Читать книгу Cloven Hooves - Megan Lindholm - Страница 9

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.

“You done?” my father asks, and when I nod he takes a grip on one hindquarter and heaves it up. I help, guiding more than lifting, and the leg is dumped onto a piece of polyethylene sheeting. I am obscurely shamed that I could not lift the moose quarter by myself, and so I am determined that I will at least ferry it to the garage on my own. There my father will tie a piece of yellow nylon rope to it, piercing through the leg between the bone and the long tendon, and hoist it up to the rafters and let it sullenly drip blood for four or five days. Bleeding the meat, this is called, and it is important, for otherwise the meat will be tough and taste gamey. But for now my father has turned back to his butchering, is using the hatchet to chop through the vertebrae. A tiny fragment of splintered bone flies up to sting my cheek. It reminds me of what I am supposed to be doing.

The piece of black polyethylene is the size of a bed sheet. I turn my back to it, grip two corners of it, and bring the corners up over my shoulders like a harness. The moose leg is heavy, but the polyethylene is slick against the snow. Once I have it moving, it glides along over the snow behind me. When we reach the packed snow of the driveway, it moves even more easily. I roll the leg off the sheeting onto clean snow by the garage, and run back for another load.

Before midnight, all the meat is hung. My father and I contemplate it. It swings slowly, eerily, with gentle creakings. The garage is unheated, but it leeches enough heat from the house that it stays just above freezing. The slow patterning of blood drips will continue to speckle the concrete floor. We nod in satisfaction, and my father slowly tamps tobacco into his pipe. He lights it, sucks it noisily to life, and then turns away from the moose. I pull the string that turns out the light. We step out of the garage into the night, and he reaches up to pull the heavy door down. We are in the blackness of night again.

My father’s streamer of pipe smoke rises up, like the steam from the moose’s exposed entrails. He has shoveled snow over the gut sack to hide it. By morning it will have frozen solid. The dogs will dig down to it, and spend weeks nibbling and licking at the frozen delight until it is gone. There remains only the head. We both know that.

“Get rid of the head,” my father says simply, and turns toward the house. I watch him go. The windows of the house are warm and yellow. I know that by now my brothers and younger sisters are in bed, probably my older sisters as well. The skin of my face is so cold, it feels like a stiff cardboard mask. I can move my toes, pressing them down hard against my mukluk soles, and awaken them to pain. The moisture of my breath has frozen into a solid cake of frost on the muffler over my mouth. I want to go in.

But there is the head.

The door thuds behind my father and I am alone in the dark. I dare not even go in to fetch Rinky for company, for he would be too interested in the head and guts. He’d only make the task harder. I snatch up the black polyethylene sheeting and start off toward the garden.

A head is not as big as a hindquarter, but it is an awkward shape, and heavier than you might think. The best way to lift one is to grip it by the bases of both ears, keeping the hacked-off neck turned away. The nose is pressed to my chest, the empty jaws gape tonguelessly. Even in the frigid air, the smell of moose and blood is strong. I turn quickly, letting go of the ears so that the momentum of my turn flings the head neatly onto the polyethylene sheet. I diaper the head up in the sheet, leaving myself one corner to use as a handle.

The night is clear and cold. I turn my back to the house with its warm yellow windows, and I pull. The head rides along at my heels as I leave the yard and the tire-packed snow of the driveway and enter the woods. I have already decided where I am going.

I follow one of my favorite trails. The trees are cottonwood and birch, alder and diamond willow. My path winds among them. Smaller bushes claw briefly at my burden, but don’t manage to rip the plastic. I drag it on, leaving a peculiar wrinkled trail, like the path of a giant worm. The head pulls easily, the polyethylene gliding over the snow. I am able to walk at a normal pace, and fifteen minutes later I am where I wish to be.

Here there are spruce trees, sudden groves of them in the deciduous forest. For some reason, they grow in irregular huddles, in groups of ten and fourteen and nine. But almost always in the center of each huddle is a tiny clear space where no trees grow. I get down on my knees and crawl beneath the outer swoop of branches, past a trunk, and here the snow is shallower, for the upper branches have caught most of it. Then out again, through deeper snow, and I am suddenly inside the grove. A moat of snow and a wall of needled branches surround me. Looking straight up, I can see the black sky and the Dipper hung on it. Unceremoniously, I dump the head here and leave it. I wad the black plastic up under my arm and crawl out again. The walk home seems longer than the walk here. The woods seem lonelier and darker, and I am shivering before the lights of the house crack through the trees to beckon me on.

My father is in the bathtub, my mother is reading in bed when I come in. No one calls out or questions me. No one save Rinky greets me, and he greets me with a wriggle of delight, his hackles rising excitedly at my blood smell. I shed my outer clothing by the door, and do not turn on the light as I go down the stairs. Everyone down here is asleep, vague blanketed shapes like furniture in storage. I am still shivering when I strip in the darkened basement and climb into bed. Rinky is snorting and rooting through my bloodied clothing as I fall asleep, my head cradled on arms and hands that still smell of sweet, sticky blood. I dream of bright white sunlight on the snow, and a faun gouging the frosted brown eyes from a moose skull and slipping them into his mouth. It is a good dream, and I smile in my sleep.