Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

Have you ever seen what a deer looks like when it’s been stripped down and skinned? Same, pretty much, as with its skin on. When I was younger I’d always worried that it was the skin that kept everything together, you see? That if you took the skin off something then you’d just have a bag of guts spilling open. But it’s not like that. You take the skin off a deer and you’ve got something that looks just like a deer, except it’s red and shiny at the neck, the muscles running down to the shoulders, and then these great skeins of white fat marbling the rest of it.

  “I show you,” he said again. “Please, child.”

  “Okay.”

  It wasn’t so long after that you came.

  I don’t know why Mom left. She never said anything beforehand. She used to write in the evening, sometimes, when she was done minding me, when I was calm and settled. I remember that. When I was going through her old things afterward I found a piece of paper tucked into the pocket of one of her sweaters. This is what it said:

  I am standing by the

  standing by the window

  in light

  like it’s from a different place

  where I know myself better you.

  The moon scares me (?) sometimes

  as much as love

  the way the light is falling

  and you

  cutting it apart with your body.

  I don’t know why Mom left but I also don’t know how she came to be here. How she came to love Dad.

  I think, sometimes, that she used to be someone else before she came here.

  I think we were all someone else before we came here.

  “I show you,” Dad said to me. And there was something in his eyes.

  “Okay,” I said to him.

  He started with the forelegs, which he sawed through easily. He hoisted the deer on a gambrel hook, mounted an anchor beneath the tailbone, and tied a rope in a hangman’s noose so that it would continue to tighten. Then he tied the rope to the back of the truck.

  “Here,” he said. “Handle the truck.”

  “Dad. I don’t want to.”

  And he gave me a look that sliced through me as easily as a fillet knife.

  I took the keys and started up the truck. I didn’t know how fast to drive, but as soon as I slipped it into gear I could feel the resistance.

  “Good,” he said. “Easy, now. Just like that.”

  The engine was rumbling beneath me. The truck smelled of old cigarettes and sweat—a gamy sort of smell. I kept the pressure even on the accelerator. I didn’t want to look in the rear-view mirror, but I couldn’t help it. Dad was over top of the thing, working furiously with the knife, freeing the meat up underneath. Grunting. Mostly, I could see, it came away easily under the tension but sometimes the silverskin—the fatty film-like substance—would hold fast and he’d have to slice at it. He knew what he was doing. The cuts were short. The knife was sharp. He wiped sweat away with the back of his hand.

  I hated to see the deer slowly unravelling like that, but when it was finished, Dad smiled at me. A smile I had never quite seen before.

  “I seen you do it well,” he said.

  I felt a strange and unwanted pride rising up inside me as he clasped me on the shoulder. My cheeks were burning. But I felt. Happy.

  Later that night I couldn’t sleep. The image of the skin coming away haunted me. I had dreams—bad dreams—in which I felt Dad standing over top of me, working away at my skin with the knife, that same smile on his face.

  “There’s someone else inside of you,” he said. “I seen him. Hold still, child.”

  I woke up in a sweat, sick, wasn’t happy until I’d emptied the contents of my stomach into the sink.

  Do you ever try to remember what it was like before you were born? I read about that once. Some people can’t look at old pictures of their parents. It’s like death for them. Seeing the happy faces of people who live in a world where they don’t exist yet. Where maybe they’ll never exist yet.

  One day at school I saw Mads by the dogwoods, way off on the other side of the fence. You were with him. You must have climbed the fence or maybe taken the easy way farther down where it had been bent up and you could crawl under, if you wanted to. But I could see you on the other side of the fence, you and Mads. I could see you through the crisscrossed chain-link. I had always figured it might be Finn you’d go with, or Baldwin even. But I knew Mads by his red hair, even at the distance. And I would know you anywhere.

  The dogwood was blooming. It was white and perfect from the distance. That’s why you went with him, I imagine. To see the dogwood blossoms up close. Even now I imagine what it would have been like to lie underneath the dogwood tree like it was one of those heavy clouds waiting to lay a blanket of snow on us both.

  Or else maybe he had caught you. That’s what scared me most. Maybe he had found a way to snare you.

  I don’t think you saw me.

  After Mom left, the house smelled different. It breathed different. The air moved in and out of the rooms with a different sound, as if it was scraping underneath the doors now, as if it wanted to go with her but it couldn’t because she was already gone.

  Dad didn’t know what to do with me. I had been her child. I didn’t settle easily anymore, and he had a host of new responsibilities. The first time I saw Dad with his hands in the soapy water, fumbling with the breakfast dishes, I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was someone else. I thought Dad would never do that. But there he was, dirt-crusted sleeves rolled back past his elbows, taking the dishes out one by one. The soap made a perfect, slick rainbow, and I thought it was beautiful, the way he was there, washing the dishes like that. Like he was afraid they’d break apart in his hands.

  “Bring me the dishes, Anna,” he said.

  But I wouldn’t. They were Mom’s dishes.

