I tried, that first night, to do as Emma had told me, but almost as soon as I was in my bed I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, with little more than vague thoughts, images in my mind of circles and balls flying and bouncing around my room. My mother practically had to pull me out of bed in the morning. All the events of the day before had left me feeling heavy and stupid. I don't think I was awake in any useful sense until I was at school, sitting at my desk, gradually aware of all the noise and chatter around me.
Hunting season was barely a week away. In such a rural community as ours, the beginning of deer season was a major occasion. It seemed like every boy in school was talking about who was going hunting this year for the first time, who had a gun of his own, and who didn't. I had been withdrawn some what from all this talk. But then, I had always been a fairly quiet person.
Among the boys at school I had a status of sorts, because my father was a policeman: to a bunch of eleven and twelve-year-old boys, being a policeman was about the greatest thing a man could be. If I was quiet, if I kept my thoughts to myself, it wasn't put down to being shy or awkward or overly introspective; in the odd, scarcely explicable world of schoolyard politics, I was Deputy Singer's son, and so I didn't need to be funny, or smart, or tough, or anything else. It was a blessing which, like all blessings I suppose, I could neither earn nor deserve, but had just been handed to me.
In truth, I didn't have anywhere near enough confidence to voice my newfound conviction that I wouldn't go hunting when the season began. There was no one I could talk to about Emma. I certainly wasn't going to tell my friends that I had been speaking with deer, and learning to heal an old, arthritic dog. If anyone among the boys at school had the least reservation about hunting, I never heard it. And they weren't going to hear it from me.
Indeed, my friends at school were certain that I was going to go hunting. My father had told me months before that he would take me hunting on my birthday. And for years my parents had said, in answer to my pestering and pleading, that I could have a shotgun of my own for my twelfth birthday, but not before. All this my friends knew, because I had told them.
So in the lunchroom that day it was natural that I would, after all, be drawn into the talk of hunting season.
“You going to the meeting tomorrow night?” Cady, one of my friends, asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, “I have to help my dad with stuff.”
“My dad says ‘next year, maybe next year,’” Cady said, “but it's my mom that won't let me go.”
I just nodded. There was a meeting for hunters at the firehouse the next night, and my father would be talking about hunting safety there. I was going.
“My dad told my mother I was going hunting whether she liked it or not,” Mike said.
“If my dad said that to my mother, she would kick his ass,” Cady said matter-of-factly.
We chuckled, but only a little. We all knew Cady's mom.
“I'm gonna find me a buck and BAM,” Mike slammed his fist down on his tray with sufficient force to make his tater tots pop into the air, which pleased him enough that he slammed his fists in rapid succession. “BAM BAM BAM!”
Cady shook his head. “You saw a buck, you'd wet your pants.”
“You can kiss my big ol' butt,” Mike said companionably.
“My dad says you don't even see one, half the time,” I said. “Don't even see a deer.”
“Where are you all going to go?” Cady asked.
I shrugged.
“We're going out behind my grand-daddy's farm,” Mike said. “There's all kind of land back there, and can't no one hunt it but family. I'm going to find me a buck, you watch.”
“You want to bet?” Cady asked.
“Well,” Mike said, “my father won't let me bet, or I would.”
“Sure you would,” Cady said, and then turned to me, and tapped his fork on the table top. “I wish I was going with you, wherever you all go.”
“Probably won't be anything,” I said quietly.
“Your dad will find some deer, you watch.”
That evening my father came home early from work, which was rare. I had only been home from school for a half an hour or so, and was more or less moping around the house.
“Not going prowling in the woods this afternoon?” my mother had asked.
“Not today,” I said. “I've got some stuff to do.” Which was clearly not the case. Our little dog, Toby, was following me around from room to room. All at once I thought I felt the question ‘play?’ form inside me, and I swung around and looked at Toby, who was just standing there, staring at me. His tail flipped from one side to the other, and then he stood still.
“Come here,” I said, and sat down on the floor.
