Eric Schumacher
Here at the edge of the firelight, I can just make out the drip of blood. It patters to the ground and pools in the curled leaves, barely audible over the noise from camp. I rub a drop, thick as crude oil, between my thumb and forefinger until it dries.
Four deer hang above me from a thick branch nailed between two young hickory trees. They’re upside down, slit from sternum to tail, legs spread by steel gambrels strung from the crossbar. I wipe my hands on my pants and stare at the biggest one, the buck. Empty eyes, lolling tongue. He smells like meat and wet dog.
A fat little dog trots in from the darkness and stops just short of the deer. His mismatched eyes dart to me, to the deer, then back to me. His breath steams in the cold. I step away from the carcasses.
I say, “knock yourself out.”
The dog, keeping an eye on me, laps the drying blood. I pull a piece of jerky from my jacket and crouch as close as he’ll allow. He noses my hand as if to test me, then snaps up the jerky in one bite.
“Good boy, Mutt,” I say. He rolls over on his back so I can scratch his burr-ridden belly. His ears perk and I turn to see my dad walking toward us from camp, wide-legged like he’s fresh off a horse. Mutt skitters back as I stand.
“We were wonderin’ where you went,” Dad says, carrying two beers. He hands me one and opens the other. Mutt growls near my feet and Dad notices him for the first time. Dad darts at Mutt like he’ll kick him, trying to scare him off. Mutt recoils and bares his teeth. Dad turns to me.
“Did you feed that dog?”
I crack my beer and drink half in a single pull. It’s cold and tinny and I look at the can.
Dad kneels in the leaves and pulls a pistol from his boot. I cover my ears.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Into the air.
Mutt runs back into the trees. Camp goes silent except for the crackle of the fire. Everyone is watching us.
“Don’t worry!” Dad yells, “just that goddamn Miller dog again.” Everyone back at the fire laughs and continues their talk.
“Was that necessary?”
“That’s Dale Miller’s dog,” he says and slides the pistol home. “Been calf-assin’ ‘round here all day. Your grandpa used to feed him. Now he won’t leave.”
Dad looks at me. I look at the deer.
We sip our beers and look into grandpa’s woods, or my dad’s now. The branches are skeletal, stripped of color and not yet muscled with snow. My cousins and uncles back by the fire cast long shadows that flit through the trees like rabbits for shelter. They’re talking about tomorrow’s hunt and last year’s and the years before that. They open coolers and pour oil into the turkey fryer.
“That’s a helluva deer,” I say and point my can toward the hanging carcass.
“Beautiful animal, isn’t he?” Dad steps to the buck and lifts its head by the antlers.
“Yes, he was.”
“This one is your cousin’s.”
It’s shot cleanly behind the front leg. Just what’d I’d expect from Matt.
“We’ve been catching him on your grandpa’s trail cams all year, Dad says, “been calling him Elwood.”
The smell of fried catfish drifts through the cold. I’ve seen what I need to see.
“Let’s get back before the food is gone,” I say and start toward camp.
Dad drops the buck’s head, and it twists to rest like an old tire swing.
“Second biggest we’ve seen around here,” he says, “the big boy is still out there.”
He yells toward camp. We’re close enough he doesn’t have to.
“Matt! How big would you say Jake is?”
“Jake the deer?”
“Yes, Jake the deer.”
“Two-thirty, two-forty.”
Dad turns back to me as we step into camp. “We’ve been trying to get him for years, before that sonuvabitch Dale Miller does. It’s about time somebody got one as big as yours.”
I remember my deer being bigger, but everything is bigger when you’re ten.
***
Dad, Grandpa, and I left camp before dawn, crunching through the early snow. I’d begged to come this year and received my own shotgun as an early Christmas present. Target practice hadn’t gone that well, but I carried my new gun with pride, fingers already half frozen. As we weaved our way through the stands of burr oak and hackberry, I described in detail the many trophy deer I would kill and how I would kill them.
“How many points?” Grandpa asked.
After some consideration, I said “twelve.”
“Only twelve?” Grandpa feigned surprise.
“We won’t kill shit,” Dad said, “if you two don’t quiet down.”
Grandpa gave Dad a look and squeezed my shoulder. He wished us luck then split off to his own stand beyond the ravine. Dad and I sloped down to a shallow valley where he had planted clover in the spring.
