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  THE ANIMAL HUSBAND

  [1]

  I am the one my father said is supposed to scratch down on this bundle. We are from the hill. He didn’t say that, but I am his son. The bird above us is too big to see around, but the white air gets on its skin and helps us see to carry the animals back and forth on the sled. He says that I will always be his carrier, his animal assistant.

  The grandfather and the father are mine. I am supposed to have come from them, and they know the most about the bird, even though the grandfather has done his smashes up on my father. They are over me. They say that I will begin to be over. I will be a bird that will eat white air to help them see while they work on the mountain. I dropped it. Should I be scratching like this? I am scratching onto the bundle as he said I should if he wasn’t here. He said not to leave, that someone will come. I could throw the bundle down the hill. Would it hear the bird as it fell? No one is here to put the food in our animals. I shouldn’t make the Michael announcement on the hill. He says that every announcement we make will stay inside the bundle, even when the air doesn’t stick to the bird. He is my Michael. That was what she said. She isn’t mine anymore. I am in [1] now, on the hill, in his room, where the bird can’t see me. I get to be the one that fills in the spaces he forgot to fill in. Will they know it in their ears if I throw this bundle off the hill? Will the bird see me? No questions, just talk, he told me. I don’t know how to talk. I can scratch about when the bird eats the black air as a meal, because it is also dark on our hill. They cry and chew at themselves, and then the small red bird cries when the light comes, which means the black air has left the bird and it won’t be hungry again until we put the food on the wood and carry back animal supplies from the grounds, and then put the food onto ourselves, which is all of us, minus me. I go into my blankets when the bird shuts down. I get to see what happens in the black air in my room, and there is also where I get to hear the light get eaten by my father and grandfather, and sometimes even she is there, and the smell of her when I am under my blankets under the shut-down bird.

  [2]

  This is our great big place and we are just myself living in this house. My hands burn when I show them up under the ball. The burning ball is what he called it, and Grandover had a specialty he spread onto himself that he said made the ball heat cool onto his back. He stayed blue beneath the surge. Let the lady return, to show me how to operate myself. I know how to bring the sled, and work the fur, and call out the names of everyone who isn’t here, like Father and Jason and Grandover. If she were here, I could operate myself, and go out on a looking-for-them trip without making our house become empty. Every hill has something to keep it from sliding.

  [3]

  I am burying food for the day the bird goes away. I will be able to dig holes to my food the way my father and the rest of them were digging for the legs and the hair. When I helped them dig, they gave me teeth, and I threw them at the bird. There was no food on the teeth, and the bird let them fall back down to me. I keep my own teeth covered up. He says I should wear the cloth when they work, and that I shouldn’t swallow. I am supposed to move my fingers if the dirt gets too heavy on me. I chew on it and let the dirt be in my eyes, and it seems that the bird is putting dirt on me and my father is hanging from the bird. The cloth is sweet, but I am not supposed to talk into it. They take it from me after they dig the dirt off, and it goes into the lab room. I keep some of the dirt on me and sit with our animals. They have the grass and the dirt on them, and we move from the house with our cargo. I can put Candy Girl in the mound of dirt, but she won’t keep the cloth in her mouth. I tell her it is better to close her eyes, but she always has to look at me when I am covering her up. I have a dead one inside my body. The cloth in my mouth keeps it there.

  [4]

  During the scratchy-clothes times when clouds came from our mouths, we had shows. This was when we would shiver and buck and get to sit back just the people to watch the hill get lit up and shifty. It was white-air time, like the bird wasn’t sleeping, but it was, because Father would kick the switch of the machine and it was back to air that was black again and our own cloudy mouth smoke. He shot light into the sky so that the bird could get fed. The air ate things, and it was our night-time. I dug my hand into my shirts and watched the bird’s belly get lit up. Sometimes Father aimed light at the house or a tree or even those times right up onto me so that I couldn’t really see what it was the light was doing. Jase and I got to touch to keep the numb out. We piled under the horse rugs and looked out at the show. Father would never talk. He turned the wheel and fed the cup with powder. Only when Jase fell asleep did he punch at us. I could never sleep then. This was the only time there was light that didn’t swim up from inside the bird, and there were shapes in the light if you pulled a squint. We never got shows if Father didn’t come back from the mountain, or if the sled threw a rail, or if Grandfather said so. Sometimes Father made shows for himself in the day, and I wasn’t allowed to help or hide nearby. I didn’t understand if there was already light how he could add light, and if this wasn’t a way to mad the bird. But he pulled his crates of powder and fed them into the cup and pumped the light through. Usually at night, the light would stay up and you could see enough to drag food around, but I never wanted to do anything but be smothered up under the rugs with Jase and watch. There were so many shows. The light made the bird blue. Father said we were seeing the first things, things that even the first people didn’t see. These were from before them, my father said, from when everyone first fell, before water had cooled off the burning tree. I never knew what to know about what I was seeing. The world was lit up by his moving light blasting through a cup of powder. Was there something like this inside the bird that made us seem to move around down here? Are we shapes that the bird opens its mouth to? Everything is always powder, and the light lets us look upon it. Father was grinding things down to see how they looked when he pumped the light through. He took bits of me, or myself, but those shows were in the day, when I was made to stay up back behind the house and wait for the machine to stop booming. When she was here, she told Father to get his powder from somewhere else. She kept me, and I got to be in her room with her and look at the big window, even though he made a cloth that covered it from the outside, and the only thing to look at was the man who was drawn inside of the cloth, who moved his face only when the wind moved it for him.

