they did. Then they all went up to Mr. Tennis Court’s to have a party. Stick your head out the door and you’ll hear them on the wind.”
Hawkheel did not stick his head out the door, but opened the album to look at the Stongs, their big, rocklike faces bent over wedding cakes and infants. Many of the photographs were captioned in a spiky, antique hand: “Cousin Mattie with her new skates,” “Pa on the porch swing,” simple statements of what was already clear as though the writer feared the images would someday dissolve into blankness, leaving the happiness of the Stongs unknown.
He glared, seeing Stong at the secret pool, the familiar sly eyes, the fatuous gaping mouth unchanged. He turned the pages to a stiff portrait of Stong’s parents, the grandfather standing behind them holding what Hawkheel thought was a cat until he recognized the stuffed trout. On the funeral page the same portraits were reduced in size and joined by a flowing black ribbon that bent and curled in ornate flourishes. The obituary from the Rutland Herald was headlined “A Farm Tragedy.”
“Too bad Bill missed that dinner,” said Hawkheel.
He saw that on many pages there were empty places where photographs had been wrenched away. He found them, mutilated and torn, at the end of the album. Stong was in every photograph. In the high school graduation picture, surrounded by clouds of organdy and stiff new suits, Stong’s face was inked out and black blood ran from the bottoms of his trousers. Here was another, Stong on a fat-tired white bicycle with a dozen arrows drawn piercing his body. A self-composed obituary, written in a hand like infernal corrosive lace that scorched the page, told how this miserable boy, “too bad to live” and “hated by everybody” had met his various ends. Over and over Stong had killed his photographic images. He listed every member of his family as a survivor.
Hawkheel was up and about the next morning, a little unsteady but with a clear head. At first light the shots had begun on the Antler, hunters trying for a buck to match the giant that Stong had brought down. The Antler, thought Hawkheel, was as good as bulldozed.
By afternoon he felt well enough for a few chores, stacking hay bales around the trailer foundation and covering the windows over with plastic. He took two trout out of the freezer and fried them for supper. He was washing the frying pan when Urna called.
“They was on T.V. with the deer,” she said. “They showed the game commissioner looking up the record in some book and saying this one beat it. I been half expecting to hear from you all day, wondering what you’re going to do.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Hawkheel. “Bill’s got it comin’ from me. There’s a hundred things I could do.”
“Well,” said Urna. “He’s got it coming.”
It took Hawkheel forty minutes to pack the boxes and load them into the pickup. The truck started hard after sitting in the cold blowing rain for two days, but by the time he got it onto the main road it ran smooth and steady, the headlights opening a sharp yellow path through the night.
At the top of Stong’s drive he switched the lights off and coasted along in neutral. A half-full moon, ragged with rushing clouds, floated in the sky. Another storm breeder, thought Hawkheel.
The buck hung from a gambrel in the big maple, swaying slowly in the gusting wind. The body cavity gaped black in the moonlight. “Big,” said Hawkheel, seeing the glint of light on the hooves scraping an arc in the leaves, “damn big.” He got out of the truck and leaned his forehead against the cold metal for a minute.
From a box in the back of the truck he took one of his books and opened it. It was Haw-Ho-Noo. He leaned over a page as if he could read the faint print in the moonlight, then gripped it and tore it out. One after another he seized the books, ripped the pages and cracked their spines. He hurled them at the black, swaying deer and they fell to the bloodied ground beneath it.
“Fool with me, will you?” shouted Hawkheel, tearing soft paper with both hands, tossing books up at the moon, and his blaring sob rose over the sound of the boulders cracking in the river below.
THE dark-colored fox trotted along the field edge with his nose down, following the woodsline of his property—his by right of use. His smoky pelt was still dull from molting and had not yet begun to take on its winter lustre. A stalk of panic grass shivered and he pounced, then crunched the grasshopper.
He skirted the silver ruins of abandoned farm buildings and spent some time in the orchard eating windfalls. Then he left the apple trees, crossed the brook at the back of the field, pausing to lap the water, and moved into the woods. He want familiarly into the poplars, black ears pricked to the turn of a leaf, nose taking up the rich streams of scent that flowed into the larger river of rotted leaf mold and earth.
At the time I moved into Chopping County, Banger was about fifty, a heavy man, all suet and mouth. At first I thought he was that stock character who remembered everybody’s first name, shouting “Har ya! How the hell ya doin’?” to people he’d seen only an hour before, giving them a slap on the back or a punch on the arm—swaggering gestures in school, but obnoxious in a middle-aged man. I saw him downtown, talking to anybody who would listen, while he left his hardware store to the attentions of a slouchy kid who could never find anything on the jumbled shelves.
I made the mistake of saying what I thought about Banger one night at the Bear Trap Grill. The bar was a slab of varnished pine; the atmosphere came from a plastic moose on top of the cash register and a mason jar half-filled with pennies.
I wanted to find somebody to go bird shooting with, somebody who knew the good coverts in the slash-littered mountainous country. I’d always hunted alone, self-taught, doing what I guessed was right, but still believing that companionship increased the pleasure of hunting, just as “layin’ up” with somebody, as they said locally, was better than sleeping alone.
I was sitting next to Tukey. His liver-spotted hands shook; hard to get a straight answer from him or anyone else. They said he was a pretty good man for grouse. They said he might take company. I’d been courting him, hoping for an invitation to go out when the season opened. I thought I had him ready to say, “Hell yes, come on along.”
Banger was at the end of the bar talking nonstop to deaf Fance who had hearing-aid switches all over the front of his shirt. Tukey said Fance had a gun collection in his spare bedroom and was afraid to sleep at night, afraid thieves would break in when the hearing aids lay disconnected on the bedside table.
“God, that Banger. He’s always here, always yapping. Doesn’t he ever go home?” I asked Tukey. In ten seconds I scratched weeks of softening the old man up. All that beer for nothing. His face pleated like a closing concertina.
“Well, now, as a matter of fact, he don’t, much. His place burned down and the wife and kid was fried right up in it. He got nothing left but his dog and the goddamn hardware store his old man left him and which he was never suited to.
“And my advice to you,” Tukey said, “if you want to go out bird shootin’ like you been hintin’ around, or deer or ’coon or rabbit or bear huntin’, or,” and his dried-leaf voice rose to a mincing falsetto, “just enjoyin’ the rare beauties of our woodlands …” He broke off to grin maliciously, exposing
