Mr. Splitfoot Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Mr. Splitfoot

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Samantha Hunt

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Hunt, Samantha.

  Mr. splitfoot / Samantha Hunt.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-52670-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-544-52672-3 (ebook)

  1. Mediums—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.U585M7 2016

  813'.6—dc23 2015016712

  Illustrations by Chrissy Kurpeski

  Cover design and illustration by Strick&Williams

  Cover illustration (trees) © Kathy Konkle/Getty Images

  Lines from “Burying the Cat,” from Vinegar Bone by Martha Zweig, © 1999 published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.

  v1.0116

  Once again there are more

  dead things than ever before.

  —MARTHA ZWEIG

  1

  We are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

  We float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

  We know that this is impossible.

  2

  We the people.

  We believe all the words which thou hast spoken.

  We cannot understand the words.

  We fled all that day into the wilderness, even until it was dark.

  We commanded the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us.

  We will, we will rock you.

  3

  We cross this great water in darkness.

  We lost a great number of our choice men.

  We will change them into cedars.

  We see there was no chance they should live forever.

  We will change them into cedars.

  4

  We have spoken, which is the end.

  We should call the name.

  We should call the name.

  We know that this is impossible.

  “FAR FROM HERE, THERE’S A CHURCH. Inside the church, there’s a box. Inside the box is Judas’s hand.” Nat is slight and striking as a birch branch.

  “Who cut it off?” Ruth asks. “How?”

  But Nat’s a preacher in a fever. His lesson continues with a new topic. “Baby deer have no scent when they are born.” Nat conducts the air. “Keeps those babies safe as long as their stinking mothers stay far away.” This is how Nat loves Ruth. He fills her head with his wisdom.

  “My mom doesn’t stink.”

  “You don’t even know who your mom is, Ru.”

  “Of course I do. She’s a veterinarian. She already had too many animals when I was born.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Ruth looks left, then right. “OK. She’s a bank robber. When you’re asleep, she brings me money.”

  “Where’s all the cash, then? Are you hiding it in some big cardboard box?”

  So Ruth swerves again, returning to the version of a mother she uses most often. “I mean my mom’s a bird, a red cardinal.”

  “A male? Your mom’s a boy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, she isn’t. She’s a stone. Bones. I spit on her.” Nat steals confidence from thin air.

  Ruth pulls her long dress tight across bent knees. She doesn’t even know enough about mothers to fabricate a good one. Her idea of a mother is like a non-dead person’s idea of heaven. It must be great. It must be huge. It must be better than what she’s got now. “I’m just saying, wherever she is, she doesn’t stink.”

  Nat flips the feathers of his hair. “Wherever she is. Exactly.” He holds his hand in a ray of sunlight. “I’m here now.” He lifts the hand that touched light up to her ear, squeezing the lobe, an odd, familiar affection between their bodies. Nat touches the scar on her face, tangled knots of tissue, keloid dots on her nose and cheeks. “Do you know how they deliver mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon?”

  “No.”

  “I taught you this before. Please.” Nat is cruel or Nat is gentle. Nat hates/loves Ruth as much as he hates/loves himself. He’ll say, “Sleep on the floor tonight” or “I’m taking your blue coat. I like it” or “Stop crying right now.” But he’ll also say, “Eat this” and “You can dance, girl” and “Stay the fuck away from Ruth, or I’ll slice your ear cartilage off and give it to a dog to chew on.” When the Father raises a switch, Nat gives his back. “Are you just someone who wants to stay stupid?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Mules.”

  She wrinkles her nose.

  “Don’t believe me? You’re welcome to shop elsewhere.”

  “I believe you. You’re the only shop in town.”

  They are alone in Love of Christ!’s bright living room. They are happiest when they are alone together. “Tell me what you know about light.”

  “Not much.”

  “It’s the fastest thing in the world.”

  “Faster than Jesus?”

  “Way faster than Jesus.”

  Dust turns before her eyes. “OK. I believe you.”

  Nat looks right at her, smiles. “What killed Uncle Sam?”

  She imagines a forgotten relative, an inheritance, a home. “Who’s that?”

  “Samuel Wilson, the meatpacking man once called Uncle Sam. Symbol of our nation? He’s buried just down the road apiece. You didn’t even know Uncle Sam was dead.”

  “I didn’t know Uncle Sam was a real person. What killed him?”

  “Stupidity, girl. Stupidity.”

  His, she wonders, or mine?

  Nothing is near here, upstate New York. The scope of the galaxy seems reasonable. Light, traveling ten thousand years to reach Earth, makes sense because from here even the city of Troy, three miles away, is as distant as Venus. What difference could ten thousand light years make? Nat and Ruth have never been to Manhattan.

