Hex: A Novel (16 page)

“And there,” Mr. Clawson said, spreading his hands before him like a magician setting up a miraculous substitution; a dove
for an orange, a rabbit for a girl, “and there, laid out before me. . .Can you imagine the mess? The noise? Her cunt split right in half, it looked to me. My own wife’s cunt which I had dabbled in so happily, so innocently up until this point. I had thought of it as a still, clear pond. A little resting place. When I thought of my wife’s cunt, I now realized, I had imagined a sandy bottom, languorous water weeds. . .” Mr. Clawson laughed again. He looked up at me and gripped the back of my calf, laughing.

“Oh, I was forced into a reckoning,” Mr. Clawson said. “I was forced to come to terms with what was weak within my own nature, and I have done that every day ever since. It’s like a mantra with me.” He pulled away for a moment to fetch his drink, but then came right back, resting his chin on my knee, passing his arm under my thigh to sip from the glass on the other side. I made a noise, some noncommittal noise that I hoped sounded casual and encouraging. Mr. Clawson seemed to take it that way.

“That’s what I like about you,” he said, gazing pensively over my thigh and into the camilla. “You’re not so squeamish, so finely tuned. If we don’t have language in common then what do we have?” He was getting worked up again, lifting his chin from my knee, raising his voice. “If we can’t say what we have experienced in plain language and thus expunge it, then we must admit the thing into the secret chambers of our soul,” Mr. Clawson shouted into the shrubbery. Behind us something plopped into the pool which made a slurping sound.

“Do you know what the soul is?” Mr. Clawson asked.

“No,” I said.

“A blob of glup. Do you know what the soul needs?”

“No,” I said. My legs were falling asleep, the circulation cut off by the edge of the lawn chair, but I was too precariously balanced to move. I felt proud of myself for not being the camilla,
blighted by the strictures of its life, visibly withering. I also felt vaguely like we were playing a game, some call and response which would spell out an unexpected word I wouldn’t be able to guess until the very end.

“No,” I repeated, a whisper.

“Me neither,” said Mr. Clawson and suddenly deflated. He rested his chin on my knee again like a good dog. He laughed. “What else could it possibly need?” he said, but not to me.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do in response. He seemed so friendly; he was almost panting. The hair on the top of his head swirled in an unexpected cowlick that made me feel very sorry for him. I think I did something like pat him on the head. If I am to be my most honest, as I hope I am always able to be with you, Ingrid, I will admit I buried my fingers in Thingy’s father’s hair and scratched his scalp the way I did for fat, little Dog whose legs were too short to reach between his shoulder blades.

Mr. Clawson took another sip of his drink and, still laughing softly, turned his head and laid his cheek against my knee. Against my expectation, I found his skin smooth and soft, with a resilient toughness where the muscles of his jaw bunched and stretched. I moved my scratching to behind his ears but became confused and shy. I let my fingers still at the nape of his neck but then thought it too much of a statement to pull away entirely. We sat there for a little while: his breath warm against my knee, my palm resting on his back and fingertips just barely touching the skin above his collar. I watched a plane wink across the sky, so far away its incredible speed was slowed to a crawl in my vision. Inside, the party had moved elsewhere and Thingy, left alone in the living room, leaned forward and accepted the mule-faced boy’s hungry embrace.

“Oh, look,” Mr. Clawson said. He reached out and grabbed my opposite ankle, tugged gently until I let him draw my foot up near his face. “Look, Alice,” he said. “You’re bleeding. You have a cut.” And, even though the cut itself was shallow and had long since scabbed in a thin crust, Thingy’s father passed his fingers over my skin as if pressing back rills of pumping blood, bent his neck and kissed the arch of my foot as if stemming a tide.

He pressed there for a long time, lingering, moving his lips in a speech I could feel but not hear. His lips were warm and dry. They brushed over my skin, but I swear to this day, Ingrid, I swear on my mother’s burst body which I sent to the grave, I have no idea what it was Mr. Clawson asked me. All I know for sure is what I said in return. And what came after, of course. Which is where you come in.

