A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

  “I say, look at this,” says the king. “That’s a nifty trick.”

  The courtiers lower their bows and take to whistling and clapping at the beast.

  “Let’s take him home,” says the king. “I’ll make a pet of him. I’ll be the only king with a pet wolf.”

  Bisclaveret knows a good thing when he sees it and behaves very well. He does not eat the queen’s spaniel and urinates only on the outer walls of the castle. He is even allowed to sleep in the king’s chamber, although he would rather not, because those marital acts between the king (a slight man) and his wife (formidable) are very loud.

  Hearken now to that which chanced.

  The king decides to throw a huge feast and invite everyone. He invites all the lords and ladies, barons and baronesses, and even that knight who’s come back from Turkey with a drinking problem (and, it is rumored, syphilis) who is now married to Bisclaveret’s former wife.

  “Whatever happened to Bisclaveret?” the king wonders out loud, and Bisclaveret sets up such a pitiful moaning, even attempting to pantomime the robbing of his clothes, that the king is once more moved to bouncing up and down in his seat and clapping; he tosses the wolf a sugared quince then turns to the tailor, who is making some last-minute adjustments to the king’s ermine cuffs, which are long by half an inch.

  All day long Bisclaveret follows the king. He watches as his liege presides over the hog pen, declaring with such a merry toss of his hand, “Slaughter them all.”

  Bisclaveret is there when the new tapestry arrives and sits patiently for nearly an hour while the king attempts to get it hung straight. “Up on the left. No, my left. I think the whole thing’s too high,” he says.

  Bisclaveret sits by the king’s side as the barber swathes the king’s face in hot towels, trims his beard to a sharp point, and drains the pus from the abscess on the king’s neck.

  And Bisclaveret is by the king’s side as he tastes the wines from the cellar until he passes out.

  By evening the guests have started to arrive and the minstrels are minstreling fervently. Bisclaveret is trying to decide on how to make his predicament clear to the king. He is still turning his various ideas over in his mind, when who should arrive but the drunkard knight and the slut who has turned his life into permanent, hairy hell. Before he knows what he is doing, Bisclaveret is at the knight’s throat.

  “Get that thing off me,” screams the knight.

  And a band of courtiers pulls him off.

  “Sit,” shouts the king, “bad Biscuit.” And Bisclaveret sits. “I’m terribly sorry,” says the king, “he’s never done anything like that before.”

  “Why,” asks the wife, “do you call that beast ‘Biscuit’?”

  “Funny story,” says the king gesturing to his servant to top up the knight’s goblet, “he was drawing in the dirt with his paw. He drew something that looked like a ‘B’ and then an ‘I’ and then a squiggle much like an ‘S’ and then he even drew a ‘C’. I could have sworn he was writing. I think he wanted me to call him ‘Biscuit,’ so that’s his name now.”

  And the wife looks with fear at the wolf who meets her eyes so frankly that she knows his true identity.

  “Clever Biscuit,” says the king, and scratches Bisclaveret’s head.

  At this point Bisclaveret no longer cares if he is riddled with arrows like Saint Sebastian. He attacks the knight again.

  “What is going on?” demands the king.

  The courtiers and servants only manage to drag Bisclaveret off when he struggles free and once more he jumps on the knight.

  “If you don’t mind, Your Highness, I think I’ll sit at the far end of the table,” says the knight.

  “What a terrible thing to have to do,” the king replies, “but your lady will sit right here, next to me, so that you won’t feel insulted.”

  The king enthusiastically pats the seat to his left (his wife was on his right and once seated, the lady found it most taxing to move) and the baroness sits down warily.

  “Your Highness,” whispers the king’s counselor, “perhaps this wolf is trying to tell us something.”

  “What would he be trying to tell us?” asks the king, understandably perplexed. “Biscuit, are you trying to tell us something?”

  At which point, Bisclaveret, leaps up one last time and rips the very nose out of the center of his wife’s face.

  “Oh, good God,” says the king, “were you teasing him?”

  The wife tries hard to get away from Bisclaveret, but Bisclaveret is still, having had the first satisfaction in close to a year.

  “Send for a doctor,” screams the wife.

  “You must have been doing something.”

  “I was not.”

  “Perhaps,” says the counselor, “it is some wrongdoing from the past.”

  “Yes,” says the king. “What have you done to Biscuit?”

  And finally, the baroness, due to the gaping wound in the center of her face, is disposed to tell the truth.

  “Give the wolf his robe,” the baroness shrieks to the knight. “Give Bisclaveret his robe back now!”

  The knight returns the baron’s robe. The knight and baroness are banished. The baron is restored.

  “Bisclaveret” was a favorite of my mother’s. Once when I was eight years old, I woke up, having thrown off my covers, to see her beautiful pale face pulling the comforter up to my chin. She was in a T-shirt from Hawaii that had palm trees and surfers on it. Her legs were bare and, I noticed, very thin. She was thin, although I don’t think they’d figured out at that point what was wrong with her.

