The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

The place to talk about all this was at the cabin. In the past, Bruce had tried to make it a place where no such troubles were allowed, but as our relationships with one another got better and better it was only natural that it became the place where emotions would erupt because this was the place they could erupt, braided into the thick communication in the place.

  “Joe, you’ve got to stop being such a baby,” said Diane. She was always totally direct, which drove Joe crazy.

  “And what more do you fuckin’ expect me to do?” he growled. “Whatever I do, it’s just not enough for you!”

  “Now, Joe,” said Dad, warning.

  “Get another job. Pay the bills. People deal with this kind of situation all the time. Just make sure Hazel’s okay,” said Diane.

  Joe went out the door and spent two hours breaking twigs and pulling knapweed. What other people saw as the human condition—working, paying the bills, having children, being responsible to a community—he saw as being trapped. He was fixated on getting out. He told me that he quit taking care of those people in the group homes because he felt like a liar. He was trying to make them feel better when he himself felt like shit. He never said anything about this when we were in Wyoming, because it wasn’t the cabin and the channels weren’t wide open there.

  He went right back to work. He got a job working on metal roofs. It was a small company, a two-man operation, but they worked on structures from a gargantuan Whirlpool warehouse in Perris, California, to old and rare copper mansards and gutters around Kalamazoo. Sometimes they’d build the odd custom gate or security grate. He found some quiet there. Not too many people mess with you when you’re up on the roof.

  Metal was Dad’s line of business, so our father felt good about that, but they didn’t talk shop very much. Dad was the boss at his company and that was one place where he was very talkative and charismatic and smoothing everything for everyone; Joe, on the other hand, thought any boss he had was purposely designing their business to ruin his life. But this job was better than most he’d worked, and it allowed him to focus on protecting his relationship to Hazel. Joe had worked with Dad to get attorneys and such for sorting out his child support, and that actually brought them closer. They’d never get fully close until the relatedness could become mature—which, in Joe’s case, meant that he needed to feel like his own man. But he was slogging his way down that road.

  I don’t think it was any coincidence that both Joe and Brett ended up working in metal. Dad approved of it. Brett and a partner bought the Alchemist Foundry, and Dad was very pleased to invest some money in that. One of their first commissions as a new company was a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of the Detroit Red Wings’ Gordie Howe, which, in Michigan, might as well have been a sculpture of Jesus. That went up inside Joe Louis Arena and was the beginning of a good business making sculptures of sports figures. They continued to pour fine art pieces for other clients, but their sports statues are now all over the country, including the Luc Robitaille, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jerry West, and Chick Hearn figures at the Staples Center in L.A.

  Brett and Joe were close as ever, and they skated in an amateur adult hockey league in Kalamazoo. They were both on the same team for a while, where Brett, who was wiry from metal work but a little on the small side for hockey, would get checked too hard by someone on the other team and Joe would come off the bench smiling and fists a-flailing. It worked out good for everyone.

  “Oh, did you hear about Joe getting hit by the tree?” said Ayron, her eyes shining, as we walked the property in summer. Stories about Dad had become funny instead of infuriating, and we loved telling them. Joe spent more time with him than anyone.

  “What?” I said. “More injury?”

  “Oh, it’s a classic,” said Joe. “I’m still having trouble walking.”

  “Where were you, out at Dad’s?

  “No, up here, at the cabin. Dad’s always had a tree stand at that crossing where the pond by Buck One drains into the swamp, but we put up a new one, and then he wanted to clear brush for sixty yards in every direction. You know half the time he shoots an hour after dark, and when you’re shooting in the dark you don’t want any trees in the way.

  “Anyway, there was a pretty big blowdown red maple that was laying right up against a tree there. It had been broken off in a storm, but big, like about forty feet tall. So Dad says, ‘Joe, let’s push this tree off there. We can’t just a leave a widowmaker hanging there; it’ll probably fall on one of us one day.’”

  “You can see your dad doing that, can’t you? ‘Oh, I know this is totally unsafe, but let’s just do it,’” said Ayron.