Once, through a confluence of events and no fault of his own, a horse fell in love with a baby.

This happened at a busy crossroad where two well traveled paths met and mingled before going their separate ways. At first the crossroad was a naked x, pressured on all sides by trees. The roads that stretched away from that place were cold and thin, insufficient lines drawn between the mountain and the valley. Over the years many trees had been cut for lumber and the forest pushed back to widen the thoroughfare. Then someone had built a gibbet. Then someone had built a stable behind the gibbet and soon enough an inn next to the stable, a feed store on
the other side of the road, an apothecary’s shop snug at its side. Soon there were enough buildings and goods to consider the place a small town.

The crossroad was busy day and night but it was not named as a town would be. It was an in-between place. Often travelers were seen standing in the middle of the x, turning from road to road in a state of bewilderment. From each road came the same cool wind. Down each was afforded the same looming view of spruce and hemlock, rock, frosted blooms of lichen, hard dark earth.

One day, to the crossroads came a white horse ridden by a young and weary rider. They were on their way back down to the valley after a trip to a mountain town to secure the hand of a lovely mountain bride who had been promised but, souring over the months of postal courtship, now refused her betrothed on her father’s very hearth. “That cunt,” the young and weary man said over and over as they came down the steep road. He murmured it into the white horse’s mane as he sank exhausted over the pommel and every time the horse flicked back one soft, sensitive ear as if to agree.

It is impossible to say what the horse thought of all this. At this point he was only a horse, though a handsome one with round knees, strong haunches, a lustrous tail and yellow hairs bristling from his pink, speckled muzzle. He had been born in a barn not so many years ago. He remembered everything that had happened to him since that point: sliding from his mother’s quivering vagina and laddering himself upright on his own quivering legs, a whisk of straw scrubbed over his face and in his nostrils, a cold breeze as the barn door opened and someone else came in. After that came many, many days that were largely the same.

Immediately after birth, the white horse had been given to the young and weary man as a present and this man had formed the basis for almost everything the white horse knew about himself. For example, he knew he was an animal and that to be an animal was to stand when someone told him stand and go when someone told him go. He knew the sun, which was like his curry brush, and the grass, which was like the bit in his mouth. He knew a sly kind of joke which had to do with his eyes and lips and a quick, sideways shuffle and, if the man were in a different mood, he knew a stupid, towering fear of brown leaves and blowing paper down from which his master could disdainfully calm him.

The young and weary man was mostly patient, but sometimes used the lash. He mostly remembered the horse’s soft mouth, but sometimes sawed the reins until the corners of the horse’s lips split and bled. In this way the white horse learned what was expected of him and, because he knew nothing but this expectation, came to understand his most intimate self as a figure of what he would do next. Not what he currently was; not what he desired to become.

This is not so strange. Who expects a mule or an ox to have a spiritual life? Who suffers a crisis of self alongside a flea? The world is full of dawning. The sun comes up. If a man or a woman or a horse is awake to see it, they might mark the very moment when the sun appears to pull itself free of the horizon: shivering like a yolk, bouncing into its shape.

The horse brought his rider to the crossroad at noon. It was early spring and the sun was small and silver as a coin. They had traveled together all night. At first, spurred by the rider’s spleen, they had pelted down the winding, treacherous road, blood in
the white horse’s nostrils, stones turning under his hooves. Then, when the moon rose, the rider relaxed and they traveled more slowly. There was time to watch shadows slide across the path in front of them. Time to smell the high, thin scent of the pines and listen once and then again as, close by their side, something heavy struck and something small shrieked and fell silent.

When the sun comes up in the mountains the world is very far away. The mountain is black and at first the sun is announced by a deeper blackness, a pooling in the valley. Then the world inches forward in slow shades of violet. Distance is uncovered and every creature knows a specific unease—to see the world unchanged when I have been so changed! to see the world cold and still when I am hot and pounding!

