Nov '02 [Home] Hunting and PredationPoetry Feature(continued) |
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Antlers and Udders Thom Ward If not cows, then certainly deer, like these eight, mantled in lights, blinking yellow and red on the Eckert's front yard, this counterfit team once again trundled from the attic, configured into shape by Fred, his kids, so much pliable metal feigning the look of swift couriers, paired up — Dasher to Blitzen — and leading the rusted shopping cart Fred bummed from Kelly's Food Land, frayed halyard looped around each buck, and set in the hands of a burlap Santa he stuffed together years back for little Charlie's show-and-tell, eight imitation deer blinking day and night, the brainchild of Frederick T. Eckert Heating & Plumbing, some weekend carpentry to pay for Sarah's braces, the Hobie Cat. Surely, it was he, who, in the winter of ninety-one, rebuilt the Pearsalls' dilapidated shed, who let Matilda, their beloved holstein, nuzzle the studs, lick sheets of Tyvek, "our sweet four-legged aunt," Dottie Pearsall often said, and many agreed. Impertubable, Matilda liked to give the Johnson girls slow rides around the barn, out to the alfalfa field, didn't mind when they yanked her tail, her black pendulous udder. She delivered twice the milk of other cows, each night slept in a private stall, spent her waking hours grazing mustard, timothy behind the mow, which was where one February morning, Fred, his blowzy partner Harris Knapp, came upon her, all fudge and vanilla, starboard flank smack against the earth, felled, it seemed, by a massive heart attack. They walked to the house, told Dottie, and she, the intrepid Baptist, whose favorite line: "If you don't plant it, it won't harvest" (a catchphrase on faith and resurrection) was sown into her flannel shawl, she asked them to give Matilda a proper sepulcher and soon. Fred concurred. He'd dug graves for a Burmese, a Beagle; why not a Holstein? Yet, leaning into their spades, straining to nick the loam it wasn't long before they realized this burial was a bitch — hardscrabble and permafrost, the blades tore at less and less, as new flakes spangled down, Matilda, two paces away, stiffer than a shot of bourbon. Palms blistered, even under gloves, they continued to shovel until they felt enough pit had been dug, then loosed a couple of nearby posts, wedged them under the carcass, pushed and pried, grunting in unison, with one final shove toppled her over the edge. Now Fred could whistle tape from a measure, but never bragged about his vision — 20/400 at best — and so here lay Matilda, on her back in her grave, hooves pointed to the heavens, each slim, mottled leg extended far above the earth, twelve hundred pounds in a hole and not coming out. Fred stood and puzzled, mid-afternoon, the mercury dropping, irrevocable rigor mortis. Harris tried to bend a leg but flopped onto her frosted belly. No doubt, Dottie would thunder at the thought of Matilda half-interred, and so Fred fetched a hacksaw, grasped a pastern and without hesitation, cut the rigid leg, frozen flesh and bone, did the same to the other three, slicing each a clean ten inches above the hock, arranged the amputated pieces on her chest, a makeshift cross, then the men in a rhythm of scoop and pitch returned the cold dirt, marked the grave with a chunk of quartz-fat granite.— Harris always said what happened next startled him most, perhaps out of respect to the widow, perhaps guilt for such a hacking, whatever it was it compelled Fred to reach into his pocket, produce a torn Gideon, open to the twenty-third psalm and read aloud, repeating the part about lying down in green pastures. Closing his eyes, he waited a long minute, mumbled Amen and trudged back to the shed. It hadn't been a year since Eckert's impromptu bovine surgery, that Walt Ramsey, his son Mitch, bundled orange, brandishing twin Remingtons, following a trail of fresh prints on the ridge behind Pearsalls' farm, these men, moving through graupeled snow, caught a glimpse of Wild Schoolboy, the town's infamous stag, eleven points and a bloodshot eye, exaggerated into legend for the April morning he leapt through a picture window in the teacher's lounge, raced by Nelson Banowski, busy eating his lunch, who, although corpulent, jumped over chairs and up on the counter, as the sleek, dun buck galloped down the west hall, past the art room, a few students astonished from their charcoal and ink, dashed through the back doors by the gym left open for circulation, snapping one of its antlers, later claimed by Nancy Vanderbush and used in her prize- winning multimedia collage. Dozens of hunters have since tracked Wild Schoolboy, never close enough for a shot, at dusk sitting on the hoods of their Fords, tipping beers, spilling tales of the stag who vanishes like dew. However, on this November day, the sky buckled chrome, decaf in their thermos, Walt and Mitch, just a hedgerow south, could see Schoolboy browsing in a tangle of laurel and spruce bordering the Pearsalls' winter wheat. Hunched, they mover closer, taking short, deliberate steps, their guns carried low and perpendicular, their breath small cumulus blasts. Making their way to a swale in the ridge, they dropped, prostrate, watched the buck raise its head, sniff the air and twitch its ears, step into the undergrowth. Turns out Justin Pearsall, Dottie's only son, a janitor at Brigham High, who had the arduous task of sweeping the shards, the coarse fur spackled with blood, was back of the shed, stationed between saw horses, gliding Swedish wax over cross-country skis, looked up and saw Wild Schoolboy disappear in the thicket, two hunters scamper along the ridge, fan out thirty yards from each other then crouch in that same hedgerow's underbrush, pop their safeties and wait. Justin knew, be it today or December, the stag would have to retreat through the copse, Jack McMillan's electric Superfence, protecting acres of rhododendrons, running east-west on the far side. So it was that Walt and Mitch, Remingtons cocked, listened for the crunch of a twig, as the flakes brushed their jackets, and Justin, smoothing wax over new fiberglass, happened to again glance up and what he saw made him rethink the whole concept of evolution — six feet of buck, eleven points and a bloodshot eye, emerging from the thicket, a stone's pitch below Walt, forelegs tucked under, moving on its knees, shinning, without a sound, across the field, both shoulders, like greased pistons, pumping back and forth to help propel, silently pull its immense body, its head turned sideways, eyeballing the elder hunter's backside. Thus, the sudden imbrication of man watching men watching for a stag who was watching them. It was then Justin wondered who the hell might be watching him. And when he looked back at the ridge Wild Schoolboy had, indeed, vanished, its ingenious body-drag over frozen earth accomplished, unbeknownst to Walt and Mitch, two orange splotches among a scramble of shrubs, naked wood, some wind and snow falling on a patch of land behind a ramshackle farm, a farm like any other in Brigham-Smith, where, given the right circumstance, you too might see a Baptist bury a cow, an old buck genuflect. |