Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  From my father’s house to Tom’s. Hiding from myself as much as from the faun. Frantically clinging to the pretenses of normality.

  This is how Tom was then. There was no need of words, we touched without touching. We drifted together painlessly, like two leaves caught in an eddy of a stream. I stayed on at the university, worked summers in the library, lived off my scholarship in winter. Tom came back in September, and he came back to me as much as he came back to school. He told me he loved me. It took a long time before I believed it, but even before I thought it was true, I was grateful for the words. Tom was beyond anything I had ever aspired to having; he was handsome, intelligent, and mannered. He got along well with everyone, drew friendships as a magnet draws pins. He became my new center.

  We continued to sleep together, and it went better than I had ever expected it could. He made no disparaging comments on my underdeveloped body, but said he loved my small feet, my long hair, my green eyes. He was uninhibited in the use of our bodies, and soon I was, too. Tom was like coming home to a strange place, like every other cliche of tightness. I met his family briefly at one spring break, and Steffie confided to me that I was the first girl in years that he had brought home to meet his parents. They seemed relieved to meet me, and were very kind, if a little stiff.

  At the end of his senior year, I dropped out of college. We got married. We moved to Alaska, and I don’t remember whose idea that was. Only that it seemed right, and we were happy. We both worked and bought the lot with the little run-down cabin, and Teddy was born and I had everything, everything, the man, the baby, the dog, the truck, the land, everything. I refused to see cloven tracks by the pond, I refused to hear any more than the wind in the trees. My life was good, and I was content. How rare it is, to be happy and to know I am happy, at the very same moment.

  We talked to his family on the phone, I sent them long detailed letters, baby pictures of Teddy, pictures of the cabin, the garden, Tom’s first moose. They seemed happy for Tom’s happiness, and although we could not accept their frequent invitations to visit, I would have sworn I had the ideal in-laws. Of my family, I heard little and saw even less. They were there, in Fairbanks, but the circles of their lives did not intersect with mine. I knew vaguely that they were well, and that was enough. I bore them no ill will, nor had any pressing desire to reconnect with any of them. They had their lives and I had mine, and mine was separate and different, as I had always been separate and different. I bore no one any malice.

  There were too many good times to separate them. Dip-fishing for salmon at Chirna, where there are ghosts painted on the outsides of the buildings and the wind never stops blowing. Teaching Tom the pathways of my forest, the red fox that came boldly into the kitchen and stole the pound of bacon right off the table, Tom adjusting the truck’s carburetor while I held the flashlight, walking together down our snowbound trail in the darkness, on our way down to the road to check for Christmas mail inside our big mailbox. I had it all.

  I believed it was real, our life together, our baby, our home. But even as I believed, it was too good to be true. It was like the intermission in a long movie, like the break between SAT tests. My life with Tom was a thing outside my real life, a parenthetical comment in the sentence of my days. It could not join firmly to my childhood. It was a thing grafted on, a wish briefly granted.

  I know that in the instant that I step into Pan’s clearing. As his eyes swing to meet mine, I draw breath again, and my interrupted life begins again. It is as if Tom and the baby had never been, as if college were a bad dream, as if my cabin were a fairy tale, too pretty to keep. This is not an excuse, nor even an explanation. It is only what happened.

  ELEVEN

  * * *

  The Forest

  June 1976

  It is a little open place in the forest, and the stream runs through it like a bright string through an enameled bead. It is perfect, as such places never are, and always are. The bed of the stream is sandy, and it is edged with reeds. The trees stand back from the stream, so the sunlight wanders freely through their foliage, and its touch turns the stream to silver too brilliant to behold. The banks are wide and deeply mossed, greenery thicker than the finest carpet, and decorated with last year’s leaves. A coolness rises from the stream to mingle with the heat of the relentless sun, mellowing and tuning it. Light cannot be harsh here, cannot burn and brown these plants. Summer does not lean on this place, but caresses it. And on the bank is the faun.

