Cloven Hooves

And I had watched Teddy shrink with each contemptuous statement, and had foolishly made it worse by putting my arm around my little son, hoping to shield him from his grandfather’s disgust. And Teddy, my Teddy, had flung my arm aside and pushed me away, run out of the little house and into the fields to cry, newly ashamed of being afraid of something unfamiliar, newly ashamed of letting his mother hold and comfort him. And that wicked old man had glared at me and said, “You coddle that boy too much. Gonna ruin him. Time he was with men more often, instead of hanging around your skirts like Momma’s little tit.”

And I, too cold with anger to speak, had stared him down, driven him from the little house with my frozen green eyes.

But that was in another time and another place, and I cannot afford to think about it now. Instead, I make my mouth smile, and reach past Tom to hold out a hand to my Teddy. But my little son only smiles, a smile that is at once secretive and begging. He slides into the other end of the circular booth, forcing everyone to scoot over and sending Steffie up against me on the other side. Grandpa has missed none of this. “He’s Grandpa’s big boy today, Mommy. He’s gonna sit over here with me.”

Grandpa’s eyes are black, like little bits of anthracite coal set into his pale, soggy face. He was a big man once, had stood tall and had tanned, weathered skin. Maybe then the lines around his eyes had been laugh lines. Now he looks bleached, like something found under a pile of old trash, a soup label with the colors gone all wrong, the green beans turned blue, a farmer turned entrepreneur, a corned and blistered foot crammed into a pointed Florsheim shoe. I could have pitied him if he hadn’t been so hateful. Our eyes don’t meet, I don’t let him have the victory. I squeeze Tom’s hand and look into his eyes instead.

“Did you find the part?” Mother Maurie demands.

Tom nods. “Junkyard had it.” He turns to me. “You eat already?”

“Yeah, but if you …”

“How much was it?” Mother Maurie cuts in irritably. This is business, and Tom has no sense, mixing it up with a conversation with his little wife. Mother Maurie has shifted gears, is no longer the chic shopper but is now the shrewd businesswoman, versed in every facet of the family’s farm equipment dealership.

“Seventeen-fifty. New one is twenty-two, but if old man Cooper wants his tractor back in the fields by Tuesday, he’s gonna have to be happy with secondhand parts.” Tom goes back to scanning the menu hungrily, fielding Mother Maurie’s agitated questions easily.

She is upset with the parts supplier and doesn’t care who knows it. Wants everyone to know it, as a matter of fact. If they think they can get away with treating Potter’s Equipment this way, they are in for a surprise, she’ll go right to the factory for parts after this, just cut them out entirely, and let them eat that. Why, she must order two or three thousand dollars’ worth of parts a year from them, and for them to let us down like this just isn’t good business, as they’ll soon find out. Her own ruthlessness is giving her great satisfaction. She speaks clearly and almost loudly, so that other people at other tables hear and know just how hard-nosed a little businesswoman she is. She is proud of her savvy, and so is Grandpa Potter, for he nods sagely as she carries on.

Tom’s fingers close over mine and hold me fast. The others at the table are talking, and he is replying to them, but his fingers against mine are a different conversation, and a different man is speaking to me from the one who they know. I listen to him alone, letting the other voices fade into a background hum like summer bees. I know I do not belong in their world. What matters to me is that somehow, Tom’s world and mine have intersected, and that in that brief crossing, we can be together.

FOUR

Fairbanks

Winter 1963

My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.

People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.

The GVEA building is grey with black windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.

The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.

That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. I’d rather have chilblains and frostbite.

Making me go to school in winter is one of the cruder things my parents do to me. Although all my brothers and sisters attend school also, I always take it as a personal torment my parents insist on inflicting on me. I do not complain much about it. I am even good at school, very good, if academics are what you consider important. I am academically vindictive, ruining class curves with my hundred per cents, doing fifteen book reports instead of the required five, but it is never enough to counteract tights that go with your dress and match the ribbons in your hair. Vaguely I know that I do not know how to compete. I always put my energies into the wrong arenas.

