Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  A carpenter bee will bore a perfectly round circle into dead wood and from there will tunnel relentlessly, carting the sawdust out in pale jodhpurs on his back legs, until he has fashioned a straight hallway a foot or more long, at the end of which he installs his queen. I imagine the miner’s tunnel is something like this at first. It goes straight into the mountain, the rock tapped back, the thready vein of gold or silver or iron ore patiently trammeled through all its whimsical halts and flushes. But then, I imagine, something happens and a kind of madness ensues. It isn’t long before the miner is blasting—tamped explosions shuddering the mountain’s flanks—and the tunnels branch off, craze wildly, turn in on themselves.

  I have never seen the miner’s camp, but I know it is like this because of what has been left behind. Carpenter bees form colonies, each black female armed with a painful sting. Eventually the males, who are single-minded and industrious, will tunnel their homes hollow and the whole structure—a log, a shed, a house—falls in on itself. It is like this with the mine, although the bees move on and I suspect were I to look at the end of one of the tunnels I would find the real bones of a real man jumbled dry under his rotting clothes.

  Regardless, the mine tunnels collapsed. Downslope from the mine’s original diggings, we see the result as the mountain leans into itself and finds only still, black air. Here also are the poisons that were bound in the rock: acids and hard mineral leeching, natural toxins loosed and mixed with the chemicals the miner used to smelt the ore. They have seeped into the ground water that streams down the mountain’s sides and formed their own little gully where they leak from the lip of the cave and collect in a second pool downhill from the one Daniel bathed his wrists in and used to wet his pretty beard. Here the water is sick, a mineral green that is almost luscious, and it leaves an orange stain on the rock. It smells and nothing will grow around its edges.

  The cave is foul, soft and rotting. It is unnatural, an embarrassment. If we think of the place the old woman visited as the home of the Oracle—a round little chamber carved at the end of progress—then this is more like an Orifice, but not a tidy one that could speak or blink, excrete or lengthen and quiver. This cave is an interruption. A wound left open to weep and suck.

  I came upon this place as a girl and was so leveled by it I squatted on the loamy ground and peed, my urine soaking into the heavy fabric of my jeans. Even now, my instinct is the same, but I am much older and have mastered those parts of myself that were once strange and wild. Now, I listen, edging closer to the cave’s mouth as the wind picks up and sweeps across it. What I hear is broken, senseless, a mad jumble as all the voices of the mountain cross each other, a blatting as of gasses channeled the wrong way through the body. A hideous release. It is the Orifice and I write down every sound, hoping for some recognizable truth.

  Sad to say, Ingrid, you are a prop in this scene. I have left you by the fire where Daniel wedges you in the crook of his arm as he sucks the lasts of the rabbit’s juices from his fingers. Jacob, squatting between Daniel and the fire pit, shifts his weight to protect you from the heat, but also to shield me from Daniel should he look up. To hide what I am doing which is taking sheets of paper from the manuscript I have stashed in my pack and dipping them one by one in the Orifice’s waters.

  “Okay,” says Daniel, passing you to Jacob who has motioned for you. “Keep the fire up,” he says to me, “will you?”

  I will. I am good at this, at stoking, at coaxing something higher.

  I clear away the luncheon things, scrub out the camp plates with pine straw and toss the last scraps of the rabbit into the fire where they blacken and shrivel. Jacob, with you in his arms, crosses the poisoned stream in one long stride and Daniel follows him, stumbling into a jog, lunging over the water. I can see your head bobbing over Jacob’s shoulder. He holds you with a firm, practical air the way a man might hold a loaf of bread still wrapped in its white paper, or a round rock he was planning to transform into part of a wall. Though he’s doing nothing wrong—you are calm, your chin resting on his shoulder, your mouth loose and wet—Jacob looks so little like a man holding a baby that he makes Daniel nervous. He trails behind Jacob, lifting his arms to you at each dip or hummock in the ground.

