Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  The road curved black before us. On Thalia’s side of the truck, the mountain had been blasted away, the funnels where the dynamite had been rammed home still visible as grooves in the graded cliff face. Water was squeezed by the winter cold through the rock and gushed here and there in frozen plumes like dragons’ beards flowing under stone snouts. On my side, the earth dropped away and the mountain plummeted into the valley. Far across it a little steam or smoke was rising against the black hulk of the next ridge. Steam from a hot spring, smoke from a house fire; it was impossible to tell. From this distance, it didn’t matter. The trees closed in on the road again, their green-black trunks a screen, their ice-sheathed twigs finite and precise.

  We drove up and up and up. Eventually, we turned off the main road onto a rutted path and followed that through thick woods until we got to a clearing. A henhouse, a creek, a cemetery. The skeleton of a vegetable garden, dead tomato vines iced into loops of silver wire around their poles. The slink of a cat slipping along the sagging peak of the pig sty, another following close behind, their bodies long and flowing in the weird light. At the head of that clearing was the house on Newfound Mountain. Backwards it seemed, crowded up to the mute face of the mountain while behind it the chickens shifted in their sleep, the sow sighed to the shoats who crowded her and the hives packed still and cold, dead wax all the way to the center where the sisters crowded into a ball humming a simple winter song.

  “It is cold. We are here. It is cold. We are here,” they sang.

  The house: simple but austere, many gabled, in need of paint.

  The house: all its windows dark, but far from empty.

  The place where my mother grew up.

  The place where she was buried.

  “Well, get out,” Thalia said, and reached across me to unlock my door.

  When I showed up at the Feed Store earlier that evening the dinner rush was over and only a last few stragglers were still nibbling strands of meat from their chicken thighs, spearing English peas one by one on the tines of their fork. The Sainte Maria, on a break from the kitchen, was eating a bowl of soup by the dining room door. There was someone new on dish duty, a man who had his sleeves rolled to his elbows and was wearing the Pinta’s old, rubberized apron. This was Jacob, come at last. Are you surprised to hear it this way, with so little fanfare? He was wearing a blue shirt, jeans in the same shade. The yellow apron tied at his waist was the only thing marking the shape of his body in all that blue and I remember thinking his head was too round, unnerving, as if it could roll off his neck at any moment and fall heavily to the floor. I remember thinking he was doing a poor job of it—splashing too much water out of the sink, leaving a rind of soup crusted on the lip of the pot—but that is all I thought. Jacob never turned around and Thalia ignored him. I had one life then, a life that had closed around me like a fist; I wasn’t looking for another.

  While I was telling Thalia what had happened—the baby, my father pointing to the door with his fork, Rosellen standing in the window—the Sainte Maria came in and slipped her bowl into the soapy dishwater. As far as anyone knew, we hadn’t seen each other in years. The summer I was thirteen (while I was at the beach with Thingy, in fact) Dax and Rosellen had moved my brother to a long-term care facility in Ridley Township.

  “For his own good,” said my father. I hadn’t even unpacked. My battered suitcase was still sitting on my bed, gritty with sand and the tiny, white shells Thingy and I had sifted out of the dunes and kept both for their severity and their cuteness. I was wearing one of Thingy’s halter tops and a pair of her shorts. I felt browned and drum-tight, like a bird that has been slowly turned over the flame until every part of it is slick and full and juicy. My toenails were painted alternating shades of pink and green. I was a new girl, a whole new creature. I hadn’t noticed my brother was gone or anything else about the house except for the new me in it.

  What was there to see? The same couch and armchair, the same television set topped with the same ceramic shepherdess and her blushing, blue-britched shepherd. The same pass-through, shedding rabbit-foot fern, wire basket filled with sprouting onions. The same kitchen sink, which dripped, refrigerator, which knocked, yellow, strawberry-patterned half-curtains which my mother had sewn when she and my father were first married.

  Down the hall, the beige carpet peeling back from the wall in a frieze of loose pilings. . .

  In the bathroom, the shell-shaped soap holders jutting from the wall to cradle shell-shaped soaps, the towels monogrammed, but mismatched. . .

