Father Shea specialized in teaching the art of the sermon, stressing the priest as God’s instrument, the invention through which He gave His divine music voice. August pictured himself part cello. Imagined the bow dragging mournfully across his hollow chest, pulling out chord after celestial chord.
Shea was an ugly brute—a barnyard face on a body the cassock couldn’t hide—but his looks fell away like a costume the moment he parted his thick lips and spoke. He began simply, as a rule. “A parish priest must be a man of faith.”
Anticipation rippled down the rows.
“And more. He must also be possessed of an ardent desire to communicate that faith.”
About there August closed his eyes. It wasn’t the words themselves—they were plain enough—it was the way they emerged, each breaking the seal of Father Shea’s mouth as though it were the silk of a cocoon.
“To communicate, one must be in communion, and to be in communion is to speak out from inside the words.” Father Shea paused. “The sense inside the sound, that’s what people listen for, that’s all they’re truly willing to hear. Words are empty vessels without intention, without thought. Bring the thought to the very lips, d’you see, bring it further, fling it out.” He made weigh scales of his misshapen hands. “Every noun its measure, every verb its proper pace. Horses are not lemons, d’you see? Horses.”
August could hear the source, the very sound horses grew out of, the beasts themselves giving rise to their name.
“Hum now,” Father Shea directed them suddenly, “all of you, try a few notes.” And they did, dissonance rearranging the room.
“Feel that? Now think of your head as a church. Try again.” This time he talked over their sound. “Let it echo through the chapels of your sinuses, high up into the vault of your skull. Keep your throat open—it’s the aisle, the passion rides up on a breath.” He silenced them with a sharp wave. “That’s when you’re really preaching,” he said into the hush. “When you can feel the Word resound.”
August is kneeling at the prie-dieu in his office, deep in evening prayer, when the buck returns. He halts mid-murmur, cocks an ear to parting bushes, an imagined lifting of hooves. Muffled through stone and glass, there comes a low, insistent baaing. He rises as though bidden, clambers quietly to stand again at the edge of his desk.
It’s not alone.
The doe steps prettily. She turns her eyes the buck’s way, liquid dark, and again the buck baas, lifts a hoof and sets it down. She leads him into the open, the snowy yard unmarked but for the record of their steps. The buck bends his swollen neck as though bowing to the doe’s hind end, his antlers the hands of a man, the shape they assume when forming themselves to a woman’s ribs. The doe halts for him. Allows him to draw close, to mount her in a single fluid move.
More than two months have passed, yet for a moment August can feel her, the soft backs of her thighs, the curve of her hips where his fingertips dug in. His position seems suddenly precarious, as though the desk is tilting, threatening to throw him off.
In the between-tree shadows a shifting, a gathering of forms. Lost in the cloud of their own scent, the deer remain intent, unaware. August is no help. Even if he weren’t so light-headed, he hasn’t the bush sense to know.
A split second before it happens, the buck lifts his head, raising his antler-hands to the sky. They break from the trees—yellow, dappled silver, one liver-coloured with enormous paws. They are dogs and not dogs. Crossbred to be pets, beloved mutts, they’re losing fur in clumps now, their origins clearly visible in bared haunch-blades, ribs, fangs.
The buck hasn’t time to disengage, the dogs attacking as though he and the doe are one body, a giant, two-headed deer. Less organized than wolves, the pack forms a snarling patchwork, one tearing at the doe’s belly, two fastening into haunches, the largest sinking its teeth into the buck’s thick neck. August yells pure sound—a warning after the fact—then stands whimpering, his hands clenched and helpless at his sides. The brawling mass traverses his window third by third—the buck goring the yellow dog, tossing it yelping through the air, others leaping back from the doe’s slashing hooves.
All at once the knot loosens and lets go. The little black dog, thrown to the poplars, rebounds off a trunk and lies stunned. The mottled grey drags a cracked foreleg. The yellow bitch slinks open-bellied into the bush. Of those left standing, the pale-faced show blood while the dark ones appear innocent and clean. The pack dismantled, these few pace at a safe distance, silently working their jaws.
The deer come apart. Stand quivering, then turn the torn flags of their tails and run. None give chase. The battered dogs dissolve back into the shadows that brought them.
“Dogs,” August tells the empty office. “Dogs?” Then it dawns on him. The question surfaces every so often on his parish rounds. Those mutts ever turn up? Ever see anything of Father Rock’s dogs?
The buck was brought in field-dressed, heart and lungs left in, chest and belly cavity spread open with sticks. The hunter’d done a messy job at the throat but declared it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t bother mounting a head that small.
