For every preserved skin and manikin, there are a thousand attitudes. And how much the finished attitude tells us about the time and place of its construction! Early in this century, taxidermists strove for mastery of detail, and the result was regiments of animals as tight-lipped and uncompromising as their Edwardian creators. But under the influence of cinema, motion became the mark of quality. For the directors of museums around the world, the desire to make the dioramas more lifelike took on a new urgency as the popularity of the picture show grew—the decision to depict natural history as an intricate evolutionary adventure was motivated as much by competition as by a refined appreciation of the subject. Techniques of realism became so involved that the American Museum of Natural History in New York City hired “motion specialists” to design the action and determine the most authentic attitudes for their habitat groups.
“The choice of an attitude depends wholly upon our artistic instincts,” wrote one of the most famous taxidermists of the time, William Hornaday. He advised his students to choose the attitude that is the most graceful and at the same time the most representative. “To my mind,” he concluded, “the attitude taken by an animal when startled by visible or suspected danger, is the one par excellence in which it appears at its best when mounted.” This aspect of danger, of suspense, fits perfectly with the desire to simulate action, and taxidermists heeded Hornaday’s advice, modeling their animals to portray “every sense keenly on the alert,” even as they refined muscular detail to such extraordinary precision that they could show a lion’s tail twitching nervously or, with two or three cunning wrinkles, they could depict the mouth of a fox about to snap closed upon a rabbit’s haunch.
Combine motion and danger, and you have a cruel realism, with one story told over and over: the story of the hunt. “For a single specimen, the most striking attitude possible is that of a beast at bay”—these are Hornaday’s words, and they should be engraved on the walls of New York’s Museum of Natural History, in place of Theodore Roosevelt’s arid scoutmaster ethics.
* * *
“My best wench,” says Lily with a giggle, flopping across her bed. “My mopsy, my favorite chippy, diggity-piggity beautiful Peg. Kiss me.” Over the past week their charged secret has transformed back into giddy friendship, or so the girls pretend to each other, both of them reluctant to speak of their short-lived intimacy. But their silly romps keep threatening to turn serious, especially when the hand of one girl makes contact with the body of the other, as Lily’s hand does now, reaching for Peg to recline her, and with her inhibitions made coquettish by Christmas punch, Lily lets her hand rest on Peg’s shoulder, lets the fingers gently knead the pocket of flesh above Peg’s collarbone. And though for Peg this touch is more inviting than anything she’s ever felt, though she knows she does love Lilian, though she’s filled her diary with intimate declarations of love and for the last seven days has despised herself for pretending otherwise, she refuses to give in. She merely sets her jaw a little more tightly than usual, and Lily instantly perceives her disapproval. The only thing left is to fill in the cause.
“Peg? What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Why? Why, she says! Why!”
“What’s the matter?”
“The matter is Hal Craxton,” Peg retorts, and the girls gaze at each other in wonder, so mutually appalled that if someone had nudged them they would have broken up laughing. Instead, Lily sits up and replies in a hushed voice that reinforces the severity of the accusation, “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the way you hung on Mr. Craxton this evening. Like you were already his whore.” Peg’s own encounter with Hal Craxton is one of the few secrets she’s kept from Lily, and she’s glad of it now.
“You’re joking!” Lily can only toss her head in irritation, tinged with a shade of scorn to indicate that she finds the idea absurd. “Hal Craxton is ancient. He has gray hairs as long as my pinky growing out of his nostrils. You jealous creature, I was just being polite.” Lily nuzzles Peg’s neck in an attempt to close the conversation and get on with the business of friendship.
“Were you being polite when you put your arm around his waist?” Peg demands. “Were you being polite when you put your hand in his coat pocket? The next thing was to squeeze the little toad in his trousers—or maybe you did that, too.”
“Crazy, crazy girl! My daddy and Hal Craxton are old friends—they were schoolboys together. Hal—Mr. Craxton—used to visit us when I was little, and he’d always hide presents in his pockets, crayons or beads or tiny harvest dolls. I was just reminding him of that old game. But I shouldn’t have to defend myself against such a ridiculous accusation.” As she speaks she tries to pluck loose the ribbon binding Peg’s braid, and when Peg pulls away, Lily says, “You’re my dearest friend. That’s all that matters,” her voice full of forced conviction. It hardly matters whether the false note is intentional or not—Peg feels herself sliding along with Lily into a melodrama, script in hand, the conclusion already written out.
