by Lee Klein
Each year I saw more traffic off the coast. Excursions along the long and narrow island revealed settlements of fishermen to the south who sometimes explored the north but never noticed my home. If I ever encountered a man and communicated with one, I doubt I would have been able to screech, for day after endless day repeated in silence until I saw a woman along the shore.
She wore a long white gown that trailed beyond her like receding surf. I dared not come out of hiding, believing that the pastor had truly banished me. Begone, begone, a hundred years gone reverberated daily, but had a hundred years passed? Trees had risen, only to fall during storms. Weather had cycled, but how many times? Had I tripled my sentence? Each morning this woman walked along the shore. As she neared, I disappeared, shy, guarding my solitude in my clamshell lair. I heard her song but when I peeked from my burrow I did not see the mouth from which her song emerged. A body occupied the long white gown, it seemed, a white hat with a healthy brim and bow, a white veil, too, but I could not see through it, the mesh making it seem empty. I detected bodily curvature, but through the veil I saw nothing, not a hint of chin or nose or cheeks or eyes. Still, her song kept me company. It was an easy song, without words, overheard from lips I could not see. I figured her face was as drawn and as narrow as the island itself, her cheeks the color of pale, smooth sand.
There was a primness as she walked, her dress indistinguishable from the foaming surf. The sun rose and cast above my head and then set beyond the bay and mainland a step south, rising lower, the weather colder, then warmer, and each day in the morning the woman passed and again in the evening she returned to wherever she had left, the same every day for several cycles of hot and cold. Other than the greenflies and the occasional gull, I counted her as a sort of friend.
I followed her from a distance one summer afternoon, compelled by an impulse to discover her home. Did she just walk all day, every day, the whole island, back and forth, resting at either end an hour before carrying on north or south again, singing that same melody? What an odd woman, I thought as I followed her, flying high above the shore so the train of her dress looked like the tail of a comet. I hadn’t flown over the southern parts of the island in some time, but it did not surprise me to see many small homes there, each with its sandy yard. Off from the main square of the settlement on the island, I watched from above as the woman walked from the shore though a cleft in the dunes to a house almost reclaimed by sand.
I waited for the sun to drop over the horizon. At dusk I soared lower, seeing that the first level of the house had been covered in sand, its windows boarded other than a side door and another on a third-story balcony from which she emerged to hold a lit lantern, standing straight, not singing, facing the sea, hat always on.
Each night for years I followed the woman and each night she stood on the balcony holding a lantern, staring at the ocean. She stood there even in terrible storms, soaked, hat on head, veil over her face like a sturdy curtain.
I longed to contact her but could not. It would have been like disturbing the sun.
How many years passed I do not know, but whatever pressure within me that kept me so long on the island one day released. I flew over the mainland, exploring the endless pines, hovering over the cities of Philadelphia and New York, amazed at the density. Oh to settle atop a rooftop among those squat water towers, the open-air washing and soot. I walked the streets at night and did not stir a soul, no one even glanced my way. But I wanted an expanse of pines and sand, and before long, near my birthplace, I found myself attracted to an enormous construction, isolated from the world.
The house did not seem abandoned. One night outside it I found a rabbit chained to a pole, the words For you on a sign. The occupant of the house had chained a rabbit like a fisherman who pushed a raft out on a pond and dropped a baited hook into the water, hoping to catch a behemoth. I did not know what this fisherman intended to do when the line stretched ahead and pulled him under.
The man did not see me remove the first rabbit, I now know, though he discovered odd prints in the spot he had cleared of grass in the hope of finding such evidence.
The next night he stayed up, but snoozed at the critical time. Again he missed the rabbit’s end.
The next night I swooped in, I gulped the rabbit down, licked my chops, and left.
He did not disbelieve his eyes. The next night, the same. Perhaps he thought I had lost my legendary aggressiveness. But if I attacked him, what better way to die?
I hovered out of sight behind the house. The sun slanted though western windows. Calm, quiet, a bowl of water at his desk. He removed his glasses, wet his handkerchief, and ran it across his eyes. He hesitated lighting lamps but did so to reread what he had written.
Clear and moonless, the sky absorbed the color of the surrounding pines. In those last moments before complete darkness, he visited his rabbit pen and picked out a sacrifice: the fluffiest charmer of a lop-eared Londoner. If presented at a county fair, it would win awards for girth and grace, its nose so twitchy even the callous would call it cute. I was glad he offered it tonight.
A rabbit’s life is dedicated to the detection of threat. A quivering ball of tenderness, its mind is committed to its body’s continuation, a minor, automatic part compared to what’s devoted to fear. Long oval ears shoot fear through flesh the same for a snapped twig as the approach of owl or fox. Nose and whiskers, the nerve center of fear, register disturbances like a bat’s radar. Great leaping abilities, of course, though the man had fattened his rabbits so those powerful legs couldn’t lift their bodies far off the ground. With added girth, their threat-detection skills became more precise. His rabbits shivered on warm autumn days at the clamor of falling leaves. No chance of escape from omnipresent threats made these rabbits cute, cuddly balls of constant alarm.
