The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  The horticulturalist John Evelyn wrote in his 1664 book, Sylva, the first great book on forestry, “The earth, especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and it is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us.”

  Evelyn and I were both interested in the relationship between this “magnetism” and the “salt, power, or virtue” it attracts. How the call goes out for all the elements that sustain life and how the call is answered. This place was calling. Screaming. This imperfect, manhandled place had its own appeal and its own needs. It needed us. I heard it loud and clear. The land presented itself, and I could feel glimpses of the heavy forest it probably once was, dense with towering hemlock and white pine, and what it could be again with some attention. Maybe part of the salt it attracted was us. I was suddenly very aware of my feet.

  Joe seemed shy when confronted by the place. He was fuzzy from the long ride and he was quiet and distracted. He looked out over the bog and seemed to listen intently. He cocked his head toward the ground and looked up into the tops of the trees and didn’t say much. He swatted at mosquitoes like the rest of us. He walked in silence.

  When we got back to the cabin, Joe went up a sugar maple and stood there on a low branch for a while, just three or four feet off the ground, like the earth was too hot to stand on. Joe had always had a certain soft-footedness when he was sober, a way of hanging back. Anne took a photo of him there that is one of my favorites. In it, he looks like a child caught in a game of hide-and-seek.

  “You should put the open fields here to grass,” I said to Dad.

  “Oh, the deer have lots of stuff to eat. Plus, we don’t want to go out there and booger everything up.”

  “How would that booger it up?” asked Joe from his tree.

  “All the farming and stuff. We just want to keep it quiet here. That’s what deer like. There’s farms all around; this is where they can come to hide.”

  We had made Dad happy and that counted for something. But after Joe came down, he and I both remarked that it was odd we had come here when Joe only had a day or two to be out in the world. Some of Joe’s troubles—and, for that matter, mine and Mom’s and Brett’s—were the result of Dad defining our world and determining how we could be in it, and yet, here we were, letting it go right on happening.

  He and I stood in the shade of the red pines, and I knelt down and put my hands in the coarse sand. The iron-tinted sand dug out of the basement was tawny gold, probably Roselawn or Rubicon sand, and I imagined it extending down hundreds of feet.

  “Dad really likes it here,” I said.

  “I really like here,” said Joe.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too. What do you like about it?” I asked.

  “It’s so imperfect—and yet, Dad likes it. He’s proud of it, he’s claimed it as his place and he barely even knows it. He’s protective of it. See, that’s what I want.”

  We all ducked into the cabin for a drink of water, and I saw Dad’s shoulders up around his ears with tension and I thought, Oh no, he’s going to have a talk with us. It was such a rare event I didn’t know whether to be scared or curious. But I was twenty-six years old: even if he said something outrageous, I could just walk away from it. What did he want to talk about? Drugs and drinking? About what happened between him and Mom, finally? Maybe he met someone new? He kept his girlfriends secret the whole time they were married, so if he did have a serious romance maybe it was hard to talk about. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Anne took one shot of me sitting at the kitchen table laughing with Joe and putting a good face on it. Joe was singing Jane’s Addiction’s “Standing in the Shower … Thinking,” and Dad didn’t know why we were laughing. It was because we both knew he was about to ruin everything.

  “And the water is piping hot!” sang Joe.

  “I thought it was, ‘And the water is fucking hot,’” I said.

  “That’s because you have a filthy mind!” yelled Joe. “Filth!”

  “Well, I just want to let you know that this isn’t going to be like old Bernard Card’s place,” Dad started, breaking the tension.

  “I like Bernie’s cabin,” I said. “It’s great there.”

  “Well, he’s a generous man and he really likes you, but there was a lot that went on there that I just didn’t appreciate.” I could see this had been bugging him for years. His jaw was tightened around a kind of half smile, probably for Anne’s benefit. Bernie drank whiskey and his guests told dirty jokes, and once in a while he had a wild guest who might shoot extra deer or stay up drinking all night and bounce a car through the woods. Bernard’s sons and daughters-in-law were very serious hunters, but these one or two others were what Dad called “slob hunters.” Slob hunters were people who poached or drank or thought it was funny to use a military weapon for hunting, or who killed for sport or left wounded animals in the woods. The idea that someone might mess up his hunting or make it somehow unethical made Dad visibly anxious. When we stayed with Mr. Card in his log cabin, Dad would wash dishes after dinner as everyone prepared to drink and play euchre and then he’d go straight to bed as a kind of protest. I’d play cards and eventually fall asleep on the floor in front of the big fireplace.

  “I shouldn’t have taken you boys up there and I apologize for it. I wouldn’t do that today. I don’t think that was sending the right message.”

  “I’m not sorry,” I said. “You taught me how to watch the woods at that place. That was really important to me.”

  “We’re just not going to have that atmosphere,” Dad said. “We’re not going to have anybody up here except family.”