Toby bounced over and pushed his head against my side, his tail wagging, ready for a bit of play.
“No,” I said. “Hold still.”
He was still interested in playing, but I managed to get him still, and then I slowly ran my right hand along the ridge of his small back, my eyes closed, trying to rediscover that other, strange, wonderful sense, trying to recreate what Emma had showed me to do with Abigail . . . but there was nothing there, just Toby's back, like always. I frowned. Toby began wagging his tail again. And then I heard my father's cruiser pulling into the drive.
I went over to the window and saw my father walking to the house with a couple of shotguns cradled in one arm and a box of shells in the other. I scrambled outside to help him.
“Hey, sport,” he said, a smile spreading across his face. “Give me a hand, here?”
I immediately reached for the smaller of the two shotguns.
“You remember John McCumber?” my dad asked.
I nodded.
“This gun belongs to his wife; he ordered it special for her. I thought we might shoot a little before dinner, see if you like it.”
I nodded again. The gun was a beauty. It had a good weight and balance to it. I wanted to shoot it. I can't explain the reason why. For all that had happened to me in the past weeks, I found the gun beautiful, enticing, and I wanted to shoot it.
We walked down to the field down behind the house. My father lugged down an old door that had been sitting in the shed, and I carried the shotguns and the shells. He leaned the door against a tree and we moved back thirty paces or so.
“Well, say we're going to shoot at this door,” my father said.
“Guess we're not going to use it for anything,” I said with a grin.
“Not if we manage to hit it,” my father said, “but if we're going to shoot at it, what are we going to do first?” I nodded. I knew what he was after. “Well, we want to check the guns, make sure they're clean, that the barrel is clean, and the shells are good.”
“I've done that,” my father said.
“Uh huh,” I said, “but I'll check my gun anyway, 'cause you should always check your own gun.”
My father nodded. I could tell from his eyes that he was pleased with me.
“And there's nothing down there behind that tree; the house and all is behind us and there's nothing down there, but we might walk down and see, you know.”
“There's nothing down there,” my father said.
“And I know where you are, you know, my shooting partner. There's nobody else with us.”
“Good,” my father said. “That's fine. Well, let's see if this thing'll shoot.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
I cracked the gun open, sighted down the barrel. It was beautifully clean and oiled, as I knew it would be. My father handed me a new shell. I popped it into the barrel, snapped the gun shut, placed the stock against my shoulder.
“Snug,” my father said. He was standing beside me, and pressed the butt of the gun more tightly against my shoulder. “Good and snug, but not rigid. Brace it, but let it come back into you. It's going to pop you one, but just keep it snug and keep your eye and cheekbone up. Up. You don't want to get a black eye.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
He messed my hair. “Okay, step away,” he said. “You're too tight.”
Before this, I'd only shot a little .22 rifle, plinking at tin cans on the ground from time to time with my father. God, I really wanted to fire that shotgun and shoot it well. The feeling was so strong: a tight, edgy joy, like great avarice on the brink of being satisfied. Ten minutes before I had been sitting on the floor with Toby, trying to practice the skills Emma had taught me, with no idea my father would be bringing a shotgun home for me to shoot. Now I was acutely focused on aiming at that door and hitting it square with buckshot, without another thought in the world.
My father nodded at me. “Snug against your shoulder, cheek bone up, squeeze the trigger. Have at it.”
A moment later there was a roar and a ripping sound of splintered wood. The door spun to the right—I had hit the right side of it—did a comically slow pirouette, and fell to the ground with a deeply satisfying “whuu-ump.”
I laughed, my father laughed.
“Great shot,” my father said, and I knew he meant it.
I rubbed my shoulder and said “Oww,” and my father laughed again.
My father set the door up and we fired at it a few more times. By the time we finished there was nothing left of it recognizable as a door.
That night I went to bed with an ice pack on my shoulder. I had a sizable welt that would turn into a splendid bruise. I was happier than I could ever remember being. It was a door, after all, that we had been shooting at. No harm had been done. I thought for a moment of Emma, and believed that I could spread a circle of strength and well-being all the way to Mars.