  In my room, set like an extra tooth at the end of the house, the bed with its peach corduroy bedspread, the child’s bookshelf, the window open to the long, familiar view. . .

  There was nothing to see and so I didn’t look. I slung my suitcase on the bed and unzipped it.

  “For his protection,” Rosellen amended. She stood across the hall in the doorway of Luke’s room with her arms crossed over her chest as if she were cold, though the house was muggy, all the doors and windows open to catch the cross breeze.

  Summer on the beach had been hot but lean, a clanging kind of heat like two metal garbage can lids being banged together. In the mountains, the summer was green, yes, but each tree its own particular green, each shrub and sprung weed, each spear of onion grass, each lifting leaf. It was hot, yes, but one kind of hot on the road, mincing across the bubbling asphalt, and another in the clearing where all around the forest whispered of cooling. One kind of hot in the town square where the sod crisped and browned, another in the lumber yard where the dusty, yellow smell of mangled trees coated the inside of one’s nostrils and throat. One kind of hot in the house where the wind died on the sills and another in the body where heat came up and up.

  I felt dizzy, short of breath. Behind Rosellen, in Luke’s bedroom, the bed was gone and the cot the girls had used on night shifts. His chest of drawers was gone, his mirror, the misshapen masks my father had hung from his ceiling, the miniature disco ball the Nina had hung by his window so it would catch and refract the sun. In their place was a desk and a green metal file cabinet. An armchair and a wicker wastebasket already overflowing with balls of crumpled paper. An office, in other words. A place of business.

  “He was getting bedsores,” Rosellen said. “He was too heavy for the girls to lift anymore and not all of them were to be trusted.” She said the last darkly, cinching her arms still tighter around her rib cage so her breasts were lifted into the scoop neck of her T-shirt. In truth, Rosellen’s body was starting to go. Her breasts had fallen into a long line of cleavage down the front of her plunging shirts. Her butt too had lost its domelike bubble and, no matter how many sit-ups she performed, grunting on the living room floor in pre-dawn light, her belly had fallen into a little pouch above her pubis like a muff she was carrying around with her in case her hands needed to be warmed.

  “Not that I’m accusing anyone of anything,” she said, which meant she was.

  With no more ceremony than that, my brother was gone.

  In simpler days, the Pinta told me that before a baby was born it lived in God’s pocket. I pictured a mass of squirming pink bodies with huge eyes sealed behind translucent membranes, like the nest of infant rats Thingy and I had turned out of a rotten stump at the meeting edge of our yards. When a baby was ready to be born, the Pinta said, God would pluck it out of his pocket—fumbling his way around bits of knotted string and lint, sprung paper clips and match books, rose hips and tortoiseshell buttons. . .He would pluck it out, the ready baby, by the scruff of its neck and pincher it all the way down down down to earth where he would put it in the mother’s body.

  “How does he do that?” I asked. We were in the bathroom. The Pinta was propping my brother up in a few inches of tepid water and lathering his back with the soft side of a kitchen sponge. I remember the smell of the soap in particular, a milky, lingering scent that wafted up from my skin for hours after the bath was over as if, instead of scrubbed clean, I had been dipped in a powdery wax an
d sealed off. My brother’s penis was rocking gently back and forth on the ripples the Pinta made with her sponge. I wasn’t supposed to look at it. “Give him his dignity,” the Nina always said, but the Pinta didn’t seem to notice what I did. She was singing to herself, a long, rambling song which she repeated over and over beneath her breath so the only words I understood was the phrase, “’I’ said the fish, ‘with my little dish, I caught his blood,’” to which she gave a particular emphasis. I thought my brother’s penis looked like a turtle’s head pulled back in its shell, only pinker and less skeptical. I stared at it as I sat on the lid of the toilet and watched.

  The Pinta thought for a moment. She made a shelf over Luke’s eyes with the side of her palm and squeezed the sponge over his forehead. She ran it over his cheeks, down his neck, over his thin chest and down each of his arms. My brother had a black, perfectly round mole on his chest that the Pinta always rubbed a little harder, as if shining it. He had a strong chin and beautiful skin that seemed to flow over his muscles and bones as if it had been poured. His eyes were very dark.

