The Testament of Harold's Wife

by Lynne Hugo

  Will it surprise you to know that I found another trail camera? I did. Or it found me. And this time, I knew I hadn’t avoided the lens. So what could I do? The only thing I could. I took it down, opened its waterproof casing, took it back to the creek, and submerged it. I held it underwater for at least two minutes. Then I dried it. To do that part, I had to take off my shirt and use it as a towel. Later I thought about how I must have looked: a wrinkled old woman out in the woods in her bra and ratty blue seersucker pants using her shirt to dry a camera she’d stolen off a tree. But then I thought, Hey, it’s not stealing if it’s on my farm. And I was just wearing a bikini top a little past the season. I thought these things and decided I was either a perfectly fine, confident, strong woman or stark raving mad. I preferred the first explanation and went with it. Besides, I’m really not that wrinkled.

  I wiped the camera a last time and put it back on the tree exactly the way I’d found it. I left a little opening in the waterproofing, enough to make the hunter think he’d overlooked it when he set it up. Now I just had to hope for rain. It was enough, honestly, to make a body answer those prayer calls that were still coming every day.

  He’d taken the bait. He was scouting seriously, maybe deciding where to hide himself. I wondered if he was one to climb a tree to wait for the buck with the biggest rack. He’d be back. His scouting would have revealed abundant prey, no competition, and it was evident that NO HUNTING and PRIVATE PROPERTY signs were no obstacle. Was he going to wait for deer season, which was still weeks away?

  Even if I hadn’t overheard what his girlfriend? wife? had said, I decided it was unlikely. I couldn’t give him the chance to get any of the creatures I’d taken into my protection. It was time for me to do some hunting of my own.

  * * *

  “So exactly what is going on?” CarolSue demanded. I’d answered the phone when I saw it was her. We hadn’t talked in two days. I’d been exceptionally busy. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling. I know you’re not out in the garden twelve hours a day now. Something’s up and I’m not sure I’m getting the whole story.”

  Well, so what if she wasn’t? Before you judge me, think of this: how likely was she to approve of The Plan as it had, to my (accurate) way of thinking, naturally and necessarily evolved? Big fat chance! She’d get all bossy and threatening. I was really happy we didn’t have videovision, or whatever you call that kind of phone where you can see the person you’re talking to. I could just hear her. “Louisa, what are you doing cleaning that rifle? Why are you wearing Harold’s camouflage? Have you been doctoring your tea again? Do you realize it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon?” Blah blah blah. Why would I want to hear that? And I couldn’t give her something to worry about either, not with Charlie on her mind.

  “Heavens, sister. You know I tell you everything.” Everything I want you to know, I added under my breath, so it wasn’t strictly a lie. “I’m going to watch for that evil man, and the minute I see him on my property, I’ll call Gus and have him arrested. Now I just have to figure out where he leaves his truck to get onto my land. But you know, I read that hunters start a half hour before dawn and twilight when the deer are most active, so I figure if I get out and drive around at dawn and dusk I’m bound to see when he’s there. Then I just have to dash back to the house, call Gus, meet him there, and we catch him as he’s coming out.”

  “Well . . .” She sounded unconvinced. “My main worry about this is that you’ll get yourself shot. You’ll remember to wear the orange hat when you’re outside, just in case? You’ve got Harold’s old one, right? I mean, he doesn’t know your land. . . .”

  Now you can see the flaw in that right away, can’t you? If Larry Ellis saw me, wouldn’t he hightail it right out of there? Could I count on just waving a friendly Hi there, which he could claim he construed as permission-granting anyway, and moseying back to the house to call Gus? Sometimes I briefly lose confidence in my sister’s brain.

  “Of course I do. But I’m not sure I like how you’re implying that I resemble an enormous old buck. I haven’t put on that much weight.” I figured to distract her by teasing.

  “Don’t try to distract me. Do you have the hat?”

