Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  “I can’t watch it. Not this time,” she said, and the slammed door off the end of the porch was the last I would hear of her for hours.

  So I stayed to do my family duty, because while Noelle hadn’t said so, I suspected that this was a vital part of the process; that they expected one of us to remain and bear witness, remembering the covenant between our species, our clans.

  So I stayed, and watched as they ferociously tugged the bodies halfway from their graves, to feed on what lay helpless and exposed, then tug a little more to expose that too. I listened as their tusks ripped through skin and muscle, to the bursting of tender organs, to the grinding of their teeth on bones.

  It was clear to me now, finally, Gran’s old story about our family coming over on that ship: what was really swaddled in the blankets and what they’d grown into, what they’d bred. I’d always thought we’d come because this was the land of opportunity, and maybe that’s really how my ancestors saw it…but only after they’d done things so terrible they could no longer remain on the far side of the ocean.

  So because of their sins, I watched, listened, as their youngest descendant was ground into gristle.

  We, too, were a part of the old bargain. Noelle hadn’t said this either, but didn’t have to. She’d been raised to believe, obviously, that there was no other way. Why else would she turn her daughter over to this? I could imagine the things our grandmother must have told her, things that Gran maybe even believed herself: You’ve seen them things dig, so don’t think you could ever get away. They got the smell of you in their noses, you know, and they was fed on the same milk that you suckled from your momma, so there’s no place you could go that they couldn’t sniff you out and dig their way to, some day.

  And still, I loved her.

  It all explained some things—why I had never once visited the graves of my grandparents—but called so many others into question: If my mother, after the cancer took her, had really donated her remains to science. If my father, the day he left, had truly left for the reasons he’d said, and why he hadn’t tried harder to take me with him.

  And because I knew so much more now about where and what I came from, I thought about families, and the roles everyone seems to fall into: givers and takers, the feeders and the fed upon.

  Turns out we were a lot more normal than I ever gave us credit for.

  WHEN THE BOUGH DOESN’T BREAK

  I

  It wasn’t a conversation to have saved for the plane, halfway across the Atlantic, but that was Ethan for you. She’d once heard someone describe him as the type of person who wouldn’t tell you he didn’t really want to play Russian Roulette until the bullet was halfway through his head.

  “What I think?” he said. “I think deep down you’re in love with a man you never met, who’s been dead for years.”

  Pandora, looking Ethan in the eye: “Says the guy whose first love was Batgirl.”

  “Plus he was celibate. Dead and celibate—it’s the safest infatuation you could possibly have.”

  “He was not celibate. Patrick had women.”

  “A few pub tarts…one-nighters, by the tone of his description. His stigmata bled the first time and scared her off, so that one doesn’t count. That part’s got to be true—who’d make up a humiliating thing like that? And maybe, maybe, Maia. If she even exists, and wasn’t just some figment of his fevered imagination. Add everything up, it’s close enough to celibate for me.”

  “She exists,” Pandora said. “They exist. And if you don’t think they do, you’ve done a pretty good job of faking it for the past couple of years.”

  Ethan’s unexpected skepticism was the prelude to a couple hundred aeronautical miles of frosty silence, until he thawed her out again by doing nothing more than being his pitiful-looking self. His nose was too long; his eyebrows peaked in the middle and sloped outward, making him appear as though he were perpetually on the verge of bursting into tears. His hair was an unruly shock that could only be cured by a buzz cut or the weight of a heavy mane, nothing in between. He brought out maternal instincts in girls who swore they hated children—hardly the reaction he craved.

  They’d been friends for years, probably since before either of them had sprouted pubic hair. Ethan, the boy at school who had made her feel less lonely because he was as shunned as she was…what else could he be by now but a brother, and often a better brother than the pair she’d been stuck with by birth.

  Ethan, she feared, had come to see things differently. Which probably explained the fine line he walked lately, veering between disapproval and devotion. As though in his eyes she was spurning him to save her affections for a man who could not have been more remote if he were living on Neptune.