  These are his colors: forest green and nut brown, and his skin all shades of polished wood. These are his scents: wisteria and musk, moss and berry, leaf and beast, and warmth rising like steam rises from the earthen floor of the forest when the morning sun warms it. I can feel him without touching him, his skin warm and smooth, the hair of his head fine and soft, the sleekness of his flanks, the smooth ridges of his hooves. He is goat and human, boy and man. His eyes are young, his cheeks ruddy above his close-cropped beard and mustache. There is a tracery of lines at the corners of his eyes, the wisdom of a man in his eyes, but it is balanced by the sweet curve of his lips, the agility of his dancing fingers. He is playing his pipes as he reclines by the stream, and the music is a tune I know well though I have never heard it before. It is Pan and Evelyn and the Forest, melded into a single melody. His eyes come up to touch mine, and the Panic I feel has nothing to do with fear.

  I come to him like a doe comes to water, like a wolf to blood, like a raven to carrion. I am aware of his scent, and it is more than a scent, and I am more than aware of it. It is what I breathe instead of air, and it nourishes me, making strong what had grown weak, drowning civilization’s touch upon me. I come to him, and as I do, he breathes more gently upon the pipes, passes the melody back to the stream and the gentle flutter of the leaves until they hold it and he lowers the pipes from his lips.

  I stand, looking down on him. I don’t want him to speak to me, and he doesn’t. I don’t want talk from him, I want only his healing presence, his reality that so quickly seals me off from the splintered stabbing world I’ve been living in. We are complete and a unity, we two. Our eyes have not lost their grip on each other, but to that look he adds a smile, a gentle baring of teeth. His teeth are whiter than a man’s, and the canines are a shade longer and more pointed.

  I seat myself on the bank beside him, and with the change in my position, I feel a sudden awkwardness. I shouldn’t be here, something whispers to me, some harbinger of danger that I cannot pinpoint vibrates within me. My mouth goes suddenly dry, and I need to do something to distract myself. “Hello,” I say, and curse myself as my human voice, so thin and sharp, seems to wither the ethereal life spirit of the glade.

  “Hello,” he replies, and the richness of his voice balances my utterance, brings it into harmony, makes me belong here. I suddenly want to split open like a ripe seed pod and scatter my thoughts before him, tell him all my griefs and fears, all the double-edged angers that cut me more deeply than anyone else. As I look at him, my throat closes and my eyes suddenly brim with tears, making his image waver before me. I try to speak, but only my tears spill out, running down my face, and I can’t get any air, I can’t breathe, I am crying as very small children do when seriously hurt and scared, without sound, their faces screwed up so tightly that only tears can escape them.

  He sits beside me and lets me cry. He does not say, “There, there, don’t cry,” nor does he say, “It’s all right, go ahead and cry, get it out of your system.” Instead, he lets me cry, watching me unabashedly as I weep, and when my throat is sore and my head is pounding, he goes to the stream and wets his hands and comes back and wipes them over my hot face. The cool water soothes my eyes, washes the stinging salt from my skin. Again, he makes a trip to the stream and again returns, his hands wet, and traces his fingers gently over the marks of my sorrow, washing it away. Then he sits down beside me again, his arm going around me as easily as my head comes to rest on his sun-warmed shoulder. “I’ve got you,” he tells me, and
those are the most comforting words I have ever heard. His skin is warm against my cheek and I close my eyes to feel it better. I am suddenly as weary as if I have made a lifetime’s journey to finally reach this place and this moment. I go limp against him as his fingers trace the musculature of my back and neck. I feel him shift, turning to support my weight. His beard tangles briefly against my hair, I feel the press of his lips on the top of my head, a chaste and comforting kiss. He answers the question that is a dozen years old.

  “I didn’t know,” he says softly, and I sense he has waited as long to say these words as I have waited to hear them. “I had not yet remembered female and male at that time. The scent of you that day was like a trumpet shouting to my senses. The realization that you were female and I was male, that we were … could be … the halves of a whole.” He stops speaking, and I can almost sense the swirling confusion he must have felt on that summer day so long ago. “I panicked,” he says softly, and chuckles, holding me closer against him as he does. “I ran away. And by the time my senses were cleared, you were gone. And I did not know, then, how to draw you back. I had not remembered that yet. I watched you and I yearned, but I did not know how to bring you to me. And I do not think you wanted to come to me. Not then. You were no more ready than I was. I had to wait, to find patience as the knowing came slowly to me. How I struggled to remember. But when I did, I came seeking you. And found you had taken another.”

