Cloven Hooves

It makes my life miserable. First, Kimmy tells on me when, in agonized desperation, I go into the woods across the lane from the house and pee. Never mind that Candy was the one hogging the bathroom. I am “uncivilized” and my mother scolds me for it, not privately but in the kitchen where my little brothers hear and giggle endlessly about it. “What did you use for toilet paper,” they demand, interrupting the scolding. “Leaves? Moss? Birch bark?” They giggle wildly, uncontrollably, even when my mother turns her scolding on them. They are unremorseful, and I am able to escape her, leaving her to tell them “It’s not funny” as I tiptoe down the stairs.

But the room I share with Candy and Sissy is a sulfurous and brooding place. Candy is pulling her hair out of curlers, and Sissy is lying on her bed, reading, and not watching her. She is not watching her so intensely it is like the sharp edge of a knife blade pressed into the silence, and I am tempted to beg her to watch Candy, to stop ignoring her. One glance would be all it would take to ignite the storm, and then they could shriek and wail and slam hairbrushes down. The tension would be broken, and I could relax then, could read a book while they quarrel as imperturbably as I can sit out a storm under a spruce tree.

But Sissy won’t look, and Candy is so miffed that she turns from the mirror and attacks me instead. “Did Mom tell you to stay in the basement when Jeffrey comes to pick me up?” she demands.

“No,” I say, trying to make it withering, but not succeeding. I am too surprised, and I am not able to hide it.

“Well, she said she was going to, so make sure you do.” Candy turns back to the mirror.

This may be the opening Sissy has been waiting for. She slams her book and sits up ramrod straight, her face going rocky with righteous indignation. “She did not. She said you could ask Evvie nicely, and that sure wasn’t nicely. I’m telling.”

“Go ahead. Who cares? Not you, for sure. You don’t care what people think of our family. Look at Evvie, for crying out loud. Look how she runs around. Susan Adams told me that Kerry Pierce asked her if Evvie was a girl or a boy. He couldn’t tell by looking at her. No one could! Look at her! Last time Jeffrey was here, she was running around in that same shirt, and I swear the same dirt on it. He’s going to think that’s the only clothes she owns!”

“She’s just a little kid!” Sissy jumps to my defense. “Leave her alone. She can’t help how she looks!”

“Maybe not, but she could at least be clean. Look at her! Mud on her knees, God knows what on her chin, her hair full of twigs, probably from shitting in the bushes somewhere. Like a little animal.”

“Whose fault is it that she couldn’t use the bathroom?” Sissy demands.

I don’t say a word. I am looking at myself in the mirror, over Candy’s shoulder. It is a large dresser mirror, and I can see nearly my entire body. I stare at myself. I cannot remember the last time I studied myself in the mirror. I suddenly see what it is about, why Mrs Haritsen hates me, why I eat my lunch alone. I suddenly see the raggedy dirty jeans and the shirt with the elbows out. I think of what I wore to school on Friday, the green pleated skirt with half the hem dragging out, the yellow blouse with the little flowers on it that has a coffee stain on the stomach. I wonder why I have never thought about it before, why I have seen everything else so keenly and never myself. I wonder why my mother lets me run around this way, and then I know. She doesn’t have the time to worry about it. Squeaking wheels get oiled. If I don’t demand new clothes, a trip downtown to get my hair cut and styled, money for hand lotion and nail polish and new socks, new shoelaces, jeans that aren’t hand-me-downs, I will never get them. The money is already stretched as tight as it will go. Thank God for one child who doesn’t nag and whine and beg. I think of Sissy’s new nail polish, Candy’s white mohair sweater, Kimmy’s new Barbie doll camper, and I know that it should have been mine, my new dress, my new jeans. But what I don’t demand I don’t seem to need, and if I am content, no one will jar me from it.

I come back to the room and they are still fighting, my sisters, screaming at each other, ostensibly over me, but actually over Jeffrey. “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings, not Evvie’s, not mine, no one’s, as long as you get what you want!” Sissy is saying, and tears are running down her face.

“That’s not true. You know that’s not true. It’s not my fault that Jeffrey liked me better, and it sure isn’t my fault that Evvie looks like a pile of barfy rags!”

