Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  Then Edgar Allan said, ‘There’s a party game that people in the organ transplant business play – a kind of puzzle. Let’s say a man is going to be executed for killing another man and wounding the other man’s son. Now let’s say that the murdered man’s son is suffering because of the wound. Let’s say it’s the kidneys. And then let’s say that the organs of the guilty man are a match for the boy. Should the guilty man be forced to donate his kidneys to the boy for a transplant? Eye for an eye. Kidney for a kidney.’

  ‘Maybe we should stick with art,’ Mom said.

  So Edgar Allan asked again, ‘When did you start painting self-portraits?’

  Mom sighed. ‘My goodness. That must be nearly twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘Is that when your first husband ran off?’ Edgar Allan asked.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Walter said.

  Mom stared at Edgar Allan. ‘No, it was some time before,’ she said.

  Edgar Allan ate a bite of green beans. Washed it down with a drink from his glass. ‘How long did the court take to let you divorce him?’ he asked. ‘And how long after that did you remarry?’

  Walter pushed his plate back. ‘What’s that got to do with—’

  Edgar Allan said to Mom, ‘I’m trying to understand how you do what you do. In the paintings that I’ve seen, the lines are always clean. The colors are always pure. Maybe you look older in the newer ones though I don’t think so. Does nothing from your personal life get through? Or is that part of the lie? And if so how do you live with it? Or is that the illusion?’

  Walter held his fork in the air.

  ‘Whoopee,’ Paul said.

  Then Cristofer started laughing the way he sometimes did when he’d spent a whole day on the trampoline and had found a perfect rhythm. Bounce and grunt and bounce and grunt and bounce and grunt. A rhythm that made him laugh from his chest and his belly and his thighs. A breathless laugh. As if all the holes in his body would open and pour his insides out.

  SEVEN

  Oren

  Walter shoved his chair from the table and charged outside, down the porch steps, and across the yard to the kiln. I wondered if he would come back with one of my dad’s big guns. Kay looked unsure of herself. She got up and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Paul grinned at me, reached across the table, and helped himself to the rest of the smoked mullet and a plate of tomatoes. ‘Christ, this is good,’ he said.

  I locked eyes with Lexi. She seemed to have stopped breathing.

  But when Cristofer’s laugh died, she said to him, ‘You can feed the chickens tonight. OK?’

  He raced from the table and out of the house.

  She said, ‘He loves the chickens.’

  ‘I see that,’ I said.

  ‘But he broke one of their necks,’ she said. ‘Then he did it again. So most of the time Walter doesn’t let him near them.’

  ‘But viva la revolución, right?’ Paul said.

  Lexi stared at him. Paul grinned at her, then ate the rice from the serving bowl. I wiped my brow with my handkerchief.

  ‘What’s he mean by that?’ Lexi asked me.

  I just folded the handkerchief, aligning the edges, and tucked it back into my pocket.

  EIGHT

  Lexi

  That night in bed with the lights out I lifted my nightgown. And stroked my legs high and higher. Circling. Thinking about the man in the blue suit. Edgar Allan. The most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Personally. Asleep in the next bedroom. Or maybe as awake as I was and thinking of me. I thought of him getting out of Cristofer’s bed. Leaving Cristofer’s room. Entering mine. In the dark my ceiling fan turned and turned and I circled higher and higher.

  I spoke his name out loud in the dark. The name we had made for him together. ‘Edgar Allan.’ If he heard me through the bedroom wall and understood that name as a beckoning. If he got out of Cristofer’s bed and came to my room. Who was I to stop him? That question was all it took. A pin prick. A spark of light. A swelling as big and mean as the fireball that rolled from the tar kiln when Walter lit it with a kitchen match.

  I fell asleep. Alone. Exhausted. I dreamed that Goneril vent-pecked the white chicken until the white was bloody. The poultry yard was a mess of blood and feathers and innards. The white lying on her side. Her black eyes glassy and unmoving. But then she started laying eggs through her open wound. Dozens and dozens of eggs. Hundreds of eggs. Endless eggs. Filling the yard. Piling on top of each other. Until the heap of them buried the white chicken. But still the eggs came and each one gleamed as bright as a star in the night sky.

