by Wingshooters
Charlie took me hunting with him and Uncle Pete over the strenuous objection of my grandmother. I don’t know whether she disapproved because of my gender, my age, or fear for my safety, but Charlie prevailed, as he always did. I still remember being shaken awake at four a.m., my grandfather already in his camouflage and hunting cap. If the game was pheasant, grouse, or ducks, the hat he wore was army green. Later in the season, when it was deer, he changed to fluorescent orange. I put on a smaller version of his hunting outfit, left over from my father’s childhood. While I was getting ready, Charlie gathered his ammunition and supplies. He’d take out the shotguns—his Remington Wingmaster and my Ithaca 66—and load them into the back of the car. He’d pack the food—roast beef sandwiches my grandmother had made the night before, canteens of water, a thermos full of coffee. Then we’d put Brett in the car and back down the driveway, pick up Uncle Pete—who often slept in the car—and drive through the pitch-black night, the dog whining with excitement until we’d reached our starting point for that week, twenty, thirty miles into the country. If we were hunting for birds, we’d go to one of the marshy areas east of town. For deer, we would work our way deep into the woods, although not to the makeshift deer stand that Charlie and his friends had built; he would never take me to a place where we might run into other, less careful hunters. We’d walk quickly but deliberately through the cold fall air, me taking two or three steps for every one of Charlie’s. The outfit I wore was more than twenty years old, but it felt unused because my father had only worn it once or twice. (It was bulky and utilitarian, made for function instead of looks—not like the form-fitting camouflage tops and girlish orange caps I see on young female hunters now, in California.) My father hated hunting—the blood and grit, the suffering of the animals, even the cold, dark mornings—and Charlie believed that part of the problem with Stewart, his failure to turn into a proper LeBeau, was that he hadn’t started hunting soon enough. By the time Stewart first went out into the woods, he was ten or eleven years old—and by then, he’d already been influenced by Helen and her womanly, book-reading ways.
I knew already that there was something very manly in holding a gun, in tracking and killing other living creatures. There was an exhilaration, a palpable tightening of the air, as the dog flushed pheasants, grouse, or ducks out of the tall grass, as the men tensed and fired their weapons. It was a heightened sense of excitement, the promise of possession and dominance, that I would have linked, had I been older, with the sexual. These men were never more alive than when they were just about to kill. When they shot something—a pheasant, a duck, or especially a deer; when they watched it struggle and die, there was no doubting their vitality or power. It was men at their purest, most primal state, the state of their highest fulfillment. Later, when they smiled into cameras with a string of captured birds, or stood together holding a buck, they were civilized again. They had assembled themselves for public consumption and the wilderness was gone from their eyes. But they loved those kinds of photographs, their conquest complete, and always brought a camera when they hunted. In so many of the old pictures I have of my grandfather, he’s holding something dead.
But there was more to those men than violence. They also had a warmth and openness that I never felt from women. In my family, it was the men who were the nurturers. They were the ones—my father included—who grinned widely when I did something funny, who bounced me on their knees, who ruffled my hair in affection. They were the ones who threw their arms around me and wrapped me up in bear hugs. It was Charlie and Pete who got angry when something happened to me at school; who held my hand when I was scared; who always seemed to welcome my presence. The women—my grandmother, my great-aunt Bertha, and even my mother, from what I remember—were more measured in their affections. Their nervousness, judgment, and frequent short scoldings always made me feel disapproved of, un-fitting. They never touched me in a way that wasn’t corrective. I don’t know if they were frustrated with their own circumscribed lives, but I do know they couldn’t imagine any other way of being. To my grandmother and great-aunt, the liberated women of the big cities, who worked corporate jobs or used child care or marched to demand equal rights, were as foreign and unknowable as the bowing, kimonoed women of Japan. They tried to bend and shape me—to fit the town, and to fit their image of what a young woman should do, which included boring things like cooking and sewing. But the men just let me be, and even their mundane tasks—like painting the house, or mowing the lawn—were more appealing to me, more active and exciting. To me, being a woman meant being limited, defined, and always stuck inside. Being a man meant having freedom, and I wanted that freedom. My grandfather was willing to give it to me. And even though he was disappointed in his own son and disapproving of his daughter-in-law, I knew that he was smitten with his grandchild. In several of the pictures I have from the time I lived in Deerhorn, my grandmother is looking into the camera. My grandfather is looking at me.
Charlie taught me how to really see and feel the world around me; there was so much I noticed and still notice because he revealed it. I remember, for instance, when I went out walking with Brett a few days after my grandfather and I sat out on the porch. A new letter had arrived that afternoon from my father, from Springfield, and he said he was coming home for Thanksgiving. He didn’t say how long he was staying, or if he was taking me back with him. But he was coming. My father was coming. And just the thought that he was on his way, especially now, when everything in school and in town was feeling so tense and strange, had filled me with such anticipation and joy that I couldn’t keep still.