I snatch up Sissy’s book from her bed and I let it fly. It’s only a paperback, it shouldn’t matter, but when it hits Candy in the face she screams, and even before the book is all the way to the floor, I can see the blood rushing out of her nose. She screams again, air bubbling past the blood from her nose, the blood that is falling on her white mohair sweater, and then I am gone, up the stairs, eeling past my mother as she comes down, making my escape before she knows I am the culprit. I grab a knife and a small bucket from the kitchen as I dash through it, trusting they will help me buy my way back into her good graces when I return. Rinky picks up on me as I race out the door and attaches himself to me like a sidecar. We careen down the lane and across Davis Road. And into my woods.

The path under my feet is hard, bare earth, beaten out by my own feet, and I fly along it, jumping fallen logs, veering around boggy spots. I could run this in the dark, I know it so well, and frequently do. It is fairly clear at first, as my path follows an old grown-over survey cut, but then it gets to the slough, still full of water this time of year, and I veer off, paralleling it, crouched over to run down an old rabbit trail, ignoring the branches that snatch at my hair and clothing, going to earth like an animal, fleeing into deeper forest. I run until I am sure I won’t be able to hear them call me, even if they send one of the boys up to stand by the mailbox on Davis Road and yell for me. Then I stop and drop, panting, onto the deep moss. Rinky gives me one sniff, to be sure I am all right, pushing his cold black olive nose against my cheek and into my ear, and then goes off on his own business, whatever that is. I am alone with my images of Candy’s blood bubbling over her mouth and onto her sweater. Dark red blood, clashing with her nearly auburn hair. I can’t remember that she has ever had a bloody nose before, at least not one from getting hit with something. I know she will blubber for at least an hour, and Jeffrey is due to pick her up in only half an hour. I am betting the blood won’t come out of the mohair sweater, even if they soak it in cold water and put meat tenderizer on it. Well, I reflect savagely, at least I won’t be around to humiliate her when Jeffrey does come.

My small bucket is beside me on the moss, the short kitchen knife inside it. I pull my knees up, start to rest my chin atop them. Then I stop and look at them. Muddy, where I knelt down earlier today when I was roughhousing with Rinky. And torn, so that my knee, too, is dirty, and showing through the rent denim.

So? So.

I cannot forget the grubby, unkempt kid I saw in the mirror earlier. That is not how I’ve been imagining myself, all this time. I think of myself as me, as looking like me. I’ve been seeing myself in terms of what I can do rather than how I look. Runner. Stalker. Tree climber, ditch jumper, mushroom hunter, game spotter. I had no clear physical image of myself. I’ve only seen the view from my windows. I never thought to wonder how I really looked, to others.

It was bad.

And yet a stubborn part of me doesn’t want to yield, refuses to rush home and wash up, brush my hair, put on clean clothes, and nag my mother for new clothes and new shoes. A part of me says, tough for them. Maybe I’ve only discovered this today, but I suspect they’ve known it all along. All along. They haven’t done right by me, and even if I never knew it until now, they knew it all along. So let them live with it. If they’re embarrassed by my looks, too bad. That’s how I am. And if they’ve never cared enough to come to me kindly, to gently help me change, then screw them. I’ll look this way. Always. Forever and ever and ever. And let them be ashamed. I won’t ask for new clothes, for new shoes. And if they offer them, I won’t want them. Not ever.

I close my eyes, imagining how horrible it would be if I went home and my mother and sisters had gone out and bought all new clothes for me, new shiny shoes, a coat with no teethmarks on the sleeve, jeans with knees in them. And if they gathered around me and brushed my hair and cut it and curled it. And then I went to school. And everyone would see the big change in me, and they’d gather around me and ask me questions. “Where’d ya get the new dress?” “Are those new shoes?” “I like your hair that way a lot better.” “You really look nice.” And I would have to smile and let them sniff me over. It would be admitting that I had been wrong, had been unkempt and shaggy. It would be admitting that they had been right to feel sorry for me all this time, to be disgusted by me all this time, to ostracize me all this time. It would be surrender. It’s too late. It’s gone too far, I can’t even surrender now. Not if I want to survive as me.

My eyes are stinging like I’m going to cry, but this doesn’t make sense. I’m angry, not sad. Angry. I take the knife from my bucket and stab it deep into the moss. Angry. I stab the moss again, and again.

