliding it into its drawer. I admit I have never looked forward to blankness quite so much, and, though I thought this was my only story, I find myself already imagining the next project. A chronicle, I think. An observation of the weather written in the form of letters, though not exclusively to you, Ingrid.

  Dear Jacob, I might write, a slow fog today, smoking along the ridges. Apple cake for breakfast, four eggs from the laying hen.

  Dear Dad, It is very windy here, Love Alice.

  Right now, however, I am still on the last page, confronted by its final border, and beside me you are very still, a mist over your eyes as if what you see is a screen behind which other shapes cast and flicker. But this morning, when I lifted you out of your basinet, you reached out to me and to me alone. When I held you against my chest, I felt the tense curl of your body press against mine as both our hearts slowed and realigned.

  When you are older, Ingrid, I will teach you how to look at a map. How to recognize the dun squares of the fields, the ripple of the forest. Where the waters flow and where they turn back on themselves. More importantly, I will teach you the compass rose and how, no matter where you stand, you are in the center of its flowering. Straight ahead of you is always north, Ingrid, the direction of mountains, and behind you, in the deep past, is the place where the waters empty out and lose themselves.

  It was still very early and though dust from the chicken yard rimmed my ankles my nightgown, fresh from the laundry, was still bright and crisp in its creases. I unbuttoned its top few buttons and slipped you inside, between my breasts, where you hummed sleepily and scratched me with your sharp nails. The smell of you, orange and yeasty and rising, wafted up to me as if it were the smell of myself: a little sour with the night’s sweat, a briny slick—Jacob or Daniel, it doesn’t matter who—damp on my thighs as I walked. No one else was awake. No one else in the world but us two. I held you against my chest. You wrapped your fist in my hair. I laid a cake and a pitcher on the table for the morning meal and together we went up both sets of stairs to the little room at the top of the house where, despite all the stories we have been told, we opened the stiff door to find nothing more than two dusty beds and a dead bird, the spidery skeleton peeking through its drift of feathers. We stayed there for a long time watching the light change. Beneath us, the house unfolded. Its morning sounds heaved up and down—a crash of cutlery in the sink, men’s voices; a bird singing close then far then close again, something scratching inside the walls—and the light thinned yellow then silver then a pure, hard white.

  What happened, I feel I can tell you now, is that nothing happened. First there was a maelstrom in which all the things of the world whirled and collided. In that time, there was no difference between a rocking chair and a black bird’s wing, a sock and a boulder laced with veins of quartz. For a long while, eons I suspect, all these things bashed into each other, causing a great commotion, terrible damage, until, their velocity finally unsustainable, they began to funnel down into a tighter and tighter point. Everything that was dark and spacious, ravenous and insurmountable was squeezed into an unbearable pip as fine as the hole punched by needle.

  As we all know, what comes afterwards is the thread, orderly and tense. Time, in other words, which drags the great plates of the world together and binds them but ultimately can be shorn through with nothing more significant than a pair of sharp scissors, or, in extremity, your very own teeth.

  Dear Ingrid, I will surely write to you, a soft rain today, the new leaves flattened silver against the limbs.

  Dear Ingrid, I will say in another season, the earth still turning, winter coming on. And apple cake for breakfast, of course. A little thermos full of coffee to warm you on your walk.

  This morning I laid you down on my mother’s dusty quilt and watched you for a moment while you held your hands up over your face and opened and closed them. “Just now,” Daniel said in response to something I couldn’t hear. He sounded close, standing perhaps at the very foot of the stairs, but he turned and his voice trailed away. “Do you want me to wait?” I heard him ask, and then his heavy tread and the creak of the risers fading as he went down them, the pop of the screen door as he left the house.

  I rose, went to the window and looked out over the yard and the henhouse, the meadow and the sturdy hives around which the bees rose and fell, their individual lives nothing more than blots against the green finery of the grass and the blank, white walls of their homes. My mother rose and went to her window. Before her were the mountains, behind her the long, disastrous slide to the sea. She was only a child and the fingerprints she left on the glass were child-sized smudges, portending nothing, and yet behind her Thalia, her fine, horsetail hair wrapped in papers and pinned about her head like a crown, watched her with a very specific sorrow.

  When my mother turned around again, she saw her sister had settled herself, oversized and steaming, at the foot of her bed with a brush in her hand. “Come here,” Thalia might have said, “I’ll tell you a story,” and, for 100 crackling strokes through my mother’s hair, her sister gave them both a little more room.