  Yet once she’d made up her mind to scrimp and save for the trip to Ireland, there was no question but that Ethan would do likewise. He had all along shared this strange obsession of hers, although she suspected it was something he never would’ve arrived at on his own; that for Ethan, this was like football had been for the more bubbleheaded girls who’d outshined her every day of high school: something they’d convinced themselves they liked so the guys they wanted would want them in return.

  So here he was, seeing it through with her from start to finish. Because that’s what brothers did. She only hoped that it was for the right reasons. There could be but one wrong reason: hoping that after she’d completed this peculiar pilgrimage, gotten it out of her system, she would turn to him as some sort of consolation prize.

  Please, Sisters, anything but that…because he’s had enough hurt for one decade.

  It was the closest thing to a prayer she’d composed in years, silently uttered over a patchwork of emerald fields, as west of Dublin they began to descend in what she’d always been uneasy hearing called their final approach.

  II

  The signposts of history once seemed to her to read like grave markers, instead. A not-uncommon teenage revelation, although perhaps occurring earlier to her than to most, the kind of thing that comes upon the kind of girl prone to suddenly finding the world an unbearable place to live, with a closetful of somber clothes to show for it, and the thing she's most tired of hearing is her mother telling her how much prettier she would be if she'd just make an effort to smile once in a while.

  Pandora at fourteen, that was…when history class became as impossible to tolerate as, she would later admit, she herself probably was. When she didn't want to be pretty. When she had no right to be pretty…assuming she could've believed that anyone who hadn't given birth to her might think she was. And she definitely didn't want to smile. Not when—wait for it—there was so much misery in the world.

  At home, in the stale sanctuary of her room, she began making the chart on the wall that so dismayed her parents. Her dad, even at that late post-countercultural date, could still be caught wearing the occasional tie-dyed T-shirt. After each particularly wrenching class or solo discovery, she added to the columns of dates and events and body counts that reflected such a scale of suffering that she couldn't understand how to other people these could merely be numbers in books or lectures:

  YEAR PLACE/EVENT CASUALTIES

  79 Mt. Vesuvius buries Pompeii in ash The entire city

  1066 Battle of Hastings Dunno; just lots of dead Anglo-Saxons

  1845 - 1848 Ireland – potato famine 1,000,000

  1863 Battle of Gettysburg 48,000 (North + South)

  1883 Krakatoa eruption 36,380 (163 villages)

  1905 St. Petersburg, Russia - Bloody Sunday 100s (exact not germane to US history books?)

  1912 Titanic sinks 1513

  1937 Hindenburg blows 36

  1939 – 1945 WWII Nazi death camps 6,000,000

  1963 Dallas, TX - JFK 1

  1972 Londonderry, Ireland - Bloody Sunday 13

  1990 Mecca; stampede in pedestrian tunnel 1400

  And so on. And everyone knew better than to get her started on earthquakes, volcanoes, monsoons. Out of this, the name Pandora—“A box,
a room, what’s the difference, just don’t open it up unless you’re ready to deal with all the woes of the world”—tacked onto her by a scoffing brother and promptly assimilated out of defiance.

  On those rare occasions when her mother entered the room and could bring herself to look at it, she would regard the chart with the same repugnance she might feel toward a slick crop of fungus crawling up the wall. Pandora eventually suspected that her parents' discomfort stemmed from a dread that it would evolve into some grander, bleaker declaration, more sinister than the idea that so many could die for no apparent purpose. That she would slap up another posterboard and summarize everything in one final equation:

  YEAR + PLACE/EVENT + CASUALTIES = NO GOD

  Or goddess. You couldn't quite pin them down, divinity being beyond gender and all. They were like that, in their New Agey way, and oblivious to the fact—clearly shown by the 1963 Dallas entry—that it wasn't just a numbers game for scrawny little Melanie, now signing household notes and birthday cards as Pandora.

