The Hare Page 11

  Rosie held the box of tampons in her hand. A luxury item, it was also subject to sales tax. She put them back on the shelf. She’d find some rags, wad up toilet paper. With the coupons there were cheaper eggs, and cheaper milk. On the discount rack, she could get the day-old bread for .33. She realized she was poor.

  On the way back, the weather turned sloppy and Miranda was already sniveling with a bad cold. Struggling to carry the baby and the groceries, she was just beyond the flood plain when a truck slowed.

  Billy.

  “Ya needa roide?”

  Pushing aside a pair of jumper cables, Rosie bundled herself in with Miranda. The cab smelled of engine oil and it was wonderfully warm, a special car oven that baked engine oil bread.

  “Long walk.”

  Rosie nodded.

  Silence.

  The truck groaned through its gears.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  “Ya can borrow tha truck anytime ya want. Ya got no needta be walkin inta town with tha baby.”

  “I don’t know how to drive.”

  Tears came, though Rosie did not know why, she was not remotely sad. They were onion tears and they dribbled down her face, plopping off into space below her chin. She had the idea that she was crying about something open or empty, but could not elaborate.

  “Shhhiiit.” Billy pulled over.

  “No, no, it’s fine, I’m OK,” Rosie protested; her snotty nose, her sniveling baby all evidence to the contrary.

  Billy handed her a rag that smelled of oil. “Ya got any money?”

  Rosie shook her head. “Just what I had for groceries.”

  “The one bag?”

  Wind rattled the truck and Rosie felt grateful to be in the warm interior. She wiped Miranda’s snotty nose with the oily rag.

  Quietly, Billy chewed.

  Then said: “We’re gonna jacka deah.”

  Salt. Billy put down a big square red brick. She also had a bag of old apples, windfallen from the trees that grew in wild profusion in the woods. “Usta be orchards, usta be fahms, sheep, Christmas trees. Not even in my day, tho. Now’s jus loggin’ n’ dairy, tho theyah fucked ovah by the big outfits Midwest. Corn maybe, hay n’ silage.”

  Two mornings later, Billy showed Rosie that the deer had found the salt, their high-heeled prints daintily engraving the mud around the block. “Molasses in tha fall, salt in tha spring. That’s what theyah needin’. Ya gotta luah them from theyah habits. A deer’ll go tha same place, tha same way every day. Gotta be somethin’ special to pullem off track.”

  That dusk, she came to collect Rosie but refused to bring Miranda. “She’ll croiy. A child croiyin’? Leave ’er ta croiy, she’ll learnta quiet herself.” Rosie locked Miranda in the dining room. She walked away from the crying, and then in the truck she couldn’t hear it.

  The truck bumped across the rough field behind Billy’s, the lumpy residue of summer’s golden rod, bramble, milkweed, and tussock grass. Billy tucked the vehicle under a cluster of wild apples and pines and cut the engine. There was to be no talking, and as Rosie waited in the dark, she came to learn about the quality of sound, not the cluster of noises or the background rattling that she’d always taken to be sound: but the single note of a squirrel’s feet pattering across the leaf litter, or a car passing on Wilder Hill Road several miles away. Her ears seemed to vibrate, the tiny hairs within the coiled interior stiffen with the anticipation of listening. An owl. An unidentified snuffling. Rosie entered a different dimension.

  Thus she heard the gentle pinprick step of hooves in damp grass, she heard the fabric of Billy’s coat rustle. But she could see nothing, the moonless dark was absolute. And then: a wild blast of white light illuminating the salt lick and a doe as Billy flared the truck’s headlamps. The deer slowly raised her head, she did not seem the least alarmed, looking directly into the light so her eyes gleamed blood red. In the peripheral light, Rosie watched Billy shift out of the car, leaning her rifle on the open window of the open door, her finger slid to the trigger. For a moment, Rosie wanted to shout to the animal, or to yell at Billy to stop; but already the bullet had left the chamber, already the doe was dropping, knees first, then canting to the side. Billy put her rifle up to the deer’s eye, but it did not blink.