  “Let me tell you a story,” I said to you, Ingrid, but I was looking out the window still and behind me your only response was to rustle against the quilt, grunting as you kicked your legs out in front of you like a frog. The End, I will write in only a few minutes. I won’t be able to help myself.

  I went to the window and saw Daniel, an axe slung over his shoulder, talking to Jacob who was carrying a gun. I turned and fetched you and held you so y
ou could drum your feet against the windowsill as we watched them talk, the yard radiating out around their center. You panted and kicked, danced in my hands, and my nightgown caught in an obscure breeze that jetted through the broken pane and puffed out around my thighs. It was a cool wind, come from very far away. For just a moment it touched us both and then it was gone.

  When it comes around again, we will not recognize it, Ingrid, and perhaps that is best. There are already so many distractions in the world, so many shadows that might keep us from seeing what is directly in front of us. Two friends, for example, moving away from each other as they bend toward separate tasks. One stands a log on its end on top of a deeply scarred stump and raises the axe above his head. The other tracks diagonally up the rise and stops in the last band of sunlight just at the lacy edge of the forest’s shadow. He tents a hand over his eyes and looks back, standing so still it is as if he and the nearest tree and the gun are all the same long line canting backward. Finally, the axe comes down and, as one friend straightens to wipe the sweat out of his eyes, the other raises a hand and waves.

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” he seems to say and then he turns and walks into the forest.

  Author’s Note

  This book is in part a pastiche of themes, images, icons and reoccurring oddities borrowed from sources that will be familiar to most readers, particularly those who had western childhoods. The unlucky girls as well as the terribly lucky ones, the dutiful sisters, transformed brothers, the itty bitty and the great big, the animals who talk or plot or watch or lend guidance, and always, always, the vast, impenetrable forest owe their origin in my private mythos to the work of the Brothers’ Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault and Lewis Carrol in my distant past, and to Italo Calvino’s collection Italian Folktales, the disquieting stories of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud and the unflappable stories of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya in my more recent readings. It is to these authors, among others, that this novel owes its sense of its symbols as echoing along a continuity of like images, echoes which crowd into the blanks.

  Many of the particulars in the tales told here, however, owe their genesis to a much more specific source: the myths, cosmologies and cultural histories of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. When I first began to conceive of Alice Small I started with an image—a woman, little more than a girl, looking through a window at another woman, dressed in white, with her back turned. Over and over, as I went about my humdrum, sometimes extraordinary, days this picture flashed in my mind, and, as I examined it, the image began to spin out themes: something about jealousy, about betrayal, about deep, abiding love, about wanting to be let in. When I started writing the book that would become Hex, the girl outside looking in became a person—Alice Small in the ferocious flesh—with both a history and a place to which she was tethered. Simultaneously, the fairy tales I grew up with began to seem insufficient to fully explore this woman who came from such a different geographic and psychological place from me. At that time, I discovered James Mooney’s exhaustive ethnographic work Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, primarily collected among the Eastern Cherokee living in the Qualla reservation in western North Carolina in successive field seasons between 1887 and 1890. Mooney’s work was originally published by the US Bureau of American Ethnology in 1891 and 1900, then gathered into a single volume and reissued in 1982 by Charles and Randy Elder in collaboration with Cherokee Heritage Books, an educational program of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual in Cherokee, North Carolina. The stories I found within were ground shaking on a scope matched in my writing life only by the moment, in graduate school, when I stopped thinking of fairy tales as familiar, children’s stories and opened new eyes on a language wild, fleet and strange.

  The World Below the World is a Cherokee world and the figures that live there and topside in the mountains I share with them are: the owl husband, the rooster husband, the husband that is the sun, the woman who enters the mountain, the woman who flings her blood into the stream, the beautiful sisters with heads like pumpkins and the shy feet of dogs, the Thunder Brothers who ride horned serpents and sit on turtles only nominally disguised as chairs, and other peoples, themes and turns of language besides. Yet, even as I sifted through the wealth of what Mooney compiled, I was more and more troubled by the fact that what I was receiving had been filtered through a perception alien and necessarily revisionist, or even hostile, to the culture that produced these tales, in spite of what seems to have been Mooney’s own best and most sympathetic intentions. By all accounts and evidence, James Mooney was a conscientious ethnographer, an exhaustive archivist and a meticulous collector of the names, tribal affiliations, myths, histories and cosmologies of the American Indian peoples at a time when they were suffering what was arguably the most organized, systemic, at once bloodthirsty and coldly bureaucratic program of genocide seen in the modern world right up until March 20, 1933, when the Dachau concentration camp opened its gates outside of Munich. He seems to have been a scientist perpetually drawn to the edge of disaster—a kind of triage ethnographer. Mooney documented the Ghost Dance movement after the death of the Hunkpapa Lakota holy man and tribal chief Sitting Bull in 1890; a few years earlier James Mooney went into the last Cherokee strongholds on their traditional lands within two generations of the peoples’ forced removal and relocation to western reservations along the Trail of Tears following the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and gathered everything he could. The results, particularly in the case of Myths of the Cherokee, are collections of data, images, oral histories, tribal manuscripts and lore that conscientiously seek to document a culture as it faced eradication through assimilation or massacre.