Night fully arrived, the man sat in a simple wood chair on the porch, eyes moist, sucking back his breath, afraid of alarming me with too excited a huff. The specially chosen lop-eared Londoner was chained out front.
I crouched out of sight in a tree. A bat flitted and disappeared. No other monsters. So soft the night. He brought out a blanket, pulled it to his eyes. His back seemed sore and, from constant repositioning, it seemed his buttocks had gone numb, which was favorable, perhaps, because otherwise he might drift to sleep before I consumed the rabbit.
Blanket over nose, hat on head—its brim greasy from a decade of touches—slanted over his forehead, and through that slit between brim and blanket, clarified by glasses, he observed the animal as it registered an unusual disturbance. For hours, the pure-white, lop-eared Londoner had sat there, pink eyes open but otherwise calm. Now its ears rotated and rose as high as they went. The nose surpassed its usual curious state to something more like alarm. Some combination of sound and smell sent its legs a message to flee.
It tried to rise. It hopped, heavily, a baby step toward the man, away from the threat it perceived. Another burdened hop toward the porch. And another. Midway through the next the chain went taut. The rabbit sounded terminal alarm. Its tail turned toward the woods, and perhaps for a moment it felt safe. Or maybe the chain and collar and the inability of its body to fulfill natural instinct paralyzed it. The only place it could flee was to a space inside itself so close to sleep it resembled living death.
As the rabbit like a fishing bobber signaled something near, the old man removed blanket and hat. His brow was bald and spotted, a long gray collar of hair on his jacket’s shoulders. He revealed himself so not to startle me when I appeared. Treat it as a man, he’d thought, and it will be a man. Treat it as an animal and it will attack as an animal.
He treated me like an animal by offering a live meal, but once I appeared he treated me like an esteemed visitor. I needed him, he knew, for he needed me. It was not the first time such creatures had found mutual comfort.
The rabbit did its best to disappear, escaping its fear like a child covering eyes with small soft palms. It came as close as it could to nonexistence, s
till as a stone. He heard the snapping of an enormous towel, a musty, whooshy flapping, and there I was. He later told me he’d thought at first I resembled a disfigured sprite, but once I opened my wings again I was gorgeous, an angel descended from family lore.
When young, he had heard of a beast in the pines banished more than a hundred years ago. He identified with the story of a son who had damaged his family and set off into the wild.
I watched him on the porch and sniffed at the rabbit. Ears up, hopping away but held back by a chain, it nearly hanged itself in mid-air.
“If you are the one who puts out these rabbits,” I said, “I thank you.
I emitted these words without excessive rasp. He neither seemed fearful nor able to reply. I wondered whether my first words to a human since last I spoke to Daniel Leeds were understood.
“Thank you,” I said. Again he seemed not to have heard.
He stood and stepped toward me on the porch.
“Do you understand?” I said.
“It’s not a matter of understanding,” he said. No more than five feet from me, he held his blanket like the cape of an amateur bullfighter. “If I throw this blanket over what I see, it will fall straight to the ground. It’s a matter of belief.”
“You understand me?”
“As any man,” he said.
“My heart soars.”
“My head spins.”
I licked back excess saliva. “You raised these rabbits?”
“I hope they appease your hunger. My flesh, by the way, is old and bitter.”
“Except at birth, I have never devoured someone unprovoked.”
“I only hope you accept an offer of friendship. I am old and alone and familiar with your story, though I’m sure you have histories that escaped family lore.”
“All I know is what I’ve overheard,” I said.
“Then we have talk ahead that will interest you. But first, a feast.”
He pointed at the lop-eared Londoner that seemed calmed by the conversation, not understanding a word.
“Will we share it?” I said.
“Save me a foot for good luck.”
I tore the animal from its chain. I pulled a long, meatless legbone from my mouth and snapped it at the ankle.
“I’ll set it out to dry and clean, thank you,” he said. “Quite a sight. You devoured an animal in seconds that took much longer to fatten.”
“Your time was worth it,” I said, breathless and bloodied around the jowls.
He offered his blanket. I used it to wipe fur from my mouth. He then invited me inside for tea.
“I have never tried it.”
“A relaxing stimulant.”
A world was opening. I stepped uneasily inside the house.
The house in which I had been born could have fit in the main room here. Daniel Leeds’s house could have fit in one of the unfurnished rooms I saw down the hall. Larner held a hand lantern. For now, all I saw in the windows were reflections of man and beast, each the same size in body, though my horns and wings made the man seem smaller. I did not know how my height rose and fell with each step. So much spring in these legs. My body around the middle was as full as Larner’s, but his skin was wrinkled and soft. Cheeks as round as the lenses of his glasses, each circle of flesh drooped like some viscous substance that had settled over time.
His gait was slow and even and considered, as though his natural state were horizontal, not vertical. Hat now off, his forehead was slanted like a steep hill, lined with gullies, freckles, and spots.
I had only been indoors twice before. This time I would only attack if tricked to trust this man who then unleashed a trap.
He made his way to a desk toward the rear of the room. I raised myself off the ground, stretched out my neck, and lifted my snout to sniff potential lurkers: dust, mothballs, candle wax, mildew, cobwebs, lantern oil, the husks of rabbits I had devoured. Any saboteurs had disguised their scent against my most developed talent.