“Fine animal all the same,” he went on, patting its torn rump. “Reckon he drained out nice, cut him with the head downhill.”
“Yes,” Thomas answered tersely. He felt strangely protective of the carcass. “I’d best get on with it,” he said, turning his back. “You can come for the meat tomorrow.”
Lying on its side now, stripped of hide, head and hooves, the buck is almost womanly—fifteen or so, before life’s hardness starts turning them soft. Thomas grows forgetful as he works, continually misplacing his butcher’s terms, thinking deer instead of venison, breast for brisket, thigh for ham.
He loves game meat. It has such flavour—too much for some. Colour too. It’s the oxygen, of course, more red blood cells in an animal that gets to run. But isn’t that just another way of saying freedom? Isn’t it the wildness that transforms their very fibres, the fact that they can’t be owned?
Thomas lifts the deer’s tenderloin from its hiding place along the spine. Such a delicacy. He wraps it with painstaking care.
Even after the hunter’s picked up his meat, Thomas can’t get the idea of venison out of his mind. His mother made mincemeat with it once and only once, following a recipe she’d clipped from a neighbour’s discarded magazine. Thomas Senior had always been a skinflint when it came to home and hearth. When he got wind of what all went into the mixture, he blew his top. Lemons! Candied citron—just what in the hell is that? Christ, woman, look around you, does this look like the fuckin’ Ritz?!
He was right, too. No matter how Sarah Rose tidied and cleaned, the house was a dump, sprung up like a weed among the stockyards so the stink had them pinned on all sides. Summer days it got so thick even the lifers could smell it. More than smell—at times Thomas felt he could bite off a chunk, chew and swallow it like a mouthful of shit.
But that mincemeat. It might have been the only time the house smelled sweet, the only time he breathed long and deep there on purpose. She made it on a Sunday so Thomas could stay home with her after church and help. He did so gladly, chopping and stirring, not resting until the very last quart was capped.
She surprised him by leaving a cup or so in the bottom of the pot. She cut slices from a dense white loaf and plastered the warm mincemeat thick. The taste matched the smell—surpassed it even. His tongue was transformed, a fat butterfly landing on bloom after bloom.
Thomas begins to plot. They’ll have some of the ingredients at Conklin’s, and the rest can be ordered in. He slips out of his apron, taking his coat from the hook by the door. On the way out he flips his little clock-faced sign.
He has no trouble getting his hands on the meat—so many of them kill for the sport alone. The last of his special order arrives care of Conklin’s delivery boy. The kid leans his bike up against the shop window and enters triumphant as a hero returned, holding up a bag of bright oranges and a flagon of vinegar, tarragon waving like a pondweed inside. Thomas over-tips the boy, then sets about getting the venison on right away. He covers coarse chunks with water, adding a kitchen-string posy of celery, parsley and bay.
When the meat falls away from the bones, everything gets chopped in together—apples, peel off, oranges, peel only, lemons, whole. He doesn’t cut corners. The famous candied citron, a whole sack of sugar, top-grade molasses, enough suet to grease up a cow—it all goes into the big black kettle, and before long, magic billows out from beneath the lid. It’s heart-rending. Exotic yet familiar, the smell of both home and away.
He stirs the pot six times during the course of an hour, then ladles the steaming contents into sterile glass, finishing each jar off with a little ceremony—two tablespoons of brandy more than good enough to drink. He’s screwing the last lid down when he hears Mathilda moving around above him. Her footsteps halt at the top of the stairs.
“Thomas,” she calls plaintively, “what’s that I smell?”
He’d planned to make tempting little tarts, but Mathilda can’t wait that long. She sits up in bed, digging her soup spoon into the still-warm jar. Soon she’s shovelling the mincemeat in, dropping glossy blobs on the lace neck of her nightie, sporting a dark circle around her lips. “Oh, Thomas,” she moans more than once, the blood flaring in his lap so he has to look away.
The spoon scrapes bottom, and before she can ask, he’s bounding down the stairs for a second jar. She’s gorging. She could make herself sick, but the thought never occurs to him, and if it did, he wouldn’t give a damn. Her hunger thrills him. He perches at the edge of the bed, watching her gobble and wolf, his heart dancing like a drunk in his chest.
Somewhere in the bottom third her pace slackens, the spoon dangling instead of digging between bites. He takes it from her fingers and scoops deep into the jar. Her eyes are glassy. “Open wide,” he whispers lovingly, and she does.