I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  My husband had never been the kind of person who demanded that everyone agree with his version of things, but perhaps he was turning into one. I told myself that he had been terribly unsettled by his father’s death, that grief, especially when it was not properly tended, could turn even a reasonable human being hostile and confused. Maybe he needed to make an appointment with Dr. X for himself instead of taking down the appointments of others; surely there was an employee discount.

  I read up on double exposure and grief. I read up on spirit photography. I tried to understand why my husband would not, or could not, see the boy in the tree even after I had made his presence known. Had his not-seeing been a charade or some kind of test? From the library I checked out Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye. Yet nothing provided an explanation as satisfying as the one I knew to be true the moment I saw the photograph—my husband had done something to that boy in the tree.

  * * *

  A great many people know the name Margaret Wise Brown, but how about Clement Hurd, who illustrated Goodnight Moon and studied with cubists in Paris? By the time my husband introduced his childhood photo into our lives, I’d had a very successful run of illustration projects, all with major publishers, though I had not won a Caldecott Medal. The things that hadn’t happened, the honors not bestowed, had never bothered me earlier in my career, when time felt like a field without a visible horizon—but now that dark line had appeared in the distance and the story I had always told myself about my own limitless prospects was breaking down; not yet was starting to feel more like not ever.

  That summer, the commission from the wealthy eccentric was my sole job. This happened on occasion, someone coming along with a vanity project and enough money to make it a real thing in the world. The author intended to self-publish the book and when I received the text it was like no children’s book I had ever before seen—a story about a surrealist ballet troupe comprised of animals. Later the reader learned the troupe was being held captive by a terrible dictator, in an unnamed country. The animals, tired of dancing to Ballet Mécanique, longed for escape. At the end, a giraffe made a run for it and was shot dead by a firing squad. The wealthy eccentric had suggested I watch Jean Cocteau’s dadaist ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel for inspiration. It was a bewildering experience. Halfway through, a lion galloped onto the stage and ate a dancer for breakfast.

  I did not care for the ballet. The music set my nerves on edge—and I wasn’t alone. When my husband heard Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel emanating from my studio one Saturday, two weeks after he showed me the photo, he ran over and began pounding on the door. He was wearing his gardening gloves and brandishing a pair of shears. His own long-dead mother had been a dancer as a young woman, though I had always imagined her doing classical productions, like The Nutcracker or Swan Lake.

  I put on my headphones and he retreated from the door. I sensed his comprehension of the world was becoming constricted in a way I did not yet understand.

  I had no idea if the wealthy eccentric’s story was intended to be a comment on authoritarian regimes or the privatization of art or the cruelty of keeping animals in captivity, but I felt certain no child would ever want to read it. To test my theory I waited one evening by the backyard fence until the neighbor’s little boy came out to play.

  “Have you ever heard of Ballet Mécanique or Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel?” I asked the boy through the wood slats. “Do you know what a dictator is?”

  The boy yelped and ran inside. Not long after, his mother called and demanded to know what was wrong with me, bringing up French words and dictators to an eight-year-old.

  “You don’t behave how people are supposed to,” the mother huffed into the phone. Often children’s book illustrators were assumed to have kind and whimsical natures—a foolish expectation, for all the best children’s literature, if anyone has been paying attention, hinges on betrayal, the heartlessness of nature, death.

  As it happened, my husband was adamantly against us having children, given what had happened to his own mother. He said that mothers terrified him and he would lose his mind if I ever became one. In the early years of our marriage, I’d had fantasies about testing the limits of his revulsion. If I handed him a forged pregnancy test, for example, would I turn fearsome and unrecognizable before his very eyes?

  Despite the shortcomings in the wealthy eccentric’s story, I had become quite fond of the animals themselves, given all the time I had spent coaxing them to life. To cope with the personal loss I anticipated feeling at the project’s end, I decided to repaint the living room walls. I would leave paint samples scattered around the house and when my husband was home, I would make a big show of reviewing them, scrutinizing the difference between Shy Violet and Mountain Majesty. Really, though, the paint job was a cover-up for a secret plan.

  That night, as I ate dinner alone at our kitchen island, I pictured my husband working after hours in Dr. X’s office, filing paperwork in his gardening gloves, and finalized the details of my plot. First, I would blanket the living room floor in plastic sheeting and haul all the furniture into the center. I estimated it would take me two days to paint the walls and once the paint had dried, I planned to stencil a miniature version of each animal onto areas that would be covered once the furniture had been returned to its rightful place.

  I was starting to feel like I was in need of reinforcements.

  * * *

  I never told my husband about the voicemails his dying father left me in the middle of the night. I suppose it was the way my father-in-law always called at a time when he knew he would not reach me and rambled on until my voicemail was full—the whole thing had the tone of a confessional.

