by Laura Furman
The blood and mucus from Hulda’s innards and the amniotic bath that still covered her haunches and much of the pups—all this Hulda began to clear with strokes of her stretching tongue. She birthed the final two placentas. She lapped them out and fed on them in slurps as though swallowing oysters, and went back to licking at the pups, which were truly animals now, with tails and legs and greed for milk.
She sneezed with fatigue.
Her master ran inside the parlor to fetch a blanket onto which to move the new family once the mess was cleared.
Where was the sire of the pups in all this? Or in the birthing and rearing of nearly all the animals dearest to us? Tomcats, studhorses, rams, his own father and Frigg’s, bulls, boars, and billies—none of them lost a bead of sweat for their young. The fatherly sentiments of human beings must come, when they do, from the extra hands farming used to require before machines. Men are only good, Ásmundur said to himself, insofar as we are womanly.
When he returned, Hulda had tidied the box. Two of the pups seemed to have lost their teats and gotten buried in the loose straw. He picked through it but didn’t find them.
Hulda went on bathing the two children at her breast. Her cavernous eyes caught her master, as though distracted by love. She licked and looked up.
“My good sweet,” he said. He unfolded the blanket on the floor and scratched her snout.
Hulda licked again, and looked up at Ásmundur, licked again—then she lifted the smaller of the pups with her long tongue, and, in a flick of her jaw, swallowed the panting babe.
Ásmundur Gudmundsson was paralyzed.
The dog bathed the other pup at her breast, which went on working her flesh with its forepaws. Then she repeated the whole business, eating the pup quite delicately, retracting the flesh of her muzzle from the teeth as though to avoid smearing lipstick on a fork.
He lifted her from the box and dumped it out, raking the wet straw for life, and found nothing. Meantime Hulda fell asleep on the blanket, her stomach growling with strange effort.
Ásmundur went outside and vomited in the mud.
By the following year, while he was consumed with the autumn hay harvesting and Íris and Frigg were visiting to celebrate Frigg’s fifth birthday, Hulda was giving birth again. In a half-hidden pile of slag under the porch, she whelped a litter of three and had swallowed two before Frigg took matters into her own hands and plucked the last one from Hulda’s gooey mouth.
Frigg handed the thing to her mother, who washed it in the kitchen sink and dried it. Then Frigg held it in a dishrag inside her coat, petting it with the end of her pigtail and singing it the lullaby about the outlaw woman who threw her baby down a waterfall.
The three of them deliberated a means of breaking Hulda of her passion for her own meat and bones. “They’re wet, like food,” Frigg said with authority. And her uncle agreed that if they only gave Hulda a dry pup she might, having no precedent in her own life, refer to the buried memory of all lady mammals and suckle it.
Frigg named the surviving puppy Vigdís, although she called the pup from the beginning by its full Icelandic name, Vigdís Huldasdóttir. And Ásmundur followed her lead, hoping to append some of his feelings for the bitch to its offspring.
Hulda let it nurse for a week, then ran off to tell the sheep what to do. She followed Ásmundur into the shower stall until he had to nudge her out with his foot and bar the door.
Íris’s yearly municipal stipend for day care ran out, and Frigg stayed with her uncle at the farm, feeding the pup with ewe’s milk from an eyedropper. She kept the infant in a fanny pack she wore frontward, so that wherever the girl hopped along the pup looked out from her pouch.
Meantime, the girl co-opted her uncle’s ardor for repairing the glasshouse and kept him at it every morning. The finished lights dangled ten feet overhead on pulleys strung with rope he could raise or lower as the season dictated. For the time being, he had wrapped the ceiling with plastic to keep drips out of his wires. But the walls’ cracked glass panes and sashes needed laborious patching.
He could not simply go to the capital and buy new panes. None would fit. His grandfather had spent years rummaging flea markets where people were getting rid of old windows, which he assembled into long walls and a ceiling, fitting the glass in wood sashes.
