The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

“Wolf!”

My father didn’t become violent until, one night while camping outside of Nacogdoches in the East Texas Pineywoods, he was bitten by a stray and sickly wolf.

Perhaps it was a dog.

Before I continue I would like to put to rest some of the myths concerning werewolves, reveal truths that, had I known them before, might have saved more of us:

The Full Moon

Father’s changes were not restricted by the light of the full moon. The changes, in fact, began even before he returned from his trip, rushed home by his fellow bird-watchers.

His beard had filled out, climbing up his face, covering his cheekbones, and reaching up to the lower lids of his eyes.

His nails had grown longer, sharper, and seemed, at the end, to be made of something harder than metal.

His snout had grown, too, allowing for an enhanced sense of smell.

In fact, all of him, by the end, had grown large, and at times I wondered at the deep reach of his long arms, at his hands and how vast they had become.

Silver Bullets

No matter how many I fired—

into his chest (near his heart),

into his side (piercing, so I discovered after the autopsy, his kidney),

through the thickest part of his neck,

into his soft underbelly,

and into his skull—

no matter how many silver bullets, he refused to quietly lie down, fall into a peaceful, interminable sleep, refused to keel over dead, refused, even, to turn from my youngest sister, whom he slaughtered before I could fire even my last shot.

Sunlight

When we captured him, my mother and I, finally, after two weeks of hiding and foraging and planning, after having buried the rest of his “brood” as Father liked to call us, or, rather, after we buried what was left of them, most of them being — well, let’s not go into that just yet — but finally capturing him with a net knotted together by my mother’s thick, supple fingers, Father was sleeping on his back in a wide strip of sunlight that poured into the living room and spilled across the rug and across his favorite chair.

Father had gone to the Pineywoods (more specifically, into the Angelina National Forest) — that year as he had every year since my birth and most likely before — in search of Henslow’s sparrow.

Not that the sparrow in question is particularly difficult to spot, though it is listed as an uncommon and inconspicuous bird. Not that he hadn’t observed and recorded his observations of Henslow’s sparrow numerous times in the past.

More that this particular sparrow was an obsession of his, one none of us outside of Noah quite understood, and we had our doubts about Noah, too.

Still, despite the yearly trips and frequent sightings, I could only find this blurred photograph of the bird in his office, in a box that contained other ornithological trappings (some ten notebooks describing sightings, habitats, movements, dates, times, etc.; some twenty ornithological texts, including The Audubon Guide to the Birds and Waterfowl of East Texas; two pairs of binoculars; and a small box of photographs [all of them as unfocused as this one, for though he was a fine observer and though he could sight birds quicker than his bird-watching fellows, he never had the steady hand necessary for photography]).

What I am trying to say is: My father was a patient man, an observant man.

The point I’m trying to make perfectly clear is: My father was a man who liked birds, and that men who like birds are, on average, men of a peaceful nature.

My youngest brother, Noah, who had, more than any of us, inherited Father’s ability to sit and wait and record, sat at our father’s bedside for two days after he was returned to us from his camping expedition. The doctor had been summoned, had arrived, had administered medicines, and had proclaimed him (our father) in no real danger.

“But what about the hair on his face?” Noah asked. “What about his fingernails?” he said.

The doctor laughed and said, more to Mother than to any of us children, “Your father merely needs a good shave and some super-sturdy nail clippers. Certainly nothing to worry about.”

“And his nose?” Noah asked. “What do you make of his nose?” he said.

But the doctor had a ready answer for that as well: “It’s only made to look bigger by the hair on his face. See if he doesn’t look as normal as Sunday once you’ve given him a good shave.”

Or maybe he had said, “As right as rain.”

In any case: Mother had my sisters shave him.

They used clippers first and then shaving cream and a fresh razor and then more cream and a new razor, as the other had been dulled by the bristles of his beard.

Two hours later, Noah, who had sat silently by throughout the entire process, came to us, Mother and I, and told us that Father’s beard had grown back again.

“Just as full?” I asked.

“More so,” he said. “And, also, I’d like to take a moment to point out that against a clean-shaven face, his nose looked even larger still.” That is how Noah spoke. Very much like our father.

“Must you watch him like that?” Mother asked. “Haven’t you homework or housework to finish?”

“I’ve done it all,” he said.

“Fine, then,” I said. “Keep us informed. Tell us what you find out.”

To that effect, Noah kept notes. But his notebook is incomplete.

What I can read of my brother’s notes reads much like Father’s bird-watching notes. It is amazing how even his handwriting looks so similar to Father’s. Father, it seems, taught Noah well. None of the rest of us cared so much for birds or for sitting quite so still. The date, a brief description of the weather, small descriptions of the length and growth of Father’s hair, the hardness of Father’s nails, how they grew now to sharp tips, the low guttural, mewling coughs rising up from Father’s throat that gave Noah chills — such were Noah’s final observations before Father woke, newly and fully transformed, and filled with what I can only imagine was a terrible hunger.

Mother fashioned the net out of raw silk and numerous thin bands of copper wire.

I don’t know why Mother and I were spared for so long or how we survived while the others, one by one, were hunted, slaughtered.

