This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  And there is the hunting. In northeast Pennsylvania, schoolchildren get the first day of hunting season off instead of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The opening of the season truly is treated like a holiday, and weekenders and summer folks generally aren’t included. For the first few years, the closest I came to a hunting party was an open bed of a pickup truck full of ten or twelve men decked out in full camouflage, large black guns slung against their shoulders. They usually head out in the early morning, when even lovely days are still cold and wet, and many wear black or orange ski masks pulled down on their faces. Only their voices or a familiar wave will reveal them as neighbors. Once we moved here full-time, it wasn’t long before the men knocked on the door and asked M. to join the push.

  A deer push is exactly what it sounds like; at the end of the season, the men fan out in a line across a swath of forest and, with whoops and claps and the clear tang of their own musk, they drive the remaining deer toward another group of men waiting with guns. There are no houses visible from our porch. There are only a handful of homes, including two single-wide trailers, two ranch homes, and one other farmhouse like ours dating back to the 1860s, within the surrounding six hundred or so acres. The property looks out onto craggy shelves of blue stone, dark and dense hemlock forests, and stands of tall, skinny poplar trees whose round golden leaves shimmer in the wind. Our hill is a thruway for animals heading toward the swamp for a drink. Which means our house is also a great place to shoot animals heading toward the swamp for a drink, a perfect place for a push.

  Although we posted No Hunting signs when we bought the house, the locals continued to stroll up our long dirt driveway during deer season, carrying wooden sawhorse-like contraptions, small seats that they pound into trees, front rows from which they scan the forest. For years, when the house sat abandoned in the 1970s and 1980s, men would sit in rocking chairs and lawn chairs on the porch, or prop themselves up on the wooden banister, one leg on the beer cooler, and pick off the deer as they crashed through the tangle of rosehips and thorny crabapple trees that mark the edge of our property.

  One morning, as I mashed banana for the baby’s breakfast, our friend James showed up on the porch before the coffee finished brewing. His Day-Glo orange hat and vest were visible through the blinds and when M. opened the door I could see his camouflage jumpsuit and the strap of his rifle slung over his shoulder like a purse. It was the last Saturday of deer season, and they always ran the push on this morning—anyone who’d already bagged an animal would form a line and spread out, slowly creeping through the woods for miles to flush any deer left out of the swamp and over to a line of men who hadn’t shot their catch yet that season.

  M. pulled his orange hat and gloves on and grabbed his rifle, following James to the line of trees just beyond the garden. I watched them fade into the forest.

  Not long after, I stood in the kitchen as sounds from a horror movie track echoed across the landscape: sharp whoops and high-pitched shrieks, catcalls and curses. The men were invisible in the forest and swamp, but their sound surrounded us. Every so often I would spy a flash of orange or yellow. Every time I passed a window, I looked out into the emptiness. The children piled blocks, we read and we slept. We stayed inside. Then a gun would crack close by, and the whoops would grow louder, like coyotes after a kill.

  Hours passed. I kept looking out into the woods, searching for human forms. I felt blind and on show at the same time, like being onstage for a concert and knowing the audience is there but not being able to see past the glare of the houselights. After a while I drew the blinds, sealing the kids and myself inside. Alone, just the three of us, closed off from the men and the landscape outside, we could have been anywhere.

  One of our favorite annual events was Venison Night at the local bar and grill, The Red Schoolhouse. Held at the end of deer season, hunters dropped off extra meat to contribute to the $9.99, all-you-can-eat feast of venison. I also liked making my own venison at home; when people hunted our property—a right that many viewed was inalienable, no matter who owned the property now—often they’d leave a bag of frozen meat hanging from the doorknob a few days or weeks later. I knew most of the neighbors brought their deer to our friend Ned for processing, and I was intrigued to see what this “process” entailed.