Every tenth pane or so had broken, and Ásmundur passed his evenings shaping new ones from scrap glass with a steel cutter he had dug up at the junk store and bought for the promise of a joint of spring lamb.
Why the girl had such patience for tedium with her uncle he could never comprehend. She had satellite television at home, but so did he. In the dark mornings, she waited for him at the breakfast table and said, “Good morning, Uncle. What do we do today? Caulk?”
It was nearly Christmas again, and time under the warm lamps kept him sane as the darkness pervaded every other hour at that time of year. He turned the thermostat up to twenty-five Celsius and they worked in T-shirts. Hulda followed always, looking querulously at the girl and her sagging pouch.
Today the man and the girl worked on sashes. Frigg walked along the scaffold with a candle, tracing them. Where the flame flickered, Ásmundur pumped the caulking gun and laid a bead of silicone where the air was drafting. Then Frigg dipped her finger in a glass of water and smoothed the patch.
Frigg had great hopes for banana trees, which she had learned in day care were grown elsewhere in Iceland in such houses. We could “make a killing,” she said, using the English phrase she had picked up long ago from his wife.
The pup squeaked in its pouch, which she carried even to the bedroom, where her mother had slept as a girl. Frigg was good about changing the straw in the pouch but she did smell perpetually of urine. If Hulda lurked nearby, Frigg zipped the pouch entirely, leaving only a hole she had cut with a scissors for air.
“Frigg, you really must let Vigdís Huldasdóttir out to play,” he said.
“But the other one,” she said, pointing her foot at the dog that lay dozing two meters beneath where her master stood.
“Let’s just try for a little while and see.”
Frigg replied, “No.”
“Frigg, you must. How would you like to spend your days and nights in a bag?”
“Just okay,” she said. “I would like it just okay.”
In fact, she might. Like her mother, she always sought to share a blanket on the couch, touching toes.
“I told you let her down,” he said. “For one hour. Then you see how she likes it.”
He had let his temper out. Frigg gave a start, squeezed her mouth, and her eyes welled.
“Don’t cry at me, now,” he said. With all the strength in his ghoulish face, he tried to make his muscles do what other people’s did when they smiled.
Frigg rattled down the scaffold steps. Her nerve, rather than her obedience, impressed him. She sat on the bottom step and whipped the puppy out and set it on the floor. The light dazzled the animal, and it sat awhile on her foot winking, before it sniffed at the pipes and jumped back when its nose tapped the hot metal.
At the moment Ásmundur relit the candle, Frigg let out a cracking scream.
Hulda had woken up, snapped at the puppy’s hind, and bitten off its tail. In a second snatch, she now had the head of Vigdís Huldasdóttir down her throat; and Frigg was furiously beating the bitch about the ears and baying.
Ásmundur leapt from the scaffold—he later learned that he sprained his ankle—and with the toe of his overshoe punted Hulda’s breast. The bitch screeched and coughed the wet puppy onto the floor.
The girl clutched Vigdís Huldasdóttir to her shirt while blood dappled it.
Hulda sprang back from the corner where she had landed and embraced Ásmundur’s waist in her forelegs. She barked: Hello! And her tongue shot out, and she did her best to wash the tacky silicone from his fingers.
Almost everything he told Íris on the phone the next morning was true. The girl was unharmed. The pup had no tail anymore. He had da
bbed iodine on the stub and taped it. He gave the pup back to Frigg, who went to bed with it that night. While she slept, Ásmundur had indeed driven off with the bitch in the car—Hulda always jubilated to taste the breeze through the passenger window.
But he had not in fact driven east through the pasture and shot her and buried her in the snow. He had driven two hours west to the capital, weeping wickedly, and found the park in Reykjavík where he had seen other dogs congregate, eating garbage and mice. The city would probably catch and euthanize her. It was treason all over again, of the worst kind, against someone—no, she was a thing, an it, he kept saying aloud—whose love for him no trespass of his would ever challenge.
