‘Are you hurt?’
Anouk shook her head. Laughed or made a sound that was almost a laugh.
‘Are you hurt?’ Nora asked again.
‘No.’
Red unbuckled his seat belt and got out, left the door gaping.
‘We hit a tree. You’re sure you’re not hurt?’ Nora leaned further over, and felt up and down the length of Anouk.
Anouk, cumbersome in the sleeping bag, shuffled herself back on to the seat. ‘We hit a tree?’
Nora turned back to the front and watched Red through the window. No tree. Red leaned over, inspecting the grille, something on the ground. He came back to the passenger side and got his coat.
‘What did we hit?’
‘A buck.’
‘We didn’t.’
He punched his arms through the sleeves of his coat, dug into the pockets for his gloves and hat. Without looking at her, ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine. Are you okay?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Wrap yourself up,’ Nora said to Anouk. She shimmied into her own coat and turned the engine on again for the heat. As soon as she stepped out of the truck there was the smell of animal, the bitter, rank rustiness of blood and the musk of fear. First thing she saw, a spray of blood in the snow, and then there it was, forelegs bent and contorted under its body, hind legs spread out behind. Still alive, hot breath rising from its nostrils and gasping mouth. A low, tuneless moan. One antler, seasoned and woody, was caught in the grille, forcing the buck’s head to hang awkwardly. It was trying to break loose, digging trenches in the snow with its hind hooves. Blood dripped thickly from its mouth and nose and its eyes rolled towards the bush, the road, towards Nora, not seeing her, and up to the falling snow.
‘We’re lucky we’re not dead,’ said Red. ‘If that had been a moose.’
‘What the fuck do we do?’
Red knelt in the snow behind the deer’s head. He reached for the antler that was stuck in the grille, wrapped his gloved fingers around the thickness of it and tried to pull it away from the metal. The deer screamed and kicked, dark eyes rolling. The front hooves jerked, palsied, and the air filled with a strong snort of urine. Nothing ever sounded so loud as this animal’s laboured breath, its dissonant moan. There was a break in the metal where the antler met the grille, and Red tried to pry back the jagged piece of steel but it wouldn’t bend.
‘Can he feel it?’ she asked.
‘Course he can feel it.’
‘No. I mean, does he have feeling in the antlers? Can’t we saw them off or something?’
Red sat back on his haunches and rubbed his beard. He touched the deer’s shoulder, as if to calm it, and the animal tried to rear back, its movements weak and distorted. ‘I don’t have any tools,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’ He put his hand on the back of the buck’s head and gripped the antler again and tried to manoeuvre it one way, then another, but the antler had become even more wedged in the grille.
Anouk had crawled to the front seat and was raised up on her knees, trying to peer over the hood.
‘We can’t stay here, Red.’
Red, still kneeling in the snow, was looking down the road, listening for something. The sound the buck made seemed to come not from the buck but from somewhere older and collective and indescribable.
‘Red?’
‘Just please shut up for a second.’
‘Are you kidding me?’
A layer of snow had accumulated on his hat and shoulders, and on the buck. It looked as if they’d been there together in the road for hours, Red at the animal’s head, and the buck, its blood freezing blooms in the snow, the buck steaming and twisted out of shape.
‘Red.’
‘I wouldn’t, Nora. You need to not talk right now.’
So much life in the dying buck, still. Nora thought if she listened hard enough, she would be able to hear its doomed heart beating against its ribcage. If only it would die, they could rip it loose and carry on.
‘Get me the bag, please,’ he said. ‘The big backpack.’
‘Why?’
‘Nora.’
She went around to the back of the truck and opened the canopy flap. The backpack was wedged underneath everything else, and she could not think of one good reason he might want this bag, and she looked behind her, up the road; it was unbearable to be so hated.
She brought the bag back around to him and he positioned it under the buck’s neck, at the base of its head for support. Blood dripped black on to the canvas of the bag. Nora went to the side of the truck and motioned to Anouk to roll the window down.
‘You okay?’ Nora asked.
‘We hit a deer? Is it dead?’ Anouk’s voice bubbled, congested.
‘Yes, but it’s not dead.’
‘Can I get out?’
‘No way.’
‘Will it die?’
‘His legs are broken. He seems to be in a lot of pain. It would be better if he died.’
Anouk considered this.
‘Are you hungry? Are you warm enough?’
‘I’m scratchy.’
‘We’ll get out of here as soon as we can.’ Nora put her hand on Anouk’s forehead, down her neck, clammy.
Anouk pulled away. ‘Your hands are cold.’
‘It’s cold out here.’
‘Dad’s mad at you.’
‘Well. I crashed his truck into a deer.’
Nothing about the tableau at the grille had changed when Nora came back, except that now the buck seemed to have accepted Red’s hand on its shoulder.
‘He must have turned his head just as we hit him,’ Red said. He stroked its fur. ‘And we weren’t even going that fast.’
‘I’m sorry, Red.’
His eyes flashed and then he looked away again. ‘Yep.’
