This creature in Maeve would be something vile and subhuman.
I said, “The likes of those which have made your child, Maeve, should not be making babies, at least not with you. It was an evil thing that led to it.”
She said, “Well, when the roof lifted off the house and blew away I climbed on out. They was all gone, out hiding or gone to town.”
She took to wearing the little blue earphones radio I got in the mail with my Amoco card. I had no idea what she was listening to. She wandered around looking at nothing, one hand pressing a speaker to an ear, the other aimless, signing. She scarcely ever took them off, not even when she slept. She was quiet before, but now with her head shot through with radio waves she was hardly more than a ghost.
She would never even change out of her nightslip, though when I’d washed it for her it nearly fell apart. She was pale as a grub, hair a wet black rag all pressed to her head. Not even seventeen and small, but she looked old somehow. She’d seen so very little of the world and what she’d seen was scarcely human. She would forget, or just not bother to use, the toilet paper. Climb into the dry bathtub and fall into naps where she twitched like a dreaming dog. She heaved herself somehow up the ladder and through the little hole in the hallway ceiling to sit in the attic listening to her headset until she came down bathed in her own sweat and wheezing from the insulation dust. Maybe the little fibers got into her brain and improved her reception.
I made her put on a raincoat over the nightslip and took her to the grocery store, since I didn’t want to leave her alone. I thought if I took her there she wouldn’t think herself so strange compared with some of the women who lurk those aisles. Town is only three miles away but you would not think it to stand here and look at the steep green walls of the canyon. And what does it matter? The whole world, and maybe others, is in the satellite dish at the edge of the yard, and I have sat with Maeve until three in the morning watching movies, industrial videos, German game shows, Mexican soap operas. It’s what Greta would do sometimes while she was dying, her body sifting little by little into the air. When I started to get the disability and was home all the time I could see this happening, so I wasn’t surprised when one morning I woke and she didn’t. I grieved but I wasn’t surprised. She was all hollowed out. We’d never had a child as she was unable, and near the end I think she believed her life had been for nothing.
I felt the same way about myself after some twenty-odd years at ChemGlo. Sometimes it seems I wasn’t even there in that job, I’d only dreamed up a vision of hell, a world of rusty green and leaky pipes and tanks and noxious fumes. But as I was not there anymore and was not dead, I began to believe or hope my life might have some purpose, though nothing had happened to confirm that until Maeve appeared.
At the grocery store I couldn’t get her away from the produce section. She wouldn’t put on any shoes, and she was standing there in her grimy, flat, skinny bare feet, the gray raincoat buttoned up to her chin, running her dirty little fingers all over the cabbages and carrot bunches, and when the nozzles shot a fine spray over the lettuce she stuck her head in there and turned her face up into the mist. I got her down to the meat and seafood area, where she stood and looked at the lobsters in their tank until I had everything else loaded into the cart, and I lured her to the cashier with a Snickers bar. She stood behind me in the line eating it while I loaded the groceries onto the conveyor belt, chocolate all over her mouth and her fingers, and she sucked on her fingers when she was done. And then she reached over to the candy shelf in the cashier chute and got herself another one, opened it up and bit into it, as if this was a place you came to when you wanted to eat, just walked around in there seeing what you wanted and eating it.
I looked at her a second, then just picked up the whole box of Snickers and put it on the conveyor belt.
“For the little girl,” I said.
The cashier, a dumpy little blond woman with a cute face who’d been looking at Maeve, and then at me, broke into a big smile that was more awkward than fake.
“Well,” she said to Maeve, “I wish my daddy was as sweet as yours.”
Maeve stopped chewing the Snickers and stared at me as if she’d never seen me before in her life.
Understand, we are in a wooded ravine, a green, jungly gash in the earth, surrounded by natural walls. This land between the old mines and town, it’s wooded canyons cut by creeks that wind around and feed a chain of quiet little lakes on down to ours, where the water deepens, darkens, and pours over the spillway onto the slated shoals. From there it rounds a bend down toward the swamps, seeps back into the underground river. The cicadas spool up so loud you think there’s a torn seam in the air through which their shrieking slipped from another world.
One evening I was out on the porch in the late light after supper and saw Maeve sneak off into the woods. The coon dog got up and followed her, and then a couple of other strays followed him. When she didn’t come right back I stood up and listened. The light was leaking fast into dusk. Crickets and tree frogs sang their high-pitched songs. Then from the woods in the direction she’d headed came a sudden jumble of high vicious mauling. It froze me to hear it. Then it all died down.
I went inside for the shotgun and the flashlight but when I came back out Maeve had made her way back through the thicket and into the ghostly yard, all color gone to shadowy gray, the nightslip wadded into a diaper she held to herself with both hands. I suppose it wasn’t this child’s first. She walked through the yard. What dogs hadn’t gone with her stood around with heads held low, she something terrible and holy, lumpy stomach smeared with blood. She went to the lake’s edge to wash herself and the slip, soaking and wringing it till she fell out and I had to go save her and take her into the house and bathe her myself and put her to bed. Her swollen little-girl’s bosoms were smooth and white as the moon, the leaky nipples big as berries. I fed her some antibiotics left over from when I’d had the flu, and in a short time she recovered. She was young. Her old coonhound never came back, nor the others that went out with him, and I had a vision of them all devouring one another like snakes, until they disappeared.
I couldn’t sleep and went out into the yard, slipped out of my jeans and into the lake. I thought a swim might calm me. I was floating on my back in the shallows looking up at the moon so big and clear you could imagine how the dust would feel between your fingers. My blood was up. I thought I heard something through the water, and stood. It was coming from across the lake, in the thick bramble up on the steep ridge, where a strange woman had moved into an empty cabin some months back. I heard a man one night up there, howling and saying her name, I couldn’t tell what it was.
I’d seen her in town. She carried herself like a man, with strong wiry arms, a sun-scored neck, and a face hard and strange as the wood knots the carvers call tree spirits. I heard she’s an installer for the phone company.
When I stood up in the water I could hear a steady rattling of branches and a skidding racket, something coming down the steep ridge wall. I waded back toward the bank, stopped and looked, and she crashed out of the bushes overhanging the water, dangling naked from a moonlit branch. She dropped into the lake with a quiet little splash, and when she entered the water it was like she’d taken hold of me. I didn’t do that to myself anymore, though maybe I should’ve because I was sometimes all over Maeve in my sleep until she began to shout and scratch, for she was too afraid to sleep alone but must not be touched even by accident. But now here I was spilling myself into the shallows where the water tickled my ankles.