  The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission is a brick bear spotted with mange. Handiwork from days past—ledge and brace doors, finger-joint chair rails, and hardwood floors—is being terrorized by state-provided, institutional, indestructible furniture common to dormitories and religious organizations. The house’s wooden floors are smooth as a gun butt. In summer Drosophila melanogaster breed in the compost pile. Each snaggletooth of a homestead constructed during the Civil War pleases Father Arthur, lord of the domain, founder of Love of Christ! “Hand of the creator,” he says. Clapboards that keep out only some of the wind; sills that have slipped off square; splinters as long as fingers. The house is always cold with a useless hearth since the State frowns on foster home fireplaces. “Meddlers!” Father Arthur unleashed his rage against bureaucracy, using a sledge on the innocent, elderly chimney. Now once a day when the sun reaches alignment, a sliver of light shines into the house through the busted-up flue, a precise astronomical calendar if anyone knew how to read it.

  At Love of Christ! children feel the Lord, and the Lord is often furious and unpredictable, so Father Arthur cowers from corrupting influences. No Walt Disney, soda pop, or women’s slacks pass his threshold. The children milk goats, candle and collect eggs, preserve produce, and make yogurt from cultures they’ve kept alive for years. Blessed be the bacteria. The childre
n remain ignorant of the bountiful mysteries filling the nearby Price Chopper.

  Boys at Love of Christ! wear black cotton pants and solid tops from a limited palette of white, tan, or brown. The girls wear plain dresses last seen on Little House on the Prairie reruns. Simple fabric, a few pale flowers, a modest length for working. Fingernails are clean and rounded. Teeth are scrubbed with baking soda. The old ways survive, and seasonal orders dictate.

  But—like the olivine-bronzite chondrite meteor that surprised a Tomhannock Creek farmer back in 1863—corruption has a way of breaking through. New charges arrive with words from the outside: mad cow disease, La-Z-Boy recliner, Barbie doll.

  “You know what Myst is?” Ruth asks Nat.

  “M.I.S.T. Yes. A secretive branch of the Marines. Surprised you’ve heard of it.” He works with more confidence than facts.

  “I thought it was a video game.”

  “Video game? What’s that?”

  When they had mothers, Nat’s read him books and fed him vitamins until a bad man bit off the tip of her right breast and told her he’d be back for the left one. She didn’t stop driving until she reached New York State. She left Nat at a babysitter’s house, disappearing with a hero from the personal ads, a man who appreciated firm thighs more than tiny kids and perfect breasts. Nat set fire to his first group home. No one died.

  Ruth never knew her mom, but when she was young, her sister, Eleanor, lived at Love of Christ! El was like a mom. She petted Ruth at night, told Ruth she was beautiful despite the messed-up scar on her face. “When you were a baby,” El said, “you used to point at birds.” Then Eleanor turned eighteen.

  “Real sorry.” The Father woke them with a fist on the door. “Time to go.” El jumped up. Ruth froze cold. She was only five. El stalled her departure in the driveway, but Ruth didn’t appear. “Bye,” El spoke to the house. No sign of Ruth. No blood vow to find one another once El got settled. It would be a long time before El would be able to come for her, if El, an unemployed eighteen-year-old, would ever be able to come for her five-year-old sister. Ruth breathed into the window upstairs, looked down on the driveway scene, a surgery in some anatomy theater removing the only familiar thing she’d ever known. El was leaving in the truck. Ruth had no idea where it would take her. A bus station? The YWCA? Some mall parking lot in the capital with eighty bucks and a crucifix from the Father in her bag? Ruth pushed harder into the pane. A black thread, lashed around the chrome bumper, yanked an organ from Ruth’s chest, dragged it in the dirt behind the Father’s truck like a couple of gory beer cans.

  Ruth said nothing for two weeks. No one noticed. Eventually the State brought the Father a replacement, a boy named Nat who’d had trouble with matches and kerosene.

  The Word became flesh and lived among them. The Word became flesh and lived among them. “You can be my sister now,” Ruth told him. That was the Word.

  Nat was also five, small enough to stuff inside the tall white garbage bag of clothes he carried. “All right,” he agreed. “Sisters.” Nat moved into the room Ruth had shared with El—didn’t even change the sheets. One twin bed. They slept foot to face. Two heads on one body, joined like a knave card. Sisters.

  Ruth grew. Nat grew. The bed stayed small. Her hair got longer. His beauty sharpened like a vampire’s, and while the Father was distracted by meditations on his messiah-hood, fantasizing his interview with Rolling Stone magazine and Oprah, some dewy bridge, a bundled corpus callosum, metastasized between the person of Nat and the person of Ruth. Their intimacy was obscene. The Father tried to separate them. It was ungodly, he said, the way Nat and Ruth clung to one another, shared a toothbrush. But Nat didn’t want to be separated. He drafted a report, accounts of drunken nights, corporal punishment, food shortages, and the possibility that state funds might have been used kitting out a black-and-orange monster truck the Father calls the Holy Roller. Nat showed his report to the Father. The Father never tried to split them up again.

  Nat’s T-shirt DIESEL FUMES MAKE ME HORNY defies the dress code. His pants are slung under his pelvis bones. A channel of dark hair points toward his fly because at seventeen—save in the eyes of the State—Nat and Ruth aren’t really children anymore.

