The Lives of Rocks (6 page)

They let Jyl work with the skinning knife, showed her how to separate the muscles lengthwise with her fingers before cutting them free of the skeleton, and the quartered ham and shoulder—the backstrap unscrolling beneath the urging of her knife, the meat as dense as stone, it seemed, yet as fluid as a river, and so beautiful in that sunlight, maroon to nearly purple, nearly iridescent in its richness, and in the absence of any intramuscular fat. And now the skeleton, with its whitened bones beginning to show, seemed less an elk, less an animal, than ever; and the two brothers set to work on the neck, and the tenderloins, and butt steaks, and neck loins. And while they separated and then trimmed and butchered those, Jyl worked with her own knife at carving strips of meat from between each slat of rib cage.

From time to time their lower backs would cramp from working so intently and they would have to lie down on the ground, all three of them, looking up at the sky and spreading their arms out wide as if on a crucifix, and would listen to, and feel with pleasure, the subtle popping and realigning of their vertebrae, and would stare up at that blue sky and listen to the cries of the feeding birds, and feel intensely their richness at possessing now so much meat, clean meat, and at simply being alive, with the blood from their labor drying quickly to a light crust on their hands and arms. They
were like children, in those moments, and they might easily have napped.

They finished late that afternoon, and sawed the antlers off for Jyl to take home with her. Being old-school, the brothers dragged what was left of the carcass back into the woods, returning it to the forest, returning the skeleton to the very place where the elk had been bedded down when Jyl had first crept up on it—as if she had only borrowed it from the forest for a while—and then they drove back down to their ranch house and hung the ham and shoulder quarters on meat hooks to age in the barn, and draped the backstraps likewise from hooks, where they would leave them for at least a week.

They ran the loose scraps, nearly a hundred pounds' worth, through a hand-cranked grinder, mixed in with a little beef fat to make hamburger, and while Ralph and Jyl processed and wrapped that in two-pound packages, Bruce cooked some of the butt steak in an iron skillet, seasoned with garlic and onions and butter and salt and pepper, mixed with a few of the previous spring's dried morels, reconstituted—and he brought out small plates of that meal, thinly sliced, to eat as they continued working, the three of them grinding and wrapping, and the mountain of meat growing on the table beside them. They each had a tumbler of whiskey to sip as they worked, and when they finally finished it was nearly midnight.

The brothers offered their couch to Jyl and she accepted; they let her shower first, and they built a fire for her in the wood stove next to the couch. After Bruce and then Ralph had showered, they sat up visiting, each with another small glass of whiskey, Ralph and Bruce telling her their ancient histories until none of them could stay awake—their eyes
kept closing, and their heads kept drooping—and with the fire burning down, Ralph and Bruce roused from their chairs and made their way each to his bedroom, and Jyl pulled the old elk hides over her for warmth and fell deeply and immediately asleep, falling as if through some layering of time, and with her hunting season already over, that year. That elk would not be coming back, and her father would not be coming back. She was the only one remaining with those things safe and secure in her now. For awhile.

 

She killed more elk, and deer, too, in seasons after that, learning more about them, year by year, in the killing, than she could ever learn otherwise. Ralph died of a heart attack several years later and was buried in the yard outside the ranch house, and Bruce died of pneumonia the next year, overwhelmed by the rigors of twice the amount of work, and he, too, was buried in the yard, next to Ralph, in an aspen grove, through which passed on some nights wandering herds of deer and elk, the elk direct descendants of the big bull Jyl had shot, and which the brothers had dismembered and then shared with her, the three of them eating on it for well over a year. The elk sometimes pausing to gnaw at the back of those aspen with roots that reached now for the chests of the buried old men.

Remembering these things, a grown woman now woven of losses and gains, Jyl sometimes looks down at her body and considers the mix of things: the elk becoming her, as she ate it, and becoming Ralph and Bruce, as they ate it (did this make them somehow, distantly, like brothers and sister, or uncles and niece, if not fathers and daughter?)—and the two old men becoming the soil then, in their burial, as had her father, becoming as still and silent as stone, except for
the worms that writhed now in their chests, and her own tenuous memories of them. And her own gone-away father, worm food, elk food, now: but how he had loved it.

