Jackalope Wives And Other Stories

by T. Kingfisher

  Jep came out and closed the door. He locked it again, his movements as slow as when he came into the stall.

  “What,” said Sarah from the floor. “What. What?” She looked up at him, half in fear, half hoping that he would confirm what she thought she’d seen. “What was that? What—who—”

  He helped her into the kitchen and then he made tea. When he opened the pantry to get the tea bags, she could see empty shelves, a few cans, and a pink hat on a hook that certainly wasn’t his.

  She could hear the TV from down the hall still, and knowing what was sitting there and watching the screen made her shudder. If she thought too closely, she’d go completely mad. Perhaps she’d gone mad already.

  Did my mallard really come alive? Did it really—no, it couldn’t have—it was some kind of trick, he had a live duck in his bag all this time—

  Which was completely ridiculous. He’d had the bag on his lap in the truck. She would have noticed if he was carrying a live duck around in it.

  She started to laugh and stuffed both hands in her mouth to stop it.

  “He can only eat wooden meat,” said Jep. He pushed the mug of tea in front of her. It had a faded picture of a kitten on it. The ancient avocado refrigerator hummed soothingly. “He doesn’t eat much of it, not really. A duck will last him all week. And the wood doesn’t go bad.”

  Sarah stared across the table at him. She wondered if he’d let her go, if she ran.

  “He’s wood,” she said.

  Jep nodded.

  “He’s alive, though.”

  Jep nodded again.

  Sarah held the mug of tea and her hands shook so badly that she had to set it back down on the table. The faded kitten ogled at her.

  “My wife wanted a son,” he said. “We couldn’t have one. So I carved him.” He looked into his own tea. “It’s not a good idea to do that.”

  “No,” said Sarah in a high voice. “No, I bet it isn’t!”

  It was impossible, of course. She knew that it was impossible.

  She thought of the carved walrus and the laughing gull and the prancing horses.

  If any man on earth could have brought a carving to life, it would have been the person who carved those horses.

  “How did you do it?” she whispered.

  Jep shrugged. “Wood’s half alive already,” he said. “You know. A good carving’s not a dead thing, if you put enough of your heart into it.”

  Sarah clutched the mug of tea. It was hot enough that her hands were starting to burn, but she had to hold onto something.

  Yes. She did know. But there was a great deal of distance between believing that good art had a life of its own, and having a thing that sat in a room and tore apart carved birds with its clacking mouth.

  “I think more people can do it than let on,” said Jep. “But you shouldn’t make people. It’s not good, making people like that.”

  “You’ve been feeding him my carvings,” said Sarah. She said it out loud and felt nothing at all. She knew that she should feel something—grief, perhaps, or outrage. They had not been very good carvings, but she had worked hard on them. She didn’t expect them to end up in museums, but she’d thought that maybe someone was appreciating them.

  Apparently they had been appreciated briefly, and only once.

  She thought of the mallard coming to life and had to put the tea down and put her hands over her mouth.

  Had all her poor carvings come to life at the last? Had they been alive just so that they could die?

  Now she felt something, but it was so huge and terrible that she didn’t dare let it out.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jep. “They have to be hand-carved. I tried the mass-produced ones and they don’t come alive. He can’t eat them.”

  He reached across the table and touched her hand, tentatively. “It’s not that yours are bad. It’s just…I’m on a fixed income. I can’t afford anyone else’s.”

  She took a burning gulp of tea. It seared all the way down.

  When she could speak again, she said “Why don’t you carve them yourself?”

  He rose from the table and led her to the back door.

  There were two sets of boots by it. One was large and black and looked like the footwear equivalent of Jep’s suit.

  The other pair were smaller and faded and had pink flowers on them. She looked away.

  It was entirely possible, of course, that Jep planned to kill her, now that she knew his terrible secret, and bury her in the backyard. But stepping outside was a relief and it was hard to believe, as the sunlight fell over her, what lay in the house behind her.

  There was a little wooden shed behind the house. He led her to it and opened the door.

  It was almost completely empty. There was a table in one corner, and few pieces of wood slid through the rafters. Jars of nails caught the light from the windowsill.

  It smelled of pine and dust. Sarah turned her head, tracing pale squares on the floor, where machinery had been and now was gone. There were not even spiderwebs in the corners.

  So poor they can’t afford cobwebs, her mother had said once, about a relative. And here it was. The only things left were the shop lights overhead, their bulbs gone dim, but still she recognized it.

  “This was your woodshop, wasn’t it?” said Sarah.

  Jep nodded. There was no emotion on his face, not even grief. “When my wife was sick, I had to sell the tools. We couldn’t afford the meds otherwise. We would have lost the house, and then someone would have found him.”

  He straightened. “I didn’t tell her, of course. I said I’d got a commission. She never knew.”

  There was a note in his voice that at first she thought was bitterness, and then recognized.

  Pride.

  He sold all his equipment to pay for his wife’s care. And he’s proud that she never found out about it.

