The door was unlocked and when I pushed, it squealed in one long aching pitch that hurt my ears. The small living room was dark, lit only by the weak sunlight piercing through the closed shades and from the flickering of the television screen against the back wall. I almost didn’t see him; he blended in with the stacks of newspapers, dirty dishes, and beer cans strewn in a thoughtful randomness across the furniture. I hadn’t seen my father in a year but he looked the same as I had last seen him, laying back in his chair with the footrest out, the bottom of his socks soot black, a can of beer seemingly about to fall from his grasp.
He was asleep. The television crackled. You simply can’t make people work together if they don’t want to. Half the citizens in
“Ed,” I called out to my dad, “Ed.”
It’s obvious because
He snored softly.
This time I was louder, “ED.”
He awoke slowly, lifting first one eye, then the other. He gazed at me thoughtfully. I wasn’t sure if he recognized me for a moment.
“Tell me something that you teach in that school of yours that I would care to know about,” His voice was slightly slurred, but then again he always talked slow and carelessly.
It’s too complicated. The bureaucracy is endless. Everything they do takes too long. It won’t ever go anywhere; their factions just continue to argue in their so called ‘national’ assemblies.
He gave me no signs of anything resembling a familial greeting. No smile, barely even an acknowledgement that any time had past since we had last seen each other. But then again, he didn’t look like he had changed, or even moved much, since I last visited him. Before, I would have been surprised— maybe even hurt, but probably not— if he had greeted me so nonchalantly, but I had somehow come to subconsciously expect this of him in recent years. It was somehow familiar and comforting, his indifference to me, his general apathy with which he sat in front of the television, watching images flash before his glazed eyes. He was never really all the way here; they would always say soldiers left or lost part of themselves in the jungle, but dad brought something back with him, something that was complex and always drew his attention away from life, from living.
My mom once told me in a moment of weakness that was why she divorced him. She would say that before the war he was much easier to be around, less worried, less contemplative, simpler. I didn’t really have an opinion on this myself, the only memory I have of my dad from before the war was of him coming back from a hunting trip, smelling of wood smoke, smiling, and handing me a stick of venison jerky.
When the war ended and he returned, after eight years, I remember everything vividly, the yelling, things breaking, doors slamming, his alcoholic breath as he leaned over to kiss my forehead as I lay in bed. I remember my mom taking me to my grandmother’s house in the middle of the night. I remember watching through a cracked door as my father cried while signing the divorce papers.
Separate but equal, yes, now that sounds familiar—
“Ed, you know nothing I teach interests you,” I was a professor of urban studies, “But there is something I hope you could teach me while I’m out here in the sticks.”
I paused, but it was too late to go back on it now so I continued.
“I was hoping you could take me hunting with you. I don’t know if you were busy…” I trialed off looking around the room.
He laughed half heartedly, but his eyes twinkled as he looked up from the TV.
“You? Hunt? What would your mom think of that?”
He was joking now, I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen him laugh or smile or make a joke. I couldn’t remember the last time he had mentioned my mother.
“Yeah, I want you to take me hunting,” I stood resolute while he stared at me inquisitively. We shared a moment of silence.
The president decided that we were ready to pull out, that they were ready to govern themselves.
My mother would never let me go hunting with my dad on weekends. He would always leave right after work and return late that Sunday night. It was really the only chance we would have had to bond with each other before the divorce and it never happened.
Not that I wanted it to happen, I had never previously thought about killing a deer, let alone cutting one open and butchering it. A graduate student of mine, a vegetarian who continually recommended books on food I didn’t have time to read, challenged me to go hunting, saying that if I can justify eating meat I should be able to kill an animal myself. He mentioning something about how that’s not even as bad as the industrial meat I ate anyway. He said something about how hunting for your own food is, anthropologically, the simplest, most basic way for humans to attain nutrition. We had gone out for drinks and I had made a slightly intoxicated bet that I didn’t think he would hold me to and I didn’t think I would follow through with. But here I was asking my father to take me hunting for the first time, thirty some years after it would have been a father son experience.
The president also decided that we should invade, and look how that turned out…
I had stopped waiting for an answer about hunting and started listening to the cadence of the news, if not the words themselves. There hadn’t been this much media on Iraq since we first invaded, but now that we were completely out of the country, things seemed as if they were starting to fall apart, and media coverage had expanded in the recent weeks.
I decided to change the subject, maybe I wouldn’t have to go hunting after all.
“So Ed, do you think
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it,” He answered automatically, as if quoting someone. Then he looked up and said flatly, “We’ll go hunting, first thing in the morning. Sit down, have a beer.”
