by Jon E. Lewis
In the late mornings and early afternoons, I’d sit by the waterfall and eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’d see the same magic sights: bull moose, their shovel antlers in velvet, stepping over fallen, rotting logs; calypso orchids sprouting along the trail, glistening and nodding. But it felt, too, as if the woods were a vessel, filling up with some substance of which the woods could hold only so much, and when the forest had absorbed all it could, when no more could be held, things would change.
Zim and Quentin came out only two or three times a year, for two or three days at a time. The rest of the time, heaven was mine, all those days of heaven. You wouldn’t think they could hurt anything, visiting so infrequently. How little does it take to change – spoil – another thing? I’ll tell you what I think: the cleaner and emptier a place is, the less it can take. It’s like some crazy kind of paradox.
After a while, Zim came up with the idea of bulldozing the meadow across the way and building a lake, with sailboats and docks. He hooked Quentin into a deal with a log-house manufacturer in the southern part of the state who was going to put shiny new “ El Supremo” homes around the lake. Zim was going to build a small hydro dam on the creek and bring electricity into the valley, which would automatically double real estate values, he said. He was going to run cattle in the woods, lots of cattle, and set up a little gold mining operation over on the north face of Mount Henry. The two boys had folders and folders of ideas. They just needed a little investment capital, they said.
It seemed there was nothing I could do. Anything short of killing Zim and Quentin would be a token act, a mere symbol. Before I figured that out, I sacrificed a tree, chopped down a big, wind-leaning larch so that it fell on top of the lodge, doing great damage while Zim and Quentin were upstairs. I wanted to show them what a money sink the ranch was and how dangerous it could be. I told them how beavers, forest beavers, had chewed down the tree, which had missed landing in their bedroom by only a few feet.
I know now that those razor-bastards knew everything. They could sense that I’d cut that tree, but for some reason they pretended to go along with my story. Quentin had me spend two days sawing the tree for firewood. “You’re a good woodcutter,” he said when I had the tree all sawed up and stacked. “I’ll bet that’s the thing you do best.”
Before he could get the carpenters out to repair the damage to the lodge, a hard rain blew in and soaked some of my books. I figured there was nothing I could do. Anything I did to harm the land or their property would harm me.
Meanwhile the valley flowered. Summer stretched and yawned, and then it was gone. Quentin brought his children out early the second fall. Zim didn’t make the trip, nor did I spy any of the skin magazines. The kids, two girls and a boy who was a younger version of Quentin, were okay for a day or two (the girls ran the generator and watched movies on the VCR the whole day long), but little Quentin was going to be trouble, I could tell. The first words out of his mouth when he arrived were “ Can you shoot anything right now? Rabbits? Marmots?”
And sure enough, before two days went by he discovered that there were fish-delicate brook trout with polka-dotted, flashy, colorful sides and intelligent-looking gold-rimmed eyes – spawning on gravel beds in the shallow creek that ran through the meadow. What Quentin’s son did after discovering the fish was to borrow his dad’s shotgun and begin shooting them.
Little Quentin loaded, blasted away, reloaded. It was a pumpaction twelve-gauge, like the ones used in big-city detective movies, and the motion was like masturbating – jack-jack boom, jack-jack boom. Little Quentin’s sisters came running out, rolled up their pant legs, and waded into the stream.
Quentin sat on the porch with drink in hand and watched, smiling.
During the first week of November, while out walking – the skies frosty, flirting with snow – I heard ravens, and then noticed the smell of a new kill, and moved over in that direction.
The ravens took flight into the trees as I approached. Soon I saw the huge shape of what they’d been feasting on: a carcass of such immensity that I paused, frightened, even though it was obviously dead.
Actually it was two carcasses, bull moose, their antlers locked together from rut-combat. The rut had been over for a month, I knew, and I guessed they’d been attached like that for at least that long. One moose was long dead – two weeks? – but the other moose, though also dead, still had all his hide on him and wasn’t even stiff. The ravens and coyotes had already done a pretty good job on the first moose, stripping what they could from him. His partner, his enemy, had thrashed and flailed about, I could tell – small trees and brush were leveled all around them – and I could see the swath, the direction from which they had come, floundering, fighting, to this final resting spot.
