She washed the land clean with the back of her hand.
“Um.” He kicked at a clump of weeds with his sandal. “Do you know where my dad is?”
“With my mom. At my house.” She looked up and smiled. “They floated away.”
He bent down, rested his rear on his heels. Annabelle drew a boy and a girl in limitless space. She gave them wings. The boy arched his back as though it itched.
“Can I go with you then?”
“Suit yourself,” she said. She took his hand. Hung on tight.
They flew away.
1.
Not one of us has ever stepped inside the Taxidermist’s house. We have no need to do so. We already know what we’ll find.
2.
On the center of his desk in the mayoral suite of the town hall (though it is not much of a suite anymore, and not much of a hall; the old town hall burned down years ago, and was replaced by a temporary double-wide) stands a mounted howler monkey, one of the finest specimens from the Taxidermist’s vast collection. Its mouth is open, lips curled outward like the rim of a trumpet. Its head is cocked sweetly to one side, as though reconsidering what it was just about to say. Its knees are bent, toes pigeoned inward in the classical stance, and—though this is a violation of protocol and is generally frowned upon by most who practice the art of taxidermy—its left hand is curled, poised just above the monkey’s bum, as though about to scratch.
Or, perhaps it does scratch. Really, who’s to say?
In any case, it is a frivolous gesture, but so furiously ruddy with life (or the side effects of life), that it takes the viewer aback. People have petted the howler monkey. Spoken to it. Loved it. They’ve checked its body for nits. They’ve unaccountably wanted to scratch their own backsides—and they have, when they’ve thought no one was watching.
The Taxidermist is always watching.
And later, at night, when they’ve left the office, when they’ve left the howler behind and returned home, they’ve tossed and shivered in bed, dreaming of that lonely howl across the empty fields, the yawning trees, and the wide, cold sky. And sometimes, they’ve howled in return.
The howler makes them forget why they came to the Taxidermist’s office in the first place. They wander away, complaints unfiled, petitions undelivered, pieces of mind ungiven.
The Taxidermist loves his howler monkey. His secretary, on the other hand, does not.
“Sir,” his secretary says, bringing in a file. “For the meeting.” She says the word meeting with a certain accusation. She lets the file hover over the desk before fanning her fingers, letting the thing hit the desk with a slap.
“Did you know,” the Taxidermist says, “that when Pliny attacked Carthage, he entered the Temple of Astarte and found it filled with no fewer than thirty mountain gorillas? Each one was exquisitely mounted, painstakingly preserved, and, apparently, terrifying. The poor man turned on his heel and ran from the temple, claiming it had been seized by Gorgons.”
He sits at his desk, ancient books opened to different pages and stacked for ease of access. The secretary presses her lips into a long, tight line. She is the former librarian of the former library. She disapproves of the wanton opening of books. She shudders at the splay of tight spines, the heedless rustle of unloved pages like the whisper of lifting skirts.
The Taxidermist presses his fingers to his mouth to suppress a burp, though he pretends to clear his throat. He continues. “It is, they believe, the first indication that the art of specimen preservation is not a modern pastime as previously thought. I wonder if the Carthaginian priests thought to re-create the minutiae of the mundane as we do now. I wonder what they thought they were preserving.”
The secretary flares her nostrils, forcing her gaze away from her employer. The Taxidermist closed the library. Everyone knows this. Everyone blames him. The secretary answers his phones and files his documents and maintains his correspondence and organizes his meetings. But she hates the Taxidermist. Hates him.
“I’m not certain your research is correct,” the secretary says. “But gorillas have nothing to do with your meeting tonight.”
“My dear Miss Sorensen,” the Taxidermist says, peering into a heavily diagrammed book, its ancient dust rising from its pages like smoke, “it has everything to do with the meeting tonight. You’ll see.”
3.
