by Lynne Hugo
“Nah. It’s gonna get hot soon. You know I hate hot weather. I wanna get out and scout new ground before rut season. Mine are hunted out.” He barked his laugh. “I’m too good. Deer fear me. Women crave me, huh?”
“In your dreams,” she said. (Personally, envisioning Ellis’s mug shot and the brief glimpse I’d had of him with that ridiculous ponytail, I completely agreed with her although he was right about the kid and the trash, and she looked like a pygmy Barbie-doll imitation herself.) And then she spoiled it anyway with a flirtatious giggle.
“Gonna hang some trail cameras, but gotta go farther out. Might even find me a nice new home decor. I’ll take the kid with me for ya.”
“I’ve told you no on that. I’d really like you to do this with us as a family. You promised.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“Not explaining it again. I don’t see why you have to do this year-round. Why can’t you wait until deer season at least?” she whined. “This is a family event, and . . . you’re gonna get caught one of these days. What’s gonna happen then, huh? Wanna lose your hunting license? Can you go to jail for that stuff? I think I heard you can. I don’t have the money to get you off again. Anyway, you should come be with me and Brandon.” There was a pause, and, then, almost begging, “We need you, honey.”
“It’s your family. Oh, wait. Supposedly, he’ll be with his dad, remember? Hah. Big fat chance of that one. You go, stay overnight, drink wine coolers, and talk about shoes. The kid’ll go to Dud’s the way he always does. You know damn well he’s not gonna end up going with you or going to see that asshole. Don’t say I didn’t try. You’ve got this stupid thing about guns ’cause your dumbass brother shot his own foot. I’m gonna fire up the grill now.” That’s pretty close to what he said. He’d gotten up and moved so it was more difficult to hear him. The door creaked and banged shut again; I surmised that one of them had gone into the house, probably her, if he was lighting the grill.
But then I heard the door open again, her voice. “Honey, I know you’re trying with him and it means a lot. You’re right. He won’t want to go with me, and there’s no chance his father will do . . . Maybe you could show him about cars, something like that?—something useful. That’d be really good. . . .”
I didn’t hear what came next because I’d started to edge backward slowly out of the bushes, careful not to make noise or movement, nothing that might attract attention. My knees and ankles had stiffened, my back was an ache that wanted to moan. Darkness was rising off the ground skyward, but it certainly wasn’t enough to hide me. I unfolded as if I were ancient, willing myself not to be.
I turned toward the road, one careful, silent foot in front of the other, crouching, hunched as my mother before she died. I had just stepped clear of the house when there was a blast of thumping music from the driveway, and the sound of a gunning motor. Jerking myself back into the house shadow, I breathed in please, and then breathed out thank you for the oblivion of the young. The boy was in the car—it was red and sporty, although it looked old, and had several doodads dangling from the rearview mirror—and he wasn’t paying the slightest attention, though he could have spotted me easily. I ducked back until I heard the car clear the driveway. Take out the trash, you young twit, I wanted to yell after him, but don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind. Cody always took out the trash. Well, maybe not the first time he was told when he was with Gary. I don’t think he had much respect for his dad.
Again, I did my casual stroll act to get back to my car, although I wanted to bolt like a deer. I didn’t know whether I’d even learned anything useful. On the way home the moon was nearly full, hanging big and just above the trees. I had less trouble seeing the road than I do when the night sky is lightless. Still, I tried to concentrate on driving rather than excavate what I’d heard. I can’t afford an accident. What if Gary tried to take my keys away, or the company raised my insurance rates?
21
Deer have always lived on our land. The field corn attracts them and the thick woods where they bed and make their trails to the ready water of Rush Run. Sometimes men have knocked at my front door and asked if they could hunt our property in season. I have always said no, and Harold didn’t argue the point. But if he answered the door, he’d always ask if the man was a vet. If he’d served in Vietnam, Harold would say yes without asking anything else. He also said yes to men who needed meat for their families to get through the winter. That was before he took Cody out, of course, and when he was still hunting himself. I’ve told you how Cody changed the Vietnam-soldier side of Harold, the part of him that wanted to be out in the forest stalking with a rifle, perhaps exorcising demons, perhaps summoning an old, bizarre exhilaration he’d shared with his platoon. I didn’t know. But I believe he saw what Cody saw; we didn’t need the meat. We didn’t need it, and Cody saw the pain with no need of the family’s to either balance or justify it.