Noah first, but quickly followed by Josephine, who had been sleeping poorly, waking early in the mornings (had, in fact, been awake and watching Father the morning he left for his trip, watching him as he packed the last of his things, long before the sun had risen, before any of the rest of us had woken), who had, in the middle of the night, stumbled to the kitchen for water and then to the guest room, where we kept Father while he lay unconscious, drawn there, I suspect, by the light beneath the door, hoping, perhaps, that Noah was still awake and watchful, or that Father had finally woken.

Then there was William, who might not have been third, but who—

But wait. I’d rather not go on in this manner. I’m not yet prepared to rattle off their names, the gruesome manner in which Father took them.

I would like you to understand something.

I would like you to recognize that I am trying my best to get through this.

I’m trying to be straightforward, honest, earnest.

To present facts, and only facts.

To paint a picture.

But.

What if I were to say I have nothing left to give?

What if I were to confess that I loved my mother dearly but that I am happy the rest of them are gone, eaten, disposed of? Noah, Josephine, William, Richard, Sarah, Rebecca, and Ruth? Even Father?

What then? Am I a bad son, a bad brother, a bad person, if I tell you that I liked that it was just Mother and me and no one else? Does that make me a monster, too?

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.

I only lost my temper, truly lost my temper, once. Displayed concerted cruelty only the one time. When he refused to eat. When I tried to feed him a starling that I had found, that I had caught for him, and he refused it. I held it by its feet with tongs and dangled it so close to his craw that as I tried to tempt him with it, it would bump into his snout, a feather would catch on one of his teeth. But he ignored it, or tried to, couldn’t prevent his nostrils from flaring at the smell of it, the small bird full of fear and unable to fly away no matter how furiously it shook.

He wouldn’t eat it, and so I threw it at him, broke its neck, I believe, on his chest, and then I gathered it up, took it away, roasted it in the oven, and showed it to Father once more, showed him that I would eat it if he would not, but I couldn’t suffer the smell of it, began to retch even as I drew it to my face, and so I threw it away.

His claws fell away almost immediately upon his death, his snout shrank back to a reasonable size, his body returned to its previous near-bald state, and the madness leaked from his eyes, leaving small orange tracks, like painted tears, down his cheek, his innocent brown pupils surrounded once more by a pure white sclera. The lycanthropic demon had, of course, left its vessel once the vessel could no longer sustain life. His teeth, the canines, are not missing, no, but are in my possession. I removed them shortly before he died, and when removed, they were three inches long, could have been, perhaps, longer as I was unable to remove them from the root, broke them, by accident, at the gums.

Would you or anyone else deny me the symbol of my mother’s ruination?

I do not claim to understand the physics, or, rather, the biology behind the process of my father’s transformation, first into a wolf and then, once dead, back into himself, and while it defies explanation that his teeth have also reverted back to the shape and size they were before he changed, this change, in light of all of the other changes performed after his death, seems only fitting, does it not?

When I finally unlocked the basement door, almost two weeks after she had walked herself down there, I had covered my face in a thick, wet towel. I carried with me two large boxes of baking soda and the shovel.

No weapon of any kind? you might ask. No form of protection?

Discounting the shovel, no, no weapon. She was dead, I was sure of it, and if not dead, so close to death that she would have posed no threat. As for protection, my best protection would have been earplugs. I had prepared myself for the sight of my brothers and sisters, exhumed, eviscerated, had even prepared myself for the sight of Mother, wasted and ruined, the sight of her splayed out across the floor, facedown, her back rising in quick, shallow breaths, had prepared for all of that, but could not suffer the bald and angry mewling noises escaping with each exhalation.

Mother’s hair I collected in bags, swept up piles of her fur, bagged the bunch of it, and set the bags in my closet. She was, I’m certain, once as covered in fur as my father, but her hair grew coarse and then fell out in clumps as her food supply dwindled, as her body lost the strength to maintain even the simplest functions. The bags are still there, I’m sure, in the closet, as innocuous as those bags ready to be delivered to Goodwill, but I am not sure what use I or anyone else might find for them.

I secured him to the ceiling with strong bolts and thick chains that made him hang, uncomfortably, I hoped, so that his feet could touch the ground, but only if his long arms were stretched to their limit.

Then I went into the woods. I had to drive there, as all the woods around our house had been replaced by houses and stores and roads. I went into the woods and I found a good, clean perch next to a small but loud enough waterfall, and that’s where I sat. I had my father’s notebooks with me to use as a guide, and I had my rifle, and I waited for my father’s favorites to fly into view, to stop at a nearby tree, or even glide lazily overhead, and I shot them, as many as I could, which were very few considering how long I sat, how many shots I fired, but enough for me to bring back to the house a box heavy with them. He had not eaten for four or five days, and I knew that despite their now cooling bodies, despite his love for their blank and uncomprehending eyes, Father would have made short work of them. I laid them out in a wide circle just out of his reach, and then I hung from the ceiling with a bit of fishing wire one of Henslow’s sparrows, hung it just in front of his snout. I laid them out and sat against the opposite wall and watched him squirm, lick his chops, stretch his neck out to the sparrow, almost, almost, as far as he could stretch, and then, exhausted, his head would fall back. He would whimper and whine.

It wasn’t until after the end, once starvation, not me but starvation, had finished him off that I pulled him down from the ceiling, laid him out, lifeless, across the kitchen table, and, using the bread knife, opened him up and went digging for my father.