“Well, sir,” said the suitor, for it was he, “I’ve come to ask for your young woman. Or not quite,” he corrected himself, fluttering the hat in the air as if to erase what he had said. “I’ve come to ask if you would ask her for me. Your daughter, I mean. I want to make her my wife.” He had a strange way of talking, winding down through his sentences so they ended on a wheeze. The daughter, who had been in the kitchen this whole time counting the cutlery, a task she assigned for herself once a week, rain or shine, popped her head around the doorframe to look at him. When he saw her he smiled and gave a little wave.
“Hmm,” said the father, sizing him up. “You look pretty weedy to me. Only a good hunter can marry my daughter. It’s kind of a sticking point.”
“Oh, but I’m just that kind,” said the suitor.
“Are you sure?” said the father, sounding doubtful.
“I am just that kind,” the suitor repeated, bending his knees and bobbing a little as if for emphasis.
“I’ll talk to her,” the father said. “But don’t hold your breath.”
After the suitor had left, seeing himself out, the father came into the kitchen and sat down heavily across from his daughter who had reached seventy-five knives and was on to the spoons.
“I suppose you heard that,” the father said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. The daughter had noticed recently that her father was starting to look older. While this called up in her unpleasant reminders of her own mortality—and what would she do with him when he was too old to care for himself, too tired to walk down the side of the mountain looking for rocks, too sore to haul them home and fit them into their piles?—it was not a bad look for her father. He was the sort of man who had settled into his features as he aged. He had olive skin, a mobile, soft mouth, deep lines curving on either side of it from the high bones of his cheeks. He had black hair which he wore closely cropped on the sides and longer on top so it hung in a rakish forelock over his forehead. Recently, it had become marked with the same flecks of white as his sparse chest hair which grew in an even T on his chest. He was fit, all that rock-carrying, and in general looked as if he were blazing with the last full light of day—harder and faster and stronger than the indeterminate hours of morning or mid afternoon—that bursts from the ridges of the mountain just before the long, gentle descent into night.
Though she did not often examine the thought, the daughter had always sort of hoped that her husband-to-be, good hunter or not, would resemble her father in some small way. This one did not. He was too thin and looked soft under his suit. His skin was too pale, almost luminous, and instead of her father’s almond-shaped, brown eyes, the suitor’s eyes were perfectly round and blue, an unnatural shade as if he had dipped his irises in dye and slipped them back into his head still wet. His hair, a tawny sort of yellow, floated up from his head and curled out over his ears like feathers. He was, all together, an unimpressive specimen. . .but he had seemed kind.
But no one else had called.
“I don’t know,” said the daughter, polishing a spoon with the hem of her cotton dress. “What do you think?”
Her father looked at her and then he smiled, reached across the table to put his slim, hard fingertips on the back of her hand. “You’re a beautiful girl,” he said, turning her hand over and tracing the cup of her palm in a way that had always made her shiver. “He said he was a good hunter. I think it’s a match.”
“Just as you say,” said the daughter and so the matter was arranged.
The next day when the suitor came back, the father met him in the front yard between a soapstone cairn for a deer struck on the highway and a teetering slate one for a mouse in a trap, and gave the suitor his daughter’s hand. That evening they were wed and went immediately away for a short honeymoon in the Catskills where the suitor had rented a cabin. They went skiing and snowshoeing, ate heavy meals and stayed up talking and drinking wine by the fire. One afternoon they went for a long walk in the forest and came upon a clearing where it was so quiet they could hear each breath as they took it, almost the blood as it whooshed around in their veins.
“This is beautiful,” said the wife, taking her husband’s gloved hand in hers. The pines were tall and still. Heavy snow drifted against their trunks, cut into ripples by the wind.
“Beautiful,” said the husband and he kissed her in his nipping, hesitant way which—she closed her eyes and examined her reaction—she believed she was beginning to learn to like.
At the end of the honeymoon they returned home to her father’s house where they were going to live temporarily until they got on their feet. In her absence, her father seemed to have been busier than ever. The gutters were filled with shifting piles of pebbles; the roof was lined with them. On one side of the house, her father had begun to build cairns on top of cairns and so brought the rocks up level to the roof, which they had spilled onto, which they were starting to consume.
“Can you live like this?” the wife asked her husband.
He shrugged, stroking his chin. “It’s only for a little while,” he said.
The very next morning, the husband said he would go out hunting. He began to gather all the necessary accoutrements: the different scents and whistles, the camouflaged jacket, the bullets, the gun, but before he could finish getting ready, he changed his mind and said he would go fishing instead. An hour or so later, in hip waders and a cap pierced with hooks, he kissed his wife at the door and left, pole slung over his shoulder, bait box dangling from his fist. He was gone the entire day which the wife spent in much the same fashion as she had when she was the daughter. She did the laundry and then sat on the couch in the living room. She made her father a sandwich and then washed his plate and watched him through a chink she had cleared at the kitchen window as he strode around the backyard with a measuring tape, checking the cairns for unnoticed drift.