The horse tossed his head and flicked his ears as the sun came up over the side of the mountain. Below them the valley was filled with fog which boiled like the surface of an uneasy lake. Behind them rose the mountain, its face streaming with green water. The horse was small, his great heart beat. The rider leant against his neck and said, “That cunt. That cunt,” in a voice as soft and thready as the new wind kicking up in the leaves. Then the path turned and they wound down again into darkness, quiet under the spreading branches of the pines.

So. When the horse and his rider came to the crossroads, at noon, weary from their journey, heart-sore and ill-at-ease, their minds were set on vengeance and on dinner, on pain and on a warm, snug place to sleep. This is to say, neither one of them was thinking of love. This is to say, they both nurtured within them a hard dark spot, like a black rock worn smooth by the river, which they turned and turned as if by turning it they would better be able to see. . . .

The crossroad was busy and loud. A man in a red jerkin sold live chickens strung up by their feet. A woman wearing a silver mask was standing on a box waving her arms. Someone was selling meat pies; someone was selling pots. A man tugged on a woman’s bodice and her breast popped out. A man sharpened knives on a stone he held between his knees.

The rider dismounted and looped the reins around the pommel. He gripped the white horse’s bridle at his cheek and pulled as he used it to balance, standing on one leg and then the next, arching his back like a bow.

“Ten pots. Ten pots,” said the man who was selling pots.

“I was buried in the meadow, but I arose,” said the woman in the mask. “I was buried on the mountain, but I washed into the stream.”

The horse whickered. His hooves felt sore and splayed. He urinated on the ground in a great, steaming arc and turned his head to watch the stream runnel through the dirt.

“Ten pots. Ten pots,” said the man who was selling pots. He was walking away from them, a pack on his back hung all about with pots and he clanked as he moved. All in all, he was a funny sort of man, easily dismissible. His hair was black and stood up around his head as if he were wearing a crown. “Buy pots,” said the pot selling man, and no one turned to mark him pass. He was like a slow, clanking shadow, unmoored from the sun, but in between all the pots was a sort of a hollow space and wedged in that hollow space was a kind of a pouch and in that pouch, her face purpling above the drawstring like a furious ornamental cabbage, was a baby girl.

The man turned his stone; he fingered it greedily.

The horse raised his head and pulled against the bridle. He opened wide a protesting eye and, for the very first time, he could see.

Of course, it didn’t last. Even as the white horse strained his thick neck forward, the woman in the mask stepped off her box to buy a meat pie from the vendor and blocked the horse’s view. When she moved again and he could see past her, the man selling pots had melted away into the crowd.

So it was that the white horse felt joy (her fat cheek! her furrowed brow!), and so it was the white horse also knew despair and a hunger that came not because something had been taken from him, as his oats must eventually be, as the comfort of his stall sometimes was in the early morning hours, but because something could not be taken from him. Something—this baby! this baby! the wide, clear eye that pierced his own as it looked back at him—was his to seek out, to possess.

“Where else was I buried?” said the woman. She slid the mask back on her head and nibbled at the edges of the pie. Some grease dribbled on her chin and splashed against her white collar where it soaked in. With her free hand she caressed the features of the mask—flat eyes, sharp nose, broad, clashing cheeks. She looked around her dimly. She kept asking questions.

The young and weary man had a terrible time getting his horse into its rented stable. It pulled against the bridle. It locked its knees and braced against him, its neck as long and obstinate as a goose. All he wanted was a meat pie from the vendor. All he wanted was to strike his lovely betrothed in the mouth and then sink to his knees at her feet as the blood flowed over her lips. This would take place in an orchard—early autumn with the leaves on the ground and fruit heavy on the branches, assaulted by wasps and bees. A sweet smell. Her little cries and her fingers in the hair at the back of his bent neck.

He struck the horse on the nose instead and was surprised when it reared up against the sides of the stall and lashed out with its hooves. But all this is temporary. There is something satisfying in turning one’s back on a dangerous animal. There is something soothing about being very tired in the middle of the day, the sun on one’s skin, people moving about with noise and purpose. If he left the horse screaming in the stable, it was just one more noise among many. What did it matter which way he turned when all the roads leading from this place looked the same?