Mountains in her heart now, and antlers, and mountain lions and sunrises and huge forests of pine and spruce and tamarack, and elk, all uncontrollable. She likes to think now that each day she moves farther away from him, she is also moving closer to him.

As if within her, beneath the span of her own days, there are other hunts going on continuously, giant elk in flight from the pursuit of hunters other than herself, and the birth of other mountains being plotted and planned—other mountains rising, then, and still more mountains vanishing into distant seas—and that even more improbable than her encountering that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that brought her to her father in the first place, that delivered her to him and had made him hers and she his—the improbability and yet the certainty that would place the two of them in each other's lives, tiny against the backdrop of the world and tinier still against the mountains of time.

But belonging to each other, as much in death as in life. Inescapably, and forever. The hunt showing her that.

The first time I realized that Wejumpka was strong, really strong, was when I slept in late. It was a rainy morning in November, late in the morning—noon. Vern and I had been up drinking, talking, playing records, until well past three-thirty in the morning. The doctors had said that Vern could go any month now, any week, even; that when his liver shut down everything bad was going to start happening, real fast. That was just the way it was, though, and you couldn't change a man's whole life.

“It's like trying to make a pine tree turn into an oak,” Vern said about his not being able to stop drinking. We weren't drinking anything hard: just beer, to remind us of when we were young, and because there'd been a sale on it that day at the gas station.

Vern's most recent girlfriend, a girl my age, a girl I'd gone to high school with, had left him two days ago, saying she
o didn't want to be around when he died; but Vern finally understood that he was indeed going to die, that it was coming, no maybes about it, and he had decided that there was a sort of dignity in not changing his movements, his patterns, before it happened. He didn't want to feel like he was running from it, since it was going to happen, and though I had not agreed with his logic at first, I saw what he was talking about the closer we got to it. Or I thought I did. He said that he did not miss the girl much one way or the other, if that was how she was, and I saw what he meant by that, too.

It was almost as if it was all happening to me instead of to him; I could see all of it, could see why he was doing things. It was what anyone would have done.

We kept the beers iced down in a trash can, floated them in water and ice, and they were so cold that they made our teeth hurt. Sometimes Vern would cry out in pain when he got up to go to the restroom. It was a bad thing he had done to himself, all that drinking, but it was done and there wasn't any going back.

“It's like a ski run,” I said, “coming down a long run, near the bottom, where you haven't fallen yet. You can try jumps, loops, flips, anything. You're hot, you're on a roll, you can do anything.”

“I've never been skiing before,” Vern said. He looked down at his beer. He was fifty, but looked sixty-five. His face was loose on him, and his eyes were sad and red, and his hair had gone all to hell, shot through with gray where it wasn't falling out; but he still had Wejumpka, his youngest, and always would. Instead of talking about dying, we talked about Wejumpka whenever the subject of Vern's health came up. I was Wejumpka's godfather, next in line, and it scared me.

“How're you doing, big guy?” I'd ask, putting a hand on Vern's shoulder. I'm thirty, but feel older.

And Vern would grin, glad I was gripping his shoulder, and he'd look down and say something like, “That Wejumpka, he's something else.”

 

Wejumpka was twelve. Vern had another son, Austin, who was eighteen by then, but Austin was different. Austin had run away from home when he was sixteen to Arizona to live on an Indian reservation and take peyote; Austin drank like a fish, had a marijuana plant growing in the backyard of his mother's house, sassed his mother, wore earrings, and was, we suspected, asexual.

But Wejumpka! My godson built model planes, wrote his thank-you notes, hugged everyone he met, and sometimes sat on the back porch with his dog, a big golden retriever named Ossie, and played the harmonica. He was learning to play it well.

