Here she comes now, long strong stride bringing her out of the yellow wood. In her arms she cradles an infant, so close against her breast I fear for them both. Evidently Eva Marie is willing to take the risk, which I understand and laud for the very reason that such passionate protectiveness is quite outside my personal repertoire. When we were together it was outside hers as well. This is how I failed her. She was forced to leave us in order to learn to love.
No, this is not Eva Marie. Eva Marie has not returned this year any more than any other year. This is some other woman, some other infant, mewling. Alexandra.
My brothers are arrayed like ridiculous toy soldiers on the dank porch of my father’s house. Daddy’s among them; I can see his bent knees. I’m yelling before I get there. “Hey, assholes, come help me with this baby! She’s your niece, too!” It’s a lot to yell, and no doubt incomprehensible to them, but I’m on a roll and I keep yelling. “Get your ass out here and take her! She’s your granddaughter!”
Vaughn drifts toward me then gets distracted—I suppose by his own music—and drifts off, trailing drumbeats and autoharp chords. Galen and Will stay where they are. Daddy gets stiffly to his feet, tucks something into the hip pocket of his awful plaid pants, and leaves the porch by the opposite end without acknowledging my presence or Bella’s. Why am I not surprised.
“Well, shit,” says Will, wearily, the way he says everything.
In my hands Bella has stopped writhing, but she’s still producing that hoarse gulping sound that abruptly I can’t stand one more minute. Less to comfort than to silence her, I pull her into me, press her face against my chest. The sound is muffled but not stopped so she must still be breathing. The ubiquitous Herpie slithers insolently under my feet, as if I wouldn’t dare step right on her, and disappears into the knee-high yellow weeds around the porch.
The drizzle has thickened into downright rain. I tent the baby’s head with my palm but—stubbornly, I guess, or maybe wisely—don’t step up onto the porch where we’d both be sheltered. “I’m not doing this! You hear me? I’m not doing this all by myself. I resign.”
“Oh, get over yourself.” That’s Galen. I want to smash his face.
“It’s fucking raining. One of you has got to take this baby.”
Galen says, “Hey. Watch your language. We don’t talk like that around here.” We are all so predictable.
Predictably, I lower my voice to what I hope is a menacing growl. “Will. Take her in the house. Now.”
He hesitates, but never one to refuse an order, direct or inferred from the strongest personality around him at any given moment, he comes to the edge of the porch and reaches down. Rain slithers and hisses between us. I hand the hiccupping infant up and over to him. Rain is now dripping off my hair and soaking the shoulders and the back of my T-shirt. My hands and the baby’s face look yellow.
Will starts wordlessly into the house with her, but I’ve climbed onto the porch—predictably, from the long side where there are no steps; might as well make this as hard as possible. Shrugging out of the pack, I’m telling him to wait, she needs a diaper change.
“Great. Thanks a lot.”
“I’ll feed her in a few minutes. Don’t you try it. She has a lot of trouble swallowing. Sometimes she chokes. They’re probably going to put in a feeding tube, just to keep her alive.”
Will looks down at Bella. “Um,” he says, as if to her, “okay.”
“There are clothes in there, too, if she’s wet. If they aren’t damp from the rain.”
“Okay.”
Then he just stands there, looking bewildered. Out of pity, maybe, I make a clumsy overture. “I bet you’re glad to see this rain, aren’t you? Good for the garden. Martin always celebrates rain.”
Right away I realize my faux pas. Having lived for so long in a semi-arid climate, I forgot for a moment where I am now. Will’s face animates darkly. “Everything’s about to drown or wash away. So, yeah, maybe I ought to be celebrating.” I don’t know what to say. Desolately he glares out at the rain, which is heavy by now, and then takes the baby into the house.
I turn on my oldest brother and demand, “Okay, Galen, what the fuck is going on around here?”
It’s a sort of all-purpose challenge, and I don’t exactly know what response I’m going for, but it sure as hell isn’t the one I get. He squares his shoulders and directly meets my gaze to tell me, “Mom’s here.”
Although I have lived my entire life in yellow humidity, I dislike it. I dislike the soggy ground, the mist and rivulets dirtying my glasses, my shirt adhering to my back, the dank smell.
Herpie crawls gamely through the mud and wet brambles. My shoes slip and stick. Every branch I grasp for balance is too pliable from moisture to be of any use and only streams cold rain and leaves upon me. Unprotected by hair or hat, my scalp cringes from the chill, and my head aches.
