"Proof" (Excerpt)

What beach this was, Louis wasn’t certain. Rock and sand, a harbor town, and everywhere the sort of broken pottery he’d combed for as a boy in the 1940s. Let his brothers fill their pockets with sticks and shells, ordinary sea glass: he knew how to look for the curved ridge on the underside of a slice of saucer. Flip it over and find the blue flowers of Holland or China, a century ago or more. Once, on the beach outside their summer cottage down the Cape, he had found two entire clay pipes, 18th century, while his six older brothers sharked and sealed and barked in the water; beyond them he could see, almost, the ghosts of the colonists who had used the harbor as a dump, casting their broken pottery out so he could find it in his own era and put it in his own pockets. But this wasn’t the Cape, or even Massachusetts. His brothers were mostly dead. That is, they were all of them dead but in his head only mostly: they washed up alive every now and then, and Louis would have to ask himself: is Phillip alive? Is Julius, Sidney?

Study the beach. Here, half-buried: a tiny terra-cotta cow with its head missing, otherwise intact, plaything for a child dead before the industrial revolution. The sea-worn bottom of a bottle that read Edinbu before the fracture. Lots of bits of plate, interesting glaze, violet and coppery brown. All his outgrown fixations had returned to him now that he was old. On an ordinary day in his bedroom at home he might hesitate to reach down for fear of falling over. Not here. He found the pottery and snatched it up. A teapot spout. A cocked handle from just where it had met cup. A round brown crockery seal with a crown and the word FIREPROOF. He thought: that which is fireproof is also waterproof, but he wasn’t sure whether that were true. Good picking anyhow. Some boy was calling far off for his father, Dad! Dad! He looked up. He was that father. There was his boy. Boy: a full-grown man, shouldering a plaid bag, standing on the steps that led from the storefronts of the harbor town down to the little beach. On the street above a man in a kilt passed by. A Lady from Hell. What they called the Black Watch. They were in Scotland. His son had brought him here, to this island.

“We’ll miss the boat,” his son said.

“Let’s not,” Louis answered, and put the treasure in his pockets.

Bowlaway (Excerpt)

In North Salford, by the fens, lived a woman who could not stop adopting wild animals. This was in the olden days. As a child she took in frogs and snakes and pantry mice. Then rats. A raccoon, a possum. She eyed a skunk but drew the line. The animals chewed the walls of her little house. It was their house, too. The neighbors called the police.

“Humans were not designed to live with animals,” the visiting policeman said to the woman.

“That’s exactly what they were designed for!” the woman said.

That policeman didn’t understand. He had never fallen asleep with the bulk of a raccoon in his bed. That humped heat off the humped back. The chatter. The weight of animals. Their tails. She wanted her own tail, she dreamt of it, and when she woke in her bed tailless she felt amputated, as though something that was by rights hers had been taken away. At least she could live with the tails of others. Sometimes there were two raccoons in the bed, and one spring a set of kits. If animals weren’t meant to live in houses, how come they learned to open the refrigerator, work the kitchen faucets? She wasn’t a bad looking woman, said the neighbors. She could marry, have children. As though the dreams of other people were hers! As though what people found attractive was likewise attractive to a raccoon. She preferred animals. She dreamt, like animals did, of chasing things, and undeserved beatings.

At the end of her life—she was not old, she was never meant to be—she found an animal on the edge of the fens, a sweet-faced wild cat, big as a German Shepherd—or was it a wild dog? No, not wild, the animal had an air of domesticity. It must have been forsaken by another human. It came snuffling up, it reminded her of the possum she’d taken in ten years before, whom she in her head called Sugar, though she never said names aloud. Perhaps she was discovering a new species. It had human eyes, hunched therianthropic posture like a little accountant, a black damp nose. She had dreamt of owning a nose like that, too, a cold wet animal schnozz that telegraphed love and health. An understanding passed between the woman and the creature. She turned. It followed.

Two weeks later she was found on her kitchen floor. Kicked to death. Throat torn out. Whatever had done the job broke down the kitchen door from the inside and was never caught.

“We warned her,” the police told the newspaper.

Cracker Graham had read this story as a young woman and took it to heart. When the authorities come to your house and say, No more, take it seriously. Listen to your neighbors, your relatives. Even so she respected the torn-apart woman. To have something you were willing not only to die for but to be killed by. She imagined the woman on her kitchen floor, already knocked down and bleeding, offering her throat, thinking, Ah, you see, my townspeople? I am not dying alone.