I needed to move, to be free. So I rode out to the country and dumped the bike and walked with Brett through the woods. It was late October now, and each tree stood unembellished and bare with its leaves on the ground beneath it, like a woman who’d just stepped out of a colorful dress. We came around a stand of trees and entered a meadow with a small, dark pond in the middle. Right at the place where the land met the water was a small flock of Canada Geese. There were maybe thirty or forty of them, some in the water, some on land, sitting and resting or walking around, picking seeds and insects out of the grass.
Since the day we had seen the flock flying over the baseball field, I had read up on Canada Geese in the old encyclopedia my father had left in his attic room. I knew by now that the flocks not only traveled to the same place each year, but that they rested at the same spots along the way, like a family on a regular driving trip that always stops at familiar restaurants. And I also knew that, like the human family, the geese stopped more often when they were traveling with young ones, who couldn’t go for such long distances—sometimes six hundred miles a day—without more frequent breaks. Although apparently their noise and droppings made them a nuisance to some people, others scattered seeds on their land to attract them. I don’t know if that’s what was happening here, but these geese seemed plump and contented. As Brett and I drew nearer, the dozen or so birds that were still on the land waddled quickly, but without much concern, down into the water. The whole flock moved away from the edge of the shore and into the middle of the pond. This was because we were there—to avoid us—and yet the birds didn’t even bother to glance our way. They looked haughtily off in the other direction, as if our rudeness didn’t warrant acknowledgment.
I stopped to admire them as they swam. They were beautiful birds. They had sleek black heads and white markings that looked like scarves, coming all the way up to their cheeks. Their long, graceful necks spread gradually into their powerful gray-feathered bodies. Even Brett seemed to understand that they were something special, because he, like my grandfather, declined to hunt them. Rather than sprinting through the grass to flush them, as he would have with pheasants and ducks, he simply stood and watched. He looked up at me occasionally to take measure of what I was thinking, and then turned back to consider the geese, working the jowls that nature made soft to carry birds without damaging their flesh. My grandfather had said that the paren
ts migrated with their offspring, but by this time of year, I couldn’t tell which was which. They appeared identical, interdependent, no individual need usurping the whole.
But as majestic as they looked in the pond and on land, it couldn’t compare to what they looked like in the air. Their beautiful, shifting patterns, their throaty calls, were always new, and always exhilarating. Even now, when I see a flock of Canada Geese, I stop whatever I’m doing to admire them. They represent fall to me—the change, the loss, the arrival of a starker beauty. When they fly, a part of me flies with them.
School ended early the following Monday and we were all let out at lunchtime. I waited to leave Miss Anderson’s class until the first rush of kids was gone, so that the hallway would not be so crowded. As I made my way toward my locker, I saw Mr. Garrett, striding down the hall and whistling as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He was headed toward the teachers’ lounge with a brown paper bag in his hand, shoulders high, eyes looking straight ahead. As he came closer, I was afraid he would talk to me—something that would surely be noted by the other lingerers in the hallway—but the feeling was immediately followed, like a gunshot and its echo, by shame. We locked eyes as he approached and the tune he was whistling sailed up briefly into a higher octave. But then, like a coconspirator who knew to keep his partner safe, he winked and passed by without saying a word.
I went home and had lunch with my grandmother. She made sandwiches with the ham that was left over from the night before, and I snuck pieces to Brett whenever she wasn’t looking.
When I was halfway done she went back to her laundry, hanging linens and clothes on the clothesline that stretched across the yard, taking advantage of the Indian summer. After I finished eating I ventured out to help her. But then she went back inside to get more clothes-pins, and I heard her yell, “Brett!”
When I got there, Brett was licking his chops and the bottoms of his ears were coated in something greasy. I didn’t need to be told what had happened: he’d stolen a stick of butter off of the counter and had eaten the whole thing, and he was looking very pleased about it.
“Darn dog!” my grandmother yelled. “Michelle, you need to keep him under control!” So I shut him in my bedroom—he was so happy with himself that he didn’t even mind the confinement—and then left to avoid further scolding. Because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I walked uptown to look for my grandfather. I passed the grocery store where I’d seen the Garretts a few days earlier, crossed the railroad tracks that divided the near end of Buffalo Street from the main strip, and wandered into Jimmy’s Coffee Shop.
I stood still for a moment just inside the front door. Halfway down the long counter a lone man sat reading the paper, and the two waitresses chatted loudly by the register. In back, I could hear the clanging of dishes being washed from the lunchtime rush. Other than the man at the counter, Charlie and his friends were the only customers. They were sitting in the big corner booth that had seats wrapped around three sides of the table.
Charlie was in his usual corner spot, with Earl Watson and Uncle Pete on either side of him. Next to Earl was John Berger, a tall, rangy man who owned the largest construction company in the area. A young man was with them too, a thin fellow in his early twenties, who appeared to be the only one eating. Except for him, all the men were leaning forward, looking serious. But when I approached the table, my grandfather brightened visibly. “Hey there, Mikey,” he said. “No school today?”
