Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  The sisters were happy to see their brother and happy to meet me as well. They came to us and touched me all over, their hands dry and light as they stroked my face and forearms, touched my lips and eyelids and turned my hands back and forth to look at my knuckles and nails. While they did this, they smiled and nodded to me and each other, conversing with their hands and eyes. I saw that each sister had two snakes tattooed on her lips, one on the upper and one below. They were fashioned in such a way that when the woman opened her mouth, the snakes opened their mouths. I also found it was true the sisters had no tongues. Their mouths were pink and smooth and empty and so they made no sound but showed me in other ways that they were happy to see me and give me comfort after the dangers of my journey.

  For dinner that night, Taw killed one of the hens and we ate her with beans and corn, wild ramps and a pat of sweet butter the sisters churned from the milk given by their old, brown cow. We drank a clear liquor Fet made from the peaches and after dinner we sat around the fire and listened to Taw play a bone flute he pulled out of his pocket which was so straight and white it looked as if he were playing another one of his fingers snapped from his hand and held bloodless between his lips. Then, as I saw no reason not to, I stayed with them for many years and passed a happy time in this fashion.

  Over the seasons, a few things became clear. For one, the sisters’ feet were short and round, almost like a dog’s paws, but this seemed to embarrass them and when they saw me looking they would sit down and readjust their skirts so I could no longer see. For another, what at first I had thought were chairs were actually turtles. They raised themselves up and stretched out their claws when we came to sit, but as soon as they saw who we were and their curiosity was satisfied, they settled back down around the table and went to sleep.

  There were other things besides. The brothers had two horses which they rode fast over the valley. But then I knew they were really two horned serpents: a white one and a red one with a stone in its forehead the size and shape of a cartridge bullet. The saddles they used were also turtles and the bracelets they wore were other snakes which rustled around the brothers’ forearms carrying the tips of their tails in their mouths. At night, before they went to bed, the sisters would take off their long black hair and hang it on pegs by the door. Their heads were round and smooth as pumpkins. Though I saw it every day, each night I would think, “Why, it is not hair at all,” and feel the same surprise.

  One afternoon, Taw rode his great red serpent out over the valley and was gone for a long time. When he came back he was agitated and drove the snake almost into the yard, leapt from the saddle and ran into the house without tending his mount or lifting the turtle from its back; unusual for him as he liked to keep things neat. It was a sunny day after a spell of rain. I was sitting in the yard idly braiding a new belt from corn silk given to me by the sisters. The hens, which had been sleeping by my feet, were startled by the commotion and beat heavily around me, showering me with dust. Inside the house, I heard Taw shouting and when I followed him I found Fet and the sisters were already there, all three seated around the table, all three looking anxious and the sisters very pale.

  “I told you this would happen,” said Taw, pacing in front of the door and running his hands through his hair until it stood up like a crane’s crest. “There’s no way there’s enough time to clean it all up before he gets here,” he said.

  “Clean up what?” I asked. “Who’s coming?”

  When no one answered me, I set about tidying the kitchen, trying to be helpful, but Taw said, “She’ll have to go. Tonight. Right away.”

  Fet shook his head and said, “Tomorrow morning. Let her stay one more night.”

  “Tomorrow then, but first thing,” Taw said. “No dawdling.” The sisters looked at me sadly, lips pressed together so tightly the snakes appeared to be starving. “What’s going on?” I said, but by then I thought I knew.

  Fet got up and put his arms around me. He smelled like pepper and some other sharp spice. “I’m sorry, Alice,” he said and squeezed me. “But our father sent a message. He’s coming to visit and he wouldn’t like to find you here.”

  “There are rules,” said Taw. “We broke them.”

  That night, as they had very many nights over the years, the brothers came to me in my little bed by the door. I knew them so well by then I could tell without looking which one’s hand, which one’s mouth. If I had suddenly lost all my senses, I would still have known from the way that they filled me which brother was above me, which brother was below. Afterwards we lay together for a long time, Taw with his hand on my breast and Fet petting the inside of my thigh with long, light strokes as he would the sisters’ cat when she slept by the fire.

  “What happens next?” I said, but I did not expect an answer. Taw stirred against me, hardening again as he rolled my nipple between his fingers and pressed his cold mouth into my neck.

  “You know it won’t live,” he said to his brother.

  “I know,” said Fet. He lifted himself on one elbow and kissed my mouth, my ear, the corners of my eyes. Inside me I felt a rising flutter as if a small bird were battering its wings against the window glass.

  The next morning was painful. All of us cried. The sisters said goodbye to me at the house, kissing me all over my face, pressing every inch of my body from tip to toe. They gave me back my basket which they had been using to store onions under the sink, and wrapped my head in a long orange scarf in case I had need of it on my journey. The brothers walked me back to the lake shore and said goodbye to me there. They stood ankle deep in the water and waved. Every time I turned back, they were still there waving until finally I turned and could see nothing behind me but trees. I knew I would never see them again—one so black he swallowed himself, one so white he burned very cold—and I sat down at the base of a pine tree and wept. I considered myself very sorry, alone now in the world and, I realized, lost in a woods through which I could not remember traveling, in which I had left no marker to guide me home.