  “‘C’mon, don’t be a big pussy!’ ‘All right, Dad.’ So I get over there and we start heaving on the thing and rockin’ it and then it starts to go and so I turn to move away but you couldn’t really see that the stump end was completely severed and free and it just popped up and caught me right in the back and flung me about twenty feet into the air. I’m not exaggerating. I went way the fuck up in the tree-stand tree and slammed into one of the steel climbers we had drilled into the trunk; it just about poked through the skin and right between my ribs. And then I fell to the ground and landed flat on my back. It knocked the wind out of me and I laid there choking, but I didn’t even care about that because I was pretty positive I broke my back. I was absolutely terrified to move.”

  “Dad goes running over there, half pissed off,” said Brett.

  “He’s standing over me, screaming, ‘Oh, SON! SON! YOU GOTTA GET UP, SON!’ There was no fuckin’ reason in the world to get up. I needed to catch my breath and see if my back was broken.”

  “It’s just that Dad is so anxious that he has to have a resolution instantly. Partly he’s worried you’re really hurt, partly he’s worried that he caused it, and partly he’s worried it will be expensive,” said Brett.

  “I lay there about two minutes unable to breathe, and finally I get a real breath and Dad’s still screaming, ‘GET UP, SON! GET UP! YOU GOTTA GET UP!’ and I say, ‘Gimme a second, my back is hurt.’

  “‘NO!,’ he screams, “YOUR BACK IS FINE! YOU GOTTA WALK!’ He’s losing his mind, and I know I really shouldn’t get up but he’s freaking out, so I reach my hand up and he jerks me onto my feet. I swear to God, he could have paralyzed me right there.

  “So he’s yelling, ‘GOOD! GOOD! NOW WALK!’ and I’ve got my arm over his shoulder and he’s practically carrying me back to the cabin. It was only about two hundred yards, but it took about a half hour, I was walking so slow. We get back there and I’m saying, ‘Dad, I gotta go to the hospital, I need to get this checked out. It’s serious.’

  “‘No, no, you just take a shower. That’s what you need.’ He actually would not let me go to the hospital. He said I could not go.”

  “A shower!” Ayron squealed, laughing. “Just like when you got stung by a bee and almost died!” Tears were coming out of her eyes.

  “So I lay on the couch for a while, and I knew Dad would never take me to the hospital, so after a bit I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to drive home. I don’t feel good.’

  “‘What? No. No, son. C’mon, I’ll help you get in that shower.’ He literally will not let me get to a doctor.”

  “Bruce is a very clean person. You know he rolls the lint off his socks every morning?” said Ayron.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s true. Gets worse and worse every year.”

  “So I never do go to the hospital, but eventually I drove home. And the very next day, I was up on the roof again at work.”

  “But you did get clean, though. And that’s what matters,” said Brett, wiping away tears.

  “So clean. How could anything be wrong if you’re clean? ‘Dad, my back is fucking broken.’ ‘Have a shower and a cinnamon bun from Rykse’s. Oh, that shower is so good.’”

  “A shower!” Ayron’s laughter rang out under the trees by a food plot we called Bruce’s. Now everything was different. It was just Dad being Dad.

&nbs
p; Sometime after Joe resumed working, he got an MRI and confirmed that he had not only broken a rib but also broken his back. He never mentioned it to Dad.

  We walked another hundred yards up the two-track, and Spenser pulled up short in front of a red oak sapling about eight feet tall.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, and leaned in.

  Clinging to the branch was a young porcupette, maybe a couple of weeks old, and it looked at Spenser without fear. The two of them were nose to nose. Spenser was smiling. The porcupette’s quills didn’t stick out every which way like an adult, but shone black and slick as though they had been combed back. It started to mew like a kitten. The babies don’t ordinarily stray far from their mothers, so she had to be right there somewhere. We’d never seen one so far from the porcupine tree before.

  “I think it likes you, Spense,” I said.

  “Baby Wendell,” said Spenser.

