The next morning rain fell steadily from a slate sky. Junior stoked the fire in the woodstove and cut up four potatoes that Murphy had in his cabinet. Murphy awoke while he was frying them.
“Better get yourself cleaned up,” Junior said. “You got to go see the preacher in a little while.”
“What preacher?”
“Mrs. Carcano.”
“I ain’t going to chin with no preacher. No way. Got this far without being prayed over and I’ll just keep going down the trail without it.”
“You’re goin’, so I don’t want to hear any more about it. She brought you out from Indian River last night.”
“Mighty steep price for a ride.” Murphy was so stiff and sore from sleeping on the floor that he couldn’t stand without holding on to something. And he felt sick, really sick. “Guess I was pretty drunk last night.”
“You were plastered, all right, but it wasn’t pretty.”
“Don’t remember much about it.”
“If you want to break up with the widow Wilfred, why didn’t you just tell her so?”
“She doesn’t know, does she?” Murphy hitched himself sideways to a window and peered over at Twila Wilfred’s house.
“Women know everything,” Junior said gloomily. “Better wash and put on clean clothes, some that don’t stink. These potatoes will be ready in a few minutes.”
“I couldn’t eat.”
“A few bites will make you feel better.”
Elijah Murphy sank onto the one chair he owned and stared morosely at the wall.
Junior dropped Murphy in front of Mrs. Carcano’s house and watched as he walked slowly across the lawn, oblivious to the rain. He climbed the stairs to the porch as if he were scaling Mount Everest. Standing in front of the door with his shoulders hunched, a wizened little man in grubby clothes, Murphy looked so forlorn that Junior almost called to him to come back to the truck. He managed to restrain himself.
Instead he turned off the engine. He wasn’t going anywhere until Murphy was in that house, with the door closed. He knew Elijah Murphy too well. The instant Junior was out of sight Murphy might rabbit for the woods. Not that Junior blamed him. A root canal without anesthetic would be preferable to a one-on-one session with a woman preacher with your sins as the main topic of conversation. Oh, well, Murphy had gotten himself into this mess; he had to take his medicine.
Finally Murphy lifted his hand and knocked on the preacher’s door.
Junior started the roll-back. When the door opened and Murphy disappeared into the house, Junior lifted the clutch and fed gas.
“How do you like your coffee, Mr. Murphy?”
“Don’t matter.”
“Strong and black, then. Please come into the kitchen—we can talk there.”
Murphy followed Mrs. Carcano and took a seat at the kitchen table. He took off his old cap and sat twisting it in his hands as she rattled cups and saucers. When the steaming black liquid was in front of him, he couldn’t help himself. He put the cap in his lap and used both hands to lift the cup to his lips. His hands were shaking again.
“Do you really want to stop drinking?” Mrs. Carcano asked over her shoulder. When his answer didn’t come immediately, she paused and turned to face him.
“I don’t know,” Murphy said when he got the cup back into its saucer.
“Won’t be easy.”
The coffee perked Murphy up. “Praying about it ain’t going to help, I don’t figure.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. The strength and determination must come from within.”
“What would you know about it?”
Mrs. Carcano took a seat across from Murphy and sipped her coffee before she answered. “I’m an alcoholic,” she said softly. “I can’t even drink cough syrup with alcohol in it.”
“Ahh…”
“It’s true, Mr. Murphy. I’m an alcoholic. I managed to stop drinking just before it killed me. I started drinking as a teenager, stayed drunk from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-four. Flunked out of college, my first husband divorced me, my family disowned me, I lost my self-respect—basically I lost everything. I gave it all up. So I could keep drinking. I knew the costs and drank anyway.”
“What made you stop?”
She got up from the table and went over to the window. With her back to him she said, “I woke up one morning in the Tombs. That’s the jail in New York City. I had been arrested for prostitution. I had a venereal disease, the DTs, I hadn’t eaten in days, my teeth were loose from malnutrition, and I didn’t have a cent to my name. Not a person on this earth gave a damn about me, because I didn’t give a damn about myself. That morning in the Tombs, sitting in my own filth and surrounded by the dregs of humanity, I hit rock bottom. I was so ashamed of myself I couldn’t even cry. I decided I would never drink again, would try to make something of the years I had left.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She turned to face him. “Life is only what you make it, Mr. Murphy. You put nothing in, you get nothing out. You’re going to have to decide.”
