Megan Lindholm - Cloven Hooves

Fairbanks

Winter 1963

My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.

People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.

The GVEA building is grey with black windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.

The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.

That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. I’d rather have chilblains and frostbite.

Making me go to school in winter is one of the cruder things my parents do to me. Although all my brothers and sisters attend school also, I always take it as a personal torment my parents insist on inflicting on me. I do not complain much about it. I am even good at school, very good, if academics are what you consider important. I am academically vindictive, ruining class curves with my hundred per cents, doing fifteen book reports instead of the required five, but it is never enough to counteract tights that go with your dress and match the ribbons in your hair. Vaguely I know that I do not know how to compete. I always put my energies into the wrong arenas.

But it is more than that. School is not my turf. I resent wasting the brief daylight of the winter days trapped in a classroom instead of running through the white and silver of a Fairbanks winter landscape. Yet even that isn’t it. I believe there is something unnatural about school, something damaging. To take a young creature and force it into an enclosed space with thirty others like it, all of the same age … would you do this to a puppy or a young chimp? You know what happens when you do it with chickens or rats. The same thing happens when you do it with children, only the damage is less visible. If I were a chick, pecked until my entrails hung from my rectum, someone would have taken pity on me. But I am a child and children are expected to endure the tortures of the damned stoically. I believe, perhaps self-pityingly, that it is worse for me than it is for other children. The ones who play in playgrounds, who visit one another’s houses, collect toys, and have sleep-over parties, never perceive how peculiar an institution school is. But I am a healthy young animal, taken from my hunting, from my running and growing, and thrust into an exhibit more inhumane than any concrete-and-steel zoo pen. From the moment I step onto the bus every morning, all power deserts me, and I am less than ordinary. I am prey, and I know it. Within the walls of the school, I know that fauns are Fantastic Animals, imaginary creatures those benighted and bedamned Romans and Greeks believed in, and that good little girls put their faith in Jesus Christ alone. Playing with a faun is probably a mortal sin, like calumny and detraction, niggardliness and sloth. I think I am going to hell. I think there is nothing I can do about it, anyway.

But release me from the bus in the evening, and the world is mine. The misery of the classroom seems an imaginary fairy-tale dungeon, nothing worth telling my parents about. The bus drops us by our orange mailbox on Davis Road. My brothers and sisters start the walk down the lane, but I stand on the road, waiting until the bus breaks down into orange and red taillights and then disappears altogether. My siblings hurry through the dark, eager to be out of the cold. I stand, clutching my book bag, waiting. Around me is the silver darkness of an Alaskan midwinter afternoon. The stars are out, and the Big Dipper swings low. Silver birch and cottonwood line the lane to our house. Our house is the only house on the lane, and not even its lights can be seen from the road. I do not know why we call our driveway the lane. We just do. It is only one car wide, and in winter it divides itself into two tire tracks with a hump of brushed snow down the middle. My siblings are far down the lane now. I walk alone between trees that lean in over me with their burdens of snow like ermine capes upon their bare arms. It is night, and yet it is easy to see. The snow is white on the ground and on the branches, the trees are ghostly grey, and in between there is darkness. The dry snow of the lane crunches and squeaks under my boots.

First the house is a few stripes of yellow light through the trees. Then I come to where we have cleared for our garden. The trees are cut away and the once-furrowed soil is now covered with a wavering quilt of snow. I see the house squatting darkly amid the snow, long and low like a crouching animal. The snow-load is heavy on the roof, but earlier snows have slid off the peaked aluminum, to create a wall of snow around the house that makes it look like my home has pushed up from under the earth and snow like a mushroom.