“There are too many of them,” my father said forcefully, as if any day now the deer would realize their advantage and stage an uprising, herding all of us into empty prisons and gently licking the salt off us. “Too many of them,” he repeated. “Also, they eat people’s gardens.” I promise you that my father had never even looked at a garden. Flowers registered to him as very small bitches, far off in the distance.
“Well, I think it’s murder,” I reiterated.
“I don’t give a dog’s butt what you think,” he said. He made no sense but he didn’t have to, he was my father. He turned his back on our effeminate protest and nodded at my youngest brother. “In a few years, it’ll be time for Daniel to get up there in one of those trees, eh, Daniel?”
Daniel rolled his inscrutable head toward my father and raised one silky black eyebrow. Like me, he was suffused with a physical laziness that verged on the spiritual. Normal human movement was impossible for him—he tripped, fell, stumbled, and rolled to his destinations. It seemed likely that at some point he would be killed by a baseball. Whenever he wanted to shock us, he would take off his shoe with great ceremony and reveal a toe that had been hammered absolutely flat by some misfortune. It didn’t bend at all, but stuck out at such a pure angle that Euclid would have cried in its presence. He would force us to admire it for a moment, and then tuck it back into his sock with quiet pride.
“No,” he said in the startling baritone he had had even as a baby. Back then, women regularly screamed when my mother brought him into the ladies’ room, believing a fully grown businessman had burst through the door and was requesting a diaper change. He subtly extended the deformed toe toward my father. No, he would not be getting up in any tree, unless perhaps a hound chased him up there, recognizing him as some new and pinker form of prey.
“Jeez Dan,” Paul said, bristling at this display of inertia. His hair was rumpled up all over his head like a dead squirrel. He couldn’t wait to get out there and didn’t understand why the rest of us were passing up this opportunity. He bounced up and down with that ricocheting energy our houses and streets and suburbs could never quite hold. He looked like what he was: a boy who would eventually grow up to pronounce the name of our country Murica, exclusively date women with patriotic eagle noses, and get a huge gun tattooed on his beefy side.
Dad lowered the thermostat to sixty-two degrees, told my mother not to even think about touching it, and set the alarm clock on the bedside table for five a.m. Next he unzipped his bag and took out a bottle of sumptuous gold liquid, holding it up to the light with the same reverence that flowed out of him during the consecration. It was, I regret to inform you, doe urine. It had been harvested from does when they were at the peak of their estrus cycle, and it claimed to “drive the big bucks wild.” Horniness and death, as usual, went hand in hand. I wasn’t sure how you were supposed to use it, but I guessed the hunters splashed it over themselves luxuriously like fine cologne and waited for the big wild bucks to trot toward them with unconcealed erections.
Finally he opened our green alligator overnight case and removed a bar of special soap that hunters used to strip themselves of all human odor. He had forced Paul and Christina to shower with it for weeks before the trip, so the deer wouldn’t be able to catch a whiff of their original sin. Successful hunting, according to my father, had everything to do with the deer not smelling you. Apparently the deer’s nose is an omnipotent organ, like God’s eye. He wanted the rest of us to shower with it too, so we wouldn’t rub off on them, but we refused.
“The deer are going to smell my candy ass . . . and they’re going to love it,” I said, rubbing a raspberry lotion all over my calves that smelled like the pure essence of womanhood to me at the time. I was going through a rebellious period, which meant that sometimes I said the ass-word kind of loudly, and sometimes I didn’t feel religious at all. I took a defiant note in my notebook about “trees rising antlered between the ears of the land” and closed it with a satisfied bang. Nothing escaped my artist’s eye.
My father ignored me. “I can’t wait to get my mouth on that Bambi meat,” he said, which sounded more suggestive than perhaps he intended. In fact, in the past two weeks he had lapsed into a vocabulary that was almost wholly suggestive, invoking phrases about “sniffing the tang of the woods” and “turning boys into men” at every opportunity.