Once Harold asked me why I said no, and I shrugged and said I wasn’t comfortable with strangers carrying guns on our land. He wouldn’t have understood the truth because I didn’t, either. I loved our animals too much and the deer seemed their kin, only a half-step removed. All the plastic-wrapped meat in the grocery store—yes, I thought about that when I bought and fixed it for the family. Would they have understood if I’d said, no more: I won’t buy it, I won’t eat it, I won’t serve it? My meat-and-potatoes husband, son, and grandson? The only person who would have heard my heart was Nicole, and we lost her. Are you thinking there was no we to it, Louisa? It was Gary with his thoughtlessness that caused the whole family to lose Nicole. He broke a lot of hearts, that son of yours. I confess I’ve thought that, but let’s stick to the point I’m making about how I cared for the animals and still served meat. Do you see how my mind set aside its own failures of logic? How difficult it is to live when we think.
It turns out that there are a lot of laws about deer hunting, even in a county as old-boy as Dwayne, Indiana. Harold knew them back when he hunted, I’m sure, not that it was a supper-table topic. As I’ve said, there wasn’t a comfortable chair in my mind for the idea of hunting to rest in, so I closed the door and didn’t think about it. Harold, Gary, Cody, Nicole, Mom, my students, CarolSue, my teacher friends, and the neighbors all had my focus. The chickens and Rose the goat, the Labs and the cats, and the horses had my attention.
Now, though, I was educating myself on the topic. My kitchen table was covered with the pages of laws. What kind of gun, say a rifle versus a muzzleloader, a hunter may aim and on exactly which dates. How many deer each hunter is allowed to shoot, with antlers and without. The season for the more quaint bow and arrow—and the crossbow, a distinction I’ll spare myself reading up on, since Larry Ellis’s guns were displayed along with the prideful pictures of him grinning over the posed bodies of his kill.
With the photocopies of the laws I also had instruction manuals. Illustrated Guides To Death. Of course they’re not called that. They have names like The Whitetail Huntsman and Successful Big Game Tracking. There are primers and more advanced directions. And there are publications for expert killers. Men like Larry Ellis were evidently way out of Harold’s league, back in the day when he bought a license and a deer tag for himself and for Cody. Trophy hunting is an obsession for them.
Two pamphlets had especially caught my attention. One had worked like tumblers in the combination to Larry Ellis’s mind state: Scouting Big Game Before the Season. The other one was the seed for The Plan: Priming the Hunt in the Off Season.
Harold hadn’t been thinking nearly big enough when he hatched his ineffective revenge schemes. He’d had no idea that he was trying to take out Attila the Hun with a squirt gun. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. I got back to my reading. Teachers know how to look things up, and how to make long-range plans. I should have helped my Harold. We’d have been unstoppable together.
* * *
Al Pelley, the farmer who had contracted to put in and tend the field corn this year, looked at me as if my
mind were wandering dangerously near the void. The register of his voice was definitely higher than usual and I noted a flush on his face, which was impressive since he’s ruddy-skinned anyway.
“You want me to what? First, it’ll reduce your yield. There’s no market for it, won’t do a damn thing except attract all the deer in the state. That soil is fine for corn. No need for this, Louisa. And why would you want those waves?” He jabbed his left forefinger at the schematic I’d drawn for planting, which he held in his right hand.