The Taxidermist is the mayor, and has been for the last fifteen years. We did not vote for him. We’ve never met anyone who has. And yet he has won, term after term. Always a landslide. We never offer our congratulations, nor do we bring casseroles or homemade bars to his house, nor do we come to his Christmas parties or summer barbeques. (We already know what’s in that house. We know.)
This, we are sure, hurts the Taxidermist’s other wife. What wife wouldn’t be wounded by such a snub? She is a sweet, pretty thing. Young. Large eyes. Tight, smooth skin. She grew up four towns over, though no one can say in which one, exactly. Each day she pushes open the large, heavily carved front door of the house and stands on the porch. She brushes a few tendrils of shellacked hair from her face with the backs of her fingers. She adjusts her crisp, white gloves.
She is perfect. Her symmetry jostles the eye. Her body moves without hesitancy, without the irregular rhythm of muscle and bone.
Each day she walks from their house at the center of town, past what used to be the butcher shop and what used to be the hardware store and what used to be the Shoe Emporium and what used to be the offices of our former newspaper, until she reaches her husband’s office at the Town Hall. She wears high heels that click coldly against the cracked sidewalk. She wears a skirt that skims her young thighs and flares slightly at her bending knees. She used to smile at us when she passed, but she doesn’t anymore. We never smiled back. Instead, she keeps her lovely face porcelain-still, her mouth like a rosebud in a bowl of milk. A doll’s mouth.
We want to love her. We wish we could love her. But we can’t. We remember the Taxidermist’s first wife. We remember and remember and remember.
4.
Taxidermy is more than Art. It is more than Love. The Taxidermist has explained this to us, but we have closed our ears. We change the subject. We scan the sky for signs of rain.
Still, words have a way of leaking in.
“If the artisan does not love the expired subject on his table, it is true, the final product will be a cold, dead thing. A monstrosity. A hideous copy of what once was unique and alive and beautiful.”
We told ourselves we weren’t listening. Still, we found ourselves nodding. We found ourselves agreeing. It is hideous when a thing isn’t loved.
“But the love is not enough,” the Taxidermist insisted. “Desire, friends. Desire. When God leaned against the riverbank, when he pressed his fingers into the warm mud and pulled out a man, what was the motivation? Desire. God saw mud and made it Man. He made Man because he wanted Man. We see death and desire life. Love isn’t enough. You have to want to make it live.”
5.
There was no funeral for Margaret, the first wife.
We learned she was dead in the “Fond Memories” section of the newspaper. That was when we had a newspaper. He never mentioned it out loud. He never told anyone. He never even held a funeral. We tried to grieve. We wanted to drape our arms around the Taxidermist, to feel his tears wetting the shoulders of our shirts, to wrap his hand with our hands and squeeze. Then we took frozen hotdishes and bar cookies and flowers and sliced ham and left them on the porch when the Taxidermist refused to open the door.
“Here,” we shouted. “We’ve brought food. Wine. Whiskey. We brought our presence and our ears and our love. Let us in and we’ll feed you. We’ll share a drink and share a song and make you live again. And she will live in the spaces between word and word, between breath and breath, between your tears and our tears. She will live.”
But the Ta
xidermist would not open the door. The next morning, we saw our gifts heaped in the trash bin outside the house. We never mentioned it again.
6.
We listened to the old men in Ole’s Tavern suck down shots and chasers and fuss over the meeting in the school. Or the building that will soon not be a school.
“Not much use pretending we’re still a town if the school’s gone.”
“We stopped pretending we were a town after the grain elevator closed.”
“And when the butcher shop shut its doors. Can’t call yourself a town if you can’t get a fresh hock for supper. If you don’t have a locker to put your winter’s buck.”
“Taxidermist’s got a lot of damn gall closing the school mid-year. If he was any sort of a man, he’d set aside his own salary rather than pull the rug out from underneath a bunch of little kids.”
“Not much of a bunch. Just fifty. On a good day. When was the last good day?”