My father came in then to check on me, and take the ice pack.
“You handled that gun real well,” he said. “I'm proud of you.”
“I was a pretty good shot,” I said.
He nodded. “And you knew what to do beforehand, which is what's really important. I liked that you checked the gun, even after I told you it was okay.”
“You told me always to check it myself,” I said. “You told me that a bunch of times.”
“Well, you listened,” he said. “That shoulder going to keep you awake?”
“It'll be okay,” I said.
“Good,” he said. Up to now it had been my father's custom to give me a kiss goodnight, on the forehead. This night he hesitated, a look of what I knew was pride on his face. He gave my leg a couple of good, hard pats.
“Good night, Thomas,” he said.
My shoulder was aching, but I soon fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.
Each year they had a big meeting of all the local hunters, or most of them at any rate, where you could buy a hunting license for the year if you didn't have one already, and where a deputy from the sheriff's department would go over any changes in the hunting laws and talk about safety issues. Very little of anything new was said at these meetings, but it gave the men an opportunity to get together each year and talk guns and hunting, argue about the best places to hunt, and tell tall tales about hunts from the years before.
For the past several years my father had given the safety talk to the hunters, and just the year before he let me come with him and help set up. There wasn't anything for me to do, really, except hand out some informational brochures the state had made up about hunting safety. I think my father just wanted me to be there. Certainly, the year before I had very much wanted to go. Now, the day after firing a shotgun that I knew would be like mine, I kept any reservations I had resolutely to one side. Nothing had been decided. It was just a meeting, a chance to see a bunch of people we knew, and I was glad to be going.
We pulled into the parking lot of the firehouse and I carried a big box full of safety brochures up toward the house, one step behind my father.
The fire station had a meeting hall upstairs in a large room above the truck bay. I always loved going to the firehouse. If there was anything better in the world than being a sheriff's deputy, like my father, it might have been being a fireman and riding around in one of those fantastic big trucks. We walked past the open doors of the truck bay—my father didn't look at the trucks so I tried not to, as well—and on upstairs to the meeting hall.
It was a big meeting and there were men we knew all over the firehouse. Downstairs in the dispatch bay some guys were talking, and more men were clogging up the steps. Just ahead of us I heard someone, laughing, chiding, “Son, you're too big to stand there. Either go up or go down, but go somewhere.” There was laughter. It was Roy Campbell talking to Mac Lewis, and Mac was a big man, sure enough, and he laughed and stayed right where he was, and we slid past him up the stairs, saying hello to everyone. Mac slapped me on the butt on my way by.
There were snatches of conversation, greetings called out. I heard Harmon Williams say, “Yeah, up to my little cabin, gonna sit with a little George Dickel an' my shotgun an' shoot anything that I see ...” this being received with Andy Powell's high pitched laugh: “Gonna shoot anything you see!” Andy repeated. Tom Lamott saying quietly, intently to Lester Houchens, “Won't go to the doctor and I can't make her, you know?” and Lester nodding.
We moved through the crowd of men up towards the front of the meeting room. We knew everyone there. The county was only so large, my father had lived there all his life, and it was just a fact of life that everybody knew everybody else. Being somewhere like the firehouse, full of all these people we knew, was a good feeling, better than good: it felt like home, an extension of home. Maybe there were eighty men there, and I would say at one time or another they had all been to our house, and most had sat to dinner with us.
I remember when my Uncle Robert died, it seemed like everyone we knew came to our house that day, to be with my mom, to bring us food, or just to be there. And like any occasion when everyone would get together, people broke off into different groups, some talking quietly, and some not so quietly, and laughter here or there. I don't know, but every man at the meeting that night might have been at our house the day after Uncle Robert died. Maybe.
We got upstairs and my father gravitated over toward Richard Healy, the captain of the fire department, and a good friend of my dad's. Who all was there? Mitchell Cromer, Mike Powell, Merwin's brother (Merwin would be along eventually), and Andy Karl was there, with this godawful bad haircut, cut really close but splotchy with bits sticking out here and there.