  Much of the meat we received was mixed with pork, a way to get some fat into the very lean venison. Most of the men recommended the venison kielbasa and burgers Ned prepared, but they were too greasy for my taste, the pig-to-deer ratio not quite right. I preferred the loin, but since I wasn’t hunting my own I had little choice in the matter. I mentioned this once to Ned, who suggested we come over at the end of the season—lots of people drop the deer off, but then don’t have the money to pay for the processing and so the meat just sits in Ned’s freezer. If he had any leftover loin, I was welcome to it.

  I told Davey, one of the men who’d helped us on some building projects around the house, about Ned’s offer. Davey has a metal plate in his head, as well as a rod in his back and another in his leg from a car crash he had as a teenager. He lived on the hill opposite ours in a rented singlewide trailer and was considered the best cook in the neighborhood. Davey is a woodworker, and he’d recently unearthed old grey barn boards and planed them until they turned honey color, buffing them soft and smooth and joining them into a countertop for us. At the end of the kitchen project, M. shuffled a two-bay industrial stainless steel sink into the room. He’d used it in his painting studio in the city; when he lived in his studio, it was where he took his baths.

  He and Davey pushed the sink into position then stood back.

  “How do you think it looks?” M. asked.

  “I love it,” Davey said emphatically. M. and I exchanged a look, surprised that this man who’d lived in these hills his whole life appreciated the way the modern sink mixed with the built-in farmhouse cabinets and reclaimed barnwood counter.

  “Thanks, Davey,” we said.

  “Sure. That’s the best sink I’ve ever seen. I mean, you could dress a whole deer in there!” Davey’s face broke open in his strange smile, his lips pulled taut against the open spaces where he was missing teeth.

  Davey’s favorite way to eat deer is canned. He likes to spread it on soft sandwich bread. He said Ned’s canned venison is a little salty, so we were to tell him that Davey said go easy on the spices.

  Driving up to Ned’s house we were greeted by two giant English Labradors, a yellow and a brown one. More solid and square than American Labs, these two were stout and close to the ground with big jaws, better for hunting fowl. Ned walked down his laneway, calling the dogs that were pawing at us and slobbering into our cupped palms.

  “Want to see the workroom first?” he asked, nodding to the outbuilding next to which we had parked. M. followed him in, but I was pinned by the chocolate lab that was trying to give me a stick from her mouth, mistaking my son’s leg poking out from the baby carrier on my chest for my hand. I closed the door over quietly, leaving my other son asleep in his car seat.

  “Come here, girl,” I said, motioning to my side. I tousled the soft hair on her head and then looked more closely at the stick in her mouth. It was sprouting hair from a knob. The dog brushed my leg with the deer bone—probably part of a knee from the looks of it—as I made my way to the workroom.

  Passing through the doorway into the dark, I was engulfed in a thick cloud of gristle. I was suddenly coated and slick with the stuff, halfway between the smell of a hamburger frying in its own fat and the foamy muck I skim off my turkey broth. My eyes adjusted and I was in a large room, a small mountain of heads to my left. One deer had a cut like a staircase in its head, as if it had been a brain surgery patient. Only later did I realize it had been pillaged for its antlers. I looked away from the pile of heads to see the body of a deer stretched as if in flight from a hook dangling down from the ceiling. It was stripped of its skin, and its brown muscles were threaded with white. The hook was fished into the deer’s neck, it
s head lolled to the side, legs slack along its body.

  I had somehow imagined Ned’s to be more of an industrial kitchen than a place of such death and disassembleage. I had heard about caping, looked it up on the Internet because I loved the sound of the word, some kind of superhero deer coming to mind. Instead, the photos I saw online were ghastly and graphic, stripping the faces off of the animals and reforming their empty stares to adorn a wall. With a carefully orchestrated dance of surgical cuts starting at the back of the neck and continuing down the spine, a deer’s entire skin could be lifted from its flesh in one piece. I imagined holding my arms out in front of me open as if for an embrace, shouldering my body into the caped hide like a hospital gown, pressing my eyes into the holes like a Halloween mask, a skin mask.