“Prove it.” Peg lowers her own voice to a whisper, as though merely to utter the challenge put them both at risk, and she says what she’s been wanting to say for weeks: “Take me home with you when you go.”
“What?”
“Take me home with you. Save me from this place.”
“Why, that’s cracked!”
“I’ll be perfectly decent.”
“Peg, I can’t … my family…”
“Let me come live with you—just for a few weeks, until I can find a job. Then I’ll rent a room nearby. We’re best friends, remember.”
Lily is on her feet now, pacing across the diameter of the oval rug, back and forth, her refusal lost to hesitation.
Peg folds her arms. Her bitterness is so pronounced she appears smug when she says, “I’m not good enough?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Your goddamn reputation.”
“Do you really believe that I can introduce you to my family—like, like some stray cat I’d picked up on the street?” Her whisper is strained now, and she jumps rashly to a higher register as she completes her question.
“Oh, but I did believe it, Lily. I hoped that we could stay together forever. But we’re just little girls playing naughty little games.” How quickly the argument, begun as a dare, has intensified. Peg hadn’t meant it to come to this, yet she can’t keep her anger from finding its expression in chilling indifference. “You know, I think I’m bored. Yes, I think it’s time to start another game. There’s always a new game of patience to learn.” As she hears herself speak, she realizes she means this to be final.
“Wait, Peg!”
Like so many of her kind, Lilian Stone has been cultivated by her parents, nurses, and teachers to uphold the standard of autocratic formality. But she’s no match for Peg, who has learned her dignity from haphazard sources and will protect it at the expense of all other emotions. Perhaps there’s a touch of old Mary Craxton in her irony. Even Mrs. Craxton, however, couldn’t affect such vicious mildness. In the moment’s passion, Peg believes she can leave behind this relationship completely, without regret, without memory. When she moves past Lily on her way to the door, she brushes her lips against Lily’s cheek and whispers a haughty “Good-bye, darling.”
But while Peg has a stronger, more dangerous dignity, Lily has greater powers of seduction. She catches Peg by the wrists and says in a voice that is both pleading and commanding, “Don’t go, not yet.”
Irony has a lure of its own, and Peg isn’t ready to give it up. “Should I send Eva down, ma’am?” she inquires pertly. “Or Billie? I’m certain you’d enjoy a turn with one of the other girls. But I’m a bit weary on my feet. So if you’ll excuse me—”
“Peg, sit down.”
“At your service, ma’am.”
“Please. I want to tell you a story about my family. When I was a little girl, five or six—please, Peg, listen to me. I want to tell you about my family. When I was a little girl, I found my daddy out.”
“I’m not interested, Lily.”
“Let me explain!”
“And then what?”
“I want you to understand my family. My father’s money book—this will give you an idea of what it’s like at home. My father kept a hollow book full of money in his study, and every few days he’d add to it. I spied on him one day. I saw him, the old miser. Counting his hoard. After that I’d sneak down to his study every morning and see how much he’d added. Altogether he put over one thousand dollars into that book. And then one day the money disappeared.”
“Why should this matter to me?”
“Not long after, he began filling up his book again. I still don’t know what Daddy used that money for. He caught me, you see. Early one morning he came down to his study and found me counting his money. He slapped me across the mouth, warned me never to tell anyone what I had found. Then he dragged me down to the basement and locked me in the coal bin. I spent the day staring out the little window at an anthill in the grass. It was dark when my father came to get me. He led me past my brothers and my mother, who were seated at the dining-room table waiting for supper. I was covered head to toe with coal dust. No one said a word. This is my family, Peg. I wouldn’t trust them with you.”
“A lowly servant girl. A housekeeper’s daughter.”
“Do you forgive me?”
“No.”
“But you won’t leave me. You can’t. Not yet.”
“Lily—”
“Not yet.”
In the silence that follows, before she gives in, Peg’s eyes search the room with almost frantic attention, as though she were looking to steal a sterner composure from some inanimate object. There is a single candle burning on the bedside table, and it lights half the room in chiaroscuro. A painting of a brace of pheasants hangs over the bed. Velvet roses tumble down the wallpaper. Plush maroon drapes cover all but an inch-wide bar of glass; the window is dark, except for the teardrop reflection of the flame.