  He stops speaking, and in that pause I sense an abyss of despair. No words come to me. Instead, I have a suddenly skewed perception of my life with Tom. My years of happiness with him have been a stolen thing, a selfish indulgence on my part. I had always known my true place, but had willingly turned aside from it, denied it. How much pain had I brought the faun? How great had been the betrayal? But I had not known! The protest rises in me like a shout, is only stifled by his arm around me tightening slightly. I lift one of my hands to cover his, feel the knuckles, the tendons, the joints of his fingers, the reality of the hand that grips me. My fingers are cold against the warmth of his hand. I slip them inside the protection of his hand, his fingers wrap around mine in understanding.

  “For a while,” his voice comes huskily, “I tried to find another. I thought, if there is one like you, then there must be others. I would seek them out. So I looked. I waited and I wandered. I watched girls picnicking in meadows, watched young women picking wild berries, watched them gardening as I stood in the edges of the forest. But they were all wrong, and even those who were almost right, I could not make aware of me. They were not—attuned. They could not, or would not, perceive me.

  “Eventually, I gave up. I began to follow you again. I knew you were the only one, then. If I could not have you right away, then the only thing I could do was—wait.”

  He puts a depth into that word that I have never perceived before. Wait. He utters it as if it were a life sentence, makes waiting a thing to be done to the exclusion of all else. It makes my breath falter, to glimpse his life from that perspective. How could it be, I wonder, to center ones life around someone and await his pleasure, to abide in the sole hope of being noticed, of being remembered, especially when that person has set you aside as a thing outgrown, unreal, unnecessary? How would it be, I wonder, and then I know, in a single word. Tom. Has he not been my sun, and I the farthest and coldest of the planets trapped in his pull? The pang of pain that rings in me surprises me with its sharpness. I shiver and open my eyes, pull myself upright. The faun releases me instantly. Coolness flows in to touch me where I have been warm against him.

  The brightness of the day surprises me. It has always been a dreaming thing, this holding and comforting and loving, a thing I could pretend to myself in the darkness to counterbalance the harshness of my days. I curl into my pillow, clutching it to my chest, clinging to it as I can no longer cling to Tom. I cannot believe in such tenderness by daylight. I glance over at the faun, but he is looking at the water. In profile, he is a king, a conqueror, square-jawed, lips set, eyes seeing beyond my limited horizons. Then he turns to me, and the eyes that look into mine make me want to hold him, to shelter him against his pain. But how can I do that, when the pain is of my making?

  He smiles, a martyr’s absolution. “So I’ll wait,” he says. “And when you are ready, you’ll come to me. Knowing that I’ll be waiting still.”

  “Please,” I say, not wanting this. It is too big a sacrifice at my altar, too foreign an experience for me. I am too used to being the one who does the loving. I am uneasy being loved this way, it feels false and silly, a saccharine thing even less believable than Steffie’s period romances. I look at him with dismay.

  He shrugs and glances away, and it is like drawing a blind down. He does not look at me as he says, “We will not speak of it again, if you prefer.” His liquid eyes dart back to me, and away again. He laughs, but it is a brittle thing. “I would not have thought that devotion would make you want to flee.”

  He knows my thoughts before I do. I resettle myself, only now acknowledging that I had been rising, had been on the point of leaving to escape his honesty. What is wrong with me, I ask, that I gallop so yearningly after Tom’s love, but pull rein and turn aside from the faun’s offer? What is so frightening about being loved?

  I have no answers for myself. My mind leafs through the books on abnormal psychology I have read, trying to find a neurosis or psychosis, a trauma or organic imbalance to explain this flaw in myself. Nothing comes to mind. Being loved for being myself has been out of my reach for too long. I cannot believe in it now. But how can I explain it to the faun? It does not even make sense to me. Has the quest become dearer to me than the subject of it?

  “Evelyn Sylvia,” he says, making a title of my name. “I did not mean to make you think of all these things,” he says softly. “I only wanted to explain what I had done, all those years ago. And to let you know that for now, I ask nothing of you. Nothing.”

  I look at him for a long time. Far away, I hear a car horn honk, incongruous in this setting. Pan glances in that direction, then back to me. It honks again, long screaming blasts like outraged geese, but at this distance the anger is impotent. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” I say.

