by Tom Bouman
“I can shoot,” she said cautiously. “We hunted duck, quail, shot clay pigeons. Soda cans with a .22. But with something as big and soulful as a deer . . . I’ve never tried. I’m not sure I’d want to.”
“There are a dozen ways to go worse than a quick bullet,” I assured her. “Starvation, chronic wasting, coyotes . . .” Julie looked down at her dinner in dismay. “And it’s an ancient part of life,” I continued, veering away from biology. “The hunt is the oldest thing there is. It brings us close to the soul of the animal, like you say. You wouldn’t have to shoot a thing to see that.” Not even Polly had gone hunting with me. I’d kept her at bay, probably, saving for myself the wild, cold dawns in communion with my fellow beasts. The soul of the animal is the soul of the whole world. The life of the world. Most humans had a hard time seeing that. So I surprised myself when I said to Julie, “If you ever do want to go out in the field, let me know.”
When our table had been cleared, and the check split and paid, Ed suggested a bonfire at their place, as they had to relieve their babysitter.
In the flickering firelight on the Brennans’ lawn, Julie stayed close to my side, not touching me, but within range. We kept an easy silence, lulled by the fire. She yawned, then backpedaled out of the fire’s range to view the stars. I fought the impulse to follow.
A couple days later we were digging through the splinters of a collapsed barn outside Owego, New York. There were a few good timbers and many more rotten ones half buried in animal dung. The days had shortened, and I could sense Ed’s anxiety build as the year ticked forward.
That weekend I’d driven up to see Ed in his shop, and waited for him to finish a phone call, seeing disappointment on his face. He’d hung up, turned to me, and said, “We’re in trouble.” He grabbed a scratch awl off of the workbench and stalked back outside. Then, almost gently, he’d plunged the awl three inches into a section of timber from the big Bradford County barn. Then another, and another. “Rot. They’re all gone,” he said.
“You’ll find something else,” I said.
“No time. Everywhere I look, rot!” He stomped back into his workshop, shoulders hunched, and picked up the phone. There was a negative to Ed’s vision, of his faith in work and works to improve the world: total Armageddon. If he couldn’t find the timbers to get Willard’s studio done by the deadline, he stood to lose not only the five percent bonus for timely completion, but also his break-even number, his future contracts, his reputation. Nobody understood his work or why it had to take so long, everybody just used the amateurs because nobody understood landscape, he had been born in the wrong century, all would be ruined. Or it’d be fine, I tried to tell him.
Anyway, we were scrambling now to fill out the frame with new material. Ed had asked me not to reveal the trouble to Julie, so of course I hadn’t mentioned it. She worked gamely with us through the bracing nightfall, digging deeper into the pile until we couldn’t see what was under our feet.
Some of us stopped at an Owego bar called the John Barleycorn for supper and beers. I only went because. One by one, the guys made exits to cross the state line into Pennsylvania; Ed was among the last to leave, gazing longingly in Miss Julie’s direction, but I outlasted him. Only she and I were left of the crew, elbow-to-elbow at the bar. As we sucked down our final pints, she reached into her pocket and slid something across to me. Lifting her hand, she revealed a rectangle of yellow plastic: a hunting license.
THE THING about hunting deer is, there’s no sense in going unless you are going to beat the sun. It’s the dawn that plugs you right into the Oversoul, into the earth’s systems, to where you can understand what’s around you. We could’ve done a night stand, but I wanted to show Julie the morning, where you almost don’t need a rifle. Almost.
But she lived more than thirty minutes away from me, in Fitzmorris. She told me straight she wasn’t going to get up that early, not on her own, but could she stay over at my place the night before? That way we wouldn’t lose any time with her getting up and driving all the way to me. We made plans for her to stay over Friday night and go into the field Saturday morning, and we parted ways from the John Barleycorn in all enthusiasm. In the sober light of the next couple days, neither of us backed out.
