The Purification Ceremony

by Mark Sullivan

  got this rifle. It was one of the few tangible connections I had to my father, and before I left his house I had taken it, despite the strange look Wilson had given me.

  I sat on the ottoman and ran the bolt several times. It slid clean on the new oil I'd coated it with after my last practice session. I shouldered the gun and peered through the low-power telescopic sight at the buck on the wall, then dry-fired it to reacquaint myself with the trigger weight.

  Satisfied, I put the gun in the wall rack, checked the stove and added wood. I went to my parka and fished out the envelope, my father's handwriting wrinkled to a scrawl from being handled so often. I sat in the leather chair and stared at the envelope, thinking of all that the words inside had set in motion.

  I had not allowed myself to open the letter before the funeral, which was well attended by all the families he'd cared for over the years. Most of them could not hide their surprise when I showed up at the riverbank to take him across to the burial island north of Old Town. There, he was laid to rest between my mother and his beloved uncle Mitchell.

  When I got home that night, Kevin was waiting up for me. He'd had a few drinks and was feeling sorry for himself. "You going to tell me about it? Now? After fifteen years?"

  I stared at him. This man I'd spent a second lifetime with. Suddenly a stranger. "If you love me, you won't make me," I whispered. "I want to leave it where it should be. Buried."

  "Diana. I'm your husband."

  "I know," I said, crossing to him to put my arms around him. I laid my head in the crook of his shoulder. "My father was a very disturbed man. I don't like to think about mychildhood with him at all. When I met you, I believed I could leave it alone forever because you were all I needed. I still want to believe that. I want to go on like before."

  I started to cry. And I heard him say, "Okay. Like before.

  ''But there was no strength in his hands around my back.

  A week later, I read the note and had to go outside to walk for hours. I never showed Kevin the letter, never let on that it even existed. I stuffed the note at the back of my bra drawer. I told myself it would remain there like a scarf too soiled to wear again, but too precious to give away.

  For a year after my father's death, I was able to convince myself, my family and the world that I had moved on. Kevin tried to bring up the subject a few times, but I'd managed to stop the conversations before they started. He'd get this hollow expression on his face and I knew a gap was opening between us. There was nothing I could do.

  Then, just before deer season the following November, I began to wake up at night, nauseated and sweating.

  The insomnia eased into melancholy. I seldom left the house except to work, habits that turned into the first degrees of separation as my husband continued with the pace of the social life that accompanied his role as director of marketing at H.D. Krauss, a prominent Boston publishing house.

  Even my kids noticed the change. Emily would tug at my arm for attention while I gazed out the window of my bedroom at the activity on Marlborough Street. It took all my strength to take them on their normal Saturday outings. The zoo especially was liable to trigger a fit of anxiety and depression.

  "If you won't talk to me about it, there's this guy, Tim Dunne—you know, the grief therapist we're publishing," Kevin suggested. "He might help."

  "I'll be fine," I said.

  Kevin turned and walked away.

  One Sunday evening in February, the deer appeared to me in a dream. The ten-point buck raced through a snowy logging slash against a peculiar blue sky. It stopped on a knoll and glanced back, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth and the fur on its flank matted with sweat. It stood panting for several moments, then curled back its lips, moistening the air to better capture scent with its flanged nostrils. It grunted. It urinated down over its hocks and tossed its rack around as if to challenge its pursuer. The buck turned and disappeared over the hill.

  The way I was raised, when an animal comes to you in a dream, you follow it. But I told myself I had left all that behind me.

  I had the dream every night for a month, however, and at last I relented. On a Monday morning in March, I bypassed the exit that would have led me to my job and kept going up Route 95 all the way into southern Maine. By midmorning I'd found the right clash of field, brush and tall timber that marks deer country.

  I left the car door ajar and, in my leather dress boots, walked the edge of a cornfield that a farmer had left standing. Several hundred yards in, I found a large track in the snow. I knelt, running my finger along the internal ridgeline of the cloven print, and knew from the relative softness that it was fresh. I followed the tracks, slipping through the briars for a half mile until I came to a pine thicket on a southfacing hillside.