Peg closes her eyes. She desperately wants to resist, and if Lily’s voice weren’t so soothing and her hands weren’t so persuasive, she would have left Lilian Stone to her wealth and self-pity. But Lily has slipped the strap of the dress down Peg’s arm and is kissing her freckled shoulder, her neck, the top of her breasts, giggling over two delicious chocolates and the neat scoops of Bavarian cream—Peg Griswood, such a tasty confection—and Peg can’t help but adore Lily, or at least she adores the sensation as her lover’s mouth moves lightly over her body, naked now, her dress somehow cast aside, and down the curve from her waist to her hip to her thigh, devouring all lingering resistance. With a sigh, Lily pushes Peg backward onto the bed and kisses her belly. It occurs to Peg that Lily must have had plenty of relevant experience, for her hands and tongue trace Peg’s willing body with an extraordinary evanescence that could only have been learned through practice. But the thought disappears like the white of an eye behind a closed lid, and Peg’s own eyes shut as she sinks completely into this dream of love. She prefers blindness, where she can imagine herself lifted out of time, so she does not notice that the door is slightly ajar and that a man, a stranger, an intruder in the Manikin, is watching from the hallway. She does not see the pinched expression of jealous rage on his face. Peg does not see him at all and so does not scream in terror as he melts away into the darkness.
* * *
Night winds in this region tend to blow steadily in one direction. Or perhaps this is just the illusion created by steady darkness under the usual cloud cover. And perhaps the transformation into morning does not in itself encourage a change in the wind, and the difference is merely one of gradual light. The weather vane doesn’t necessarily shift direction as the day approaches. But for anyone out walking in the fields early on a winter’s morning an hour or two before dawn, the wind itself seems to change. It is not warmer, not immediately. And the wind doesn’t usually alter in velocity. But it seems more playful—or more wicked. The constant night wind begins to blow in opposing currents, drenches the face with a blast of cold, subsides for a second and then slams against the back of the head. At this time of day the air seems crowded and fractious, as though all the diverse day currents had just been born and were jostling each other in an attempt to secure a preeminent place.
The freshness of the morning wind makes it preferable to the solid, stale, purposeful night wind. But perhaps this, too, is only a lie. An illusion of freedom—as though the wind had not traveled an infinite number of times around the globe but had sprung up just then from the earth. For that brief span of time before morning has completely settled, the wind seems like an unruly spirit released from the bondage of the land, half crazy with its freedom.
Say this spirit is a dream: the earth’s dream, an unreal remembering. Red-winged blackbirds screeching. Rabbits. Chipmunks. A red fox. Long-stalked Solomon’s seal umbels sagging in the heat, pairs of blackberries like a sow’s teats. Wood sorrel and chickweed. Above, tired buckeye leaves, the green half washed to yellow. Everything crackling dry.
The last dream before daylight. Heat begets heat. A single flame splitting into two. The dance of fire against the white backdrop of sky. Generation. Spitting, laughing, drunken flames. The ground cowers, leaves shrivel, animals collapse into ashes. A rush and whir. Oak trees fifty feet in circumference explode. The sleeper shouts, gropes, and seizes a handful of fire.
* * *
Lore hears the panic in the knocking before he is fully awake, and he thinks automatically of Junket. Something has happened. Something has happened to his son. This is how such news comes—first with a pounding, pounding, pounding, knuckles against wood, rousing a man to a life that has changed utterly during the night. He springs from his bed, opens the door to Peter, whom he pushes away so he can get to Junket’s room. He flings the door open just as Junk pulls it from the inside, so the door snaps back and the boy tumbles over Machine to the floor.
“Jesus,” Lore says, catching his breath. “Jesus. Oh Jesus.”
“What is it, Papa?” Junk rubs the wrist he’d landed on, then pushes himself to his feet. The dog barks until Junket shushes him.
“You all right? I’m sorry. What time is it?”
“Lore—” Peter raises his lamp to illuminate their faces. “You’d better get dressed.”
“What is it?” Junk is already pulling on a sweater. Peter contemplates the boy for a moment and says, “Come on to the barn. The both of you.” Then he leaves, hurrying down the stairs and out into the darkness.
