by Philip Roth
I should have expected it. I had expected it. I had looked forward to it. I would have thought that I couldn't get enough of it. Yet I did. I was starting college the following week, and my education with Ira had ended. With a speed that was incredible, it was over. That innocence was over too. I had walked in the shack on Pickax Hill Road one person, and I was walking out another. Whatever the name of the driving new force that had come to the surface, it had come unbidden, all by itself, and was irreversible. The tearing away from my father, the straining of filial affection prompted by my infatuation with Ira, was now being replicated in my disillusionment with him.
Even when Ira took me to see his favorite local friend, Horace Bixton—who, with his son, Frank, ran a taxidermy business in a half-converted cow barn of two rooms next to the Bixton family farmhouse on a dirt road nearby—all Ira could talk about with Horace was what he'd been talking about nonstop with me. The year before, we'd been out there and I'd had a great time listening, not to Ira going on about Korea and Communism, but to Horace going on about taxidermy. That was why Ira had taken me out, to hear Horace go on about taxidermy. "You could write a radio play, Nathan, starring this guy and based on taxidermy alone." Ira's interest in taxidermy was part of a working-class fascination he still had, not so much with nature's beauty, but with man's interfering with nature, with industrialized nature and exploited nature, with nature man-touched, man-worn, man-defaced, and, as it was beginning to look out in the heart of zinc country, man-ruined.
When I walked in the Bixtons' door that first time, the bizarre clutter of the small front room staggered me: tanned skins piled up everywhere; antlers strung from the ceiling, tagged and hanging from bits of wire, back and forth the whole length of the room antlers by the dozens; enormous lacquered fish also hanging from the ceiling, shiny fish with extended sails, shiny fish with elongated swords, one shiny fish with a face like a monkey; animal heads—small, medium, large, and extralarge—mounted on every square inch of wall; a populous flock of ducks and geese and eagles and owls spread across the floor, many with their wings open as if in flight. There were pheasants and wild turkeys, there was a pelican, there was a swan, there was also, scattered furtively among the birds, a skunk, a bobcat, a coyote, and a pair of beavers. In dusty glass cases along the walls were the smaller birds, doves and pigeons, a small alligator as well as coiled snakes, lizards, turtles, rabbits, squirrels, and rodents of every kind, mice, weasels, and other ugly little things I could not name realistically nestled in wilted old natural tableaux. And the dust was everywhere, cloaking fur, feathers, pelts, everything.
Horace, a slight elderly man, himself not much taller than the span of the wings of his vulture, and wearing overalls and a khaki tractor hat, came out from the back to shake my hand, and when he saw my startled expression, he smiled apologetically. "Yeah," he said, "we don't throw much out."
"Horace," Ira said, looking way, way down to this elfin person who, Ira had told me, made his own hard cider and smoked his own meats and knew every bird by its song, "this is Nathan, a young high school writer. I told him what you told me about a good taxidermist: the test of a good taxidermist is to create the illusion of life. He says, 'That's the test of a good writer,' and so I brought him over so you two artistes could chew the fat."
"Well, we take our work seriously," Horace informed me. "We do everything. Fish, birds, mammals. Game heads. All positions, all species."
"Tell him about that beast," Ira said with a laugh, pointing to a tall bird on stalky legs that looked to me like a nightmare rooster.
"That's a cassowary," Horace said. "Big bird from New Guinea. Don't fly. This here was in a circus. A traveling circus sideshow, and it died, and back in '38 they brought it to me and I stuffed it, and the circus never came back for it. That's an oryx," he said, beginning to differentiate his handiwork for me. "That's Cooper's hawk flying. Cape buffalo skull—that's called the European mount, the top half of the skull. These are the antlers of an elk. Huge. A wildebeest—the top of the skull with the fur there..."
We were half an hour making the safari through the front show-room, and when we stepped into the back workroom—"the shop," as Horace called it—there was Frank, a balding man of about forty, a full-scale model of his father, sitting at a bloody table skinning a fox with a knife that, we later learned, Frank himself had made out of a hacksaw blade.
"Different animals, you know, have different smells," Horace explained to me. "You smell the fox?"
I nodded.
"Yep, there's an odor associated with the fox," Horace said. "It's not as pleasant as it might be."
Frank had nearly all of the fox's right hind leg skinned clear down to raw muscle and bone. "That one," said Horace, "is going to be mounted whole. It's going to look like a lifelike fox." The fox, freshly shot, lay there looking like a lifelike fox already, only asleep. We all sat around the table while Frank kept working neatly away. "Frank has very nimble fingers," Horace said with a father's pride. "A lot of people can do the fox and the bear and the deer and the big birds, but my son can do the songbirds, too." Frank's prize homemade tool, Horace said, was a tiny brain spoon, for the small birds, of a kind you could not begin to buy. By the time Ira and I got up to go, Frank, who was deaf and could not speak, had skinned the whole fox so it was down to an emaciated-looking red carcass about the size of a newborn human baby.
"People eat fox?" Ira asked.
"Not normally," said Horace. "But during the Depression we used to try things. Everybody was in the same fix then, you know—no meat. We ate possum, woodchuck, rabbits."