  They lifted the doe into the back of Billy’s truck, and back at her house, Billy slit open the belly and the garlands of intestines slipped smoothly out. Her dogs smelled the blood, howled and agitated on their chains, and Billy tossed them the guts. An argument broke out, loud protests by the dogs who hadn’t reached the guts in time. Then she hoisted the deer by its hind feet onto the overhanging branch of a tall tree. Rosie saw from the wear of the rope that this had happened regularly. Billy held the body with the familiarity of a lover. Swiftly, she drew the knife down, peeling back the skin, so this hung in a cape around the deer’s head.

  The scene is cruel and beautiful, Rosie thought, the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio from the headlights, the deadness of the animal, like a crucifixion or one of Ida Shultz’s meat-packing canvases: the body both dull and bold, objectified and personified. Yet who would make art of this awkward womanless-woman and her illegal deer?

  Billy severed the hooves, cut off the head. These she threw to the rest of her dogs.

  “So hungry I ate ’em once,” she said. Rosie thought she meant the head and feet. No, Billy clarified: “Tha dogs.”

  Her knife flashed in quick, sure cuts, the slabs of meat off the flanks and ribs and neck. The spine was exposed — she cut this also for the dogs — so that only the hind legs remained, hanging, swaying slightly.

  A hunk of back strap in the skillet, the blood oozing from the tissue. Wild onions Billy gave her, a basket of dried boletes. The woods’r a lahda if ya know them. The meat browning on the outside, interior still red and moist, the sharp smell of the onion. Rosie pre-chewed small pieces for Miranda and then ate her own steak with her hands.

  A week later, Billy brought them a hare, already skinned and butchered. It seemed so rudely naked. She set it in a broth of dandelion greens, ramps, and potatoes.

  Mud is its own season in Vermont, it is no simple transition. Rosie’s previous idea of spring was a brief gap between winter and summer, a mere fortnight of unsettled days and blossoms. But mud this far north colonizes three entire months. Mud oozes through the seams of frost. Mud congeals like cold oatmeal. Mud slips like silk. It clamps onto boots and the wheels of cars so they screech, it clomps onto the axles so they wobble and judder on the highway. The smell of mud is the earth’s own and oldest smell, the first smell the first olfactory sensor ever detected. Mud is the smell of earth time. Rosie sat on the back porch and inhaled.

  The trees were still without leaves, brushed with tones of umber and the palest green — a teenage fuzz, more tint than color. She’d grown accustomed to their nudity, she even felt a trepidation for the foliage that would hide the mountains from her, obscure the woods she’d mapped on her walks. She liked things spare. Today, dozens of robins bounced about Billy’s overgrown pastures, and red-winged blackbirds perched on the electric wire and the brook that ran through the woods behind the house unfastened its icy corsets and she listened as it rush rush rushed downhill, excited and eager as a birthday child. Miranda toddled in the grass, which was just green by this mid-May. The temperature was still below freezing at night, barely breaching 50 in the day, but the little girl demanded bare feet. Rosie took off her own shoes, her feet so pale they were nearly luminous. Miranda ran, and Rosie followed. The puddles in the driveway lured them and they flattened their feet into the silt and curled their toes through it even though it was icy cold. Miranda patted it with her hand.

  “Mud,” Rosie explained.

  “Mudah,” Miranda agreed, plumping it. “Mudah!”

  Dimly, Rosie heard the car as it turned onto the road by the gravel pit. Dread rose in her like sap, flushing every vein in her body. She had half a mind to grab Miranda and run across the fields like refugees avoiding s
niper fire.

  Into the mud Bennett returned, the BMW slogging and skidding. The way the noise of the engine filled up the air, the smell of the exhaust, and then the wind once again looping in when he cut the engine: Rosie was so used to the quiet that foreign noise now squeezed against her ears, an uncomfortable pressure. Bennett stood by his car, he seemed hesitant, almost awaiting a command from her. Rosie scanned him, head to foot. He was shabbier, his clothes not quite flush with the frame of him. Wherever he had been, whatever he had done had reduced him. This new vulnerability had a wildly ambivalent effect on Rosie: she was glad of it, yet she felt a swell of compassion.

  He was standing in the mud. “How are my girls?”

  Miranda examined him, too, confused by her inarticulate memory. He must have seemed like a dream to her.