Junk tucks his long underwear into his trousers and pulls his boots over his bare feet, while Lore in the same amount of time dresses fully, with socks and a flannel shirt beneath his sweater. Lore even remembers to grab their hats on the way out, and on impulse he sends Machine back into the house and shuts the dog inside. They make their way along the slippery drive through the morning darkness, planting their heels with each step to break the night’s crust on the snow. The predawn sky is an eerie cobalt blue that promises a storm. The barn door is open, and inside, at the far end of the aisle, they see Peter and Sylva standing outside Emily’s stall, the soft yellow glow of Peter’s kerosene lamp giving the figures an antique look, as though they were daguerreotype images and hadn’t moved for fifty years.
As Lore approaches the stall, he hears a soft squeal from within. Colic, he thinks, his worry firm and manageable now, even tinged with relief, since the bad news doesn’t involve Junket. Inside the stall, Red Vic is sitting in the straw with Emily’s head in his lap. He’s such a large block of a man, over six feet tall with a heavy build, that the horse seems dwarfed by him. As Lore approaches, the mare suddenly reaches around and tries to nuzzle and bite her hindquarters, and Lore sees a stain of dark blood on the straw beneath her tail. She’s foaling! But that’s impossible. Lore stomps his feet to shake off the chill of this Christmas miracle. Then he notices the bloody fetlocks. Emily drops her head in Red Vic’s lap again, exhausted, nostrils fluttering with her light panting.
“Papa?” Junk has his high-pitched boy’s voice back again. Lore squeezes his hand and then pushes past him into the stall, takes in the familiar scents of straw and horse sweat and urine along with the sour smell of blood. He lifts the tail, its hair caked with blood and as hard as feather shafts. Emily curls her lip and tries to nip Lore, but Red Vic manages to calm her.
A long slash made with surgical precision, probably with a razor, reaches from the mare’s rectum and disappears between her hind legs. The wound doesn’t bleed as heavily as the more ragged lacerations on the legs. Lore probes a hamstrung foreleg and glimpses the rubbery white tip of a tendon. Emily makes a strange sound, half squeal, half whisper, and kicks out weakly at Lore when he touches her.
“Hush, honey.” Red Vic strokes the broad chestnut cheek and speaks quietly into her ear.
Lore has seen plenty of wounded animals and has killed more than he can count. He doesn’t mind the sight of blood when it’s spilled legitimately. But this blood—unnecessary blood, useless blood—doesn’t fit into his notion of things. For a moment his brain feels as though it has clenched into a fist, and he can’t see anything through his pain but the blurry form of the horse. He shakes the spasm from his head, takes a deep breath, and the ghost image sharpens back into their dear old nag. Emily. Poor Emily.
“Worth bringing in Martin to have a look?” Sylva asks. Dr. Martin is the county’s only vet and lives on Main Street in Millworth. “Peter could fetch him.”
“I don’t…” Lore pauses, stuck at the brink of the decision he doesn’t want to make. “I don’t think so, Sylva. Naw.” As he stands he grabs a fistful of straw and rubs the wet blood from his palms. “Who did this?” he asks, only because the question must be asked, though he doesn’t expect an answer.
“On Christmas morning…” Sylva says, clucking her tongue, and that sound, which usually precedes a command, causes Emily to prick her ears forward and try to roll onto her belly. Red Vic pulls her gently back; she doesn’t resist. They watch her without a word, the silence broken only by the mooing of an impatient cow. Lore’s initial relief has long faded—there’s no place in his understanding of nature for something like this. Such an act couldn’t even be conceived of by any animal other than man. And that Lore can’t reach out and catch the fiends who did this and return the injury, justly, tit-for-tat—this seems the most unnatural thing of all.
“Junket, go get my rifle.” Father and son exchange a quick glance—they’ve never been reconciled over the lost Maynard—but Junket rushes off. Lore listens to the clomp of his boots as he runs down the aisle and out the door.
For whatever reason, the boy’s absence frees the adults from their solemnity, and after a minute or so Peter says, “The devil who did this—I’ll kill him, if I ever catch him.”
“You leave it to God or to the judge, depending…” Sylva says, kneeling to pick straw from Emily’s muzzle.
“Who did this? Who?” Red Vic slowly shakes his head. Of anyone present, he’s the one most sentimentally attached to the horse. Economically as well, since he has only three responsibilities at the Manikin: the horse, the touring car, and the truck. How this will affect Red Vic’s position no one present can be sure.
“Would have taken two strong men, I think. One to hold her, one to hurt her.” Lore’s voice drifts off so the last words are inaudible.
