Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  And so it was that Anders agreed to help Mr. Dubose with his project. Elated, the showman clapped his hands together. There was no time to waste. The rest of his traveling museum would arrive in mere days, Dubose said, and after the monster’s debut in Golly, it would go on the road, winding its way north to New York, where he was in the process of building a more permanent home for his entire collection. Beyond that—who knew?—perhaps he would ship it to Paris and London. Anders could not imagine how Dubose planned to transport a ten-foot-tall creature, but in the barn he discovered that at least some of the hammering and sawing had been in the service of a massive cart with giant wooden wheels. It would take a team of horses to pull it. The bones themselves had been placed at intervals across the straw floor.

  “It’s going to take longer than three days,” a man with frayed blond sideburns came over to report.

  “This is my architect, Mr. Gustafson,” Dubose said to Anders. “Mr. Gustafson, you’re in luck, we have a scientist here who has extensively studied the creatures. He has even published papers on the topic.”

  Anders did not correct the showman regarding his publication history, despite the fact that he had not published a single paper on vertebrate fossils (or, for that matter, on any other topic zoological).

  “Expert or not,” Mr. Gustafson said, “I’d like to see him try and fit the pieces together.”

  Anders’s knowledge of nonhuman anatomy was, to put it delicately, incomplete, but at the boardinghouse he had with him a number of engravings from the Academy’s holdings. He sent Temp for his books, and when they arrived, he opened each to various illustrations—of mammoth molars and giant sloth skulls—looking desperately for any correlations between those figures and the dark gray chunks cast about the straw. Gustafson and his team had chiseled away more of the rock, though not with any precision. Some of the fossils now had small fissures, cracks, and chinks. About this Anders said nothing.

  He shuffled the bones. He traded one toe for another, experimenting with angles and directions. The spiky horn: Was it a feature of the tail, of the foot, or of the head? The rib cage he arranged and then rearranged. Temp watched from his perch in the rafters as Anders spun the femur like a windmill blade, around and around until it paired with the tibia. As for the other tibia, the missing one, they’d have to make it from plaster. They’d have to form much of the skeleton from plaster, Anders slowly realized.

  The men who’d been busy building the cart and freeing the fossils now leaned back in the hay with straw between their gray teeth, murmuring and laughing as Anders hobbled around on his cane, exhaling loudly whenever something failed to fit, which was most of the time.

  The spine, Anders eventually decided, was the best place to start, and so he began all over again, this time focusing on the vertebrae. But which were the dorsal and which were the caudal and what was their order?

  “Where’s the head?” one of the men asked. “It’s got a head, right?”

  Anders didn’t answer him. Other than the lower jaw, there was no skull.

  “Looks like a giant horse to me,” another man said, and Anders saw that the way in which he’d laid out the spine did make it appear rather horselike.

  At the end of the day, Mr. Dubose reappeared in the barn and asked the men to lift him into the air so that he could get a better view of what he called Anders’s diligent scientific study. They hoisted him up and sat him on their shoulders, his waist squeezed between their heads. He loomed over all, barking at them to move backward, then forward. Clearly he was displeased with his new scientific advisor’s progress. He didn’t try to hide this fact. The skeleton on the barn floor was messy and incomplete and not at all terrifying or impressive. The showman closed his eyes and then popped them open. “What about those over there?” he asked, and pointed to all the bones not yet utilized.

  “Tomorrow,” Anders said.

  “Tomorrow,” Dubose said, “it gets a head. I want to see its head.”

  • • •

  Mrs. Lang’s dinner table was more crowded and livelier than usual that night. Mr. Dubose and his representatives, it seemed, had been hard at work drumming up enthusiasm for the project in the nearby towns. Word had spread and people were arriving in droves for the chance to see it on Saturday, when it would be unveiled for the paying public.