We climbed into our stand and waited. Quiet, dark and cold, I leaned against the tree and watched the dawn creep orange across the purple snow. Dad sipped coffee and scanned the woods.
“How long do we wait?” I asked.
“Until we see something.”
I pretended my breath was cigarette smoke and thought hunting was far more boring than I’d realized. When you’re looking for antlers, every tree branch looks like antlers. Eventually, movement caught my eye. I saw a buck tiptoe along the edge of our little valley and into the clearing by the creek. He was roped with muscle, graceful and silent. I watched him bend his great neck and nuzzle through the snow for clover, but I didn’t tell my dad.
***
Camp is just like I remember from twenty years ago. The fire bigger than it needs to be, stained coveralls and red coolers, a jumble of pickup trucks and popup campers. The circle of men, every uncle and male cousin now that I’m back, is bigger and louder, but the spirit is the same. On one side of the fire, my younger cousins are like teenage variations of myself, their faces furrowed with acne, soon to scar. On the other side, graying men whose lips bulge with chaw and whose knees ache from a lifetime of manual labor. This year, the uncles each wear one of Grandpa’s old ball caps like they’re a ragtag softball team.
From my right, Matt passes me a jug of blackberry wine. He’s tall now, lean and broad-shouldered since he came back from basic. The homemade wine is silty and oversweet. It tastes like summer on the farm.
“Your grandpa would be happy to see you out here,” Dad says to my left.
“It’s a good year to come. It’s been a while.”
From my right, a cousins asks, “you hunting tomorrow?”
“I’m retired,” I say. “I don’t want to embarrass you.” Everyone in earshot laughs, my cousin included.
“I don’t know,” Uncle Jim says, I think Matt might have the crown now.”
I drink again and pass the bottle left. Bourbon comes next. Then amaretto. Apple pie moonshine, then gin. When the wine circles again, I’m already hammered. Mercifully, the next round is food – catfish and venison, thick-cut onion rings that soak through doubled up paper plates. I blister my tongue on the first bite, cool it with cheap beer, and toss my can in a white garbage bag nailed to the nearest tree.
“Cans go in the black bags,” Matt says from behind me. “For the scholarship fund at the Knights of Columbus.”
I fetch my can, the only one in the white bag, and we both toss our cans in the black one.
Matt and I walk in step to the cooler. “Grab me one while you’re in there,” he says.
“Uncle Jim doesn’t care?”
“If you can die for your country, you can drink a beer.”
“Fair enough.”
I pull two beers from the ice and hand him one, point mine toward Matt’s buck.
“That’s a helluva deer,” I say.
***
“One big sonuvabitch,” Dad whispered when he finally noticed the buck, now only thirty yards out. He lowered his own gun and guided mine.
“Careful,” he said as the deer turned broadside. I clicked the safety off.
“Right behind the shoulder. Aim for the lungs and the heart, not the head.”
I held my breath.
Squeezed the trigger.
Crack.
The deer crashed into the snow then scrambled to his feet like he was running on ice. My ears rang and my shoulder ached from the recoil.
“Got him!” Dad said and pulled me into a sideways hug.
The buck shambled down the hillside, shaking and barking, sliding in the snow. Falling, getting up again but slower, and slower still, down toward the creek and grandpa’s stand. We climbed down from our stand, Dad faster than you’d think and me slowly, trying not to fall. He grabbed me under the armpits and lowered me down the last few steps.
“Let’s go!” Dad said and jogged off through the clearing.
We followed the deer’s trail, red as spring cardinals, to the edge of the creek. Grandpa was already there, kneeling beside the deer. Nose and neck dripping red, breath like smoke, slather foaming pink. The deer tried to stand but couldn’t.
“Nice shot,” Grandpa said to Dad, “that one’s going on the wall.”
“Not my wall,” Dad said and clapped me on my sore shoulder. I just shivered and stared.
Grandpa eased the shotgun from my cold hands, racked it, and handed it back. He pointed at the deer.
“I know it’s hard,” Grandpa said, “but you can’t let him suffer.”
I didn’t move for a good long while. Grandpa tilted my chin, so I could look him in the eyes.
“It’s okay,” he said, released my chin and raised his own gun.