“All right, idiots, lights out!” he commanded, as soon as he was finished with his ritual tasks. It was only eight o’clock, but they needed lots of rest. My mother was so disgusted with the motel that she stomped outside to sleep in the van, wrapping a towel around her shoulders and yelling “NASTY!” as she went. The rest of us girls squeezed ourselves into the single double bed, underneath the bedspread whose camouflage was so effective that we couldn’t see any of the body juices it must have been stained with. The men settled into their cots, shifting and restless, and we drifted off to the soothing sounds of my dad and brother discussing what protocol they should follow if one of them accidentally shot the other.
The hunters woke at the red sound of the alarm and crept out of the motel room with their guns slung over their shoulders, dabbed at all pulse points with doe urine. My sister and I sat up when the door slammed, blinked, and then fell back asleep under the influence of the erotic duck painting. It affected Mary so strongly that she threw one solid thigh over me and locked me in a forceful hump, all the while still unconscious. This always happened when we shared a bed. It was a spontaneous, lewd, and uncontrolled habit. If she had lived in the Victorian era, she would probably have been put in a Home for it. God only knows what she dreamed about—rocking horses and pony rides and endless turns on carousels. Perhaps, as she slept that night, she dreamed of galloping on the back of a deer, urging it faster and faster away from the pursuers in camouflage.
A black gap of sleep, where I seemed to be sitting cold and motionless in the burly crotch of a tree, and then hours later, we heard the door creak open again. The party had returned from the hunt! I opened my eyes, expecting to see them with expertly disemboweled carcasses slung over their shoulders—where would we put them? in the bathtub?—but no. Christina stumbled jerkily inside and then fell to the floor with a paralyzed thud, unable to walk. My father had strapped her with a belt to a tree trunk, handed her an SKS and told her not to move, and then left her there for three hours. By the time he came back, she couldn’t feel her legs and had, as she described it, “accidentally hypnotized herself” by scanning back and forth for deer the entire time he was gone. “I never saw a single one,” she mumbled from somewhere down on the carpet. “Nobody ever saw any deer.”
My father stepped forward to elaborate, his arm around Paul’s shoulder. He cleared his throat, embarrassed, and then explained that not only had they not killed any deer, but my brother had crapped himself in a tree stand because he got too excited. “Poor little dude,” my father said, shaking his head sympathetically, “he got so worked up, he crapped himself.” He said it like that was just something people did, just one way young men reacted to the overwhelming stimulus of their first hunting trip. My brother nodded, as if to confirm both the crap and the excitement. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who care if they crap themselves and people who don’t. My brother manifestly did not. Probably the crap was keeping him warm.
If I were writing this chapter about one of my other brothers or sisters, I would have to call it “Mary’s Secret Shame” or “Everyone Is Disappointed in Daniel” or “Christina Couldn’t Wait.” Disgrace didn’t stick to Paul, though. He stood there with a look of self-congratulation on his face, as if he had just graduated from a VERY private college. His affectionate nickname P.J. now stood for something else: Poop Jentleman. I could be wrong, but I don’t even remember him changing his pants, I just remember us bundling up our things sheepishly and checking out of the motel, Daniel rumbling out a vengeful man’s laugh the whole while. It was Sunday, though, so before w
e could leave, my father led a small group into the woods and said Mass for them among the pagan columns of the trees—not because he wanted to, but because that was the only church available. I imagine the only prayer in his heart the whole time was the one that went WHY LORD WHY.
The ride home had the feeling of a funeral procession, but where was the body? Every other car on the highway had a dead deer strapped to it, but not ours. Whenever we pulled into a gas station, we were surrounded by vehicles flaunting their corpses. I ventured the opinion that perhaps we should have strapped my brother’s tiny crap to the top of the car instead, to save our pride. “If you stuck two tiny sticks in it, it would look like antlers.” But my helpful suggestion was met with silence. My father’s seat belt hung free; he could not buckle it over the gut of his sadness. He was a broken dad.