  And then there was that day that Dad brought the deer home. I was older then. I hadn’t met you yet, but when I saw it I knew I was going to meet you, I don’t know how. Sometimes you just know things. I felt something new breathing inside of me, and it was like the way that it was just before Mom left, because I knew that was coming too. Everything she did became so gentle. So precise. The way she’d stroke my hair down.

  Dad was that careful when he took down the deer, and he slid the skin off it.

  I don’t think Dad knew about the thing Mom had told me.

  It was the week after that you came.

  You had hair so fine that it clung in all sorts of shapes to your sweater. You weren’t used to how dry it could get here in the winter, the cold snaps. Your voice sounded different than everyone else’s voice because we had all learned how to speak together, and it was only when I heard you speak that I realized there was a different way to do it. That words could come out differently if you let them. If you learned how somewhere else.

  You laughed at different times than everyone else did. I didn’t mind. I liked to hear you laugh even if it was when you shouldn’t laugh. And you didn’t know the things we all knew, like what to do if you ever saw a bear, how you shouldn’t use perfume, even in your shampoo, because of the way it could attract animals.

  That meant the first day you were at school Britta didn’t like you, because you smelled so nice and your hair was so much finer than hers. It took a while before she left you alone. That must have made it hard for you. You must have been very lonely in those early days.

  I wanted to say something to you in the beginning. Oh, my hands would shake when you walked by, and my body would get flushed with the heat of you sitting next to me, sometimes, if it happened that way. And remember the first time I did say something? You laughed. I don’t remember what it was that I said, but it made you laugh.

  “Anna,” you said. “Oh, Anna!”

  That was good, but I hadn’t meant to make you laugh then. Even if it was nice to hear you laughing. Britta didn’t laugh though. And, later
on, she taught you what things were funny and what things weren’t funny, and so you didn’t laugh so much after that.

  It was hard, that year. It was hard to have someone like you so close to me. I never knew what to do with myself. It was like another person had jumped into my skin.

  I think Mads might have been holding your hand. Under the dogwood. I think I might have seen him kiss you.

  Was that his mistake? The first one?

  When Mom taught me that rhyme about the steeple her hands were very soft. I always wondered if maybe your hands would feel like that. Mads had hands that were rough from the work with the lines and from the few times that someone in the camp let him use the axe. I think Dad taught him how to do it, but it might have been one of the other men. Baldwin’s father, maybe, or Britta’s. I had never used the axe before. But Dad took me out to the camps once so I would see what they were like. I don’t know what I thought it would be like. It was men drinking coffee from old thermoses. Some of them worked the big trucks that would haul the lumber out.

  But I could see the way they looked at me. They did not want me there. Not these men. These boys who would be men. I made them nervous. They did not chatter around me. They kept their tongues.

  Dad showed me one of the trails that he’d cleared to a new patch of wood, the ones they’d maybe be starting on soon, he told me.

  “This is mine,” he said. “I cleared the way myself. They will all follow after me.”

  He was proud of the trail. He was proud of the trees.

  I tried to imagine him roped in by harness to the top of one of those trees, stripping away the branches so that it would fall cleanly. It was so high up. I told him that, and he said he was never scared when he was up there.

  “The ropes will hold me,” he said. “I won’t fall.”

  “But someone else fell.”

  “Mebbe. But it won’t be me,” he said. “Not me. I know the trees too well for that. It’s only the young ’uns that fall. The crazy ones. Or stupid. They don’t check the equipment first. I seen them at it.”

  It was the longest speech I had heard from him in years.

  “What about Mads?” I asked him. “When will he become a high-rigger?” Mads had been telling us that’s what he was going to do.

  Dad chewed on the inside of his cheek a little. His beard was just starting to grow in salt and pepper, the beginnings of an old man’s beard.

  “He won’t,” he said. “Mads? No. He’s a good boy, mebbe, but he won’t be a high-rigger.” And he looked at me. It was this strange look. Like he wondered who I was. What I had heard.

  There were secrets among the men in the camp.

  “Okay,” I said, “maybe I’ll become a high-rigger.”

  And Dad just stared at me. He stared. And then he shook his head. It was slow the way he shook his head and something made me think of him washing those dishes back then, the way he set them down so carefully even though they’d already been chipped in small places before.

  “No,” he said at last.

  “Why?” I asked him. I thought of the men in the camp. I hated those men. I hated their stares. “Maybe I could do it.”

  But he didn’t say anything else and he took me back to the camp, then, away from the place he’d started to lay out for himself.

  He told Mads to take me home that evening, and even though I could tell Mads wanted to stay out with the men longer. When the coffee changed to whiskey or mash then it would be a different sort of evening. I was ashamed because I didn’t know the way. Dad walked these roads every day to work, and Mads did too, but I didn’t know them like they knew them, and, besides, it could be dangerous at night.