I’d taken one whole field out of regular field corn. The edges of it will be let go, in curvy lines, back into the natural grasses that lead into the woods above Rush Run Creek. A section of it will be planted in clover; some in corn and oats that won’t be cut; some in brassica, kale and turnips and winter greens, although those won’t be planted until August to create a cold-weather food source. Al was entirely right that this would attract deer. That was the exact idea. The curvy lines were to provide the deer the cover they like; using the field next to the woods was to put a food source near where they bed and find water. I was extremely proud of myself. I gave myself an A plus. I hoped every deer in the county would come. I was still working on how to connect this up to Larry Ellis, but first things first. I’d even told CarolSue the basic Plan I’d come up with: to attract deer, somehow get word out that they were abundant on my land, catch Larry Ellis hunting out of season, call the sheriff, and press charges, with the result that he’d lose his hunting license. You might think there are a lot of holes in The Plan, but as I said, it was a work in progress and my sister hadn’t been much help.
Al squinted at me and then looked down at the paper I’d given him, which was eleven by twenty inches. He looked back up at me with that look people give when they think you’re putting them on and don’t appreciate being made a fool of.
“Don’t you think the lines are pretty?”
He stared, not a trace of my humor playing on his face.
“Well, Amy’s the artistic one, and she’s very impressed with the design.” I said this to annoy him more. The design was all mine.
Although he’s an inch taller than I am, I think it’s fair to say Al’s one of those runty, bowlegged men who looks like he couldn’t handle a rototiller let alone a combine, but he’s got cowboy in his blood and he’s stringy-strong because of it. Harold told me that Al had come out of a rodeo and married a farmer’s daughter six months before their daughter was born. That was a long time ago, and the union didn’t last, but what Al knows about farming did.
“I just want to try something different,” I finally said into his silence. “We can do two plantings of the oats, one in the spring, and a late one. We’ll sell the first cut, okay? And the winter greens will cleanse the soil. I read that.”
“That’s not enough oats to be worthwhile, Louisa. And the soil ph is already six point seven. Had it tested at the County Extension myself. You talked to Gary about this?” Al scratched his cheek, leaving a white line next to his mustache, which was halfway between brown and grey, like his unruly hair. He wore overalls like the ones Harold used to favor. It was only nine, though; the dew was barely off the grass. Maybe he didn’t realize how warm it would be by noon. I always told Harold those sorts of things, and Al lived alone.
“Are you worried about being paid, Al?” I came back at him quickly and Al looked surprised. “Because I’ll write you a check for half right now. I don’t expect you to wait.” I probably should have told him the truth, made him an ally, but the business about asking Gary upset me. And I didn’t want anyone but CarolSue knowing that I was out to make Larry Ellis lose what he loved. Hunting. As you know, I was still evolving Plan details, but teachers are good at revising Plans.
Al and I were standing on the front porch. Al had declined my offer of coffee. He didn’t meet my eyes, which I later realized should have tipped me off that there was something I didn’t know. “It’s not that. I was jus . . .” he mumbled, but then he couldn’t let it go. “Not right. Won’t make the land pay what it should.”
“It’ll be all right, Al. Really.”
“All right with you, maybe,” he muttered, turning, tossing the back of his hand in my direction in a wave of departure, dismissal, or resignation, as he went down the two porch stairs and cut across the grass toward his truck. “Your grass is bad. Hired a kid for help on my own place. Got too much to do myself. Took on too much contract work. Want me to have him mow for you? Good kid, just gotta learn.”
The grass was lush, weedy, and overgrown. Cody used to mow the grass. CarolSue asked me who was taking care of it, and I told her, “No one. I have no one.”
I really didn’t want another boy mowing the lawn. “Our Cody used to . . . he was the one who . . .” I had to look away from Al then. Some things you don’t want another person to see. He had the good sense to give me a couple seconds. When I looked back, he shrugged.
“Up to you. But when Harold was here, he—”
I looked away again and then I gave in. Teachers are nothing if not practical. The old push mower is too heavy for me. Harold’s riding mower had broken down yet again. He’d been going to get a new one after the harvest—that harvest that I wasted—after he died. I wanted to ask Gary to mow even less than I wanted a boy who wasn’t our beloved Cody to do it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Thanks.”