  “I was lonely. Did I wake you up?”

  “Yes. I’m glad you did.”

  She told me the story of Bisclaveret. I remember her hands moving around in the dark air and her laughing, because to her it was a funny story. I remember her reaching for my nose at the end and pretending to have captured it when I was already too old not to recognize that it was the tip of her thumb in her fist. I think my mother loved the tale of Bisclaveret because the real wolf in the story was the baroness. It’s the baroness who is awakened by the existence of the unknown. She betrays the baron, warms her bed with another man. She is brutally, physically punished, forced to go through life with her face—the seat of all things human—altered.

  Even though the baroness didn’t win, my mother was pleased that not all wolves were men. I remember her sitting on the foot of my bed with her T-shirt stretched tight over her knees. The light from the bathroom across the hall kept the room dimly lit so I could see her profile.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After the baron got his castle back. Was he still a werewolf?”

  “I suppose he was,” said my mother. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t be.”

  “And what happened to the baroness?”

  “Oh I don’t know. I suppose the knight left her. Men don’t like women without proper noses. She had to go live in a shack far from town. She raised goats and the goats were her only friends. During the Inquisition, she was probably burned as a witch.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “Well,” my mother said, looking over her shoulder and into the hall light, “things often are.”

  28

  The rain had finally stopped and now the days were bright and beautiful. A few daffodils raised their heads around the property. Even one rogue red tulip had popped up by the house, but how could I enjoy the weather when I missed Arthur? Ann called every day, sounding nuttier each time, and I felt sorry for her. Without Boris, she didn’t really know what to do with her time except to look for him. Now the police were involved, but Boris remained silent and hidden. Kevin was company, but not much in the way of conversation. The nights were lonely. Because of this, I had taken to sleeping on the couch in the living room. The idea of going to bed depressed me and I started sleeping in shallow fits, wrapped up with the dog in the stadium blanket. The couch faced the slidi
ng doors to the deck and on clear nights I could see the moon rising and a smattering of stars from where I lay. I was half-asleep with the TV muttering when I first saw her. She was on the deck, her pale face watching me. I watched, completely still, and she stepped back from the window. The TV threw up a sudden bright reflection and she disappeared from view. I jumped up and pulled the sliding door open. There was no one there.

  “I know you’re out there,” I said. “You better come in before you freeze.”

  But the night was unusually warm, in the forties, and there was no answer. I lit a cigarette and was smoking heartily, massaging my head as if it would help my brain sort out this latest appearance, when I heard the front door swing open. I turned around, and there she was, wrapped up in my father’s black cashmere coat, pale and wasted, her teeth chattering.

  “Mother?”

  “You’re not happy to see me,” she said.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Your father knows where you are,” she said. “You should leave while you still can.”

  “Sit down,” I said. I went over to her and she sat in the nearest chair waving me off. “You don’t look good. You should be in the hospital.”

  She shook her head. “What you mean to say is that I should be dead.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Then let me stay a while. I’ll be no trouble.”

  “That’s not my point.”

  “Then what is your point?”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Taxi,” she said and she smiled. “I can always get to where I want. It’s you who seem to have a problem finding your way around, finding your loved ones.”

  She was exhausted. The act of speaking seemed too much for her.

  “You should lie down,” I said. I placed my hands on her shoulders and led her down the hallway to the bedroom. I took off her coat and she crawled into bed.

  “I’m cold,” she said. “Lie next to me.”

  I got in beside her, as we’d slept so many times when I was younger.

  “Mom,” I said. “I want to know about the bones.”

  “Oh, the bones. That’s quite a long story.”

  “That’s all right. We have time.”

  “Then I’ll start at the beginning. You know about the whale ship Essex?”

  “A whale sank it.” I said. “It’s the basis for Moby-Dick.”

  “Moby-Dick leads up to the story of the Essex. It’s like a prequel.”

  “What does this have to do with the bones at the Hidalgo?”

  “The survivors tried to make it to Chile in the whaleboats. They could have made it to Tahiti, which was much closer, but they were scared of cannibals. When the survivors were found, they were clutching the bones of their departed friends.”

  “They’d eaten them?”

  “Yes, but they held the bones. When their rescuers tried to take the bones away, they cried. You see, they loved their departed comrades, they cherished their remains, and couldn’t bare to let them go.”

  “I thought the bones at the Hidalgo were Anasazi.”

  “The Anasazi disappeared. No one knows where they went. Maybe the earth swallowed them up, and all we have to show they lived is their bones and a few pottery shards, some buildings crumbling in the desert.”

  “Oh mother, give me a straight answer.”

  “We all disappear, Katherine. We are all nothing but bones, briefly animated, then still.”

  I was still pondering this, almost relieved to see my mother’s dementia alive and well, which made her animation so much more real, and was about to pursue my original line of questioning when I heard her breath slow and realized she had fallen asleep.

  Later that night the phone rang. I was in the bathroom and by the time I had reached the living room, the answering machine had already picked up.

