Soon the remaining three uncles took to pining and curled morosely in corners and in the cellar. They grew gray, seemed to wither, then died off one by one. I turned all the salamanders free in the cellar so they could feast on the crunchy mummified remains with great relish, clearing away all traces, but shortly after that those slithering creatures also began to mope, to vomit, and grow very cold to the touch…then to wither and die. It is fall again now, and I have been burning the last of the fetuses in piles of leaves.
Father no longer wants to pulse atop my wife. They both seem to brood, apathetic. Will they, too, wither and die, leaving me alone? Perhaps then to die, myself? The house is so empty now, so quiet and lonely; a sepulcher. A family vault. But families sometimes do die out utterly, leaving no progeny behind. Of course, my selfishness aside, I know that sometimes this is for the best.
I realize this is all quite embarrassing to hear and it’s awkward to tell. Family matters often are. But your family is your family and you love them, no matter what.
Again, please, I must insist…don’t tell anyone this story.
Dust
When my mother died she left me her skulls.
It wasn’t a common thing in the early 60s for a father to gain custody of his child in a divorce, but my mother didn’t contest it. Nor did she make any pretense of hiding from the judge that she was a suicidal, manic-depressive alcoholic unable to take proper care of herself, let alone an infant son.
She survived her suicidal depressions, and all the unthinkable quantities of liquor, but it was the cigarettes that ultimately ended her life’s turmoil. I remember her as she was when I was a young boy. My father never forbade her from visiting; nevertheless, these occasions were infrequent. Christmas time, usually, although she was normally a week or two late.
Mother was beautiful then, very tall and slim. She looked much more like her lanky father, Dad told me, than her mother—who had been very petite. Mother had short dark hair, and eyes slanted cat-like; a pale feline green. And the cigarettes, always cigarettes, her wrist flopped back as one who doesn’t smoke might do if pretending to smoke. She smoked with flair, the cigarettes an artistic prop. She was an artist. Maybe the butts helped her stay in touch with that.
In the last five years of her life she began to call me, write, and then even visit again after I hadn’t seen her for nearly ten years. I visited her as well. She was shockingly ravaged. Her hair gray, her face deeply lined—made leathery from all the time she had spent out West; Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico. The heavy flesh above her eyes that had once made them sexily slanted now was just sagging and wrinkled; the green eyes once startlingly clear and sharp, even when she was drunk, now were like the greenish cataracts of an old dog.
As a boy I had been afraid of her…and I think she had been afraid of me. Now I felt some tenderness for her. She had stopped drinking at last, rid herself of at least that artistic prop or inspiration. But drink had done its damage and the cigarettes continued to, and my mother died at fifty-five.
She had been living in New England again the past seven years, in the house she had inherited after her parents died. Now I had inherited the house from her. And her art. And her skulls…
* * *
“Sorry to hear that your fiancée broke off with you, Jack,” said my mother’s best friend, David Foster.
“Thanks. It’s okay. I introduced her to Mother once. I got the impression she didn’t like her.”
David smiled. “She hated her on sight.”
I chuckled. “Oh, really? Did she say why?”
“Well…just that she was a fat, loud midget with a mustache. Sorry,” he said, but we were both laughing.
“Angela was not fat…she was…plush.”
“I’m just telling you what Annie said. I’m glad for her that you broke up while she was still alive; she was worried about you. She was just afraid to say it.”
David owned a small shop here in Eastborough which sold South Western art, Native American jewelry, and pottery and such; I was surprised that this trendy sort of store could still survive with the economy gone so sour. And were Yuppies still buying the stuff when Navajo patterns were turning up on tacky shower curtains and rubber welcome mats? Apparently so, though at the moment their interest had seemed to shift to the Victorian…at least until that trickled down to the K-Mart crowd.
David had been Mother’s closest companion the last seven years of her life. He was a good-looking gay man with the likable combination of a boyish face and distinguished gray at the temples. I felt like I’d known him for years myself. Very funny, very kind to me, if a little catty. He liked to gossip, but his gossip about my mother was filled with obviously sincere endearment. David had met me at my mother’s house the first day that I came into possession of it, to point out the antiques and pieces of art Mother had willed to him before he took them away. I had told him this was not necessary; if Mother wanted him to have them I had no complaints, but I suppose he felt a little awkward about it. And I think he wanted to help show me around, as I had never spent much time in the house—certainly not exploring.
Preceding me into Mother’s studio, David asked, “Did she ever show you in here?”
“Yes, once. Briefly. She was making that at the time.” I pointed to a steer skull hanging on one wall of the large bedroom-turned-studio, which would have been brightly washed in sunlight had it not been so gray and rainy an afternoon. The skull was entirely covered in a mosaic of turquoise pebbles but for the horns; remarkably beautiful. Eagle feathers dangled from one horn. “I’m glad to see she finished it. The work she must have put into it.”
“God, yes. She’d done those before; I’ve sold a few at the store. A thousand a piece. But worth it.”
There were numerous cattle skulls on the plain white-painted walls. A row of them rested atop a work bench which spanned the length of the room. These had been painted a bleached white, and Indian-style designs had been rendered on the foreheads, feathers hung from rawhide thongs around the horns. “An assembly line over here, huh?” I said.
“She wanted me to pick those up,” David said reluctantly. “But she wanted you to have the others.”
“Oh, great.” I had moved to one side wall to examine a trio of hanging skulls, these far more unique and interesting than those made for David’s shop. One, horns and all, had been painted sky blue with fleecy clouds seeming to drift across it. Another was fire-engine red, and looked like something a Satanic cult might have ordered. Beside that, more disturbing, was a skull painted carefully to look like it still had skin on it—and a hide. The texture of hair was meticulous, and reminded me what a fine painter Mother had been, though she had apparently given that up as a means of expression in itself long before. Glass balls—Christmas bulbs?—had been glued into the eye sockets and painted with glossy paint to look like real eyes. They did, except that at some point one of them had shattered and the jagged shards of the glistening eyeball were grotesque. A fanged mouth for an eye.
“Your father always accused Annie of emulating Georgia O’Keefe too much. She did love her work, but Annie was her own artist with her own vision. Your father should have tried to understand her.”