He lit a candelabrum. The room revealed portraits and landscapes, oils in heavy frames, old dusty books on shelves from ceiling to floor. I’d like to see him reach for one of those high volumes. I hadn’t yet laughed in my life but I’d heard these pleasurable barks. Maybe it was something I needed to practice, just as it took so long to control my voice. Since stepping into this cavernous estate I felt something like mirth arise inside me, maybe related to having what might be a friend lighting a candelabrum and offering a seat.
“Sit?” I said. The chair seemed comfortable for a man with a traditional rump more than a ten-foot tail.
“Yes. Please do. Sit. Perch? Make yourself comfortable.”
I approached the chair. I stood on its seat. I crouched, leaned back, wings folded, tail coiled. “I have never sat,” I said.
“I’ll teach you whatever you would like.”
“Much to learn,” I said.
“All these books are yours to study. In them, you will discover commonalities more than differences, especially in the epics and myths you seem to have stepped from as naturally as you entered my home. Does this interest you? Or have I overshot my hope? I did not expect for this night to begin as such. I expected it to end much earlier, and terribly.”
“But you had no weapon?”
“Let me show you the letter I wrote before nightfall.”
He held up a sheet and pointed to his signature.
“Our studies may as well commence with the letters of my name. It is Vance Larner, see it here. If I read this to you, you will know why I sat and waited for you, ready to be struck down, but hoping for a happier end.”
He leaned on his desk, the pages close to the flames, nearly enough to set his writing alight. As he read, I emphasized his pauses with huffs and snorts.
“These may be the last words, an affirmation of years alone on this estate. My mind is as clear as ever—I am sure of this—free of missteps in the travel of thoughts. Yet what follows is an account of a beast believed in only by the young, the deluded, and the old seeking to scare the young. My visitor is the long-standing threat of these lands. I saw it alive last night. Tonight I will attempt to contact the beast. If it destroys me, it shall be months before a traveler finds my remains and this note. It is a peculiar endeavor to write of one’s imminent manslaughter, but I am unafraid. If the beast I have seen is unreal, I am physically safe yet doomed to an uncertain mental future. If it is real and greets me with violence, such an end will prove my cogency. No one of sound mind would befriend this beast, of course. Anyone who valued life would barricade doors or escape in daylight and only return with armed witnesses. Instead, I will contact this being who I believe may be a relative. Such coordination of movement among its composite parts, wings and tail and snout, claws and hooves, an unfamiliar torso of short golden hair. So unlike any man, so unlike my father or mother, whose own father I believe was the son of the beast’s father’s first wife. My mother passed the story to me of a family descended into madness and neglect and lore after my great-grandmother fled the colonial Jersey coast. The thirteenth son of my great-grandmother’s first husband’s second wife, now known as the Leeds Devil, is not my blood relation, but the focus of enough shared history to make me think of beastly features in myself. I am man in form but in spaces concealed we are otherwise similar. Such exaggeration derives from gratuitous introspection. Whoever languishes in thoughtful reenactment of the past falls prey to cruel beasts. Memory is louder when alone. No roar shall match the one inside me untamed by healthful solitude. If tonight I meet my end, I am willing. And if an end does not come, if this remarkable beast and I protect one another from sorrow, tonight will redeem me. I am responsible for my actions, past and future. Now I only hope that the present hours pass so I may once more engage the world, even if it costs me my life.”
I asked if he could prove the link between us.
“The last Genuine Leeds Almanack was never published for wide distribution,” he said. “All copies are believed lost long ago. B
ut this one remains, long declared a hoax in attempt to quiet an uprising of rumor. It mentions the disappearance of William Leeds, whose wife and two sons had left him, whereupon he engendered a dozen children with another woman before leaving his family shortly before the horrors they experienced. A look at the pages he published in early almanacs reveals an unhinged mind. But if one proceeds from an acceptance of the man’s sanity, if read in terms of the initial stages of the struggle for independence, the words change shape. Courage and meaning emerge. I trust my great-grandfather was sane, for a thread of him runs through me. And I trust I too am sane. Your presence here confirms it.”
I snorted. Sanity based on my presence. Was this what it felt like to laugh?
“Glad to be of service,” I said.
Larner smiled. I felt a surging unknown when still. Soaring, yes, I knew that feeling. All I wanted now was to see this smile again.
But then the suns of his eyes seemed overcast. A depressive front steamed from his brow and descended across his vision.
“My god,” Larner said. “If my wife and children could see me now. Years of hard work, steady earning, homelife disappointment, all led to this night.”
Once upon a time, he said, he had been someone who had more than he needed, who could no longer endure the demands of Manhattan, including wife and children who rebelled at every turn and unnaturally aged him. His wife, their two sons and three daughters, and all their spouses and children—the immediate family was like some multi-headed dragon. Disrespectful was not the word for how they had treated him. Disgraceful was better. They expected luxury as one relies on the daily rising sun. If he had been more volatile and blasted them, or if he had been more a miser and withheld affection and praise, or positioned himself miles above them and condescended like a midsummer thunderstorm, it may have been different.