Rinky comes back, snuffles my hair, snuffles at what I’m doing, nearly getting his black nose cut off by my knife in the process, finds it incomprehensible and hence uninteresting, and goes off again. Comes back a second later, licks my ear comfortingly, and leaves again.

The music begins, tentative and breathy. I lift my chin a fraction of an inch, and freeze, listening. There are only five or six notes to the simple melody, and it seems familiar, but I cannot put a name or words to it, nor say where I have heard it before. I turn my head slowly, listening. Sound travels strangely by water, and it takes me a minute before I am sure I have my direction. Across the slough. Damn.

I stand, catching up my bucket. There is a place to cross the slough, one where I will not get more than knee wet, and I head that way. As I go, I keep an eye out for wild mushrooms. My mother loves wild mushrooms, and has taught me twenty-seven different edible varieties, as well as those that I must not touch, and those that are merely useless or unsavory. I find several orange delicious, their caps actually a mottled green, but a secret orange ring hidden within their stems that makes identification easy. I draw the knife tip across the gills, watch the milky liquid rise to the cut. Lactarius family. Same as the pepper cap. I roll Latin names on my tongue as I scavenge mushrooms and walk.

The bottom of my bucket is covered with mushrooms by the time I get to the crossing place. I stand on the bank, picking my most likely path, and then set off, stepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, edging along an old log for part of the way, and then working my way again from tuft to tuft. Rinky comes, crashing and splashing to catch up with me, and nearly knocks me into the slough as he races past me. I have only two misses, and it is the same foot each time, so when I reach the other bank, I am only knee wet on one leg, and ankle-wet on both feet. Not bad.

The music has not ceased, but is smoothing out, as if the player is becoming more practiced. I know who it is, I do not need to catch the elusive tracery of his scent upon the air. I follow my nose and ears now, follow the sound and scent trickling between trees and brush, still pausing every now and then to add another mushroom or two to my bucket. Here is a hedgehog hydnum, a shingled cap with spiny little underpoints instead of gills, and a small orange boletus, its orange cap still tight to its white stem, hiding the soldierly rows of tubes that substitute for gills on it.

And here is a faun, goat legs akimbo, perched on an old log, cheeks red with puffing, eyes merry at my approach. He doesn’t stop playing, but plays for me, deliberately, showing off how well he blows his pipes. For they are genuine panpipes, the little wooden tubes bound in a row with some vegetable twine. They look new, the wood unscuffed, unworn, new-made for spring. I sit next to him on the log, watching how it’s done, how his mouth leaps from pipe to pipe. He is sweating, his curls are damp as they bob on his forehead, and I am struck again by his odor, sweeter than the warm breath of nursing puppies, pungent as crushed herbs, like tree resin and squashed raspberries and rich crumbly loam in the hand. Like all the sweetness of the earth embodied by a scent. It is a pleasure to sit beside him and smell him, and the music he plays has a similar unity to it. Breathless and soft it whispers like wind, like water over pebbles and rain dripping from branches, like birdcall and yet like the trumpetous sounding of an elk. He plays on and on and I listen.

When he stops, it is not the end of the song, but only the end of his breath. The song goes on around us, paler now, slurring its notes, but still there, breathing through the forest, and I understand what he has been doing. Not harmonizing with the forest, but amplifying it, anticipating its song, and playing beside it. He sees in my face my wonder and grins at me, unabashedly proud of himself. He wipes his pipes down one of his hairy thighs and offers them to me.

I take them cautiously, fearing for an instant that it is some kind of challenge from him, a dare for me to play as well as he has. If it is, I know I will not try. Something inside me is in full retreat from dares today. But in his eyes there is no challenge, only sharing. He watches me eagerly as I lift the pipes to my mouth, try my breath cautiously against one. It hoots softly, wistful as an owl, and my heart leaps in me with joy. Each pipe speaks to me with a voice I already know, and I forget the faun, forget everything but playing with the sounds I can utter now. It is like speaking a new language, no, like being mute all my life and then being granted speech, the speech of my dearest friends. I speak as the water, and then as the wind through branches, speaking as they do, not their thoughts but only their own being.