In the afternoon, she watched a television program about two elephants who had been sent to a rescue park to live out the last years of their lives and, though they had been separated all that time, recognized each other from their babyhood as the stars of a traveling circus show. In the end, one of the elephants died and the friend went back to the place they had last been together to do things like lean disconsolately against a tree and turn over rocks with the tip of her sensitive trunk. It made the daughter a little weepy, though she had known from the beginning this was how it would end. She turned off the television and read a couple of chapters of a book instead. Soon, she drifted off to sleep on the old plaid couch where she had slept many an afternoon away in her long time in that house, lulled by the sound of her father pounding two rocks together in rhythmic counterpoint to the ticking of the clock which hung above her head.
When she woke up, her husband was home. He had brought only three small fish which she cleaned and scaled and pan-fried in butter, keeping their bones for a soup.
“No luck?” said her father. He pushed his meager portion back and forth on the plate, knife scraping against the china.
“Not today,” said her husband, bobbing his head up and down over his fork as if too nervous to take the bite into his mouth.
“Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure,” she said.
The next day her husband went out again to a different fishing spot at which he claimed to have never had a bad day. “Brook trout as big as your arm!” he said, wheezing. “Their bellies fat and speckled, eyeballs good for soup. You’ll see,” he said, kissing her at the door. In his excitement he nipped her so sharply that afterwards she checked her lip for blood.
The day passed in much the same way: laundry and dishes, watching and reading. The clock in the living room—a wood block carved with figures of rabbits and a swooping owl her father had picked up somewhere before she was born—broke the hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds, the seconds into even smaller parts that were so quickly gone they had no names.
Finally, her husband came home, but she saw right away he had not been successful
. He had a sheepish air about him, pausing in the hallway to bob in the door frame and look in on her where she lay reading on the couch, and he carried the creel slung from his fist as if his prey were very light. In fact, there was almost nothing in it at all: just two worthless spring lizards limp inside a folded dock leaf, their bodies pierced as if he had caught them with a spear.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” the wife asked her husband, holding one of the lizards up by its tail. “My father will never eat a lizard,” she said, shaking her head.
“Does he have to know?” said her husband. “Couldn’t you bake them into something?”
She was dubious, but she set about making individual pot-pies, rolling the dough out thick, covering the butchered lizards with a kitchen towel as her father came into the house and walked past her, went into the bathroom to wash up for the meal. “What happened, anyway,” she asked her husband who was sitting at the kitchen table watching her work. “I thought this place was a sure bet. Brook trout as big as my arm, remember?”
“I know, I know,” said her husband, hanging his head. “Everything was going really well, but then a bird came along and scared all the fish. I would have shot it, but I didn’t bring my gun.”
He looked so mournful, blinking his round eyes at her, his shoulders hunched, that she took pity on him and after the meal, which her father picked at and largely did not eat, the wife pulled her husband into their bedroom and locked the door. In the dim light that filtered through the rocks covering the window, she looked down at her husband’s body, at his hand on her breast, at his bony chest rising up to her as he propped himself up on one elbow, and thought, just for a minute, she saw a wash of feathers fluttering at his throat. But this was wrong, of course, and in the middle of the night she looked over at her husband and saw only the face of a man, relaxed in sleep, his brow smooth and unlined.
The next morning, the husband announced he was going hunting today and fetched his gun out of the hall closet. She stood in the doorway and watched him weave around the cairns and walk down the road, his peculiar characteristic gait making him look as if he were edging sideways along a steep drop instead of walking down a perfectly level, freshly paved lane. She leaned against the doorframe, thinking, peeling thin strips of paint away from the wood and dropping them on the stoop.
“Where’s he going?” her father said, appearing at her shoulder and making her jump.
“I don’t know,” the daughter answered. “He said it was a spot he knew about from when he used to go hunting with his dad. When he was a kid.”
“Humph,” said her father. “Around here? What was his father’s name? I would have known him, and I don’t think I remember anyone’s kid that looked like that.”
“I don’t know,” the wife answered as her husband crested a rise and disappeared from sight. “I’ve never asked him. He never said.”
That day passed in the way of the others, marked only by a restless hunger that kept the father and the daughter on the move through the house, passing each other in the hallways, bumping into each other more than once in the kitchen which was small. Lunch was a sad affair: a wilted celery stick for them both, a handful of raisins, a hard-boiled egg. Her father’s face was set, the jawline sharp. He was looking a little brutal, which made her uneasy but also, a little bit, excited. What would happen next? she wondered.
When her husband came home it was late. The sun had long since gone down and she turned on the porch light so he could see to navigate his way around the cairns in the front yard. Her father had gone out.