  “He does it with his thumb,” the Pinta finally said and she held out her own thumb to demonstrate.

  I imagined first my brother and then myself lifted by the scruff of our necks and swung through the air. We were uniformly pink, our skin tight and shiny, our eyes huge and black and wet beneath our lids. We were smooth and identical—identical bald heads, the place between our legs a smooth cap of skin—and we hung from God’s fingers, curled like shrimp, spit bubbles forming between our lips. We were the ready ones, but we weren’t yet anybody. Just babies. Just one out of the rubbery, blind, indistinguishable mass wriggling in his pocket, rubbing up against each other. And then there was God’s thumb, square like the Pinta’s but broader, the nail flat and yellow and well polished. And then there was our mother and somehow. . .first one and then the other. . .

  All that, it seemed to me at the time, in order to lead up to this moment in the bathroom where my brother, who liked the water, stirred his hands just below its surface and I, who had already had my bath and was naked and damp inside my terry-cloth robe, stared at his penis. “Who killed Cock Robin?” the Pinta sang, but the answer was lost under the rhythmic splashing of her sponge.

  But that is not the truth. God and his thumb, our willing helplessness, these are figures of the truth and the truth itself an unshaped thing, ravenous, void. The truth is that at the heart of every something, at its rigid, concentric core, is the nothing from whence it came. When a something is created—any old lentil or bird’s egg, baby or igneous batholith—it does not supplant the nothing that was there before it, but merely takes its place in conjunction with that continuing void. A child is something that does not replace nothing. When Luke was born, the nothing that was there before him was also born. As it was when I was born, when Thingy was born, when you yourself, Ingrid, were expelled screaming into our shared world.

  “Tell me the truth,” Mrs. Clawson said to me. We were in the hospital waiting room again, downgraded from the cushy, rose patterned privacy afforded to the families of the dire and ushered instead into a crowded mint-green room with blue plastic bucket seats, tattered magazines on the kidney-shaped tables and an electric carafe in the corner merrily burbling its coffee down to a thick sludge. We were there because you were fine, Ingrid, and always had been. Because Thingy was dead and Mrs. Clawson, wearing a light camel coat and the shimmering lip gloss of mourning, was constitutionally incapable of imagining either formlessness or unappeasable hunger.

  “Tell me the truth, Alice,” she said, but when I did she couldn’t hear me. Then Daniel came back with another sheaf of papers to add to the bundles he was amassing in his study—overflowing manila folders, avalanches of green and pink forms: your footprints, a count of your heartbeats, a chart that detailed the exact lucidity of your skin, other charts that ranked your eliminations, your respirations and reactions to heat and cold, pin pricks and pinches, in spidery lines tending valiantly upwards.

  (“To reach the top!” said that long ago explorer to his Sherpa, his yak. “And then what?” the Sherpa might have said had he been asked. “And to what purpose the earth?” might have opined the yak.)

  The truth! The truth! The truth! It all depends on how you deal with it. Thingy took her nothingness and stitched it to the bottom of her foot. I took mine and sent it spinning into the forest where I pretended it perished—eaten by a bear, felled by the forester’s axe. Daniel and Jacob have made formulas of theirs, albeit very different ones, and my father pressed his to him as he would the body of a woman, reveling in the way it defined his form.

  But Luke was an altogether different sort. Luke looked into his abyss and what he found there satisfied him so fully he couldn’t be tempted to look away. That’s why when anybody asked me what exactly was wrong with my brother, I answered them truthfully.

  “Who killed Cock Robin?” the Pinta asked and asked. The answer was everyone, from sparrow to bull.

  “What’s wrong with your brother?” asked Thingy and Mrs. Clawson, asked Rosellen and the other children at school, old women in the grocery store, young men plugging quarters into machines at the arcade, new mothers plugging them into machines at the Laundromat. What’s wrong with your brother? and I answered, nothing. It’s nothing that’s wrong with him.

  The truth! The truth! The truth!