  Yet their worries were more justified than she let on: The chart wasn’t just more of the same morbid curiosity that marked her as a classroom freak, but a big screaming question mark, taking the form it did because she wasn't sure whom to scream at out loud anymore. Even before the maudlin thing hit the deep purple paint of her wall, whenever she learned of some atrocious event, she would ponder all the prayers that would’ve gone unanswered.

  A bearded, pissed-off Patriarch on His throne, demanding love and threatening grim consequences for its withholding; a meek Lamb willingly trudging to His own slaughter, sent by a Father who had by now mellowed into an all-merciful old duffer…they each seemed equally improbable to her, and equally frightening. At least the state of the world seemed like something you could more easily pin on the former.

  Which was why the chart’s final entry—even as she wearied of updating it, the point having become redundant—seemed out of character, bush league. Serial killers had never greatly interested her, most of them just kinky products of a warped upbringing. Yet long before she knew the details, and the rumors his spree inspired, Pandora sensed that this one was different. That he belonged on the chart because his acts were, in some crude and misguided yet brutally poignant way, a response to the entries that preceded them:

  YEAR PLACE/EVENT CASUALTIES

  This autumn Belfast, Ireland, et al; Patrick Kieran Malone 13…all priests

  A modern-day friar and parochial Latin teacher, Patrick had been a reluctant stigmatic who’d beheld a vision of a Christ who had denied himself. In despair, Patrick had left both his abbey and the Church that had no use for him. Months later he killed the priests over a span of five weeks, dispatching each with a savagely efficient military knife. He had, in the account he was purported to have written of his sad, strange life and unexpected crimes, likened the spilling of their blood to the biblical description of old wineskins that had burst after being unable to hold new wine. He had killed the priests, had set down his tale…then vanished from the face of the earth.

  Of course, anyone who read Patrick’s testament—in time, Pandora found it on the Internet, where else?—would know what happened. It left no room for doubt.

  As to whether or not it was true, well…sometimes things had to be taken on faith.

  III

  Clockwise around this most green of islands, their path had been dictated by the shrines themselves—four of them, it was said, one for each of the cardinal points. They’d started in Dublin, next traveling south to the outskirts of Cork, then swinging up and westward to the shadow of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, and finally north, deep into the wild highlands of County Donegal.

  These were not shrines in the Catholic sense, at least not the Catholicism of the past millennium: gaudy tourist traps whose foundational piety had been usurped by tacky commerce. Instead, Pandora imagined that these new shrines were more akin to those from the Church’s earliest centuries, so humble that they scarcely drew attention to themselves at all—the biggest difference being, naturally, that they existed in opposition to all the Church held sacred.

  In Dublin, a fourth of Patrick’s bones were said to rest behind a brick wall, concealed by a dense curtain of ivy, on a side street so desolate you would never go there by accident. The southern shrine was a flagstone on a path leading to an ancient cemetery whose ground had been deconsecrated in the eighteenth century. You had to count to make sure you had the right flagstone, but once you found it, you noticed the subtle etchings left by prior visitors. In the west, his resting place was also marked by rock, with the quarter-share of bones rumored to lie far below ground, beneath one of the solemn gray standing stones that had since pagan times listened to the lapping of the waters of Clew Bay.

  And here in Donegal, a crooked mile’s walk from the village of Glenmullen, they had been reposited into the core of a vast-trunked yew so old it had started to turn hollow. Ancient yews sometimes did that, their roots grown so strong over their first two thousand years that they began to rip the trees open…yet this was not their end, just a new stage of life. It made the grandest tomb she ever expected to see.

  A man’s bones interred the length and breadth of a land—there were plenty of historical precedents, although usually from periods of conquest and terror. After the English had disemboweled Scotland’s William Wallace, across the Irish Channel and 700 years of time, they’d drawn and quartered him and sent the pieces to the farthest corners of Britain as a failed warning to others who would dare fight for freedom.