  I thought of a line from an old church song—and we know all of them—“Like a bird from prison bars has flown, I’ll fly away.” I was already halfway out the door. Bruce had created another place to separate himself from the dirty old world. Up here at the Kuipers Hunt Club, we weren’t going to talk about any shitty divorce or anybody slashing their arms with broken glass. No way! If that stuff had to happen, it didn’t happen here. This place was about the communion of saints.

  Dad then grimly spat out the rules that he and the uncles had made to keep the place pure, so nobody would “booger it up”: No going out into the woods when it wasn’t hunting season. No wandering the place or camping out on it or putting in sit-spots that were unapproved, not even over on the USA. No bushwacking off the trails. No tearing around with motocross motorcycles, which Brett had, or snowshoes or skis. No hunting with dogs at all, because everybody knows dogs run deer, and no dogs in the cabin. No drinking. No smoking. No bonfires. No visits without one of the three uncles present. No guests. And, above all, no dirty boots in the cabin. Don’t bring the outside in.

  “That way, it can be for the whole family,” Dad said. He looked at Joe.

  “Sounds about right,” Joe lied, then sang: “The water is so piping ha-ah-ot!” Joe looked out the window. Dad clearly believed this place had something to do with keeping Joe alive, but from the look on my brother’s soft and puffy face I thought that was unlikely.

  “How do you feel, Joe?” asked Anne, seeing his faraway eyes.

  “I like all them people just fine,” he said, answering a different question.

  “We can fish the PM and the Baldwin from here, too,” I said. “It’s so close.”

  “Well, it’s not a hotel,” Dad said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pretty soon everybody would be staying here to go fishing or canoeing or whatever. We didn’t build it for that. It’s for hunting this property.”

  Dad made being in the woods sound like a cruel psychology experiment: short hours on the land while hunting and then long hours shut indoors with shitloads of people; fourteen or fifteen uncles, aunts, and cousins were expected in the fall, and our cousins hadn’t even started having babies yet. Like being rolled up in a piece of carpet with just a circ
le of light showing at the end.

  The place had the potential to be so beautiful, but there was no way we could hang here.

  “We’re going to fill these woods with hot lead!” Joe suddenly joked, perking up. I knew from the way he said it he’d just come to a decision; they’d be lucky if he stayed here even one night. Where would he go in the middle of the night if he couldn’t sleep? Where would he walk? Where would he smoke? How could you watch the night if you got in trouble for even opening the curtains?

  “The hunting is going to be awesome here,” I said, backing him up.

  Dad jumped on our comments, taking them for enthusiasm, “Oh, you guys should come in the fall when all your cousins are here. We really will have so much fun.”

  Joe and I went out on the sand and stood looking up at the tall red pines alongside the cabin and Joe lit a cigarette.

  Dad put his head out the slider: “Joe, we really don’t want smoking up here because the deer can smell it,” he said, hanging in the doorway.

  “Dad, I’m gonna smoke this cigarette,” Joe said without pulling his gaze out of the trees. He wasn’t angry. The clouds formed question marks in the sky. The world was vast and had its own agenda. Dad withdrew and closed the slider after him.

  “It’s like prison with camo,” I said.

  “On the other hand, that’s the most Dad’s talked to me in at least ten years,” Joe said.

  In the quiet between us, my body pitched toward the fields out there. I could feel my whole organism responding to the call of the place. I knew Joe felt it, too. I wanted to slosh through every inch of those marshy woods and find every porcupine and watch every fawn being born and coax blades of grass out of the hot sand one by one. I looked at the sky and thought of a phrase that the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty had written in his book Phenomenology of Perception; when describing the blue of the sky, he noted that he wasn’t merely observing the sky but communicating with it. He and the sky each had their own subjectivity, and together they shared an intersubjectivity. He borrowed a line from Paul Valéry and said of the sky: “It thinks itself within me.” That sky thought itself within me.

  But Dad, on the contrary, had built a monument to his own separateness. There wasn’t space for us in it. It was crushing, because the dirt that he was offering was the best ever.

  I went from being disappointed to being pissed off as we rumbled back out to the tarred road. Joe sat behind me on the BMW in a kind of daze. Dad had built him a place to heal and then denied him half the medicine. The Hunt Club’s dualistic strategy—to keep man and nature totally separate—was more of the same wrongheaded shit we’d grown up with. Deep down, Dad knew this, and we knew he knew that we knew it. But, as in many cases in American life, or at least ours, there was an absolute disconnect between the truth and what was presented in public. He was just hoping we’d accept half a deal, half a real identity, half a truth. It was another betrayal. And we were grown men. It felt like we’d never get another chance at this.

  “Aren’t you fucking angry?” I said over my shoulder.

  “Why? It’s the same as it’s always been,” Joe shouted. “I just can’t be a real person.” Dad saw me turn back to look at him and he gave a big fake smile. I gave him a big fake smile back.

  I drove the moving truck out of Bruce’s driveway the next morning, worried I’d next see Joe in another less luxurious rehab, in an ICU, or in a box. When I had told Joe that he should come with us, he just waved and said, “I’ve got my Jane’s Addiction tape.” I left in tears.

