by Joy Williams
Somewhere is your animal, and it is important that you know him, that you know how to reach him, or you will be nothing. You will always be afraid. You will have nowhere to rest and be safe.
They had been coming down here each day this summer. And as Aaron made the carvings and Emma had made her children, so these children made their story, the story becoming daily more and more a living thing they could almost touch, a large fantastic butterfly, lying among them, a butterfly looking like a dark hand with outspread fingers gathering them together.
•
The first building that Aaron had made on the island was this stone house. He’d lived here with the meat he’d made. For this was where he’d salted the animals when he had been a trapper, flayed and stretched them, cored their brains. Sometimes he would begin to eat them when they were still alive. A chthonic act, appropriate in this partially subterranean place, this murky grotto.
Aaron was a savage here. Blood beneath his nails. Blood upon his boots. a preposterous and inconsistent youth, all dark ignorance and strength. He could skin an animal so perfectly you couldn’t see the fault . . . moving his knife around the hind foot, slitting the skin along the back of the leg to the base of the tail, carefully around the tail, down the other leg, skinning out the feet, keeping the nails. Then peeling it off. Just as easy. Like an orange. Detaching the head, cleaning it out with a stick and some water . . .
Even today, in the heat of the summer, the children could almost smell the cooling blood and hot dust. They could imagine his heavy blotched hands carving and dividing, skinning a thing that hung by the heels, a thing turning and turning, catching the light, the sorrel hairs tipped with gold that glistened . . .
How clearly the children could see this. How vividly, in their minds, the things swung; so vivid in their whiteness, in their nothingness. Their skins, their otherness, their otherness lying apart . . .
Aaron could skin a bear cub in a minute and a half.
Aaron could empty and mount an animal so brilliantly that it would seem whole, uninjured, as though a puff of breath in its cold nostrils would set it to running again. There had been so many of them, those animals, those things that had been snared or shot or poisoned or drowned, with no forgiveness asked nor blessing bestowed.
Aaron prided himself on his agility. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t track or trap. He could catch a songbird with his hands and break its heart with his thumb. With the animals in traps, the ones with the fancy coats, he wouldn’t shoot them and muddle their coats. He’d stomp on their hearts with the heel of his boot. He’d always know where its heart was and he’d stomp it there. It would never seem too painful. It would just break the creature’s heart.
But trapping lost its crude charm and Aaron killed just for sport for a while. He liked the bow and arrow best. It was so economical and silent. He liked the silence of it. He could shoot an arrow three hundred yards. Like a Turk. The light of an arrow is a terrible thing. It can be seen and not avoided.
The last animal that Aaron killed spoke to him as it was dying, and its blood did not run red as an animal’s blood. It was sad but it was mad too and it spoke to Aaron, although not in words, and Aaron understood it. He wasn’t frightened. He laughed at it. It was no more than a carcass with lies upon its teeth and he was a live man. He laughed at himself too for living alone so long in the wilderness that such a thing would happen to him. He decided to make his mark on civilization for a while, make some money, travel and learn. He came out of the wilderness. He left his guns to rust and his bows to warp. He turned his energies to society, and everything he fancied he took.
By the time he was thirty-five, he was worth several hundred thousand dollars. He read Latin and he had danced with princesses. He was in Europe when he met Emma.
And Emma, as the children had long ago established, was a witch.
She hated salt. She vomited needles. Her witchcraft looked like a piece of red chalk, but Aaron didn’t care. He was full of himself and he didn’t care at all about anything. He picked up the piece of red chalk and put it in his pocket, and then he had to follow her around. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. After having been lucky for all that time, he was now as unlucky as a fox fallen down a well.
Emma put her witchcraft in him and made him need her. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t rich and she certainly didn’t have nice ways. She didn’t think much of Aaron’s learning. “Fuck Ovid,” she would say. She never had a mother. She was born of something horrible. A kidney frying and splattering in a pan. Her arms and legs were always scratched up and her skin was burned dark from the sun and her hair was matted, falling over her shoulders and hanging down into her eyes. But none of the ways she looked mattered because she made Aaron see her as she fancied. She had witched him that way. Emma did her witching poison by staring into the mirror at herself until the mirror got all discolored and greasy, and then she took the grease and put it in the food.