  “Is it true that the jaw is longer than my arm?” the man sitting across from Anders asked. He was gnawing on a fatty piece of beef. “Gracious God!” he said when Anders nodded vaguely. “How many animals do you think it crushed?”

  “Crushed?” the woman to his left said, eyes wide. “This is like something from a horrible dream. Somebody pinch me. I’m afraid if I see it once, I’ll see it everywhere I go. I’ll never be rid of it again. It will be there—and there and there—hiding behind every house and tree.”

  “I suspect it wouldn’t be very good at hiding behind trees,” the man said, “or anything else.”

  “You know,” another man said, tugging at his wiry gray chin beard, “I’ve heard Indian stories about beings that used to stalk this continent. They say that their ancestors were giants, just as big as the buffalo and lions that lived here. They say everything was bigger back then, including us.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Anders said. “Every creation is an improvement upon the last. We in the Present Age are God’s most perfect creation. Everything that came before us, God destroyed for a reason.”

  “But giant men. Can you imagine?”

  “Is it a form of crocodile?” the woman asked. “That’s what I heard.”

  Anders explained that though the bones indicated certain lizard qualities, it was not a crocodile but a distinct and unrelated species, heretofore undiscovered and unknown.

  “Heretofore undiscovered and unknown,” the man across from Anders repeated, his squirrel’s tail of a mustache shining with roast beef grease. “Now you sound like Ol’ Dab.”

  “Dabney Dubose,” Mrs. Lang said. “You know him, then?”

  “My whole life, just about. Been all over the world with him. London, Calcutta, Constantinople. No place that man hasn’t traveled to. If anyone can figure what the monster is, it’s him.”

  “To be well traveled hardly qualifies him for this,” Anders said.

  “Not the travel,” the man said, and formed two fingers into prongs that poked away from his eyes. “It’s this that qualifies him.”

  “And what is that, exactly?” Mrs. Lang asked.

  “Sight,” he said. “Insight. Outsight. Pastsight. Futuresight. Take your pick of the sights.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Lang said. “I for one think we should defer to Dr. Anders’s authority on these matters.”

  Anders nodded gratefully in her direction—though he couldn’t help wondering if she was right to do so.

  • • •

  Across town, at that very moment, a behemoth was being born.

  Dabney Dubose was not a patient man, and he had doubts about having his show ready in time with Anders at the helm. Perhaps another naturalist from our Academy might have been better suited to the task, it’s true. But then again, no other of our naturalists would have dared partner with such an unscrupulous man. As Anders was feasting on beef and potatoes and then later as he dreamed in the big white bed set up for him on the first floor of the boardinghouse, Dubose and his crew continued their work by the light of lanterns hanging from barn nails.

  “Make it bigger,” he instructed his team. “Do what you have to do. Put cork between the joints. I want it on all fours. That horny spike there—I want that on the head.”

  Mr. Gustafson, reinstated as architect, started with the feet, connecting tarsals and phalanges and claws with wires and rods. As the beast began to take shape on its wagon pedestal, Dubose clapped and cheered. Rough plaster molds were made to fill in the missing sections. When the rib cage collapsed, Gustafson had
them insert wooden dowels where the organs would have been. Bones were attached to bone, even when they did not properly join. Unnecessary parts were tossed aside. With all four legs on the ground, the spine sagged in the middle like a toothy smile. The tail pointed skyward at the tip. At the other end, the neck craned up and forward, as if the animal had just been caught in the act of feeding on a fresh carcass.

  The creature they were building of course bore no resemblance to what the physiology of its bones actually suggested. Dubose brought in his tailor to measure the beast and test various fabrics that might serve as a skin. They tried cotton and silk and wool but ultimately decided on a thin pounded leather, which they could ornament with layers of iridescent flakes. Dubose wanted to leave the top ridge of the spine exposed as proof that that their monster contained the actual bones. The tailor worked from the bottom up and, when he reached the spine, suggested that he glue on horsehair, dyed gray and blond, to resemble a scraggly mane. “Do it,” Dubose said. As the tailor’s assistants stitched the silvery flakes into the hide, the creature began to shimmer under the burning lamps.