“Hey, Tom,” Mitchell said to me. “Come to help your Daddy?”
“Yes sir,” I said, nodding to the box I was carrying.
“They got some Cokes back in the kitchen if you want,” Mike said. “Can the boy have a Coke?” he asked my father.
My dad nodded. “If you want,” he said to me.
I set the box down on the table up front and was about to go to the kitchen when Hally Lynch came over, his eyes big, grinning at Andy.
“Now what on earth got a hold of your head?” Hally asked Andy, checking out his haircut from a couple of angles.
My father doesn't like to laugh at people. When he doesn't want to laugh he just grins and his body shakes a bit. He started shaking now.
“Aw, Allison said she'd cut my hair ...” Andy began, but Hally didn't let him finish.
“Was she drunk?” Hally asked, slow and loud, happy, relishing every word. “Did you all have a fight?”
Allison and Andy had only recently been married. Andy was blushing now, but he was still trying to keep his dignity.
“She said why pay Martin seven dollars for a haircut when she'd be happy to cut it for me,” he tried to explain.
Hally was shaking his head, trying to look serious. “Son,” he said, putting his hand on Andy's shoulder. “Pay the seven dollars. If it's a matter of money, I'm sure we can come up with a little for you.”
“Well,” Andy said, trying not to laugh, “you see ...”
“Now I don't like to say anything bad about anybody's wife,” Hally continued—there were a few people standing around us now, laughing—“and Allison is a fine lady; but, Andy, keep that woman away from your head!”
My father was laughing now as hard as anyone else, and I was too, and Andy was laughing, and he turned to me and pushed my shoulder and said, “What are you laughing at?” and that made me laugh the harder.
Hally walked off, probably to give someone else a hard time, and my dad pointed toward the spot where he wanted me to set out the brochures. I started putting the brochures in small stacks. The room was filled with loud and cheerful conversations, laughter. I looked up and Mike was there, the necks of two bottles of Coke pinched between the fingers of his broad right hand. He held out a bottle to me, and I took it with a shy nod. He winked and nodded, took a swig from his bottle of Coke, and walked away. I had a swallow, too, and looked over and saw my dad on the other side of the room talking to Richard Healy and Hally and Mitchell. Hally was laughing hard at one of his own jokes, and my father was grinning, his shoulders shaking with barely suppressed laughter, and I could hear Mitchell say, “You ain't right in the head.”
I loved these men. How far away from Emma was I at that moment? Certainly I didn't give her a thought. She was a source of joy and wonder for me, but there was a deep feeling of joy here, as well: the joy of home, the joy of being with a group of people who knew me, and, for good and for ill and through thick and thin, were an inextricable part of who I was. I had no such thoughts then, of course. But I was caught by a kind of joy and pride about being part of this group, of being at the meeting and, more to the point, of belonging there.
After a while the meeting got under way. My father talked at length about hunting safety. He emphasized the importance of wearing blaze orange. He talked about planning the hunt carefully beforehand, and sticking to the plan; about knowing where you were heading, and how long you intended to stay out. He stressed the importance of knowing exactly where your hunting partners were at all times, and of not wandering off yourself without letting your partners know. Then my father began telling about an incident from the year before.
One county over, maybe thirty miles away, a man had shot his brother because he mistook him for a turkey. The fellow had walked a little ways off to relieve himself, and the unexpected rustle, the snatch of red clothing that might or might not have looked like a turkey's neck, had caused his brother to fire. The single rifle shot had pierced the man's throat. The shooter ran over, thinking to find a turkey, and found his brother crumpled on the ground, his pants twisted around his knees, dead. Everyone knew the story already. It had enough elements of the macabre, the tragic, to be well known. But my father told it again to good effect.
“Hell of a way to die,” I heard Hally say from a few rows behind me. “Get popped while you're taking a crap.”