The reason for haste has slipped my mind—what the object might be, whether I am escaping or pursuing—but this does not diminish the need for haste. Working my left hand into my hip pocket, I find it damp and empty. Panic seizes me, but when I think to check my right pocket the small notebook is safe, neither lost nor ruined by rain.
Often, though less frequently as years went by, Eva Marie and I wandered through this wood in rain, as well as in fog and moonlight and darkness, twilight and dawn and rare dappled midday sunshine. At first these were not romantic interludes or episodes of any other sort of intimacy. I would keep my hands in my pockets, or occupied with tools, or clasped behind my back. I would stay paces ahead of her or paces behind. We seldom talked, and our silences, though I think not hostile, were also not often especially companionable.
“I’m scared,” she would say nearly every time, shouting or whispering or in irritating baby talk. “These woods are creepy. I don’t like being out here in these woods, Alexander. Alex, please, I want to go home. Let’s go home.”
For innumerable reasons—temperament, childhood training, weak character—both Eva Marie and I were afraid of many things. Each other. Our children. People in any way unlike ourselves, which meant all people. Social situations. Artistic self-expression; she had a real feel for colour and texture and design, occasionally would go so far as to buy fabric and thread, but as far as I know never finished a piece. Travel. Friendship. Love in any form.
When Eva Marie was pregnant with our first child, I took her to the hideout I had discovered not long before, even more recently made usable for purposes which at that time were still unclear. She resisted. She wept. She claimed sickness, fatigue, pain, swollen ankles, concern for the foetus. I persisted, led her to the grotto under the granite outcropping. At the sight of Herpie stretched out in the line of pale sunshine at the edge of the rock, she screamed and fluttered her hands. I took her by the shoulders and pressed her down onto her knees, though she cried out about the mud on her white maternity slacks. I urged her into the dim cave and settled her in what was then her place. At the time I had no reservations about being a bully, and I have no regrets about that now, only that I did not persevere.
She made unseemly sexual advances to which I could not prevent myself from responding, although to do so was against my intent, my better judgment, and my will. I was a young man, with the woman I loved, however guardedly, in a low-lit, secluded place. She distracted me, and I succumbed.
For a while then, I tested the theory that sex might be a way of transferring to my wife—ejaculating into her, if you will—this most vital of aptitudes. This was not self-indulgence, as Eva Marie believed; I was at least as uncomfortable with what I was proposing as she was. She said I made her feel like a whore. I saw it as a failure of nerve on both our parts. When that phase ended, having veered close to pornography and produced no beneficial results, we could scarcely look at each other, did not touch each other for a long time, and both considered ourselves to have been vindicated in our instinctive stance against the risks of physical passion and, by extension, passion in any form.
I did make several other attempts at presenting to Eva Marie what I knew to be essential to the world but could not myself put into practice: the ability and the willingness to love large and deeply. I saw how we were with Galen, and then with the other children, one after another. Both of us loved them, in our own fashion—which is to say, not very well. Neither of us could say it or show it directly, or, in truth, feel it with any real conviction. It was too much to ask—it has always been too much to ask—for me to love like that, but had I been sufficiently strong and skilled and daring, had I used the powers I was beginning to recognize, I believe I could have given it to Eva Marie. And then she would not have left.
Eva Marie became increasingly constricted. She did little but tend to the children’s basic needs, and that without much enthusiasm. She was hardly sleeping or eating; her eyes hollowed and her skin dulled. More and more real and fantasized dangers paralyzed her—she admitted to snakes, falling trees, kidnappers, other children carrying disease, touching me, talking with me, living with me, caring for our children, the wood at night, the wood in rain, the sunlit wood. She would hardly leave the house. Soon she would not leave the house at all.
The wood is now filled with rain. Rain grows among the trees. The noise of rain among trees is deafening. I am cold. I have been told of, or have concocted, Eva Marie’s summons; she wants to see me, but I do not know where she is. I might almost be floating. I might almost be drowning.
Emily was a colicky baby. For the first ten months of her life, she screamed almost constantly. We had four other small, demanding children. When not at my quiet job at the county library, I was spending a great deal of time in the cave, justifying this behaviour to myself—and not without reason, I still maintain—by working on methods of infusing Eva Marie with the ability to rear these children in more than a cursory, obligatory manner. I had fundamental doubts as to my own ability in that regard, but continued to believe I could discover a way of giving it to her.