  “Hello?” I called out, but to whom? The forest was dark and unwilling. There is a story that says the pine is of the same nature as the stars and holds within itself the same bright light, but that is just a story and the tree I was leaning against did not bend to comfort me or brighten to beam me the way home. I was alone, alone. I was alone. And then something in my basket gave a little jump and began tapping at the lid to be let out.

  Cautiously, you may be sure, I lifted the lid. I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps some present from the sisters—a magic bean, enchanted spindle. Perhaps one of the brothers’ bracelets which had crawled in there the night before to get some sleep. What I saw was none of these things; it went beyond my talent for prophecy. It was the little bird my stepmother had cooked for me so long ago and whose bones I had sucked clean and wrapped in a twist of paper!

  The bird beat the bones of its wings and hopped up onto the edge of the basket. It looked about, tipping one empty socket toward the ground and one toward my face, and sidled around the basket rim to step onto my finger where it nibbled at my knuckle with its sharp, black beak. I stroked the bird’s skull with the tip of my finger. Its bones were cool and smooth, burnished brown with age. When it moved, it made a faint grinding noise. It opened its beak as if it was singing, but no sound came out. Its ribcage was empty; its brainpan was dry.

  So, there were two of us: me and the bird I had eaten so long ago, whose flesh was so sweet, whose bones I had used to pick my teeth. We made an unlikely couple, but the forest is full of such strange friendships, and as we travelled I soon learned that the bird was better than I at direction. It preferred to ride perched on my wrist, but if I strayed from the right path it would hop up my sleeve to my shoulder and tug on my ear until I corrected myself. At night, it settled down beside my head and seemed to sleep as I did, though it was hard to tell: the bird’s empty eyes were always open. Even when it tucked its head beneath its wing I could see their caverns through the screen o
f its bones.

  In this way we went, day after day, through the unchanging forest. I ate mushrooms and roots I dug under the lichen. I scraped the inside of oak bark and brewed small, dark teas. Every day as we went, the bird opened its beak as if to sing me encouraging songs, and every day as we went my stomach grew rounder, harder, hot to the touch.

  It was clear something was happening, but when the bird and I came to the edge of the meadow I had once called my home, I was unprepared for how shy I felt. There was my father’s house: smoke rising from the chimney, rose bush tightly budded by the front door. There was my stepmother’s bicycle leaned up against the porch railings and in the garage my father’s tools, each on a peg inside the outline of their shape. Someone whistled as they walked past the screen door, their song composed of the same notes I thought my bird had been trying to sing.

  All was just as I had left it, but though the bird hopped up and down my arm, I could not bring myself to step out of the forest shadow and into the sun. Instead, I stood there with my hand resting on my belly which was now so hot and tight it was like resting my hand on the side of a kettle. The little dead bird hopped up my arm and down again and I stood and the light began to change. Then, I was overwhelmed by a terrible pain.”

  My father stared at me. You can imagine: his hands on either side of his plate, his chop growing gray as it leaked into the peas. We sat that way. Then my father lifted his fork and knife and cut a bite out of his meat. He chewed it, never taking his eyes from my face, and took a long, deliberate swallow out of his cup. “Now, let me tell you a story,” he said. And this is what it was:

  “Once there was a King who had need of a Queen. Never mind why; it was something political. His advisors proposed they search far and wide for the most beautiful or virtuous or well-read maiden in that or any other land, but the King was a practical kind of guy who liked to get things done.

  “Just find someone in the village,” he said. The advisors weren’t pleased with it, but what were they going to do? They all went down to the village.

  Once they got there, they were struck by a problem. The village didn’t have the best reputation in the world. It was a pretty dirty place, littered with swine and turnips and other villagey things. The people were naturally suspicious of governmental authority, and usually so grimy and bent up in their sack clothes as they hauled around their heavy loads that it was really hard for the advisors to tell who was a fair maiden and who wasn’t which was a criteria they thought was kind of important even though the King had said he didn’t care.

  One of the advisors was of a scientific bent, and he proposed that they find the new Queen through a process of systematic interrogation involving calipers and precisely weighted scales and reams and reams of graph paper. That sounded okay to the other two advisors in theory, but, as one of them pointed out, they hadn’t brought any of those materials with them and they sure weren’t going to get something like that in the village where the only things for sale seemed to be swine tonics and economy sized boxes of powdered cheese.

  Another one of the advisors was a man of faith who had played around with the idea of going into the seminary for awhile when he was in his twenties, but then he had met his wife and one thing lead to another. Now he had ten kids, all daughters, and he felt a little pissed off at God, but also scared at being pissed off at God, so he walked around all the time with a tension headache.

  “Why don’t we just round up a bunch of them,” this guy suggested, “and take them to the river. We’ll strip them and scrub them down and go along the line making them recite something, maybe the alphabet or the Lord’s Prayer, just to make sure no one’s a retard. If we had them all in a group like that, one of them would probably stand out.”