  In the photos, the single deer made caping seem almost artistic, if brutal. But in Ned’s shop, the sheer quantity of death was too much. My son’s head sweated into my chest from his sleeping perch and my heart fluttered beneath his brow in alarm. The men were blurry movements beyond the carcasses, walking around in the next room, as if we were in a bakery, or a flower shop, or a gym. I tried to move my legs, but found them stuck. My throat tightened and my pulse began to race. Finally, after a few moments, I uprooted my feet and left the thick darkness of the workroom, finding my way from the piles of death and bones and back out into the light, into the air, into life.

  The dog still sat in the dirt driveway, licking at the puffs of dust his paws kicked up as he gnawed at his prize, turning the white knobbed bone over and over and over in front of our red truck.

  When I lived in the city, I’d never imagined myself as the kind of woman who, with a baby on her hip and a toddler by her side, would collect bouquets of pineapple weed, pressing out the plant’s juice with the pads of my calloused fingertips to dot behind my ears and under my children’s noses. There was a fierce pride when I thought of my life on our little hill, what we could withstand.

  When we’d straddled both worlds, I would exhale as we hurtled up our long driveway, ending the three-hour trip. Our city exterior would be punctured and my brain and body came alive, senses alert to the smells and rough feel of wild ramps and rhubarb, cupping a baby to my breast. I felt alive to the tips of my fingers and toes.

  But then, once that world became our only one, a familiar numbness set in, similar to the days before the farmhouse when I would stare out my city apartment window, dreaming of coconuts or crisp hotel sheets or the sea. Where do you escape to when you’ve escaped full-time to your escape?

  That’s the trick of the dollhouse—you can never really live there. You store all of your ideas and dreams of the perfect home inside it, make the figures go about their business with their tiny plastic dishes and lace curtains. But if you could actually live there, if you could shrink down and fit inside, you’d still be inhabiting someone else’s house, cracked open for all the world to see. You could never feel home. I could lace my arms into the deer’s caped skin, but I could never inhabit its body.

  Standing there in Ned’s dirt driveway, I realized that over the course of the years coming up here and living in this falling-down farmhouse in the middle of the woods, surrounded by thousands of empty acres and bobcats and bear and soft-tipped fern and untamed men I didn’t understand, I’d finally had my fill of the fantasy. I could no longer stand the relentless pounding of gunshots, the winters, the wild. That day at Ned’s, my baby tethered to me by a sling, my toddler asleep in the pickup truck, I stared at that dog and understood that I needed to leave.

  I thought we would bloom in the country; M. took root, but I withered. I tried growing things, to offset the blood and brutality that seemed to accompany the country life, but I couldn’t—I am no farmer. All I could do was pull tangles of berries that were already growing wild, yank yet another damn zucchini from the garden when we were tight on grocery money. The house belonged to the wasps, the powder post beetles, the mice and snakes and voles. The property belonged to the hunters. Both belonged to the bank. I thought I was gaining space with all those acres, but I had no room to breathe.

  I had tried to inhabit the skin of another person, of another house, to shrug into a cape of chicken feathers and garlic scapes and wood stove cinders, of the staccato of soft-nosed homemade bullets and the angry silence of broken men in the hills, of separating meat from skin with a knife and nimble fingers, gently loosening jawbones and limbs and antlers, until all that was left was a jumble of parts on the floor. In the process of trying to become someone else, a part of me floated off over the hills, just another bit of loose late-summer hay on the wind. I wasn’t sure how to get it back, but I cupped my baby’s soft-socked foot in my palm like a talisman and steered us away from that loamy-smelling hut and the carcasses and stack of heads. I looked back, saw my husband’s orange-capped head through the foggy window and waved desperately, but he couldn’t see me.

  So I got into the pickup truck with my children and closed the door tight.

  Kelly McMasters is a former bookshop owner and the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, the basis for the documentary film The Atomic States of America. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Paris Review Daily, American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, and Newsday, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in New York.