  When Jacob reaches the water’s edge, Daniel says, “I’ll do it. Can I do it? Does it matter which one of us holds her?” and, for once, lifts you out of Jacob’s arms without waiting for a reply. Daniel cradles you on your back, too low. This is a mistake: you’re cramped, your lungs compressed and you can no longer see the view. You begin to greet and stretch your neck, thrusting your hands in fists out before you. Jacob stands back and looks at me. He nods; my husband, brown and sleek as a mink, just as solitary. It is time to begin.

  I first found the manuscript in the bottom of the cedar trunk Thingy kept at the foot of her and Daniel’s bed and used to house extra blankets and sweaters. I was clearing up. It was only a few days after she died, in that dark period when you were taken from me and kept in the hospital for observation while Mrs. Clawson perched in the waiting room like a blonde mantis, shocked temporarily sober and brittle with suspicion. Mrs. Clawson is many things, but she is not a fool. I’m sorry to say, Ingrid, she disliked you from the start.

  Thingy was keeping the manuscript in a series of biscuit tins, three of them, different sizes and patterns. They were under everything else in the trunk: the pink sateen-trimmed blanket and white and pink jacquard bedspread her mother had chosen for one of her childhood beds, the cable-knit sweaters—in mulberry, goldenrod, chestnut—and the tumble of wool hats, some with poms, some with rainbow ear flaps, all marked by strands of hair that poked like golden wire through the loose weave. As I lifted the first of them, I thought I had found a memento box. I was breathless, you understand, overwhelmed. It had been a strange few days. I felt something was off in me: a lodestone stripped of its magnetism, needle wildly oscillating. The house was empty. Jacob was in town making funeral arrangements and Daniel was in the hospital with Mrs. Clawson who would not speak or look at him. You were there, too: blue as a spacewoman in your plexiglass pod, your eyes bandaged lest they be dazzled by this planet’s strange light. I had opened a window and outside I could hear the sounds of summer coming to the mountain. Bird song and ambient rustle of new leaves spreading their palms toward the sky.

  If a truck had gone by or someone shouted, a dog barked or a lawnmower chugged into reluctant life, I would have been transported to my own childhood lying on the floor of my bedroom with a book open on my chest, watching the green dapple of the tulip poplar across the ceiling. Waiting for Thingy to come home from her swimming lessons and let herself in the backdoor. Calling to me, “Alice! Alice! Come on. I haven’t got all day,” as she crossed our kitchen, flip-flops slapping her heels, a trail of water snaking behind her as if she were a selkie or one of those lost children come back from the world underneath our world to rummage in my father’s refrigerator for something to eat.

  I opened the first box—a winter scene, children skating on a frozen pond ringed by dark, precise firs while in the far distance a doe, exposed!, sprung across a clearing, her white tail lost in the dazzle of the drifts. Instead of treasure, the junk of memory (a resurrection) I found a manuscript; chapters twelve through twenty-one, to be precise. Eventually, I read the whole thing. It was typed (when had she done this? where had she done this? there was no typewriter in the house, not even in the clutter of Daniel’s study which, you may be sure after this, Jacob thoroughly searched), neatly annotated and close to finished. Thingy, displaying a facility for both subterfuge and psychological theory I had never suspected, had compiled her research, analyzed her data sets, crafted charts and bar codes, carefully codified the experiences of a life I had thought she was merely living. All that remained was to draw her conclusions. She had left notes, hand written on graph paper in her loose cursive, but her final word on the subject had been a question.

  “Given the directly quantifiable development of the motherless
child into the fanatical narcissist can Subject A’s reaction to the introduction of a proxy-child (female: Subject X) be extrapolated within secure parameters? Does the cultural history of Subject A’s titular hive rival (Self) render the data-set too specifically referential? Consult Ellis and Wilson,” Thingy had written.

  Underneath this, in a different pen and dated the day she died—her last word on this, and almost any, subject—she had written, “If A is the worker who figures Self as the Queen, how will she perceive Subject X? Rival, sister, or child?”

  The other two tins—one red, one green and stamped with a worn, Nordic version of St. Nicholas—contained the rest of the manuscript. The middle and the beginning; I had started with the end.