I went and borrowed a neighbor’s draft horse. The moose that had just died wasn’t so heavy – he’d lost a lot of weight during the month he’d been tied up with the other moose – and the other one was a ship of bones, mostly air.
Their antlers seemed to be welded together. I tied a rope around the newly dead moose’s hind legs and got the horse to drag the cargo down through the forest and out into the front yard. I walked next to the horse, soothing him as he pulled his strange load. Ravens flew behind us, cawing at this theft. Some of them filtered down from the trees and landed on top of the newly dead moose’s humped back and rode along, pecking at the hide, trying to find an opening. But the hide was too thick – they’d have to wait for the coyotes to open it – so they rode with me, like gypsies: I, the draft horse, the ravens, and the two dead moose moved like a giant serpent, snaking our way through the trees.
I hid the carcasses at the edge of the woods and then, on the other side of a small clearing, built a blind of branches and leaves where I could hide and watch over them.
I painted my face camouflage green and brown, settled into my blind, and waited.
The next day, like buffalo wolves from out of the mist, Quentin and Zim reappeared. I’d hidden my truck a couple of miles away and locked up the guest house so they’d think I was gone. I wanted to watch without being seen. I wanted to see them in the wild.
“What the shit!” Zim cried as he got out of his mongotire jeep, the one with the electric winch, electric windows, electric sunroof, and electric cattle prod. Ravens were swarming my trap, gorging, and coyotes darted in and out, tearing at that one moose’s hide, trying to peel it back and reveal new flesh.
“Shitfire!” Zim cried, trotting across the yard. He hopped the buckand-rail fence, his flabby ass caught momentarily astraddle the high bar. He ran into the woods, shooing away the ravens and coyotes. The ravens screamed and rose into the sky as if caught in a huge tornado, as if summoned. Some of the bolder ones descended and made passes at Zim’s head, but he waved them away and shouted “Shitfire!” again. He approached, examined the newly dead moose, and said, “ This meat’s still good!”
That night Zim and Quentin worked by lantern, busy with butchering and skinning knives, hacking at the flesh with hatchets. I stayed in the bushes and watched. The hatchets made whacks when they hit flesh, and cracking sounds when they hit bone. I could hear the two men laughing. Zim reached over and smeared blood delicately on Quentin’s cheeks, applying it like makeup, or medicine of some sort, and they paused, catching their breath from their mad chopping before going back to work. They ripped and sawed slabs of meat from the carcass and hooted, cheering each time they pulled off a leg.
They dragged the meat over the autumn-dead grass to the smokehouse, and cut off the head and antlers last, right before daylight.
I hiked out and got my truck, washed my face in a stream, and drove home.
They waved when they saw me come driving in. They were out on the porch having breakfast, all clean and freshly scrubbed. As I approached, I heard them talking as they always did, as normal as pie.
Zim was lecturing to Quentin, waving his arm at the meadow and preaching the catechism of development. “You could have a nice h
unting lodge, send ’em all out into the woods on horses, with a yellow slicker and a gun. Boom! They’re living the western experience. Then in the winter you could run just a regular guest lodge, like on Newhart. Make ’em pay for everything. They want to go cross-country skiing? Rent ’em. They want to race snowmobiles? Rent ’em. Charge ’em for taking a piss. Rich people don’t mind.”
I was just hanging back, shaky with anger. They finished their breakfast and went inside to plot, or watch VCR movies. I went over to the smokehouse and peered through the dusty windows. Blood dripped from the gleaming red hindquarters. They’d nailed the moose’s head, with the antlers, to one of the walls, so that his blue-blind eyes stared down at his own corpse. There was a baseball cap perched on his antlers and a cigar stuck between his big lips.
I went up into the woods to cool off, but I knew I’d go back. I liked the job of caretaker, liked living at the edge of that meadow.
That evening, the three of us were out on the porch watching the end of the day come in. The days were getting shorter. Quentin and Zim were still pretending that none of the previous night’s savagery had happened. It occurred to me that if they thought I had the power to stop them, they would have put my head in that smokehouse a long time ago.