  About a week later, Joe was set to leave the psychiatric hospital and Mom went to pick him up. As they sat in the lobby waiting to be discharged, it was revealed to Joe that he would go stay with a family as a kind of halfway house to transition him back to the world. He even walked outside and met the family, but Mom saw he couldn’t do it, and they went back into the lobby. There he broke down again, shaking and crying, and told Mom he’d likely hurt somebody if he had to stay with strangers. So he was readmitted for another week or so and then finally allowed to go back to Dad’s house.

  About a week later, Mom and her fiancé, Tom, went to Mexico and got married. They drove into Nuevo Laredo on a sightseeing tour with my uncle Marlan, who lives in Texas, and decided to tie the knot. On Joe’s birthday, of all days. That was a spot of welcome good news in a hard summer.

  I didn’t see the deer camp again for seven years.

  Four

  The Darkness

  Dad hardly told me a single thing about his childhood. He just didn’t want to talk about it. Once, he and I were sitting at the Marathon station in Texas Corners in our old red F100—the Jesse, we called it; it was like the one Scott had later. It had a suicide knob bolted to the steering wheel and Dad would hang on that and stare out the window like he was in a movie. I was sixteen and we were having a fight. He was in a white T-shirt and his stupid straw cowboy hat and he had been hissing at me that I should probably just get out, that sixteen was when a man should get out of his father’s house, and I asked him where he thought I should go, and then he felt bad and got quiet. He hung there a minute on the knob.

  “My dad was a smart guy, smarter than I knew, but all I wanted was to get away from him. That’s why we started to hunt,” he said.

  That was the first I’d heard him talk about Grandpa Henry. He said he and his three older brothers were obsessed with getting away from him. They had to get out of that house and do things he didn’t do. One thing Henry didn’t do was hunt.

  “What was so bad about Grandpa Henry?” I asked.

  It was summer. Blades of corn across the street sawed at the watery air.

  “The darkness,” he said.

  After a minute he added, “My dad worked like a mule. Really, like a dumb animal. And nothing we did was ever good enough. His take on life was so grim, he made farm life so miserable. So if we could get to the crick, down there we’d feel like we had a life.”

  I loved my grandpa for the way he purred when he talked, for the roasted coffee color of his skin and its leathery texture and his wave of silver hair, but something morbid attended him.

  Dad, Mom, and I lived with Grandpa and Grandma for a few weeks in their brick house outside Zeeland, Michigan, when I was four, and one of the first times I had dinner at their house I was reaching for the dish nearest to me when Dad put his hand on my arm and told me to wait for Grandpa. “I’ll read the scripture,” Henry said without other comment, looking down as he took his black leather-bound Bible off the table. Then he began a remarkable performance. He opened to his place and proceeded to read in a voice that none of us could hear. He enunciated carefully in a half whisper like the sound of small creek water moving over stones. My mouth hung open as I strained to hear: his voice was mesmerizing and transporting. But it clearly wasn’t for us. Grandma Gertrude told him, “Heinie, speak up. No one can hear you.” His voice rose for half a verse and then submerged again. I’d been around a fair amount of prayer, as my surrogate grandparents, Roy and Vesta Sutter, prayed, too, but this was the first time I’d ever really been aware of someone talking directly to God in what seemed like a private conversation. Grandpa Henry’s God was mysterious and powerful and far out of reach. He teased us with the text’s mystery as though he were sprinkling us with holy water, a substance charged with meaning we could not understand, and it felt like a game, like he was hiding the words somewhere around the room.

  When Dad and his three older brothers were small, Henry and Gertrude bought their first farm, a twenty-acre piece with a good house and a couple of small outbuildings just south of Zeeland on Perry Street. They weren’t there long, though, and it was on their second farm that all six boys really grew up, a one-hundred-acre chunk of prime prairie loam and elm trees a few miles east of town. Everyone referred to that farm as the Kasslander Place after the former owners, one of the founding families of Zeeland. Henry grew corn, wheat, oats, and hay, and kept about twenty dairy cows on pasture. He also rented
the twenty or forty acres across the road.

  For most farmers, working 120 or 140 acres was a full-time job, but it was only Henry’s side hustle. His real job was an hour away at Keeler Brass in Grand Rapids, where he did piecework buffing brass hardware. It was dirty and loud, polishing one item at a time in a spray of oily brass filings, and he did this five days a week and sometimes half days on Saturdays for his entire adult working life. Because he was paid by the piece, the pace was inhuman, but he was proud that he was not a union man because unions were communist and thus godless, in his estimation. The true cost of a union pension was damnation.

  “So here’s a guy, he has the biggest farm in the neighborhood. Nobody else works in the factory; they all work their farms. But then he’s got a full-time job in the factory,” said my uncle Ron, who made a career in the CIA and is a reliable reporter. “And he’s got six kids. But always at least four. Who were a lot of trouble. Because we were all rambunctious. None of us were good kids. Heh heh. And your dad was one of the worst. I might have been one of the worst. Well, Dale was the worst.”