  The deer was probably bedded somewhere above the thicket to take advantage of the winter sun. But where? It had been years since I'd gone one-on-one with a whitetail.

  Yet, like an athlete who remembers how her muscles felt at the peak of her form, I decided to try one of my father's most subtle and ethereal hunting tactics. I sought to abandon control over my heart until it sought a new rhythm, the rhythm of the closest living thing around it. As a woman's heart will try to echo her lover's pulse.

  It had been years also since I had attempted the joining of spirit between what is seen and unseen, and even in my most sensitive moments as a teenager, I'd managed to achieve only a fluttering in my breast in anticipation of a buck moving before me. But I crouched anyway, closed my eyes and let the tension drop from my shoulders.

  After five minutes, I felt my breath come and go like water. Another ten and I could track the push and draw of blood through my arteries and veins. But try as I might, I could not find in my heart the watchful, intelligent spirit of the deer.

  I opened my eyes finally and chastised myself for arrogance. It had been fifteen years. This was like starting all over again. Starting over began with humility. I had to return to basics.

  I skirted the pines until the breeze blew directly in my face. A deer will distrust its eyes and its ears, but never its nose. To close on a deer, you must not let it smell you. Slowly, tasting the wind with my nostrils, I threaded my way through the brittle understory. Every few moments I stopped to peer ahead through the branches, hoping to catch sight of the animal.

  I snapped a twig. The deer broke cover, a bounding white flag that crashed off to my left. It bolted like flickering light through a beech glen, cinched all four legs together below its stomach to leap off a ledge, then bore pell-mell into a stand of thorn trees. I raced after the animal, ignoring the scolding squirrels overhead, the spines that tore at my cheeks and the roots under the snow that snatched at my ankles.

  The deer doubled back upon breaking free of the thorns. Halfway to the pine thicket, it coursed downwind toward an unfrozen stream bed and took to water. I reached the stream, gulping air, trying to still my heart, to anticipate the animal's movement. I tried desperately to recall what my father would have done. But the memories were like a language practiced, then abandoned.

  I finally arrived at work that day about noon. The engineers who worked for me gave me inquiring glances that I did my best to ignore. I settled before my computer as if nothing had happened. I typed in several codes that brought up the new software program I was charged with developing. Ordinarily, the challenge of devising a system that could three-dimensionally demonstrate environmental change on rivers and estuaries would have consumed me.

  That day, however, I dimmed the screen to see my own reflection. Bloody scratches scored my face and forearms like the cicatrices of primitive tribeswomen. I picked at some of the caked blood with a fingernail and brought it to my nose. The dull metallic odor reminded me of childhood.

  A sharp rap came at the cabin door. Griff called out, "Hurry up, Diana, or you'll miss the meeting."

  "Be right along!" I yelled back.

  I put my father's note down and went into the bathroom.

 
; In the mirror was the face of a woman I almost didn't recognize. I wondered whether Kevin was right after all: had I lost my mind?

  They were all gathered in the great room of the lodge having cocktails when I arrived. Two men I didn't recognize stood before a granite-faced hearth in which a pine fire roared. Overhead, a chandelier formed from shed antlers bathed the room in soft light. Rust-and-blue kilim throw rugs covered a plank floor. The furniture was the same Mission-style leather and oiled pine I had in my cabin. Expensive works of sporting art, including several Remingtons and Curtises, graced the walls. A spiral log staircase rose at the end of the room to a second level. Above the landing was the lodge's most striking feature—a huge, circular stained-glass window depicting two mature stags locked in combat. Smaller stained-glass windows to either side of the centerpiece showed does and lesser males watching the battle. With money like that, I thought, you can do anything you want.

  I decided to be social and chatted with the Pennsylvania hunters a bit at the bar.

  "So how did you three come to be friends?" I asked.

  Phil's biceps and pectoral muscles strained against the blue long-underwear shirt he wore. The muscles popped when he grunted, "Vinny the hunter."