There were a couple of grumbles, some nervous laughter.
“It's not funny, Hally,” someone said.
“I know it's not funny,” Hally shot back. “It scares the hell out of me.”
“Good,” my father said brusquely. “It should scare you.”
I thought: “Even Emma couldn't have saved him.” It was the first time that evening that I had thought of her.
Just then I heard a woman's voice. It seemed that everyone's head turned as mine did.
“Officer,” she called to my father as she walked toward the front of the room.
“God help us,” I heard someone mutter. Everyone watched her as she walked. She was a young woman, very fair, with light, light blond hair. She was so thin she looked frail. Her jaw was set tight as she walked, her eyes set straight ahead, ignoring the men all around her.
“Go home, Carole Ann,” Corey Hughes called out. His voice was flat, not unkind but definite.
“Officer, can I say a few words?” she asked my father. She was standing only a few feet away from me. Her jeans hung loosely on her thin hips. She was wearing an oversize sweater that seemed to engulf her.
For a moment my father didn't speak.
“Aw, for gosh sakes, Singer, we didn't come to listen to her!” This was Lyle Abbott. I knew all these men; I didn't know her. Merwyn Powell was seated next to me, his hands folded lightly on his large belly, a look of quiet disapproval on his face.
“Who is she, Mr. Powell?” I whispered.
“She's a nut. But if I know your father, we're gonna listen to her.”
Several of the men were complaining now, but my father already had his hand up. The room settled down.
“Gentlemen, this is a public meeting in a public building. If Miss Proffitt wants to talk to us, briefly,” he paused and looked at her. She did not flinch. “. . . then let's give her our full attention.”
“Some of you might know ...” she said softly. Her voice was quavering.
“Speak up, darlin'!” someone from the back called.
“Some of you might know,” she said more slowly, loudly, looking down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, and then, suddenly, fixedly, at me. “I'm the president of the local animal rights group.”
“Oh for crying out loud!” Chester Lanz started.
My father banged the flat of his hand, once, on the table top, and Chester frowned, and was silent.
“I know you don't want to listen to me. I know you think there's nothing I could say to you that could change how you think about hunting,” her voice was shaking. I thought it was nervousness, then realized in an instant that it was anger, a true and deep anger. She took a breath. All at once the anger seemed gone, to be replaced by sadness, resignation. Her voice became too quiet. “You're probably right. There's probably nothing I can say.”
“Nothing that we can hear!” Hally shouted, which brought some laughs. Even my father looked down at the floor and smiled.
“Nothing that I can say,” she repeated more loudly. “But I want you to listen to Charlie Hatch for a minute.”
She gestured toward the back of the room. Charlie was back there, his hands jammed in his pockets.
“Charlie, come on,” the woman urged, motioning him toward the front.
Charlie stood quite still. There was a long silence; you could hear the Coke machine buzz.
“How ya doing, Charlie?” Hally called to him. No one laughed.
“Okay, so I was hunting last year, right?” Charlie spoke loudly, apparently to his shoes. “And I was with my friend Landon, ya'll know Landon, and we were up in tree stands, you know, fifteen feet up or something, only we just had the one ladder, and Landon was up in his stand last, about fifty yards away, okay, and so he had the ladder at his stand. And this buck walks underneath me, just, damn, right there,” he stopped abruptly. He had been speaking quickly. For the first time he looked up at us. “Right there beneath me, and I shot him.”
Charlie stared back at the floor and kept talking. “And I shot him once and I'd have shot him again but my gun jammed. He went down on his forelegs and he was trying to get back up; he was, like, spinning there in place, kneeling on his forelegs, trying to get up, and I hollered for Landon to come over, and, well, he did, he climbed down and come over but it was, I don't know, minutes, four or five or six minutes, and that buck just spun, and struggled, and fell, and tried to get up and couldn't. It took him forever to die, before Landon got there. I just stood up there like I was some god in the sky, some big man that could kill an animal like that. I just watched him. And I knew right then that I shouldn't have ought to shot him, and I tell you, I won't do it again. And that's all that I'm going to say. I mean, if you shoot something ...” he stopped abruptly. The room was silent. Charlie blinked his eyes, like he was blinking away tears. We waited, and Charlie began again.
