Lycanthropia

After the flood, the sky turns a robin’s egg blue unfamiliar during east-Tennessee summers, and it takes a few days of unrelenting sun before the more normal late-August haze reappears. A week of it and humidity rises. Walking from the air-conditioned cool of the office to the car is like shoveling coal on a steamship, and even minor gardening leaves one dripping sweat. It is no time to be out in the heat.

So on a Friday evening we flee with a picnic dinner into the mountains, where it is cooler, winding steadily up the side of the North Carolina foothills through the low deciduous forests into the newer pines, arriving at last at a pale clapboard church. I pull the car down and around the parking lot until it is out of sight of passing motorists. Not that anyone else will interrupt: At 9:30 nearly everyone who lives in the area is either settled in for a banal evening watching television or is installed at one of several honky-tonks for the long-necked Mickeys, loud country music, and a possible romantic tryst. What few cops prowl the area will be occupied chasing down DUIs, breaking up the occasional barroom brawl or reasoning a rare drunk out of a gun. It is unlikely we will be disturbed.

Even if we are, I have nearly as much right to be there as the oldest, staunchest parishioner, because the land on which the church rests belongs to my grandfather, and down the ridge a graveyard holds the remains of hundreds of my ancestors. As we walk among the graves I hold her hand to keep her from stumbling over hidden stones in the thin, milky light of the full moon. Most of the markers reflect the light and cast eerie shadows, but an occasional stone, blackened by age and half-buried by long neglect, will deliberately reach up to trip an unsuspecting soul; I know these wily dead, and I insist she walk close and place her feet where mine have been.

Her name is French: Anaïs. But in addition to the accent of a distant land, her voice is touched with magnolia blossom notes from the Deep South; it originated in cotton and rice country, chattered throughout the world and ended here, speaking in hoarse, almost reverent whispers in a graveyard full of Scottish, English and Irish names, many of them the same as mine. When we settle at the feet of a couple planted little more than ten years past, she cannot hold her tongue: “This is a little creepy. These are your grandparents, for goodness sake.”

I pretend not to hear her and, instead, set down the picnic basket, spread a blanket on the ground and open a bottle of German wine. I pour a couple dollops of the vintage on the two graves. “Pretty good stuff, isn’t it, Mockingbird?” I ask the old fellow. “Rhine wine. Milk of the Madonna. You’d appreciate it if you were still here.”

He is here, of course, strands of his DNA surging through my veins as personality markers and in the shape of my hands. I am, in fact, the representative of all those gathered for their long sleep here. My appreciation of the moon-touched distant hills, my affection for the dark river winding between them, and my deep love of the woman sitting near me on the overlook are all reflections of my ancestors’ intense passions, as though I am a mirrored ball in the ballet of the living, giving back a little light to those who have expressed a final pas de deux, who have iterated the danse macabre. In fact, I am a recent expression of the first man, a distant traveler from the fertile crescent, but no less bound to its red earth and no less a part of the cycle of birth and death, no less battered — in spite of advances in cosmetic surgery and hair coloring — by the winding wheel of time. I spend long moments staring at Anaïs, my Eve, reaching to touch her face and trace my fingers down the side of her neck. Her green eyes flash. She whispers, “Kiss me.”

“Here?” I tease her. “In the graveyard? Isn’t that profaning the dead?”

“Fuck the dead,” she says. So I kiss her to the zinging applause of crickets and the appreciative chirps of tree toads, tasting the wine-flavored liquor of her mouth. Afterward she is breathless: “Why don’t you kiss me that way all the time?”

“Because I’m not always profaning the dead,” I tell her.

“Hush,” says Anaïs. “Don’t speak sacrilege.”

I smile at her and say, “It isn’t sacrilege, darling. And I’m not really profaning the dead. I’m rather honoring them. Continuing their adventure.”

Anaïs gets it right away: “You are like the Christopher Columbus of your ancestors.”

“Yes. They represent my past and my future. I express their present. I am alive now, in this moment. I love you now. What we have is this. This nowness.”

“Baby,” says Anaïs, “you talk such beautiful rot.”

I drink deeply from the bottle of wine; I can taste each part of the grape: the salty skin, the sweet meat, the tangy heart. “Not rot,” I say. “Truth. Absolute truth. I want to drink you as I drink this wine. Give me your mouth.”

The taste of her is more delicate than the flavor from the bottle, but no less complex. We kiss until it must go one direction or another. The invitation in her eyes and her mouth is unmistakable, but I pull away and stretch out on the blanket, face-down, then reach past its edge to the grass and tangle my fingers in it. My grasp is tethered to the earth by the grass and tethered to the yawning remains of my grandfather by the earth. I feel connected to him, and he speaks through me; I press the left side of my face into the blanket.

“He wants to live through me,” I say to a passing breeze.

“Who wants to live through you, lover?” Anaïs whispers so near my ear that I feel the humidity from her breath.

