The Boy Who Made Water of Ribbons

They are still driving. She said they would drive until he said stop and he hasn’t said stop yet. She reaches to reflexively run her fingers through his hair, forgetting that it is now gone, and she massages his rough scalp, knobbed red with razor burn, the flesh pitifully white compared with the rest of him. She asks if he’s hungry and he says maybe a little later. That is the hardest of all to countenance. In her own school days skinny as a willow, she learned it was light that fed the leaves and the grass and in turn everything that fed on leaves and grass and had since she held as firm a belief as any that turning away from the world of food was turning away from the world of light. But even in the remotest provinces of night the dawn will still come and a little later he would be hungry.

They approach a tollbooth. There is a bank of sand and strawlike grass to the left and Lynda’s window admits salty air. A pit bull’s head hangs out of the truck ahead of them, tongue lolling from its death grin like an unspooling red ribbon. Nicolae had said to her while she was pregnant that he had had a vision of holding the baby and the baby peeing on him and the pee coming out as one red silk ribbon after the other, and that was how he knew Peter would have a heightened receptivity in his Swadisthana.

“I knew that life for this little pisser would be long and full of great adventures,” he said. “And it made me hurt inside of my bones with sadness. Because in a life that is long and well lived there are sorrows and darkest doldrums that cannot be understood by those who live day to day like it could be any other. And I knew that the lump inside that great big belly would grow one day into a fine man with fine shoulders and a big heart and he would need both in his adventures, which would take him many times through the Rivers of Woe and Lamentation. But even as these bones were sad for him there was O Beng’s grin on my face because still this boy who had made water of a red ribbon was a Rumancek and this is America, and who knows, who knows!”

Somewhere close by there is a siren. The dog ahead of them lifts its nose into the air and closes its eyes. Peter closes his eyes too. He does not open his mouth, but the message is clear.

Yes, says Peter.

The message is clear.

Yes, I say, and so do you. Yes. “A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,” says the dog. “A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…”

Acknowledgments

Sean McDonald and Emily Bell, for alchemy. Lydia Wills, for being a champion.

Lee Shipman and Philipp Meyer, good medicine. Michael Connolly, walking down that hill.

The memory of Patrick McGreevy, for the Dorothy Parker line (among others).

And for their generosity: Jim Magnuson, Michael Adams, and the gang at the Michener Center for Writers; the Reverend George Hickok and Avalanche; Kate Bolick; Adrian N. Roe and Gilbert Vasile; Smaranda Luna; Carolyn Hughes, Dr. Robert Hudak, Dr. Roy Chengappa, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; the Austin State Hospital; Maja D’Aoust; Ron Baraff and the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area; the Wolf Sanctuary of PA; the Waverly Presbyterian Church; and Lei-Lei.

Also, God.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2012 by Brian McGreevy

All rights reserved

First edition, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGreevy, Brian, 1983–

Hemlock Grove : a novel / Brian McGreevy. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-374-53291-8 (pbk.) 1. Paranormal fiction. I. Title.

PS3613.C497245 H46 2012 813'.6—dc23

2011046352

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 978-1-4299-4262-1

Frontispiece: Bessemer blow, Scientific American, May 1924, courtesy of Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area

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