  Seeing my puzzled expression, Butch plastered a big grin on his Mick Jagger lips. "Vinny the hunter, my old man," he said. "Everyone in the old neighborhood in Philly called him that. He ran a retail appliance store. We lived upstairs over the place. Dad used to go outside the city, hunting every weekend during the fall. He'd bring back what he got—always deer, usually pheasants and rabbits—and butcher them in the garage in the alley out back. He'd share the meat with everyone in the neighborhood. Vinny the hunter."

  "Vinny'd give you the shirt off his back," said Arnie, nodding. "What's it been, Butch, five years?"

  Butch nodded sadly. "This past May."

  Phil said, "My dad moved up from Mississippi just after the war and worked in a garage across the street from Vinny's store. Dad and his brothers always hunted deer down there, but he'd gotten away from it once us kids started coming. The story goes that he was taking a walk at lunch, comes around the corner and finds Vinny skinning this big buck with an apron on over his sales clothes. They got to be talking, realized they were both crazy about it. Next thing you know, they were hunting partners."

  "And my dad ran the hardware store around the corner," Amie said. "He never hunted as a kid, but Vinny convinced him to go along one year. Got a six-pointer.

  He was hooked and bought in to their camp. Vinny and Phil's dad, Carlton, built the camp in the mountains west of Wilkes-Barre in '58, I think."

  "Your dad bought in '60, so that sounds right," Butch said.

  Phil's features hardened. "Vinny had to buy the place first in his own name, then sell shares. That was before civil rights, you know. But Vinny was a tough guy. Even when he took some crap about my dad and then me going to the camp, he told those SOBs where they could stick it. My dad worshiped Vinny."

  "So you three grew up hunting together, that's nice."

  "From the time we were eight or nine, anyway," Butch said. "Every fall, no matter what."

  "No matter what," Phil and Arnie repeated almost in unison.

  "Sounds like a promise you've all made to yourself," I commented.

  "We've gone our separate ways, but we make it a point to do something like this every November," Butch said.

  "Hunting's about the only thing I have in common anymore with this aging hippie," Phil joked and punched Butch in the arm.

  "If you don't mind me asking," I said, gesturing at his hair. "You know—Butch?"

  Arnie spit out his drink and guffawed. "We've been busting him about it for years."

  Phil smirked. "Vinny the hunter was this real strict Italian, been in the Air Force and had this thing about keeping a military cut. Butch hated it, but didn't do a thing about it until he was sixteen."

  "Seventeen," Butch said. "I went upstate for a music camp I won a scholarship to. I just refused to cut it when I came back. Vinny was pissed."

  "Worse when you started protesting," Arnie said.

  "He got over it," Butch said. "But anyway, he started calling me Butch when I was eighteen. It was just to bug me about my looks. These guys picked up on it and it's been Butch ever since."

  "You got kids?" Arnie asked.

  "Two," I said, hoping I could keep a cheerful expression.

  "Boy and a girl."

  "We have two girls," said Arnie. "They're off to Disneyland with my wife."

  Phil took a swig of his beer. "So what's the deal, a woman hunting by herself?"

  "I just like to hunt," I replied. "I grew up with it, too. Tracking, I mean."

  "Kind of a tough way to hunt," Phil said. "You sure you wouldn't take a nice heated stand where you can read one of them romance novels?"

  I smiled sweetly. "I figure I'll leave that to you city boys, Phil."

  "Aren't you gutsy?" He laughed.

  I stared at him. "No, Phil, just good."

  He laughed again, but it was halfhearted and he excused himself and headed to the bar for another beer.

  Butch put his hand on my arm. "Don't mind Phil. Deep down he's a good guy, just macho."

  Cantrell called for our attention then. Without his coat on, you could see the outfitter was wiry, the kind of guy you'd struggle to keep up with in the woods. Cantrell welcomed us all again and introduced the two strangers: Tim Nelson and Don Patterson, the guides. Nelson leaned against the mantelpiece of the fireplace and gave us all a hearty hello. He was past forty. Cold winds had damaged his skin. From the bulging forearms that emerged from the maroon Henley-style shirt he wore, I figured he'd spent part of his life doing construction. Cantrell said Nelson had worked three seasons for Metcalfe and knew the property and the animals well. He was the hunt strategist.

  Don Patterson had a beard but no mustache and his whiskers were wispy and blond. His features were equally fair. I had a tough time believing he could be in his late twenties with a master's degree in wildlife biology and five years' experience guiding in Alberta. Cantrell said Patterson had an uncanny ability to read signs and draw disparate pieces of information into a coherent pattern that could be used to decipher a big buck's travel pattern in order to set up an ambush.

  Cantrell went on to give a brief history of the estate. Purchased by James Metcalfe in 1954, the 227,000-acre parcel had a resident deer population from the beginning. But Metcalfe was an early student of modern game management. In the early 1960s, about the same time such practices were adopted by Texas ranches, he began applying the techniques to the estate's herds. Since then, more recordbook whitetails had been taken off the Metcalfe Estate than any other piece of property in the world. And all of them had been taken by members of Metcalfe's family, close hunting buddies or business associates.

  The hunts had meant so much to Metcalfe that he had stipulated in his will that they continue or his heirs would forfeit the land. His son, Ronny, had returned once to hunt, but hadn't come back in nearly two years. Metcalfe's daughters, who feared losing the property, had offered it up for lease through their attorneys. Cantrell won the outfitting rights through a competitive bidding process.

  "You're the first public hunters to see this magnificent property," Cantrell said, rubbing his hands together. "The rut is upon us after three mild winters and three falls with no hunting.

  The chance to kill a world-class deer here in the next week is probably higher than anywhere else at any other time."

  Butch and Arnie threw each other high fives. Lenore smiled. Griff raised his beer in my direction. I tipped my orange juice in return.

  Cantrell led us all to a giant topographical map and an enlarged aerial photograph of the estate mounted under glass on an oak table at the rear of the room. He explained that the way to think about the estate was as a chunk of land divided by a minor mountain range running west to east. The lodge and the lake lay in the southern zone. The Dream River flowed north out
of the eastern headwaters of the lake through an interruption in the ridge line, then out the northeastern corner of the property. The Sticks, a second river, divided the northern zone and joined the Dream near the estate's eastern border, almost to Alberta.

  I pointed to a tiny circle on the map, smack in the confluence of the rivers. "That little island: is it in British Columbia or Alberta?"

  "Alberta, technically," Nelson said. "Never been on it myself, but you can see most of it from the river's edge.

  Just a pile of rock and brush. Big, though, eh?"

  Cantrell changed the subject. Each of us, he said, would be entitled to take two deer during our stay, though he

  urged us to hold out for a minimum of one hundred sixty Boone & Crockett points.

  "One Boone and Crockett point equals one inch of antler, right?" Kurant asked, scribbling in a notebook.

  "Roughly," Cantrell said.

  "And how many inches of antler to make the record book?"

  "One hundred and seventy inches as a typical," Earl piped in. "One ninety-five as a nontypical. Typical's a symmetrical kind of rack. Nontypicals, the antlers go in a bunch of different directions, kind of like Griff's hair."

  Griff chortled and made a show of smoothing his mop.

  Kurant asked, "What are the odds of making the book?"

  "A million to one back home," Butch said.

  "And here?"

  Cantrell said, "One in five."

  'That's what I like to hear!" Arnie cried.

  The Addisons and Arnie said they wished to take stands in the woods between the clear-cuts that had been made along the base of the central ridge of mountains. Cantrell would be their guide. Nelson would work with Phil, who wanted to rattle antlers near the western clear-cuts to imitate bucks fighting; and with Butch, who was a bow hunter. Griff, of course, was bow-hunting, too. He'd take a tree stand close to a winter rye field. Because I wished to track and still-hunt, Patterson would take me toward the confluence of the Dream and Sticks rivers, drop me off and return at dusk.