  By midmorning, when Anders returned, he was stunned by the overnight transfiguration of the creature. What had been scattered and flat across the straw now towered overhead, twelve feet tall and at least thirty feet long, atop the cart bed. With its sparkling scales and hideous mane, the headless chimera was like something out of the Greek myths. Never in his wildest dreams had Anders imagined the behemoths as such.

  “As you can see”—Dubose stepped toward him—“we took the liberty of continuing your work last night. Your guidance was crucial.”

  “This is all wrong,” Anders said. “You need to strip it back down.”

  “As for the head,” Dubose said, undeterred, “do you have any ideas? I suppose we’ll need to dream up something, won’t we?”

  “Dream up?”

  “Yes, since we don’t have those bones.”

  “But if we dream it up, then how will it be accurate?”

  “I take your point, but people will be let down if it’s headless. Just give me a rough idea. Do you think it had tusks like the mammoths? That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? I have a few in my collection that we could include.”

  “No, I don’t think it had tusks. We can’t know what it had. You . . . you might as well make it a Cyclops. That’s how little we know. Why do we need to provide a head? Put up a sign, explain to people that the head has not yet been located. People will understand.”

  “Yes,” Dubose said, nodding. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. We’ll figure something out, I’m sure. You will be coming to the show on Saturday, I hope? Your admission will be complimentary, that goes without saying.”

  He escorted Anders out of the barn and shook his hand amicably. “See you then,” the showman said, and returned to his project. In a daze Anders wandered back in the direction of the ramshackle farmhouse, his toes so cold and numb in the tips of his shoes that he had to subtract them from the idea of his feet. It was a drizzly day, the earth and sky washed in gray. Temp appeared on the horizon as a peachy dot, moving toward him at a run. As the distance closed, Anders was surprised to discover certain changes in his assistant. Temp’s hair had been brushed flat and parted neatly down the middle. Not only that, the child was wearing an oversized dress with a white ruffled collar and a dusty too-long hem. Temp, he realized, was a girl.

  “You like it?” she asked, pulling the loose fabric tighter at the hips. “I didn’t want it, but my daddy said it was time I dressed right.”

  Anders didn’t know what to say. That he’d so grossly miscategorized a member of his own species was no doubt distressing. How could he understand a creature that was thousands of years behind him, if he couldn’t make sense of the world directly in front of him?

  Temp smiled politely and held out a small gray bone. “There’s a whole pile of these in the barn,” she said. “The ones they couldn’t get to fit right. I don’t think anyone will miss it.”

  Anders accepted the bone. It was one of the creature’s ribs. “Did they see you take it?” he asked, already tucking the bone into his jacket pocket.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “They’re very busy.”

  • • •

  Of all those forms now passed into extinction, the Gollysaurus, as I have dubbed it, is the most impressive and inspiring. Anders’s letter, composed later that afternoon in his room at the boardinghouse, reached us far too late to be of any use. Contained therein was what he called “a serious attempt at objective description despite his overwhelming excitement.” Only in his conclusion did he reveal to us his failure to procure the bones, and Dubose’s scheme to use them as an exhibit for his Monsters from a Darker Age. But through other sources we had been kept well apprised of developments in Golly and our representatives were already en route to try to repair the situation.

  When Mrs. Lang knocked on his door for supper that evening, Anders shouted that he wasn’t hungry and was in bed with a headache. Alarmed, Mrs. Lang let herself into the room to make sure that her guest was comfortable. Did he want food brought to him, perhaps? Could she prepare a wet cloth for his forehead? Did he want the windows open or closed? Anders wanted only to be left alone. He wanted to sulk. But Mrs. Lang refused to abandon him in his time of need. “It could be a fever,” she said.

