by Ann Pancake
“Look, Shea! Look!” I had hissed, excited to see her reaction, and Shea did look, but up at me. I gestured towards the horses, pushed Shea in their direction with my knee, and then she turned her eyes to them, but with no more interest than if they’d been a parked car.
Then, abruptly, she went rigid. Stared so intently for a full minute that later I imagined I could see the new circuit plowing through her brain. And, finally, she lunged, she barked, entranced, until I had to drag her away and out of their sight.
As we kept walking, Shea prancing and pulling, I understood: in those first minutes, Shea had not seen the horses at all. Even though the mares were moving a little, tails swishing, a fetlock cocked. Shea had not at first seen them because she had no shape in her brain to receive “horse.” So the horses, until her mind laid new track, did not exist.
I SPENT THE night near the Pittsburgh airport, slept poorly, woke at six, found I-79, and turned south. These Pennsylvania hills shorter, rounder, more pastoral, than the ones I remembered in West Virginia, and I hoped my remembering was right. In fifty miles, I passed no fewer than four billboards exalting natural gas, including one where solemn steelworkers photographed in 1950s black-and-white passed a metal baton to fully colorized, grinning hydrofrackers. Then I crossed the state line, and the land did get steeper, closer, but otherwise the place looked like nothing I remembered, these chain restaurants and gas stations, the strip malls hacked into hillsides. The edge of my first mountaintop-removal mine I glimpsed outside Morgantown. Mistook my first drilling rig, spearing through trees in the near distance, for a cell tower. West Virginia had billboard love songs to gas and coal both: “clean,” “keeping the lights on,” the fuel of patriots. The poorest state in the nation, I knew, the saddest too, they had studies confirming that.
I grubbed down into my own history for happier images. I found my child hand turning over rocks to flush crawdads, squeezing puffballs between my finger and thumb. I brought back me lodging my head into a hollow log to discover, finally, my dog’s new pups. But none of these, not even the puppies, returned fleshed, real, and I felt again the shame of absurdity I’d felt on the plane. That the past seven months were a fantasy I’d frothed up out of loneliness and idleness and the desperation to remedy despair, and on top of that, my noble-savaging of West Virginia’d made me waste time and money on a detour that would only despoil my childhood sense of the place I could have otherwise carried forever undefiled.
I left the interstate for a two-lane highway before I reached Charleston. My plan—and for now I was sticking to it—was to visit our old neighborhood tomorrow. Because the woods around that neighborhood were private, if they were still woods at all, today my destination was a state park my family had often visited. I didn’t know of any better place to place myself for the bone following.
The lone motel near the park was a Holiday Inn Express, its only trace of Appalachia the older clerk’s accent. The younger clerk spoke just like I did now. They allowed me an early check-in, and I stumbled into the noon darkness of a second-floor room, slung my suitcase on a bed, and jerked open the rubbery drapes. My view was a high ocher bank, the skinned end of a hill half-sacrificed to make a flat place for the building. I bent down, angled up my eyes. On the bank’s top, a brushy border of thick woods.
The approach to the park finally looked like something I’d known. The close-ranked deciduous trees, smaller than the ones out West, and at this highish altitude, still leafless in late March. The sensation of being girded by hills so close they couldn’t be directly seen. My mind slowed, my breathing did. Possibilities, first tingling in my arms then tiptoeing closer, crept back again. I pulled into a parking lot with a single other car, swung open my door, and stood up. And had to catch myself with both hands on the window top. The smell of the place. It’d near rolled me. A smell foreign to anything I’d scented as an adult—water on limestone? Appalachian dirt? acorn rot?—but one sniff. And I was eight years old again.
The first few steps felt like dream-walking. I turned a slow circle under the clouded sky. It all came back, everything in its place—the primitive elegance of the WPA stonework, the damp coolness of the restroom insides, the softball field, the split-rail fence—but miniaturized. Everything at half the scale my little girl memory had saved it, and I broke into a smile. I discovered in a wooden pocket on the shuttered concession stand a map. I chose the longest path.
