Page 177 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

The rest of the story is a childhood memoir. From earliest memory, Lou had been

surrounded by fur. “Pelts of deer, bear, raccoon and wolf had lined my bed... They were

a beautiful and warm comfort to me, my lap and my solace... furs and how they came to

be were always an unquestioned fact of my young life.” As the only living child of her

parents, Lou, as she was called as a girl, apprenticed to her father at an early age; she

worked with him in the back room of his shop and assumed that she would carry on her

father’s tradition. But the skinned animals also gave her pause. As she observed, “the

molded meat and muscle, the bluish tissue that wrapped them, the open mouth, the

lolling tongue,” she understood that, “this was dead... and the recognition of my own

animal self sent a shiver of wonder and unease through me.”

While Lou and her father worked in the back of the shop, the local men gathered in the

front around the woodstove, “the air blue with their smoke, their language.” Lou listened

and watched and became “as mute as the death that came through our door...

Sensation and smell, the warmth of the stove, the men’s voices, the pelts, the sitting and

stitching, this was my life as a child.” Bonded in their work and their silence, Lou’s father

treated her as the son that she should have been. But that’s just one half of it.

Next door to John Sewell’s Taxidermy was her mother’s store–Salome’s Lingerie and

Corset Shop. The wives of the men who sat around her father’s woodstove voiced their

marital laments amidst the delicate hand-sewn undergarments of silk and lace. Skilled

with a needle, Lou worked both fur pelts and fine cloth, moving between her parents’

domains, absorbing the charged tension that arced between the men and women, a

sizzle of sexual heat, longing and fury.

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