Bigfoot’s Widow

Something about this place inspires fantasy, can make a susceptible person think of prophecies and tokens. The wise woman of the woods bid me eat of this salad, said it would give me a vision of true love. The burbling river whispered his name to me as I slept and I woke with a certainty in my bones. If I plant the seed this tree dropped, it will grow into a strong pillar outside our well-swept door.

So I’m not surprised that the story of Bigfoot has its genesis here, western Oregon, where the air is so thick under old-growth Douglas firs that it seems more water than gas. Where the soil is so thickly padded with fallen needles that it springs underfoot. Where the bright yellow banana slug, long as a hand, cuts its bladeless way, collecting bits of forest duff or dangling in midair from its shining self-made cord. A fantastic place requires fantastic inhabitants.

But as it turns out, Bigfoot is dead, and his widow tells us so. Bigfoot was a man, a man who held a job and paid taxes, who fathered children, who loved a practical joke. He was fortunate to have a mate who understood and even encouraged this joking. Joking takes two. She was the straight man to his punch line.

I’m betting she was the one who cut a pattern from brown paper, pinned it to the furs, sharpened a heavy pair of scissors. She sewed the seams, the needle of her machine jumping high and steady. She did nothing less than make him a new body. He read (Melville? Time?), sipped (brandy? decaf?), drowsed in an easy chair. Maybe he made birdhouses from scrap lumber. Maybe he planned trips to Sicily, Arizona, Bombay. Long evenings with a beloved seem endless: the oldest of lies.

In town, she bought the biggest boots she could and wrapped them with batting and leather to make them larger still. The first afternoon, she zipped him into the suit and settled the mask on his head, guided him into the truck seat, and turned the truck off the highway onto a long-abandoned logging road. Fog blurred the trees. She held the camera steady as he walked, slowly, into the woods. Did it again, working to get the best shot.

Together they developed the prints in the red-lit darkroom, laughing as the grainy images rose. It was good work; she had hidden the zipper with a thin strip of fur. It looked real. They laughed long and well, enjoying their joke. This is my hope.

And when he died, years later but much too soon, she told the truth about Bigfoot, as he’d wanted her to. But nobody believed her. She pulled the suit and the huge boots out of the closet they had shared, but this evidence was not enough. Some claimed to have spotted Bigfoot in Ohio and Indiana; some said he ranged as far north as Minnesota, south to the Carolinas. It was entirely possible that Bigfoot—the real one—was a migratory creature, experts opined. The joke had grown beyond them, and had a life of its own.

I have read of another joking husband, the Wakefield of Hawthorne’s story, who, on a whim, abandons his wife and takes up residence in a nearby apartment. He continues the joke for twenty years, living unnoticed a street away from his former life. One afternoon, caught by a sudden storm, Wakefield blusters in his old door, returning to his wife and comfortable fireside. How she reacts to his sudden return we are not told. She had, of course, long thought herself a widow, as in practical fact she was.

Bigfoot’s widow has an inverted situation. Instead of a husband who makes a joke of a twenty-years’ disappearance—but lives—she has the memory of a husband whom no one will let die.

I wonder if she stops short when she sees the tabloid photos. Does it seem possible to hope that he lives, somewhere, that some quick-footed soul captured his shadow on film? He would seem nearer then—not a husband, quite, but maybe a neighbor. Someone to carry out the domestic transaction of borrow and lend, a twist of parsley, an egg passed warm from palm to palm. Close enough to meet, sometimes, so that even if changed, he wouldn’t be a stranger. His place in the bed cool but waiting. Perhaps she thinks, This could be some kind of test. She imagines the wry smile on his face when he blows in the door on a rainy afternoon, pictures him slowly walking the world on those wide, solid feet, wrapped in a warm something she made, as she waits through the long years, tired, hoping he could be more cruel than she ever dreamed possible.