  NINE

  Oren

  I lay in the dark in Cristofer’s room. On the floor Paul looked like a shadow mountain alive in the night, his big chest rising and falling with his big slow breaths, as if the earth itself was fattening and shrinking.

  ‘Sure you don’t want the bed?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m getting up as soon as they’re asleep,’ he said.

  The room smelled like a dying animal too weak to leave its cave. Cristofer can’t help it, Walter had said. I pulled the bed sheet over my face. Kay had changed the covers but the smell was deep – in the mattress, the bedframe too. The walls seemed to breathe it from the holes that Cristofer had kicked through the old plaster. In the afternoon I’d tried shaking the windows open, but, as Walter also had said, they were nailed shut.

  ‘We could break the panes out,’ Paul said in the dark. ‘Get a breeze through.’

  I said, ‘Kay shouldn’t have let it get this bad.’

  ‘I like the kid, though,’ Paul said. ‘He’s energetic. And’ – he gave it some thought – ‘honest.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘He deserves better,’ Paul said. ‘He deserves to have you here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said again. I made myself breathe in deep and long and slow. Then I breathed out and breathed in again, as big as Paul did, until the rancid smell no longer registered and I no longer tasted the bitter air on my tongue.

  ‘He’s a terrific kid,’ Paul said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He is.’

  We lay quiet for a while. I didn’t remember the silence from when I lived in the house. I remembered wind rushing through the tops of the back-acre pine trees or, on windless nights, insects chiming in the open windows. On stormy nights, the sound of breaking waves would blow across the road and over the hill.

  ‘What about Lexi?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She says Walter hits her. But I don’t know if she …’

  ‘Likes it?’ Paul said.

  ‘… if she’s gotten used to it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if this is what’s normal to her or what she’ll do when the house starts to shake.’

  ‘She seems to hate Walter,’ Paul said. ‘That’s a start. So tell her your story. See where it takes her.’

  A sound came from downstairs. Cristofer was making a noise between a high whining and humming. It was a glad, musical noise.

  ‘He’s singing,’ Paul said.

  We listened for a long time. He sang a wordless song and then sang it again, high and happy. After a while he lost a measure and then started again, as if he was falling asleep and waking, and then the song pitched still higher, and it was the music of a child alone in the dark whining and winding toward slumber.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Paul said. He sometimes used words like lovely, which made me want to punch him until I realized he was serious.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘it is.’

  Then Cristofer was quiet.

  Paul and I listened, and after some time he sat up and said, ‘I’m going out.’

  But then downstairs Cristofer laughed – at a joke in the dark or at the dark itself.

  So Paul sat on the floor and I lay in the bed until the house became quiet again and stayed quiet.

  Then I said, ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Ha,’ Paul said.

  ‘You’ll check the yard for my dad’s guns?’ I said.

  ‘C
lose your eyes and let me worry about it,’ he said. ‘Big day for you tomorrow.’

  ‘It won’t be the last,’ I said, and I sat up on the bed. I had no interest in sleeping.

  He said, ‘If they catch you, it’s over.’

  He was right. I lowered myself to the mattress. ‘Don’t get caught,’ I said.

  Then he was gone.

  For a big man, he moved as quietly as a spider.

  TEN

  Lexi

  In the morning our chickens were dead. Walter was first out of the house and he howled like he’d caught fire. I ran downstairs but Cristofer beat me out the door. I knew what would happen. I shouted at him to stop. But his messed-up brain told him to go go go. When he got to the poultry pen Walter hit him in the face with his arm. Which stopped him. Knocked him to the ground. His nose and lips bled. He didn’t move.

  When I got there I kicked Walter.

  ‘Me?’ he yelled. He shoved me away and pointed inside the fence.