  “Of course I do. I told you that.” It was the absolute truth. I did have it. I winked at Marvelle, who looked away and yawned. She can be a drag sometimes. I added a bit of bourbon to her water, hoping to improve her participation. She’d been trying to cut down on her drinking, but I saw it was just making her grumpy. I set the bottle down on the kitchen table, sat, and patted my lap for her to jump up. Her response was to rise from the patch of sunlight she was lying in, stretch, and amble off in the opposite direction, tail high. Lord, how I missed having a dog. The minute The Plan was complete I was going to the shelter to get one; wouldn’t that just put Miss Marvelle in her place!

  “Louisa! Are you there? Louisa? Can you hear me?”

  “Oh! The line sort of went quiet for a minute. I can hear you now, though. What were you saying?”

  “Will you wear the hat? Listen, I’m all on board with getting Larry Ellis, but you can’t do anything stupid or dangerous, you hear me?”

  “I always hear you, sister. Always. How’s Charlie doing today?”

  “Napping again. It’s wearing him out.”

  “Wearing both of you out, I think.” And I’ll tell you the truth, right then I thought I should tell her that I was abandoning The Plan and getting on a plane to Atlanta the next day. But I didn’t. I was afraid she’d say, Yes, come now, and, as you know, The Plan was to finally do right by my husband (the way I hadn’t when he was alive and maybe could have saved him). It was a terrible flash: was I failing to do right by my sister, trading one disaster for another? No, I could do right by both of them in the end, I told myself. So I didn’t say it. Instead I just said, “You hangin’ on?”

  “Of course I am,” she said, too heartily, but I let myself take comfort in it.

  “So, Gus called me again. Asked me out.”

  “It took you long enough to tell me! You’re serious? What did you say?”

  “I sort of said yes.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I want him on my side, but I don’t want him around here, good grief, because it could scare Larry Ellis off. So I said I’d have dinner with him, but not this weekend because I was busy. Thank goodness he didn’t ask me what I’m doing. I said next weekend. I’m hoping I’ll have caught Larry Ellis by then and I won’t have to actually do it. Just to be safe, though, if I haven’t caught Larry, I’ll say I’m busy and make it sometime well after dark when he’d be out of my woods anyway.”

  “So old Gus is putting the moves on you? Or . . . wait a minute, are you putting them on him?” She finally laughed then and sounded like herself. “Who are you and what have you done with Louisa?”

  She was teasing but that almost made me put the phone down and cry. In a way I was whoring myself out so I could get revenge for Harold. I hoped that good man understood. But he’d expected me to understand suicide, when he knew how much I loved him. Sometimes love just doesn’t do a lot of good, does it? No matter how much we want it to save us all.

  So it had all come down to this. The next morning I got up at quarter to five. The girls were so surprised they must have thought old Bronson had come back to life. He never did wait for dawn. I made some tea and toast, ate one of the eggs I’d thought to hard-boil last night, and put on long johns. How I do feel the cold now! But over those went my jeans, and then Harold’s camouflage, rolled up, of course. An old brown shirt, and Harold’s jacket. Then, the heaviest socks I could fit under the sneakers. My barn boots were no good for hiking. If there were such a thing as bag ladies who went hunting, I’d be their poster child. CarolSue would faint. I considered putting on some eyeliner and mascara in case I died out in the woods and she had to claim my body—maybe it would make her feel like I’d listened to at least something she said—but then I realized Gary was technically my next of kin, and he�
�d be way too busy praying over my corpse to ever tell people Mom might have gone off her rocker, but she sure looked pretty when they found her body.

  I picked up the rifle. Strange, I remember how light it felt in my hands. Nothing felt quite real. You know how you can plan and plan for something, even dream about it, see it in your mind’s eye, and then when the day comes, it doesn’t seem like it could be. With my free hand, I stuffed a couple of granola bars in one oversize pocket and a bottle of water in the other. Uncomfortable; the water bounced against my thigh when I walked, so I took it back out. How do men do this stuff? I wondered. I opened the broom closet and made eye contact. “Wish me luck,” I said to Glitter Jesus. “You stay inside. You too, Marvelle.”