"What was good?" Ira asked.
"It was all good. We was always hungry. During the Depression you ate anything you could get. We ate crow."
"What's crow like?"
"Well, the trouble with crow is you don't know how old the darn things are. One crow, it was like shoe leather. Some of those crows were only really fit for soup. We used to eat squirrel."
"How do you cook a squirrel?"
"Black cast-iron pot. Wife used to trap squirrels. She'd skin 'em, and when she had three, she'd cook 'em in the pot. You just eat 'em like chicken legs."
"Got to bring my little woman over," Ira said, "so's you can give her the recipe."
"One time the wife tried to feed me raccoon. But I knew. She said it was black bear." Horace laughed. "She was a good cook. She died on Groundhog Day. Seven years ago."
"When did you get that in, Horace?" Ira was motioning above Horace's tractor hat to the outthrust head of a wild boar mounted on the wall; it hung between shelves loaded with the wire frames and the frames of burlap impregnated with plaster over which animal skins were stretched and adjusted and sewn back together to create the illusion of life. The boar was every inch a beast, a great beast at that, blackish with a brown throat and a whitish mask of hairs between the eyes and adorning its jowls, and a snout as big and black and hard as a wet black stone. Its jaws were set menacingly open so that you could see the rawness of the mouth's carnivorous interior and the imposing white tusklike teeth. The boar had the illusion of life, all right; so too, as yet, did Frank's fox, whose stink I could hardly stand.
"Boar looks real," Ira said.
"Oh, that's real. The tongue isn't real, though. The tongue is fake. Hunter wanted the original teeth. Usually we use fake ones, because by and by the originals crack. They kind of get brittle and fall apart. But he wanted its real teeth in there so we put its real ones in there."
"How long did that take you, from day one?"
"That would be about three days, twenty hours."
"How much you get to do that boar?"
"Seventy dollars."
"To me that seems cheap," Ira said.
"You're used to New York City prices," Horace told him.
"You get the whole boar or just the head?"
"Usually the whole skull is in there and it's cut off at the back of the neck. We do get on occasion whole bear, black bear—a tiger I did."
"A tiger? Did you? You never told me that." I could see that though Ira was leading Horace on for the benefit of my education as a writer, he also liked questioning him in order to hear him reply in his small, sharp, chirpy voice, a voice that sounded as if it had been whittled out of a piece of wood. "Where was the tiger shot?" Ira asked.
"It's a guy who owns 'em, like pets. One of them died. And they're valuable, the skins, and he wanted this one made into a rug. He called up, and he put it on a stretcher, and Frank got it right in the car and brought it in, the whole thing. Because they didn't know how to skin it or anything."
"And did you know how to do a tiger, or did you have to look it up in a book?"
"A book, Ira? No, Ira, no book. Once you been doing it for a while you can figure out just about any animal."
Ira said to me, "You got any questions you want Horace to answer? Anything you want to know for school?"
Just to be listening, I couldn't have been any happier, and so I mouthed "No."
"Was it fun to skin that tiger, Horace?" Ira asked.
"Yes. I enjoyed it. I got a fellow and I hired him to take a home movie, a movie of the whole process, and I showed it at Thanksgiving that year."
"Before or after dinner?" Ira asked.
Horace smiled. Though there was no irony that I could discern in the practice of taxidermy, the taxidermist himself had a good American sense of fun. "Well, you're eating all day long, aren't you? Everybody remembered that Thanksgiving. In a taxidermy family they're used to things like that, but you can still always come up with a surprise, you know."
And so the talk continued, an amiable, quiet conversation with a little laughter in it that finished up with Horace making me a gift of a deer toe. tra throughout was as gentle and untroubled as I'd ever seen him with anyone. Except for my nausea from smelling the fox, I couldn't remember ever having been so unagitated myself in Ira's company. Nor had I ever before seen him so serious about something that wasn't world affairs or American politics or the failings of the human race. Talking about cooking crows and making a tiger into a rug and the cost of stuffing a wild boar outside New York City freed him to be unexcitable, at peace, almost unrecognizable as himself.
There was something so winning about those two men's good-humored absorption in each other (particularly with a beautiful animal being relieved of its lovely looks right under their noses) that I had to wonder afterward if this person who didn't have to get all stirred up and go through all that Ira-ish emotion to have a conversation wasn't perhaps the real, if unseen, inactive Ira and the other, the furious radical, an impersonation, an imitation of something, like his Lincoln or the boar's tongue. The respect and fondness that Ira had for Horace Bixton suggested even to me, a boy, that there was a very simple world of simple people and simple satisfactions into which Ira might have drifted, where all his vibrating passions, where all that equipped him (and ill equipped him) for society's onslaught might have been remade and even pacified. Maybe with a son like Frank whose nimble fingers he could be proud of and a wife who knew how to trap and cook a squirrel, maybe by appropriating those sorts of near-at-hand things, by making his own hard cider and smoking his own meats and wearing overalls and a khaki tractor hat and by listening to the songbirds sing ... And then again, maybe not. Maybe to be, like Horace, without a great enemy would have made life even more impossible for Ira to tolerate than it already was.