“It’s his deer,” Dad said, “he can do it.”
The buck pulled in long, squeaky breaths like a cracked woodwind. His eyes wet and panicked but still beautiful.
I raised my gun.
***
A shrill, two-fingered whistle.
“Everyone listen up,” Dad says as the circle quiets. He’s standing on a tree stump and holds a small cardboard box. His voice is raspy with smoke.
“It’s good to see everyone here tonight,” he says. “This is the first time in a long time we’ve all been here together.”
A few eyes, Matt’s included, look sidelong at me.
“I have a gift for everyone, or rather Grandpa does,” Dad says. He opens the box and hands it to the nearest person. “Take one and pass it down.”
Each cousin and uncle pull something from the box and pass it along. Dad follows the box with his eyes until it reaches me. I take one and hold it up to the light. They’re shotgun cartridges. Twelve-gauge, blue plastic and brass. The uncles recognize something special in them but I don’t. Matt takes the last cartridge and hands the empty box to Dad.
“Each one,” Dad says, “is packed with Grandpa’s ashes.”
As a group, we are rarely quiet, much less hushed. Now we are hushed – just the crackling fire and the far-off honk of geese. I turn the cartridge in my hands like I’m trying to solve a puzzle.
“One more thing,” Dad says, “and this comes from the man himself. Don’t save ‘em, don’t use ‘em for target practice. Shoot at something worth killing.” Everyone laughs. Dad steps down from the stump and picks up his beer.
“What are you going to do with yours?” Matt asks.
“I don’t know.”
The blackberry wine returns and I down what’s left of this bottle. Someone throws more logs on the fire. Coolers creak open. The cold brass squeezed warm in my hand. This is what’s left of my grandpa.
***
The creek exploded with my shot, well wide of the deer. I threw my new shotgun into the water and ran up the hill, back toward camp. Dad yelled something but I couldn’t say what. I was halfway up the ridge before I heard the second shot.
I sat on the step of the camper, red-faced and runny-nosed when Grandpa walked back into camp. He kneeled down and pulled my stocking hat over my stinging ears.
“The first one can be tough,” he said, “no one is mad at you.”
“I don’t like hunting.”
“It’s okay. Let’s sit someplace warm.”
We sat in Grandpa’s pickup with the heat on while Dad field dressed the deer. Grandpa read aloud from The Little Prince, which I’d brought along in my sleeping bag. He spoke in an exaggerated French accent, getting more and more outrageous until I smiled.
***
Dad steps in next to me, a new bottle of wine in his hands. We are almost touching shoulders.
“Thank you,” I say, “for the shell.”
Dad is watching me close. He looks tired and proud in his dirty seed company hat. The world smears and I wipe my eyes with my sleeve. He slips his own shotgun shell into his left breast pocket and presses it to his chest. I do too.
“That’s it for me,” Dad says, “good night.”
He hands me the wine and walks toward the camper. Matt shakes an empty can at me.
“You got a few more left in you?”
“Yep.”
One by one, everybody heads to bed. Soon Matt and I are the only ones up. He’s already shot his deer, and I’m not planning to get up early tomorrow. Tonight’s the first time we’ve both been in Illinois since grandpa’s funeral. We talk about Matt’s time in the National Guard, which he says is difficult but worth it, and my grad school, which is difficult, and I don’t know what it’s worth.
“After 9/11,” I tell Matt, “I thought about joining the Navy.”
“Cool,” he says.
When I can barely keep my eyes open, we head for the camper. Matt concedes he’s been out drank tonight. I concede my little cousin has outgrown me, but I still claim the bigger deer. Matt grants me this small concession.
Dad is snoring like a diesel engine on his side of the popup camper. I smell propane. The little gas stove has been turned on low for heat. I click it off and unzip the window flap for fresh air. Dad’s snoring at least tells me he’s alive. When I think I’ve let out enough fumes, I lay down on the trundle bed in the middle of the camper. Matt is already asleep on the other side.
On my back, the camper sways like a ship at sea. I try putting a foot on the ground but it doesn’t stop the dizziness. Neither does laying on my stomach, nor eating more jerky. I decide it’s better to stay up until I’m sober, however long that may be. I step out of bed and put on a headlamp. Click it on, kneel, and pull a long, padded case from under my bed. I unzip it on the tiny counter. It’s an antique Browning Superposed shotgun, heavy and inlaid with brass. Not a Walmart model like my first. It looks unreal in the harsh blue light of the LED headlamp.
