Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  Whenever the girls stepped down from the school bus for their three or four nights’ stay at my house, they were clearly, profoundly comforted to see Sarge—her wide grin; her wet, black eyes glazed by cataracts; her floppy tail and slipshod, slanted, arthritic gait as she trailed them from the bus stop to the house. Wherever the girls settled in the yard or the house, as long as she didn’t have to climb the narrow attic stairs to be with them, Sarge lay watchfully beside them, as if guarding them from a danger whose existence Louise and I had not yet acknowledged.

  Vickie wasn’t around all that much, but Sarge was not attached to her in the same intense way as to the three younger girls. Sarge pretty much ignored Vickie. From the dog’s perspective, I think she was a late-arriving, auxiliary member of the pack, which I hate to admit is how the three younger girls saw her too, despite my best efforts to integrate all four daughters into a single family unit. No one admitted this, of course, but even then, that early in the game, I saw that I was failing to build a recombinant nuclear family. Vickie was a free radical and, sadly, would remain one.

  Mostly, when the children were at school or up at their mother’s, Sarge slept through her days. Her only waking diversion, in the absence of the girls, was going for rides in my car, and I took her everywhere I went, even to my office at the college, where she slept under my desk while I met my classes. From dawn to dusk, when the weather turned wintry and snow was falling, if I was at home and my car parked in the driveway, Sarge’s habit, so as not to miss an opportunity for a ride, was to crawl under the vehicle and sleep there until I came out. When I got into the car I’d start the engine and, if the girls were with me, count off the seconds aloud until, fifteen or twenty seconds into my count, Sarge appeared at the driver’s side window. Then I’d step out, flip open the tailgate, and lift her into the back. If the girls weren’t there I still counted, but silently. I never got as high as thirty before Sarge was waiting by the car door.

  I don’t remember now where we were headed, but this time all four daughters were in the car together, Vickie in the front passenger’s seat, Anthea, Caitlin, and Sasha in back. I remember it as a daytime drive, even though, because of Vickie’s classes and the younger girls’ school hours, it was unusual for all four to be in the car at the same time during the day. Maybe it was a Saturday or Sunday; maybe we were going ice-skating at one of the local ponds. It was a bright, cloudless, cold afternoon, I remember that, and there was no snow on the ground just then, which suggests a deep freeze following the usual January thaw. We must have been five or six months into the separation and divorce, which would not be final until the following August.

  Piling into the car, all four of the girls were in a silly mood, playing with the words of a popular Bee Gees’ disco song, “More Than a Woman,” singing in perfect mocking harmony and substituting lines like “bald-headed woman” for “more than a woman,” and breaking each other up, even the youngest, Anthea, who would have just turned seven then. I can’t say I was distracted. I was simply happy, happy to see my daughters goofing off together, and was grinning at the four of them as they sang, my gaze turning from one bright face to another, when I realized that I had counted all the way to sixty and was still counting. That far into it, I didn’t make the connection between the count and lifting Sarge into the back of the station wagon. I simply stopped counting, put the car in reverse, and started to back out of the driveway.

  There was a thump and a bump. The girls stopped singing. No one said a word. I hit the brake, put the car in park, and shut off the motor. I placed my forehead against the steering-wheel rim.

  All four daughters began to wail. It was a primeval, keening, utterly female wail. Their voices rose in pitch and volume and became almost operatic, as if for years they had been waiting for this moment to arrive, when they could at last give voice together to a lifetime’s accumulated pain and suffering. A terrible, almost unthinkable thing had happened. Their father had murdered the beloved animal. Their father had slain a permanent member of the family. We all knew it the second we heard the thump and felt the bump. But the girls knew something more. Instinctively, they understood the linkage between this moment, with Sarge dead beneath the wheels of my car, and my decision the previous summer to leave my wife. My reasons for that decision, my particular forms of pain and suffering, my years of humiliation and sense of having been too compromised in too many ways ever to respect myself again unless I left my wife, none of that mattered to my daughters, even to Vickie, who, as much as the other three, needed the original primal family unit with two loving parents in residence together, needed it to remain intact and to continue into her adult life, holding and sustaining her and her sisters, nurturing them, and more than anything else, protecting them from bad things.