  The chickens were dead. Lying side by side. Goneril by herself. The four pheasant-brown campines in a row. The eight whites. No blood. Their beaks pointed at the hill. The yard smelled only of skunky smoke from yesterday’s kiln fire. The sun was coming over the hill. The last damp hung in the morning air. The night had laid dew on the dead birds’ feathers.

  ‘A coyote?’ I said.

  Walter moved as if he would hit me. ‘Cristofer fed them last night?’ he asked.

  ‘He didn’t do this,’ I said. I sat on the dirt next to Cristofer. Cleaned the blood from his face with my nightgown.

  Walter went into the poultry pen. He picked up Goneril and kneaded her body. Checked for broken ribs. He cupped her head in his hand and rolled it in circles.

  ‘Broken neck?’ I asked.

  He forced open her beak. Smelled her gullet.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  He fingered through her feathers. Dropped her on the ground. Picked up the biggest white. Checked her. Dropped her.

  Cristofer wiped his bloody nose with his hand and wiped his hand on my knee.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked again.

  Feed was on the ground from last night. Walter picked it up and smelled it.

  ‘It wasn’t Cristofer’s fault,’ I said.

  Walter went to the bin. He got the shovel and threw it into the pen. He looked inside the jar of vitamin feed. He pulled out the medicine pail and said, ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’

  ‘What?’

  He took out the medicine dropper by the rubber-bulb. The glass tube was shattered.

  Cristofer looked at Walter and keened low.

  ‘Cristofer?’ I said.

  Walter pulled out the bottle of reserpine that I had used to tranquilize Goneril. He unscrewed the cap and turned the bottle upside down. It was empty.

  ‘Oh Cristofer,’ I said.

  He keened louder.

  Walter cocked his head and looked at Cristofer the way you look at something disgusting when you’re not sure what it is.

  ‘You don’t know that he did it,’ I said.

  But Walter kicked Cristofer in the ribs. He would have done it again but I grabbed his leg and hugged it until he pushed me away. ‘This is insanity,’ he said. And went across the yard and into the house.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I yelled.

  ELEVEN

  Oren

  When Lexi brought Cristofer into the kitchen, I was sitting at the table. I had opened all of the downstairs closets but hadn’t found my dad’s guns. So instead of jamming them and stealing the ammunition, I had cleaned my jacket, put a crease in my pants, and polished my shoes. ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Lexi said.

  Cristofer let her use a wet towel to wipe the blood from his face.

  The chickens hadn’t been part of the plan, but Paul was nothing if not an enthusiast.

  In the front room, Walter sat on a green leather chair, his feet planted on the floor, his hands gripping the cracked leather on the arms. The chair had once been my dad’s, but Walter sat on it as if it was a personal throne.

  Kay came downstairs, and I don’t know if she’d been watching the chicken pen from her bedroom window, but she went to Walter and kneeled on the floor. She whispered to him words that I couldn’t hear, and after a while the anger fell from his face. He ran his fingers through her long hair, and she laughed and then he laughed too, a loving laugh that carved a space around them and excluded everyone else.

  Lexi looked at the hem of her nightgown and Cristofer’s blood on it. She looked at me. ‘No breakfast this morning,’ she said, then asked, ‘Where’s your driver?’

  ‘He went for a walk in the woods,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t see him go,’ she said.

  ‘He was out before the sun came up.’

  ‘The two of you missed the excitement,’ she said. ‘Some of it anyway.’ She went into the front room and pulled the nightgown off over her head. She balled it up with the bloodstain on the outside, dropped it on Walter’s lap, and went upstairs.

  ‘Filthy girl,’ Walter shouted after her.

  TWELVE

  Lexi

  In the middle of the morning Tilson came and Walter put him to work digging a pit for the chickens. The sweat on his black arms gleamed in the sun.

  An ocean breeze blew through the tops of the back-acre pine trees but the hill kept it off the front porch. I sat on the swing with my Bible locked shut on my lap. Poe inside it. And Hawthorne and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and their kind. Their hearts beating fast. As if the Bible was a coffin and I had buried them alive.