  I found the title page in the green box. Narcissist Delusion in Collectivist Isolation, she had called the thing; then a semicolon, Broken Matrilineage as a Developmental Model for Gender Pathology; then another semicolon, Thingy never did know when to stop, Wicked Witches and How They Come to Be(e); long dash, A Case Study. Underneath all this she had typed: by Ingrid Isolte Clawson, and after her name, in letters that had been traced over many times, etched into the page, Thingy had written: PhD.

  So. That is what I was burning, Ingrid, if you would like to know, on the day your father and Jacob introduced you to the mountain.

  Thingy’s manuscript burned quickly in spite of its dampness. By the time I stirred the last pages into ash—“. . .indicative of both malevolence and a contradictory desire to please. . .” I read as the page disintegrated into lacework, spiderweb—the men had already waded out into the pool and thrust you under the water once, twice, three times, the spray which fanned out behind you glittering like gems, or magic seeds, or scales. With my eyes closed, I listened. In my mind, I copied what I heard, what echoed back from the mouth of the cave as the words Thingy had labored over lifted up on the drafts of smoke, drifted unmoored from their meaning.

  The water was very cold, the feel of it on skin like crunching an ice cube between one’s molars. Understandably, you were screaming by the time the men waded back to shore. Your face, usually so placid, was drawn tight as a knot and your ears, the skin around your flared nostrils and howling mouth, your fingertips and toes and the bobbed plug of your navel were turning a delicate bluish-gray. But I was there, a conscientious minder. I stoked the fire high and bright and soon we had you warm again, swaddled in towels like a grub pinking inside its cocoon. You were calm and I was calm. A wind across the Orifice carried over to us an old lost song about a turkey in the autumn forest, looking for his meal, imagining the sweet gold of the acorn when he finally found what he sought. A knot popped in the fire and a drift of papery ash rode up the spire of the flames.

  By the time we came back around the mountain to the house, it was night. The clearing was dark and unremarkable, the hens asleep, the house just a collection of boards and nails fastened together and bid to stay put. You were exhausted and made the transition from darkness to electric light without waking up. I took you upstairs, set you in the bassinet and lay down beside you in Jacob and my bed.

  It is easy to imagine a romance in this. Two girls in white—I had changed into my nightgown—asleep under the eaves of the house like dolls filled with wadded cotton. Often Thingy and I would go to bed before the men, both exhausted by Thingy’s pregnancy, and this is what I would imagine then, lying in the close dark that is the second floor of any wood-heated house, listening to the drift and pitch of Jacob and Daniel’s voices as they crossed the floors below.

  Two dolls, silly things, picked for their pretty faces and the engaging lilt of their limp necks. Two dolls, heads too large, bodies sexless blanks ready to be dressed. But then, with the house finally silent and the moon gone round the mountain peak, its crescent a soaring caliper measuring the sky, an eye might open, roll. A finger with a hole in the center just the right size for a stone might stir and lift.

  Most nights I went downstairs first and Thingy joined me. We sat in the kitchen, the only light a conical spill from the battered overhead lamp, and ate the leavings of dinner, often the makings for the next night’s meal, talking, remembering some things, mutually and silently agreeing to forget others. Being with each other as we had always been and you held between us in your hot chamber, waiting only for the word that would call to you and you alone: awake!

  When I awoke, it was much later. Jacob had come to bed and was lying with one arm crossing my stomach, hand limp over my hip. The house was quiet. I was a little worried you would wake up when I got out of bed (you often do, imperious, I might add, as if I owe you some explanation of just what I am about), but you were heavy and still, your white sleeping singlet aglow in the faint light seeping through the window.

  In the kitchen, I erased a sign. In the living room and before the front and back doors. At each of the windows, I erased a sign, and at the foot of the stairs, at the end of the long hallway where I paused for a moment to look over the yard, each object in it picked out by starlight against the black swale of the forest. I erased a sign over each of the bedroom lintels and at the bottom of the stair which lead to the attic. Finally, I cracked the door to Daniel’s room, paused there to listen for his uninterrupted breath, and slipped inside.