“I tried. I tried to stop. But yesterday, standing in front of that beer joint, thinking about how good that beer would taste—”
“No, Mr. Murphy. You can’t sell me that lie. I’ve wallowed deeper in the slime than you’ll ever get. What you were thinking about was how good that alcohol high would feel. That is what you are addicted to, Mr. Murphy. That is what I’m addicted to, and that’s why I can’t touch anything with alcohol in it. Just one little alcohol kick and I won’t be able to stop.”
“Did you ever fall off the wagon?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t drink now?”
“Not for fifteen years.”
“Could I have some more coffee, Mrs. Carcano?”
When the thick envelope addressed to Anne Harris arrived at the Elkins house, Matilda gave it to Anne, who recognized Ed’s handwriting on the address. Anne took it to her bedroom to read.
Dear Anne,
You asked why I went hunting those days before Dad died two years ago. I have thought about it a good bit these last two weeks, so I will write my thoughts down for you. I don’t know that you will understand, because I am not sure I did myself at the time. Even now, I am not sure I have it right.
The first morning hunting I thought mostly about pending matters at the bank. Almost two years later, confessing that makes me blush. With Dad dying and Mom getting senile, walking through the deep woods in sleet and snow, getting wet and cold, my mind was on the bank—interest rates, personnel problems, a couple of pending loans, and a loan that looked as if we would have to call it. It takes a lot to get me out of my rut.
Finally I began to think of other things, about Dad, his life, Mom, that part of their journey that I accompanied them on, the road still to travel…Gradually, looking at the gray trees and the snow and the low clouds, listening, listening to the silence, waiting for that flash of movement that oh so rarely comes, even the folks faded. Sometime that afternoon—I am not sure when—up there on that mountain there was just the winter forest and the elusive deer, and me. Me, this little blob of bone, muscle, sinew and digestive tract that the world knows as Ed Harris, a mortal man with at least half his life already past.
I didn’t wear enough clothes that first day, so I had to keep moving to stay warm. Couldn’t stand or sit for more than three minutes. Finally my coat began to absorb water and my feet got cold and my fingers got numb. I kept moving around Panther Lick, which is the head of the Indian River drainage.
A family farmed this high mountain meadow around the turn of the last century: they died or moved away in the ’20s. They merely eked out a poor living on thin, rocky soil, and the young people were probably glad to go. The land was sold for taxes during the Great Depression. The man who purchased it on the courthouse steps by paying the delinquent taxes merely let the trees grow. Dad bought it about 1960 and cut the timber three or four years later.
Panther Lick is becoming timber again. The ruins of the old house are still visible amid the weeds and brush, and you can see the foundations of the well house. Every now and then you find a locust fence post still standing—there are not many of those. Everything else that man made is pretty well gone except the logging road, which is badly washed out in places.
Ed Harris, cold, shivering middle-aged banker, thought some about the family that lived there all those years ago, thought about who they were, what they might have wanted from life, what they wanted for their kids. Wondered why they picked this place, isolated, up here in the forest on this mountain.
I was on a tip of a ridge that comes down off the main ridge and overlooks the meadow where the house stood, idly turning these questions over, when I found the cemetery.
I hunted all over that area as a youngster, even before Dad bought the land, and I didn’t know the graveyard was there. It is merely a dozen or so stone slabs amid the trees. No doubt the ridge was meadow or pasture when the bodies were buried, but after the family left, it went back to trees. The stones—slate, I think—have some carving on them. That first afternoon I could read the carving clearly in the diffused half-light; the next afternoon, with the sun shining, I could only see scratches—the names and dates were impossible to make out.
I didn’t see hide nor hair of that big buck the first day. I don’t think I did, anyway. I jumped several deer, but they bounded off through the trees so quickly that I couldn’t see if they were does or bucks.
Not that I cared.
My being up there wandering around was enough to satisfy Dad. He thought I was hunting. That was enough. My only regret was that I hadn’t worn enough clothes, so I had to keep moving, which cost me a lot of energy.
That evening I was so tired, yet I had to tell Dad what I’d seen. I wanted to know how he was feeling, how his day had gone, but he didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to hear about the hunt, about Panther Lick.
I had seen a couple of deer, sex unknown. He assured me again that the big buck was up there, told me about watching him for almost an hour one afternoon.
I asked him about the cemetery.
“You didn’t know it was there?” he replied.
“No.”
He lay there silently for a moment, then said, “All of us are going to be forgotten eventually, like those folks up on that mountain. When the people who loved you are gone, you’re gone.”