  “Exploring,” he says, and makes the simplicity of the idea enough for me. “Come on.” He rises and offers me a browned hand. I take it and he pulls me to my feet, but even when I am standing, he keeps my hand. I do not pull it away. I am doing nothing wrong, I tell myself, holding hands with an old friend, there need be no guilt in that. “I know where there are huckleberry bushes,” he tells me as he ducks his head to pass the overhanging branches of a show currant. His horns clatter lightly against the twiggy branches in passing. “They’re not ripe yet, of course, but later you and I …”

  He leaves the thought dangling, and I do not need to nod. His hand is warm against mine as I duck my head and follow. I feel the soft rasp of the ridges of the skin of his palm against mine, a pleasant friction. We move with the forest and he shows me things, with very few words to come between us. Here is a hummingbird’s nest, a painstakingly fine construction beyond the scope of human fingers, and there a waddling porcupine followed by her three youngsters, hair and quills brushed back stiff as crew cuts. She ignores us, taking no alarm at the faun or the human. My scent, I think, is masked in his; he loans me his kinship with the forest as I follow him.

  I do not know how much time passes. He shows me things I had forgotten how to see, increases in my eyes the value of this forest so different from my Alaskan home. We nibble a yellowish mushroom whose name I do not know, but it does not need a name in our silence. We go deeper into the forest, working our way parallel to the stream, going ever so slightly uphill. He shows me many things, but my eyes linger longest on the curve of his bare shoulders, the nape of his strong neck, brushed lightly by his uneven brown hair, the curve of his smile all but hidden in his beard until the edges of his white teeth show. Under his tutelage, I remember my love for these wild, ungr
oomed places. And I remember more than that.

  It is only when we come to a meadow, a wild place of deep grasses, that I realize that shadows are lengthening and the sun is no longer over our heads. With a jolt, time recommences for me. My laundry is in the washer still, probably mildewing in the heat, my sheets in the dryer, Tom and Teddy will be wondering about their dinner.

  “I have to go back,” I say, feeling a sudden anxiety rising in me as I realize how far we have come, how far I must go to get back home. It will be dark, I think, before I cross the cow pasture again. The darkness does not scare me, nor am I worried about losing my way. No, my sense of direction has always been good, I am already thinking I could make my way back in a straight line rather than following the wandering stream back. No, it is not the darkness nor the distance that makes the way back so long. I think of the questions rriy long absence will prompt.

  And Pan asks me the first, most dreaded question of all. “Must you go back?” he asks, and it is a genuine question, not a teasing or polite thing.

  “I have a child,” I tell him, and he nods, understanding rising in his eyes, and also a deep sorrow.

  “I do not,” he explains, and lets go of my hand for the first time that day. He turns aside from me, looks over the wild meadow with farseeing eyes.

  I feel like a boat cast adrift.

  “I have to go,” I say helplessly. I want to grope after his touch, but I restrain myself. I start to take a step away, but he turns, springs back to me.

  “I know a deer path,” he says, his liquid brown eyes suddenly alight. “We can run. Come on!”

  He catches up my hand, pulls me along like a stuffed toy. I stumble at first, then fall into stride beside him, run with him, run as I have not run in a very long time. I expect to puff and blow, to stumble and beg him to slow down, but I don’t. It is easy, running has always been easy, I wonder when I began to think of it as too strenuous for me. We swoop back into the arms of the forest, and now we must duck, but only slightly, for the deer have trod out the best and easiest way, their antlers have tattered away most of the overhanging foliage, and we can run, me on Pan’s heels now, heads only slightly bowed. The earth is firm beneath our feet, but kind, giving to the shock of each stride, and the air is almost cool in the shade of the trees. I am sweating now, but the wind of our passage cools me, and the musk of Pan’s sweat is for me like a lure to a hound. I run, more behind than beside him, and the path begins to wend down the hill, and we go faster and faster, his hooves thudding, my sneakered feet slapping the earth in rhythm. We spook some larger bird, a pheasant or grouse, it rises too swiftly for me to identify it, clattering in its angry flight. Still he runs on, and I follow, feeling muscles in my legs stretch and loosen, it is like scratching an itch I did not know I had, and my lungs fill full and the rich air of the forest is heady and dizzying as I gulp it in.