  She had the sensation again of standing on the edge of an emotion so huge that if she let it reach her, she would drown.

  “This is the only thing left,” Jep said. He pointed behind her, up against the wall, and she turned. “Couldn’t find a buyer, since it wasn’t done.”

  It was a horse.

  It stood twice the size of the carousel horses, the neck arched. Its face was exquisitely carved, its front hooves feathered like a draft horse. The mane rippled. There was no bridle, no saddle, hardly any decoration. It needed none.

  The back half, though, was barely roughed in. The hooves were square and the tail was a crude rectangle of wood. She could see the exact point where he had set down the chisel, the different coloration of the wood.

  He was working on this when his wife got sick.

  It was a crime that it had never been finished.

  And what do you want him to finish it with? His teeth?

  She thought of the marionette saying Where’s my horse, old man?

  She stepped out of the shed and went around the house, toward her truck. Astonishingly, she did not seem to be dead. Jep walked with her, and didn’t show any sign of stopping her.

  “Don’t think too badly of him,” he said. “My wife tried to teach him some manners. She loved him. He misses her.”

  So do you, thought Sarah, thinking of the flowered boots by the back door and the hat still hanging in the pantry.

  “It’s the TV,” said Jep. “But if he doesn’t have it, he gets restless. And there’s nowhere he can go.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Sarah, with her hand on the door handle.

  He stood on the sidewalk, not moving. Then he made the barest shrug. “Keep feeding him,” he said, and turned away.

  She drove around the block and then she parked the truck and bent over the steering wheel and sobbed.

  She cried for horror and for her poor dead carvings and for an old man who had lost everything and then had lost his wife too, who was left caring for a monster. She cried until her eyes were dry and burning and her nose ached and her forearms hurt where the steering wheel
cut into them, and the world was still terrible.

  Then, because she’d left the cash box there, and because some habits die hard, she went back to the flea market.

  “You okay?” asked Rauf. “You don’t look so good. What did he want, anyway?”

  Sarah exhaled. Her throat was raw. “He showed me his workshop,” she croaked “He doesn’t carve since his wife died.”

  Rauf nodded.

  “If my wife died,” he said slowly, “I wouldn’t do anything again. I’d just close up the shop and sit down and wait to see her again.”

  Sarah had met Rauf’s wife two or three times, a small, round, dark-skinned woman with a smile that could light up a continent. She wondered if it was her smile that could make her husband want to do nothing but sit down and die if he lost her.

  She wondered what Jep’s wife’s smile had been like.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” said Rauf, seeing her face. “She’ll outlive me. She’ll do better without me than I would without her.”

  Sarah laughed dutifully and went into her stall. She threw her tools into her bag—all of them, and the paints too, which took three trips out to the truck—and dropped the half-finished ruddy on the passenger seat.

  She went home to get the rest of her gear, and then through a drive-thru because she couldn’t live on Rauf’s popcorn all day.

  And then she drove back to the little house with the painfully tidy yard and knocked on the door with her hands full of chisels and a bag of burgers.

  Jep opened the door and blinked at her.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ve brought my tools. Let’s finish your horse.”

  Sarah thought, at some point in that mad night, that she had learned more about carving in the last five hours than she had learned in the fifteen years leading up to it. Her hands were nicked and bloody and her arms ached from holding the heavy wood at the proper angle. She did not have a vise remotely large enough, so they had to improvise with the table and the walls.

  The years did not fall away from Jep’s face, but his hands were younger than they had ever been. He stroked the tools over the surface of the horse and under the blades, the muscles came to shining life.

  She knew that her tools were cheap, amateurish things compared to the woodshop he must have had, but he held them as if they belonged to a master.

  When he passed her the knife and gestured to the horse’s tail, she stared at him.

  “Are you sure?” she said. “My ducks aren’t that good…”

  He stared down at the horse.

  “The greatest thing I ever made came alive,” he said finally. “Because I wanted to make my wife happy. And now she’s gone and it sits there and I feed it and sometimes I dream about setting us both on fire.”

  Sarah’s hand closed convulsively on the carving knife. She swallowed.

  “You’re a good girl,” said Jep. He sounded tired. She knew that it must be very late. “I don’t know if this will work. But I want you to know I’m grateful. And I’m sorry about all your decoys.”

  “It’s all right,” said Sarah, even though it wasn’t.

  She steeled herself, and began to carve the tail.

  It was closer to morning than midnight when Jep cut the last hair on the back hoof. Sarah had been sanding the flanks until they gleamed under the shop lights.

  He stepped back and looked at the horse.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, that’s not bad.”

  There was a noise at the door.

  They both looked up, and Sarah took a step back.

  The marionette stood in the entryway.

  It’s between us and the outside, what do I do, can we distract it…

  She moved so the horse was between her and the creature. If it came at them, it would have to move out of the doorway, and she could make a break for it.

  And what about Jep? He can’t move that fast.

  “I locked the door,” said Jep. “I always lock it.”