  First grey light above the trees. Black ground. The underbrush when I reach the deer trail that I’d figured was most likely to intersect with the road, the second trail camera and Rush Run—the area I’d guessed Larry would hunt first—was wet with condensation when it grabbed at me from every side as I picked my way through, trying to be soundless. Don’t step in a hole. Don’t trip, I kept telling myself. Nobody knows you’re out here. That’s good and that’s bad. I had to get out before dawn and hide.

  You see the perfection of The Plan, I hope. A hunting accident. My land was posted NO HUNTING, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hunt on it. It was, after all, my land. I would say I needed the meat. I’d say that if I’d been successful, I’d have called Gus to help me retrieve it. Was anyone going to charge this grieving widow who needed food with hunting out of season on her own land? Not in this county. Wouldn’t ever happen.

  Suddenly, something was over across my face. In a panic, I batted at the sheet, mostly stifling an instinctive scream. I tore at my face where it clung, sticky on my lips, eyelashes.

  Cobweb. Squatting to avoid the residue, as best I can squat, which is questionable on a good day, I opened my jacket and wiped my face with my pulled-up shirt. In the next twenty steps, there must have been ten more. Clearly, no one had been this way before me this morning. Would the absence of cobwebs reveal that I had? Or would Larry think it meant deer had been? Did he even use deer trails to make his way through the woods? I knew he’d have been looking for day beds and scrapes on trees, but because the rut wouldn’t be until mid-November, there wouldn’t be the mating activity yet that distracts deer from the human danger. I was basing so much on conjecture, but really, isn’t that the way we all make our way through life? This was just a more apparent enactment. What was there to do but go on? What is there ever to do but go on? If you’ve decided to go on, I mean.

  And I had. I did. I wasn’t going to let it all be for nothing.

  It took much longer than it had during the daytime when I could see clearly, and when I wasn’t trying to be silent. Even wearing my driving glasses, which I’d decided I better do. The leaves, so distinct and separate in daylight, especially as they had begun to vary into golds and burnt oranges, here and there even to flame toward red, were a monochromatic dark grey. There was smattered birdsong, probably cardinals if I recognized their call correctly, though nothing like their raucous morning joy in spring. These were the ones like me, who stayed, who wouldn’t give up and move on. “Be strong and brave,” I wanted to call up to them, but of course I didn’t.

  I noticed the birds and how the leaves were leeched of color because I was trying to be alert to everything: sound, movement, sign of animal or human life. The sky lightened in imperceptible immeasurable moments. I had so little time to pick a place, get into hiding. I took one wrong turn and had to double back when I realized there was no trail where I thought there was and I was thrashing into underbrush. As I’ve said, it was very hard to see, and I didn’t want to advertise with a flashlight, however small, though I admit it would have been a lot more efficient and, doubtless, safer.

  I reached the creek, and picked my way along the slanted rocky creekside about twenty yards to another deer trail. I wasn’t entirely positive it was the same trail; there were many, but I was pretty sure. The unobstructed sky over the water was a faint pink and the air like wet wool as I pulled it into my lungs. Rain coming. I had nearly made it to where I’d found the trail camera when I heard it. I had been going to go off the deer trail it was on and set up a blind. I had shifted my rifle to my left shoulder to let my right arm be rested and ready.

  From another part of the woods: gunfire. A shot. Three seconds. Another shot.

  I turned, trying to locate the source, but I couldn’t. The reverberation died quickly. My heart thudded and I leaned against a tree to stay upright, sick with failure. I couldn’t believe I’d so miscalculated where he’d be. The second shot must mean he’d gotten one of my deer.

  There was a mature hickory tree three feet from me and I reached for it to steady myself but couldn’t. The tears came slowly at first, it had been so long, and then harder and from some deeper, sadder place until I sank to the cold ground, the ground that holds my Harold and my Cody, and cried for everything I loved and couldn’t save. I was on my knees, my back hunched over in the ancient pose of prayer and supplication. But there was no prayer, nothing to beg for. There was only grief, raw and gasping as an open wound. That un-staunchable bleeding, the way a bullet kills.