Quentin, looking especially burned out, was slouched down in his chair. He had his back to the wall, bottle of rum in hand, and was gazing at the meadow, where his lake and his cabins with lights burning in each of them would someday sit. I was only hanging around to see what was what and to try to slow them down – to talk about those hard winters whenever I got the chance, and mention how unfriendly the people in the valley were. Which was true, but it was hard to convince Quentin of this, because every time he showed up, they got friendly.
“I’d like that a lot,” Quentin said, his speech slurred. Earlier in the day I’d seen a coyote, or possibly a wolf, trot across the meadow alone, but I didn’t point it out to anyone. Now, perched in the shadows on a falling-down fence, I saw the great gray owl, watching us, and I didn’t point him out either. He’d come gliding in like a plane, ghostly gray, with his four-foot wingspan. I didn’t know how they’d missed him. I hadn’t seen the owl in a couple of weeks, and I’d been worried, but now I was uneasy that he was back, knowing that it would be nothing for a man like Zim to walk up to that owl with his cowboy pistol and put a bullet, point blank, into the bird’s ear – the bird with his eyes set in his face, looking straight at you the way all predators do.
“I’d like that so much,” Quentin said again – meaning Zim’s idea of the lodge as a winter resort. He was wearing a gold chain around his neck with a little gold pistol dangling from it. He’d have to get rid of that necklace if he moved out here. It looked like something he might have gotten from a Cracker Jack box, but was doubtless real gold.
“It may sound corny,” Quentin said, “but if I owned this valley, I’d let people from New York, from California, from wherever, come out here for Christmas and New Year’s. I’d put a big sixty-foot Christmas tree in the middle of the road up by the Mercantile and the saloon, and string it with lights, and we’d all ride up there in a sleigh, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, and we’d sing carols, you know? It would be real small town and homey,” he said. “ Maybe corny, but that’s what I’d do.”
Zim nodded. “There’s lonely people who would pay through the nose for something like that,” he said.
We watched the dusk glide in over the meadow, cooling things off, blanketing the field’s dull warmth. Mist rose from the field.
Quentin and Zim were waiting for money, and Quentin, especially, was still waiting for his nerves to calm. He’d owned the ranch for a full cycle of seasons, and still he wasn’t well.
A little something – peace? – would do him good. I could see that Christmas tree all lit up. I could feel that sense of community, of new beginnings.
I wouldn’t go to such a festivity. I’d stay back in the woods like the great gray owl. But I could see the attraction, could see Quentin’s need for peace, how he had to have a place to start anew – though soon enough, I knew, he would keep on taking his percentage from that newness. Taking too much.
Around midnight, I knew, he’d start smashing things, and I couldn’t blame him. Of course he wanted to come to the woods, too.
I didn’t know if the woods would have him.
All I could do was wait. I sat very still, like that owl, and thought about where I could go next, after this place was gone. Maybe, I thought, if I sit very still, they will just go away.
CHRISTOPHER TILGHMAN
Hole in the Day
CHRISTOPHER TILGHMAN (1946–) was born in Boston. He is the author of the novels The Right-Hand Shore, Mason’s Retreat, Roads of the Heart, and the short story collections In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run. Tilghman’s short fiction has three times been selected for Best American Short Stories, and he is the recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award. Since 2001 he has been Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
SIX HOURS AGO Lonnie took one last look at Grant, at the oily flowered curtains and the kerosene heater, the tangled bed and the chipped white stove, at the very light of the place that was dim no matter how bright and was unlike any light she’d ever known before, and she ran. She ran from that single weathered dot on the plains because the babies that kept coming out of her were not going to stop, a new one was just beginning and she could already feel the suckling at her breast. Soon she will cross into Montana, or Minnesota, or Nebraska; she’s just driving and it doesn’t really matter to her where, because she is never coming back.
