Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

this time I do not reach for them at all. I know what he wants to hear, and I do not wish to play it. I will not play ragged jeans and dirty knees, runny nose and scaly knuckles. I will not play my shame, and I try to pretend I don’t notice he is offering the pipes to me. So he pokes me with them, and when I still don’t respond, he pokes me again, hard, prodding me in the short ribs with their hardness.

      I glare at him. He makes a face at me, sucking in his cheeks and hogging out his eyes. I snatch the pipes from his hand before he can jab me again. Immediately he settles back on his log seat, attentive and polite. I want to call him a bad name. He sits watching me, waiting for me, and I don’t understand why he is being this mean, this nasty, to demand this of me. I know what I am, and he can already see what I am. Why demand it be given a tongue? But he is still watching me, waiting, his face smooth, and I look long in his eyes, trying to find where he has hidden the malice that makes him demand this.

      But he is too deceptive for me, and at last, in anger, I lift the pipes to my lips. I close my eyes, and squawk out bony dirty knees and snarled hair. The pipes shriek hilariously of a smudged face and hands rougher than a dog’s toepads, of ragged clothes that flutter in the wind they croak, and then of thin arms and a bony chest.

      The pipes smack against my front teeth, jarring me to my very spine and cutting my upper lip and gum before they fly past my face. I open my eyes, frightened, and his hand is still lifted, palm toward me, as if his hand will fly back again and this time strike my face. His eyes are outraged and hurt. We stare at each other across the torn place between us, and something is bleeding, I am cut in a place that isn’t even on my body and he shares the wound, feels it just as I do. The hurt lasts a long time, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

      I stoop slowly and pick up the pipes. They are unhurt, save for a drop of my blood on the end of one. I wipe it off on my shirt, cautiously offer them back to him. He takes them as if they are encrusted with dog shit, by two disdainful fingertips. He gives me a look I cannot interpret and hops off the log and rubs the pipes over the moss carefully, rips loose a handful of green willow leaves and scrubs the pipes with them, staining them green but ridding them of whatever uncleanliness he imagines on them. He is puffing when he sits back down. As he starts to lift the pipes to his mouth, I rise. I’ve had enough music for today, I decide. Especially I fear that he may play his own beauty again, a wicked counterpoint to my latest performance.

      Walnut fingers grip my wrist, clenching tight. He has always been stronger than I am, but never before today has he used that, except in play. I refuse to struggle, knowing I cannot break free. Instead, I glare at him, then make my face cold and impassive as a bank of blown snow. I look past his shoulder into the moving shadows of the woods, for the wind has risen slightly and is stirring branches and grasses to dance. With the corner of my eye, I see his left hand lift the pipes to his mouth.

      He plays, and I must listen, but I don’t have to show I’m listening. I continue to stare past him as he plays a tiny green frog clinging to the underside of a leaf, a cluster of high-bush cranberries dangling beneath an umbrella of rosy leaves, tiny alder cones rattling down on new-fallen leaves, and spruce sap glinting in the sunlight. I watch the shadows sway.

      He pauses, but not for breath. He shakes me, hard, by my wrist, and I try not to sway with his rattling. I look at him, making my eyes cold and hard. Something in his forest eyes keeps me from looking away from his gaze, even when he lifts his pipes and puts them to his mouth. He plays again, the same tune.

      But this time I cannot deny the slender ankle wading past the frog, the strong brown fingers reaching for the cranberries, the laughter that echoes the rattle of the cones, the fan of hair the wind blows past the spruce tree that glints the same as the shining sap. He plays on, watching my face, and I hear warm breath stained with wild strawberries, the curved back of someone curled and sleeping in the deep grass, green eyes blinking with snowflakes on their lashes. What I hear is me, and not me, like a reflection in a pool is both me and the leaf-dappling light on the soft mud at the bottom.

      He plays it twice again before he will let me go, his eyes watching me as if commanding me to commit it to memory. Evelyn Sylvia it is, Evelyn in the forest, the Evelyn he knows, and the notes are my name as his pipes say it, as the forest itself breathes it.

      His fingers loosen around my wrist as he continues to play. I draw my hand free of his, and gather my bucket to go. Rinky comes to my tongue click, and splashes beside me as we recross the slough. His black tail is curled up tightly over his shining back, and I think of going back and asking Pan to play Rinky for me. Another time. Another time. His music follows me still, rising and falling with the stirring wind, but as I get farther and farther away, it blends with the forest’s own singing, and I cannot tell if I am hearing the forest itself or Pan’s rendition of it.

      His music has driven the sense out of my head. I see my mother’s face as I shut the door behind me, and the sound of the door shutting is like the clack of a jaw trap on my ankle. Too late to run, and the mushrooms I offer are not enough. I am required to sit at the table and peel potatoes while I listen to a recital of my sins. She admits that Candy said a lot of cruel things, but that doesn’t excuse my physical violence. Sissy and Candy come up from the basement, both to listen and to chime in with any crimes my mother may miss. Candy’s nose has stopped bleeding, but as I suspected, the mohair sweater, though still soaking in cold water, is probably ruined. I bite my tongue, refusing to say aloud that now she will probably give it to me, hand down the stained, worn-out stuff to Evelyn, she’s too stupid to know the difference.

      Candy’s eyes are both blacked, too, and this explains Sissy’s sudden chumminess with her. Jeffrey showed to take Candy out, but when he saw swollen nose and puffing eyes, he backed out of the date, none too graciously. Now they both agree that Jeffrey is an asshole, but have no gratefulness to me for revealing that to them. Candy is demanding I pay for her sweater, which is a joke, as I never have any money except at my birthday or Christmastime. I am judged and condemned to clean up the room that we share. I don’t say a word as they rant at me, and I can feel how much angrier this makes my sisters. But it only seems to make my mother more thoughtful. As she swoops up the heap of potatoes I have peeled and splashes them into a bubbling stew and stirs it, she stares at the blank wall over the gas stove, and her grey-green eyes are distant, almost as if she were listening to music rather than to the nattering and bleating of my sisters.

      The next morning I find that the hem of my pleated skirt has been resewn. The mohair sweater is dyed a uniform brown before it is folded into my drawer. I say nothing, and neither does anyone else.