  In these messages, my father-in-law told me he had decided to limit his food intake to what was farmed in Florida, which amounted to consuming a great deal of citrus and sugarcane, sweet corn and boiled peanuts. He had regular sexual fantasies about the woman in the red uniform who rang a bell for the Salvation Army outside Walmart. He told me he visited Teotihuacán in the sixties—before he was married, before he was a father—and saved a French tourist from leaping to her death from the top of the sun pyramid. She had climbed all the way up there to die. Many years would pass before he heard the phrase “suicide tourism”—which struck him as such a rude plan, to travel to a different country for the express purpose of making a bloody mess. My father-in-law said he’d grabbed this French tourist by the shoulders and shook her so hard her sunglasses fell off her face and clattered down the side of the pyramid. “Look at all this beauty,” he’d said. To my voicemail he confessed that he wouldn’t know what to tell a suicidal person now, as an older man, nor did he know what had happened to the French tourist after they got down from the pyramid. Yet this was the only time he could say with any certainty that he’d helped save a life.

  I wondered if he’d held on to this memory so tightly because he’d been unable to save his own wife. They were on their way to the hospital when the car broke down. She gave birth on the side of the road and then bled out in the backseat. Umbilical cord cut with pliers.

  His final missive was just static and silence and then, right before the cutoff, he said: “Did I ever tell you about my other son?”

  The first time I listened to the message, I felt like I was holding a cold stone in my mouth. After I played it again, I decided to chalk his words up to delirium, given that being in close contact with the end of all time could make a person behave very strangely. But when my husband showed me the photo, with the pale boy perched in the tree, the boy my husband refused to recognize, the boy that compelled him to burn and bury the evidence—well, the memory had returned like an avalanche.

  Did I ever tell you about my other son?

  * * *

  I decided to put the question to my husband directly. One morning, I poured him a coffee and pressed the mug into his gloved hands, the fingertips damp and dark from soil, and whispere
d, “Did I ever tell you about my other son?” I had spent many hours testing different shades of paint in the living room and by then the entire house reeked of chemicals.

  He startled, sloshing coffee over the rim of the mug and onto the gleaming tips of his dress shoes. He began making wild accusations. He said that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was insisting on keeping a terrible story alive, and when I told him that he wasn’t making sense, he slammed the mug down on the kitchen island, sloshing more coffee, and fled our house through the garage.

  I refilled his mug and dropped a couple of ice cubes in, because that was how I took my coffee in the summertime. I followed a faint dirt trail from the kitchen to the garage, where the door was raised, the driveway empty. I stood barefoot on the concrete floor, wondering what to do next. Already the ice had melted into translucent slivers. I stared at the highest shelves, searching for a way to climb up and see what else could be discovered among my father-in-law’s things, and that was when I realized that all the boxes were gone.

  That night my husband did not come home. When he turned up the following day he claimed he had fallen asleep at the office, but he did the same thing the next night and before long he was coming home only to shower and change; he claimed Dr. X had never been so busy. I would watch him struggle to peel a banana in his gardening gloves and wonder how long it would take for his beloved roses to wither from inattention.

  * * *

  Alone more than usual, I was productive. I submitted my illustrations to the wealthy eccentric and then called her up, under the guise of wanting to ensure my work was satisfactory, when in fact I longed to ask why she had written the book in the first place. Did she have a particular child in mind for this story and if so was this child perhaps a bit unusual? She explained that she had not written the book for a child at all; rather the story was translated directly from a dream that had been plaguing her for years. Sometimes she was the bear. Sometimes she was the giraffe. Always she was the animal who attempted to flee and was shot dead on sight; she never learned her lesson. She thought that if she made the dream real it would lose its power over her.

  “But I’m starting to think,” she said before we got off the phone, “that I might have made a terrible mistake.”

  A few weeks later, after the paint had dried, I spent two afternoons stenciling animals on the walls: a galloping giraffe behind the TV, a bear in a tutu on a place that would be hidden by a corduroy armchair. Our living room was now their habitat. I made the bear look gentle and entreating—head tilted, one front paw raised—even though I knew it stood ready to rip out someone’s throat. When my drawings were finished, I pushed all the furniture back into place.

  “You can never be too careful,” I said to the whiskered lion pacing behind the bell-shaped lampshade. “You can never be too sure.”

  I was about to start rolling up the plastic sheeting when I heard a car rumble into the driveway and then my husband was standing on the edge of the living room, holding a large cardboard book. I watched him survey the walls, now painted a color called Suave Mauve.

  “You’re home,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead.

  He set the box on the plastic sheeting. He pulled at the edges of his gardening gloves, sinking his fingers deeper into the fabric.

  “You’ve been working so hard.” He rubbed the sheeting with the toe of his dress shoe. “Why don’t you lie down?”

  “Don’t be sinister,” I said. “What would Dr. X say?”

  “Dr. X sent me away. He said that I was developing a filing compulsion and needed to take a vacation.”

  “Good,” I said, nodding. “We can take one together.”

  “I did everything I could.” His entire body seemed to deflate a little.

  I told my husband that I had no idea what he was talking about, that I hadn’t had any idea what he was talking about for some time now. In response, he brandished his car keys and sliced open the box, revealing a row of book spines. The wealthy eccentric had sent me copies. I went over to him and lifted one from the box. I turned the pages, showing off my fine drawings of the animals dancing the Ballet Mécanique.

