Hex: A Novel by Sarah Blackman Page A

hours of morning or mid afternoon—that burstsfrom the ridges of the mountain just before the long, gentle descent into night.
    Though she did not often examine the thought, the daughter had always sort of hoped that her husband-to-be, good hunter or not, would resemble her father in some small way. This one did not. He was too thin and looked soft under his suit. His skin was too pale, almost luminous, and instead of her father’s almond-shaped, brown eyes, the suitor’s eyes were perfectly round and blue, an unnatural shade as if he had dipped his irises in dye and slipped them back into his head still wet. His hair, a tawny sort of yellow, floated up from his head and curled out over his ears like feathers. He was, all together, an unimpressive specimen. . .but he had seemed kind.
    But no one else had called.
    “I don’t know,” said the daughter, polishing a spoon with the hem of her cotton dress. “What do you think?”
    Her father looked at her and then he smiled, reached across the table to put his slim, hard fingertips on the back of her hand. “You’re a beautiful girl,” he said, turning her hand over and tracing the cup of her palm in a way that had always made her shiver. “He said he was a good hunter. I think it’s a match.”
    “Just as you say,” said the daughter and so the matter was arranged.
    The next day when the suitor came back, the father met him in the front yard between a soapstone cairn for a deer struck on the highway and a teetering slate one for a mouse in a trap, and gave the suitor his daughter’s hand. That evening they were wed and went immediately away for a short honeymoon in the Catskills where the suitor had rented a cabin. They went skiing and snowshoeing, ate heavy meals and stayed up talking anddrinking wine by the fire. One afternoon they went for a long walk in the forest and came upon a clearing where it was so quiet they could hear each breath as they took it, almost the blood as it whooshed around in their veins.
    “This is beautiful,” said the wife, taking her husband’s gloved hand in hers. The pines were tall and still. Heavy snow drifted against their trunks, cut into ripples by the wind.
    “Beautiful,” said the husband and he kissed her in his nipping, hesitant way which—she closed her eyes and examined her reaction—she believed she was beginning to learn to like.
    At the end of the honeymoon they returned home to her father’s house where they were going to live temporarily until they got on their feet. In her absence, her father seemed to have been busier than ever. The gutters were filled with shifting piles of pebbles; the roof was lined with them. On one side of the house, her father had begun to build cairns on top of cairns and so brought the rocks up level to the roof, which they had spilled onto, which they were starting to consume.
    “Can you live like this?” the wife asked her husband.
    He shrugged, stroking his chin. “It’s only for a little while,” he said.
    The very next morning, the husband said he would go out hunting. He began to gather all the necessary accoutrements: the different scents and whistles, the camouflaged jacket, the bullets, the gun, but before he could finish getting ready, he changed his mind and said he would go fishing instead. An hour or so later, in hip waders and a cap pierced with hooks, he kissed his wife at the door and left, pole slung over his shoulder, bait box dangling from his fist. He was gone the entire day which the wife spent in much the same fashion as she had when she was the daughter.She did the laundry and then sat on the couch in the living room. She made her father a sandwich and then washed his plate and watched him through a chink she had cleared at the kitchen window as he strode around the backyard with a measuring tape, checking the cairns for unnoticed drift.
    In the afternoon, she watched a television program about two elephants who had been sent to a rescue park to live out