  I was almost finished, a sign wiped from under the bed, the door to the closet, the windowsill, when, from the tin roof of the woodshed which joined the wall just below the window, something hurled itself at the glass. It was one of the cats, the female: fat and white and fond of Thingy who used to leave the window open for her at night. She rubbed her wedge head against the glass followed by her body, the flirting tip of her tail. Then she came around again and spat, battered the pane with her paw. Her white face was sharp as a snake’s, her eyes slitted. I stumbled backwards and Daniel caught me by the wrist.

  “What are you doing?” he said, reasonably enough. He was turning his head back and forth on the pillow the way he might if he had a fever, trying to find a length of cool cloth with his cheek. “What time is it?” but even as he asked he was pulling me back into the bed with him, and even as I answered, something innocuous, some dull tale of drudgery, he was pulling my nightgown over my hips and I was helping him, arcing my back, sliding my haunches up as he moved on top of me and met me, as he looked down at me, his eyes navy blue in the bad light and inside them a smaller Daniel pressing into me, a smaller one inside that. Smaller and smaller until he was so minute he could stop inside that one long shuddering moment and look around.

  Afterward, I slept in Daniel’s bed. Sometime toward dawn, he surfaced long enough from sleep to ask, “What was at the window?”

  “It was her again,” I said, staring out into the graying corners of the room. The birds were waking up, starting all over as they did every morning, too brainless to remember where they left off.

  “The cat?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I meant.”

  The Daughter’s Tale

  Once there was a widower who had an only daughter. He was always admonishing her to marry a good hunter, someone who could provide for her and keep her into her old age. This was somewhat ironic because the widower himself, who had been renowned about the county in his younger years for his sharp eye and skill with a knife, had forsaken hunting all together in favor of building cairns out of river rocks in the backyard. He was building a cairn for every animal he had ever killed. As he had lived many long seasons alone with plenty of time on his hands and had all those years a daughter to feed, this meant the backyard was rapidly starting to fill with stones. All the grass had been smothered, the tomato vines crushed.

  “But father,” said the girl as she stood on the back porch and surveyed the ruin, “I’m too young to marry.”

  “Nonsense,” said her father, taking off a work glove to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Why, when I was your age, I had already outlived two wives and soon would have outlived a third. You’re never too young to make a start in the
world.”

  The cairns were often top heavy and had no mortar to hold the individual stones together. No matter where the father and daughter went in the house, at all times of the day or night they heard the sounds of rocks sliding off each other and clunking to the ground. “Goddamnit,” the father would say, “there goes another one.” Much of his mornings were spent repairing the existing record before he could go on to commemorate something new.

  Well, they lived in this way for a long time: the father admonishing, surrounded by rocks; the daughter washing the dishes, swirling her rag around the face of each dish as if it were the face of a human man, a husband she would come to love. Her father’s cairns grew more and more elaborate and pressed closer to the house until one day the daughter arose to discover that there were pebbles piled up against the glass at every window and boulders in a dusty jumble blocking the front and back door. Smooth river-stones filled the chimney so that their fireplace had become a rockslide, their foyer a cave-in, their house itself a cave pierced by rays of strange, golden light.

  “Dad,” said the girl, “what were you thinking?” But her father was building a monument to a flea out of sand and didn’t reply.

  That was the day a suitor finally came for her.

  It was her father who answered the door and gave the man he found there a hand as he scrambled down the loose slope of a cairn dedicated to her father’s childhood pet, a budgie named Mary. Her father helped him brush off the knees of his pants and retrieved his hat, knocked from his head by the doorframe during his entrance and rolled all the way to the living room where it had come to a rest under the couch.

  “Shit,” said her father, eyeing the damage to Mary’s cairn ruefully. He pulled a pad of paper from his back pocket and added Mary’s name to the list of cairns to repair which, while very long, still did not compare to the list of ones yet to be built. “What’s your business?” he asked the visitor who was peering around him as if even the dim light of the house hurt his eyes. The man was tall and thin and in need of a haircut. He wore an entirely brown suit with a brown hat to match which he held up before him and turned in his hands as if studying it, darting glances at the father over the bridge of his short, hooked nose.