“Well, of course,” she said, when I told her this.
“What do you mean?”
“Thomas, the deer I help go on to die, someday, somewhere. Some die of hunger, some of disease, some by hunters. I can't reach them all, only a very few. Some die of grand old age. But they all die. Now, here is something important to tell you: I could never kill an animal. I guess I would say I can't even understand how someone could kill an animal, but I won't go on to say that hunters are evil or heartless or savage.”
“But ...”
She shook her head, quite emphatically. “You want a simple world, but don't you see the turmoil inside you? You love your father, and yet now you think his hunting must be evil. But think deeply. Why are you troubled?”
“I ... I don't know.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes,” I said quickly, and I was sure I did, and yet I ached.
“Why do you love him?”
I didn't know how to answer her. “He's my father,” I said simply.
“Exactly!” She actually smiled, and slapped me on the back. “Now think.”
I could think of nothing else. It was less than two weeks until my birthday. I knew my present was to be a new, cut-down shotgun, and a fluorescent orange hunting coat. I knew that on the morning of my birthday I was supposed to take that new shotgun, load it . . .
I had a sick sense that I would simply go along, too afraid to resist. More than anything I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to decide, that I would be in anguish until the last minute, until . . . what?
I had this same nightmare, again and again. I would be walking in the woods with my father. I'd point at a deer, turning to tell my father, in a reasonable voice, “You see, I just can't,” and in a blast of smoke and fire the deer would fall. I would realize with horror that I had been carrying a shotgun the whole time, that I had fired. With the logic of dreams I would be once again lying on my stomach in the ravine, watching the deer fall, only now it was I who had shot it. I lay there, sweating, my heart pounding, waiting for Emma to come, to set things right. She never did. The deer lay stiff and cold, its glassy eye staring blankly at its killer. At me.
I wanted to tell my father about the dreams, but I didn't. You have to understand about my father. He had such a commanding presence to me, and yet he was such a friendly, gentle man. He was the hardest person in the world to refuse, to argue with, to disappoint. I wanted to be with him and I wanted to be like him.
Well, of course, I didn't know what I wanted. I wanted to be like other kids, like older boys who went hunting. I could see the logic of it. Many deer die of starvation when they're not hunted. Hunting helps control the deer population. The occasional poachers notwithstanding, the hunting season was closely monitored by the game wardens. I knew all the arguments in favor of hunting. I had heard them all my life.
Also, there was the hunt itself: the men together, drinking coffee and laughing in the early morning, telling jokes, trying to keep warm. I would watch them out of my bedroom window each winter when hunting season came. They would be hugging themselves against the cold. I would see the frost of their breath as they talked and laughed. They would always start talking in whispers and end up hollering happily at each other, laughing, until they would remember that it was early, and their voices would fall, quiet laughter building more loudly again. Finally, they'd climb into two or three pickup trucks, and rattle away. Late in the day they would return, with more laughter and talk, full of stories of the day.
To be a man was to be with them.
Often, of course, at the end of the day, there would be a deer tied down to the hood of one or two of the trucks. The sight of the deer carcass always filled me with a vague, dark ache: the perfect awfulness of the dead body.
“Coming up on the big day, little man,” my father said the next morning at breakfast.
“Yes sir,” I said, quietly.
He frowned a moment, drank the last of his coffee in a long swallow, smacked his lips, and got up to leave.
“Is everything okay?” he asked. He leaned over the back of his chair, propped on his long, solid arms. The butt of his revolver stuck out from the wide leather holster wrapped around his waist.
“Oh, sure,” I said, and shrugged.
“Great,” he said, his voice flat, his face creased as he peered down at me.
“Well,” he said, and then smiled and ruffled my hair with his large strong hand, and kissed my mother, and left.
“Thomas,” my mother said quietly. “Come on now. You've been gloomy for weeks, and now you're never home. What is it? Is it something at school?” She reached over and squeezed my cheek between her thumb and forefinger. “Come o-o-o-on, you're driving me crazy.”