But it is more than that. School is not my turf. I resent wasting the brief daylight of the winter days trapped in a classroom instead of running through the white and silver of a Fairbanks winter landscape. Yet even that isn’t it. I believe there is something unnatural about school, something damaging. To take a young creature and force it into an enclosed space with thirty others like it, all of the same age … would you do this to a puppy or a young chimp? You know what happens when you do it with chickens or rats. The same thing happens when you do it with children, only the damage is less visible. If I were a chick, pecked until my entrails hung from my rectum, someone would have taken pity on me. But I am a child and children are expected to endure the tortures of the damned stoically. I believe, perhaps self-pityingly, that it is worse for me than it is for other children. The ones who play in playgrounds, who visit one another’s houses, collect toys, and have sleep-over parties, never perceive how peculiar an institution school is. But I am a healthy young animal, taken from my hunting, from my running and growing, and thrust into an exhibit more inhumane than any concrete-and-steel zoo pen. From the moment I step onto the bus every morning, all power deserts me, and I am less than ordinary. I am prey, and I know it. Within the walls of the school, I know that fauns are Fantastic Animals, imaginary creatures those benighted and bedamned Romans and Greeks believed in, and that good little girls put their faith in Jesus Christ alone. Playing with a faun is probably a mortal sin, like calumny and detraction, niggardliness and sloth. I think I am going to hell. I think there is nothing I can do about it, anyway.

But release me from the bus in the evening, and the world is mine. The misery of the classroom seems an imaginary fairy-tale dungeon, nothing worth telling my parents about. The bus drops us by our orange mailbox on Davis Road. My brothers and sisters start the walk down the lane, but I stand on the road, waiting until the bus breaks down into orange and red taillights and then disappears altogether. My siblings hurry through the dark, eager to be out of the cold. I stand, clutching my book bag, waiting. Around me is the silver darkness of an Alaskan midwinter afternoon. The stars are out, and the Big Dipper swings low. Silver birch and cottonwood line the lane to our house. Our house is the only house on the lane, and not even its lights can be seen from the road. I do not know why we call our driveway the lane. We just do. It is only one car wide, and in winter it divides itself into two tire tracks with a hump of brushed snow down the middle. My siblings are far down the lane now. I walk alone between trees that lean in over me with their burdens of snow like ermine capes upon their bare arms. It is night, and yet it is easy to see. The snow is white on the ground and on the branches, the trees are ghostly grey, and in between there is darkness. The dry snow of the lane crunches and squeaks under my boots.

First the house is a few stripes of yellow light through the trees. Then I come to where we have cleared for our garden. The trees are cut away and the once-furrowed soil is now covered with a wavering quilt of snow. I see the house squatting darkly amid the snow, long and low like a crouching animal. The snow-load is heavy on the roof, but earlier snows have slid off the peaked aluminum, to create a wall of snow around the house that makes it look like my home has pushed up from under the earth and snow like a mushroom.

And then I am up on the wooden porch that rattles under my boots, and the door must be shouldered open because the frost always coats the bottom edge of it and tries to freeze it shut. I thud it open, breaking into my mother’s territory. Our house is made of dark logs chinked with pink and yellow fiberglass, and the ceiling is low. Yet I remember it as being full of an amber light, rich as honey, breathing out the warmth-and-cookies smells of home. Moose stew, as inevitable as thrice weekly math assignments, is already bubbling over the blue flames of the gas stove. The radio is always on, and my mother is always doing something in a highly untidy and inefficient manner. When she does laundry, she does mammoth loads of it, heaping chairs full of warm laundry, weighting the table with stacks of folded underwear and towels, heaping a box to overflowing with mateless socks. If she bakes cookies, there are tall leaning stacks of sticky bowls, showers of flour on the counters, the floors, and the husky dogs that sprawl everywhere in their sleep, and scatters of cookies cooling on every horizontal surface in the kitchen. When she knits us hats and sweaters, one pattern is never enough to please her. She must combine patterns, change the colors, rework the instructions. She has knitted my father a parka with twenty-seven different colors in it that is a combination of fourteen different patterns. It is an epic work of needles and yarn. My mother is of mythic proportions in my mind. To say that I love her is like saying I love the earth. My love is a puny thing beside her, unnecessary to her continuance. She is the home, the house, the food, the warmth, the hearth-witch. She leaves me almost entirely to my own devices; this makes me love her even more.