  In the introduction to his text, Mooney writes, “The enforced deportation, two generations ago, from accustomed scenes and surroundings did more at a single stroke to obliterate Indian ideas than could have been accomplished by fifty years of slow development,” (Myths of the Cherokee, 12). Later, in the concise timeline he devotes to the Cherokee peoples’ cultural and political development both precontact and then in conjunction with European settlers, Mooney describes the removal of 1838–39 as a “tragedy [that] may well exceed in weight of grief and pathos any other passage in American history.” He even hints toward the culpability of the European aggressors in this matter, describing the mobs that looted and pillaged in the wake of the soldiers who had swept down on the Cherokee villages and farmsteads as a “lawless rabble,” and “outlaws”(12).

  However, at least in this text, Mooney constrains his implied criticism to individuals—the lawless rabble, a few bad seed soldiers—and does not go so far as to condemn the systems present behind these vicious expressions of institutionalized racism, the ultimate aim of which was to exert the force of the dominant culture’s military might not in an act of defensive war, or even really as a means to territorial expansion, but as a theft, pure and simple, of lands, materials and resources. I cannot know what Mooney thought of the moral identity of a country that could commit such crimes. From my temporal and cultural remove, I cannot really know how he—a product, after all, of his times—came to rationalize his work among the people of the Eastern band of the Cherokee with his position as a paid employee of the government that had instigated their liquidation (was he regretful? Radicalized? Subversive or scholarly? Did he identify? Exculpate? Did he rage? Sigh?). I do not intend here to judge the motivations of someone who has, after all, left so much of value behind. But I do know what I think on these subjects and I record here a deep unease with my own appropriation of Cherokee texts sourced through the language of a translator who is, ultimately and in spite of what appear to have been his intentions, the oppressor. Consider this moment from Myths found in the section of Quadruped Myths: “The unpleasant smell of the Groundhog’s head was given it by the other animals to punish an insulting remark made by him in council. The story is a vulgar one, without wit enough to make it worth recording” (279, italics mine). I am right to be uneasy
, Reader; so too should you be.

  And yet, as this book’s themes began to develop and solidify, as Alice’s own story became concrete and then dissolved again into the mists of the stories she herself was telling, it began to seem more and more appropriate to me that the main source text for this project was one plagued with broken lineage, corruption, manipulation, a subtext of power and abuse. Alice is a motherless child born of a motherless child, a girl given very little care and so due a tremendous store of luck. What Alice knows of the world and herself in it she has had to invent from the scraps of a history shredded before her insertion into the timeline. Though I am by no means conflating the suffering of a single fictional character with the very real, ongoing, struggles of the American Indian peoples to navigate and preserve their cultural identity in the face of its near eradication, I am saying there is a sympathy here; an echo, however faint, that reflects the damage done when the world we inhabit must be created forever anew because the people who should have been our forebears are gone. Carried away from us and with them a large portion of who we are, who we might have been believed to be.

  And so, in spite of the violent subtext of history that haunts his work, I am still grateful to James Mooney. To his memory, and to all those who seek the hand behind the artifact, I say a heartfelt thank you. Yet, please know that these stories are not history, but rather a living thing, echoing with all the voices that have come before in the ongoing storytelling tradition that still exists among the Eastern and Oklahoma Bands of the Cherokee. Without the telling there is no tale.

  Acknowledgments

  My grateful thanks to the editors whose magazines published individual stories from this novel:

  “King of Hearts, Queen of Spades,” Black Warrior Review Online, ed. Kirby Johnson

  “King of Hearts, Queen of Spades,” Spolia, ed. Jessa Crispin