  Walter loaded an axe and his chainsaw and a can of gas into the wheelbarrow. And pushed it across the yard to the pine woods. Mom and Edgar Allan talked in the front room about lines and palettes and mirrors. I drifted off until Edgar Allan changed the subject.

  ‘Who is this?’ he asked.

  I knew without seeing that he had picked up the one photo that Mom kept of my dad. It was the only picture in the front room. The only thing at all on the shelves by the fireplace.

  ‘My first husband,’ she said. ‘Amon.’

  She took the picture twenty years ago. My dad was in his forties then. Dressed in jeans and a black-and-red-checkered flannel shirt. Sitting at the dinner table. When I was twelve I stole the picture and put it on my dresser in my bedroom. Mom stole it back and put it on its shelf. She dusted it the same way she cleaned the windows.

  Edgar Allan asked, ‘If he ran off why do you keep the picture?’

  ‘That’s what he looked like when I last saw him,’ Mom said. ‘I keep it to help me remember what he did to me.’

  ‘Your memory can’t do that without it?’ he asked.

  ‘Some people’s memories harden their experiences,’ Mom said. ‘Mine has always softened them. I don’t want to fall in love with him again even in my memory.’

  ‘But you did love him?’ he asked.

  ‘Very much,’ she said. ‘For a time.’

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘We should talk of other things,’ she said.

  They were quiet. In the yard Tilson stripped off his shirt. Each time he sank the shovel into the sandy soil the grit scraped against the metal like a sharpening stone. Out in the pine woods Walter’s chainsaw ripped and whined as he touched the blade to a tree.

  Then Edgar Allan asked Mom, ‘Did you ever hear from him after he left?’

  She said, ‘He’s probably dead by now. I hope.’

  ‘Why do you keep the rest of the shelves empty?’ Edgar Allan asked.

  She said, ‘Does this really have to do with my painting?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  She said, ‘Amon kept his books on them.’

  ‘He took them when he left?’ Edgar Allan asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Walter didn’t like them in the house.’

  ‘What did he take when he left?’ Edgar Allan asked.
r />   I listened for what Mom would say.

  Edgar Allan asked, ‘Another woman?’ Needling her.

  Mom had had enough. ‘Let’s go see my paintings,’ she said.

  They came out of the house. Crossed the yard to the studio and went inside. They looked like secret lovers. I itched to chase them across the yard and pound on the door until they let me in. Instead I opened the Bible and took Great American Stories from the cut-out. I read ‘Tell-Tale’ again. Thumbing the rough edges of the Bible pages where I had cut them. When I made the hiding place I had burned the insides in the kiln. The blackened paper had crumbled through the holes in the bottom ovens and into the box where Walter was collecting tar to paint the roof of the house. Now the ashes from Deuteronomy to the Book of John kept us dry when it rained.

  Mom and Edgar Allan came out of the studio. She carried two of her paintings and he carried a hammer. They went to the side of the house so I locked the Bible and went to see. Edgar Allan hammered nails into the outside wall. Mom hung paintings on them.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  Mom said, ‘He wants to see them in natural light.’

  They went back to the studio and came out with more paintings.

  ‘You’re wrecking the wall,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mom said.

  Edgar Allan pounded nails. Mom went for paintings.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked him.

  He said nothing.

  I said, ‘What’s your real name?’

  He said, ‘Do you know how many paintings she has crammed into that shed?’

  ‘Hundreds,’ I said.

  ‘Thousands. I want to see how they handle the sunlight.’ He stepped back from the wall. ‘If they can’t take it what good are they?’

  Mom came back and handed him two self-portraits. He hung them and they went for more.

  Tilson stopped digging. Threw the shovel aside. Watched. Then he went into the poultry pen and picked up a chicken. He looked at it nose-to-beak and threw it over the fence into the pit. He picked up two more and threw them also.

  Mom and the man laughed inside the studio. Sharing a secret.