The faun’s hand is on my knee, and I suddenly feel it, breathe the last of my breath down the pipe. I stop reluctantly, and wipe them on the cleanest part of my sleeve and then offer them back to him. He takes them with a smile that says, “Wait, wait now, just a minute.” He holds them in his hands, and his rounded nails are the same color as his hooves, and two shades lighter than the tiny points that push up from amid his curls. His horns are growing this year, and I lean forward to touch one, knowing he will not flinch away nor resist my curiosity. Hard horn, smooth as polished wood yet knurled like diamond willow almost, the tip sharp against my palm. He angles his head away from my touch, gives me a glance that is through his lashes and over his cheekbones, then leans his head back, baring the browned swell of his throat, and lifts the pipes to his mouth. He closes his eyes.

He plays Pan.

He plays a glimpse of sunlight on a dappled flank in a birch grove, he plays brown eyes that light green with laughter, he plays the unwary clack of a cloven hoof against a glacier-worn stone, the deep breath drawn after a race through the woods, the grip of strong fingers on my wrist when he bids me be silent, the nudge of his shoulder against mine when our heads are close together over the first pale wood anemone, he plays the wind through brown curls and the trickle of rain over his shoulder blades. My throat closes up with how beautiful he is.

When I open my eyes, he has lowered the pipes, and I do not know how long I have been listening to the silence that is also a part of his song. He meets my shining eyes and his cheeks rose with more than the flush of his playing. He scratches his head, digging lovingly at the bases of his nubbly horns. With his free hand he offers the pipes to me again.

But this time I do not reach for them at all. I know what he wants to hear, and I do not wish to play it. I will not play ragged jeans and dirty knees, runny nose and scaly knuckles. I will not play my shame, and I try to pretend I don’t notice he is offering the pipes to me. So he pokes me with them, and when I still don’t respond, he pokes me again, hard, prodding me in the short ribs with their hardness.

I glare at him. He makes a face at me, sucking in his cheeks and hogging out his eyes. I snatch the pipes from his hand before he can jab me again. Immediately he settles back on his log seat, attentive and polite. I want to call him a bad name. He sits watching me, waiting for me, and I don’t understand why he is being this mean, this nasty, to demand this of me. I know what I am, and he can already see what I am. Why demand it be given a tongue? But he is still watching me, waiting, his face smooth, and I look long in his eyes, trying to find where he has hidden the malice that makes him demand this.

But he is too deceptive for me, and at last, in anger, I lift the pipes to my lips. I close my eyes, and squawk out bony dirty knees and snarled hair. The pipes shriek hilariously of a smudged face and hands rougher than a dog’s toepads, of ragged clothes that flutter in the wind they croak, and then of thin arms and a bony chest.

The pipes smack against my front teeth, jarring me to my very spine and cutting my upper lip and gum before they fly past my face. I open my eyes, frightened, and his hand is still lifted, palm toward me, as if his hand will fly back again and this time strike my face. His eyes are outraged and hurt. We stare at each other across the torn place between us, and something is bleeding, I am cut in a place that isn’t even on my body and he shares the wound, feels it just as I do. The hurt lasts a long time, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

I stoop slowly and pick up the pipes. They are unhurt, save for a drop of my blood on the end of one. I wipe it off on my shirt, cautiously offer them back to him. He takes them as if they are encrusted with dog shit, by two disdainful fingertips. He gives me a look I cannot interpret and hops off the log and rubs the pipes over the moss carefully, rips loose a handful of green willow leaves and scrubs the pipes with them, staining them green but ridding them of whatever uncleanliness he imagines on them. He is puffing when he sits back down. As he starts to lift the pipes to his mouth, I rise. I’ve had enough music for today, I decide. Especially I fear that he may play his own beauty again, a wicked counterpoint to my latest performance.

Walnut fingers grip my wrist, clenching tight. He has always been stronger than I am, but never before today has he used that, except in play. I refuse to struggle, knowing I cannot break free. Instead, I glare at him, then make my face cold and impassive as a bank of blown snow. I look past his shoulder into the moving shadows of the woods, for the wind has risen slightly and is stirring branches and grasses to dance. With the corner of my eye, I see his left hand lift the pipes to his mouth.

He plays, and I must listen, but I don’t have to show I’m listening. I continue to stare past him as he plays a tiny green frog clinging to the underside of a leaf, a cluster of high-bush cranberries dangling beneath an umbrella of rosy leaves, tiny alder cones rattling down on new-fallen leaves, and spruce sap glinting in the sunlight. I watch the shadows sway.