  Like Wallace, Patrick too had been dispersed by those who killed him, but any parallels ended there. Hunted and hated, too weary to go on, this most notorious of Ireland’s murderers had returned to the only ones he knew would take him back…because even if the Sisters had not made him what he was, his transformation could never have happened without them.

  At her feet, the yew’s roots writhed in and out of the earth like a vast tangle of snakes. Pandora stepped atop them, almost expecting them to squirm, and splayed her hands across the purple-brown bark of the trunk. It may have been one shrine out of four, but this northernmost among them seemed to dominate the rest.

  His skull…surely this was where they’d lain his skull.

  “Imagine someone loving you so much,” she said, “that they would do this for you.”

  “All of it, you mean?” Ethan asked. “Or just the shrines?”

  “Of course all of it,” she said. “Imagine having to tear me apart with your own teeth. Imagine understanding that for all its apparent cruelty, and as much as you’d hate to do it, it’s the last act of kindness you could show.”

  “Hide me,” Patrick had pleaded, knowing he could not outrun the police forever. “Hide me where they'll never find me. Hide me where they never can.”

  And so they had. The three women who, in the mists and shadows of legend, had become known as the Sisters of the Trinity did the only thing they could. Granting his wish by dealing with him as they had been dealing with much more naive men for perhaps longer than this yew tree had been standing.

  “’Caress then, these beasts, that they may be my tomb,’” Patrick had written, quoting Saint Ignatius before his own martyrdom in a Roman arena, “’and let nothing be left of my body; thus my funeral will be a burden to none.’”

  They devoured him, body and essence.

  Lilah, his flesh.

  Maia, his blood.

  Salíce, his seed.

  But, like thousands of saints before him, he’d left behind bones.

  Or so the story went.

  That the Sisters had treated these bones with such veneration could only be an act of sublime love—not only on their part, but by extension, the scattered society of abominations of which they were a part, referred to by Patrick as The Misbegotten. Surely they’d known exactly what they were doing—both in scattering his gnawed skeletal remains, as well as sending his testament into the world. But because it was only the text, and not the orig
inal document, few believed it genuine, and most of those who did dismissed it as further evidence of a delusional mind.

  But from where Pandora stood, it was too good not to be true.

  The Sisters’ acts, she thought, were intended only for those few in whom they might resonate as lures into a hidden truth: that, as she’d suspected ever since she could remember, the thing that had come to be called God loved nothing but itself. That it had taken credit for a world it had never created, and drank in the suffering of those who groveled before it. That at least some of those branded as devils were not without honor, decency, and love, living in the darkness not because they were born there, but because they’d been forced into it and found it more welcoming than the light.

  “So…what now?” Ethan asked. “You did the legwork. You’ve found them all. What now?”

  A simple question, yet it implied a terrible burden to her. “I don’t know. Are we just supposed to go home after something like this?”

  “Well, yeah, what else?” For the first time, he looked not just annoyed, but genuinely disgusted with her. “What’d you think was gonna happen—you could hang around one of these pathetic little excuses for immortality and some flash of insight would explain why you’re alive?”

  Maybe she did.

  Oh god, maybe she did. Face it: If your free time was consumed by gathering fragments of heresy and fitting them together, if you strained to hear whispers of unholy war, if you went looking for the shrines to a mass-murderer that someone had christened Saint Patrick the Fallen, then you were a freak, motivated by compulsions most people couldn’t begin to understand. Least of all yourself.

  Ethan wasn’t finished. “Once I came across this saying, I don’t remember, it was Buddha or the Dalai Lama or somebody like that: ‘Before enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water.’ I thought of you. I thought of you, and it fucking hurt. Because I knew you’d rather freeze and die of thirst before admitting that just wood and just water isn’t the end of the world.”