Grant sits in the darkened parlor room, still and silent. He’s only twenty-nine, but he’s got four children. It’s five-thirty, maybe six in the morning. He’s in his Jockeys, and his long legs and arms are brushed with the white of his blond hair. He feels as if the roof of his house has been lifted, as if he’s being stalked by a drafting eagle high above. Straight ahead of him on the other wall, above the sofa and framed in weathered board, is a picture of mountains, of Glacier Park, but Grant isn’t looking at the picture, it was Lonnie’s. He is listening to the sound of the grass, a hum of voices, millions of souls, like locusts. Outside, there is a purple dawn over the yellow land, reaching toward this single house, and a clothesline pole standing outside casts a long, heaving shadow. There is a worn lawn between the house and garage, and beyond that in the rise and fall of Haakon County there is nothing, but still always something, maybe it’s just a pheasant or a pronghorn, or maybe it’s something you don’t want to stare hard enough to find, like swimming in the river and looking straight down into the deep.
Grant shifts his weight off the thigh that’s fallen asleep on the wooden edge of his sagging easy chair. He’s got his twenty-gauge bird gun at his side, but it isn’t loaded, it’s just there. The grass tells him to forget her, Forget Lonnie the whore. There is a sigh from the kids’ bedroom, a sigh and a rustle. Through the half-opened door of his bedroom Grant can see the tangled sheets where she stopped him last night a few inches away, left him hunched over an erection dying in its rubber sheath, a precaution taken too late and too sporadically to save her. The white dresser on the far side is now empty, the small bottles and pink boxes swept off the top into a duffel bag that she shut with a loud snap from the clasp. Grant had watched from the chair, and his mouth had settled open. Lonnie the whore, sings the grass, and Grant cannot resist the song, even though he knows she’s never been unfaithful.
The kids’ door opens and five-year-old Scott comes out, sees Grant, comes over, and stands at his father’s side for a minute or two until he understands there will be no response. He goes off to the kitchen, hoping to find his mother, and does not come back. Grant hears the rest of them stirring, but he cannot help them, he’s not sitting there. He’s out on the plains, swooping low over a pack of coy dogs, looking for the bitch Lonnie; he’s up on the light brown waters of the Cheyenne, waist-deep and getting ready to launch out naked into
the passing root clumps and cedar hulks. He’s standing on a four corners in the middle of the grass, underneath the solid dome of silver sky, and he feels the hills dark in the west, and he knows that is where she’s headed.
Grant looks at Leila, his oldest; she’s eight, sandy and freckled, already almost as tall as her mother. Grant understands that she has been talking to him, remembers that she has just said, We’re out of milk, Dad, the kids are hungry. In the kitchen the baby wails as he is passed around; the sun is now high outside, dropping across the draped window casings. Grant cannot answer, even though he knows she is very frightened and wants to know what is happening and where her mother has gone. After a while, Leila shrugs bravely and says, “I’m takin’ us to Muellers’.”
He looks through the window and watches as they settle the baby in his stroller, Scott holding his bear, and the four of them head down the gravel road. He watches until the grassland heaves one last time and swallows his children into the black earth.
Grant’s open mouth is caked, his lips tight, his teeth glazed like china; he feels as if he’s got no defense against the hot air, as if his mouth and nose are just holes in his skull. He moves finally because his bladder is full, has been full for hours, but he’s afraid to draw himself up to full height because of what she might have taken away. He reaches through his fly and feels as if she’s made his prick skin into feathers; she’s hollowed him out from the very point of his penis right up into the hard knot of his gut.
It’s noon now, twelve hours since she backed the old Buick out onto the country road. She’s a small woman, thin and taut; pregnancies have made her stomach wiry, not loose, but wiry like long scars. She’s a fine-looking woman but her teeth aren’t good. The big car makes her look foolish, but there’s no room for him as she throws it into reverse. She is crying the whole time, but she’s also gone. Her breath is always stale from smoking, and when she’s in Philip she goes to her friend Martha’s room and they drink Canadian Club. She has a good time but she comes back just the same. She’s sleeping somewhere now, maybe at a scenic turnoff with the doors locked, or maybe she’s driven down into a creek hollow where there are trailers beached like rafts on palm stones. Maybe while she sleeps there will be a flood of yellow waters under a cracked sky.