  In the fall of 2009, I was feeling pretty ragged. Meg and I had really struggled to find a relationship between us, but it wasn’t working, and we split up. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, but for eleven years we had talked and talked and talked, and it always seemed we weren’t talking about the right things. Or not in the right way. Or not long enough, or too long. We argued and even had horrible fights, but mostly it was just talking every night from midnight to two or three A.M. And then I would end up on the couch. I wrote two good books during these years, and Meg had made brilliant artworks, including a show inspired by her mother’s death that produced one of my favorite pieces she’s ever made, a yellow papier-mâché donkey with a plunger for one front leg, appropriately titled Yellow Donkey. I couldn’t even look at it without sobbing. I guess it had come to represent our relationship, too. Both of us were so madly in love with our beautiful son, and I told myself I’d never leave that house, so I slept on the couch year after year.

  But one morning in June I got up and realized I was living like my mother had, day and night on the couch, and that I couldn’t live like that anymore. I didn’t want Spenser to grow up watching us fight and me sleeping on the couch. So I announced that, in a few days, I would go. That day came and Spenser was outside on his swing in the big ash tree in the front yard, and I told Spenser to come inside because I had to tell him something. He came in with his chin on his chest and wouldn’t look at me. Meg encouraged him to give me a hug and Spenser climbed into my lap. He was nine years old and I held him and wept and assured him it would be okay. He just shook his head and said, “No, no, no, no.” There was no worse feeling in the world. It was the worst day of my life. As I walked out to my car with a bag in my hand, my knees were shaking. I just wanted to die.

  I found a tiny apartment down the street from our house, and on the nights Spense was with me he slept on the couch. He felt a little better once he found that I wasn’t moving far away. I saw him and Meg every day. I was working at the Los Angeles Times but I was flat broke. We had been spending as much time at the camp as we could, and it was the one place I could be assured of sanity. Spenser looked forward to seeing Grandpa Bruce and Joe and Brett and Ayron because he could feel I was empty. I was hollowed out like the old porcupine tree.

  I called Mom to talk to her one day in October. She asked how I was doing. I was going out on dates, but I didn’t feel that good. I felt like a failure. It was hard to accept that Meg and I couldn’t make it work. I was looking forward to going to the cabin, and we talked about that.

  “Well, there is something good happening. Something good besides the cabin,” Mom said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Joe is getting married,” she said.

  “To Hazel’s mom?” I was surprised by that.

  “No, no. That would be a little bit weird, as they hardly know each other,” she said. “No, Joe met a woman from Sturgis, her name is Becky, and they’ve been spending a lot of time together over the last few months. They met through mutual friends, I guess. She’s very nice. She’s very soft-spoken and has a big smile, and they both said they realized pretty quick that they were meant for each other. Joe just called me a little while ago and said they were going to get married.”

  “Holy crap!” I said. I didn’t recall Joe ever mentioning a new girlfriend. I worried suddenly that I had been so down about my own home life and things with Meg that I had simply failed to hear it when he told me. “When is this going to happen?”

  “Well, uh, tomorrow. At Sturgis City Hall.”

  There was no way I was going to get there for a wedding the next day. I had to go to work at the Times and I had no money for a plane ticket, anyway.

  “Oh, that’s fine, honey. Joe and Becky say they don’t want anyone there,” Mom said. “They just want to have a small private ceremony.”

  “Well, are you going to go?”

  “Well, sure, Tom and I will go. And your father and Diane, probably. I mean, we all want to be there. I wouldn’t miss his wedding!”

  Poor Mom had never been able to put on a wedding. I had been engaged for a while, but none of us had ever been married. She’d come to graduations and to Spenser’s baptism and probably Hazel’s, but other than that she’d never had any of the big ceremonies that normally mark your kids’ lives.

  “Damn, I wish I could be there. Will that be okay for you, being there with Dad and Diane?”

  “Oh, sure. We see them all the time, for the boys’ birthdays and stuff. Your dad gets along good with Tom, and Diane and I are totally fine to sit and chat.”

  “But what about you and Dad?”

