Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

Saint Possy

Our house was more than a hundred and fifty years old and full of mysteries and we loved it. We’d bought it for the original hardwood floors and the ornate plasterwork and the stone fireplace. Soon after we arrived, the man across the street, the unofficial neighborhood historian, dropped off his self-published pamphlet. It included a lengthy essay that said our place had been, at various points, a boardinghouse (1840s/50s), a convalescent home (1890s), the boyhood home of a famous neuroscientist (1920s/30s), a lawyer’s suite (1960s), and a drug house (1990s). Now it was ours: its history, its shoddy plumbing, lead paint, crumbling foundation, all of it.

Reorganizing our boxes in the attic one afternoon, my wife discovered a silvered daguerreotype hidden in the eaves. The woman in the photograph had a pinched, severe-looking face, and she was dressed in some sort of black frock. On the back, the script slanted and faded, was a single word: Lang. This made sense. According to the brochure, the area had been settled mostly by German immigrants.

Not long after that, I was fixing the basement stairs and discovered two red candles and what I guessed was a possum skull concealed beneath the boards. It looked like it had been there a long time. The skull was gray and thin, two small pencil-prick nostril holes below the eyes, the front teeth fanglike and awful and covered in dried drips of red wax. My wife, who grew up Catholic and who can be pretty grim, dubbed the relic Saint Possy and stuck it on our dresser, which meant we had to fall asleep looking at it.

The first night it was there, I dreamed I needed surgery and had to watch a doctor pull what looked like dirty linguini from a hole in my side. The second night I dreamed I was pregnant.

“You can’t blame that stupid skull,” my wife said, and patted its crusty crown.

“Don’t even try to tell me that thing isn’t evil,” I said.

“It’s just bone,” she said. “Just carbon atoms, same as you and me.”

Still, I didn’t want it on the dresser. The skull absorbed light, and after dark it was the brightest object in our bedroom. I threw my shirt over it whenever we had sex because surely any child conceived in its sight was going to come out a monster. I tolerated it for as long as I could — a month, maybe — before packaging it in a shoebox and shoving that toward the back of the closet.

We went out for dinner one night, and I ordered mussels and french fries, and we talked about money because we’d spent most of our savings on the house and we still had more repairs to make. We were thinking about taking in a roommate to make ends meet. When we came home, I polished off a bottle of wine and fell asleep fast, but around midnight I woke up with a full bladder. When I got back from the bathroom, the skull was on the dresser again, the sockets empty and dark.

I shook my wife. She didn’t even open her eyes. She patted my arm. A slow smile crept across her face.

“You’re a jerk,” I said. “Don’t you know you married a man with a gentle heart? Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? And you know that may not even be a possum — the truth is, we don’t know what it is. It could be anything. It could be a deformed baby skull. Remember the photograph from the attic? Maybe it was her deformed stillborn baby, and she built a shrine for it under the stairs.”

I thought my wife had already fallen back asleep, that she wasn’t paying me any attention, but two days later, she came home from work with a strange look on her face, a nervous half smile. I asked her what was wrong, and she pulled a mess of paper towels out of her purse. She unraveled the ball, and there was the skull.

She said she’d taken it to her friend Barry, who taught biology at the university in town.

“And?”

“It’s not a possum skull,” she said. “It’s not a baby skull either. But don’t freak out. He doesn’t really know what it is. He’s never seen anything quite like it.”

We were at the kitchen table. I got up to doctor the soup I was making and then sat back down. I asked her if she thought we should just bury it in the backyard instead. To be done with it.

“Maybe we should put it back under the stairs where we found it,” she said. “It was probably there for a reason.”

The skull was on the table between us. It seemed to breathe. I was losing my appetite. She scraped some of the red wax off the bone, studying it. My wife hadn’t been to church since she was a little girl. She was a Buddhist now, and one of the wonderful things about our house was that she had a room entirely for her meditation, which she did every morning.

“You don’t really think it’s evil, do you?” she asked. “Because I don’t believe in evil. I don’t see things black-and-white.”

“It’s at least a very dark gray,” I said. “If what we’re talking about is a spectrum of goodness.”

“Why were there candles?” she asked. “That is eerie, right?”

We didn’t say anything for a while. The skull grinned at us. Maybe we were waiting for it to talk.

“This is silly,” she said. “I mean, really, what are we so afraid of?”

She snatched the skull off the table and threw it at the floor. The skull didn’t break. It ricocheted toward the door and slid to a stop at the doormat.

My wife went into the hall closet and took out our bucket of tools. I asked her what she was doing. She rummaged around and pulled out a socket wrench.

“Wait,” I said, but it was too late. She was down on all fours, bashing the skull as hard as she could. She hit and she hit and she hit, and when she was done, there were fragments of bone everywhere. She looked at me with wild eyes.

“Quick,” she said. “Help.”

I was brushing the pieces into a pile, trying to collect all of them together. If we weren’t diligent now, we’d never be rid of this thing. Months from now we’d still be finding tiny shards. What if we got a bone splinter? What if there were bone particles in the air and we breathed them in? She got out the broom and swept as thoroughly as she could and then told me to do the same. Then we wiped the floors with wet paper towels.

“I feel funny,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

She looked like she was bracing for a sneeze but the sneeze wouldn’t come. I gave her a Kleenex and advised her to blow her nose. Then I blew mine. We weren’t hungry anymore. I threw out the soup. We went to bed early. The next morning neither of us mentioned what had happened, but I saw her scanning the floor while we ate breakfast, and also later at lunch. That night I had another dream. I was pregnant again, but in this one whatever was growing in my belly could talk. It had a smooth voice, baritone, vaguely southern, muffled by my flesh, and it called me a coward. It called me a wretch. It spoke with the power of all the saints in heaven. It called me names I don’t even remember but still feel.

I told my wife about it in the shower.

“No skull to blame for it now,” she said. “That’s just your own inner weirdness.”

I worried that the voice in the dream had been my own.

After that we rarely talked about the skull, except as an anecdote at dinners and parties. Oh, yes, I’d say, she was wild-eyed when she destroyed it. Well, you should have seen him, my wife would say, he was such a baby. We’d make ourselves sound silly. We made ourselves sound temporarily insane. That always got big laughs. The more we told the story, the stranger we seemed. We told it until the people in the story were barely recognizable versions of ourselves.

Years later we sold the house and bought a newer one on the other side of town, in a better school district. We were unloading all our mixing bowls in the new kitchen when I saw it at the bottom of the box: the tooth, gray and small. Nothing had changed. We hadn’t changed.

“You know what we have to do,” my wife said. “So we might as well get it over with.”

We drove over to the old house. We hadn’t yet handed over the keys. Standing there one last time under those beautiful high ceilings, the floorboards creaking under our feet, I thought about how soon we’d be just another footnote in our neighbor’s pamphlet. My wife moved to toss the tooth into the fireplace ash but I stopped her. What if what was required was a little pageantry?

“Such as?”

I led us up to the attic, where we had, perhaps unkindly, left behind a few boxes of our junk and trash. We didn’t have any candles, so I jabbed the tooth into an ugly old teddy bear’s mouth, which made the bear look country-poor and sad and creepy. I placed it in the attic eaves alongside the daguerreotype. It felt right to unite them. I don’t mind admitting now that I performed a little farewell dance as I backed toward the door, where my wife waited with her arms crossed.

“You think that’s necessary?” she asked.

I shrugged: What was the harm? Just after pulling the light cord and leaving the attic forever I even whispered a few quick words into the darkness. When I turned, my wife had her eyes closed and hands clasped. A little prayer, she called it later, in the car, joking, though we both knew that’s exactly what it had been.