  [5]

  My older under climbs up to us from the water town on visits. He doesn’t know how to breathe. He grabs his smaller knee and he cries. They say we should pull him in the sled. The bird won’t cover my brother, my father says. The bird won’t fly over him, so there is black air in my brother, and he has to hold his belly. I want to throw a hook in the bird and pull it down. She once threw a brush at my brother. He is my Jason. If I clean out its insides, then when it eats the black air, we might see behind the bird. I’ll clean out the bird and put the hair in it so Monk, the dog, and the others who were smashed and put behind it can dress up again, and we can be on the hill and pour the weather bottle on one another. Or I could put my Jason in the legs of the bird so the bird will swallow white air to feed him, but he might get burned when the ball burns a hole in the bird. I can’t hear anything. No one is climbing up. My father would be smashing them now, and Grandover would have the cloth out to keep the hill from breathing on us.

  [6]

  Our house is big enough for all of us and we are just myself living in it. Will there be a visitor come like it used to? No questions, please. Am I the one the animals make circles around? I’m sorry. He said if we say it, it is true, and I get to be the one that chews on the cloth here in his room, putting my scratch in his bundle. No announcements. Please, my Michael. He said to scratch the white off of it. They hauled him off. She would say please to him. His bundle is blue. We dug holes, and I got to be the one that stayed under. The messenger will collect my scratches, and a man is allowed to hide when the messenger comes. Father said the lips sho
uldn’t show. I can’t see anyone coming up. The cloth can cover it, but we need to cut holes for the eyes. They made fires mainly to the feet of them, and we got to lie down. I was the one looking out when they poked down. The bird won’t let me burn if I finish. They stitched the mouths and you could still see cloth coming out. We heard the teeth try to chew when they couldn’t move, and I heard the cloth stay inside me and keep me from speaking out. The dirt wasn’t heavy, but I couldn’t cut holes in it for my eyes.

  In this house, the dogs don’t look at me, which means I am alive. If the bird leaves, I will live here still, but there will be some things I won’t know, like where to breathe and how to put my hands up when I have no food in them, and when to dig myself up out of the pit if they have left me in it. I will never neglect the cloth and how to make it all fit into my mouth. This keeps the air out and my face gets fat and sings on the inside. My father said that animals sing so slowly that we can’t hear it. We have to reach our hands in them to know what they are saying. We have to pull fires upon them. I try to sing slowly with the cloth in my mouth. I try to forget what I am saying.

  This will be the time to say things not on the outside. I will be the scratcher, the mister. No chores for me now. I can make up my own chores. I can make up what I think the animal is saying without having to go arm-deep.

  There is so much whiteness here, his bundle. He was scratching down here what he thought the animals were saying, but I can’t. His numbers and his lines make me smart. Big shelves and his windows are blacked out where a bird might have gotten trapped in each piece of glass. The messenger will know what to do. He will have the arms for this type of grabbing.

  [7]

  I put my ear on the horse Tom Blue to hear what he was hearing and Tom Blue kept quiet. I want Monk to come back to this side of the bird. After he was smashed, my father said Monk had to go to the other side of the bird and get fixed. I want to fix Monk here and stitch his hair back on. He said I can’t save hair. He left his shape here; the animals sniff at it. I have all of the hair in the bottom of my blanket. Good-bye, Monk. I didn’t get to say that. When I don’t put the black air on my eye under the blanket, I open the blanket and take out Monk’s hair. My father has all the other hair in his lab room. I am not supposed to fix him if he lies down. I am not supposed to go in there. I go in there when the bird eats white air, so I can see. There is so much hair. My father isn’t here and I am supposed to be the one who marks on this bundle. I put the food on myself in his room.