It was paved at first and over-signed. I hurried deeper. The air, of course, was dryer than the Northwest, but somehow more dense. Stiller, but a stillness that had nothing to do with presence or absence of wind. The trail turned to dirt now, but it still felt too domesticated. Yet, somehow also the enchantment that I’d touched earlier darkened into eeriness here. Was it just the emptiness of the place on this weekday afternoon? The vacancy of the sky, the way the high clouds simply erased it? And with the exception of an occasional rhododendron, almost all the vegetation was still black and brown, white and gray, a sobering contrast to the Pacific Northwest’s winter-long green—salal and fir and fern—and for the first time, I saw the green as deceptive. This place told you. Look. Understand. Half the time, I am dead.
I walked faster to get ahead of my mind. I reached from my chest. But of course, I could not conjure it. The knowing, the following, never answered when asked. Yet another sign pointed to an overlook down a spur trail, and now I recalled it, the splintery roughness on my chest from the wooden rail topping the stone barrier wall. And then I was standing behind that wall again, the rail along my waist.
Soft-topped mountains bound me every way my eye could reach. Abruptly, my body remembered these mountains, too, remembered almost as sharp as it had remembered the smell. Mountains brooding, embracing. Radiant. Suffocant. I could see white water no wider than my two fingers in the gorge hundreds of feet under me, and between me and that river, two buzzards tilting, close enough it seemed I could reach out and graze their backs. Railroad tracks ran along a narrow wainscoting right above the river, hauling coal to power plants, I knew, and the single other man-made things in my view were the mammoth metal towers, stringing over the mountains through a clear-cut swath, giant skeletal metal men walking the electricity away. And how, I wondered, could this place feel more wild than the West when it had been so much more used, so much more lived in by European people? When it felt millennia tireder than land out West? Then I realized it was not wilder it felt. It was more primal. No. More elemental? Once again, I had no words to name what I knew.
I turned back to the main trail, tuned again for the following. When, without warning, I passed out of the woods and into a field. I stopped short, then choked out a laugh. I was right back at the concession stand, had walked the entire perimeter in twenty minutes. I’d completely overlooked that the scale of my little girl memory would include the hike, too. And, naturally, I understood now, this was a park more for picnicking than hiking, a working people’s park.
I walked the loop twice more. With each diminishing circuit, my hope for the following withered. By the fourth lap, I’d given up altogether; I barged on out of a stubbornness that verged on spite. But the last time I stepped into that brown field, my anger had been smothered by a disappointment so penetrating my own bones ached.
Evening was shading in. The car of the other park visitor, whom I’d never seen, was gone. I plodded to a picnic table and climbed onto its top. I pulled my notebook from my pack. The temperature was falling fast, and I huddled deeper into my jacket. I couldn’t help but recall the months-ago elk bone in my coat.
Bone, I scrawled at the top of a page. What’s left last. I paused. My intellect stealthed in. My gut pushed it back. Things supposed to be buried. Pushing up through graveyard grass. Maybe its meaning was simply that it did not mean. Maybe the meaning was emancipation from that. Feel it in your bones. Bred in the bone. Fishbone caught in your throat. My throat had stobbed up, the pressure that comes before tears. Desperation tears. Not finding ones.
I closed
my notebook. I thought again of the day in the canyon, the following to the elk bone. Me bereft of the following now cast into even more brilliant relief the memory of the following then. My sternum pulled to that leg loosed from its body, body loosed from spirit, bone drawn to bone. And next I knew, knew not with my mind, knew only because my mind had given up, that the point of the following was the feeling itself. There was no further, no deeper, understanding. That such a phenomenon could happen to one—that it had happened to me—was enough. Even if where I always landed was bone.
THE NEXT MORNING, I showered, grabbed a mealy bagel from the breakfast bar, and wheeled my suitcase to my car. During the night, I’d lectured myself to push the bone business aside; I needed to gird myself for this interview, face reality and the end of unemployment checks. As I lifted my bag into the trunk, my eyes snagged on that scabbed orange bank behind the motel. I looked away from its ruinedness, reached for the door handle instead. But unlocking the trunk had not freed the door, so I had to pull out the key, struggle with the button on that. And right then, light as a net. The knowing settled over me again.