At various times, certain potions seemed to show promise; I have notes, but looking them up would be pointless. I was also experimenting with mixtures, sequences, juxtapositions of ancient and otherwise traditional incantations, as well as composing originals; notebooks filled with annotated drafts are still extant, utterly irrelevant now.
Our children provided practice opportunities and heightened my awareness of all that was insufficiently good and loving and steadfast and beautiful in the world into which they had been born. Galen was not yet four years old the first time I took him to the cave. An exuberant boy then, he paid little attention to either his mother’s dutiful protests or her distracted relief; with a two-year-old and a newborn, she was decidedly unfocused, easy for both of us to ignore. When we left the house, she was weeping, Will was shrieking and banging on the tray of his high chair where he had probably been left too long, Vaughn was wailing in his crib, and although it was not raining the wood dripped grey-yellow under a low grey sky.
In a thick new notebook I had worked out a plan, a sort of experimental design, beginning with a rather lengthy list of qualities I considered deficient in the world but was myself incapable of putting into action. Doubting I would have enough children for all the items, I had been forced to combine and prioritize.
Having chosen with this firstborn son to begin with social responsibility, high on my list, I had worked out a careful protocol. Galen noticed the gun, of course, and begged to be allowed to hold it. Of course I refused. He regarded it curiously. “What’s it do, Daddy?”
“It’s a hunting rifle. It kills animals.”
His eyes widened. “Why?”
“For fun.”
He took that in, nodded, crouched to examine some interesting stone or leaf or ball of dirt. I called him to me and we continued our trek until we reached the cave, by which he was immediately fascinated, as I had known he would be.
However, he was afraid to enter, so I crawled in first, laid the rifle in its predetermined place, then turned and beckoned; holding out my arms to him would have been better, but beckoning was the best I could do. I saw the courage it took for him to follow my orders. Sympathy made me brusque. “Do not dawdle,” I told him. “We have no time for dilly-dallying.”
Settled awkwardly on my lap, he began asking a four-year-old’s endless questions about everything in his field of perception, from cave walls to Herpie to sounds from the wood to the array of envelopes and Mason jars he spotted in the back corner. “What’s that, Daddy? Why’s it called that? What’s it do? Why’s it do that? Can I have it? Does it like me? Is it yours? Is it your friend? What’s that?” To many such questions there are no known answers. I provided him with a few—though not all—of those I had, but he was not satisfied, and I quickly became impatient as ever with slow, incremental, unpredictable teaching.
Mentally checking off the steps I had outlined in the notebook, I set Galen off my lap, to his mild objections. I took up the vial of blue-green liquid and the pouch of grey powder I had prepared just that morning for maximum freshness and strength. The risk was undeniably sobering. I had researched thoroughly, but these alchemical concoctions are drawn from materials rife with metaphor and innuendo impossible to verify, and I had added my own touches. Though I had exercised as much caution as I could bring to bear, it was still not inconceivable that I was about to cause great harm to my son. Hoping with grim fervour that this would not be the case, I nonetheless had no doubt that the risk was justified by the potential benefit to him and to humanity.
Allowing Galen to continue his prattling, I mixed the powder into the liquid, which in appearance and taste somewhat resembled Kool-Aid of an unknown flavour. He heard the clink of the spoon and twisted around to look. “What’s that, Daddy? Can I have some?”
“Yes, son, you may have some. But first I want to show you something.” Because I then put one arm around him, he both saw and felt me raise the gun. Perhaps he heard it as well, the dull rattle of metal and wood against flesh. Perhaps he smelled it.
This was one of Herpie’s first assignments from me, and she performed well. On cue, a brown rabbit with a frantic white tail hopped across the narrow vista framed by the cave opening, Herpie in silent, invisible pursuit. I felt Galen’s little gasp just before I pulled the trigger. The rabbit screamed, spasmed, spurted blood, fell.
The echo was still ricocheting around us as I laid the gun behind me out of Galen’s reach, held the elixir to his lips, tilted his head back, and commanded, “Now swallow.” Stunned, he opened his mouth. Almost playfully, his cheeks stayed ballooned for a few moments. Then he swallowed.