  When the wailing finally subsided and came to a gradual end, and I had apologized so sincerely and often that the girls had begun to comfort me instead of letting me comfort them, telling me that Sarge must have died before I hit her with the car or she would have come out from under it in plenty of time, we left the car and wrapped Sarge’s body in an old blanket. I carried her body and the girls carried several of her favorite toys and her food dish to the far corner of the backyard and laid her and her favorite things down beneath a leafless old maple tree. I told the girls that they could always come to this tree and stand over Sarge’s grave and remember her love for them and their love for her.

  While I went to the garage for a shovel and pick, the girls stood over Sarge’s body as if to protect it from desecration. When I returned, Vickie said, “The ground’s frozen, you know, Dad.”

  “That’s why I brought the pick,” I said, but the truth is I had forgotten that the ground was hard as pavement, and she knew it. They all knew it. I was practically weeping by now, confused and frightened by the tidal welter of emotions rising in my chest and taking me completely over. As the girls calmed and seemed to grow increasingly focused on the task at hand, burying Sarge, I spun out of control. I threw the shovel down beneath the maple tree and started slamming the pick against the ground, whacking the sere, rock-hard sod with fury. The blade clanged in the cold morning air and bounced off the ground, and the girls, frightened by my wild, gasping swings, backed away from me, as if watching their father avenge a crime they had not witnessed, delivering a punishment that exceeded the crime to a terrible degree.

  I only glimpsed this and was further maddened by it and turned my back to them so I couldn’t see their fear and disapproval, and I slammed the steel against the ground with increasing force, again and again, until finally I was out of breath and the nerves of my hands were vibrating painfully from the blows. I stopped attacking the ground at last, and as my head cleared, I remembered the girls and slowly turned to say something to them, something that would somehow gather them in and dilute their grief-stricken fears. I didn’t know what to say, but something would come to me; it always did.

  But the girls were gone. I looked across the yard, past the rusting swing set toward the house, and saw the four of them disappear one by one between the house and the garage, Vickie in the lead, then Sasha holding Anthea’s hand, and Caitlin. A few seconds later, they reappeared on the far side of the house, walking up the lane toward the home of my ex-wife. Now Vickie was holding Anthea’s hand in one of hers and Caitlin’s in the other, and Sasha, the eldest of my ex-wife’s three daughters, was in the lead.

  That’s more or less the whole story, except to mention that when the girls were finally out of sight, Scooter, my black cat, strolled from the bushes alongside the brook that marked the edge of the yard, where he had probably been hunting voles and ground-feeding chickadees. He made his way across the yard to where I stood, passed by me, and sat next to Sarge’s stiffening body. The blanket around her body had been blown back by the breeze. The cold wind riffled her dense white fur. Her sightless eyes were dry and opaque, and her gray tongue lolled from her open mouth as if stopped in the middle of a yawn. She looked like game, a wild anim
al killed for her coat or her flesh, and not a permanent member of the family.

  I carried the body of the dog to the veterinarian, where she was cremated, and brought the ashes in a ceramic jar back to my house and placed the jar on the fireplace mantel, thinking that in the spring, when the ground thawed, the girls and I would bury the ashes down by the maple tree by the brook. But that never happened. The girls did not want to talk about Sarge. They did not spend as much time at my house anymore as they had before Sarge died. Vickie moved in with her boyfriend in town. By spring the other girls were staying overnight at my house every other weekend, and by summer, when they went off to summer camp in the White Mountains, not at all, and I saw them that summer only when I drove up to Camp Abenaki on Parents’ Weekend. I emptied the jar with Sarge’s ashes into the brook alone one afternoon in May. The following year I was offered a tenure-track position at a major university in New Jersey, and given my age and stage of career, I felt obliged to accept it. I sold my little house down the lane from my ex-wife’s home. From then on the girls visited me and their old cat, Scooter, when they could, which was once a month for a weekend during the school year and for the week before summer camp began.

