Hex: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

face.

Queen Of The Tie-Snakes
    But wait. . . I’ve confused myself. I began intending to write about my mother—little Alice Luttrell, who grew up on a mountain and should have stayed there—and ended up at Thalia. I can’t say I’m too surprised. If Thalia was anything, she was an omega. A stocky vanishing point standing spraddle-legged in heavy brown boots. It is Thalia who I miss the way I imagine a daughter might miss her mother: with a mixture of melancholy, indignation and relief. My own mother is harder to quantify.
    What is more, in between where I began and where I find myself now, several days have come and gone. It was a rainy spring, Ingrid—your first—and the season has passed into arainy summer. Our house is high on the southern slope of the mountain, parallel to a gap where millions of years ago some geologic schism thrust one fold of rock deeper into the mantle and levered another to crooked angles above the valley. It leaves us exposed, which is to say when a storm rolls up from the south it finds the house unprotected on its bald and levels us.
    When you are older, Ingrid, you will be able to stand with me on the creek bank and watch the storm come. The house will be behind us, its windows catching the sunlight and flashing it back as if they were shields, and before us: the creek, swift and busy, the lower field frosted with bluet and the edge of the forest where the solomon seal and jack-in-the-pulpit grow. Then there will be nothing but trees, miles and miles of them rolling variously green up and down the sides of the ridges. And the storm, of course. Always the same storm coming back around. You’ll find it feels a little like being on a boat. We here, the family, with our hens and bees, our piles of wood and stone, all together hanging as if tossed from the crest of an enormous wave. Frozen in the whistling space between the foam and the green depths, watching the ocean come rushing up.
    I have laid you on a quilt on the floor where you can see the birds as they squabble at the feeder, but you are unusually intolerant, thrusting your arms and legs into the air and grunting in the way you do just before you lose all patience and begin to cry. A spell of bad weather unsettles everyone. It brings the men into the house, brings us all too close together for comfort. Daniel claims to be fond of this.
    “Nature’s vacation,” he says gaily, leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head. The perfect conscientious picture of a man at ease, but he is faking it. I can tell by the way he watches Jacob as he paces the rooms, pausing to consult thewindows as if he feels the evidence of his hearing—rain pounding the tin roof, roaring in the gutters, tocking the windowsills with the hollow rap of a geologist’s hammer—cannot be wholly trusted. When the men are in the house there is very little time left for anything else. There are the usual meals to prepare and serve and then the cleaning up to do. The usual chores: beating the rugs, changing the linens, washing the laundry, darning or mending or cutting clothing into strips, blacking the belly of the coal-black stove. . .all made infinitely more tedious by the presence of an audience.
    When the storm comes and stays to swell the creek in its banks and devil the hens until they are uniformly beleaguered and peevish, I get up at night and creep down the hallways on the hard edges of my feet just to remember myself as I am without someone watching. Sometimes, if I am very tired, I do this in my nightclothes: a moth-white woman haunting the halls of her cold house. More often I get up from whichever bed I have lain down in and re-dress in a dark corner of the room. Then I walk about the house like a fairy tale child who has gone to sleep in the familiar world and woken up in its mirror twin—the dolls and jacks, cups and boots and brushes, needles and pearls that surround her all the more sinister for their insistence that