I click off the shotgun’s safety, flip the lever, and break open the action. The bottom barrel is empty. The top is still loaded.
“Goddammit, Grandpa,” I say to myself and laugh.
***
“I know you don’t care about guns,” Grandpa said, “but this Browning may be worth some money now.” We sat in his living room, he in his rented hospital bed, I in a dining room chair pulled close. He had shown me this gun many times before. A Belgian shotgun, made in the thirties, that he bought because Hemingway had one.
“Your uncles might try to trade you, but don’t you listen.” I ran my fingers across the engravings. It was a beautiful gun, the first I’d held since I threw mine in the creek.
“Thank you.”
“It probably still shoots okay if you do want to come back to camp this year,” Grandpa said.
“I’d like that.”
He laid back in bed and coughed until I called in the nurse for his breathing treatment. I set the gun on the floor and picked up a broken-spined copy of The Nick Adams Stories from the nightstand. I read aloud from “Big Two Hearted River” until Grandpa started to doze. I turned off the lights except for the reading lamp and watched him breathe. He was a fraction of his former size.
***
A twig outside snaps. I look up from the gun and see movement though the half-open window flap. I scan the darkness, smell the smoke from the still smoldering fire. My head spins less now that I’m focusing. After what feels like a long time, the thing moves again like liquid through the trees. It’s hard to tell, but it looks big. Almost too big to be a deer.
“Jake,” I whisper.
I pull Grandpa’s shell from my breast pocket, slide it into the empty chamber, and lock the barrel into place. I push the button-latch on the camper door, creep out, and ease the door back into place as quietly as I can. I slip behind a nearby truck in my socks and lift the Browning over the bed. I think Jake was moving east across the edge of the clearing. I aim where I think he’ll be next.
I stare between the trucks and into the trees, but nothing comes. My shoulders ache. My mouth is dry. I yawn and try to focus on the trees. When the birds begin to stir and the first gray light crawls through the sky, I finally drop the barrel.
Then there’s sound again. I lean forward. In front of me? Behind me? My ears and eyes strain. I hear quick, quiet steps. A rustle. Something is moving. It’s close but I can’t place where it is. I slip my finger into the trigger guard and squint, afraid to lift the gun for being seen.
Something warm and wet as a tongue slides across my trigger hand. I shout in surprise; my whole body contracts.
Crack.
The shot echoes like thunder in my skull. I fall to the ground screaming. Mutt is where the deer should be, tail between his legs, darting into woods. Tents unzip. Aluminum doors swat their campers. Running feet like rubber mallets.
I scream again and I don’t stop. I feel sick and disoriented. My eyes can barely focus. Dad, dressed only in his long johns, grabs my shoulders and crowds my vision. He demands my attention.
“What happened? Are you okay?” His sounds both scared and angry, a voice I haven’t heard since I was kid. He shakes me.
“I saw Jake,” I say and nearly black out.
“Oh shit,” uncle Jim says, “his foot.”
Flashlights converge on the shapeless mess that used to be a whole foot. There is more blood than I can imagine in me. It soaks my sock to the ankle. I reach for what’s left of my toes.
“Don’t touch it,” Dad says, beside me now. “Give him space!”
Uncle Jim says to me, “don’t look. Most of your toes are gone.”
“We need to find my toes,” I say, and struggle to stand. The pain, so terrible an instant ago, is gone. My heart is racing.
“Easy now,” Dad says and presses me back to the ground. “There aren’t toes to find.”
Matt runs in with a first aid kit. Everyone steps back. I can feel Matt pressing on my foot but I can’t see what he’s doing. I kick at him in pain but he goes right on working. He barks orders and people run to fulfill them. He wraps my foot as tight as a sausage casing. An uncle packs it with ice. I feel ready for market.
There are voices all around me. Several people try their phones but there is no service
“Do you have bars?”
“There’s no signal out here.”
“I’ll drive him,” Dad says. “Someone go to the Millers down the way. Call 911.”
He and Matt lift me and drape my arms over their shoulders. Dad turns to me. “Give me your keys,” he says, “You parked the rest of us in.”