  Handling the Beast

  Sarah Minor

  8000 BCE, THE BLACK PÉRIGORD of southwestern France: A cave system is forming. At the end of the last ice age, water seeps into fissures in the high cliffs along the Vézère River. What begins as the slow drip of melting glacier soon becomes a subterranean river that carefully slices 250 meters of branching passages within the limestone bluff, opening what will later be known as La Grotte de Lascaux. The extensive cave paintings preserved within show that early Homo sapiens crept inside by widening the entrance to this grotto during the Upper Paleolithic period, and used the protected walls of its interior not for shelter but as canvas upon which to create the first known art.

  ____________

  (Of the four hundred figures depicted at Lascaux, only one is anthropomorphic. One semihuman figure with a birdlike head rests, angular, perhaps fallen, before an eviscerated bull with innards dangling from its open belly. Human figures are rare in cave art from this period. When they exist, their bodies are disguised with wild appendages, roughly rendered as compared to their nonhuman counterparts. The legacy those first conscious beings left to speak for them is not one of written texts, complex shelters, or machines, but representations of the wildness outside of them. At the moment they hopped the crevice spanning the animal and human brains, they began to imagine, to create art, to grapple with the beasts they had been. Some prehistorians theorize that the Lascaux paintings reflect how, in the first moment humans developed the gray matter, the wherewithal to make art, they also recognized that it made them different, and thus drew the other creatures repetitively as their first expressions of mankind’s loneliness, a consideration of separation, of the animal still inside of them, a nostalgia for wilder days.)

  ____________

  1869 CE, the French Caribbean: Aesop’s fables are being translated into Creole. Through volumes like Fables créoles dédiées aux dames de l’île Bourbon (Creole fables for island women), colonists in the Seychelles are impressing French culture upon native island peoples via literature. Most of the stories these books hold are beast fables or beast epics, short texts that contain speaking animals and their sly scrutinies of human behavior. Beast fables were passed in oral tradition long before Aesop’s recording of them. These fables are especially evident in the bestiaries of medieval Europe, illustrated volumes describing various real and mythical animals that served as symbols in the visual language of Christian art of the period. Bestiaries exist as a kind of collection of beast epics related to religious teachings, a cataloging of animals and the ways humans can learn by their example.

  ____________

  (It wasn’t that our species was without the physical capabilities for art making before the Upper Paleolithic; one of the main benefits of bipedalism was its freeing the hands for activities other than forward motion. The Neanderthal could plod upright, bowlegged, could raise a high flame, craft hand tools—but she did not bury her dead, did not, as far as we know, leave any record of representational art. With a sharp blooming in her species’ cranial capacity came the advent of a “creative explosion” that marks the birth of Homo sapiens, the first artists, and their newly vast imaginations. Homo sapien pressed five toes into the Dordogne River sand, a burier of grave goods, a self-adorner, a grinder of manganese pigment created for art alone.)

  ____________

  157 CE, Bergama, Turkey: Galen of Pergamon eviscerates an ape before the High Priest of Asia. He then fully mends the damage to the primate’s body, winning himself the post of physician to the priest’s gladiators, human men hired to battle the formidable beasts brought to Bergama from the untamed corners of the continent. Both men and beasts were kept in cells off the stone corridors below the floor of massive arenas where Galen sometimes worked. Ever the student, Galen referred to the wounds of his patients as “windows into the body.”

  Following his post as physician, Galen would become one of the most prominent researchers of antiquity. He performed countless animal dissections in his research, primarily of the tissues of the Barbary ape. Galen produced the first detailed drawings of the inner musculature of an ape’s hand, which contains all of the structures present in humans, differing only in the tapering of the ape’s slender wrist and fingertips, and in the proportional development of muscles rendering the ape’s thumb only partially opposable. These drawings served as a model for the crude surgical processes of many ages that followed.

