A Language of Toads

Our new dogs would dig up bones and then bury them again in the field, the bones, I presumed, of the old dogs we’d seen die. Pooch and Snow, husband and wife, had failed to make it through one bitterly cold winter, and my father had buried them in the same square of ditch he’d buried snakes he assassinated for me in the garden. (The sight of a snake so legless in the shade of the low leaves of the pumpkin patch would send me running, and I wouldn’t return to the garden until I saw the snake hanging limp, all its mocking wiggle gone, from the end of my father’s hoe.) I’d been young enough when Pooch and Snow had been old that I’d seen them as elegant somehow, dignified royalty despite their wolfish taste for chasing the rabbits that they’d sometimes catch and tear away at until they were nothing but pretty tufts of fur.

The bones on our farm were likely not the bones of dead dogs, but ones only tossed into the yard from the kitchen, the remnants of a Sunday night roast or Saturday night steak. But once anything entered the out of doors, it took on, to me, a sinister touch. Sickly, pale, and not at all sporty, with a paranoid imagination that sometimes left me crippled by a baseless fear, I was not the farm boy my parents had expected. I was distracted and uneasy, and I could lose myself, beyond all good sense, in storybooks.

In the basement of the library in town, a librarian named Mrs. Mulligan stood guard over the children’s collection, her thick-heeled shoes noisy on the wood floor as she clomped around, shushing at the slightest squeak, her finger lifted, coarse hair curling up from her knuckles. Once, my friend Sarah and I crept over to the fifth-grader’s section to pore over the illustrations in a book on human reproduction. Our giggling grew so raucous it attracted Mrs. Mulligan, who suddenly appeared at the end of the row of stacks, her gaze falling onto the page open to the source of the hilarity—a drawing of a naked man and woman assuming the missionary position. Sarah and I clammed up, and I was certain we were about to be plucked from the library, our cards revoked, our parents alerted. Perhaps we’d even lose the very sexual organs we’d just learned all about. But Mrs. Mulligan, taken aback for the first and only time I’d ever witnessed, simply told us to be quiet, and she stepped away, rendering our dirty book, in one fell swoop, blandly innocent.

A few weeks later Mrs. Mulligan, perhaps because of her awareness of my sexual exploration, refused to check out to me the illustrated fairy tales I’d selected. I was too old for them, she explained, and she thrust upon me a book about the Bobbsey Twins at the ocean. I spent that week in despair, the book open and unread before me, as I looked over its cover and out the window at a farm as landlocked as any there was.

In the country, where seeds are nestled and nursed in spring, musk thistle and fanged worms poisoned in summer, the overgrown world of fairy tales, with its knowing beasts and spindly trees, seems strikingly down to earth. And winters on the farm are just as dead and white as those that plagued the impoverished in the stories of the Grimms. Though I never believed for a moment in the magic of the stories, in the way that I believed in the magic of the Bible, the tales seemed rich with truth, their morality complex and, at times, indecipherable. I never knew what to make of the version of “Hansel and Gretel” that I knew best. I’d thought it arrogant of the children to start gnawing on the doorknobs and shutters of a stranger’s house, not to mention potentially dyspeptic, and they should have expected a trap. When I wasn’t feeling superior to the...