The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (27 page)

We found him sleeping.

The plan, originally: to use Mother as bait (by then, who else was left?).

While he chased her, I would, with our newly fashioned net, trap him, and with any luck, would do so before he caught Mother.

But. He was snoring. His legs twitched. There were flies circling his head, every so often landing on his teeth or his tongue, which lolled out of the side of his mouth.

I could see lodged in his gut the soft end of a silver bullet.

We were covered, my mother and I, in two and sometimes three layers of clothes. I was wearing my hiking boots and Mother was wearing Noah’s, and we had gloves on. We were suited up and hidden beneath the scent of the already dead.

We were stopped short by the sight of him lying on the floor in the middle of a patch of sunlight. We had expected him awake and waiting. We had prepared ourselves for running and screaming, had prepared for one of us to fall, a sacrifice for the other.

We stopped when we saw him sleeping there, unsure of how to proceed, and then we moved, very quickly. We threw the net, caught him by surprise, pushed him over, and, swiftly, Mother tied the ends together, and then, with Mother’s yarn, we cinched him tightly into the net.

Father thrashed and growled and yelped. I kicked him once, twice, three times in his stomach, aiming for the silver bullet. Then it was Mother’s turn, and she aimed her kick for his head, his snout, but as she pulled her leg back for a second go, her pants cuff, which she had forgotten to tuck into her boot, rose up, exposing for the briefest moment her pale, bared calf, and he nicked her once with a slick and sharp canine, leaving a long gash across the back of her leg.

Why didn’t I kill him immediately, when I had him trussed up, had him ready to be spit over a fire? He who devoured my brothers and sisters? Who ruined my mother?

I could have rushed in. I could have harnessed the mentality of the countless torch-bearing mobs who had come before me, who once stormed castles and murdered monsters. Would anyone have blamed me? Would anyone have stopped me, or would they instead have lifted up pitchfork and ax, screamed “Kill the beast!” and pushed me forward?

I could have killed him without reproach. But he was, remember, at one time, my father.

Don’t get me wrong. I had no doubts. I did not try to bring forth the kind, gentle, patient soul of the man he once was. I did not say things like, “Dad, it’s me, your son Henry.” Did not say, “I know you’re in there, somewhere.” Did not ask him to remember the good times. Fishing up in Kansas. The small perch I caught with my Snoopy fishing pole. Early mornings driving through our small town to buy donuts, leaving before everyone else had woken up, the car radio turned off, the two of us quiet, listening to the sounds of the tires rolling over cracks in the road.

Did not say, “Remember how we loved you?”

I did not once say anything of the sort. Father would have had to turn to Josephine or perhaps William for such overdrawn displays of sentimental histrionics, and little good it would have done him, or them.

He was what he was, and I understood this, and understood, too, that I would kill him eventually. In the end, I suppose, I did not kill him, did not, as you would say, end it there because I, too, like my father, was once patient, observant, curious.

Mother was very good about handling herself. We had made plans, contingency plans, in case one of us were bitten but not devoured. But I can only imagine how I would have reacted had I been in her position. Would I have been able to bind my own mouth shut? Lock myself in the basement, where we had already buried the remains of my brothers and sisters, her children? Would I have been able to resist the smell of my own son’s living flesh, the sound of his footsteps above me as I lay waiting for starvation finally to be done with me? Resist the knowledge that he was vulnerable, available, raw, and unsuspecting? Would I have been strong enough—finally so hungry for meat that I would have begun feasting on my own flesh—to wait patiently and alone for death to come for me?

No. I don’t think so. I don’t think I would have been strong enough at all.

We found William, who most resembled Father, faceless, as if the wolf within Father, no longer satisfied with devouring Father from within, took a certain untoward pleasure in eating away at Father’s image as reflected in my brother’s face. In fact, they were, almost all of them, disfigured—not that their disfigurement much mattered, not by the time we found them.

Rebecca’s nose (a perfect match for my father’s) had been slipped easily from its dock; Richard’s eyes, sucked (I can only imagine) from their sockets; Noah, whose shaggy head of tight curls not only matched Father’s in color and texture but covered as well a perfectly matching mind, both of which were removed, taken in—Noah looked as if he had been scalped.

From Josephine, Father took her cheeks; Ruth was missing her chin and her left ear; and Sarah, who bore no resemblance to Father at all, who was, in fact, the spitting image of our mother, Sarah’s face was untouched, completely smooth and untouched, and when we found her, she appeared to be sleeping, to be sleeping peacefully, if awkwardly, her neck bruised and broken.

The rest, of course, was a matter of the strength of Father’s hunger.

Father became, so it seemed, quickly bored with meat not freshly killed, and for Sarah he had had no appetite at all.

It was Mother’s idea that we should hide ourselves beneath the scent of my brothers and sisters. By her thinking, if we smelled like those bits of flesh that he had already finished with, nudged at and gnawed away but ultimately ignored, then he would pass us by, disinterested.

I did not build a cage for my father.

Nor did I knock him unconscious, secure him, with rope and tape, to the kitchen table in order to slice him open, figure him out.

I did not drag him by chains from town to town, calling out, “Come, see the eighth natural wonder! Come, look upon the horror that is my father, the Wolfman!”

I did not charge for admission, did not benefit by his capture in any way whatsoever.

What I mean to say is: I was not cruel. Not at first.

I heard Mother in the basement below, thrashing and growling, and at night, for the first two or three nights, I heard her howling as well, her throaty expulsions growing weaker with each successive night.

It was she who dug up my brothers’ and sisters’ bodies, to finish off in her desperate hunger what my father had left untouched.

Don’t think that I did not consider, at least once every night, opening the door just enough to fit through the crack raw meats, bloody strips, or even small birds or mice, fresh kills to ease Mother’s hunger, quiet her down, and toward the end, I dreamt of lacing slabs of beef with rat poison, in hopes that I might quickly end her pain and my suffering. But I have to admit that I let her die a slow and empty death, and I did so for selfish reasons, did so because I did not want it to be me who finished her off.