That was all he said about the cemetery. He talked some more about the buck, told me what he looked like and where he had seen him and where he thought I might find him. He spent the rest of our time together on that subject.
When I left him I was too exhausted to talk to you, too tired to keep my eyes open. I remember collapsing in the chair by the fire.
The next morning I awoke about five. You had put a blanket over me and were asleep on the couch.
Dad was sleeping fitfully, and every now and then he would exhale, then not inhale for the longest moment. I asked the nurse about it. She whispered that often they go like that, exhale and never inhale again.
Standing there in the doorway of the bedroom in those moments before dawn, waiting for Dad to breathe again, I felt so helpless, realized how little I knew of life, of its processes and profound mysteries.
I hope there is a God. Don’t know that there is, and maybe that skepticism is widely shared these days. I flat don’t know.
But I hope He exists. And I hope He cares.
You were stretched out on the couch sleeping deeply. I decided not to wake you. Wish now that I had. Wish I’d kissed you and told you I loved you. But I didn’t; like so many of life’s chances, that moment is gone forever.
The porch thermometer read seventeen degrees. Wind blowing, snow coming down but not sticking, the ground frozen… I had a lot more clothes on than the day before but still the cold wind cut through.
When you first feel the winter wind’s bite there is a moment of doubt, a moment when you don’t know if you will be able to make the journey. The trail will be long. The path ahead is unknown, fraught with perils both real and imagined. Will you be strong enough, tough enough? Can you endure?
There were a couple of deer in among the old apple trees behind the barn, and I heard them scamper away. Didn’t see them, not in the snowy darkness that precedes the dawn. I kept walking. I was going pretty good when the gray dawn came and was almost to Panther Lick when a break in the clouds admitted a little sliver of sunlight. Just a sliver, then it was gone.
I guess that even then I didn’t believe in the big buck Dad had talked about. The deer had no reality, no substance. Somewhere between nine and ten that morning, that changed. The snow had become flurries, and the Lick cleared momentarily. I was on the ridge at the head of the drainage working my way along it when I saw him, five or six hundred yards away, trotting across the old meadow behind the cabin site. He was following two does, had his head up. His coat was a dark gray, nearly black, and he was huge, almost twice the size of the does.
Even now, as I write this, I can see him trotting along, sampling the wind, his enormous antlers carried high, a legend become flesh. Until I saw him, I didn’t believe. Oh, I heard and nodded and knew Dad was telling the truth, but I didn’t believe.
I was too far away to shoot, of course. With open sights at that distance, I didn’t have a chance.
Suddenly I wasn’t tired. Wasn’t cold. Wasn’t depressed about Dad and Mom and the absence of hope. And the bank was gone—interest rates, bad loans, everything—washed away as if it had never been.
I walked ever so carefully through the woods, easing along, knowing that the three deer were somewhere in the timber ahead, and if luck or fate or God willed it, somewhere, sometime, I would be close enough, would get a shot.
Every sense was alert. I could hear every dry leaf rustle, hear the trees popping and snapping from the cold, hear my footsteps, my breathing, my heart. At moments like that, your eyes become attuned to catch movement and you peer between trees and around rocks as you sneak along, trying to breathe shallowly, make no noise, become one with the forest.
I walked like that for hours…and didn’t see the buck again that day. Looked and looked amid the cold wind. The sun came out and fine, frozen snow that didn’t accumulate kept falling, but I couldn’t find the buck or his does.
When I stumbled into the farm that evening, I was whipped. I told Dad about seeing the buck, which perked him up. He seemed to become more alert for a while as we talked about the woods, the wind, the snow and freezing cold, about the buck and where he might be tomorrow. For a few minutes his mind was clear, he talked in complete sentences, then he drifted off.
I forced myself to take a shower, then I collapsed. Slept without dreaming.
Anne put down the letter and went to the window. She, too, remembered that evening two years ago. She had had to call the doctor, and he had arrived around nine. Ed had already fallen asleep on the couch. After the doctor examined the patient, he sipped coffee in the kitchen while Sarah wandered about like a lost soul.
“Won’t be long,” the doctor said. “His heart could quit anytime. Tonight, tomorrow night… I’ll be amazed if he’s alive a week from now.”
“I see.”
“The nurses doing okay?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“I suppose.”
“Get plenty of rest. Give him pain medication when he needs it.”
