Annie Proulx - Heart Songs

Hawkheel knew one of Stong’s lies when he heard it and wondered what it meant. He wanted to get home with the album and examine the proof of Stong’s trespass at the secret pool, but Stong poured from the bottle again and Hawkheel knocked it back.

“Where does you fancy friend get this stuff?” he asked, feeling electrical impulses sweep through his fingers as though they itched to play the piano.

“Frawnce,” said Stong in an elegant tone. “He goes there every year to talk about books at some college.” His hard eyes glittered with malice. “He’s a liberian.” Stong’s thick forefinger opened the cover of The Boy’s Companion, exposing a red-bordered label Hawkheel had missed; it was marked $55.

“He says I been getting skinned over my books, Leverd.”

“Must of been quite a shock to you,” said Hawkheel, thinking he didn’t like the taste of apple brandy, didn’t like librarian Rose. He left the inflated Boy’s Companion on the counter and hobbled out to the truck, the photograph album between his shoulder blades giving him a ramrod dignity. In the rearview mirror he saw Stong at the door staring after him.

Clouds like grey waterweed under the ice choked the sky and a gusting wind banged the door against the trailer. Inside, Hawkheel worked the album out from under his shirt and laid it on the table while he built up the fire and put on some leftover pea soup to heat. “‘Liberian!’” he said once and snorted. After supper he felt queasy and went to bed early thinking the pea soup might have stood too long.

In the morning Hawkheel’s bowels beat with urgent tides of distress and there was a foul taste in his mouth. When he came back from the bathroom he gripped the edge of the table which bent and surged in his hands, then gave up and took to his bed. He could hear sounds like distant popcorn and thought it was knotty wood in the stove until he remembered it was the first day of deer season. “Goddammit,” he cried, “I already been stuck here six weeks and now I’m doing it again.”

A sound woke him in late afternoon. He was thirsty enough to drink tepid water from the spout of the teakettle. There was another shot on the Antler and he peered out the window at the shoulder of the mountain. He thought he could see specks of brightness in the dull grey smear of hardwood and brush, and he shuffled over to the gun rack to get his .30–.30, clinging to the backs of the chairs for balance. He rested the barrel on the breadbox and looked through the scope, scanning the slope for his deer stand, and at once caught the flash of orange.

He could see two of them kneeling beside the bark-colored curve of a dead deer at his Place. He could make out the bandana at the big one’s neck, see a knife gleam briefly like falling water. He watched them drag the buck down toward the logging road until the light faded and their orange vests turned black under the trees.

“Made sure I couldn’t go out with your goddamned poison brandy, didn’t you?” said Hawkheel.

He sat by the stove with the old red Indian blanket pulled around him, feeling like he’s stared at a light bulb too long. Urna called after supper. Her metallic voice range in his ear.

“I suppose you heard all about it.”

“Only thing I heard was the shots, but I seen him through the scope from the window. What’d it weight out at?”

“I heard two-thirty, dressed out, so live weight must of been towards three hundred. Warden said it’s probably the biggest buck ever took in the county, a sixteen-pointer, too, and probably a state record. I didn’t know you could see onto the Antler from your window.”

“Oh, I can see good, but not good enough to see who was with him.”

“He’s the one bought Willard Iron’s place and put a tennis court onto the garden,” said Urna scornfully. “Rose. They say he was worse than Bill, jumping around and screaming for them to take pictures.”

“Did they?”

“Course 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.