Later we found out that the whole time Paul was forced to shower with the special hunting soap, he was also ordered to eat only apples and bagels so the deer wouldn’t be able to smell his meals. My brother was vindicated, but the rest of us were never quite able to shake the suspicion that he had done it on purpose, for fun or pleasure or out of sheer scatological whimsy. Poop Jentleman worked in mysterious ways.
After this notable failure, the whole family gave up hunting for the next ten years. We never even spoke of it, except to laugh at my brother’s youthful incontinence, until one moonless night when we were all vacationing on a little island off the coast of South Carolina. My mother and I were driving on a winding road that ran from the heart of the island toward the beach, where the ocean made a fine continuous flushing sound. Light pollution laws meant that streetlights were dusky and spaced far apart, and we rode under a canopy of live oaks so shaggy with Spanish moss that we were cut off from the disclosing glow of the sky. Out in the darkness, life stirred everywhere. Through our rolled-down windows we could hear the round rattle of the palms, crickets applauding, bullfrogs belching out their personal ads. “Don’t you just love Nature?” my mother remarked, and then: thump. A fawn darted in front of us and her black van of death struck him with all the force that a non-grindup vehicle could muster. I got a glimpse of his gooseberry-green eye just as it took the full impact of the headlight. With that single thud and a cry of WHOOOPS, she became a more successful hunter than my father ever dreamed of being.
When he heard about it, my dad asked wistfully if she had left all that good meat lying on the side of the road, but from the look on his face, you could tell he already knew the answer. It was all right, he wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. Who knew where it had come from, who knew where it had been. Who knew who had given it to us.
12
MEN OF THE CLOTH II: THE CLOTHENING
The Rag,” Jason whispers to me one night in late autumn, as he’s cocooning himself in the multiple blankets necessary to protect his dainty body against my father’s thermostat. He snuggles down inside them and shudders. “It’s following me again.”
We first noticed the Rag shortly after we moved in, when it appeared one morning without seeming rhyme or reason in the sink of the upstairs bathroom that we share with my parents. Since then it has attained almost the status of a cryptozoological myth. It is a simple unadorned washcloth, but it has a sinister significance. It might be alive. It is always wet. We never, ever feel at liberty to move it.
“Where am I supposed to spit my toothpaste?” Jason asks, the whites of his eyes showing all the way round. “I just swallowed so much that I seriously considered calling Poison Control. If it happens again, I will. The number is on the back of the tube.”
“And how am I supposed to wash my face?” I wonder in my turn. “If I bend too low, the Rag brushes my cheek . . .”
“Like the little finger of a drowned child,” Jason finishes, his voice rising into a sort of wail. A thought occurs to him. “Do you think it’s trying to get revenge on me for drinking all of the bourbon your mother bought for the bishop? Because that was a mistake. A wonderful, delicious mistake.”
Sometimes the Rag even migrates to the shower, where it lurks in a malevolent wad. This means that it can walk . . . or crawl. From the corner, the wad follows our naked movements with invisible eyes. If it could speak, it would call us dirty.
“If Stephen King knew about this Rag, he could write such a scary book,” Jason says. “Where the Rag follows innocent people around and scrubs them against their will.”
“Instead of dressing as ghosts for Halloween, kids would dress as the Rag.”
“The sound of blood dripping would be less frightening than the sound of the dripping Rag.”
“Rip the Rag into a hundred pieces and it throbs under your floorboards like the telltale heart.”
One pavement-gray, sleeting afternoon, we go grocery shopping with my mother. As the year winds down toward the fireside holidays, daily errands with her become almost unspeakably soothing. I avoided accompanying her on them during spring and summer, but I am irresistibly drawn to them now—being with her feels like existing in the overflow of a cornucopia. We go to three different stores looking for the best pomegranates. We have to pick up a copy of Pat the Bunny for my sister’s baby so she “can learn about softness, and not have a deprived childhood.” Cornish hens are on sale at the market across town, and “you know how crispy their little bodies get.” And always, throughout, we must tend to my father’s long and clamoring grocery list.