The children had her picture, which just showed how clever she had been. The children knew enough not to be deceived by a photograph which showed her pretty much like the other women of their time, and even as Pearl looked today . . . skinny and sad, her dark hair pulled carelessly back, her eyes puzzled and bereft, the structure of her bones reciting in its witch way, the image of any other baby-raising mother of the century before. The picture was her witchcraft too, just like the piece of red chalk. It had survived all these years so the children could have it now, so they could know and appreciate her cunning.
Emma made Aaron marry her, and she made him forget all of his wandering ways and all of his intellectual pride. She made him take her back to the island, the place he had begun and abandoned so many years before he’d come across her. And there, on the island, in the wilderness once more, there were twelve years of silence, of waiting.
Emma made him build her a big house, big but not too fine, with many rooms. And other buildings, boathouses, and barns . . . she made him obsessed with building and filling up the place. Furnishing it as though for a huge family, as though for important guests. But there was no family and no one ever came to visit them, just the boats and that brought the lumber and the tools, and the fine furniture and valuable art. Aaron just kept building and filling the rooms with circumstance and detail and Emma kept filling it with her emptiness. It went on for years like this, with nothing but the loneliness between them. The childishness and loneliness Emma wore in her magic like a second skin.
Aaron did everything she asked, for she had an enchanted will. And with her will she made him accept the animals she began to gather around her to gnaw at her loneliness. Aaron collected some of the animals, alive now, to be her companions. Living . . . their hearts pounding blood not dust. Half-tamed or not tamed at all. How his life had changed! For Aaron had dispatched the demons that were available to his skill long ago, fashioned them into something he could see and kill and had killed them long ago. But now in his prime they had returned, restored by himself. By day they wandered freely everywhere. At night they were more restricted, at least in the beginning, although Aaron didn’t know it had begun. Aaron was far too innocent for Emma, and the basest of the beasts she gathered around her were far too innocent too. They became her companions, her darlings. Weasel, leopard, hawk, bobcat. Coon, bat, bear, fawn, terrapin . . . accepting meat from her lips and her love for them.
Their living shapes were so alien to Aaron. He had thought of them once only in terms of pelts and heads, of liver and spleen, of hearts, glands, and tongues roasting over burning wood in a pine branch camp. But now they seemed more alive than himself. The air quivered with the warmth of their bodies. They had made it their home here.
He wouldn’t allow them in the house. He put all of his strength into keeping them out of the rooms he had made. Each night he went through the rooms one by one to make sure that none had gotten in. The windows had been nailed shut for years. On one door there were seven locks. When he was satisfied that only he and Em
ma were inside, he prepared dinner for them. The two of them sat eating their simple meals from silver plates, on a table that Aaron had designed and built for twenty. He had a gift for collecting things although he had no taste and Emma couldn’t have cared less what she ate or saw or wore on her back. They ate, Aaron chewing and drinking and serving himself, and Emma sitting silently, one with the animals in her head.
After dinner, they went to bed, and Aaron lay upon Emma, his long body straddling hers, his fingers around the cold brass of the headboard, the bony hollow of his cheek pressed against the coarse hair. Outside the animals rubbed against the sides of the house, their heavy flanks slumped against the foundation stone, their lives preserved in their dark shapes as though in amber, their reality outside pressing on Aaron’s sense of his own within that he feared they might fall through upon him, through his chest and into his heart.
And yet he managed to keep them out until the first child was born, keeping the sense of his own reality separate from his knowledge of theirs. In the days he’d watch them wandering freely, through the other buildings, all over his land. He’d watch them from behind the nailed windows. They didn’t seem to pay slightest attention to him except when he was with Emma, but he knew that they were conscious of him, that they knew him. Sometimes he felt he wanted to crawl through the hole in the center of the great brass headboard, crawl through and come out somewhere else with a different shape and a soul they couldn’t recognize. But then the first child was born and he knew there wasn’t any use anymore in keeping them out, that there was no distinction there to them, that they were in a timeless state of permanence in a world that had transformed itself around him.