“All of them,” I mumble. “Every last one of them.”

“Then we’ll let them live,” Anaïs whispers. She bites the edge of my ear and straddles my hips. I sense she is unfastening buttons, and in a minute my intuition is proven accurate when she hovers over me, lifts my tee-shirt and brushes the bare skin of my back with the dangling fabric of her open blouse. She tugs at my shirt. “Off,” she insists.

I disengage from the grass and lift the shirt over my head, discarding it at the end of my reach. Anaïs lowers her body onto mine: At first I feel the small touch of her nipples against my upper back, then the press of her breasts, finally the full, delicious weight of her. I feel I am being baptized in the electric warmth of her skin. She lays her face on mine, reaches along the length of my arms to grip my forearms just below the wrist. She sighs: “I love you.”

“And I love you,” I tell her. “And all my ancestors love you, all the way back to Adam.”

Anaïs whispers, “You say such strange things.”

We lay together for long minutes, breathing in unison, hardly daring to move. When her stomach grumbles I laugh and the moment vanishes into memory. She sits up and buttons her shirt. I reach for mine and she says, “No.”

So we sit on the blanket and drink wine from the bottle and eat a late picnic dinner: cold chicken and potato salad. Over the sound of the crickets, the night is filled with hushed noises, little notes in a symphony we take for granted. Far below us, occasional cars pass on the highway, their headlamps piercing bright pinprick holes in the pale blanket of moonlight. Touched by the glow of the moon, the distant hills look like lumbering elephants or stationary waves on a pine-infested ocean or a series of parabolic mathematical equations.

“Or my knees,” says Anaïs. “Look.” She draws her feet near thighs, lifts her skirt and allows the moon to touch her pale skin. There, in miniature, is a model of the landscape molded in her skin. I kiss each knee.

“Take off your clothes,” I tell her. Without hesitating, she begins shedding her blouse, then tugs at the clasp of the wraparound skirt and drops it away from her hips. I lift her from the ground and kick aside the blanket and clothing before lowering her onto the carpet of grass. All the while her eyes await the answer to a question she has not asked.

“Dessert,” I tell her. Anaïs smiles.

From the nearby cooler I take a piece from the heart of a watermelon, wring juice from the pulp over her belly and breasts, then lean down and drink the sweetness from her skin. She trembles.

“It’s cold,” she says. “You’re incorrigible.”

“Yes, yes,” I agree. “Incorrigible. Mad for you. Mad I tell you.”

Anaïs laughs. In minutes we are feeding one another watermelon and are covered in sticky juice, grass and grit. Out of the blue, she is sitting in my lap, facing me, and I am inside her and we are concentrating on each other’s eyes and she is breathing in rapid syncopation and sweat drips from her hair and we are speaking the language of sighs and whispers and she tugs at my face and pulls it to hers and we kiss, all watermelon sweet and sticky, and she turns away and says something unintelligible to the moon and the moon’s answer saddens her and she begins to cry and hides her face in my shoulder and sobs and I touch her hair and hold her close and whisper something in her ear and she comes and I do and she says, “All of them.”

“Yes,” I say. We sit very still for a long, hushed, solemn moment.

By now the local ants are curious about the sweetness in the grass, and we move to another place with our clothing, our picnic bounty and our blanket. Anaïs complains that she is filthy and cannot get dressed; but I have anticipated her need. I tell her to stand still, then I take a large Thermos bottle from the basket and begin to pour its contents — slightly hotter than tepid water — over her body, washing away the grass stems and grit and sticky juice.

“God!” says Anaïs. “This is so delicious it must be sinful.”

I take a second Thermos from the basket and tell her, “Do me.” She stands on tiptoe and pours the water over my shoulders and chest. She is right: The sheet of warm liquid streaming down my body is a sensual taboo.

We dry ourselves with beach towels, then wrap up together in the blanket, huddle close and eat a pair of pomegranates. Anaïs says, “The juice looks like blood.” I squeeze some from the fruit into the palm of my hand. She is right; in the moonlight it looks like a pool of blood.

“My blood for you,” I tell her.

The light of the moon glistens from her tongue as she laps up the juice like a cat, then carefully licks the palm of my hand. Her mouth is stained with the crimson color and tastes of sweet pomegranate when we kiss. “Now we are one blood,” she tells me. “And you should take me again to celebrate.” So I find her in the fragile moonlight and we make love gently, as if for the first time, among the pale stones of the graveyard.

Afterward, the night envelopes us in a warm soporific. I am certain we sleep, but the memory of it bleeds into the morning mist and vanishes in the warmth of the sun. When the caretaker arrives to mow the grass, little trace of Anaïs or me is left behind: Only a watermelon-sticky spot in the grass swarmed over by a ravenous colony of ants.

Oh. And all of my ancestors — every last one of them — are smiling and feel alive.

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