“Is it always like this?” Sarah asked. She had drifted into the kitchen.
“Death, you mean?” When Sarah didn’t answer immediately, the doctor added, “Or life?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t, either. Bodies wear out so differently, people are so different in their attitudes toward death…” He shrugged. “Death is a natural part of life, yet people confound their physicians every day. They die when they should have lived; they live when the medical journals say life is no longer possible. You figure it out. By the way, this is good coffee.”
He left soon afterward, as Ed slept. Poor, lonely Sarah went back to her aimless trek back and forth through the drafty, cold rooms and hallways.
The snow was sticking the third morning. It came in flurries. When the flurries were thickest, visibility was reduced to about a hundred feet. I thought the deer would be lying in, so I kept moving, hoping to jump them out. I confess, by then I wanted that buck badly.
It seemed to me that conditions were ideal, or close to it. If I could get that big buck moving, I could track him, which would have been impossible the previous two days. If I could get on his trail, I could keep him moving, and finally he would tire, would let me get closer and closer before he moved on. Then I would get a shot. If I didn’t wear down first.
But I felt good. Confident. The previous two days of hiking had taken the soreness out of my muscles and inured me to the cold and wind. It seemed to me that I had a chance.
Most of life’s opportunities are like that; all you get is a chance. And you can easily blow it.
I wanted that deer. I wanted to go back and tell Dad that I got him, tell him how it was. This I could share with my father. He wanted to share it with me and I with him. That was important that morning as I walked up the mountain in the snow. Now, two years later, I’m not sure that I understand. But it was important then.
I jumped the buck and two does just behind the old farmhouse site on the meadow at Panther Lick. I got a glimpse of his antlers, saw brown hide, then they were gone. I didn’t have a shot. They left nice tracks, though, and there was no doubt which set belonged to Old Buck. His were almost twice as big as the ladies’.
With the snow falling I couldn’t dawdle. My tactics were useless if I followed too slowly and allowed the deer to rest. And the accumulating snow was merciless; if it wiped out the tracks I was finished.
Still I felt optimistic. This was only the second time I had seen him in three days, and I felt the conditions had given me an edge. I moved right along as quickly as I could.
I was soon sweating. Now I had on too much clothing. I took off a sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, let the coat hang open.
Sure enough, on the side of the mountain I jumped them again, only they were so far ahead I only saw their white tails in the snow. They went up over the ridge behind Panther Lick, then went along the side of Laurel Mountain to where it drops off into the upper reaches of the Little River Basin. This was perhaps five miles from where I jumped them the first time. I could tell from their tracks where they slowed, stopped to listen and look back, browsed, even laid down once until they heard or saw me coming. Then they bounded away, finally slowing to a walk again.
Somewhere above the Little River they began to circle back. Went across Laurel Mountain and started back toward Panther Lick.
It was darn near noon by then, and I was beat. I figured I had done six miles through snow and thickets, six miles over logs, up hills and down… I was so tired. If only I had known how tired I was going to get.
Six miles out, six miles back. The snow let up some that afternoon—it seemed there was about six to eight inches on the ground then. The tracks were easy to follow. Finally it dawned on me that I wasn’t far behind the deer.
They were moving slowly by then. The hike had taken a lot out of them, too. They needed time to browse, to rest, and I was insisting they burn calories.
About two o’clock or so I got a glimpse of them again, got the rifle on the old buck and actually snapped off a shot. After the silence of the woods for the previous two days, the boom of the report seemed extraordinarily loud, like a cannon.
A .25–35 doesn’t kick much, but it kicks a little, enough to raise the barrel so that your target is momentarily obscured. When I got the barrel back down, the deer weren’t in sight.
I charged over to the place where they had been. No blood. I could see where their sharp hooves had dug deeply into the snow and leaves that lay underneath. At the crack of the gun they had accelerated to great, leaping bounds.
At that time I believe I was three miles from Panther Lick, which is, as you’ve heard, a mile or so above the farmhouse. I confess, at that moment I believed the hunt was hopeless. I was so exhausted that I wanted to lie down in the snow and sleep for a week, and the deer were running strongly…there was just no way.
The only bright spot was that they were running in the direction of Panther Lick, and I had to go that way in any event. I think that if they had been running in any other direction, I would have let them go.
Perhaps.
Oh, I don’t know.
Certainly at that point I didn’t realize how close to collapse I was, how much energy it was going to take to walk the miles back to the farm. As it was I almost didn’t make it, but looking back, I am not sure I realized how perilously close to the edge I was at that time, after I shot and missed.