  She curls her spine over bent legs. She holds the folds of her belly. On all fours, Nat rests his head in her lap. “All we need is a room somewhere. We can fix it up.” He plays the part of the man.

  “And a pair of jeans for me,” Ruth says, playing the part of the woman.

  “We’ll see.” Being a man is scary.

  “Children! Come unload the van,” the Mother calls from the bottom of the stairs. The Mother is a part-time parishioner, part-time wife, part-time drug addict. She’s most visible in the residue she leaves after preparing midnight snacks or sneaking a shower. Her infrequent appearances allow the children to believe there is something holy about her, though she looks like the singer in a hair metal cocaine band. Purple velvet pants, high black boots. She’s got a homemade permanent wave, and her face is soft, as if termites have had their way with the undercarriage.

  “Supplies! Children!”

  When the Mother’s around and right in the head, she cares for some of the home’s daily needs: shopping, cooking, math, science, the mission’s tax-free status, state inspections, and a Christmas light display so involved, planning begins in mid-August. She does not follow the Father’s partiality for olden times.

  “Children! Supplies!” Or, for those who don’t cotton to an approaching Armageddon, groceries.

  Nat and Ruth join the ranks outside. The Love of Christ! children are a rainbow of deformities.

  Roberta, eleven, and her weird tiny body. She has an old face on a kid’s body. She raises stray kittens in the barn, relying on coyotes to cull her pack.

  Tonya, sixteen, sold pencils and blowjobs when she lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, with her aunt. She compares the honeyed days of Worcester to “living on Capri,” the Tyrrhenian Sea island she once glimpsed as a photo in an Italian restaurant downtown on Ida Street.

  Colly, fifteen, brown as a mummy, is a boy who thinks he’s a girl.

  Vladimir, fifteen, the albino is Colly’s bunkmate. He once described to Ruth the pleasures of masturbating in a jar of mayonnaise. She’s not touched the condiment since.

  Shauna, twelve, and Lisa, thirteen, are actual sisters. Their mother, another addict, sold them to their uncle when they were nine and ten. He turned them out and made a pretty penny until Shauna was picked up by the cops. They speak in their own language, spare and coded.

  Raffaella, ten, has claw hands from arthritis.

  Sarge, sixteen. Her real name is Sarah. She was a gutter punk who arrived at Love of Christ! with dark insects skittering beneath the skin of her forearms. In the race to be the most messed up, competition is steep between Sarge and

  Tika, fifteen, a big girl who jig-tattooed the word “fuck” across her cheek and spelled it wrong, and

  Ceph, seventeen, whose body seems broad as Niagara and disturbs thinking in the same way. He resembles a scoop of lard. Ceph is angry enough to deform DNA.

  Then there’s Nat, seventeen.

  Then there’s Ruth, seventeen, and her wormy mess of a scar.

  The Father requests damaged wards, parents who are dead, retarded, in jail, all of the above. The more desperate the case, the more money the State gives him. “Got any ugly ones?” The Father doesn’t want reunions or adoptions. He doesn’t even want scheduled visitations. He wants converts. He wants Jesus Warriors, foster kids for indoctrination, labor, and money to fund his mission.

  Still it is not all bad at Love of Christ! The Father takes each child’s face in his hands and reminds him or her, “You are the light of the world. You are the light.” Most of these children have never heard that before.

  Still, the adjustment’s not smooth. New arrivals carve filthy words into their dry skin, aching for their absent mothers.

  “You know who my mom is?” Colly asks one night. Four boys, two b
unk beds. “Barbra Streisand. ‘People,’” Colly sings. “‘People who need people.’”

  Ceph doesn’t get the joke. Ceph doesn’t know how white Barbra is.

  Vladimir on the bunk below calls Ceph a dumbass, so Ceph pins Vladimir to the bed, strikes a lighter, and sets his hair on fire. The room fills with a sticky stench, caramelized and runny. Colly throws a blanket over both boys. Vladimir with scorched hair says nothing. No one tells the Father because the Father fetishizes obedience, developing creative punishments when he should be sleeping. He withholds food until a child becomes docile. He locks children in the downstairs bathroom. He strikes the soles of their feet with a wooden dowel or sprays a child with a frigid garden hose, then screams at the child to cover his or her immodest, naked body. He issues shunnings, forbidding anyone in the house from speaking to a particularly willful child. The Father practices holding therapy, which sounds tender but entails sitting on a child, pinning the arms and legs to humble and break the will.

  And still Love of Christ! is better than some of the other options the State has for hard cases. The Father says, “Come with me and you won’t have to go back to public school, where just now a gang of sixteen-year-old thugs with nunchucks are anxious to sprinkle your teeth across the linoleum of F Wing. I have clothing, beds, food, and clean lavatories. I have a purpose for you, labor and the Lord. I have farm animals.” Other foster kids bounce from home to home and school to school, but the Father never lets a child go. He deposits checks from the State and makes up a list of chores. “Stay,” he says, imagining he’s a savior performing rescues—and, in some rank way, he is.