It's a quiet neighborhood, full of old trees, Spanish moss, everything moving slow. The houses were two and three stories, with their foundations thrown down in what was then forest, built on the treacherous, shifting Yazoo clay formation: slick and red, deceitful, it was beginning to crawl back toward the swamp, toward the Pearl River, trying to take the houses with it.

A lot of the homes were for sale. There were small panics at the first crack in the driveway, the crack that grew after a rainstorm or a cold spell, sometimes growing so fast that you thought you could see it happening.

Vern wasn't supposed to be anywhere near Ann. The judge had barred him from coming within a five-mile radius of
her; he'd given Vern a map of the city of Jackson, showing where he could and could not go. It was simply too much for the city to bear, otherwise. Vern and Ann went at it like cats and dogs, hissing and spitting whenever they came across each other, throwing canned goods at each other, turning one another's shopping carts over in the grocery store. Vern had sometimes shopped with the red-haired girl who was now gone, which had infuriated Ann to new levels of berserkness—she was a big woman, getting bigger since the divorce, and she'd take her Mace sprayer out of her purse and chase Vern through the grocery store with it, spraying him as if he were a bad dog—and it was just too much for the city to stand.

But I wasn't barred from being in the neighborhood, and because so many of the shifting homes were up for sale, some of them were also available for lease and for rent: for anything. Most people just wanted out, any way they could do it. Quitting was imminent.

To help Vern out and to keep an eye on his boy, and on old Ann, I rented the house across the street; put curtains up, wore a false beard and mustache and wig, walked with a limp and a cane, so she would not know it was me.

I can't really stress enough how brutal the divorce was. It took everything they both had, and then from Vern it took a little more.

Ann got his new unlisted phone number and passed it out to her friends. They would call him at all hours of the night—and always he had to answer, not knowing if it was an emergency involving one of the boys or merely another hate call—but always it was the latter.

“You're a dead man, Davidson,” a woman's husky voice
would whisper, full of hate: maniacal, and full of the holiness of being right. “Dead
meat
” the voice would hiss, and then hang up. And Vern would laugh about it, telling it to me, but he had also half worried about it for a long time—and months later, when the calls finally stopped coming, he had begun to worry even more, as if now they didn't dare risk threatening him, because they were
serious
now and didn't want him to be alert.

He listened to noises in the night for a long time, he said, and wondered how they would do it to him. He couldn't understand such hatred; he would shake his head, run his hand through his hair, and say, “I just don't get it. It was only a divorce.”

I wanted to tell him that it was
not
just a divorce, that it was all these lives, that they were ticking away, lost time, misspent hours, and things ruined, good things—but that was precisely what Ann's angry friends were telling him, and I was Vern's pal so I could not do that. I had to try to bolster him, even if with stories, tales and lies, until he was back on his feet again, or until the end. It was a hard job.

If Vern was out, Ann's friends would leave messages on his answering machine. They called from pay phones, and when they got the answering machine, they would tell him to check with Sue at the hospital, that there'd been an accident involving one of the boys.

He had been wrong, but they were more wrong. They were guerrilla tactics, brutal and nasty, and I did not blame Vern for wanting to get out early. I opened his beers for him, handed them to him, got the whiskey for him out of the freezer. I'd always heard that a weak man can stand any kind of pain except another's. I didn't know if I was being weak. It was the only thing I knew to do. Reason had long ago left
Ann and would never return; and Vern's strength, and courage, had finally been worn down.

There was only my godchild, Wejumpka, left.

 

We drove into the garage after dark, wearing dark clothes, sometimes already drunk, and pulled the garage door down and made sure all the curtains were drawn before turning on any lights inside. We always kept one man at the window upstairs in a room with the lights turned off, to keep an eye on his house. It was usually Vern up there.

I'd be down in the kitchen fixing supper, or fixing drinks, and he'd be sitting backwards on a chair, resting over it like a riverboat captain, watching his old house with expensive field glasses, the kind hunters use right at dusk for drawing in as much of the failing light as possible—and he'd call out in a loud voice what all was going on, a radio announcer giving the play-by-play.