  ____________

  (When one studies the cave art at Lascaux, it becomes clear that the natural formation of the wall was considered as a primary influence of a figure’s placement upon it. Often an existing rock shelf became the ground on which a painted herd ran; a sharp cleft gave dimension to the tucked neck of an equine. We can imagine the earliest human artists planning their work the way their successors would in millennia to come, by skimming palms along the inner rock faces, tracing grooves with fingertips in search of spines, a sinuous flank. When the first artists grazed these pigments to stone, it was not their own likenesses, but those of the creatures around them that they drew. These animal figures were layered, stacked in lines or packs suggesting procession or stampede. They were dusted with patterns, empty to suggest whiteness, heavy bellied, bent. None were captured in stillness. These first attempts at representation proved detailed enough that humans living thirty-five thousand years later could identify and catalogue 605 of the 900 depicted species, and counting.)

  ____________

  1994 CE, outside Montignac, France: I step across a threshold of limestone into the slick chill of French subterrane. My damp palm is wrapped in my mother’s long fingers. A hard pool of sunlight at the entrance quickly fades as we descend farther into the rock face and my mother ducks her forehead down toward mine. I let her lead me forward blindly and tilt my head back to gaze beyond the brim of my sun hat where flat figures are streaming slowly overhead. Fais attention, she warns, practicing our French. Our flashlights skip across the sharp ceilings in a flickering that recalls torch light, that stretches and plucks at those painted skins until I am sure they are tugging across the rock in the darkness, somewhere swimming beneath. I remember wondering how the images had been placed there and why we didn’t just take them back out into the light with us. I remember guessing that we had shuffled miles into the dark, that the black passages opening in the swoop of yellow beams were endlessly descending into the earth.

  ____________

  (The musculature of a hand cannot be dissected without a hand. Nor can its tunnels and crevices be detailed and recorded without the precise crafting and then wielding of a pen. Thirty-five thousand years before Galen of Pergamon pressed fingerprint to fingerprint, split the skin of gladiator or ape, Paleolithic artists and dissectors of southern France commanded the same manual precision in their own re
nderings, in their excavations of anatomy. We know this because they left finger bones behind. Today, we can guess at the contours of flesh that once encased the marrow of the first artists through the study of similar existing species. The recorded curve of the earliest human musculature presents itself to us only in handprints stenciled on the walls of Lascaux. To create these distinctly human marks, early artists blew crushed pigment directly from their mouths onto the bare stone between their five spread fingers—perhaps a kind of signature, a symbol of their existing this way, or at all.)

  ____________

  2007 CE, Iowa City, USA: My mother is chewing her cuticles. They are shining, raw down to the first knuckle, deeply stripped around nails she leaves beautiful, intact. She normally chews while reading her medieval history, historical fictions, but with me away at college her erratic nerves are singing at a higher frequency. In leaving, I seem to have taken with me part of the order she imposed upon her days. She refuses medication, is frantic, forgetful. Fais attention, I warn into the phone. I lie in my lofted bed, feeling deeply guilty for leaving her behind—that’s how I think of this. I lie and imagine I possess a specific kind of psychic power to ease our anxieties—those that, like my mother’s, slept inside me until adulthood. I imagine that I can conjure freeze-frame images of the people I love, in whatever motion they are making at that exact moment. Something like an instant X-ray or simplified stick figure upon an empty background. With this ability, I might check to see if they assumed positions of comfort or attitudes that required my attention. Were fully intact, or otherwise. Maybe this seemed a less invasive kind of checking in than calling my mother or sister for the fourth time that day. Maybe it felt more plausible than bird’s-eye viewing them satellite style, like the universe was more likely to grant me this specific skill. If it did, I could squeeze my eyes shut in the dark to see if my mother was curled C-wise in her bed, or with skull cradled in palms. If my sister’s feet were tapping a dance floor or angled along the slope of a highway bank, in dire need. What worried me was the forms I could not imagine, the positions that pained them most, those I never knew. Lying there, I picture their stick figures in succession, asleep in beds, reading in armchairs, laughing in TV glow, and I slowly find sleep.