I swiveled my head. The lot was empty except for me. I scanned the whole bank. I hesitated a long second, the keys still in my hand. Then I stuffed them into my jacket pocket and trotted to where the bank looked the least sheer. Then I was climbing it, using my hands, too. Shale crumbling under my shoes, me scrambling to get ahead of the ground’s dissolve, I was helped, I was held. And then I was at the top in sparse sharp grass, and past that and into woods.
Now the following filled me, I knew how to move. Now I was traveling in the flat elation, never mind that these woods were more beaten-down than the park’s, third-growth, fourth-growth, never mind the gash of fresh-dozed road I had to cross, never mind the NO TRESPASSING signs. I’d slipped out of mind joint and into soul joint, the buoyancy amplified because I’d abandoned all expectation of the following finding me here. And after a half-mile, it magneted me, I knew exactly where to turn. Into a thicket of scrubby, head-high pine.
Right away, the trees got too dense for me to burrow through them standing up. I wiggled on, bent at the waist, until I was forced down into a crawl. And spied, not five feet from my splayed fingers, a skull. Recognized next that the teeth were canine.
I could put it together in increments only, my eyes moving faster than my understanding could keep up. The long curve of spine, the serrated snake of tail, my sight widening to take in pelvis, to take in toes. The collar without tags.
I crouched paralyzed. Never had I found a full skeleton of a large animal, but worse than that, never had I found one of a pet. Grief for Shea vised my heart, grief for this dog’s suffering, grief for the suffering of anyone who had loved this dog. Grief for the possibility no one had. But, exactly concurrent with the grief, with the horror, simultaneous with those and just as potent, the transcendent gratitude. I gritted my teeth in revulsion, in confusion—the uncharged euphoria—I twisted but could not pull away. And yet embracing, containing, the entire welter: the love. The love came, too.
Then I was sprinting. Thrashing out of the pines, losing all sense of direction, scuttling over rocks and logs, I tore across the road-marred ridge and dropped to the mountain’s other side. Where I slipped, arms windmilling, on those decades-deep slick leaves, and fell, my cheek crushed into the acorn-rot smell. I rolled over, grabbed a spindly trunk, and hauled myself to my feet. Brushing away duff, I wheeled in what I thought was the motel direction and set off. But the following—my heart quivered—still held me. And the following tugged the other way.
I shook my head. Took two emphatic strides towards the car, then broke into a slow jog. But because the running was easier here, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful was this long flat where I’d landed, the trees here less recently timbered, the trunks bigger around and more space between them so it felt almost like a park. Despite myself, I couldn’t help savoring that oaky dirt odor, thick again, the one that returned me to eight years old. And suddenly I knew the following would not just leave me with that dead dog. To move in the following direction, I felt sure, must lead to some compensation, some antidote. Why else would it feel so right?
When I turned, I was drenched immediately in the grounded rapture. Immediately my legs, my back, they glided, so easy was the way. I slipped through sassafras and hickory, maple and beech, me throbbing with the radiance of that bench. The smell changed. A tiny warning flared inside me. I’d never scented, not with my nose, a bone before. But the following insisted, I did not slow. Then just downhill ahead of me, I spied the high vault of rib cage—the following tugging—I saw the buck’s head still in its skin, it still had a face. Me towed closer, the stench pulsing over me in ebb and flow of breeze, the deer’s fur dun-gray dead, the hide splotchy in riddled decay, the eye sockets empty—and I wrenched myself away and was sprinting again.
Straight down the mountain to get farthest fastest, I did not think, I did not fall. The white belly of a big bird winged out over me, and I heard other crashings, other things flushed, but I did not stop. Then I hit the bottom, hard in my knees, a hollow no wider than my body was long, and without breaking my pace, I swung in the direction I had to pray was the car. And this time, I nearly stepped on it. The body of a red-tail hawk.
I staggered back. The bird perfect except for its stripped-off head. I couldn’t pass. The corpse too fresh for odor, the torn flesh at the neck so clean it looked, I realized, then blanched, like something you could eat. I crept closer. The faultless yellow of the scaled feet, air-scoured. The hard grace of the muscled flanks. Her tail a red I’d never imagined, dusky red, an earth red, yet this red went in the sky. Something flashed in the leaf litter. I squinted. A glassy-backed beetle making for the meat. I was witnessing the very first one.