Friday: After a supper of homemade ravioli made by Julie with a pumpkin from her patch, we sat on my couch with glasses of wine. The space between her knee and my leg was competing with the TV, which was tuned to a singing contest that Miss Julie could not miss: she’d seen too much to turn back now. The music said almost nothing to me, so to the extent I had any skin in the game, it was because of the stories. Between songs, one contestant cried for a lost brother, one had struggled through an inner city childhood, sustained by faith in Jesus. One had lost over sixty pounds. Again, Jesus. I don’t watch very much television because it gives me the feeling of life slipping by unseen. If I’d had the place to myself, I’d have run scales on the fiddle, maybe tried some tunes, maybe thought my thoughts, maybe read, maybe watched one of my movies over again. I felt a heavy silence. If I was somebody else I’d have had more to say.
I got up to go to the john, and when I came back she was standing, peering at a framed photograph of my wife Polly and me in camping gear, a huge western vista behind us. You could see the wind in her hair, Polly’s. This was the problem with my living room—Polly’s bodhran perched behind a lamp in the corner, the photographs, the hat she’d knitted me hung in a place of honor on the back of a chair.
Polly Coyne had been my constant companion, at least in my mind, for many years. Most of my adult life. From the moment I’d met her in the Wind River Range, through my first return to Pennsylvania and a dreary year of training academy in Allentown, through a sloggy time of tree service with my uncle in Bradford County after finding no police jobs anywhere I wanted to live. A boyfriend of Polly’s and a girlfriend of mine in the way, letters and late-night phone calls, my own reluctance to leave the Pennsylvania hills—I’d hardly been anywhere else. A confusing time where we lost touch. I worked and saved what I could. Always, the thrill of meeting her that one summer stayed with me. And it was that same feeling that had faded to where I almost couldn’t get back to it now. It would almost—almost—be easier if I could forget.
Aunt Medbh’s guest room came furnished with a cot-sized bed from the Great Depression, a cheap pine dresser from the eighties, and a closet full of rolls of crumbling fabric where the door didn’t close all the way. I had wrung my hands over the sleeping arrangement, and decided that it’d come off weird, not gallant, to offer my own bedroom and full-sized, twenty-first century bed. So that morning I’d dusted, swept bunnies out from under the guest bed, vacuumed, washed the sheets and quilts, kept the windows open, boiled apples and cinnamon sticks on the stove and then left the pot in the room all day, repurposed a milking stool and a lamp from the living room as a bedside table, and hung a cross-stitch done by my mother in a Currier and Ives style decades ago.
At bedtime, Julie and I stood in the doorway. “Cute,” she said.
The upstairs bathroom was at the end of the hall, not far from my room, and I could hear more than I’d expected as she brushed her teeth and washed her face. I lay on top of my covers, fully clothed with my boots on. She tapped on my doorframe and stepped in, wearing sweats and a tank top that had rolled a little bit up over part of her hip. She looked around at my room and its newly clean floor, the bare walls, the blue hospital blankets that I’d favored since boyhood.
“All right, we’re doing this. Four-thirty wake-up. But I never go to bed this early.”
“No?” It was nearly ten-thirty. “What do you do all night?”
“I talk to my plants. So this is how you sleep, in your clothes, like Dracula?”
“Ha ha, no.” I slept naked, like everybody.
“Good night, then. I like this old house. It’s very you. But I’m leaving my door open and can we have the hall light on? I don’t want Aunt Medbh sneaking up on me.”
I s
uppose we both lay awake for a while, yet four-thirty seemed to arrive about five minutes after she went to her room.
We stepped outside in darkness, Julie clutching my .243 by the stock and shivering white breath. I had my .270. The trail through the field was silent, but in the woods we crunched brittle leaves on our way to my go-to spot, a crag at the base of a ridge that faced a clearing to the east. Black trees marked where a creek went through the field. The air was perfectly still, and we each sat against a tree trunk and waited for the sun.