  [8]

  When we work during our season, I get to be the one that will throw string. When it falls, I will know who to kill. I throw with my girl arm because my boy arm is tired from dragging the sled. The string falls in the shape of the name of the animal I will down. The string is always falling in the shape of a squiggly animal name and my father helps me read it. He says we can’t read unless we make squints, which is like pretending there is no bird. Squints is a way to shrink things, and we shouldn’t always do it or the bird will die, and then black air will rule. I think I can hear the bird make a stung noise after I throw string, or a man has held a noise inside him after being surprised. I wonder to my father what would happen if the string fell down into the shape of a squiggly name that was the bird’s name. Who would get up there to kill at it? Would he climb up there to give a kill at it, and then who would eat the white air after that? If nothing ate white air, then how would we see to breathe and see which body was our own that we should pick up and carry inside? Could we cover our own body with a cloth if the bird has been killed?

  [9]

  Cheeser is the one that drags. His eyes are big and his face drags behind them. Father has gotten his smashes off on Cheeser and Cheeser walks slowly. There is no hair left on him, but his hair stays close. It is near, in a pile. Cheeser doesn’t leave it, and I will stick it back on him, or make for Cheeser a new hair. He needs a new hair, but he would never act that way. Father says that we need to pull our smashes off on Cheeser because he is as hard as almighty and what’s inside is worth the wait. I am supposed to pull a smash off on Cheeser when my father is not here, but when I am with Cheeser, I rub him and feed him grass. Because he is shorn, he will be an animal that will guard me.

  [10]

  Mind the hill. Throw the water. Pull the wood. Crack up the fires. Fix their feet. Don’t talk. My father says do this when we have the good air. But it is empty here, and so I will mark instead, in case the messenger comes. No one is climbing up. My Jason hasn’t climbed up, nor ever has Grandover since they hauled my father up the mountain. Am I supposed to put food out for them? We have the wood that holds our meals. I brought it in from the birdless side of our hill. Can I ask a question now?

  [11]

  I pray to the bird and I know that the sky is bird. How many times until I am hollow, the way the bird is when it flies? Yes or no, Father said that the bird has to be hollow so it can eat itself and keep flipping inside out. He said that if I looked at it right, I could see it flip over and over and hear the wings beating to keep it from falling. That’s what the noise in wind is, and if wind didn’t make noise, it would mean the bird was falling all over us, so that we would be getting pecked at and pecked at. How many other hills are there? I want to ask. How many other birds are stuck up there guarding how many other hills? Or does our bird know about us? I am making a plan so that I will become known to it. If I leak out, it is because I need to become lighter to fall up there. Get an uprush and make my fall. Father said that there would be a day when I could take the air and squeeze it, and whatever fell would fall first onto me.

  [12]

  Here’s how I stop what is moving. I’ll follow it until it makes noise and then I’ll do the rush. Rush is how you go fast and grab necks. My grandover said the hunter makes a rush for the eye of the animal, so that you don’t get sight-stopped. That’s when something can look you into being stopped. If you rush the eye, they can’t sight-stop you. Don’t get seen, is what he said, and you can keep moving.

  [13]

  [14]

  There is nothing here. Report says empty. My father’s bundle is clean and there are no scratches. It will be enough of me to scratch on it to get most of the white off. Put things where they go is my chore.

  I have a sound inside me that scratches to itself and I am not allowed to listen. When I open my mouth, it is a hum that dogs notice, and they come to me and wait. Father doesn’t hear it. He works around me when I open up and doesn’t notice. I hold the hair onto my open mouth and the hair shakes. Then I put it back in the dish in his lab. I think that maybe I can go and listen later, to hear what the sound has done now that it has shot out of me. With my mouth closed, my face itches and I have to rub it with air. When I speak, it shuts up.

  This is Subject A speaking. Am I speaking if I can’t hear anything but these scratches? No questions, just talk. No talk, just scratching. Where are the stitches for me to sew my hands off this paper? Will I blow the scratches off this paper? I have been making scratches outside, for the bird. The dirt is soft and I kick the messages into it, or I carve on the backs of the softer dogs. The cloth stacks are high, here, because we haven’t been making the fires. I can climb to the hot parts and scratch where the cloth is closest to the bird. How will the messenger know what is what. Is that a question?

  [15]

  This is what they did. They carried the hair on the sled. They went to the other hill and to the mountain, and also under the hill, where you can’t see what color is the bird. This is where the animals have stopped making weather and are resting. My overs say the mouths are stitched up so we won’t get blown on and go off the hill into the air. We never feel much of a blow here because we keep the mouths of the dogs stitched tight. I put mine on the mouth of Ken Green, the dog, and feel the hot blow out of his nose. I put his nose on me and get heated, and then I put the food up on him for a treat. They give me the hair they don’t burn. I also pull hair from the sled and stitch it into a snake until my
father takes it from me to burn. He says if I keep the hair when the bird eats out of the black air, then the hair makes a sound I won’t like. He is wrong. I keep the hair and hear nothing.