  The other two advisors thought this was actually a really great idea, particularly the part about stripping the women and scrubbing them down, but then the science-minded advisor pointed out that most of the women on the street were in town with their husbands. While that wouldn’t matter to the King—he was the King!; there wasn’t anything too complicated about making a husband disappear—it was statistically very probable that it would matter to one or more of the village men who, guided by their genetic predisposition toward rash physicality, might make things kind of sticky.

  The third advisor was named Beemis and he was new on the job. Originally he had thought of this gig as a stepping stone to bigger and better things, but the longer he stayed at court hanging out with the King’s advisors and cooks and pageboys and stewards of the crown, the more he began to think that he’d made a tactical error.

  “Just stick it out,” his mother had told him. “Keep your head down. Suck it up. Put your shoulder in.” But Beemis was ambitious. By thirty he wanted to be his own boss, and by forty-five he wanted to retire and buy a condo on this roving, twenty-story ocean liner he had read about where you did your grocery shopping port by port (wine in Marseille, bread in Gibraltar) and every night smartly dressed couples played pinochle on the aft-deck under the light of a gibbous moon.

  If he couldn’t figure out how to get the King’s attention soon, he was going to try to move into a lateral position in the court of one of the country’s neighboring allies, but this would mean buying a whole new wardrobe in that kingdom’s colors and having to learn a new language. No country stayed allied with the King for too long, so potentially he’d have to do military service fighting against a lot of guys who he’d gone to college with and played with now on a softball league, none of which he particularly wanted to do. What Beemis wanted most in the world, the secret desire of his heart, was for the King to notice him and call him by his name. While the other two advisors stood in the street and argued, Beemis was mindful of the time and getting jumpy.

  Finally, after they had gone round and round on the cost effectiveness of going all the way back to the castle for calipers versus the relative likelihood that their insurance plan would cover injury by mob violence, Beemis said, “I’ll be right back,” and took off trotting down the street and into a dog-leg alley where he was lost from sight.

  “Jesus, that guy,” said the second advisor, but nevertheless he and his colleague sat down on the side of a watering trough to wait.

  Before too much time passed—they took in a Punch and Judy show and bought fried pies from a vendor who was selling them out of a tray he wore round his neck—Beemis returned and with him he had a woman.

  “Who’s that?” asked the scientific advisor, but the man of faith rose to his feet and exhaled, “The Queen. . .”

  He was right, that’s who it was. Or at least that’s who she was going to be. She was wearing a brown dress of some scratchy material and sturdy blue shoes; not much to look at, but she seemed tidy and under the plain exterior it was clear that she had potential. Put her in a dress with an embroidered bodice, powder her face and slap a coronet on her head, and they would have the bonafide article. So what if she couldn’t tell her oyster knife from her sorbet spoon or discourse on classical sculpture? She had clean eyes and a pretty good smile which she showed them from behind Beemis’s shoulder where she was standing as if she were shy.

  “Hi,” she said, and that was that.

  The next morning the advisors introduced the girl to the King and he said that was fine and the whole court started making preparations for the royal wedding. Even though the King was in a hurry—his political situation had gotten more urgent—a royal wedding has to be done a specific way so it would be a least a week before the girl became the Queen. Meanwhile, she was free to roam about the castle as, once the seamstresses got her measurements, no one really needed her for much. She spent a lot of her time in the royal library. She couldn’t read, but there were big tapestries there which showed pictures of lords and ladies riding horses through the forest. All around them were animals they hadn’t yet noticed peeking out of the leaves or hiding in the undergrowth. Also, the King kept a lot of atlases on hand and the girl like to open them at random and trace th
e strange rivers and shorelines with the tip of her finger. She hadn’t had much opportunity for schooling in the village, and she thought it was really great how, no matter where it started, every one of those rivers eventually ended up at the sea.

  Soon enough, the week had passed and the day of the wedding came. The girl was gotten out of bed very early by a team of hairdressers and dress fitters and makeup artists and aromatherapists who powdered and pinched and puffed and pried her into her wedding array. It was elaborate, to say that least: her hair so high it jangled the crystal of the chandeliers as she walked, her skirts so wide she wedged in the door and had to be pushed through like a cork being rammed down the neck of a bottle. She looked great, really swell, they all assured her, but she couldn’t know for sure because there weren’t any mirrors in the castle big enough to reflect the whole display at once.

  When she was all ready, her team of dressers melted away and an elderly footman named Harold took her down the hall to the throne room and then, to her surprise, past the big empty thrones, through a curtain, down another hall and into a part of the castle where she had never been. There he opened a door and, after another little issue with her skirts, ushered her into a hot, close room with purple velvet curtains pulled tight over the windows, floor to ceiling mirrors on the walls and smack in the middle a huge, canopied bed. There weren’t as many people there as she had expected. Beemis, for one, and the other advisors. Then some lords and ladies who were standing around the room in the finest wigs and hose, rustling and talking to each other, though they straightened up when she walked in.

  “Great,” said the King, holding out a hand to her. “Tell Mrs. Zuckerman good work,” he said to Harold, leading the girl to the center of the room where there was an end table sitting next to a short stepladder and turning her to face the court.