The second year we went out to see Horace, there was no laughter in the conversation and Ira did all the talking.
Frank was skinning a deer's head—"Frank," Horace said, "can do deer head with his eyes closed"—while Horace sat hunched over the other end of the worktable "preparing skulls." Laid out before him was an assortment of very small skulls he was repairing with wire and glue. Some science teachers at a school over in Easton wanted a collection of small mammal skulls, and they knew Horace might have what they wanted because, he told me, grinning at the fragile, tiny bones before him, "I don't throw nothin' out."
"Horace," Ira was saying, "can any American citizen who has half a brain believe that the North Korean Communist troops will get into ships and travel six thousand miles and take over the United States? Can you believe that?"
Without looking up from the skull of a muskrat whose loose teeth he was fixing in its jaw with glue, Horace slowly shook his head.
"But this is exactly what people are saying," Ira told him. "'You have to watch out for the Communist threat—they're going to take over this country.' This Truman is showing the Republicans his muscle—that's what he is up to. That's what this is all about. Showing his muscle at the expense of innocent Koreans. We're going in there and all to prop up this fascist bastard Syngman Rhee. We're going to bomb those sons of bitches, y'understand? President Wonderful Truman. General Wonderful MacArthur ..."
And, unable to stop myself from being bored by the tireless harangue that was Ira's primal script, I was thinking, spitefully, "Frank doesn't know how lucky he is to be deaf. That muskrat doesn't know how lucky it is to be dead. That deer..." Et cetera.
Same thing happened—Syngman Rhee, President Wonderful Truman, General Wonderful MacArthur—when we went by the rock dump out on the highway one morning to say hello to Tommy Minarek, a retired miner, a burly, hearty Slovak who had been working in the mines when Ira first showed up in Zinc Town in 1929 and who had taken a fatherly interest in Ira back then. Now Tommy worked for the town, looking after the rock dump—its one tourist attraction—where, along with serious mineral collectors, families sometimes drove out with their kids to go hunting through the vast dump for chunks of rock to take home and put under an ultraviolet light. Under the light, as Tommy explained to me, the minerals "fluoresce"—glow, that is, with fluorescent red, orange, purple, mustard, blue, cream, and green; some look to be made of black velvet.
Tommy sat on a big flat rock at the entrance to the dump, hatless in all weather, a handsome old fellow with a wide, square face, white hair, hazel eyes, and all his teeth. He charged the adults a quarter to go in and, though the town told him to charge the kids a dime, he always let the kids in free. "People come from all over the world to go in there," Tommy told me. "Some through the years that come every Saturday and Sunday, even wintertime. I make fires for certain people and they give me a few bucks for that. They come every Saturday or Sunday, rain or shine."
On the hood of Tommy's jalopy, parked directly beside the large flat rock where Tommy sat, he had samples of minerals from the collection in his own cellar spread out on a towel for sale, chunky specimens selling for as much as five and six dollars, pickle jars full of smaller specimens for a dollar fifty, and small brown paper bags full of bits and pieces of rock, which went for fifty cents. He kept the fifteen-, twenty-, and twenty-five-dollar stuff in the trunk of the car.
"In the back," he told me, "I got the more valuable things. I can't put 'em out here. I go sometimes across the road to Gary's machine shop, to use the toilet or somethin', and the stuff is out here ... I had two specimens last fall, in the back, guy put a black thing over 'em, and he's lookin' with a light, and I had two fifty-dollar specimens in the car and he got 'em both."
The year before, I had sat alone with Tommy outside the rock dump, watching him deal with the tourists and the collectors and listening to his spiel (and later I wrote a radio play about that morning called The Old Miner). That was the morning after he'd come to have a hot dog dinner with us at the shack. Ira was at me, educating me, all the time when I was up at the shack, and Tommy was brought in as visiting lecturer, to give me the lowdown on the plight of the miner before the union came in.
"Tell Nathan about your dad, Tom. Tell him what happened to your dad."
"My dad died from workin' in the mine. Him and another guy went in a place where two other guys worked every day, in a raise, a vertical hole. Both of them didn't show up that day. It's a ways up, over a hundred feet up. My dad and another guy the boss sent in there, a young guy, a husky guy—was he a beautiful built guy! I went to
the hospital and I seen the guy and he wasn't in bed, and my dad was stretched out, didn't even move. I never seen him move. The second day I come in, this other guy was talkin' to another guy, joking, he wasn't even in bed even. My dad was in bed."
Tommy was born in 1880 and started working in the mines in 1902, "May the twenty-fourth," he told me, "1902. That's about the time Thomas Edison was up here, the famous inventor, experimentin'." Though Tommy, despite his years in the mines, was a robust, upright human specimen who hardly looked to be seventy, he had himself to confess that he was not as alert as he'd once been, and every time he got a little befuddled or got stalled in his story, Ira had to get him on the trail again. "I don't think that quick no more," Tommy told us. "I have to follow myself back, starting with the ABCs, you know, and try to hit into it. Get into it somewhere. I'm still alert, but not as good as I was."