  If you hold a mirror to my brother’s face you will see his skin but not his self. If you put your fingers in his mouth you can feel his pulse at the base of his tongue and the square monuments of his teeth, but no lingering speech, no hot breath of desire. If you lie next to him on his narrow bed, as I have done so often to whisper in his ear, you might feel deep within him the stirring pip of his being, but it is not you he is interested in. My brother might as well have been a wax doll—his body rigid, his features set and even as if carved in great curling swoops with the little bone knife—but there is no one else alive with such an uncompromising knowledge of himself.

  “We are the children of a black snake,” I told him, or of the dragon, of the mountain, of a mermaid who split her tail just long enough for the snow white bull to force himself inside, but Luke knew all this already, and anyway, he wasn’t listening. When I was thirteen and my brother was taken away from me, I mourned, but I realize now it was for myself, for the stories that would no longer have an audience, and not for him at all.

  But when I was thirty and Thingy died. . .ah, then from the forest came that thing I had thought so long ago banished. It took me between its jaws and it shook me the way any animal will when it has at last what it has hungered for so dearly. It is shaking me still.

  The Weeping Woman

  My grandfather Mick had died only a few weeks before I moved into the house on Newfound Mountain. There were still traces of him lying about: an armchair pulled closer to the fireplace than Thalia would sit, a pair of man’s loafers, broken at the heels, laid just inside the door to the bathroom as if they had served as slippers. I slept in Mick’s old room, where Daniel sleeps now, the one with the window overlooking the tin roof of the tool shed which Thingy would leave propped open for the cats. Though Thalia did the wash the day after my arrival, that first night I listened to the sounds of the house settling and breathed in the papery musk of my grandfather’s smell. Bitter cloves and thin skin. Powder and black soil. Then she erased him: the chair moved back to a corner near the window, the shoes tossed into a bin on the porch where they swelled with the spring rains and eventually grew a lush crop of yellow horsehair mushrooms.

  Mick was not buried on the family land, but in a plot behind the First Presbyterian in the center of town. He lay between his father Clell and his only sibling, Baby Boy Luttrell, whose gravestone is ornate, flecked with pink granite and topped by a curly-headed lamb as if to make up for the practical decision not to give him a name.

  “Your great-grandmother was hard minded,” Thalia said. We were in the kitchen scrubbing canning jars in the dee
p belly of the sink. It was spring, too early for tomatoes, but Thalia planned ahead, setting the gleaming jars on the kitchen shelves alongside others already stuffed with brining peach halves and the ruby duck eggs of last season’s beets. I was six months pregnant and Thalia had begun to address herself largely to my stomach. She never touched me, not even so much as taking my elbow to steer me out of the way, but she talked a constant mumbling stream. Correction, instruction, Thalia’s voice not so much like water as the rocks at the bottom of the creek bed, grinding against each other, wearing down.

  “What would you do?” Thalia said, handing me the lids and rings which must each be meticulously dried. “Before you get so high and mighty, ask that. Someone hands you two eggs and one is whole and speckled and one gives off a stench. Are you going to waste your time feeling sorry for the chicken? Are you going to beat it into the batter and hope for the best?”

  She rubbed her hands dry on a dish towel and watched me as I ran a kitchen rag around the lip of a ring and around again for good measure. Thalia had blue eyes, blue irises and blue-tinged whites. Her eyes watered and she kept a red paisley handkerchief tucked in her back pocket with which to wipe them. Thalia already knew what sort of choices I was likely to make—my heart wrung out every morning as I collected eggs still hot from the hen’s wrinkled, pink brood patch—but she remained curious to watch me decide.

  “What would you do, little mama,” Thalia said, but she wasn’t talking to me. Inside, something pedaled its legs and took a firmer grip.

  The cemetery on Thalia’s land, my land now, is bounded by a stone wall made of stacked slate. The ground within is raw, kept assiduously scraped clean of grass and other opportunistic sprouters by yours truly. A little iron gate, topped with a series of diminishing, hand-hammered scrolls, swings from a pole that does not quite meld with the wall to the one side and latches on the other by means of a twist of chicken wire snipped from the coop.