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.