  “Katherine, this is Barry. I left a message for you last week, which I presume you did not receive. It’s about the bones. The Anasazi bones you found in your mother’s attic? They’re not Anasazi at all. Actually, the bones are only ten years old. I had to turn them over to the New Mexico police. They just called me. The bones belong to a young man who went missing in 1993. Do you have any idea what they were doing in your mother’s attic? Please call me . . .” and then the machine cut him off. The phone rang again. “Katherine, this is Barry Buster Parkinson. I just left a message, but I’m not sure if it got recorded. Call me. My number is 512–555–9874. The bones are new. The bones are new.”

  29

  My mother woke me up the following morning. She was standing by my dresser, looking at my things. She looked surprisingly well. The FedEx envelope was still there, pretty much undisturbed, and she was going through it.

  “Is this all there’s left of me?” she said smiling. She was holding the postcard of The Raft of the Medusa.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I was still half-asleep.

  “The safe-deposit key, these earrings, my hair . . .”

  “My hair,” I corrected her. “The hair is mine.”

  “That’s right,” she said. She held the dogwood earrings out to me. “You always liked these.”

  “I like them on you,” I said.

  My mother brushed her hair back and held the earrings up to her ears, then she put them on.

  Later that evening I received more unexpected visitors. My mother was napping silently down the hall and I had a cup of tea in my hands when the doorbell rang. Kevin barked from the couch, but couldn’t be bothered to get up. I opened the door just a crack. It was Detective Yancy and Officer Brown.

  “Good evening,” I said. “What brings you here?”

  “I think you know,” said Detective Yancy.

  But I didn’t know. There was a lot going on. I opened the door. “Can I interest you in a cup of tea?”

  “No thank you,” said Detective Yancy. “We’d like a minute of your time.”

  “All right then.” I went into the living room and the two men followed me. I turned off the television and gestured for them to take the couch, next to Kevin. I arranged myself in the easy chair cradling my tea in my hands. “What appears to be the problem?”

  “Is there a problem?” asked Detective Yancy cryptically.

  “I would assume as much. You are here and not at your policeman’s ball, or whatever it is that occupies you on Friday nights.”

  Officer Brown smiled.

  “What do you know of Mr. Connor’s suitcase?” asked Detective Yancy.

  “Not as much as you do,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

  “In Portland,” said Detective Yancy. “In a dumpster.”

  “Portland? Are you sure it’s his?”

  “His manuscript was in there.”

  Officer Brown was about to say something when Detective Yancy raised his hand to silence him.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Travis did kill himself.”

  “I don’t think he did that,” said Officer Brown. Then he covered his mouth as a way of apologizing to his superior.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?” I asked. “I really have no idea how the suitcase got in the dumpster. None. Give me a lie detector test if you don’t believe me.”

  “Where is Mr. Verhoven?” asked Detective Yancy.

  I set my tea down on the coffee table and took up the pack of cigarettes. “Arthur’s gone. He’s gone.” I shrugged. “If you find him, let me know.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “You might say that,” I said. “Why are you looking for Arthur?”

  “His fingerprints were all over the suitcase,” said Detective Yancy.

  “The suitcase was in this house.”

  “His fingerprints were also on the dumpster.”

  “And?”

  Officer Brown and Detective Yancy exchanged a look.

  “So Travis’s manuscript was in it. That’s hardly damning.”

  “Mr. Connor’s manuscript,”said Detectiv
e Yancy. “Also Mr. Connor’s head, his hands, and his feet.”

  I heard the water dripping in the sink. It seemed that for a moment no one breathed. “Oh my God,” I said. “What happened?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “Did you call his mother?”

  “I called Travis’s mother,” said Officer Brown. “She didn’t take it very well.”

  “The poor woman,” I added.

  There was another moment of silence.

  “I see Mr. Verhoven’s van is parked out front.”

  “Arthur left it here. Something’s wrong with the starter.” I looked first at Detective Yancy, then at Officer Brown. “No,” I said. “You don’t think...”

  “When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Verhoven?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “How did he leave?”

  “In a hurry,” I said. “We’d had a fight.”

  “What did you fight about?”

  I composed my thoughts. “He had a jealousy issue. It was an ongoing thing in our relationship.”

  “He left the van here?”

  “He made a phone call. One of his friends came and picked him up.”

  “What was his friend’s name?”

  “I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “What was this friend driving?”

  “I didn’t look. I was sitting right here. We’d had a fight. I was mad.” I looked at Officer Brown, who seemed both sympathetic and embarrassed. “Is Arthur a suspect?”

  “The suitcase,” said Detective Yancy, “was covered in a clay-like mud, the same kind of mud found on this property.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. And you think it’s Arthur?”

  “His fingerprints, Miss Shea, were all over the suitcase.”

  “Arthur is not a violent person,” I said. After the third try I managed to light my cigarette. I offered a cigarette to Detective Yancy and to my surprise, he took it. “How do you know,” I handed him the lighter, “that it’s not Bad Billy?”