Despite my efforts at preparing myself not to expect immediate results, I began almost at once to despair. Galen showed no effect at all. He took the potion willingly enough, and when it was gone he licked his lips, wiped his mouth with the grimy back of his hand, pulled me by the sleeve to go look at the dead rabbit. The creature lay in the weeds, contorted and bloody, one eye staring. “Is the bunny sick, Daddy?”
“It is dead, son.”
“What’s ‘dead’?”
“Dead is no longer alive.” Unhelpful, I could see, but accurate.
“Oh.” Abruptly he whooped and jumped over the mess, as if it were a hurdle in a game, and before I could stop him had stuffed a handful of juniper berries into his mouth. I reached him in time to force him to spit them out and to swat his bottom for disobeying the rule about not eating things from the wood without parental approval, which meant my approval because Eva Marie claimed inability to distinguish poisonous from healthful. His distress was so short-lived I doubted the punishment had been effective, but out of concern for the experiment I did not administer more. We went home.
That night amid the cacophony of supper, from which I always did my best mentally to absent myself, Galen suddenly announced to his mother, “My Daddy did a bad thing.”
Preoccupied as always, Eva Marie paid him no heed. Galen raised his voice and the stakes. “My Daddy’s a bad man.”
This time Eva Marie did glance up, but at that moment Will spilled something and the baby spat up, and she shouted at them both. Through the din I pressed Galen. “What bad thing did I do?”
He was still looking at his mother, but he said to me, “You killed that bunny dead.”
By reminding myself of the importance of what I was trying to do, that this cause was much bigger than my personal relationship with my son, I was able to triumph over the impulse to defend my actions. “And why is that bad?”
He stared, not so much at me as off into some internal distance. Eva Marie and the two younger boys were escalating, and there was not much time before I would be forced to intervene. I waited. Galen waited. Then his eyes cleared and he climbed onto his chair. He waved his fork like a flag and proclaimed, “That bunny has as much right to live as you do!”
This was not the syntax of a four-year-old. “Right to live” was not a child’s concept. I had no doubt something new had been instilled in him. As I got up to rescue Will from his mother, I said to my eldest son, “Good boy, Galen. Good job,” and his face glowed.
Over the next months I carefully built upon that first step, with more visits to the cave, more elixirs and emollients, a few small rituals with fire and water and certain words of my own composition. By the time Galen entered kindergarten, he was ready to lecture the other children about animal rights, to be the designated caretaker of the classroom pets, to achieve a certain fame for his precocious commitment to the greater good. Even people who did not agree with him—and in our district the schools were closed on the first days of doe and buck season—took note of his ardour and ability to express it, and a few told us he had changed their attitudes.
But I did not intend for him to stop there. Killing a rabbit before the eyes of a four-year-old had been the easiest route I could think of into his psyche, but there were many other important social causes. We continued our work.
In third grade, Galen spearheaded a fund drive at his school for a local family whose house had burned; I myself could never ask people for money. At the age of eleven, he was collecting signatures on petitions to decrease federal defence spending; I had explained to him at some length the immorality of war in terms a boy his age could understand while he chewed a certain efficacious gum. By the time he entered junior high he had rallied for peace and civil rights, and in high school he led a delegation to the Mock U.N. where his team took first place.
When he came home I would be waiting to hear all about it. I was very proud, and very watchful. Now and then he would protest, mount a short-lived resistance to ingesting what I gave him, or otherwise resist, but without much passion or stamina.
To my satisfaction, Galen continued his social and political activities well into middle adulthood. He was an activist against the Vietnam and Gulf Wars despite this area’s simple-minded patriotism. He was successful, at least for the time being, in thwarting efforts to develop the southeast quadrant of the wood into a housing tract, even though he did not seem fully convinced of his own position. I applauded, silently, his skill and commitment which allowed me to effect social change by proxy. At the same time, I chafed. I could do more.
Now that he has married, Galen is obviously weary of his role. He would not say so directly, but he does not want to be away from his wife. He has no interest anymore in large-scale social action. He merely wishes to nest. And the time is long past when I might have had more direct access to his psyche.
There is, however, no dearth of worthy causes someone in this family must address. I maintain a list. Through Galen’s agency, the Koves have been a force for the greater good, and we will continue to be.
Will’s gardening and Vaughn’s music were easy enough to impart. Will was and is simple-minded in a more literal sense than the term usually implies—not unintelligent, but also not complex or deep or difficult to penetrate. I worked the soil with him a few times, demonstrated to him the wonders of germination and photosynthesis—processes that I understand but do not experience as wonderful—and tamped the gift into place in his spirit with a simple, well-placed chant; he has not been free of it since.