He pauses, but not for breath. He shakes me, hard, by my wrist, and I try not to sway with his rattling. I look at him, making my eyes cold and hard. Something in his forest eyes keeps me from looking away from his gaze, even when he lifts his pipes and puts them to his mouth. He plays again, the same tune.

But this time I cannot deny the slender ankle wading past the frog, the strong brown fingers reaching for the cranberries, the laughter that echoes the rattle of the cones, the fan of hair the wind blows past the spruce tree that glints the same as the shining sap. He plays on, watching my face, and I hear warm breath stained with wild strawberries, the curved back of someone curled and sleeping in the deep grass, green eyes blinking with snowflakes on their lashes. What I hear is me, and not me, like a reflection in a pool is both me and the leaf-dappling light on the soft mud at the bottom.

He plays it twice again before he will let me go, his eyes watching me as if commanding me to commit it to memory. Evelyn Sylvia it is, Evelyn in the forest, the Evelyn he knows, and the notes are my name as his pipes say it, as the forest itself breathes it.

His fingers loosen around my wrist as he continues to play. I draw my hand free of his, and gather my bucket to go. Rinky comes to my tongue click, and splashes beside me as we recross the slough. His black tail is curled up tightly over his shining back, and I think of going back and asking Pan to play Rinky for me. Another time. Another time. His music follows me still, rising and falling with the stirring wind, but as I get farther and farther away, it blends with the forest’s own singing, and I cannot tell if I am hearing the forest itself or Pan’s rendition of it.

His music has driven the sense out of my head. I see my mother’s face as I shut the door behind me, and the sound of the door shutting is like the clack of a jaw trap on my ankle. Too late to run, and the mushrooms I offer are not enough. I am required to sit at the table and peel potatoes while I listen to a recital of my sins. She admits that Candy said a lot of cruel things, but that doesn’t excuse my physical violence. Sissy and Candy come up from the basement, both to listen and to chime in with any crimes my mother may miss. Candy’s nose has stopped bleeding, but as I suspected, the mohair sweater, though still soaking in cold water, is probably ruined. I bite my tongue, refusing to say aloud that now she will probably give it to me, hand down the stained, worn-out stuff to Evelyn, she’s too stupid to know the difference.

Candy’s eyes are both blacked, too, and this explains Sissy’s sudden chumminess with her. Jeffrey showed to take Candy out, but when he saw swollen nose and puffing eyes, he backed out of the date, none too graciously. Now they both agree that Jeffrey is an asshole, but have no gratefulness to me for revealing that to them. Candy is demanding I pay for her sweater, which is a joke, as I never have any money except at my birthday or Christmastime. I am judged and condemned to clean up the room that we share. I don’t say a word as they rant at me, and I can feel how much angrier this makes my sisters. But it only seems to make my mother more thoughtful. As she swoops up the heap of potatoes I have peeled and splashes them into a bubbling stew and stirs it, she stares at the blank wall over the gas stove, and her grey-green eyes are distant, almost as if she were listening to music rather than to the nattering and bleating of my sisters.

The next morning I find that the hem of my pleated skirt has been resewn. The mohair sweater is dyed a uniform brown before it is folded into my drawer. I say nothing, and neither does anyone else.

SEVEN

The Farm

June 1976

“Are we gonna stay so I can have a pony?” There is a ring of orange juice around Teddy’s mouth, like a visible question mark at the end of his sentence. He phrases the words casually, but his eyes are vaguely accusing, as if he expects me to selfishly snatch all his hopes away. As if someone has warned him in advance of my cruelty.

I refuse to let their warning be fulfilled. “I guess so, honey. Daddy and I need to talk about it a little more. Do you want to stay here all winter?”

I reach across the table and rumple his hair, but it is too short to tousle now. He reaches up to smooth it, looks briefly puzzled at how short it is. But it will grow again. It is not permanent, none of this is. They can change the outside of him, but they cannot change what I have put within him. Child of my long days with you, full of stories read by me, of questions I have answered and questions I have asked, grown within my own body and then nourished by my mind. My own. My boy, I thought, mine. This one is all mine, Mother Maurie. You may be able to whistle up Tom, but not my Teddy. This one I’m keeping.