“Was it a horse, though?” I asked my grandfather on the second or third day of my visit home. “Or just a man with a horse’s head?”
“I never saw it,” my grandfather said dryly. “I guess it must have had hands.”
“And a penis.”
He stuck his tongue out at me a couple of times. He stared out his window at a skein of fog wound around the eucalyptus and arborvitae trees. “The penis looked like a raw turkey neck,” he said. “Or so she said.”
To a psychiatrist who treated my grandmother in the late fifties, she once attributed the physical appearance of her tormentor to a picture-book painting of Bottom and Titania that haunted her childhood dreams. Another time she described having witnessed the gelding of a draft horse in the stable of her family’s tannery, and once she speculated about the weird comminglings of men and bleeding hides she had watched come and go across the tannery yard. In the pit of her worst ravings she often claimed to have been raped by a stallion or a man with a stallion’s head. There was a timelessness in these ravings that made it seem as if the childhood violation were ongoing, happening still.
“She cooked up all kinds of theories,” my grandfather said. “She used to read Freud and Jung.” He pronounced it Young. “Adler. All those guys. So she could tell the doctors what she thought they wanted to hear.”
My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother’s illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone’s head, he figured; in my grandmother’s case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adaptation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.
* * *
On the eve of the preliminary hearing of charges in the Feathercombs case, my grandfather took his telescope and a thermos of tea up to the top of the hill behind the farmhouse to have a look at the full moon. In his heart, he said, he knew that the Horse was lurking. He could see the signs. There was the stream of observations, questions, and imponderables that had begun to pour out of his wife, drowning out silences almost before they could begin. Once, nearing home with the car window rolled down, he’d heard a ghostly skirl of bagpipes on the air. Another time he had caught my grandmother turning from the living room windows that looked out on the tree with a violent bloom of color in her cheeks and throat.
He had been outside with his telescope for two hours, in his fur hat and Pendleton jacket, when wood smoke reached his nostrils. At first he registered the smell without attributing or even identifying it. His right eye had full possession of his brain and was busy dazzling it. He had just pointed his telescope at Reiner Gamma, near the southern coast of the Sea of Storms.
Of all the celestial bodies available for viewing to the backyard astronomer, the Moon was the only one you could see in enough detail to imagine living there, ranging those quicksilver mountains in seven-league moon boots. Naturally, my grandfather knew the Moon was inhospitable to life. When it came to astronomy, he might have been a layman, but he had worked throughout the late forties and early fifties as an aerospace engineer, first for the Glenn L. Martin Company, then briefly at a firm of his own, Patapsco Engineering, designing inertial guidance and telemetry systems. The need for a guaranteed paycheck after my grandmother’s first breakdown in 1952 had obliged him to sell his interest in Patapsco.* Since then the recession of 1953, bad luck, and—in my grandfather’s view—the white-shoe, genteel anti-Semitism that pervaded the aerospace industry had forced him gradually down the economic ladder and, at spare moments, ever deeper into the world inside his telescope’s lens. In his imagination, he built my grandmother a city on the Moon and escaped by rocket with her and my mother to settle there and live in peace.
At first it was a domed city to afford a stunning view with every earthrise of all the strife and unhappiness they had left behind. Over the years, as he read and researched, its configuration changed. To account for cosmic rays, he put buildings inside of craters and in tunnels underground. To assure reliable sunlight, he put my grandmother’s moon garden in a bright spot near the North Pole. But two principles, two rules of the game, endured: On the Moon there was no capital to grind the working moonman down. And on the Moon, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss. The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.
A moment after he smelled smoke, he became aware of a flicker at the edge of his field of vision, light leaking in. For a few seconds he ignored it. Then, with a jolt, he connected the orange flicker to the smell of firewood. He looked up from the oculus of the telescope, blinking away the ghost on his retina of Reiner Gamma, a luminous fish.
In the yard beyond the farmhouse, the hickory tree stood rigged in sails of fire. The windows in the face of the tree fort shone with a malign glint.
My grandfather’s first reaction, after disbelief, was annoyance with himself. On his return from jail, in the wake of the first fire, he had gone through the house from cellar to attic, rounding up combustibles and locking them in the toolshed. But he had relaxed his vigil, and his wife would have had ample time to replenish her stock of hair spray, lamp oil, paint thinner. (In fact, it would emerge that she had improvised, showing an ingenuity he could not help but admire, by using a kitchen spoon to fling cotton balls larded in Vaseline, like tiny gouts of Greek fire, directly into the treehouse.)
The second thing my grandfather felt was rage. The persistence of his wife’s madness was an insult, an act of defiance, a repudiation of the past two years of relative peace in their marriage. From the top of his hill my grandfather shouted my grandmother’s name like God summoning a prophet to a mountain of reckoning. Even five hundred feet from the roar of the flames, his voice in his own ears sounded thin and feeble. Its very feebleness increased his anger.
He strode down the hill at a vengeful clip. If he didn’t find her already burned up and dead, then he intended to kill my grandmother. He held off on making the decision as to how the killing would be done until he got his hands on her and discovered which method promised the sweetest deliverance.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, the tree was englobed in gases, spewing a long orange jet. It looked, my grandfather said, like a comet on an old map of the heavens. Between him and the tree hung a curtain of heat that turned his cheeks red for days afterward and singed the tips of his hair. His anger dissipated as he contemplated the shimmering curtain, a heart of fire pumping its lifeblood into the sky. There was nothing for him to do but stand there and marvel.
* * *
My mother remembered none of this.
“Just the next morning,” she said. “The tree was this shriveled black stump. Like a burnt wick on a candle.”
She had changed out of her work pantsuit into a turtleneck and jeans. She had more work to do on the class-action suit, but she was taking a break to knit a stocking cap for her father, who often complained that his head felt cold. When she was through, it would have gold and crimson stripes and a green pom-pom. It was not the kind of hat anybody would want to die in, but maybe that was the point.
Every night after work my mother came in and sat with my grandfather while I cooked dinner and got a tray ready for him with some Jell-O and a cup of lemon tea. My grandfather had expressed impatience at the constant presence by his bedside of one of us or the night nurse. He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would