Down into the basement, rattling down the steep old stairs. Down here it is like a den, beds here, walls there, more beds, more walls. A veritable maze of nesting places for children, stacked bunk beds, green metal army surplus bunks, a menagerie of dressers, every horizontal surface festooned with laundry both clean and dirty, with papers, books, and a scattering of toys. I change clothes, pulling on layer upon layer upon layer of worn-out jeans and corduroy pants and T-shirts and shirts and sweaters and a surplus US Air Force parka. Put on my socks, my brothers’ socks, and my father’s socks and a pair of canvas military surplus mukluks. And up the stairs and out the door with Rinky at my heels. Disappear into the night of the forest. Run silently down the rabbit paths, bent almost double to keep from disturbing the snow that rests so delicately upon each twig and swooping branch. Rinky ranges ahead and beside and beyond and behind, but is always there whenever I pause and crouch down in the snow. He grabs the sleeve of my old parka, leaving teeth marks in the fabric. Sooner or later, all my clothes bear the mark of his teeth. I do not mind. He tugs at me until I rise, and then we range together, he and I, following the paths we have created and keep packed, looking to see what is different from the last time we passed this way. Here is the blood-speckled trampling of the snow that marks a fox’s kill. Here something has gnawed the bark from a fallen branch, and there something large and heavy has crossed our path. This trail and its faint musk fills me with excitement. Moose. Moose in our woods. The time will be soon.

I never need to tell my mother when I have found signs of moose. She knows. Perhaps she is a witch, the way she knows. I will find the knives sharpened on the counter, I will see a new roll of butcher paper. Days ahead of time. Then, one evening, it will happen. All six of us will be clustered around her table, our heads bent over our books. One cannot move an elbow lest one obscure a sibling’s math book, shuffle the pages of someone’s report. Pencils scratch, the dogs snore beneath the table, someone mutters over a stubborn calculation. It is unnaturally quiet for a house inhabited by eight people. My sisters have their hair in curlers, there is the muted chink-chink of my father’s pipe against the ashtray.

Then it happens.

“Evelyn. Turn off the lights.”

My mother is standing close to the cold blackness of a window. I rise and turn off all the lights, flicking switches until the darkness outside flows in from the windows, oozes out from under the couch, and fills up the room. No one moves, save my father. As I stand by the light switch in the darkness, I hear his heavy tread as he crosses the room to stand beside my mother. They peer out the window and speak softly to each other.

If I am silent and unobtrusive, I can slip to a parallel window and likewise peer forth. They will be in the garden, pawing the snow away from what remains of the cabbage patch, churning to the surface a scatter of frozen leaves, a half-rotted head, a tough green stalk now frozen solid. They remind me of ships, tall sailing ships, I cannot say why. This time of year their racks have fallen, leaving their heads misshapen and knobby. Their noses are long and seem saggy, like stuffed animals without enough stuffing. Their huge Mickey Mouse ears swivel in the darkness like antennae, but they are not really alert. Their attention is all for the paltry leaves of cabbage, the frozen broccoli stalks, the forgotten head of cauliflower they have churned to the surface. They are unaware of the darkened house and the silent watchers marking one of them for death.

There are four this time. There is a game I play, predicting which one we will take down. I play it now. Not the cow. Never shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs. Leave the cow. Not the old bull. Why he is with them now, at this time of year, I will never understand. But there he is, and his meat is sure to be tough. That leaves two, the young calf, born this spring by the look of him, and the older calf from the spring before. It will be him, the older calf, I am sure. But of this I say nothing aloud. The chain of command does not appreciate such speculations.

“Let’s get ready,” says my father. And it is all he needs to say. My younger sister and my two little brothers are already gathering their books and heading for the basement. They are all still too small to be anything but a nuisance out there tonight. I hear them go down the darkened stairs, and in a moment a light clicks on in the basement. Yellow light wells up from the stairs, bleeds into the darkness around me, lending vague shapes to the hulking darkness of the furniture. Sissy and Candy, my two elder sisters, drift toward the basement and down the stairs to find suitable clothing. It will be hard for them. They own very little that can tolerate blood spatters and possible rips, very little that will keep out the deep cold as we crouch to our bloody work. I am already by the door, pulling on the garments I frequently leave heaped there, much to my sisters’ disdain. By the time my father has pulled on his parka and chambered a round into the 30.06, I am ready.

He jerks the door open, letting cold spill into the warm room. The icy air condenses as it flows into the room, making great ghost fogs that venture a short way into the house before disintegrating. He shuts the door quickly behind him but not before I have slipped out. He does not notice me, or he ignores me; it doesn’t matter which, it amounts to the same thing. I shadow him as he steps from the porch.

With night has come a greater cold. It is a cold that freezes the tiny hairs inside my nose, that makes my eyelashes stick together for a fraction of an instant when I blink my eyes. I push my muffler up over my nose and mouth to shelter my lungs from the icy air, and try to resist the temptation to lick my dry lips. All moisture has been frozen from the air, and the snow is a dry dust that creaks under my father’s weight as he makes his way across the yard. We move slowly, drifting in the night like bodiless shadows, not stalking the moose, but moving easily and quietly in the darkness.

