The Pelt

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion.

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

                    —John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

The lion’s pelt hung tacked over the mantle by nails driven through three of its four feet. A crack in the drywall ran under its middle and down toward the faded brick of the fireplace. The pelt glowed a high golden color in the offcast light of a near window. Without the sun, the pelt looked old and graying. The husband sat before the fireplace in a highbacked armchair. He had dragged the chair into the sitting room’s center and had brought along a side table from another room. He stared at the pelt. He sipped at his third glass of whiskey.

“Won’t you get rid of that thing?” said the young wife. She stood in the doorway that connected to her kitchen with her arms crossed.

The husband finished his drink.

“I don’t like it,” the young wife said. “I don’t like having dead things on the walls.”

“I like it fine,” said the husband. He shifted in his chair, and it creaked under him. It was a groaning sound.

“I know you like it fine, but I don’t like it.”

“Alright.”

The woman spun on her heel and retreated into her kitchen. Her slippers slapped the tile as she went. When the sound became distant and illegible, the husband relaxed into his chair.

Under the pelt and on the mantle sat a framed photograph. The frame was gold, the same hue as the pelt. Behind its glass was a tattered, black and white photograph of a man standing over a slain lion with rifle in hand. The savannah behind him stretched into unknown territories. The husband at times imagine himself in the photograph, rifle also in hand, next to his great grandfather. He imagined the smell of long yellow grass, like baled hay. He didn’t know what else it might smell like.

The husband stood and went to the radio. He fiddled with the dial until the speakers spat out something fast and smooth. He sat back in his chair and poured another whiskey.

The wife came back into the doorway. There was something white on her striped apron, but he didn’t care to know what. Her stomach had grown immensely in the past months. The room felt very small around him.

“Does that have to be so loud?” the wife asked.

“It doesn’t have to be.”

She left the threshold and walked to the radio and turned the dial. Something softer played. She turned another dial, and the volume dropped to a whisper. “Isn’t that better?” she said. She looked very content.

“It’s something.”

“You’re in such a mood,” she said, and then she went back to her cooking.

The husband stood again, and his knees felt unsteady. He stumbled to the mantle and reached over it. The pelt felt slick and oily under his hand. He pulled his hand back and sniffed his fingers, but they smelled like nothing. He thought of how it must have felt to pull the skin off the lion, and of the wide plain space of the savannah.  

          “We can put it upstairs,” the wife said from the other room.

The man ignored her. He went and turned the radio back to his station and then turned it up.

          “Did you hear me?” she said. She stood some feet back from the doorway, whisking something in a bowl balanced on her engorged stomach. She had been a slight girl when he met her, was still slight now, except for the onerous bump around her middle. She might say the same of him. When he looked at her, he thought of old times.

          “I didn’t,” said the husband.

          “I said we could move the lion upstairs. Into the den?”

          “Good place for a lion,” he said. He felt rather drunk.

          “It’s settled then.”

          “I suppose it is.”

          The wife disappeared out of sight. A great calamity of steel and copper sounded from the kitchen. “Alright?” the husband called.

          “Yes.”

          “Would you bring me some more ice?”

          “Do you need more?” said the wife.

          “I’m out, yes.”

          “Hold on.”

          He heard another shifting of things and a door sliding open and the tinkling of ice as it fell into a glass. She came out of her kitchen with a claw hammer in one hand and a glass in the other.

          “No need for the hammer,” said the husband. “The whiskey will do the job just fine.”

          “I was thinking you might take it down now. The lion, I mean.”

          “There’s no rush.”

          “It might scare the baby,” she said.

          “I don’t think so.”

          “But it might.”

          “I can’t see how.”

          “Don’t you care?”

          “I should think so. It’s a family heirloom.”

          “About the baby. Don’t you care about the baby?”

          “Well.”

          “Well what?”

          “Well it wasn’t my idea.”

          The wife moved to cross her arms but found them still laden with glass and the hammer. She put the glass down hard enough to rattle its ice and did the same with the hammer. The husband thought she looked very sour, and very ugly when she was sour. She reminded him of the old times. She thundered off, and he collapsed down into his chair and looked at his pelt. He thought it was a lovely sight. It was all his father had left behind.

          He heard the bearings of more drawers slide and then several loud slams. When his wife came back, her footsteps sounded like close-fisted jabs against the floor. She had a long­ pair of kitchen shears in her right hand. She marched up to the mantle and reached above it with the open shears. The shears sank into the aged pelt and sliced it in two. The young wife yanked on the head side of the pelt until it came loose from the wall, and then she flung the freed piece at her husband.

          “There,” she said. “One for the den and one for the fireplace.” She took the shears and left.

          When the pelt was taken and tanned and preserved, its eyes had been replaced with glass orbs. The orbs were very black, and the husband saw himself in them as a warped reflection. He held the head in his lap and looked up at the legs still tacked to the wall. He felt a deep numbness is his chest. He poured himself another drink.