“We stopped pretending we were a town when the hardware store closed. And the seed store. And the gas station. And the green grocer. And the shoe shop. At least we still can pickle ourselves at Ole’s. Soon, he’ll just shove us into a bunch of damn mason jars and line us up on a shelf. He’ll keep us topped up with nice, clear vodka so we can see. Folk’ll come in looking for the town and find it looking right back at ’em, shelves and shelves of blinking eyes.” Arne says this. He’s always been a morbid fellow.
“The Taxidermist’ll like it, though,” Zeke Hanson says. “He’ll like it very much.”
We agree.
7.
Night falls early in November. In those waning moments of light, the sky paints its face like a harlot (overripe rouge, stained lips, unbuttoned taffeta spreading outward like wings), before opening itself wide to the void of space. Each jagged shard of light in the darkness is a tiny message sent from the recesses of time. “You are alone,” the stars say. “You are alone. You are still alone.”
We pull our coats tightly against the howl of the wind and start our cars.
The school is slightly outside the town, and it sits on a small rectangle cut out of Martin Hovde’s sod farm. The schoolyard is packed earth with a single metal swing set for the children to play on. The yard is dusty from their feet, every speck of green crushed by the insistence of play. Just outside the schoolyard is the endless grass of the Hovde farm. Martin steamrolls it twice a year to keep it as flat as any floor and then he burns it, to give the grass a good, rich start. It is green as snakes, and softer than a lie.
We park our cars next to the school but do not lock them. No one locks their doors. This is a small town. A good town. Or it was, anyway. We hold our coats closed tightly at our throats and bend our backs against the wind. The stars are cold and sharp above our heads and the wind howls across the wide, empty fields.
8.
Taxidermy must embrace imperfection. It is a weak practitioner who feels the need to extend the leg of a lamed cougar cub or repair the jagged scar above the eye of an ancient wolf. Taxidermy, in its soul, is the celebration of life, the re-creation of a single moment in a sea of moments. The taxidermist must build motivation, history, consequence, action, reaction into one, perfect gesture.
The taxidermist’s diorama is a poem.
A song.
A short story.
“We are all just a collection of faults,” the Taxidermist told us once. “A myriad of imperfections through which shines divine Perfection. You see? It is our flaws that make us beloved by heaven. It is our scars and handicaps and lack of symmetry that prove that we are—or once were—alive. The more we attempt to force our corrupted idea of the Perfect and the Good upon what is actually and deeply perfect and good, the farther we are from the divine. Reveal the subject as the subject was, and you reveal the fingerprints of God.”
We have shut our ears to the Taxidermist. We have stopped listening to his hypocrisy. We know what he has done. We have seen it.
This is the very reason why we can never love his other wife.
9.
The Taxidermist’s other wife greets us as we come in. Her eyes light upon each coming person and dim when they pass. Her lips spread open into a smile. We shudder at those straight, white teeth. We turn our gaze from that flawless skin. She tilts her head to one side and blinks her large eyes.
(There! We gasp. We grab one another’s shirts and pull. We whisper in one another’s ears. Did you hear that? The whir of metal. The click of motor. She doesn’t clear her throat. She doesn’t sigh. She doesn’t lick her lips, or adjust her skirt. She doesn’t pass gas, or snort when she laughs, or cough.) We have examined her skin. We have watched her pass. We’ve looked for clues but have come away with nothing.
“The efficient preservationist leaves no trace of his hand,” the Taxidermist told us once. “It is a dim fellow who has the tools of the trade, who has centuries of experience to guide his practice, and still leaves evidence of stitching. Who still leaves a seam to mar the life that he sets out to create. Do not repeat the blunder of that poor fool in Austria. Do not let the Doctor’s mistakes be your mistakes.”
We would not expect to see scars.
We would not expect to see seams.
The Taxidermist’s other wife lays her hand upon our arms as we pass. We shiver. Even through our coats, we can feel the stony cold of those fingers. Even through our scarves, we can smell the formaldehyde on her breath.
10.