  In the Kitchen

  Margot Kahn

  At 7 p.m. on a recent evening, I’m standing in my kitchen scrubbing the broiler pan in our double-basin stainless-steel sink. It was a mistake, this sink, neither basin really big enough to wash the big things. Out the window, tree-leaf shadows shift on the neighbor’s stucco house and the new auralias I planted for a backyard party reach their variegated, palm-shaped leaves out over my son’s toy dump trucks. The trucks are scattered in a patch of dirt that’s too shady to grow vegetables or even grass and that for years now has been left empty as a simple place to play. Each of these choices has been made deliberately, carefully: the kitchen, the sink, the plants, the child. And yet, come 7 p.m., when I’ve been standing in the kitchen for at least two hours, I am chafing at the nagging reality with which I have not yet come to terms. I am the one who is home, in the supporting role, in the same way my mother and my grandmother and all the women before her were. And I always thought I’d be the one to break the chain.

  My grandmother spent the majority of her life in the kitchen, seen only from the waist up behind the counter that separated the kitchen table from the sink and stove. The cupboards and counter of her kitchen were pale yellow and cream, the color of eggs and butter beaten together, and I saw her against the backdrop of them as I sat at the kitchen table eating broiled lamb chops and carrot pennies cooked with syrup and butter. While my mother was divorced and I was an only child, I spent a good deal of time at my grandmother’s table. But I never inquired after my grandmother’s work and she never narrated it. The meals appeared before me as if by sleight of hand. If I spent the night, there would be fresh orange juice and a bowl of Cream of Wheat for breakfast, or a plate of French toast with sugar, syrup, and jam. On occasion, my grandfather would sit across from me at the table, eating a bagel with cream cheese and fork-smashed sardines.

  My grandmother had her specialties and she made them in rotation. Out of her kitchen came a consistent string of briskets and kugels, matzo balls and chicken noodle soups, rum balls, banana cakes, macaroons, rugelach, and chocolate chip cookies. When her children were young, they came home from school for lunch, so my grandmother, like most other immigrant women of her generation, was making a hot meal three times a day, and my mother swears that she and her siblings never ate anything canned, processed, or store-prepared. The family joke was that the one time they ate a
TV dinner, my grandmother finally having relented after the children begged for it (it was what every other family ate, the American way!), they all got sick. But as adults, all my grandmother’s children will say they resented their mother for spending so much time in the kitchen. They wished she had done something other than feed them. When my son was still a baby and distracted at the table, my mother admonished me for all the things I did to entice him to eat—counting peas, making the spoon swoop like an airplane. “Your grandma used to chase my brother around the house with a fork!” she said, as if warning me against a future fate.

  My grandmother’s hands were arthritic and talon-bent, large knuckles giving way to fingers tipped with long, lacquered nails. With the curl of her finger she would scrape batter from the edge of a bowl and add it to the pan; she would open any jar no matter how tight. She did each task with a consistent sense of purpose: that her children should be nourished, flourish, and grow. It never occurred to me to ask my grandmother, who fled persecution in one country and landed in another to make a home for herself from scratch, if the simple routine of the meals, day in and day out, was enough. Did it save her, sustain her? Did she long for something more? Never, in the years I knew her, did she express any regret.

  She did, however, tell me a story once, and only once, when I visited her in Florida after my grandfather died, in the ground-floor condominium that smelled like a Wallace Stevens poem, all green and orange and pink. The living room there looked out onto a screened porch where, as a girl, I kept lizards caught in a shoebox; outside, in the man-made lake, the little shower of a sad fountain seemed to hang in the humid air. The compact kitchen had a view of the parking lot, boxy Buicks and Cadillacs glinting in the sun. We were sitting at the kitchen table with bowls of tuna salad, egg salad, and cottage cheese between us, when she told me that she’d wanted a divorce. She’d wanted it so much that she’d asked for it several times, and each time my grandfather’s anger rose. “The last time I asked for a divorce,” she said, “he told me that if I ever mentioned it again, he would take out his gun from the closet and he would shoot me. And then he would shoot the children, and then he would shoot himself.” So she stayed married. Brisket, kugel, banana cake. Brisket, kugel, banana cake.