Stark had been long awaited. A cluster of cells long in the gathering. Two thousand years perhaps in the gathering. And then born. Brought up from magic, whether it be imagined or real, into memory. The proof of the powers of love and loneliness, and whether dream or solid flesh, it was, nevertheless, a child. Emma’s child. Made from Emma’s magic and Aaron’s sin.
For after the first, Aaron truly believed himself to be a sinful man. He invented the Devil for them then. Emma didn’t care. She had always been below good and evil. Her magic had never been anything trivial. No burying of teeth and hair. No communions of blood and excretions. If Aaron chose to believe in something as trivial as the Devil, Emma allowed him his foolishness.
Aaron made a chapel of his slaughterhouse, the building that had been his first stronghold here, his first shelter against the elements. He fashioned an altar, put up a picture of Christ in a silver frame, brought back a handsome brass cross from Boston. He was a frightened man. He prayed. He prayed for love and understanding.
But understanding was not there. They were there. his and Emma’s children. After twelve years of waiting, there were twelve years of children. One each year. A miracle.
After the twelfth, it was said that Aaron died, of nothing, in bed.
The children knew, of course, that he had died of something.
That death is like a bee, buzzing around the mouth of the person it wants, trying to get inside. And it got inside Aaron.
But before that, in the years before the twelfth, when Aaron thought he still had time to atone, he grew fanatical. Fasted. Mutilated himself. Wandered naked through the seasons, slept in snow and thorns. In the winter of his sixth child, he had lost a toe and the tips of his ears to the cold. That spring, the buds of lowers opened darkly showing the faces of saints. And Aaron began losing his teeth, his teeth which had always been so strong before, falling into his hands, all carved indecisively by rot, dismal death’s-heads in the image of himself.
Aaron abandoned God after the seventh was born. His prayers to him had been useless, making Aaron think that perhaps he did not want prayers, had never wanted prayers, but meat. Flesh and blood.
It was Emma that seemed to have the excellent relationship with God. They were like two bears in the same den.
Dismissing faith, Aaron took up with superstition. He started whittling, a dreamer’s art, thinking he could save himself by making shadows of his terrors, those terrors which now had become as intimate to him as the shapes of Emma’s children. His intent was to take their souls and make them into shadows, playthings. He had known the animals so well once by killing them, laying them, stretching and skinning them, coring their brains, that now he was able to re-create them in wood with a knife that once had accomplished human sacrifice. He spent months carving each one, trying to capture every instinct, every aspiration in each line . . . it calmed him, healed him a little. He thought he felt his will returning.
One night a year after the twelfth child, Aaron entered the house. The rooms were dark. Everything slept in the protection of their bodies. He walked through the rooms he had made, soundlessly, as he had once slipped through the wildness. It did not seem an unusual place. It was as he had built it. His family prospered here.
Aaron had now stopped trying to understand. He had made himself sink far below understanding with its poor distinction between the world of sorcery and men, between sickness and health.
He went into the room where once he’d slept with Emma. The smallest child lay beside the large brass bed, inside its sleeping box. Aaron stepped quietly, carefully not to wake his wife, and picked the baby up. Its dewlap swung gently, faintly yellow in the moonlight; its large blunt face was sleeping. He took the knife from his pocket, the one he whittled with, the ancient tool brought back from Guatemalan jungles. On the baby’s chest was a faint crescent. Like the horned moon. Like a heel mark in the dust. He turned the baby on its stomach and ran the knife lightly down its spine, through the hair, not cutting but feeling the spine hard and iridescent beneath the blade. He raised the knife and in that instant Emma was upon him, tearing the knife from his hands, biting his face, screaming. It was a cry so terrible that Aaron knew that it had summoned all that he feared most. The baby screamed, and Emma. And into the room rushed the children . . .
•
“Aauuuu,” shrieked Angie.
Pearl’s head jerked. “What is it?” she cried. “What’s wrong!”