The old bull lifts his head. A frozen cabbage leaf dangles from his pendulous lips. He alone watches us, his ears cupping toward us like petitioning hands. He gives no sign of alarm, issues no warning snort. He only watches. I wonder if he knows what is to come.

My father stops and I halt behind him. We stand silently. He doesn’t turn to look at me, but proffers the six-cell flashlight he has been carrying. “Put the spot right behind his ear,” he says. I nod as I take the flashlight, but he doesn’t see me.

He doesn’t need to turn and watch me nod to know I will obey. He is my father. He rules this night. He is the one who knows where to send the bullet to drop the moose. On other nights, he has stood in this yard and shown me the constellations. He has shown me Sputnik winking by, and told me that if I want it badly enough, I can go to the moon someday. He believes this of me, that I can do anything I want, if I want to do it badly enough. It is both terrifying and uplifting to have someone believe in you so. I point the flashlight at the young bull we have chosen. I watch my father lift his rifle to his shoulder. When he is ready, he makes a tiny move that is less than a nod. I push the button on the flashlight.

The light explodes, bursting the moose into reality. The shadowy shape leaps into detail, frosted whiskers drooping from his muzzle, shaggy hair on his neck, a great fringed ear, a single lambent eye capturing my light. In less than a breath, the rifle explodes beside me, and the moose falls, dropping from my circle of light into death and darkness.

It is done.

I click off the light. We stand in the darkness together, my father and I, looking at the thing we have done.

Animals are put together so neatly, almost as if they were intended to be taken apart. Interior organs packed together like a Chinese wood puzzle, awaiting the human hand, bared to winter but warm with fresh blood as it snakes in to lift the liver up, free it with a swipe of the knife. I put the liver in the bowl that is nestled in the snow, and surreptitiously take a lick from the knife. Electric. Fresh blood is electric on the tongue, like sparks snapping inside my mouth. It warms me, almost. An hour has passed since the shot, and I have not been inside. My toes are wooden inside my mukluks. I should have worn more socks.

My father’s flashlight finds me. “Did you get the heart and liver?” he asks, and I nod briefly toward the heavy bowl. He tosses the tongue he has just freed, and I catch it deftly in the bowl. I rise with it and start toward the house. “Take the knives,” my father tells me. “They need sharpening again.” They lie in a row on the packed snow beside the body, and I stoop awkwardly to gather them. Their metal blades are cold, and one sticks painfully to my bared fingers.

I am halfway to the house when Sissy reaches me. She comes from the warmth and light, and I can tell she still has her hair curlers in under the woolen knit cap she wears. “I’ll take them,” she tells me eagerly, and I let her. She would rather take the gut meat into the house, rather sit by the table with the oil and stone and put the edges back on the knives, than crouch in the darkness by the fallen moose, rendering it into meat. I do not understand her.

I think about it as my father and I work to break the moose up into smaller pieces. Some of it is hatchet and ax work, some of it is for the meat saw. Head off, front quarters, hindquarters, backstrap, neck. My sisters are sickened by this work. They flee the great darks and the heavy cold of the night, they shun the bright blood and the musky smell of just downed meat. Even my father does this work grudgingly, thinking of getting up at six tomorrow to go to work, wondering if we will be caught poaching, cursing when the heavy head refuses to come free of the neck section. None of them feel it the way I do.

They can no more understand what I feel than I can comprehend their feelings. I know what they think. They feel debased by this confrontation. Meat from the store in cardboard trays wrapped in plastic, meat with tidy price stickers and labels, that meat is food, is flank steak, chuck roast, ground round. None of it is labeled, “Cut from the shoulder of a large dead animal in a snowy field at night.” There is nothing to remind them that the hide was pulled away from the flesh while it was still warm, and the steam rose into the night to the greedy waiting stars. They do not want to remember they are predators, carnivores. They’d rather eat the flabby muscles of an animal raised hock-deep in its own shit, castrated and injected and inspected, a smack in the head to fell it, a large white room to chill it, humming machines to cut it into neat slices. De-animalized meat. The thought disgusts me, as they are disgusted when they think of their sister putting her knife to the dead flesh of an animal, kneeling on it as she pushes the blade into the dead flesh. Once the guts are out of the way, the hindquarters are separated from the rest of the animal at the place where the ribs stop and only the spine connects. We hurry, hacking at it with knives and saw and hatchet, trying to ruin as little steak as possible. Then the hindquarters are spread, to reveal the inner side of the backbone, and we work down it with a hatchet, and then knives, cleaving it into the separate legs.