I hated it when she did that, but I couldn't help but grin as I pulled myself away.
“Do you think ...” I began, and hesitated.
“Sometimes I do,” she said, “if I'm not too busy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Do you think Dad would be really upset, I mean if ... I mean I'm supposed to go hunting with him, I know it's this big thing, this tradition, but . . .”
“Oh, Tommy, what? Just say it.”
“I was thinking, what if I didn't want to? If I just didn't want to go?”
“But that's okay,” she said quickly. “You don't have to. Oh baby, Dad thinks you want to go. It used to be all you'd ever talk about.”
My mother was right about that. Just the year before, all I wanted in the world was a gun of my own. So much had happened to me in the past few weeks; when I was eleven going on twelve I couldn't see how parents might see time differently, might notice some things in their children, remember some things, and never see the changes as they came.
“I don't know,” I said, and shrugged.
“If you want,” she said, “I could tell him.”
“No,” I said quickly, and I wasn't at all sure why.
“No, I was just thinking.”
It was cold and overcast that day, a bleak, early winter day that suggested snow ahead, short nights, hot chocolate, and days spent hunting.
I walked slowly out through the woods, to find Emma.
“I can't spend as much time with you, Thomas,” Emma told me, after we had walked a while. “Hunting season's coming. I need my rest. Anyway, I have some things I need to do.”
“Things?” I cried, surprising her, I imagine, by how upset I suddenly was. “What things?”
“Oh, the world,” she said, “things. I live in this little motor court and they're painting all the cottages this week. Heaven knows it's overdue, but I have to move some furniture about. And then my granddaughter is coming up from North Carolina ...”
She shook her head. I stared at her. Even though she had told me about her family, it still hadn't really occurred to me that she lived somewhere, that she would ever have anything to do except walk these woods. “You have a granddaughter? How old is she?”
She blew out a breath. “She's, what is she, twenty-six now? She doesn't know about me, about all this. You know, Thomas, people think I'm just a little bit odd. She wants me to move down near her.”
“Move?” I think I almost shouted this question.
“Oh, there's no question of my moving. No question. There's more I have to tell you; you know so little, yet. What I do here is tied to the land, to where I am. I couldn't move, not now. But I can't explain that to her.”
I could see that she was unhappy, that whatever problems she had with her granddaughter were bothering her. All the same, I was feeling jealous and irritable. I didn't want her to have a family, or a cottage. I wanted her to walk with me, and teach me things.
“So, I'll be a little busy,” she said, wearily.
“Okay,” I said. I looked over at her. I wasn't sure, but I thought she might be crying. It was cold, and my eyes were watering a little.
“Emma?” I asked.
“The world is so vast, Thomas,” she said abruptly. I was certain she
was crying. She began to walk, and I scrambled up after her. She walked along, slowly, painfully it seemed. “You can't pick and choose what you want in it: the world comes all in a bunch. You should love what you can and,” she drew in a long breath, “oh me, and try not to hate anything. Please believe me. Sometimes it gets away from me. I wish you could have met Mr. Nash. I don't set a very good example.”
“Well, but, sure you do,” I protested, “I don't understand!”
“Oh, don't mind me. I'm just getting old, Thomas.”
“But you said Mr. Nash was a hundred and two!” I protested.
“Well, Mr. Nash didn't have a husband, and a store to run, and three children to raise.” She shook her head. She was almost smiling now.
“No, he was a wonderful man. I've been Emma for so long ...”
“What do you mean?”
“Hmm? What do I mean? Oh, very little, I assure you. I'm just tired. Weary, is the word. I'm just an old country woman, Thomas, old and worn out.”
There was almost a lilt in her voice now.
“No,” I said, and punched at her arm.
“Hmmph,” she took another deep breath and smiled a rare, full smile. “Listen to me! What a sour old goat. Shouldn't all the world feel sorry for me!” She laughed now, a sound I loved to hear.