In the pool Jesse was bawling too. Big tears rolled down his shiny face.
“Tracker told me something terrible,” he screamed. He hung to the tiled lip of the pool with his chubby hands. “It’s not true either, it’s not!”
Angie sat in the grass and shrieked. There was an awful smell. Franny had wound some lowers through Angie’s curls. Pearl stumbled to her feet, dizzy, her head pounding.
“What’s happened?” cried Pearl.
“The baby needs her diaper changed, but I don’t want to do it,” Franny said.
“Oh yes,” Pearl said, rubbing her temples. “What a commotion, yes, that’s all. I must have been dozing.”
“Pearl,” Jesse yelled. “It’s not true what Tracker said about the whales, is it!”
“Why is she wearing a diaper anyway?” Pearl asked. “Wouldn’t it be better for her to go without?” She looked at Jesse dazedly. His lower lip was thrust out. His eyes were like bowls. He held to the edge and swung his body to and fro in the water. Pearl blinked.
“He said that they kill them to make lipstick. He said that they kill them sometimes just to see how much their brains weigh.”
Pearl looked at him sadly. Those wonderful songs that whales sing, she thought. The way they try and protect one another.
“It’s true,” Tracker said.
“Don’t be mean,” Jane said. “You’re always trying to say mean things.”
“They’re going to be extinct,” Tracker insisted. “You only see them when they’re dead.”
. . . and so spiritual, Pearl thought. With all that water around them, they must get into the meditative state quite easily.
In the sea, even here, in the sea which was around her, Pearl, and the children, there would be whales still, traveling and calling, calling one another across thousands of miles and galloping toward one another through the impossible depth
s of the sea, through the faint and changing lights of the sea, singing and calling and faithful to one another . . .
Oh to be a diver in deep seas, to know creatures like them, to have the experiences of things! That was the secret of a woman’s unfathomable smile, was it not? That she had been a diver in deep seas and been dead many times, that she had lived in a manner both sinister and undisclosed, a perpetual life of ten thousand experiences?
Pearl stroked a child’s head.
One of the children said, “Whale calves in their first six months gain several hundred pounds a day.”
Like a nightmare, really, Pearl thought, the growing . . .
She looked from one child to another. Sam was not there. He had slipped away from them again and gone up to the house to be with her, the old woman, his grandmother. Pearl looked into the children’s faces. Who could open the door of a child’s face? It was like a door opening upon the growing . . .
What had Sam said when she asked him if he loved her, Pearl? Yes, he had said. Yes.
But it wasn’t true. It was the old woman that he loved.
CHAPTER TEN
Pearl had never found Sam’s grandmother to be very lovable, but of course she saw her differently than Sam. The old woman did not like Pearl and Pearl couldn’t blame her for that, and they had never spoken to one another in seven years and Pearl was actually relieved about that, but Pearl did wish that she was not quite so eccentric in her appearance.
Sometimes Pearl, in viewing the two of them together through the open door, wanted to rush through and take the child out of there, away from her speech, away from her face, which seemed terrible to Pearl. But she didn’t feel she had the right. The fact of it was that the old woman was raising Sam and Pearl was not. The old woman took better care of Sam than Pearl did and always had. She had taught him how to tell a story and how to listen to one. She told him wonderful things. What advice could Pearl give if she ever had him to herself? When one is drunk and trying to eat at the same time it is helpful to make the attempt before a mirror? It was hopeless. There were tall roses in the garden that Pearl suspected of disliking her. Once she was positive that a curtain blowing in the window had been sent to murder her. It was too depressing, her flickering world. What could she say to the child? What hope could she give him? Sometimes she would wake in the night to see fifty birds, dead, but rigid in the attitudes of life, scattered on the blanket of her bed. With a groan, they would rise and be gone. She sweated. She shook. Her eyes filmed with things galloping, burrowing, flying, nesting there. And love seemed to be a kingdom from which she had been banished. The appearances of things were like scabs upon her soul, a crust which kept her soul from light. How could she tell Sam this? He was her fear.