David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Roy grabbed the toilet paper and got behind his father to pull him up under his armpits. His father was able to help some with his legs, then with a hand on the table, and so they were able to stand and then make it to the door, where they rested.

It doesn’t seem like you broke anything, Roy said.

No, it doesn’t, his father said. I was really lucky.

They rested against the door for a few more minutes while his father looked out at the cove. Then they moved along the outside wall and out to the steps and took them one at a time, Roy going first, his father leaning on him.

This is gonna work, his father said. We’ll be fine. I’m just a little sore and stiff, but it won’t last.

They rested at the bottom of the steps.

The outhouse might actually be easier, his father said. Even though it’s farther away.

I can try to carry you, Roy said.

I think I can walk if you help me.

So his father hung on him. They stepped slowly toward the outhouse, resting every ten or twenty feet, and then it started drizzling faintly but they decided to keep going and made it to the outhouse, where his father got help turning around and sitting and then Roy stepped outside to wait.

Roy standing there in the drizzle felt things he could not make sense of. His enormous fear had mostly lifted, but a part of him that he did not understand well wanted his father to have died in the fall so that there would have been a kind of relief and everything could be clear and he could simply return to his life. But he was afraid to think this, as if it were a kind of jinx, and the thought that he could have lost his father made his eyes well up suddenly so that when his father called out from inside that he was done, Roy was trying not to cry, trying to fight it down in his throat and eyes.

His father extended a hand when Roy opened the door. Help me up, he said. But he still had his pants down and Roy couldn’t help looking at his penis hanging there and the hair on his thighs. Then he was embarrassed and tried to look away as if he hadn’t looked.

His father didn’t say anything. When he was standing, still holding on to Roy’s hand, he pulled up his pants with the other, then turned to lean against the doorjamb so that he’d have both hands to button. Then they went on to the cabin, where his father lay back down, ate and drank a little bit, and slept the rest of the day.

Over the next week, his father strengthened. He became limber again, enough to walk himself to the outhouse and then walk around out front slowly and then finally walk out to the point and back. Soon after, he announced himself fully well.

Back from the grave, he said. Lungs never felt better. And I’m not gonna let anything like that happen again, I promise you.

Roy wanted to ask again whether his father had stepped off on purpose, because that was the way it had looked, but he didn’t.

They hunted and shot deer, the first from the pass behind the cabin shooting down the other side. His father let Roy take the shot and he hit it in the neck. He had been aiming low behind the shoulder and so was way off, but he let it seem afterward that he had intended the neck.

They found it sprawled in the blueberries, its tongue hanging out and eyes still clear.

Good deal, his father said. This will be good meat. He un-slung his rifle and got out his Buck knife. He slit up the stomach, pulled out the entrails, bled the neck, cut off the balls and everything else down there, and then slotted the hind legs and pushed the forelegs through to make a kind of backpack.

Normally I’d carry it, he said. But my back and side are still a bit sore, if you don’t mind.

So while his father carried both rifles, Roy put the hooked hind legs over his shoulders, the deer’s butt behind his head, and carried him that way up the side of the mountain and down the other side, the antlers banging his ankles.

They hung the buck and stripped off the hide, punching down between meat and hide with their fists. Then they cut most of the meat into strips and dried them on the rack or smoked them.

The rack’s not going to be great, his father said. Not enough sun and too many flies. But we’ll smoke most of it.

They stretched the hide just as it was getting dark, then salted it and turned in.

His father did not cry that night, nor had he since the fall. Roy listened and waited, tense and unable to sleep, but the crying simply never came, and after a few more nights, he got used to this and learned to sleep.

They set about stocking up for winter more seriously now. When his father was strong enough to work again, they dug a huge pit a hundred yards from the cabin, back in a small stand of hemlock. They dug with shovels until his father was shoulder deep and Roy in over his head. Then they widened it until it was over ten feet on every side, a huge square cut into the hillside, and after that they deepened it some more and used their homemade ladder to get in and out. When they hit a large stone, they dug around and beneath until it was free and then hauled it out by rope. They stopped when they hit solid rock and there was nowhere left to go.

The hole was to be their cache, but once the hole was dug, his father had second thoughts. I don’t know, he said. I don’t know how it doesn’t mold, or how bugs don’t get to it. And I don’t know how to make it easy for us to get to stuff inside without it being easy for bears to get inside. And this whole place is going to be covered in snow, too.

Roy listened and looked down into the huge pit they had dug for a week. He didn’t know, either. He had just assumed his father knew more about this.

They stood there some more until his father said, Well, let’s think this thing out. We can put the food in plastic bags. It may mold, but it can’t get wet or get bugs in it.

Are we supposed to build some kind of shed or something in there? Roy asked. Or do we just bury it all?

The pictures I’ve seen, they’re made out of logs, whether they’re in the ground or up in the air.

Okay, Roy said.

Let’s sleep on it, his father said.

So they fished out on the point as the day drizzled and faded and then cooked salmon again for dinner and turned in.

Roy had trouble sleeping and lay awake for a long time. Hours later, he heard his father begin to cry.

In the morning, Roy remembered and stayed in his sleeping bag and did not get up until late. His father was already gone, and when Roy walked up to the pit, his father was standing down inside it with his arms folded, staring at the walls.

Let’s think this thing out, his father said. We’ve dug a pit. We have a big pit here now. And we need to store our food in it. We need a low cabin-like thing, I think, and a door that we can get into but a bear can’t. The door could be on the top or it could be on a side with an entrance that slants down to it. I’m thinking the door should be on top and nailed shut and buried. What do you think?

His father looked up at him then. Roy was thinking, you’re not any better. Nothing has gotten better. You could decide just to bury yourself in there or something. But what he said was, How do we get to the food?

Good question, his father said. I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that a cache is what you save for late in the winter. You stock up in the cabin and just don’t leave it. You keep your rifles ready and you shoot any bears that come by. And then when you finally run out, you still have something left. You come up here and dig and take it all and you’re ready to go again. Or maybe you come up twice, but not more than that. So we don’t have to have any easy access. And the reason the food keeps is that it’s all frozen in addition to being smoked or dried and salted.

That sounds right, Roy said.