It was cold and deeply quiet. Snow quiet. No wind and the snow fell straight as rope. Still, heat rose from the animal. Its winter-thin ribcage expanded and relaxed with each laboured breath and its haunch shivered and twitched.
‘Red. You’re not doing anything. We have to do something. Anouk’s getting worse.’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘She’s getting worse.’
‘She’s fine.’
Nora looked up the road, all but obliterated by snow that fell as if it would never stop as long as the world turned. She had half a mind to just get in the truck and start driving until the buck died, until the road wrenched him from the grille. She went again to the back of the truck and opened the tailgate and unloaded all their bags. She was looking for a shovel, something she could use to hit the thing over the head. Nothing in the flatbed. She lifted back the rug that lay on the bottom, and underneath was just sawdust and dirt and rust. Some tangled fishing line and a hook bent out of shape.
‘Somebody’s bound to come along soon,’ she called out. Something to say at least. She repacked their things and closed the tailgate. Back to the deer and the man, and she repeated these words again. Somebody’s bound to come along soon. Get the fuck up, she thought.
‘Aren’t your legs getting cold?’ she asked, cajoling. She whisked her hands together, her knuckles raw pink. The deer’s eyes were glazed and its face was set. Its movements now seemed involuntary.
Red looked down at his legs and brushed the snow from his jeans, but still did not get up.
‘What’s wrong with you, Red?’
He looked past her, up the road. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
She could use a rock to the head. It would be awful, but. ‘Screw it,’ she said, and tramped through the snow-filled ditch at the side of the road and into the trees, mainly birch and alder here, naked and spindly and asleep. A thousand branches nicked at her cheeks, caught her hair. She was looking for a rock small enough to carry; big enough for killing. No feeling i
n her fingers or toes. The afternoon light was so flat and the ground so uniformly white that it almost wasn’t there. Only indications of the land underneath were the baby green yew branches and the odd yellow grass stalks poking through the snow, like breathing straws in water. There were no rocks here but she kept trudging forward and, when she turned to look back, the truck on the road looked like a photograph, scratched and worn. That dark hump on the road was Red. That deep hum was the sound of the engine keeping her daughter warm. She tripped on a root and landed with her arms buried, got back up angrily. Black dirt under her nails and a scraped knuckle.
Red was calling her name and so she pushed back towards the road and then there he was, standing over the deer. Nora organized her face into a confident smile for Anouk, watching through the windshield.
The deer’s eyes were death-open.
‘Did you kill it?’ she asked.
‘No.’
He knelt again and laid his palms flat on the dead animal’s haunch, and Nora knelt beside him. He leaned closer, put his cheek on its shoulder.
‘What are you doing?’ Nora whispered. The smell of the animal was sharp and it was also beautiful. The rusty sound of Anouk coughing came from the truck. ‘Red. We have to go.’
‘I know that.’
The antler that was entangled in the grille had pulled slightly away from the buck’s head, leaving a gap underneath that was ruddy and fleshy, like the blood-filled socket after a lost tooth. Nora straddled the deer’s muscular shoulders, its thick neck, and there so close was the soft, white fur lining its ears. There were its long black lashes and the bony racks behind the ears from which the antlers, like polished, grainy wood, sprouted.
With one hand she gripped the trapped antler by its thorny base, and with the other hand she pushed the top of the deer’s skull and in this way tried to separate the two. The flesh and skin at the base of the antler pulled like gum, but still held. Her mouth filled with spit. She gagged, her throat tight. She looked to Red for help, but he had moved away and was looking down the road at nothing.
This was too gentle. She shifted her weight and got a better purchase with her heels in the snow, and with this new leverage tightened her thighs around the animal’s shoulders and pulled harder, eyes closed, pulled the head back until the antler began to crack away – a grinding sound and wet. She moved her hands closer together and gave a bit of a twist to the antler, and finally felt antler and head separate. She released the buck’s head and it dropped heavily to the snow. The antler was still in the grille but could now be twisted easily from the bars.
‘We should keep this,’ she said, out of breath, a little nauseous, holding the antler up to Red. A shred of skin and brown-grey coat, and also a shard of bone, hung off its base.
Red turned. Looked at her face and then the thing she held in her hand and back at her as if she were a stranger.
Again, ‘We should keep this.’
Red ran both gloved hands up and down his beard, then moved to the buck and gripped its back legs under each of his arms and began to haul it to the ditch, carving a guilty trail in the snow. Blood dripped thickly from the hole where the antler once was.
‘I can’t believe I did that,’ Nora said, daring to be proud of herself, and helped Red to kick snow over the carcass. A gesture of burial at least.
‘Well. You killed it, so.’
She wiped her hands in the snow to get rid of the smell, but the smell stayed and maybe she didn’t mind it so much. She loaded the antler into the back of the truck, careful not to soil their things with its bloody stump.
21
Pieter
Karmøy Island, 1942
I already told you that my grandfather – my father’s father – was the storyteller in our family. He was also the archivist, the keeper of records. He survived my grandmother by a decade and when he died, partway through the war, your mother and I packed up their little house on Karmøy, the house by the sea where I spent most of my summers as a boy.