  When I got to the illustration of the firing squad taking aim at the giraffe, he pulled the book from my hands. He got down on one knee like he was proposing (when he asked me, years ago, we were in a swimming pool and we both came up for air at the same time, our faces shiny with water, and then he said, “How would you feel about doing this for the rest of your life?”). I slipped off his gardening gloves, one at a time; his skin was soft and pale from the lack of sunlight, his fingertips pruned.

  “I’m serious about that vacation,” I said to him. “We could leave right now. We could drive and drive.”

  He squeezed my hands and asked if I wanted to go out to the Pitch.

  Behind the furniture the animals snorted and stomped.

  I was raised in the desert and always appreciated the way its landscape gives you a chance to see what’s coming. In Florida, dangers don’t reveal themselves until it’s too late. The alligator lurking in the shallow pond, ready to devour your pet or your child. The snake hidden in the underbrush. The riptide slicing across that postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that flourish in overheated lakes. Quicksand.

  In the car, my husband said that lately he had been thinking about his childhood in North Florida, about the things that had happened there. He had tried to stop doing so, but found he was unable; before he sent my husband home, Dr. X had told him that which cannot be forgotten must be confronted. I stared down the endless gray line of the highway. The sky was clear; I felt sunshine in my lungs. My husband’s hands gleamed on the steering wheel.

  At the Pitch, I followed him out into a sea of darkening green. I ducked under ropes of moss and mildewed branches. I kept my eyes on my feet. I took high, careful steps.

  “Do I know everything about you?” my husband asked as we walked.

  “Everything except my thoughts.”

  We went on for a while in silence, twigs snapping under our feet. I considered the possibility that our thoughts were the most important thing to know, because they made up the stories we told ourselves about the world and our place in it, what was possible and what was sacred and what was forbidden.

  “Also,” I added, “your father left me voicemails in the middle of the night when he was dying.”

  Ahead I watched my husband nod, as though he had all along suspected treasonous communications between his father and me.

  “He told me all kinds of things,” I said.

  My husband swatted away a branch. “Did he now.”

  I relayed the stories. The sexual fantasies about the woman from the Salvation Army. The French tourist from Teotihuacán and how he had saved her life with beauty. I was surprised by how much I had to say.

  “My father did not have the first idea about how to save a life.” His steps turned long and quick across the forest floor.

  “Did I ever tell you about my other son?” I pressed. I thought it might be worth putting the question to him again in the outdoors, even as I sensed us skittering toward a place from which we would not easily return. “That’s what he said to me, in his last message. He said that and then he died.”

  My husband stopped in front of a tree. A massive water hickory, with a gnarled, mossy trunk and powerful roots, arranged in a way that resembled the giant hands of a pianist: fingers suspended above the keys, curled in anticipation. I touched the trunk and was surprised at how warm and supple the wood felt, almost like skin. Something about this tree was terribly familiar.

  “That photo I showed you was taken by our father,” my husband said. “A month before my brother disappeared.”

  He told me that the first time he and his brother heard their mother’s voice in the Pitch, they told themselves it was just the wind. They told themselves it was their own sadness. Their mother, though—she was persistent. Little boys kill things and climb tree
s. His brother started climbing tree after tree, determined to root out the source of the voice, and then one day he went up into this very tree and never came back down.

  A police report was filed. A search party combed the woods. My father-in-law hadn’t believed my husband’s explanation of what happened. He suspected my husband had done something to his brother, disappeared him by accident or on purpose, and since he was not prepared to lose another child he decided they would simply never speak of the missing one again.

  As I listened to my husband, all these years later, I wasn’t sure what or who to believe. Conveniently he was the only survivor, leaving no one to contradict his story. My sneakers sank down into the forest muck. I looked around for a big stick that I could pick up in a hurry.

  It took a long time for him to forget about his brother, but eventually he did. Or maybe forget was not the right word. His memory was like a faint scuttling beneath the floorboards of a house. It was like eating a sumptuous meal to the barely audible sound of animals being slaughtered in the backyard. He had worked very hard to convince himself that there had never been a brother at all, that his brother’s short life had been nothing but a strange and dogged dream, and he thought he had succeeded in getting the story to turn dormant—that is, until I looked at the photo and sought out the little boy in the tree.

  “Maybe if you weren’t so ruthless.” My husband wrung his gleaming hands. “Maybe then we wouldn’t be out here.”

  I thought it was unfair for my husband to blame me for the bizarre state in which we currently found ourselves, but I kept that to myself. I did not have a good feeling about where we were heading. I spotted a stick the size of a club near my feet. I picked it up and held it like a batter.

  He removed his tie and stepped out of his shoes. He cuffed his shirtsleeves.

  I can still scarcely believe what happened next and maybe I shouldn’t, and maybe you shouldn’t either, not with the way I was waving that big stick around as my husband called me ruthless. Who was I to be trusted?