Vaughn’s psyche was characterized from a very early age by high degrees of both suggestibility and obsessiveness. Therefore, that particular transference (I say “transference” in this case because I did once have a musical bent and still listen to the classics because it is a worthwhile activity, although anything that could be termed enjoyment has long since faded) perhaps would have required only a single sprinkling of rarefied singing stone to lock in his natural aptitude with the natural aptitude of the music itself. However, I decided to test the injection technique, by this time developed and refined to a limited degree. On two occasions, once in his bedroom when his older brothers were at school and once in a misty yellow clearing, I filled myself with the imagined need and ability to create music, as fully imagined as I could tolerate, and then shot it into him. Back then, I required physical contact. My son and I sat facing each other, on the Mickey Mouse rug and again on the damp yellow ground, and I held his head in my hands, pressed his temples with my fingertips and his eyelids with my thumbs. At first it was a game to him. Very soon it was not. I was stronger than he and did not let him go until the transfer was as complete as my power and stamina—considerable at that time in my life—would support.
Earl has more to do with Emily’s fecundity than I. However, having missed the opportunity with her mother, I blessed and cursed her with a devotion to parenthood that has worked well for her and for her children. Until now, until this child who can scarcely be called a human child. I have no spells or magic substances for this, nor do I have the energy or fortitude to concoct any. I am too weary to try to imagine what claiming a child like this would be. I am used up. This is asking too much.
Seeing Eva Marie after all this time is asking too much. Not seeing her when she is close by and has asked for me is unthinkable.
I am soaked to the skin and shivering. Every joint in my body protests. I have come to a fork in the path. One direction seems more worn than the other, though in the driving rain I may be misperceiving. As is my wont, I take the more travelled route.
Cognitively, it doesn’t even compute at first, but I have an immediate visceral reaction—chills, tingling, ringing in my ears. Gaping stupidly, I manage, “Mom? Here? Here at the house?”
“She’s at Vaughn’s.”
“At Vaughn’s?” The thought of my mother—I couldn’t say the image, since I have no current mental picture of her—in my youngest brother’s decrepit one-and-a-half-room cabin, among the clutter of musical instruments and dirty clothes and pop cans, is so grotesque it makes me laugh. “You mean you guys have been in touch with her all these years? All of you have? I’m the only one who hasn’t?”
“You weren’t around, now were you, Alexandra.”
Emerging from the house with Bella, Will is kinder. “Not all these years. She contacted us when she was diagnosed.”
“Diagnosed with what?” Not that the name of it matters.
“Some kind of heart thing. She says she doesn’t have long. She wanted to see us.”
Galen corrects him. “She wanted to see Dad.”
“How long has she been here?”
“A week or so.”
“A week? And you didn’t think to mention it to me?”
“You didn’t seem all that interested.”
“Fuck you. Does Daddy know she’s here?”
“He didn’t until a few minutes ago.”
“He didn’t know? How could he not know?” My brothers shrug and shake their heads and look away. After a while I breathe, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“She wants to see you, Alexandra.” This is Galen, of course, setting up the moral order.
“Not a chance in hell.”
“She’s your mother.”
“In name only.”
“You owe her—”
“I owe her nothing.”
“This may be your last chance.”
“Good.”
“Sandi.”
“Anyway, that’s what you said about Daddy to get me here.” I’m shaking.
“And it was the truth.”
“While you’re here,” Will points out, wanly cheerful. “Kill two birds.”
The turn of phrase makes me snort, offending both Galen and Will for different reasons. “Where is Daddy anyway?”
“Who knows?”
Returning the baby to me, Will says, “Think about it, Sandi. Will you at least think about it?”
“Like I’ll be thinking about anything else, you idiot.”
Galen issues orders. “Be here at five o’clock. We’ll take you to see her. All of us. Emily, too.”
“Emily won’t leave the house. Emily won’t leave her room.”
“Oh, she will.” Promise or threat, this declaration isn’t hollow.
I make a declaration of my own. “I’m not doing it, Galen.”
Without even exchanging a glance, my brothers have formed a two-person phalanx and started moving out into the woods, presumably to find our father.
“No way!” I shout after them, clutching the baby. “You hear me? No fucking way!” In my arms Bella stiffens and then goes limp, panting and rolling her big blue eyes.