So I followed them. Followed the trail through the trees, up on the ridge behind Panther Lick and along it toward the west.
I was still thinking then, wondering why they didn’t go on down into the Lick. Didn’t understand. The answer, as it turned out, was that the snow was deep on the north side of the ridge, really deep, and the deer were staying on the ridge so they wouldn’t have to fight through it.
They were wandering, going down off the crest, then coming back up, trying it again a little farther on.
I began to move straight along the ridge. I was doing that when I saw them.
A doe was in the lead. Saw her first. Then the doe behind.
The distance was less than a hundred yards, maybe about seventy-five or eighty. There were lots of trees, lots of blown-down timber, so I was just getting glimpses.
I steadied the rifle against a tree, cocked it and held my breath.
Sure enough, the buck came into view. I saw him as he passed between two trees, but he was gone before I could shoot. I shifted the rifle…and he came out from behind a big tree and paused, looked back over his shoulder, back the way they had come.
I shot him then. The bullet knocked him down. He got up and I shot him again. That time he stayed down.
He was dead by the time I got to him, thank God! Both bullets had hit him in the chest—one apparently went through his heart.
I collapsed in the snow.
I wasn’t elated. I wasn’t anything, as I recall. Just bone-weary tired. So tired…
How long I sat in the snow I don’t recall exactly. It couldn’t have been over ten or fifteen minutes. I was soaked with sweat and began to get cold, deathly cold, and that hard reality got me up and moving.
First I had to gut the deer. Hot blood, steaming in the cold—it was then that it sank in that I had killed a living thing. That was what I had been trying to do, of course, and I knew when I was pulling the trigger and the rifle was booming and bucking that I was trying to kill, but the visceral reaction didn’t set in until I was pulling guts out of his body cavity and the slippery, hot blood was warm on my hands and steaming in the snow. Red snow…I can still see it as I write these words.
And yet I didn’t feel guilty. Every living thing is condemned to death at the moment of its birth. That’s been said so often it is trite, yet until you come to grips with that extraordinary fact at a gut level, you cannot cope with life. You fear it, shrink from it.
Luckily I had the foresight, years ago, to put a length of rope in the pocket of that hunting coat. I got it out, tied it around the antlers of the deer, picked up my rifle, and started pulling. Downhill.
Downhill seemed best, toward the old homestead on Panther Lick. I figured I was about a half mile above it.
The problem was the snow. It was nearly two feet deep on the side of that ridge, which was why the buck and does had gone along the top of the ridge instead.
Pulling that dead deer through the snow, struggling to move my feet, falling regularly over buried limbs and tree trunks, I quickly expended what energy I had left. I was facing absolute exhaustion when I got down to the edge of the old meadow, a couple hundred yards from the ruins of the farmhouse.
I could not drag the deer another step.
I decided to hang it in a tree, come back for it tomorrow. In those temperatures the carcass would keep nicely.
The problem was getting it into the tree.
Rope over a low limb, pull and lift. Tug, strain…
I dropped the deer twice. Finally got its feet up a few inches above the snow, but I could get it no higher, pull as I might on the rope.
I think it was then that I realized that I would be fortunate to get back to the house that night. And if I didn’t make it I would freeze to death.
Unbelievable! A middle-aged banker goes hunting just a few miles from his father’s house, and he is in danger of dying from exposure.
I don’t remember knotting the rope or retrieving my rifle, any of that. What I remember now is staggering along the old logging road toward the house, trying to keep my eyes open, trying to keep upright. The temptation to lie down for just a few moments was so very strong; the light was fading fast, the air was getting colder.
Just a little farther, a little farther. I kept telling myself that.
I don’t remember much more than that about the walk home.
Somehow I made it. I remember coming into the kitchen, the light, the warmth, you standing there looking at me.
I remember going in to see Dad, trying to tell him I had gotten the buck, trying to tell him how it was up on the mountain in the snow, and I remember waking up in the chair in his room when the nurse was fussing around him. I don’t know what time that was—maybe three or four in the morning. Dad was in a deep sleep by then and never woke again. As you recall, he died six or seven hours later.
I don’t know whether he understood that I had gotten the deer, or whether he cared by that time. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
In the end, nothing matters. And yet we deny our humanity if we fail to understand that our obligation to the living is the only thing that does matter. To us.
Ed