  “It’s Daddy,” Bennett smiled. Miranda pumped her arms up and down, made a breathy noise like a fire bellow, and stepped forward. Just one child step yet Rosie felt the roaring of her daughter’s treachery. Rosie blinked, turned away, for she was the traitor, too selfish to desire her child’s happiness; if only her own father had come home.

  Bennett came upon her as she was making supper: fiddlehead ferns in butter, deer liver. It hadn’t occurred to him what she’d accomplished. For in the months of his absence, she had found her way to the dairy on Wilder Hill where she could get milk and eggs in exchange for sluicing out the milking shed; sometimes, too, she got meat when a cow died. The farmer and his wife had older children, and they gave Rosie bags of old clothes for Miranda. And Billy — Billy had taught her to drive the icy roads, the blind corners.

  “I missed you,” Bennett said, his hands on her hips. Didn’t he notice the taut muscle of her lower back, the firm obliques of her waist and belly?

  “Don’t,” she hissed.

  Surprisingly, he fell away. “I understand. I’ll wait.”

  Now she spun, the short chopping knife in her hand: “You understand? You left us here for two months with nothing, your child — with nothing!”

  His large, beautiful hands splayed out, then came together in something like prayer. “I came back.”

  Outside, the earth was rolling slowly into space: Rosie felt herself to be miniscule upon the surface of the planet, of time. She was unimportant. She could disappear and nothing would change. Who even knew she was here? Bennett, Billy, the dairy farmers. This was the way she’d felt in Gran’s house, looking out her bedroom window at other families, other children, they feathered carelessly, ceaselessly through the afternoon air in loud flocks, on bikes, skateboards, Myra Foley on her roller skates, her mother pushing yet another Foley in the worn-out stroller. They ran with balls, they ran with sticks, with ropes around their waists playing horses and they never glanced up, they didn’t even think of her except as the orphan child with the creepy grandmother, a character in a cautionary fairytale.

  Bennett was one of them, wasn’t he? Running with his sticks and his toy gun, and he had chosen her — not for inclusion with the others, not to join the running and the shrieking, the hide-and-seeking, but for his own private purpose. He had seen her, that morning at MoMA, in her solitude and scuffed shoes. Perhaps it had been curiosity or sympathy that set him toward her at the museum; though she wondered now, about a darker intention: when a man evaluates a lonely young woman, he knows exactly why he chooses her.

  “I came back because I love you, Rosie.” His hand on her face was hot with need.

  And this is love, what all the fuss is about, the wielding of love to make you do what you don’t want to, up the stairs, along the dark hall, swooning with gratitude for human touch, the intervention of a hand, to wear the bright halo of one who is chosen not discarded or ignored. She’d gone to The Giggle Man willingly, up the stairs, up the stairs, and now she stood obediently, obligingly for this other man.

  While he was sleeping, she went through his things, yet there was merely: a gas station receipt from Portland, Maine; a packet of cigarettes; a lighter; matches from the Algonquin in New York; a copy of Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien; his money clip. He did not have a driver’s license. In the car’s glove compartment: no registration, no papers, only a wad of paper napkins, another packet of cigarettes, rolling papers, a leather button. She noted, too, a new smell like the damp sawdust she swept from the corner of the farmers’ cow barn where the rain leaked in. Perhaps Bennett had spilled a drink of some kind, a yeasty beer.

  As she fed the last of the wood to the stove, she considered Bennett’s presence, his absence: the wavering quality of him. He might be a small-time dealer in art and antiques, he might be an intellectual teaching at an elite Vermont college. He might not. Bennett cultivated his obscurity, it was a mindful curation; he did not want her to know who he was. Nor did he want to know who she was. In Southport, this anonymity had seemed daring to her, a liberation, not having to explain Gran. Yet now she realized he might be anyone, anyone at all.

  A friend of Bennett’s was coming for dinner.

  A colleague from the college.

  “Wheezie. Teaches French and Canadian History.”

  “Is Wheezie a WASP, then?”

  “He’s an old friend.”

  The whole world was Bennett’s old friend.