The war had been a confusing time, Bear. Among other things. I was already thirty years old, considered by some too old to fight, considered by others to have had no excuse for doing nothing. There were men my age who chose a side and enlisted. Others joined the resistance. But this wasn’t my plan. I hadn’t yet managed to save the money I would need to start my own business, and I was still working for the man under whom I’d apprenticed. I was good at what I did – very good – and I could think of nothing else than to build something of my own. Naturally the war slowed everything down, so I stayed right where I was. I began to fear it would be this way for ever.
But then my grandfather died. And he’d left everything to me. Finally, there would be enough money that I could lease my first factory space as well as a bandsaw, a lathe and a sanding machine, and purchase most of the tools I would need, drawknives and whittling knives and mallets. The man I had been working for all those years helped by giving me a bargain on a lot of what I would need.
This makes me sound callous, as if I were more concerned with what I could get from the death of my grandfather than with what I had lost. It may sound that way but it wasn’t. This was an opportunity, a way to honour and to remember.
Your mother and I had been married only a few months when he died, and I was lucky to have her with me on this trip to Karmøy to settle his affairs. The house had been sold and all that was left to do was to pack up what my father wanted (he wasn’t sentimental and had asked for only a few things to be salvaged), to decide what to give away and what to throw out. A whole life, a marriage, in boxes and kitchen drawers and closets. In a cedar chest and a glass-fronted armoire. In a crawlspace under the stairs, I found my father’s old binoculars. I prised open the rusty snap of the hard leather case and flipped up the top, and fastened to the underside of the lid, a yellowed and brittle slip of paper. On it my grandfather had written that these binoculars had been given to my father for his twentieth birthday by an uncle. Everything had been itemized, memorialized, in this way, as if in preparation for audit: a tennis racket, a jewellery box, a clock. All in my grandfather’s tidy script. Your mother found a box of photos and we lost two hours drinking cheap wine out of the bottle, sifting through photographs labelled on their backs with dates and names that were known to me because of my grandfather’s stories. There was the cousin who’d gone to America and married a Mexican on a horse ranch, and the fisherman who had been lost at sea and was believed by everyone in the village to be dead. But then who, two weeks later, washed up with his boat in some craggy Scottish cove. He’d been blind drunk on spirits the whole time.
Bed linens and clothing were to go to an orphanage. Furniture, dishes and cookware were to be donated to the church for their annual charity sale. For my father: a cracked-glaze teapot and tube radio. Some inexpensive jewellery, my grandfather’s pocketknife, photographs and books. Also, my grandmother’s paintings and the mask that hung on the wall. The milky one I used to want to lick when I was a little boy. According to my grandfather’s labelling system, the radio had been a gift to my grandmother for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. The mask had been a curio, a keepsake purchased at a flea market in Oslo. Apparently, my grandfather wrote, it had originally come from Paris.
The work was tedious and your mother and I were newlyweds. On the last night, amidst boxes and a house now cold and echoey in its new state of transition, we lit a fire and candles, and I threw a silk handkerchief over a standing lamp. When there is nothing but picture hooks and stains on the walls, when the carpets are rolled up and cushions packed away, a house becomes sharp and mean. I put the handkerchief over the lamp to soften the shadows and to make the room feel a little more inviting. And we were a bit drunk. We weren’t thinking clearly. We ate our dinner on the floor in front of the fire and drank more wine and talked about our future, about my toy business and your mother’s wish to go to university, and we talked about t
he children we were both eager to have. We schemed and we made love and then we fell asleep, tangled together like two puppies. It couldn’t have been much later when I woke up to a burning, sweet smell. A room translucent with smoke. At first I thought a spark had come off the fire and ignited a box or some other old, flammable thing, but when I turned to wake your mother up I saw the lamp, alight, tip to the floor.
I stood unmoving, choking on smoke. My eyes, Bear. I have never forgotten the sting. Couldn’t see for the tears. While I stood there like an ass, your mother attacked the lamp with a blanket, punching out the flames. If she hadn’t acted so quickly, we would have lost everything. She burned the palms of both hands that night, and a dash of her wrist on the right side. Over time the scars faded so that you wouldn’t know they’d ever been there unless you knew the right place to look, just on the nub of her wrist. A shiny redness, which only she and I knew was there, because she was my wife, and this was part of our story, and I knew where to look.
22
Nora
Toronto, 1987
Nora plucked at the coarse, white deer hairs stuck to her jeans, licked her thumb and rubbed a shadow of blood from the webbing between her other thumb and forefinger. In the hospital now, dim yellow lights and the smell of boiled chicken and Anouk asleep on a high, mechanized bed. Nora and Red had closed the curtain around them and sat in stiff metal chairs on the same side of the bed. Three other children asleep in this room but not children with CF, because children with this condition could not be mixed for the risk of the bacteria they might spread to one another. Nora watched Red, asleep also with his chin on his chest and his cap pulled over his eyes, and she looked at his hair, the way it curled up under his hat, then flowed over his ears like it always had and probably always would.
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