Sunrise will push air west. The faintest breeze came just before the first gray light added depth to the landscape. Julie reached out and clasped my wrist. I looked, she cocked her head south of us. We waited; millimeter by millimeter I turned my head to see what was coming. Climbing the ridge behind us was a line of deer, six or eight yearlings led by two does. Julie had heard them and I had not. They walked without fear, dumb and incurious, until they crossed our downwind, snuffed, and bolted. In their commotion I turned my head back around, just as the sun gained the opposite ridge and caught the frost in the grass, pooling golden light in the clearing and reaching into the woods. I snuck a look at Miss Julie: she saw it too.
The temptation is to move. If nothing comes our way, we’re hardwired to think we can stalk game to where it is. No. But with nobody driving, Julie and I were relying on luck just sitting there. I kept us in the same spot as long as I felt she could stand it, but she was shivering, so up we got, shook the cold out, and began our slow way back. I took her the long way, on a four-wheeler trail that passed by a grove of red pine. We took a seat on a bank of moss behind some rattling beech scrub and peered into the dark. Julie sat on my left. The slow, stately pace of a lone buck coming toward us. The world crowded in to my vision from all sides, telling me now, now, now, here it comes. The cold air hovered in front of my face, thick. The buck was to Julie’s side, it would cross the trail any moment; she raised her rifle and the animal streaked into the woods and gone. It took effort to listen to my own good sense and head back to the house for Miss Julie’s sake.
Back in the kitchen, I put on the kettle, and my hands buzzed. My blood was up and I tried to contain myself.
“Holy shit, man,” Julie said, tearing off her jacket. “That was . . .” She shook her head, searching for words. “The real thing.” She folded herself into me to get warm, and the next thing I knew we were pawing at each other like bears, right there in the kitchen.
MID-DECEMBER, AND we were socked in under two feet of snow that had come down over less than a day and night. After a melt and another freeze, icicles grew all the way down from my porch roof in a sheet. In the morning, Julie and I were at my place, and neither one of us planned to go anywhere until we were toned out. We both would be. Our uniforms waited upstairs. Until then, we would enjoy a blizzard like normal people. I’d made coffee and we had some ham and eggs going in the kitchen. Our sleepovers had become something of a cold war, in that each one’s home was about half an hour from the others’ work—mine in Wild Thyme, hers in Fitzmorris. Clothes and necessities had traveled back and forth across Holebrook County to lodge either in her white Victorian cottage in Fitzmorris or my creaky hilltop farmhouse.
I left Miss Julie reading a book at the kitchen table and went out barefoot to the porch to collect firewood. The snow on my skin was a jolt that cut through the beery fog of the night before. I stoked the stove, then put on my country slippers, hat, and coat, dug a path to our cars, pulled the rider/mower out of the shed, and plowed what I could of the driveway. When I came back I caught Julie snooping in the living room again. Winter had made Polly’s life, the nothing that remained of it here in the farmhouse, an intimate companion. A too-sweet, too-heavy breath hanging in the air, a half-heard pleasantry said in the next room, waiting for an answer.
Julie smiled and said, “You two look very happy.”
“Yup.”
“She has a kind face.”
“She was,” I said.
“I like that.” She placed a hand on my arm. “You must miss her.”
“Come on.” I tried to smile, too late, and it didn’t work.
“I just wish you would talk about it,” she said.
“Please. I don’t need to.”
“It’s not for you,” she said. “I’m trying to get a look at the competition.”
That brought me up short. “Dead people don’t put up much of a fight,” I said.
She sat on the couch and said, “That’s what you think.”
Julie’s point was—and I heard about it at length—that if I included Polly in my life openly, then Julie could share it, this unreachable part of my self when I was happiest and maybe the most myself that I ever was.
“I’m still an outsider,” she said. “I can only guess. I want to know.”
You want to put Polly in her place, I thought to myself and didn’t say. I saw the sense but I did not want to share. I wasn’t ready, and I hated being asked. Then and there I decided to box up and stash the things. If only she knew what it took to reopen the box in the first place—everything in that room, Polly’s parents had shipped to me in one package once they’d found where I was. It had been kind of them, but I didn’t want to look. Eventually I made myself, and it hurt. And now Polly was going back in that exact same box, up in the attic. I’d have to talk to her about it. She was mine, always would be.
