"The tail was cut off," the taxidermist said. "I reattached it."
Henry stared. The taxidermist put the lamp back on the counter and walked over to a table at the far end of the workshop. Henry reached and touched Virgil's fur, meaning to smooth it down, but instead he pushed it back to look again. He didn't know why he did this, but he looked and then he touched. A shudder went through him. He pulled his fingers back and patted the fur down. He felt gutted. How utterly barbarous to do that, to cut Virgil's splendid tail off. Who would do such a thing?
Henry wondered why the taxidermist had stopped telling him about his play. He was standing in front of a table, handling something. Had Henry been too hard on him? Insensitive to his struggles?
"Why don't you let me read your play, or what you have of it?"
The taxidermist didn't answer.
Was it the feeling that he would be revealing the treasure he'd been working on his whole life, and that once it was out, he'd be left empty, without secrets, bereft? Was he afraid of the exposure of his inner self? Of Henry's and other people's reactions? "Years of work and this is all you have to show for it?" Was he sensing the failure of his enterprise, for a reason he could not determine and with no solution he could imagine? Henry realized he couldn't answer any of these questions because he had no sense of the taxidermist's inner self. The man, despite the play and the conversations they'd had, remained a mystery to him. Worse: a void.
"I should…" Henry began to say, but he trailed off. At every visit, the taxidermist swallowed up so much of his time. He got up and moved to where the man was standing.
He was working on a red fox. It was lying on its back and he'd already made a cut along its stomach, from the lower ribs to the base of the tail. He began to lift the skin off the body, using his fingers and the knife. Henry watched him work with morbid fascination. He'd never seen a freshly dead animal so close up. The taxidermist pulled the skin away until he reached the base of the tail, which he cut from the inside with the knife. Then he worked on the legs until he reached the knee joints, which he cut through. There was little blood. Pale pink-muscle, Henry guessed-and streaks of white-fat-predominated, with only here and there spots and patches of deep purple. Henry thought the taxidermist would now continue upwards with the ventral cut, to the base of the neck, slicing the chest area open and doing there to the front legs what he had done lower down to the back ones. Instead the taxidermist started turning the animal's skin inside out, easing the body through the ventral cut, separating skin from body with the knife as he went along. The skin was coming off the animal like a pullover. When he reached the front legs, he severed the legs at the shoulders and continued peeling the animal's skin off the neck. At the head, he cut where the ears were attached to the skull. Two dark holes were left behind. The eyes were a weirder sight. Whereas the fox's ears, their outer structure, went with the skin, the eyes remained behind, staring out even more now for having their eyelids removed. The taxidermist artfully cut the only place in the eyes where skin and body were linked: the tear ducts. Then the mouth was released, the blade cutting through the skin next to the gums. Lastly, the nose, the final point of attachment, was dealt with, the black skin skinned off and the cartilage cut through. He returned the skin to its natural shape, inside in, and there they lay, side by side, the skin and the flayed carcass, like a baby that has been taken out of its red pyjamas, only a baby fiercely staring with the blackest eyes and displaying a full set of teeth.
"I've done this for you," the taxidermist said. "It's a head mount. All I need is the head."
He picked up a scalpel and made a small cut at the base of the fox skin's throat. Then, with a pair of small, sharp scissors, making sure not to cut through fur, but only through the skin at its base, he cut the fox's skull-less head off. He turned the head inside out again, including the ears. Picking with his fingers and scraping with the side of the knife, he cleaned flesh and fat off the skin.
"Need to treat it," he muttered. He walked over to a shelf of jars.
Henry stared at the head. It was a fox's head, but emptied and turned inside out. A snout, a mouth, eyes, large ears, a neck-but all wrong, all inside out. Henry could see white fur inside the mouth, where a tongue should have been, and at the neck cut he could see red fur bursting out. The rest was the peeled head, pink and raw, of a formerly sentient being. The ears, despite being the largest features, were inexpressive. But the eyes, the eyelids rather, were closed, while the mouth was open, as if in a scream. He looked at the neck cut again, at the red fur emerging from within. A soul on fire, he thought. The head suddenly became that of a being caught in its moment of greatest agony, shuddering uncontrollably, beyond reason and beyond help. A feeling of horror overcame Henry.
The taxidermist came back with a small pot of white paste, quite granular. "Borax," he said, without further explanation.
With one hand inside the fox's head and the other wearing a rubber glove, he began to apply the paste to the animal's head, rubbing it in vigorously.
"I have to go," Henry said. "I'll come back again soon."
The taxidermist said nothing. It was as if Henry weren't even there. Henry turned, left the workshop, picked up the end of Erasmus's leash, and walked out into the late afternoon.
The next weeks were some of the most intense and chaotic Henry had ever known in his life.
The Greenhouse Players were in the run-up to their next play, one in which Henry was reaching his modest acme as an actor. He was playing the lead role in Lessing's Nathan the Wise.
The Greenhouse Players had existed for more than twenty years as local purveyors of broad farces when a new director came on board and transformed the company. In a stroke, the coarse, the facile and the conventional were banned. "Why leave all the good stuff to the professionals?" he asked. "Great theatre is for everyone." That greatness could be seen as much in the flawed attempt as in the polished success, he argued. It was a potential recipe for disaster, and indeed there were surely, in the early days, shows that were more fun for the players than for the spectators. But what was the risk? Everyone participating did it for nothing, for the simple joy of being theatrically creative.
The director was an old Serbian immigrant-he called himself a Yugoslav-and he was animated by an unwavering faith in the dignity and equality of all, a positive relic of communism. He had a vision and he pursued it. He possessed the unerring ability to find the actor in each person he directed, with the point being not to erase the person behind the role but to merge person and role, so that they were balanced. "Don't worry about being good," he used to tell the troupe. "Aspire to be authentic." Casting was entirely age-blind, colour-blind, accent-blind, body-shape-blind and, when it was not directly relevant, gender-blind. This was theatre of the people, by the people, for the people. It had to be seen to be appreciated.
Under his firm yet fair guidance, the Greenhouse Players rose in the world's-that is, the city's-estimation. The widely read weekly city entertainment magazine had once done a feature on the Players-"Exalted Amateurism," the piece was titled-and they regularly attracted the notice of community media. All agreed that it was a serious endeavour and a fascinating, ongoing sociological experiment. As a result of the publicity, the spectator base had expanded to include a good number of university students-as much of sociology and cultural studies as of literature-as well as theatre lovers and the usual suspects of family and friends.