In the park, he reached over her and popped the passenger door. Snow fell. The green aurora moved like a theater curtain in a breeze. She would not get out—it would not get out. He went around the side of the car, the frigid wind petrifying his snot and biting his ears, and found a lava rock and threw it into the trees. She was not normally the fetching sort. She was the sort that sought out and gathered. He made to run in his galoshes across the snow at high speed. She tore after him, as always desperate to get ahead, bounding in the snow gleefully at the game. Then he ran back to the car and raced away, closing the passenger door at a stop sign.
He made a maze of turns through the classier parts of the city, with wide boulevards where it was possible to speed and turn suddenly. But in the mirror he did not see her trailing. And at the main highway he slammed the accelerator, rocketing at twice the legal speed through the endless night.
Íris took time off from work for the holidays and came to stay at the farm for a week.
“Children forget everything,” she said with insouciance, as though either she or her brother had mislaid a single harsh word from their mother and could not recall in detail the shape of the stick their grandfather had used to thrash them.
Frigg did seem okay though, and let Vigdís Huldasdóttir play outside the pouch, but only in the glasshouse with its lights burning so she could trace the puppy’s every step.
Íris roasted a goose Ásmundur had shot. He read through two weeks of the London Times that she had brought him from Reykjavík. Frigg sat close beside him at the kitchen table, paging through seed catalogs from Germany in search of exotic fruits and inquiring after their suitability for the climate of the glasshouse.
“Whatever you like, my dear,” Ásmundur murmured. “But avocado can take many years.” Other farmers nearby had done well lately selling roses and tomatoes in the city. Well meant earning in a season what he had used to blow on a night out in Moscow, with the woman who had lived with him in the house, in the old days.
It was the greatest happiness left to him to eat goose with his sister and the girl on New Year’s Eve, picking pellets from the meat. And to keep the old family custom of a nap afterward on the sheepskin couches still firm with horsehair stuffing. And then to wake up in the evening and to run outside to the hot spring, barefoot in their robes.
All three climbed naked into the well of the spring. The steam that always enshrouded it swelled in its obscurity throughout the winter like an enormous fun house. The silica in the water had accreted over the years into pearly walls in the pool basin. Their grandparents had maintained that the water there cured ailments from eczema to pimples to the curses of witches that lived under rocks. His sister’s red breasts drooped now as his mother’s had, the areolas still wide from Frigg’s nursing. The adults drank beer, and Frigg malt with juice. When the water got too warm, they scooped some snow into it.
Every so often on the distant highway cars passed. Frigg counted them. She had persuaded them to allow the puppy to swim in the spring; they agreed only on the condition that she be vigilant lest it defecate in the water. “Eleven!” Frigg said at a car from the west.
Íris had stretched an extension cord from the glasshouse generator and plugged a boom box into it that played at terrible volume the thudding club music Ásmundur could tolerate only if he was drinking.
The music blared so loudly that at first when Frigg claimed she heard something cracking the snow outside the great cloud of steam, they didn’t believe her.
“Shush, it’s only a Christmas elf,” her mother said.
But then he heard it too. Steps. Assertive then tentative, as though nosing about.
And Frigg, with a mother’s weird sensual acuity, screamed, “Hulda! Hulda! Hulda!”
Ásmundur sprang from the pool, naked, and ran limping around the far edge of the cloud to the farmhouse.
The shotgun shells were in a teacup at the bottom of the linen chest. He loaded the gun at a sprint. He threw his foot in a galosh and slipped to the floor, his coccyx smacking the tile. He pulled on the boot and ran into the warm cloud.
At the spring, Frigg cried in furious whispers, “It will eat her! It will eat her!” clutching the squirming pup and pointing into the steam in the direction of the glasshouse.
Ásmundur stayed at the spring long enough to perceive his sister grip the girl and mutter with flagging confidence, “Hulda is back in the rocks, dear, where she came from.” And then he turned back toward the glasshouse.