“You know,” she said, “I must give you your birthday present a little early.”
“Really?” I said, excited. I certainly hadn't expected a present from her.
“Yes. There's someone I'd like you to meet, before hunting season begins. A few someones. Can you meet me here early tomorrow? We have a long walk.”
“Oh sure! Right after breakfast.”
“Good,” she said. “Good. Bring a little something to eat. And don't mind all my talk.”
That evening I stood in the doorway of my parents' bedroom. My father had called across the house for me. He was sitting at the end of the bed untying his heavy black work shoes, to change into his slippers.
“Dad?” I said.
“Hey, sport,” he said.
He looked at me, and for a moment nothing was said. He looked like he'd done something wrong, but he couldn't remember what. He looked at me like he couldn't quite place me. When he spoke he spoke slowly.
“Tom, about your birthday, you know.” He took a breath, almost a sigh. “I mean, hey, we could always make some other plans.”
“Mom told you.”
“Ah, well, you know, she was worried about you. And maybe I haven't been paying enough attention lately, with work and all. But Tom, I thought you wanted to go with us.”
He looked at me, searching my face. I didn't say anything. He shrugged.
“It doesn't matter,” he said. “If you don't want to go hunting, then of course that's fine.”
It was the strangest moment for me. For perhaps the first time I could see my father from a little distance, somehow. He was nervous. He wasn't sure what to say. I was amazed, and I hurt, with guilt and with what might have been a kind of fear.
“No, Dad,” I said, my own voice sounding odd to me. “I was only thinking . . . I'm just not sure I could kill something, you know, a deer, a buck. I'm not sure.”
“Oh, well, half the time you don't even get a decent shot at anything,” he said, and chuckled. But then he looked up at me again. “Tom, I don't know if it will help, but when I shot my first deer ...” He leaned his head back, and smiled from a long ago memory. “It was, let's see, the third time my dad took me hunting, and I remember I shot a small buck, just barely legal; and Tom, you see, I cried that night in bed. Okay? I mean, you don't have to spread it around, tell everyone, but I cried.”
I stood there, four feet away, unable to breathe.
“Anyway, I did,” he said, the words coming quickly now. “I mean, that's all. Does that help any?”
I nodded. “Thanks,” I said. I was too scared to cry.
“Ah, c'mere,” my father said and grabbed me in a quick hug. He ruffled my hair, turned me around, swatted me on my butt, and sent me on my way, more confused than I had ever been in my life.
Chapter 4
Early Saturday morning I dressed in a hurry and slipped quietly into my chair at the breakfast table. I know my parents thought there was something wrong. Breakfast was unusually quiet. My mother and father stole glances at each other, as I ate in hurried silence. I headed out the laundry door to the back deck, the yard, and the fields beyond, but not before I heard my mother's quiet comment to my father: “poor guy.”
For all the turmoil I was going through, I was still excited about the prospect of a birthday present from Emma. I felt certain that a gift from her would be something magical. Though I had spent many long hours with her since that first day, walking and talking and exploring, the only real marvels I had seen were those at the very beginning: the deer, and the cuts and scratches on my face. Occasionally she would tell me about something she did. Once she found a doe, hung up in a barbed wire fence; it took her quite a while to get the deer untangled.
“And then?” I had asked her.
“Then I just shooed her away,” Emma said.
“But was she hurt?”
“A little. Nothing much to worry her. She was more afraid of the fence, confused by being caught, than hurt.”
“But you healed her?”
“I helped her a bit, yes.”
That was as much as I could get from her that day. I hungered for the kind of wonders I had seen the first afternoon Emma and I met. I wanted my birthday present to be something amazing. It was.
“Where are we going?” I asked, breathless from running most of the way to our meeting place.
“Would you like to see where I live?” she asked in return. “There's someone there I'd like you to meet.”