“Only one pair of boots walked out of the barn before us,” Peter says. “He cross-tied her, see.” He motions to the lengths of rope hanging from wall hooks.
“Let’s go after him,” Lore suggests.
“He has half an hour on us, at least.”
“Tend to the horse,” Sylva insists. “And what about Mr. Craxton? Remember, he’s back home.” She probably means to remind them that the master of the house needs to be informed of the crime, but by calling up his name she manages to cast him as a suspect.
“Why would he—?” Red Vic loses the question to choking emotion.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Strange, you gotta admit. Craxton comes home and that same night someone takes a knife to our horse,” Peter says. “Maybe he’s trailing a history.”
“What are you saying, man? Better you keep your crazy hunches to yourself than try them out on the rest of us,” Sylva scolds.
“We’ll have to report it,” Lore says vaguely, uncertain of the procedure. Perhaps he should bring Craxton to the barn before he puts the horse out of her misery. What should he do? No one helps him with advice. They stand around pondering the mare’s suffering, unable to take their eyes off her and all of them wanting her dead, until Junket returns with the rifle—loaded, ready to be cocked.
“All right.” With the weight of the gun in his hands, Lore feels more helpless than ever. After a few minutes Red Vic plants a rough kiss on Emily’s nose and eases out from beneath her. She’s too weary to raise her head again—she stares at Lore’s weapon with mild interest, perhaps sensing that it is the instrument of her relief.
“All right,” Lore repeats, infected by the horse’s contagious exhaustion. The others move away from the stall. Sylva says needlessly, “Just do it, Lore. Get it over with.” Almost in one motion, Lore cocks the gun, lifts it to his shoulder, aims for the small hollow beneath Emily’s right ear, and fires. The whole body jerks at the impact and flops back, twitching, blessedly lifeless within a matter of seconds. Brain and blood have exploded into the straw, and from above the killing looks clean. Lore backs away so the others can see.
“Maybe we should have brought in Mr. Craxton first,” Junket says. His son’s voice still sounds so boyish to Lore. Stupidly, pathetically boyish.
“Maybe…” echoes Lore, managing with his tone to convey his irritation, and Junket glances up in surprise and shame.
“Oh, he wouldn’t care if his house burned down,” Sylva says.
Peter adds, “Hal Craxton will burn it down himself one day. For the insurance money.”
Red Vic squats and runs his hand around Emily’s belly, as though feeling the tightness of a girth. Then he covers his face with his hands.
Maybe, Lore is still thinking, watching Red Vic mourn. Maybe.
* * *
There were some who heard the horse’s agony. Mrs. Craxton had woken early and was lying in bed waiting until the decent hour of 7:00 A.M., when she would ring for Ellen. She thought the scream was a raccoon’s, though she took it as an omen for the day. “There will be trouble before sunset, Ellen,” she muttered later, when she had her arms around the housekeeper’s neck and was lifting herself onto the bedpan. “Mark my words.”
The maid Eva was awake in her attic room and heard it too—mistaking the weird cries for a human voice, she assumed that someone in the house was having a nightmare.
And Boggio, who never slept better than fitfully, had been up for hours and was making coffee over his paraffin stove when the screams began. He misjudged the distance of the voice, thought it was coming from a deep, nearby interior.
He reached out from his chair and touched the satiny feathers of his snowy owl, probed under the extended wing until he felt the stretched leathern skin. And beneath that, he felt the outline of the wadded excelsior bound with wire, and the wooden skeleton. The cry, he believed, had originated from somewhere inside the body of the owl and was muffled by the padding and skin and winter feathers. The bird was calling out to him, over and over, barely audibly. Not that Boggio was surprised. He’d heard the owl’s voice dozens of times, on nights when the wind gusted and shook the windowpanes. But he could discern a difference in these cries, even in their weakness. His lovely owl was begging to come alive, just for one day—Christmas Day—hoping beyond hope that nature would celebrate the holiday and grant a dead creature temporary life. Boggio felt a guilty pride. Thanks to him, the spirit of the owl lived on inside the trap of its false body, the stuffed bird too powerful a monument to leave behind. Boggio’s little mammoth, this white muff of a bird trapped in ice, was teased day after day by its own verisimilitude.
After the screams ceased Boggio watched the owl carefully for some slight motion. He even wagged a forefinger inside the open beak, but nothing happened. Dour nature couldn’t be persuaded to bend the rules. Not even on Christmas. Not even in fun.