He emerged from the bright fog into brighter light still, where the glasshouse lights blazed over the spinach they had planted the week before. And the light blinded him. He really could not see anything. His eyes were in pain. His foreskin froze excruciatingly in a blistering gust. But his need now to kill the animal approaching around the other side of the glasshouse overpowered him. He heard it coming, crack by crack in the snow. The wind stung his lungs, and the veins in his thighs stuck out blue and monstrous.
He wanted to breathe, though the air was ice itself, and he breathed, and aimed his heart at the animal approaching the corner of the crystal box, the butt of the gun jammed to his shoulder. Blinking his one open eye to keep its surface from freezing.
His treasonous thumping throat called out, “Come here, my sweet.”
And the animal rounded the corner, its shape somehow elongated by the sodium lamps. Trusting his voice, it approached him. Too tall. Far too tall, as fear is. His exposed pupil shrank. The thing kept coming.
It was a woman.
It was a woman with hardly any neck at all and a hat tied around the white mass of her hair. She stood on two human legs, in a blue parka, shivering.
It was a woman.
It was you.
Alice Munro
Corrie
“IT ISN’T A good thing to have the money concentrated all in the one family, the way you do in a place like this,” Mr. Carlton said. “I mean, for a girl like my daughter Corrie here. For example, I mean, like her. It isn’t good. Nobody on the same level.”
Corrie was right across the table, looking their guest in the eye. She seemed to think this was funny.
“Who’s she going to marry?” her father continued. “She’s twenty-five.”
Corrie raised her eyebrows, made a face.
“You missed a year,” she said. “Twenty-six.”
“Go ahead,” her father said. “Laugh all you like.”
She laughed out loud, and, indeed, what else could she do? the guest thought. His name was Howard Ritchie, and he was only a few years older than she was, but already equipped with a wife and a young family, as her father had immediately found out.
Her expressions changed very quickly. She had bright-white teeth and short, curly, nearly black hair. High cheekbones that caught the light. Not a soft woman. Not much meat on the bone, which was the sort of thing her father might find to say next. Howard Ritchie thought of her as the type of girl who spent a lot of time playing golf and tennis. In spite of her quick tongue, he expected her to have a conventional mind.
He was an architect, just getting started on a career. Mr. Carlton insisted on referring to him as a church architect, because he was at present restoring the tower of the town’s Anglican church. A tower that had been on the verge of toppling until Mr. Carlton came to its rescue. Mr. C
arlton was not an Anglican—he had pointed that out several times. His church was the Methodist, and he was Methodist to the core, which was why he kept no liquor in the house. But a fine church like the Anglican ought not to be let to go to wrack and ruin. No hope looking to the Anglicans to do anything—they were a poor class of Irish Protestants, who would have taken the tower down and put up something that was a blemish on the town. They didn’t have the shekels, of course, and they wouldn’t understand the need for an architect, rather than a carpenter. A church architect.
The dining room was hideous, at least in Howard’s opinion. This was the mid-fifties, but everything looked as if it had been in place before the turn of the century. The food was barely all right. The man at the head of the table never stopped talking. You’d think the girl would be exhausted by it, but she seemed mostly to be on the verge of laughing. Before she was done with her dessert, she lit a cigarette. She offered Howard one, saying, quite audibly, “Don’t mind Daddy.” He accepted, but didn’t think the better of her.
Spoiled rich miss. Unmannerly.
Out of the blue, she asked him what he thought of the Saskatchewan Premier, Tommy Douglas.
He said that his wife supported him. Actually, his wife didn’t think Douglas was far left enough, but he wasn’t going to get into that.
“Daddy loves him. Daddy’s a Communist.”
This brought a snort from Mr. Carlton that didn’t squelch her.
“Well, you laugh at his jokes,” she told her father.
Shortly after that, she took Howard out to look at the grounds. The house was directly across the street from the factory, which made men’s boots and work shoes. Behind the house, however, were wide lawns and the river that curled halfway around the town. There was a worn path down to its bank. She led the way, and he was able to see what he hadn’t been sure of before. She was lame in one leg.