“I mean, if you're going to shoot something, well, I just figure ...” He took a deep breath. “God goes to all this trouble to make a deer, you know? So if you shoot one, just make sure you're prepared to watch it die.”
He kicked at the floor, looked up at us, and said, “Good night,” in an odd, almost formal tone, and hurried out of the back of the room, shouldering past three people who were lugging in some huge object in a sheet. The sheet was stained with blood. My head swum a moment, and then came crystal clear. Two men and a woman—I didn't know any of them—were lugging a dead deer wrapped in a sheet to the front table. They heaved it with a thud on the table in front of us all. The rank smell from it filled the room.
“She's a pregnant doe,” Carole Ann Proffitt said sharply. “One of you shot her two days ago off the back of Mavis Gentry's property. Anybody want to claim it?”
She said this last around my father, who had moved in front of her. The room was in commotion, men moving to see, a chair fell over, someone was cursing.
“Let's go,” my father said sharply, to Carole Ann and the people with her. “Outside. Thomas, come with us. Richard,” he nodded to Richard Healy, and gestured toward the deer. “Burn that thing.”
My father led us down the center of the room. Sherman Kyle, another particular friend of my father's, fell in silently behind us. He was a quiet, lanky man. I was glad to have him there. I don't believe anyone could possibly have come to any harm there; indeed I'm sure Carole Ann and her friends could have left in safety, with no more than some jeering. But as it was, we moved swiftly out of a nearly silent room.
My father took the steps rapidly, the first one down the stairs. I could tell he was angry, a rare state for him. I ended up next to Carole Ann. As we descended the stairs she gripped me by the wrist, hard.
“Don't become like them,” she whispered sharply. “You don't have to be like them.”
“That's my father,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of to say. He was holding the front door to the firehouse open ahead of us.
We spilled down the steps into the parking lot. The night had grown much colder. After all the activity upstairs, it was strangely quiet outside. It was a muted group that climbed into a couple of pickup trucks and drove out of the firehouse parking lot. My father stood silently watching them go, Sherman Kyle at his side. I didn't realize how angry he was until he spoke.
“Now what the hell did they think they were going to accomplish by that?” he asked sharply, and turned to look to Sherman, and saw me. His face, tight with anger, softened. “Son,” he said quietly.
“I don't know,” Sherman said, in his slow, easy drawl. “I expect they thought they'd make an impression.”
“And what's Charlie Hatch want to get caught up with them for?” my father asked.
Sherman shook his head. “Charlie's a good boy. I can't see that he meant any harm.”
“No,” my father agreed. He seemed to force a smile. I could see that his anger was fading.
“I'm cold,” I said.
Sherman laughed. “I'm a-cold, too,” he said, and the three of us went back inside.
Upstairs the evidence of the deer carcass having been there was all but gone. A couple of the men were slowly, methodically cleaning the table up front with wet, soapy sponges. Mitchell was rolling the mop and bucket away, having cleaned a wide path up through the center of the room. The deer itself was gone. Several of the men were still very agitated. Some even questioned if charges couldn't be filed against Carole Ann and her group for disturbing the peace.
“You can swear out a complaint,” my father said, his even temper returned. “But I wouldn't bother with it.”
They burned the carcass in the little field behind the firehouse. Some of the men went out back to watch, but it wasn't much of a fire, and the night was very cold. I could see the flames from the windows of the meeting room, while my father and I packed up the leftover brochures.
“Need a hand with that box?” It was Sherman Kyle. “No sir,” I said, “thanks, but it's not heavy.”
“I hear we'll be going out together next week,” Sherman said.
He meant hunting.
“Yes sir,” I said quietly, moving the brochures around in the box, not looking up.
“Well that's good,” Sherman said. “That's real good.”