We are making our way down the breakfast aisle when my mother picks up a box of granola, reads the product description, yells, “Don’t TELL me it’s all-natural. So is CRAP from a CAT,” and shoves the box back into the stack as if she’s administering a punch to breakfast itself. That duty to truth dispensed with, she maneuvers the cart into the next aisle and picks up a spotless bundle of fresh new Rags. Jason gives me an agonized look and tugs the sleeve of my coat. If we don’t ask now, we might never find out. We might go to our graves without knowing.
“Mom . . . the Rag,” I begin.
The squealing of the cart’s wheels stops abruptly. She has been expecting this moment, and bows her head as if waiting for the stroke of the executioner’s sword.
“Why is it there?” I ask. “What is it for?”
“I can’t take it anymore!” Jason shrieks, unable to control himself. “What’s on it? It smells like a crime.”
With alarming speed and force, she yanks us both into the freezer section where no one will overhear our secrets. She slams the door behind her and exhales a cold cloud, gazing past us with war-torn eyes at a point in the middle distance. “Ooooo, what a deal on chicken breasts,” she says, momentarily distracted. Then she turns to me, grips my forearm, and gives me the same haunted look she gave us when she told us about the economy-sized bottle of Palmolive. “Oh, Tricia. Do not post this on the internet, but . . . your father washes his legs with that Rag.”
13
BLOW, GABRIEL, BLOW
The only Christmas present I ever really wanted, besides various large marbles carved of semiprecious stone and purchased from the gift shop at the Natural History Museum, was a radio . . . inside a stuffed cat. A stuffed-cat radio. It was called the Pettable Portable Fluffy Kitty, and it had a functioning AM-FM radio inside it. “You’ve done it, Radio Shack,” I thought when I picked up the box and saw it staring out at me with eyes as gold and seductive as a saxophone solo. “You’ve finally made me care about technology.”
“Please, Mom,” I said, turning to her in desperation, unable to fully articulate my need. What could I say? That the cat’s face was as symmetrical as only the mathematics of immortal composition could make it? That it had the Fancy Feast of music in its stomach? That it was a longhair, like Beethoven, and I wanted it? I resorted, as I always did, to reading. “Please. The box says it’s HUGGABLE, and a PERFECT COMPANION FOR CHILDREN.”
When Christmas came, I tore through the pyramid of my presents in a frenzy. Nothing. No stuffed cat radio anywhere. In despair I pic
ked up the final package, which seemed too light to accommodate something as momentous as a pettable portable perfect companion that contained actual radio music. Yet when I ripped the wrapping off, there it was, one of its eyes set crooked in its socket so it looked like it had gone daft with pleasure, waiting for me to turn it on and unleash its Top 40 meow.
I had never been happier in my life. I still remember the look of bewilderment my father directed at me as I whispered “thank you” to my parents and then buried my face in the cat’s fur. “What the hell,” he said under his breath, and then set about installing batteries in that empty part of its belly where the uterus had been scooped out.
It was an unusual Christmas, because he was there. Priests have better things to do on December 25. They must rise early, put on their vestments, and bring Jesus into the world through the legs of Mother Church. Picture a priest’s Christmas. He says two or three Masses in the morning, then walks through the old snow to an empty rectory, cutting a hard black shadow on all that whiteness. He enters a kitchen that was last remodeled in the 1970s, one with marigolds printed on the linoleum, and reheats a dinner the housekeeper prepared for him the day before. Today she has gone to visit her family. Her sister, maybe, in Michigan. The priest is alone among old Life magazines. He is tired. All that lifting of the arms; all that dry singing, rattling with the seeds of Latin; all that blessing and handshaking and smiling. He turns on a small fizzing television and adjusts the antenna. The black cat of the house, with a solid patch of white on her throat, comes and rubs up against his legs. When he falls asleep on the couch, with the light of the television still pulsing on the ceiling, she licks him, hoping that he’s dead and that she’ll finally get to take his body and eat. No wonder my father distrusts them.
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