  The marionette rolled its carved eyes. “I’ve been able to open that lock for the last ten years.”

  Jep rested both hands on the horse’s back. “I see,” he said.

  The wooden lips twisted up. “Are you surprised, old man? That I could open it, or that I didn’t strangle you in your sleep some night?”

  Jep shrugged.

  The marionette looked down at the horse.

  Its face changed. Sarah couldn’t explain it. A light came behind its eyes that had been missing before.

  It said, very quietly, “Oh.”

  It took a step forward and Sarah knew that she should be ready to run, but instead she burst out “Don’t you dare try to eat this horse!”

  The marionette laughed, but it wasn’t the horrible clacking laughter that she had heard earlier. It was softer and more rueful, the most human sound that she had yet heard it make.

  “I won’t,” it said. “I understand why you’d think that, but I wouldn’t.”

  It took two more steps forward. Sarah backed up. Jep didn’t.

  It stroked one long, articulated hand over the horse’s neck.

  She could see the exact moment when the horse woke. She saw the flanks heave as it inhaled, and saw the marionette’s ball-joint fingers tighten in the suddenly liquid mane.

  “We did badly by each other, old man,” said the marionette distantly.

  “We did,” said Jep quietly. “She’d have been disappointed in us.”

  It shook its head. “She’d have understood.”

  The horse lifted its head. Its carved nostrils flared open and it turned and nuzzled the marionette’s arm.

  “I’m going now,” said the carved boy. “Finally. Now that I have my horse.”

  “All right,” said Jep.

  It—he—swung up on the horse’s back. They were perfectly sized for one another. He had to lean far forward to go through the doorway, but then he was through.

  As one, Sarah and Jep followed.

  The moon was the eye of an ink-dark whale overhead, barnacled with stars. They walked through the shadows of the sideyard. The pale wood-grain color of the horse was bleached to blue-white bone.

  Moonlight surrounded the boy and the horse as they walked into the street. The click of wooden hooves on asphalt became a clatter as the horse broke into a trot, and then into a run, and then the moonlight was a blue ribbon before them and they were running up it and there was no sound at all.

  And they were gone.

  Sarah had to put Jep to bed. He was heavy, for all his frailness, and she was practically carrying him as they reached the bedroom.

  She tried to set him down on the near side of the bed and he struggled until she helped him around to the far side, where the blankets were pushed back. “My side,” he said, by way of explanation. She looked at the other side, at the neatly tucked pillow and the faint depression in the mattress, and she would have cried again if there were any tears left in her.

  She got his shoes off and left it at that. His frayed suit wouldn’t get any more frayed for being slept in.

  She picked up her tools. When she had duplicates, she left him one, and when she didn’t she left him one anyway. Her credit card could strain to another few knives if they had to.

  She let herself out of the shed and drove back to the flea market in the moonlight. She kept expecting to see a horse and a rider, but she didn’t and she thought probably no one else ever would either.

  She was exhausted, but there was no chance of sleeping. She didn’t feel like going home.

  Instead, she keyed in the security code and let herself into the empty building. Her stall was dark, but she turned on one light, and saw the reflections winking in Rauf’s popcorn maker across the way.

  She had the right tools to finish the ruddy, so she did.

  There was light coming in through the skylights when she put the last line on the feathers.

  She sat back. Her neck ached and her eyes were gritty. It was the best thing she had ever carved, eve
n better than the horse’s tail.

  She didn’t know what she was waiting for.

  She set down the sandpaper and sighed.

  “Maybe I’m being stupid,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and lost in the vast echoing spaces of the market.

  The duck carving flexed its wings. Its unpainted bill opened, just a fraction, and then it shook itself and settled back down. Its tail flicked, and then it was a wooden carving again, with no more life than any piece of art has on its own.

  A single wooden feather slipped free of the wings and landed on the table.

  She picked it up. It was unpainted, and more perfectly carved than anything that she had ever done.

  But not, perhaps, more perfect than anything she could do.

  She stroked her hands over the wood, then got up and turned out the light and went home.

  EDITING

  I must remind myself—

  they can’t tell that I didn’t write this bit immediately after that one

  the six months where I ignored the manuscript are not visible to the naked eye

  the bit where I put my head in my hands and muttered “I have no idea what I’m doing” takes place in the single space between the period and the next capital letter.

  As soon as I shove that character in, she has always been there

  and someone will probably say that she’s the emotional center

  and the book couldn’t have been written without her

  and nobody will know that I thought of her three thousand words from the end and scrolled up and shoehorned in a couple of paragraphs near the beginning because, for whatever reason, the story needed an elderly nun

  she was almost the cook

  and for about ten minutes she was the earnest young village priest

  and now she has been there since you started reading.

  I am sanding down the places where my editor found splinters

  kicking up a fine dust of adjectives and dropped phrases

  (Wear a breath mask. Work in a well-ventilated area. Have you seen what excess commas can do to your lungs?)

  and eventually it will all be polished to a high shine

  and hopefully when someone looks into it