The Taxidermist takes the podium. His other wife sits in a folding chair just behind. She crosses, then uncrosses, then crosses her legs. She rests her hands, one on top of the other, on her knees. She cocks her head to one side, a studied look of wifely admiration on her face.
(We know! We know what she is. Look in her eyes. Look under her skin. We know what we’ll find.)
The Taxidermist taps his microphone three times. He smiles at the audience. The audience does not smile back.
“My friends,” the Taxidermist says.
(You are no one’s friend. You closed the library. You’re closing the school. We are pickled in memory, preserved on porches and in church basements and bars. We blink through worlds of liquor and mason jars. You have frozen us in time.)
“This isn’t easy for me to say,” the Taxidermist says easily. “We are down to fifty students. That’s all. What we get from the state isn’t enough to cover the heat for the building. It doesn’t cover the health insurance for the employees. Our school, once the pride of the county, is falling apart. It is dying.”
(We are dying. We are dying and we don’t know why.)
“Now, I recognize that, with the school closed, we will be forced to bus our children all the way to Harris, and I recognize that it is a long ride for little ones, but I’m afraid it cannot be helped. Those who do not want their children going so far away can consider homeschooling. We can all come together to help make that happen. This is a community.”
(It was a community. Now it is a cold, dead thing. We are alone, we are alone, we are so alone.)
“It is true that we loved the school.”
(We loved Margaret.)
“And it is true that we will mourn its passing.”
(We wanted to mourn her. We wanted our grief, to prove that we aren’t alone. We wanted our grief to show that we are—were—alive.)
“But we now have an opportunity. Preservation, my friends. The dead are not gone when we preserve what is left.”
The Taxidermist’s other wife lifts her hands, preparing to clap. Her lips unfurl in a mechanical smile. Our eyes dazzle and spin in the glare of those perfect teeth. She splays her fingers out and brings her hands together.
But once her palms are half an inch apart, they stutter and halt. The lights behind her eyes flicker and dim. Her lips freeze in that lovely smile—pink lips insinuating themselves into the white mounds of her cheeks. She is por
celain. She is glass. She is stone and milk. She doesn’t move. The Taxidermist doesn’t notice.
“We, right now, are sitting on holy ground. How many of us first fell in love on this very schoolyard? And here in these halls, how many of us first discovered the tools that would make us the men and women that we are today? Our lives are written on memory. We preserve the memory—in its perfection, in its state of bliss, and we preserve ourselves.”
The Taxidermist’s other wife does not move. She does not blink. She is lifeless, breathless, perfect. She is memory and history and longing.
There are stitches hidden under her collarbone.
(We know! We know what’s in there! We know what we’ll find!)
There are seams sliding along the curve of her spine.
(A gesture. A moment. Proof of life, or the memory of life.)
“My wife,” the Taxidermist says.
(Margaret. We wanted to mourn you. We wanted to grieve. We wanted his tears on our shoulders, his hands in our hands. We wanted to sing songs and tell stories and let you live in the spaces between word and word, between breath and breath.)
“Thinks I’m crazy.”
(She doesn’t think. She simply is. A memory. A state of bliss.)
“But it can work. We can preserve what we have. We can turn our loss into a single perfect moment. We can turn this school into a memory of a school. A moment in time. The fingerprints of a thousand hands, and the mingling of a thousand breaths. And it will be proof forever that we are not alone.”
(We are alone.)
“We are not alone.”
(We are alone. We are still alone.)
The Taxidermist’s other wife does not move.
(Margaret.)
She does not clap.
(Margaret.)
And we feel ourselves lifting. We feel our souls unfurling like wings. We feel the howl of the wind and the vastness of space and the tiny voices of the distant stars. We feel our stitching and our seams, the clean line of empty bones, the weight of plaster and spun glass. We taste arsenic and salt, the grease of leather, the dust of hair. We feel the beat and the longing of our broken, paper hearts. And we love the Taxidermist’s other wife.
Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories Page 6