My little car was not built for roads like this. The bottom scrapes along the rutted lane that leads out of our property and to the gravel road, then to the blacktop, then the highway. Dad pulls out of the woods and flies east toward the nearest hospital. It’s a thirty minute drive. The pain in my foot is back. I roll the window down for air and the cold feels good.
I pull my phone from my pocket and try to call 911. Nothing.
The engine whines as Dad picks up speed. The rising sun is in our faces. It’s hard to see. The road towards town hugs the edge of our woods to the north. The south is drainage ditch and barren field. I wince at every pothole, almost unavoidable on these back roads.
I realize I’m still holding the shotgun. My fingers ache from the grip.
“Dad, do you have signal?”
Dad reaches down for his phone. He can’t get his bloody hands into his jeans pocket while he’s sitting. We drift toward the drainage ditch and into loose gravel. An enormous deer jumps out of the woods and lands in front of the car.
“Dad!”
The airbag whips my head into the back of the seat. Everything crunches. The car, the deer, the gravel under our tires. Dad jerks the wheel. We slide off the road and smash into the bottom of the ditch. Lightning crackles in my foot, thunder booms in my head. For the second time this morning, I’m overwhelmed with pain.
The world is quiet. The airbags hang limp in front of us. We’re both dusted in white powder. It sticks to the blood on our shirts. Dad turns to me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Yeah.”
He tries to start the car. It clicks and grinds but doesn’t turn over. He drops his hands into his lap and sighs.
“You were right,” I say. “I shouldn’t of bought a Ford. You hit one goddamn deer and it quits on you.”
Dad laughs then coughs.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s just a car. It’s just a deer.” He turns to look at me and squeezes my knee. “None of it matters”
We stare at the sunrise through the cracked windshield.
“I have to go for help,” and unbuckles his seatbelt.
“Stay here,” I say.
“Someone else will be coming behind us. I can flag them down at the last turn.”
Dad struggles out of the mangled car, so I give him a push. His feet are bare and he slips climbing out of the ditch.. He jogs as best he can back the way we came.
I feel woozy and tired. I check my phone. Still no signal.
My door is pressed shut by the ditch, so I unbuckle my seat belt and crawl to Dad’s side. I shake loose the heavy ice packs and bang my foot against the gear shift. Pain radiates up my leg. I grunt and fall into the driver’s seat. The door is heavy at this angle. It closes on me each I try to crawl through. I breathe deep, smell beer-sweat, smoke, and vomit.
When I’m finally out, I lean against the car. and wonder when I vomited. I reach down and poke the spot where my toes used to be. They were right – the big one is still there, maybe a little of the pinky toe too. It’s hard to say with the bandages. Blood seeps through the gauze.
There’s a trail of blood in the gravel and long grass at the edge of the road. Not my blood, I realize. The streak goes up the ditch and into the empty field. What’s left of the corn stalks poke through the earth like rotted teeth.
Something is moving out there. I pull the shotgun from the passenger seat and limp toward the motion. I drop down into the ditch and I’m calf-deep in freezing brown water. The cold feels good on my ruined foot and terrible everywhere else. I wrestle myself up the edge of the embankment, using the gun as a crutch and grabbing handfuls of woody grass. Each dragging step is agony.
The deer is lying in the field, maybe two hundred yards away. It’s Jake, judging by the size. I limp up to him. His antlers are splintered, muzzle and neck dripping blood. The legs closest to me are twisted and useless. Jake tries to run, either towards me or away, but he can’t stand. Each attempt gains him a foot at the most. I shiver.
Horns blare. A line of pickup trucks pulls alongside my battered car. From the opposite direction, the flashing red lights of the ambulance. Matt jumps from the driver seat of Dad’s truck and clears the ditch no problem. Dad lumbers up behind him.
Jake whips his neck at me, but his antlers are useless at this distance. His two good hooves can’t gain traction in the mud. Blood and saliva and drip to the earth. His breath is torn, his eyes savage.
I raise the gun.
Jake falls to his side. His breath quickens.
The sun is cold on my face. The wind whistles in my ears.
I sway on my feet and lift Grandpa’s gun.
Shouts at my back, boots stomp in the mud.
They’ll be here any minute.