“Fuck this,” he said, rising from the table where he had been sitting in front of an empty plate for an hour, his hands clenched around his silverware. “It’s nine o’clock. I’m going out for a beer.” He banged around in the hall closet for his coat and the daughter walked out into the yard with him, loitering between the rocks indecisively as her father, hands crammed into his pockets, walked down the road and disappeared over the ridge just as her husband had that morning.
She passed the evening in a dissolute fashion and, by the time she heard the front door open, had already gotten into her nightgown and was brushing out her hair in front of the vanity which had sat in her bedroom since she was a child. She could tell it was her husband and not her father by the sound of his footsteps as he walked down the hall.
“Well,” she said as he leaned in the doorway. “What did you get?”
“You look beautiful,” her husband said. He looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes.
“Thanks,” she said and, though she knew once again it was slim pickings, she turned out the light and brought him to the bed where the sheets were cool beneath them and the night very long.
The next day she was awakened by her father making a lot of noise in the kitchen. Her husband was already up, already out of the house, and her father had discovered in his absence that all he had brought home the day before were some scraps he had found in a place where another party of hunters had cleaned their kill.
“What is this?” her father shouted, waving a fistful of viscera in her face, loops of intestine dangling almost to the floor. “And this?” he held up the heart, its strange oval tough and impervious. “This is what I am supposed to eat?” he yelled, tossing the heart onto the table where it slid into a candlestick and knocked it over.
“Calm down,” the daughter said. “I’ll make a gravy.” But it was clear something more had to be done.
That night her husband came home empty-handed and the next morning, at her father’s urging, the daughter waited until her husband had disappeared over the rise and set off to follow him. He travelled a long way and then, at a spot where the stone wall that bordered the road lay broken, he looked around him and left the track for the forest. At first, the daughter thought she had lost him. She had to duck down behind the stone wall to keep from being seen and when she made it to the spot where he had entered the tree line there was no sign of him. Not a broken branch, not a bobbing leaf; it was as if he had vanished. But, as the daughter pushed her way into the dark, thick forest, she heard someone singing a little song.
It was her husband and he sang:
Come dance with me and be my love
My light in darkness, turtledove
Oh come to me, my heart’s desire
The clearing where I build my fire
He had a beautiful voice, high and silver at the top of the register, vibrating like a brass bell when he dipped into the lower notes. From behind a tree, the wife caught a glimpse of her husband’s blue shirt as he bent and picked a blade of grass, twirled it between his finger and thumb. He sang:
Against my body slide your hips
Against my body move your lips
And when it’s time for us to part
I’ll leave you with my beating heart
He used his fishing pole to hack a path in the forest and she followed it, trying to walk on the sides of her feet as her father had instructed her and so make little noise. The morning had been cool but, in the patches of sunlight that filtered into the forest, it was beginning to warm up. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. She could feel it dampening the hair at the nape of her neck where it rubbed against the collar of her father’s coat which she had borrowed because it was warmer than her own. She paused as her husband paused and wiped her face on the shoulder of the jacket. It smelled like her father: a mixture of sweat and sunlight, a musk. Her husband sang:
So dance with me, my life’s embrace
And turn to me your lovely face
To love you always that I vow
If not forever, then for now
In this fashion they came out of the forest and to the bank of a swift river. The wife ducked behind a blackberry tangle and watched as her husband carefully wedged the tackle box and pole into a niche made by a tree trunk and a mossy boulder and began to strip off his clothes. As he took off each article—jacket, shirt, pants, underwear, socks—he folded them neatly and stack
ed them in a pile on top of the rock. Finally, he stood naked, still humming to himself, stretched his arms over his head and windmilled them as if warming up for something. She could see his ribs as they descended his back and the archipelago of his vertebra. She felt a little feverish, as if her senses were overly sharp. She could see his skin pucker into gooseflesh as a breeze struck him, the fine golden hairs that downed his lower back and swept over his buttocks, the cracks in the tough skin of his heels. Then her husband turned into an owl and flew out over the river.
She supposed she should have been more surprised. Shocked, even. Instead, she found herself admiring the sweep of his wings as he downbeat to land on a snag of driftwood in the stream and the powerful flex of his claws as he drove them into the wood. He ruffled his feathers and looked around him.
“Uh-gu-ku! hu! hu! u! u!” her husband called.
She said to herself, “I thought I had married a man, but my husband is only an owl.” She tried to feel angry. She had been lied to, she and her father both. Yet, as she watched the owl blink its round, blue eyes, she found herself focusing only on the second half of her thought. “My husband is an owl,” she whispered and caught her breath.
For a long time her husband stared into the water and she watched him. At last, he swooped down and brought up in his claws a handful of sand from which he picked out a crawfish. He flew to the shore with the crawfish impaled on his talons, shuddering as it died, where he took the form of a man again, dressed carefully, one article at a time, and wrapped the crawfish in a dock leaf he pulled from a plant near where his wife was hiding. He was still humming his little song as he packed the crawfish in his creel and started for home. The wife followed him.
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