  Rosie bought a chicken from the dairy farmers, an old layer hen, and the wife told her to brine the meat to tenderize it. She stuffed it with wild garlic, colt’s foot, and dried wild cranberry, and rubbed dandelion greens with a tiny bit of oil, then salt. Bennett had foraged on his own in town — a passable wine, a bag of Florida oranges for dessert. The evening was sleek as an otter: warm, slippery. Rosie laid the picnic table under the maple with a white linen tablecloth she’d found folded neatly with the sheets in the linen closet. In the center of the table, she placed a jam jar stuffed with wild flowers while Bennett dressed Miranda in the farmers’ hand-me-downs. As they worked together, Rosie felt the reverberation of some other life they might have had together, the one in which they were happy.

  “Close your eyes,” Bennett said, and she obeyed and felt the weight of soft fabric in her hands.

  Dark green silk, a slip of a dress. Even though it was crumpled, Rosie could tell it was new by the smell. The clothes she bought in the thrift shop, the blue-tag-three-for-a-dollar, stank of detergent, and deeper in, nestled within the very molecules, of other people’s lives. Bennett was dancing around her, “Put it on, put it on!” She noted the hemming. The pearl button at the neck. The way the fabric moved over her hips and breasts, the way it hung in loose pleats. It felt like warm water slipping over her body. It wasn’t the kind of dress you could buy around here. Even if you had the money.

  “And your hair. Wear it up.” He admired her. “You’re beautiful, Rosie.”

  Wheezie was a small man, narrow as a boy. He wore Wayfarers so Rosie could not see his eyes, and tight black jeans, a white tee-shirt, Stan Smith sneakers.

  “Lovely to meet you, Rosie.”

  He handed Bennett a bottle of wine and offered her a bouquet of cut flowers that certainly did not come from the local supermarket, where the carnations were dyed bright blue and purple. He glanced at her dress, or seemed to — his head making an up-down motion: “Fabulous dress.”

  Rosie had a whiff, then, of sawdust.

  Miranda tottered out holding her stuffed bear.

  “Buggy,” she told him seriously.

  “Hello, Buggy.” Wheezie offered his hand to the bear, whom Miranda engaged to return the gesture. “What a pleasure to meet you.”

  Dinner was served on the white tablecloth. The chicken had a gamey flavor, more like Billy’s wild hares. Bennett kept touching Rosie, his hand on her shoulder, caressing her neck. Glancing at him, she saw only his easy smile, his open face. Wheezie kept his dark glasses on and told gossipy stories about the college — fellow teachers screwing each other or students, the revelation of the art teacher’s criminal background.

  In the kitchen, she sliced the oranges, distracted for a moment by the ex
otic color. Oranges came with Bennett and went with him; alone, she couldn’t afford them. Through the window she watched Miranda, plump and content on Wheezie’s lap. He had at last taken off his Wayfarers, for Miranda was chewing on the ends. His eyes were periwinkle, extraordinarily bright, like the eyes of a doll. As Rosie cleared the plates, she watched Bennett in attendance, his body swiveled to Wheezie. The narrow, little man is so convincing, she thought, with his stories, how neatly he embroiders with detail, and his instinct for the salacious.

  But she was alert, as in the middle of the night, when she heard snuffling and pawing at the back door. It was only coyotes smelling the garbage, but long, long ago, it would have been wolves.

  Once, driving Billy’s truck, she saw Wheezie walking down the main street, his Wayfarers on, so she could not tell if he saw her back. Even though it was mid-day, mid-week, he wasn’t at college. “College” — she added the quotation marks in her head.

  And then, on a warm day in mid-July, she saw Bennett.

  Just as she pulled the pick-up into a parking space under the trees at the supermarket, Miranda fell asleep. Rosie had wound the seatbelt around her with vague deference to the law — though, just this morning, she’d seen three different cars with small kids in the front seats, unbelted. Miranda chewed her fat cheeks like an old man at a cigar. Her eyes shifted back and forth beneath the lids, deep-dreaming. “Miranda,” Rosie cooed, then louder for good measure: “Are you awake?” The little girl sighed, settled deeper.

  Winding the windows down a few inches as she’d seen people do for their dogs, Rosie slipped out, locked the door. She was about to bolt for the entrance, when Bennett crossed from a parking space at the center of the lot. He was tilted forward with intention. At her remove, she studied him as a stranger: a man now in his 40s with thinning hair, a handsome face, a dapper wardrobe. He was getting fat. He carried a small paunch before him with the pride of an early pregnancy.