  She dragged a chair to the edge of his bed and sat with a book while he pretended to sleep. Afternoon sunlight through the window danced violently, orange and red, inside his lids. When the room went dark, he opened his eyes and discovered that Mrs. Lang, by candlelight, was watching his chest rise and fall.

  “I’m feeling better,” he said.

  “It was the bones that did this to you.”

  “No,” he said, not mentioning the bone under his pillow. “That’s not possible. Sickness comes from the air. From unhealthy vapors. It’s been proven.”

  “Was it bad air that killed off the monsters, then? Maybe some of that bad air got trapped down there in its grave.” She grabbed his hand. “Now we’ll all get sick, everyone in town.”

  Anders assured her that she was mistaken, that the monster posed no real threat, at least not to her physical health. “If you say so,” Mrs. Lang said. He asked her to retrieve the paper and pen from his bag. When she brought it to him, he thanked her for taking such good care of him. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “You can go to bed now. Really.”

  She hesitated at the door but, seeing him put the pen to paper, left the room. Anders was writing a letter to his fiancée. In it, he likened his love for her to a bed of flowers blooming in unison. He wrote that he was her moon, forever loyal in his revolutions.

  My trip hasn’t gone as planned, he confessed, finally, and told her of Dubose and the bones and their upcoming unveiling, and of Temp, the girl he mistook for a boy, and then, curiously, of his own misgivings regarding our scientific mission. Some part of me fears, he wrote, that the world as we know it only exists as a set of shared beliefs, which change and grow according to our needs and intellects. Meaning, the world becomes more complex as we do, forever outwitting and confounding us. In the beginning, perhaps all that was needed to sustain us was the idea of a small garden, a plot of land bordered on all sides by nothingness. The earth formed around us as we explored it, the stars burst into light when we looked up. Microorganisms might have only sprouted into being the first time we gazed through a microscope. The sun might have revolved around the earth until the very moment we needed it to be otherwise. Did we dream the fossils into the ground? If enough of us believed it possible, maybe Dubose’s monster would walk right out of the barn and destroy us all. I fear we’re on a wall that can’t be scaled, one we climb with one hand while we build it higher with the other. If that’s the case, we might as well stand back and just paint pictures across the stones—one-eyed monsters, cataclysmic floods, the universe as imagined by a caveman or a carnival
barker or a wild-haired prophet.

  Forgive me, my darling, he concluded. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been napping with a fossil under my pillow.

  His disturbing and faithless letter is stored in our archives to this day along with Dr. Anders’s other personal papers, all willed to our collection at the time of his death.

  • • •

  The Dubose Brothers Traveling Museum arrived on Saturday morning. Sitting on the front porch of the boardinghouse after his cold bath and simple breakfast, Anders watched people stream into town on foot and on horseback, entire families crammed onto rattling carts. Anders’s ears burned from the cold. Mrs. Lang emerged from the house in a long brown jacket over a frilly apple-green dress.

  “Are you sure you won’t join us?” she asked.

  Anders had decided to skip the event. “I’ll be fine here. Go ahead.”

  Slowly the boardinghouse emptied, and Anders was alone. Across the street the shop had closed its doors for the day. A billy goat with a white sagging neck and two short horns hopscotched down the street and stopped abruptly to consider Anders rocking on the porch. It stepped toward the gate that divided them. But Anders had no scraps for it.

  One day, after the next Catastrophe, the town might look like this, empty and abandoned to the billy goats. In his notebook, Anders sketched his own skeleton embedded in the stone beneath the boardinghouse porch. He imagined his gray bones on a pedestal, the identifiable fissures in the right femur that would make him a particularly interesting specimen. If his skull was missing, some future showman would stick some other animal’s head there, a skull disproportionate to his own body, a fox head perhaps, its long, thin, haggard mouth with sharp hanging incisors, eyes on the side of its head. A monster for a brighter age. They’d give him a glittery hide, a demon’s horns.