“Um, sure,” I said, a little hesitantly, thinking, in the back of my mind, that probably my present was back at her cabin. Maybe it was too big to bring. I couldn't imagine what it would be.
It was a long walk to her place. I hadn't realized how far away she lived. She seemed happier than the she had been the day before, and stronger. It was a cold, clear morning; the walking warmed us quickly. I felt happier too, now that we were walking, and less expectant about a possible present, about anything. I had stowed away a few biscuits from breakfast, and Emma and I ate them early on. We fell in side by side, and for a long time neither of us spoke. I was enjoying the silence, and her company.
After a while, though, she began to talk. She seemed to be in a mood to teach again, which was fine with me.
As we walked she taught me more about deer, about their families. She told me how a young, strong buck might have two, three, or even more does as his mates. The deer traveled in small groups of perhaps six, ten, maybe twelve, that were a sort of loose family: the dominant buck, his does, a few young fawns, perhaps a weaker, submissive buck.
She said that the bucks fought for supremacy. They clashed with their heads lowered in charge, the violence of the collision sometimes so great as to snap their antlers. I could picture it; I slammed my hands together. She said that these battles, though, were usually tests of strength and will. The buck who lost was seldom seriously injured; he simply assumed a lower, submissive role in the family, or went to look for mates and supremacy elsewhere. When the deer battled in earnest, she told me, against wild dogs for instance, they lashed out with their front hooves, which are deadly sharp.
Emma said that the young fawns matured in a year or so, and might stay with the family or wander off to join another. Sometimes a young deer would rejoin its family after months, or even years, apart.
She said most bucks only lived to be two or three years old, they were hunted so. Her face tightened only a little as she told me this. She shook her head, seemed to force herself to cheer up.
“Do you know that deer can run as fast as forty miles an hour?” she said, her voice bright again with enthusiasm.
Well, no, I didn't know, but I was learning.
&nbs
p; She nodded, emphatic and proud and happy. “They can. Did you know that they can leap between the wires of a barbed wire fence, say a foot apart,” she showed with her hands, “at a full run, and not even brush the wires? I've seen it.”
She spoke quickly and eagerly. I remember she seemed increasingly on edge, her cheerfulness forced, her teaching more mechanical, almost so that it began to seem eerie, unsettling.
We walked on, mile after mile. The cold, crisp air made for good walking weather. I felt happy and strong, but it seemed to me that Emma's moods were shifting quickly—cheerful for a few moments, and then tense, and sometimes just tired.
“I didn't know you had to walk so far to meet me,” I said at one point. Emma's changeable mood was starting to make me edgy.
“These are all my woods, Thomas,” she said. “I walk all through here, every day. It doesn't seem that far.”
She gave me a brief, warm smile. It made me feel that I could ask a question I had been wondering about.
“What did you mean when you said that you couldn't leave here?”
“Hmm?” She seemed distracted.
“You said you were tied to the land, that you couldn't move away.”
She stopped, took a deep breath. We had been walking at a brisk pace.
“Come here, Thomas,” she said, and she knelt down.
I stepped over and knelt down too.
“Put your hand on the earth,” she said. She had placed her hand firmly, palm down on the ground, so I did likewise. “What do you feel?”
“It's cold,” I said, without really thinking. I looked into her eyes, a blue so bright it almost hurt. She was looking at me with such intensity that it frightened me.
“No, Thomas, it isn't,” she said at last, with sorrow in her voice, and pitched herself awkwardly to her feet.
I got up and scrambled after her. There was something going on in her mind, and I didn't have a clue what it was.
“Emma,” I said.
“Perhaps you are too young,” she said quietly.
“I can't help how old I am,” I said, rather curtly.
“Oh, Thomas, it's all right,” she said, and she even gave a quick, rough laugh, at her own expense it seemed. “There are so many things I want to tell you about, and have you see, but you can't take everything in all at once and on the first try, now can you?”
The Healer of Harrow Point Page 4
