Five(23)

“Do you see the beauty of it, child?” he said to her. “Do you see the perfection?” And he held it gingerly to the light with delicate dissecting forceps.

It was then that she said, “I’m sorry, Papa,” and excused herself to be sick. She was both fascinated and horrified, nauseated and stupefied. Part of her wanted to scream and cry, and part of her wanted to hold the tiny heart in her own hand to hear the echo of its dead beating.

A few weeks after the kitten, Gerald brought home a dead mouse he’d found when delivering the post to the newsagent. Its distended abdomen, he and Matilda discovered, was due to a large, fatty tumor sitting on its liver. After that, there was the rat, already slightly decomposing and still in the trap that had caused its demise, which Gerald had found round the back of the posh cheesemonger. A squirrel, a crow, a pigeon, a seagull followed.

“It’s so sad, Papa, so many dead animals along your route,” innocent Matilda said, believing wholeheartedly that all the animals had simply been found by her very observant father.

“Yes, very sad,” Gerald said.

With each body they followed the same procedure: don aprons and rubber gloves, sterilize the instruments, cover the table in newspaper, get the old cutting board, remove the pins from Jo’s sewing kit. Afterward they would clean and scrub all of the surfaces and floor diligently, with the smell of disinfectant soon becoming the most prominent in the house.

Their evenings changed markedly. Instead of listening to the radio and reading, Gerald taught Matilda how to run the scalpel down the midline of the abdomen without nicking the organs underneath. He had Matilda practice sutures on squirrels and pigeons, teaching her first the continuous over and over sutures, then progressing to the subcuticular and horizontal mattress sutures.

Gerald showed her how to carefully cut away and then harvest organs of the various creatures that came to their kitchen table. They put the healthiest specimens in jars of formaldehyde, labeled them, and stored them in a cupboard in the kitchen that had become their makeshift operating theater. They did this with the most deformed organs as well—enlarged bird spleens, ruptured squirrel livers, diseased pigeon lungs.

Once the necropsies were finished, the skins and furs and carcasses and feathers and viscera and bones that they were not preserving for Matilda’s education were buried by Gerald at night, in the dark, under the tree in the back garden.

And so this was the nature of their love. Matilda understood that worse than the war, worse than his bad vision and the tremor, worse for her father than losing Jo, worse for him was losing this, his calling, his talent, and his purpose—surgery. Manipulation and control of bodies. Science. He did not speak of healing, curing, saving. He had lost too many men on his operating table to believe in them anymore.

But when he found a way to get surgery back, the meticulous practice of cutting the skin, peeling back the flesh, delving into the organs under the dome of the rib cage, holding these components of life in his hands—not the mundane life of some mediocre, meaningless, individual but Life itself, Creation—the first thing he did was give it to his daughter.

Matilda understood this from the very start, so she didn’t complain. She knew her father was a fragile man, and he would never recover if she rejected this macabre embrace. She accepted his strange affection with every bone they sawed through and every organ they sliced. Gerald had no other way to love her, and she had no one else in the world to love.

She stopped needing to retch. After a year or so of practice, Matilda thrilled, in secret, when she opened biology books in the local library and could name each organ, each nerve, each muscle of the two-dimensional diagrams of frog anatomy, drawn so neatly and intricately on the pages. The drawings were pretty, perfect, unsullied by tumors or traumas, bruises or ruptures. But Matilda knew what really lay beneath the skin, attached to the bones. She had seen the undigested contents of a stomach, fluid in the lungs, how the hammer of a rat trap causes fracture of the vertebrae. The part of her that was still her old self, the girl she was before Gerald began his unorthodox training, was ashamed, suspected that something was wrong, and that part of her thought about asking. Or maybe even telling. But she was too afraid of asking or telling, of what would happen if anyone knew.

The her that she became the more she learned from her father was also the most shameful part of her, because that part truly loved what they were doing. She knew there must be something wicked about how Gerald acquired the bodies, and odd about their kitchen cupboards full of organs and skeletons. But she also found them utterly compelling, and wonderful and miraculous because Gerald showed her the genius of respiration and circulation; digestion, reproduction, and excretion; the brilliance of the nervous system, the endocrine system; of blood vessels and skin and egg and bone and feather; and she knew these could only be what some people called God. And she had seen him, at work through her father’s shaking hand, under the light of the single bare bulb that hung above their kitchen table.



* * *





“Papa?” Matilda is afraid. She knows from the shape of the sack that her father has not brought home a stray kitten or rat or crow this evening. When he pulls the body from the sack, she knows that this time he’s done something he shouldn’t have.

“What’s the matter?” Gerald says when he sees her stricken face. “It wasn’t easy, you know,” he adds, irate and tired.