22
I’ll give him credit for this much: Al did not beat it back to his own place and call Gary before the highway dust had settled. He must have slept on it because it was a full twenty-four hours before Gary got wind of my plan (a wind that could only have blown out of Al’s mouth), and bounced his rattletrap van down the ruts in my driveway so fast and hard, I’m surprised his head didn’t go right through the top.
I didn’t get what was going on at first, which scared me again about my mind, which I cannot afford to lose. But he showed up with a strawberry cheese danish from Diana Dee’s Bakery over in Germantown—a particular weakness of mine—instead of some new atrocity like the bumper sticker he put on my car last week. GOT JESUS? it said, next to a picture of a glass of milk. I had to work with a pan of hot water and a razor blade to get it off after he left. The danish made him a son I could relate to again, like when he was married to Nicole, and the notion was so lovely it threw me off my game. In those few moments, he reminded me of Harold.
“Good coffee, Mom,” he even said before he showed his hand. “Hey, cat, get off the table. Great weather we’ve been having. I guess Al must be about ready to put the corn in, huh?”
“That he is. Ground’s dry enough now.”
“So are you doing okay money-wise? I mean I know you didn’t get the crop harvested after Dad died, and . . .” He trailed off, waiting for me to pick up the piece of yarn he was trailing and knit it into some information for him. Only I didn’t. I hate knitting.
I took a drink of my coffee, which was still almost as hot as I like it. The light in the room was quietly full, clear, unyielding—not the kind to make you blink—but direct and true, unwilling to soften small flaws of my housekeeping. A couple of random crumbs on the counter, whitish dried droplets of water on the window above the kitchen sink, a smeary sponge line where I’d wiped the kitchen table, a small spiderweb I can’t reach up in the corner next to the dish cupboard. In the same way, I could see the lines on my son’s face. The angry parentheses around his mouth from the arguments he won with Nicole, and the war he lost when she left, how it surprised and nearly killed him and he didn’t know it and might never. The grey-brown hollows under his eyes that must be the dried pools of Cody grief. I saw where he’d missed two spots when he shaved that morning, and how the collar of his tan shirt was slightly frayed. These scars of grief and failure put me in mind of my Harold, and I started to move my hand across the table to put it over his. Had it not been for that same expansive light, when I leaned into feeling oh my son, my son, and looked into his eyes, I’d never have caught how they hooded for an instant wh
en I didn’t answer about my finances, as if he were calculating what to say next.
I pulled my hand back.
“So, uh, Al mentioned you’re not putting all the land back in field corn.”
“Oh, did he.”
“Can’t figure why you’re not.”
“You or Al, you mean?”
“Uh, Al.”
“He shouldn’t worry. Doesn’t affect him.” I smiled at my son and took a sip from my cup. “How’s your coffee doing? Want me to heat it up for you?”
“Mom. No, my coffee’s fine. You’re putting in crazy stuff that won’t make money.”
“Oh my. Poor Al. I’ll have to have a talk with him. Have you heard when the repairs on the bridge over Three Mile Creek are starting? That’s going to be a bad detour.”
Gary’s neck was red. He scratched his arm, then the back of his head. He closed his eyes in a prolonged blink, then wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “The sign says the detour starts Friday. You couldn’t have missed it, it’s right—look, Mom. I’m glad you’re not putting corn in that field. That’s good.”
This was a new tack. I decided to hold steady. “Hmmm.”
“There’s no need to put crazy stuff in there, though. Just leave it empty. Leave it empty. Since you don’t need the income corn would have brought, well, don’t put anything in. Don’t lose money by putting in crazy stuff. Like Al says, I mean.”
“Hmmm.” I tried to read his eyes as I took another sip of my coffee, starting to cool and turning unpalatable. “I hate it when that bridge is out, don’t you? I wish they’d fix it right once and for all instead of all this stupid patchwork. Going all the way around something instead of straight to it just drives me nuts.”
“You should just leave the field empty. Al says.”
This is Gary’s way. He just keeps saying the same thing, as if to wear a rut in my brain that will come to seem familiar and I’ll start thinking it was my idea. That’s how he’s trying to save me with his new religion, too.