  Mads was an inch taller than me. His shoulders were broad. I could imagine the muscles knotted and hard beneath his shirt. His legs were longer and I had to hurry to keep up with him. He wasn’t resentful, though, about having to go back. At least he didn’t show it. He was kind. Polite. A bit shy even the way men sometimes are around me ever since I filled out. That’s what Dad called it. Filling out. But eventually we got to talking. I asked him a bit about what it was like to work with the other men, and he said he learned a lot about drinking and swearing and other things besides.

  “What other things?” I asked. He didn’t want to talk about it at first, and so we walked a bit longer. The night was starting to settle like a blanket around us, but Mads wasn’t worried, he knew the way.

  “It’s like this,” Mads said after I had pestered him for a while. “There’s things the men seen.”

  “What things?” I asked again.

  He made a noise in the back of his throat. And when he looked at me there was something I didn’t expect to see. Helplessness. He looked trapped.

  “There was this time,” he said. I didn’t know if he was going to keep going, but he did.

  “There was this time and I was in the woods near that clearing that Jon, I mean, your father was out at. I was just bringing him the coffee but then I seen something in the woods. I know not to go wandering because of the animals and such, but I did anyway, and I seen something.” His voice changed a little, saying the words the way Dad might have said them, not the way we learned at school.

  “What did you find?” I asked. He took a step closer to me. I could smell the sweat of him. The dark, burnished tang of it. And for the first time since we had left camp I was afraid.

  “It was just this old deer hide. Like someone had been hunting, even though you’re not supposed to near the camp, and just left it out in a pile after the field dressing, all slick with blood on one side. I thought I’d take a look. You know, it’s not good to leave something bloody like that out in bear country. And you know, there was a hole in it, just there. A bullet hole. Just next to the heart. I figured whoever’d made it did a pretty good job of things up until that point. But then.”

  I didn’t want to know. I wanted him to stop.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this.” He looked at me, and I could see some part of him did want to tell me. Some part of him was hungry to tell me his secret.

  “Please,” I said. No, I thought. Do not tell me this.

  “Well.”

  “Please,” I said again.

  “I was feeling around this hole with my finger and it didn’t feel like a hole. It just felt . . . soft. Warm. I don’t know. Like putting your hand into warm water. The softest, sweetest thing I’d ever felt.

  “Oh.” He was standing so close to me.

  “So I took out my, uh, thing. And. I put it in there.”

  “In where?”

  “In the hole. And. I don’t know. It just felt so good. So I pushed and I pushed and I pushed and it was the best thing in the world, like nothing else. Like nothing else I’ve ever felt.” The words came tumbling out of him in a rush. He couldn’t look at me, and then, all of a sudden, he did: his eyes were round and terrified, but full of something else too—desire, a kind of desire that scared me.

  “Oh,” I said again. I didn’t want to look at Mads then. I didn’t want to look at the bulge of his thing in his pants. But I could feel the heat coming off him.

  “I left it there in the woods,” he said after a bit. “But the men. Sometimes when they get to drinking, they talk about stuff like that. The things they seen in the woods. They seen all kinds of crazy things, and some of it. Some of it is like that.”

  It seemed very dark then, and even though Mads frightened me, I was glad he was there with me. I was glad I was not at the camp. The camp where men told stories like that.

  “What does my dad say?”

  “Oh,” said Mads. “Your father doesn’t talk about stuff like that.”

  And then he turned away from me. Like he had realized something.

  “Let me get you home now, Anna,” he said.

  I think you knew I loved you from the very first moment.<
br />
  Mom never liked to use the word “love.” She’d write it out in poems sometimes, or in other things, but then she’d always have to cross it out.

  But I think it is love. What I have. I think this is what love is like.

  I remember, when I was older, the first time you let me hold your hand. I asked you about kissing Mads underneath the dogwood and you laughed at that. You thought it was so funny. You told me you had just been waiting, really. You were waiting for me to lie down beside you.

  I was so awkward. You said I should have found my way to you sooner.

  I remember the first time you let me slide the sweater off your shivering body. It was all pink underneath the way I’d always imagined it would be. The little goose pimples that I tried to smooth away, and the way that made you laugh because they’d just come back again, and you didn’t mind them anyway.

  Dad never talked much after Mads died.

  It was just the kind of thing that happened. Freak conditions. Nobody knew what he had been doing so far from the skidder trails. But the cold out here can kill a man if it catches him after dark. If it catches him in the woods, lost, too far from the paths he knows. Or maybe Mads didn’t want to find his way home. There were things out there, he had told me. I had seen the look in his eyes. I know what that feeling is.

  Sometimes you don’t want to come home.

  Or you want to stay lost.

  Sometimes you are willing to lose yourself.

  I still love to listen to you laughing.

  My dad won’t speak of it. What happened to Mads. No one will speak of it.

  I love the way sometimes you still don’t know the right things to laugh at. I love it when you get it wrong and you don’t mind how people might stare at you because they know you come from somewhere else where other things are funny and people say things differently.

  Is this how it will always be between us?