  “Oh, we’ve been fine for a long time. But things are definitely better in the last few years. Maybe because he got married, but also lots of things have changed for you boys since you’ve all been going to the cabin. Brett talks about it all the time, how much Bruce has changed. I don’t know the details, exactly, but I’m so glad. Because you were all frustrated for so long. It certainly makes things better for me. He and I are more like friends now.”

  I was glad when hunting season came again and I could feel that sand under my feet. Just after light on the second day of the gun season, I was wet up to my knees and sloshing out of the sucking blackwater of the swamp. The snow boots I wore in the blind, Dad’s old size twelve Sorels, were full to the top with skunky ice water and leaves but I didn’t mind. My heart was pounding and my mouth was full of news as I made my way back to the cabin. Skorsh. Skorsh. With every step, water squeezed out of the top of the boots as I kicked through the oaks alongside the swamp, and I stopped when I noticed for the first time that the understory was full of young white pines, knee- to head-high, in every direction. They had been seeded by the small copse of white pines James Askins had planted, but suddenly they were erupting through like adult teeth. They must have been suppressed and came up when the other forest had come up in the cuts five years earlier. In the summer, when the oak, beech, and maple were in full leaf, I just hadn’t seen them.

  I sloshed down a trail of soft pine needles and through the chest-high canary grass in the vernal ditch, and when I stepped into Cabin Field I spooked about sixteen wild turkeys out there, maybe half of the resident flock, and they flattened out like prehistoric roadrunners, bending horizontally from beak to tail, and scurried toward the west. I don’t know if they ate anything we’d planted in the field, but they liked scratching there. The fields were starting to bloom. Two years earlier, Dad and Joe had hand-pitched trailers full of cow manure onto the fields. They had spent two days hauling manure from a dairy farm in Walkerville on the trailer we used to pull the tractor, pitching by hand until they about wore out their welcome and themselves. But it had helped with the organic matter. The deer had kicked at the purple-top turnips and gnawed the puna chicory and kale and canola right down to the dirt. Ravens and starlings followed behind the turkeys, a train of gleaners hoping for uprooted treats.

  Joe already had a five-point buck hanging from the buck pole.

  The dogs barked from inside the sliding-glass door. Brett and Ayron had not o
nly brought their new griffon, named Dorothy after our other grandma, but brought their white Lhasa apso, Jimmy, too, with all his ruction. The dogs slept right in the bed with Brett and Ayron. Spenser and I loved it, and even more shocking, Dad loved it.

  “Oh, I was on the couch and that little Jimmy just jumped right up there and snuggled in next to me and we had a nap,” Dad said. “He sure is a cute little bugger.”

  When I heard Dad say this, I thought there was nothing more the world could show me by way of surprise. But, of course, the world was just getting started.

  I sat on the edge of the weathered porch and dumped the water out of my boots in the cold sun. I sniffed at my one spent seven-millimeter shell—one of the smells I love most in the world, the metallic odor of heated brass against the mix of burnt nitroglycerine, sawdust, and graphite that constitutes modern gunpowder. I’m not a gun freak and I only have the one rifle, the same Ruger Dad bought me when I was fourteen, and it was a running joke that I was still using the same two boxes of Federal brand ammo that we’d bought at Meijer’s for my first trip to Card’s in 1976, more than thirty years before. I used one shell a year to sight in the gun, and one to kill some food. But a lot of years I just didn’t shoot anything.

  “Was that you shooting, or the neighbor?” Dad said, walking up to the slider. He had stayed in with Spenser to hunt from the cabin and he missed the fact that I was huffing at a spent rifle cartridge. “I thought I heard Randy shoot.”

  “No, that was me,” I said, playing it down. I tried to pass off my shivering as if I were simply cold. I had spent years and years just watching and listening, trying to comprehend the voices that carried over the water. But Spenser was ten, and I wanted him to see the old contract fulfilled: to make a habitat for the deer, to celebrate its wild life, to kill it and enjoy it as venison stew. My dream was that he’d never eat supermarket meat again. I wanted to validate all of Brett’s effort with his schooling and forestry on this place. The other creatures in the forest saw me as a predator, and in this instance I wanted to be one.