“It couldn’t have been the ocean,” said the woman in the mask. “Where did I leave off?”

The young man bought a meat pie and ate it. Nothing was ever the same again.

For the rest of his life the white horse carried his joy and his rage on his back like a second rider. He grew sullen and would disrupt his master’s journeying by trying to thrust his head over hedgerows and into open windows as they went. He began to gulp air, to fight the bit. He shied at bits of paper in the road, rustling leaves, the sudden heavy flight of crows and could neither be calmed nor jollied. His master put him in blinders. He employed spurs and rods, other more inventive encouragements, but the horse was driven, distracted by the weight on his back which was alternately as hard and cold as a ruby, sparking from all its facets, and as soft and dark as an organ engorged with blood, feebly trying to pulse.

In short, the white horse was ruined. His master—who had passed out of his youth but regained none of his vivacity and so was a stout and weary man, dark as a pudding, fairly steaming—used him to service the mares, but even at this the horse was
fractious and unreliable. Eventually, his master put him out to pasture on a deserted, wilding side of the property, bound on three sides by thorn hedges and on one by the rustling forest. He forgot about him all together. There the white horse languished.

It is impossible to say how much time passed. What did it mean to the horse? Each day followed the next and it was the same sun, the same sky. The grass came up around his fetlocks and he bit it back down. A fox slunk out of the forest and trotted down the hedgerow, its black legs quick as shears. Later it came back with a rabbit slung from its jaws. The horse’s knees grew swollen and boxy. His back swayed under the weight of his burden and his coat grew dull and dry. How many foxes? How many suns? The grass came up around his fetlocks and he bit it back down. On his back was a ruby, an organ, a ruby, a great, wet weight. One day, the horse went into the forest.

When a certain kind of girl walks she leaves behind her both the place she has just been and the person she was there. She breaks the new air with her new self and greets around her, with a shining face, all the possible versions of herself to come. Of course, she is caught up quickly. When she stops, even just for a moment to unsnag a thorn from her stocking, adjust the heel of her shoe, all the black weight of her self slams into her back and settles there. Her greed, her fear! Her nervous hands and the dark circles that press below her eyes like thumbprints. She must go on. Quickly, quickly. She must never look back.

A horse is a different sort of animal. The white horse left nothing behind him. He removed himself from the picture and the picture filled in. Simple as a soap bubble: iridescent, then pop.

The forest was not a natural place for a horse to be. The ground under his hooves was spongy and hummocked. Roots arced out of the leaf mold and zipped along a few feet before diving back in like trout choking a stream, the stream boiling with their bodies, he like a horse plashing witless in the shallows.

Was he thirsty? There was nothing to drink, though the forest had the lowering feel of a damp place and around him, at varying distances, he could hear the sound of water plinking against stone. Was he hungry? The horse lowered his head to graze as he went, a domesticate and thus accustomed to meeting many needs at once, but the ground was barren, soft and yet unyielding. Below him were vast hollow spaces. The roots pierced them and traveled on in darkness and in damp. The white horse could not see very well. The forest pressed around him like blinders, at once too close and too far: the dancing motes of light, gold and green; the suggestion past each trunk of a space opening out; the older trees shot like jackstraws, collapsed against each other’s shoulders; a bird which called and fell still, called and fell still to listen. Was he thirsty? Was he hungry? The horse went on and on. His back hurt under its weight; his knees swelled and popped. A bird called. Water fell against stone. There was a great, rearranging flurry and then nothing. Silence. The forest drew itself up.

Eventually, as he must, the horse came out of the forest and into a clearing. Here the grass was long and thick. Through the center of the clearing someone had beaten a road; at the head of the clearing someone had built a house. What a pretty sight. A chimney. Rose bushes. There was a vegetable garden sprung with stands of rhubarb and clouded about the edges with pennyroyal and phlox. There was a shape at the window twitching the curtains and two crows perched meditatively on the garden
fence. The roses were furled like champagne flutes. A curl of smoke lifted from the chimney and hovered in the still air like the shadow of something larger and further away.