And wrapping me, the odd objective love. I stood over the hawk, my palms open at my sides, my cheeks sticky with tears. This time, I held. The revulsion and the tenderness, the grotesque and the gift. The numinous and the dismemberment, the terror, the bliss. My heart dilating to accommodate the paradox, the contraries interpenetrating, I felt them, until what they made together burst free of me, and I hovered inside of that. The hawk blurred below me, the ground around me, the trees, the sky. I didn’t end at my skin.
Eventually, softly, the knowing seeped away. I turned from the hawk. I gazed down the hollow. In the grounded peace the following left behind, I trusted I’d take the right way.
I’d walked maybe a quarter-mile when a mild unsettling prickled me. I stopped and lay my hand on a young sycamore trunk. Every realization I’d had about the bone following, I remembered, had always been temporary. Had always eventually been overturned. I pressed my whole body along the tree, but the uneasiness did not wane. I understood I would not lose anything that had already come to me. But I knew also I’d found no final word.
SAID
SAID THAT WHEN them boys jumped out, ours was already loaded, safety off, and cocked. Said nobody thought. Said who could of lived through that close of range, what the hell we gonna do now? Said it was the other two fired first, but ours aimed best, what the hell? Said only one of them got up afterwards, the least hurt dragging the most hurt away. Said it’ll be all over town by evening, all over the county by morning, what? Said get our goddamned story straight, that’s what they said.
They come off the mountain with their own boy in a purple-lipped panic. Eyes frogged out and reared back both, horse at a snake, and shiny with a crazy crying, at first I thought it was just a crazy crying, only later did I hear the guilt. And him a big boy, at least fifteen, you’d thought it was him’d got hit, but although it was him they wanted, he wasn’t so much as grazed. I just went on a-peeling my potatoes, licked my finger on a nick.
First I thought it was an accident, then I started hearing how on the other side it must of been planned. First I thought it was only our boy pulled the our-side trigger, then started hearing I was at least half wrong. Heat off that woodstove, heat off fourtee
n scared men, and already five different stories were fighting for what would be said. I was getting my taters going in some grease out a cup, when the oldest one, Franklin’s first son, Bunk, come up on my back. I shifted my head and I looked at him there. “Chester. Ches.” Was all he said.
Aside from Bunk, they brung me only because they could stand my cooking and was always short on people to drive, I knowed that. And because, at sixty-nine, I was still my father’s son, them theirs. And because they knowed I couldn’t talk good when I could talk at all, and most people thinks what comes out your mouth is one and the same with what runs in your head. Which works against you most of the time, but with them, it usually worked for. Hunting places around here have shrunkt up smaller every year, I needed fresh meat in my freezer. Now Bunk had slumped away from it, into a back-cracked chair between the cookstove and wall, and he dropped that gray chin in his hand.
I got to slicing my onions, the sharp of that odor a-stamping at theirs. Boots and blaze orange and gun cases and guns, they was a-raising a steam with what they thought should be said. Closest to my age were Franklin’s three sons—Bunk, Gordon, and Kenny Lee—and them three’d had five sons, and out of their son-in-laws, two who would hunt. And then that bunch had a whole slew of boys, Franklin’s great-grands, but only four with us now because a few was too little, and more only hunted on video screens. And some of them argued nasty, and some argued reasonable, and some argued crazy, and some argued half-sweet, but only Ryan, the one the other side’d been after, showed any hurt for them two shot kids. Kids, I heard them say, he knew from school. And other things. He was the youngest with us, Rusty’s son, Gordon’s grand, Franklin’s great, I’d never paid him much mind, him a-surlying around under stringy red hair, fingering spots on his face. But now he was carrying on like a just-cut calf, snotting and bawling where he curled on a cot, until one of em said, “Get out there in that johnnyhouse til you get hold yourself!” Then another one said, “No, just go out there sit in Uncle Kenny’s truck.” I poked the rings out my onions. Felt the thin curl of trigger in the middle of a finger. Before pot, before cocaine, before crack, oxycontin, and crystal metholatum . . . My daddy wasn’t a drinking man. Franklin, he wasn’t neither.