Julie watched as, without a word, I collected and boxed everything of my wife’s that was still downstairs. I was angry all out of proportion, but I couldn’t stop.
“Henry,” she said, and decided to leave it alone.
My radio toned one high, two low. A gas station’s alarm had been tripped. The place was almost to Airy Township. I got dressed while Julie lay on the couch in her pajamas and slippers, her face hidden in a book. She was gone when I returned in the afternoon, and her stuff was too.
THE SNOW hung on a few days, and then it snowed some more. I figured I might as well just stay in the station during working hours, as nobody was going anywhere by car anyway unless the township building was clear. Big John Kozlowski was plowing overtime for the people, and even the Sovereign Individual took a shift behind the wheel. Fitzmorris was in better shape than Wild Thyme, but Julie felt she should stay there until the blizzard passed; many old-timers got trigger-happy for an ambulance when they felt trapped. All except one: I’d had to travel to the edge of the county to check on an aging pedophile yellowed by bile duct cancer who had missed his Megan’s Law check-in. You could understand it, given the conditions. People had been civil and full of the can-do spirit, apart from the gas station burglary a couple days back. Junk food and soda only. Whoever it was had smashed the glass doors easy enough, but couldn’t get into the register, much less the safe. A two-car MVA where one car had flipped and the driver ran, leaving his buddy in the passenger seat. I’d followed the driver’s tracks and found him shivering on the roadside. Both passenger and driver of the flipped car tested positive for heroin. That to deal with, and the usual trespassing calls on snowmobilers.
The fourth day of blizzard had come down over us like a gray-and-white coma. The daylight didn’t change at all from one hour to the next. It could have been night, or morning, or the ashes of a long-dead fire in some dimension beyond space and time. How long until I could eat my sandwich? My cell phone beeped with a text, and I stared at the name there, and my heart did a clumsy little dance because it thought nobody was looking. I got in the truck.
Shelly Bray had almost made it down the driveway from her horse farm to Route 189, almost but not quite, and she stood there on the packed snow beside a ten-foot moving truck whose right front tire had buried itself in a three-foot berm of snow, while the rest of it sat diagonal across the entire width of the driveway like an old dog. On Shelly’s head was a pointy cable-knit hat, jaunty and out of place for the occasion. She hugged me and said thank god I was there.
“It had to be today?” I said.
“Court order,” s
he said. “I can’t drag it out any more. I wouldn’t want to. He was going to sell my shit online.”
“You don’t have anyone to help?”
“I have you,” she said.
I knew what would happen. I did it anyway. We got to work getting the truck unstuck. At one point, her husband Josh appeared some forty feet up on the driveway, a slight figure in sunglasses and a hat, his coat weighed down with what I was pretty sure was a handgun. As Shelly and I shoved at the front grille, I muttered to her, “Should I be here?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Should I talk to him?” I said.
“And say what? Trust me. It doesn’t matter.”
Maybe not to her. Josh reached into his coat pocket. My hand crept toward my belt. Josh produced a little silver camera, took several photographs of us, turned his back, and left.
With a couple sheets of cardboard and some main force, we got the truck pointed toward Binghamton, where Shelly had taken an apartment near downtown. She asked me to follow her and I did. All the way in, I steeled myself against what was coming. All the way back and forth from the truck, through the falling snow, through the lobby of a massive Front Street building intended as low-cost housing for the elderly, into the elevator, and down a long hallway with door after door leading to tiny apartments just like hers where the old folks watched, and into number 11F.
When the last box was stacked in her new home I said, “Well.”
Shelly cut me off. “You need to hear this.”
We faced each other across a small patch of empty floor near a picture window. Below, if I could’ve seen through the snow, the Chenango River was crashing into the Susquehanna under a jagged field of ice. Snow that once clung to me had melted and I could hear it tock-tock onto the floor.
“Take off your hat, at least,” she said.
I did. My glasses were fogged and I unzipped my jacket to find a piece of shirt to wipe them. “This isn’t how I pictured you,” I said, meaning the apartment.