  The rifle was lying a foot from my knees. I understood my Harold then, how the weight of failure was beyond what he could lift again, how he was broken and couldn’t stay on his feet. I forgave him. I reached for the rifle and turned it around to look directly into the muzzle, forgiving Harold. I leaned forward so the muzzle would be directly over my heart. It dug into my left breast, and I remembered my Harold’s mouth there when we made love. I forgave him.

  * * *

  Yes. You’re right. I didn’t do it. Not because I thought to spare Gary and CarolSue. It wasn’t because of anything but this: Larry Ellis wasn’t going to take one more life. Not on my watch. Not off my land. He’d taken my grandson; he’d taken my husband. There wouldn’t be any more deaths to hang on his wall. None. I don’t know how long I knelt there, sobbing on the damp mulch of trodden leaves after I let the rifle fall to the side. Long enough for my feet to go to sleep, for my pants and socks to get thoroughly wet and grimy and for me to stiffen up enough so that it was pretty much impossible to stand back up. Long enough to decide that Larry Ellis was going to die. Then I’d help CarolSue, and then, I’d see if I wanted to go on.

  I had to roll onto my backside and straighten my legs one at a time in front of myself, still shuddering with the end of my crying. This gave me a whole new thing to be furious about. By the time I put my glasses back on and got myself standing up again, I had worked myself into a frothing-at-the-mouth rage. It was also full daylight. Cloudy, but the greens, russets, yellows, and early reds splashes at the tops had appeared out of their silhouettes, the whole scene repainted. I folded from the waist to pick up the gun. I was sure it was too late to find the shooter, but I could try to find where he’d been.

  He wasn’t going to get another member of the Hawkins family; he wasn’t going to kill anything more. Not ever. Plans change, and mine just had. Larry Ellis never hunting again wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough now that I knew, really knew, the despair my Harold had felt.

  * * *

  The shots had seemed to come from west of me, the direction of the other trail camera, farther from the creek. I’d seen more deer in the area where I’d gone, but then I’d had the benefit of not having to sneak around, of leisure. And of no evil intent. Perhaps the deer knew. Or perhaps that’s a silly idea. Harold would say it was, but CarolSue would say, “Of course they can tell who’s not out to hurt them. Likewise, if he were unarmed for five minutes, even a small doe would plant one of her hoofs in that bastard’s forehead.”

  Anyway, maybe that’s where he’d been, maybe not, but I was too seething mad to go home so I went to look for whatever I could find. I was guessing it was about a half hour walk in the direction of the road, maybe forty minutes if I didn’t skirt the two front field
s and stayed in the woods. The sun broke through the clouds in slashes, warming and thickening the air into a watery cream soup. As I moved, rifle over my camouflaged shoulder, I thought about my Harold in that faraway war. As soon as you’re mad enough, you can carry a gun and shoot it at something alive. I haven’t gotten to understand how anyone does it without anger, like the trophy hunters, when nothing they care about is threatened.

  I was getting quite tired by the time I got to the area of the second trail camera. And I’d realized: maybe there were more, ones I hadn’t spotted. I told myself, Don’t think about that now. He wouldn’t necessarily hunt near the trail camera anyway. The camera might have made him think it wasn’t a good area. I knew it was, I knew it was full of deer, but what had he seen? I couldn’t know that.

  I was dizzy trying to second- and third-guess the unknowable, checking up in the trees in case he’d put up a blind, checking the ground for signs of disturbance, stopping to listen. I needed that water I hadn’t brought with me. (Who knew that crying was so dehydrating?) All I was running on then was anger and will.

  I found a declivity with flattened leaves that I was pretty sure had just been used as a day bed. There was fresh scat in it. I’d been quiet and downwind but maybe they’d caught my presence. Instinctively, I hid the rifle behind me and stood still. I didn’t want them to be afraid. “This is your refuge,” I whispered. Then I backed out in the opposite direction from how they’d run off.