“Here,” we shouted. “We’ve brought food. Wine. Whiskey. We brought our presence and our ears and our love. Let us in and we’ll feed you. We’ll share a drink and share a song and make you live again. And she will live in the spaces between word and word, between breath and breath, between your tears and our tears. She will live.”
But the Taxidermist would not open the door. The next morning, we saw our gifts heaped in the trash bin outside the house. We never mentioned it again.
6.
We listened to the old men in Ole’s Tavern suck down shots and chasers and fuss over the meeting in the school. Or the building that will soon not be a school.
“Not much use pretending we’re still a town if the school’s gone.”
“We stopped pretending we were a town after the grain elevator closed.”
“And when the butcher shop shut its doors. Can’t call yourself a town if you can’t get a fresh hock for supper. If you don’t have a locker to put your winter’s buck.”
“Taxidermist’s got a lot of damn gall closing the school mid-year. If he was any sort of a man, he’d set aside his own salary rather than pull the rug out from underneath a bunch of little kids.”
“Not much of a bunch. Just fifty. On a good day. When was the last good day?”
“We stopped pretending we were a town when the hardware store closed. And the seed store. And the gas station. And the green grocer. And the shoe shop. At least we still can pickle ourselves at Ole’s. Soon, he’ll just shove us into a bunch of damn mason jars and line us up on a shelf. He’ll keep us topped up with nice, clear vodka so we can see. Folk’ll come in looking for the town and find it looking right back at ’em, shelves and shelves of blinking eyes.” Arne says this. He’s always been a morbid fellow.
“The Taxidermist’ll like it, though,” Zeke Hanson says. “He’ll like it very much.”
We agree.
7.
Night falls early in November. In those waning moments of light, the sky paints its face like a harlot (overripe rouge, stained lips, unbuttoned taffeta spreading outward like wings), before opening itself wide to the void of space. Each jagged shard of light in the darkness is a tiny message sent from the recesses of time. “You are alone,” the stars say. “You are alone. You are still alone.”
We pull our coats tightly against the howl of the wind and start our cars.
The school is slightly outside the town, and it sits on a small rectangle cut out of Martin Hovde’s sod farm. The schoolyard is packed earth with a single metal swing set for the children to play on. The yard is dusty from their feet, every speck of green crushed by the insistence of play. Just outside the schoolyard is the endless grass of the Hovde farm. Martin steamrolls it twice a year to keep it as flat as any floor and then he burns it, to give the grass a good, rich start. It is green as snakes, and softer than a lie.
We park our cars next to the school but do not lock them. No one locks their doors. This is a small town. A good town. Or it was, anyway. We hold our coats closed tightly at our throats and bend our backs against the wind. The stars are cold and sharp above our heads and the wind howls across the wide, empty fields.
8.
Taxidermy must embrace imperfection. It is a weak practitioner who feels the need to extend the leg of a lamed cougar cub or repair the jagged scar above the eye of an ancient wolf. Taxidermy, in its soul, is the celebration of life, the re-creation of a single moment in a sea of moments. The taxidermist must build motivation, history, consequence, action, reaction into one, perfect gesture.
The taxidermist’s diorama is a poem.
A song.
A short story.
“We are all just a collection of faults,” the Taxidermist told us once. “A myriad of imperfections through which shines divine Perfection. You see? It is our flaws that make us beloved by heaven. It is our scars and handicaps and lack of symmetry that prove that we are—or once were—alive. The more we attempt to force our corrupted idea of the Perfect and the Good upon what is actually and deeply perfect and good, the farther we are from the divine. Reveal the subject as the subject was, and you reveal the fingerprints of God.”
We have shut our ears to the Taxidermist. We have stopped listening to his hypocrisy. We know what he has done. We have seen it.
This is the very reason why we can never love his other wife.
9.
The Taxidermist’s other wife greets us as we come in. Her eyes light upon each coming person and dim when they pass. Her lips spread open into a smile. We shudder at those straight, white teeth. We turn our gaze from that flawless skin. She tilts her head to one side and blinks her large eyes.
(There! We gasp. We grab one another’s shirts and pull. We whisper in one another’s ears. Did you hear that? The whir of metal. The click of motor. She doesn’t clear her throat. She doesn’t sigh. She doesn’t lick her lips, or adjust her skirt. She doesn’t pass gas, or snort when she laughs, or cough.) We have examined her skin. We have watched her pass. We’ve looked for clues but have come away with nothing.
“The efficient preservationist leaves no trace of his hand,” the Taxidermist told us once. “It is a dim fellow who has the tools of the