I shook my head and managed to say that the teachers had a meeting. Then I stood in front of the table, not knowing what to do—there was no clear path to my grandfather and Earl and John Berger weren’t moving. Charlie hit Uncle Pete on the shoulder, who hit the young man, and they both piled out of the booth to let me scoot across the orange vinyl seat and sit beside my grandfather. He asked if I wanted a Coke, which I did; Lorraine, the middle-aged waitress, brought one over. The men resumed drinking coffee, but they seemed a bit restrained, not calm and casual as they usually did when they sat around this table.
And then it occurred to me that they’d been talking about the Garretts. In fact, this was probably where they talked about them most, their social gathering transformed into a kind of meeting. I had interrupted their discussion, and they were having trouble shifting to easier topics. Finally, though, my grandfather cleared his throat and gestured toward the new young man.
“This here’s John’s oldest boy, T.J.,” he said. “He did a couple of tours in ’Nam, and now he’s moving back home from Milwaukee.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “And this here is Mike, my only grandchild.” The young man looked up from his sandwich and nodded, but didn’t say a word. Despite the crew cut and the left-over military stiffness, he was unshaven and a bit bleary-eyed. I remembered what I’d heard my grandparents say about John Berger’s oldest son—he also had a thirteen-year-old son named Cody, as well as a nine-year-old daughter, Harriet. What they’d said was that T.J. had always been a bit wild, which had probably served him well in Vietnam. As a teenager, he’d gotten drunk and unruly enough that Ray Davis’s men had apparently had to escort him home on several unrecorded occasions. But he had straightened out, moved to Milwaukee for a while, and enlisted in the army, and now he had finally come home.
“He could’ve stayed in the big city,” said Earl now. “But the city couldn’t offer you nothing, son, that you couldn’t get here in Deerhorn, ain’t that right?”
“Nothing but a whole lot of trouble,” said T.J., taking a gulp of his Coke. Although he was on the skinny side, he had a certain physical ease I’ve always associated with men who use their bodies to work. And my impression was confirmed when John cleared his throat and said, “He’s going to come and work with me until he gets himself settled. He’s got a girl, you know, and they’re having a baby.”
There was a general murmur of approval and T.J. grinned widely, as if he’d accomplished something unusual. “That’s good, that’s good,” said Earl. “There’s nothing like being a father. It’ll change you, son. Put everything in your life in the right place.” There was a friendliness to his manner that I’d never seen before, a warmth he must have reserved for those he approved of. He took a sip of his coffee and asked, “So how was Vietnam? I’ll bet you burned up in those swamps. Did you kill yourself a whole bunch of gooks?”
I looked up at the men’s faces, surprised, but there was no reaction except for T.J.’s chuckle. “That was your war, Mr. Watson. What we had was Viet Cong. And yeah,” he smiled. “I did kill me a bunch of ’em.” And here I thought—although I couldn’t be sure—that he looked for a second at me.
“My years in the army were the best years of my life,” Earl said. “You were surrounded by good men, doing the country’s work, and you always knew exactly where you stood.”
“It’s still good, I guess,” said T.J., scratching his neck, “but things have changed since your time. Now, there’s no telling who you might get thrown in with. I mean, there was a lot of good country boys, but we had some sissy city boys, too. And a whole lot of niggers and spics.”
Again I looked for a reaction and again there was none. The men all nodded and shook their heads.
“They mix everyone up now, I guess,” his father said. “Throw the coloreds right in with the white men.”
“That happened in Korea, too,” Earl said. “But it’s gotten worse now, what with the army needing recruits, and all this garbage in the last few years about niggers and their rights. People don’t understand. You give a nigger a gun and let him fight, and pretty soon he starts to thinking he’s as good as a white man.”
Then Uncle Pete turned toward the window and said, “Funny you should say that. Look.”
We all followed where his finger was pointing and saw an older man walk by the coffee shop, holding a leash in his hand. It was Darius Gordon, the retired lawyer, farmer, and unofficial town historian who’d been a baseball hero when my grandfather was a boy. But I knew immediately why his appearance spark
ed Uncle Pete’s interest, and it wasn’t because of his youthful heroics or his knowledge of the town. It was because his middle son, Del—Dr. Del Gordon—was chief administrator of the Deerhorn Central Clinic.
T.J. Berger sprang up with more speed and force than I would have guessed his thin body could muster. His father stood up too, and then Earl, and my grandfather and Uncle Pete. They all walked to the door quickly and I followed closely behind; by the time I was outside, Earl had called Gordon’s name. The old man turned around and his dog turned too, a beautiful gray-ticked English setter. When the dog saw all the people, she drew herself up and growled softly. Gordon quieted her with a quick tug on her leash and a short, low, “Hup!”—and the dog licked her nose and sat down.
“Hello, Earl,” he said. “What can I do for you?” Now that all the men were standing together, I saw that Mr. Gordon was the tallest. He must have been eighty or eighty-five, but with his thick head of gray hair and upright posture, he looked and moved like a much younger man. He still hunted and fished, and since his wife had died, he spent his summers in a cabin next to Cortland Lake with its abundant supply of bluegill and crappies. When he reached up, quick, to save his hat from a gust of wind, you could still see the grace and fluidity that had made him, for four years, the second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds.