“NICE!” my dad shouted, giving me a poolside thumbs-up. Little did he know that his daughter’s dowry had just gone down by at least ten cows. What man would marry me now? “REMEMBER TO KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR FORM, THOUGH,” he continued. “YOU WERE A LITTLE BIT SLOPPY GOING IN.”
Suddenly I felt romantic toward the aqua-blue water. I scissored through it in languid strokes and pictured the baby we might make together. From the waist down, it would be a manatee who flopped its tail in my tender arms, and from the waist up it would be a hot woman with good boobs and a nest haircut, which would be popular in exactly fifteen years, when the product of my unusual intercourse had finally matured.
I hauled myself dripping up the ladder and wrapped myself in the COWABUNGA! towel. The beds of my nails were blue and my teeth were chattering, and the little piece of meaning was still closed in my hand. I had not lost it. The lifeguard whistled and ordered everyone out of the pool; someone had seen lightning. My father smiled at us and continued to read. He was just getting to the best part, where everything was moving as liquidly as a movie. The men in the submarine were freaking out—they were about to blow up the sea.
11
HART AND HIND
By the end of the summer, we have saved four thousand dollars, not a round number but a nice rectangular one, the shape of a cozy living space. It pleases us to dwell on it, and make plans, and talk about where we will hang our pictures and stack our dishes and set our favorite lamp with the red cardinal perched on it. We will, as Jason remarks with some awe, have our own bathroom again, with no Rag in the sink (more on this later) and no dishwashing liquid in the shower. “There won’t be any more Mr. Horni, either,” he says, pointing to the crucifix and raising his voice. “NO MORE MR. HORNI, WHO CAN’T KEEP HIS EYES TO HIMSELF.” Perhaps our rejoicing is a temptation to fate, because we are just beginning to search apartment listings when with one terrific bang our ten-year-old car breaks down in the driveway, sputters out, and refuses to be resurrected.
We pass one afternoon in despair, drinking local Missouri wine out of goblets, burying our faces in the cat’s sympathetic stomach, and pacing the perimeter of the upstairs room.
“It’s too Catholic!” Jason bursts out, gesturing to the walls, the books about Marian apparitions on the chest of drawers, the flamboyantly injured Mr. Horni hanging above the door. “How can it be so Catholic! The Council of Trent wasn’t this Catholic! Wait, which one is the Council of Trent again?”
“The one where they decided that everyone had to wear a baby hat,” I say, splashing more Jazz Berry into his glass. He is losing it, and I am the one who must engineer our escape. “It’s all right. We’ll spend the money on a car, and I’ll figure something out.”
He takes a gulp of wine and his face contorts. “This wine is disgusting.”
“Yeah. The winery literally recommends that you pour this one over ice cream.”
We begin shopping right away. Jason is looking for “a car of the future, large enough to hold only one half of an American person, that runs on trash.” But my father, who got a mad glint in his glasses as soon as he heard that someone in the household would be making a major machine purchase, is trying to convince him to buy a sports car. He makes racy, curving motions in the air as he tries to persuade him.
“They build ’em like a shark, J,” he says wistfully. “Nature’s perfect shape.”
“Well, I was thinking of getting a Smart car,” Jason tells him.
My father almost cries. A car that is smart, as opposed to a car that failed out of tenth grade, wears black leather jackets, and gets bicycles pregnant on its days off? He turns to me. “Can’t you influence him?” he begs.
“I need an intelligent car,” I say. “Mom taught me to drive, remember? The majority of her instruction consisted of telling me to double-check my rearview so that I would not one day run over my own child.”
“Of course he wants us to buy a sports car,” I tell Jason later in private, over the remainder of the Jazz Berry. “My dad has never even owned a car with more than two doors.”
“Oh my god,” Jason says. “Do you remember the time one of his parishioners gave him a sensible Buick, and it had so many doors that it made him insane, and within six months he had given it to one of you . . .”
“. . . and leased a Jaguar for himself,” I finish, closing my eyes, as the familiar head-to-toe blush begins to overtake me.
He tips his glass back to the dregs. “This wine,” he repeats, his awe increasing. “It tastes like a grape’s hormone. It tastes like going down on a jar of jam.”
People do give us things. They always have. They give us buttery homemade caramels and free haircuts. They send over plates of gnocchi at the local Italian restaurant, where the owner nurtures a fervent love for the Virgin. Once someone gave us half a cow—first when it was living, and then when it was dead. The steaks of this cow tasted like they had been stockpiled for the end of the world, but what else could we do? We ate them. It is steaks like these that have sustained me throughout my life, no matter what I believed.
• • •
THEY GIVE US OTHER THINGS TOO. One inauspicious morning, someone leaves a Piggly Wiggly bag full of human crap on the rectory doorstep. We assume the crap is human, at any rate. Jason lifts it in one objective hand and says it is “definitely heavy enough to be a man’s.” We set it on the scale and it weighs four pounds, which ought to tell you something about my husband.
We don’t like to admit it, but the bag of crap unsettles us. It forces us to imagine a furious churchgoer, squatting in righteous indignation over the Piggly Wiggly logo. My mother has a guess as to who it might be—“She would be capable of it. She would be VERY capable of giving this poop to us”—but she won’t tell us anything more. My father has had enemies in the parish from the very beginning. After he closed the school due to low attendance, these enemies multiplied and grew louder, especially when my father turned the building and its supplies over to the homeschoolers.
The seminarian and I had explored the echoing school one summer day in darkness: cases of trophies and water fountains, chipped plaster statues at the turns of the stairwells, ghosts of information still on the whiteboards. As soon as I stepped inside, I could feel myself getting a C in history. My education in these places was dry, strict, and limited, but I am grateful for it now—now that my father has taken to wishing that my mother had homeschooled all five of us. “Now,” he tells her, “kids go away to college and then they’re not Catholic anymore. Except, sometimes, the homeschooled ones.” Tiptoeing up the stairs, I gave a sort of shuddering laugh. On the one hand, being homeschooled by my mother would never have been boring; on the other hand, I would have come out of it knowing only lists of diseases, and not in a doctor way.
Scattered through the hallways were piles of books. I recognized nearly all of them—literate spiders and magic wardrobes, tubby Hobbits fighting over jewelry, children escaping suburbia to camp out at art museums and children escaping cramped city apartments to hide out in hollow trees. Those were the most domestic books of all, the ones where a boy made his way in the forest with nothing but a knife, his wits, and a crudely fashioned diaper made of deerskin. By the end, he was never just surviving but living like a lord—the woods a great estate broken free from its walls, doors gone feral and refusing to close, escaped gardens and fountains and featherbeds and fireplaces, banquet halls laid with drumsticks and fresh fruit.
The seminarian’s skirts swept the linoleum. He went through one of the doors, lifted off his dress in one bat-winged black motion, and began to play the baby grand piano that my father had purchased on a whim during one of his lunatic moons, for a sum I cannot even set down. The money could have been a college degree for one of us, it could have been the down payment on a retirement house, it could have been that feeling of green security that none of us have ever had—but instead it was this music, tumbling like a
loose class through the school, sounding like an entire education, sounding like the reason why.
I stretched out on a sofa, propping my bare legs on one arm of it while I listened. The seminarian assiduously avoided the sight of them and plunked away at his classical compositions. When he finished, he pulled his dress over his head again and straightened its long lines with decorous hands. “That would be a misunderstanding, if anyone saw me taking off my clothes in here,” he said, buttoning thirty-three buttons with limbered fingers. We went back through the door together, and I contemplated taking a book from each stack on the way out, as much to save them as anything else. My father had told me that one of the homeschoolers had called to ask if she could throw away “the sinful books.” I thought, “Yes, but I will write another, and then another one after that, and another and another.”
• • •
THEN THE AIR TURNS crisp and appleish, and it’s time to burn the leaves like Animal Farm, like Lolita, like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game. I want to watch my father strolling up and down the sidelines the way he did when he was an assistant coach, hurling his hat to the ground and stomping it with one bengal-striped leg, shouting at the cornerbacks, doing a general impersonation of a man in the grip of a fatal coronary. He looked then, as he looks now, like a man who lived his whole life on meat.
In the middle of November, a parishioner surprises him with a large, reeking venison sausage from a deer he shot himself. Jason loses his head when he sees it and runs upstairs, terrified that my dad might offer him a slice of it to bond them together as men. “I just remembered that I have to . . . put different pants on,” he says, and then vanishes, leaving a comet trail of cowardice in his wake.
As it turns out, my father can’t manage more than two inches of it himself. He would like to be the sort of man who loves venison, but the reality simply doesn’t match up with his romantic conception of it. I sympathize. I once bought a pound of salt pork, believing the taste of it would transport me back to pioneer times, only to find that one of the slices had a distinct, tweakable nipple on it. The sausage rests in the refrigerator, an accusing tube. Every time he opens the door, the foot-long appendage taunts him.
“What is this piece of SHIT,” my mother says when she first encounters it in the vegetable drawer, but with my father she is more circumspect. “Do you want me to throw it away, Greg?” she asks every so often, with tact, but he keeps insisting he’ll eat it. “Are you kidding? That’s great stuff. GREAT stuff,” he says, much louder than necessary, smacking his lips with the fake gusto of a child actor. “That’s the stuff, bay-bee,” he finishes weakly, in a voice that fails to convince even himself, then walks straight into his room and closes the door. Finally we smuggle it to the dumpster when he’s over at church, and the dogs of the neighborhood are a little wilder the next day.
“Can’t believe your mother threw away that wonderful sausage,” he says when he notices, unable to hide his relief, and his shoulders straighten as if a huge buck has been lifted off them. “I’d love to get out in the woods and snag some of that meat myself,” he adds, but that isn’t true either. He and venison have a long and troubled history reaching all the way back to my adolescence. It betrayed him once, and he cannot forget.
• • •
BECAUSE MY FATHER WASN’T allowed to hunt hippies, he decided to settle for hunting deer instead. It was a good compromise, all things considered. Deer were the pacifists of the animal kingdom. They sat around doing weeds all day and didn’t even try to get jobs. The males of the species pranced and ate salad and had a hundred kids they didn’t know about. In November, a long line of them marched to the polls, leaves held delicately in their mouths, each marked with the name of the Green Party candidate. A deer, in short, was a peace sign made out of meat, and the only way to fight it was with bullets.
“PROPAGANDA!” he once burst out suddenly, when he caught Mary and me watching Bambi in the living room, curled up together on the couch. If there was any fictional character my father hated, it was Bambi. “Acting all innocent. Oh yeah, the hunter’s always bad, isn’t he! He has red eyes and he kills your mommy!” Flames began to gulp up the screen. “Booooooo-hooooooo, the precious forest is on fire!” he continued, in the same tone he used when he openly mocked Earth Day. “Sack up and be a man, Bambi. I’m coming for you.”
He wanted to feel that if the whole world ended, he could still live in it, and inhabit the sphere like his own backyard, roasting its megafauna on spits and drinking its lakes when he was thirsty. In reality, if my father were ever called upon to survive on his own in the wilderness, he would very quickly die of treat deficiency, or of tripping over a big rock while bellowing, “WHO PUT THAT THERE,” or of trying to use a snake as toilet paper. I doubt he could build a fire, unless it’s possible to start a fire by yelling at logs. And what about clothes—in the wintertime, when it got too cold to go nude? I pictured him trying to shove his feet through the back legs of a moose to make pants. No, the rugged life was not for him, but he didn’t know it. The belief that he was a born outdoorsman could not be stripped from him—being stripped of his beliefs was the one kind of nakedness my father didn’t go for. He continued in his fantasies of fringed buckskins and rifles painted with moonlight, cold notes whistled solo under the stars, and excerpts of a fictional deer smoking over hickory logs.
He read instructional books with the ugliest covers I had ever seen—uglier even than the classics of theology. He studied thorny pictures of men posing with fourteen-pointers. He shopped for reflective vests, overalls, and various scraps of oiled and gleaming gear. He visited websites with tasteful patterns of targets and crosshairs in the background, called things like Doug’s Killing Corner. After worshipful, hyperfocused research, the same kind he lavished on guitars and other engines of beauty, he chose the correct guns. He was giddy with that high altitude he sometimes climbed to in his mind, that giddiness that made him buy things, things he needed for the journey. You could not grudge him this, really. It was still a height, it was still exhilarating to behold. These moments were still, on the map of my childhood, elevations.
Then it happened. A friend of his owned some land outside of Cape Girardeau, near the fringe of the St. Francois Mountains, and when my father mentioned that he was interested in taking a hunting trip, he granted us full use of it for the weekend. “Oh god, stop giving us things,” I said to that friend in my mind. “Please stop giving us things.”
My dad was overjoyed. “I tell you what, the kids are gonna love this,” he exclaimed, but after much wheedling, the only children who could be persuaded to accompany him on the hunt were Paul and Christina. Paul was a hunter from birth. He was feral and patriotic, like a boy who had been raised by coonskin caps, and my father had high hopes that he would join the military as soon as he was of age. Christina, however, had only ever been to the shooting range once, and when she had expressed a desire to join the Navy, my father sat her down and told her that if she did, she would most likely be assaulted on a large boat when she was least expecting it. She would have to follow in his footsteps some other way—by playing the guitar, or by climbing up a tree in a hideous outfit and taking dead aim at woodland creatures. If only there were some sort of guitar that shot notes instead of bullets, they could indulge in both forms of bonding at the same time.
The rest of the family had no interest in killing deer, but that didn’t deter him. He dragged us all along and booked us into a forest
motel that was favored by out-of-town hunters. I had always thought the words “hotel” and “motel” were synonyms, but as soon as I stepped across the threshold, I understood that a motel was grosser. It looked like the place where Smokey the Bear went to cheat on his wife. My mother hefted our bags inside and almost fainted. She was a good Republican woman, but this was really too much. She nudged open the bathroom door and stared in horror—no doubt she saw a bear pube—but my father looked around him and sighed with contentment. Among his other vocal talents, he was capable of issuing the most expansive sounds of physical satisfaction, like the Ghost of Christmas Present or Caligula. “Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”
There was an erotic painting of ducks bursting breastily out of a bush hanging over the bed, which he took a long moment to appreciate. The bedspread was patterned with a melancholy design of bare branches and puddles of despondent mud, to remind us of how much everything was going to die someday. “Especially deer,” my father whispered to himself with visible anticipation. He felt this was where he belonged, on an icy brown afternoon when the sky looked like rain, or snow, or doom. He was participating in an age-old ritual, where a boy becomes a man and a man becomes a psycho.
He was wearing a camouflage hat, as if inconspicuousness were even possible for him. Like a deer would see that hat and think, “That is a tree with a lot of religious opinions.” Though it did give me pleasure to call up an image of my father tiptoeing cartoonishly through the underbrush, autumn leaves crunching under his feet like snacks. My father is a large, swaggering, legally blind man. Autumn leaves had no chance against him. Deer, on the other hand, were almost certainly going to be fine.
Mary and I were feisty after a long car ride through the skeletal woods. We felt persecuted worse than the early Christians. “Why would you want to kill deer?” we argued. “A deer is the last thing that needs to be killed.”
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