In the morning, as we climbed into his truck he seemed youthful and excited in his old age. My head ached slightly. The ride took us almost immediately off of the main road, to a small bumpy dirt trail where branches thrashed against the windshield as we drove.
He was explaining to me the mechanics of the rifle I would be shooting. He was enlivened in a way I had never seen him before. He then explained how to wait for the deer to expose his flank, to aim right above where the neck holds the head, to be patient.
“I will be easy, I know you’ll be a natural, you’ll get one with your first shot,” His speech was clearer than usual.
“Don’t worry about once it goes down, I can take care of it if it’s still breathing.”
I was thinking about after that, when we would have to cut open the belly and cut away organs from the body and meat from the bones. The bet was not just to shoot the animal, but to butcher and prepare it as well.
He continued to talk, rambling on about the best spots to come across deer, their movement patterns at this time of year, their excellent diet in this region that made for some of the best venison steaks in the state. I sensed I was being sentimental, but I felt some sort of bonding taking place for the first time. It wasn’t the idyllic game of catch between father and son, but as we rolled down the path deeper into the woods, I felt young again, the responsibilities of an adult life slipping away, boyish thoughts of conquest and glory filling my mind as I held my father’s best hunting rifle in my hand.
I thought about when my father first came back from
He stopped talking for a second, seeming to bask in the light of our shared moment. We had both returned to an earlier time we had both previously missed out on. Things seemed simpler. I didn’t really know what I was saying, but it came out before I could stop it, “Dad, what happened to you over there?”
“Huh?”
I paused, and then said, “You know, in
There was another longer pause as my father slowed the vehicle. The branches swished across the roof of the truck, no longer assaulting the car with such vigor.
“Don’t ask me about that ever again.”
He switched on the radio, opened the cooler situated between us and violently cracked open a beer.
You can’t tell them to return to the old, ways, but at least use it as a model, something they can work with…There’s no foundation for this form of government. There can’t be a political system that is not only too complex to operate rationally, but has no historical or cultural basis in their society—
I switched the radio back off, the rest of the ride was silent.
I was laying flat against the ground, the smell of pine needles tickling my nose as the needles themselves pricked my skin where it was exposed. My dad lay next to me in the thicket overlooking the small grove of pale green shrubs. He had told me flatly that deer would be coming through here soon. He went over the technical details without emotions, then joined me on the ground in silence. He was brooding and I might as well have been alone for all the company I would have.
As we lay there motionless, the rifle already cocked in my hands so that I would not make any noise as the deer approached, I began to imagine my father’s experiences in war. It must have been so similar to this, sitting hidden in the depths of the forest floor, watching and waiting for movement, alert yet tranquil, motionless.
He must have often lain in that same position, waiting patiently for signs of life, to be snuffed out not for nourishment, but complicated factors of geography, politics and beliefs.
At that moment I heard movement, the cracking of twigs from in front of us. The deer was already in plain view, I must have missed its entrance, lost in thoughts that were not my own.
I raised my rifle, sighted along the smooth barrel. The deer was nibbling at one of the bushes in the clearing. Its back was turned, and my father put his hand on my arm, silently telling me to wait. I couldn’t remember the last time he touched me.
As we waited my arms shook slightly. I tightened my grip on the rifle. After a while the deer finally shifted position, exposed its flank. The deer stood motionless, staring forward, I had a perfect shot. I raised the rifle. It was so simple, all I had to do was pull the trigger and it would be dead. Soon after my arms would be covered in blood as we gutted the deer as it hung from a tree. Later tonight we would grill thick cuts of venison over coals, and only then would I have ‘the right’ to eat meat, having killed an animal myself.
I took a deep breath, steadying myself for the shot. The deer must have heard and stretched its neck to listen. It looked as if it was about to bolt. I pulled the trigger.
The deer’s shoulder exploded in a spray of piercing red. At first it stumbled, letting out a cry, then hobbled to its feet and limped away in a chaotic sprint. As it disappeared into the woods, the stream of blood had already streaked the deer’s entire side.
“Shit,” my father leapt to his feet and began running after the deer. I hadn’t seen him move so fast in years. He was in this moment surprisingly quick and light on his feet for the old man he had become.
I followed suit and chased after. The deer was crying, wailing in long forlorn, confused squeals. It was constant, the long single pitched cries sounding all too human. I was reminded of the dry heaves I would hear late at night from the bathroom when dad would go on one of his really bad streaks. It was momentarily comforting to think of the sound as having less to do with death. But then I was shocked into reality again— there was movement in the brush and my dad took one more shot into the disguising green mesh of the forest. As the shot reverberated around us I was hopeful that it was finally over, but the wailing continued.
The forest was thick with pine trees and it was impossible to see anything, it was hard enough to move through the thickly interwoven branches. We tracked the trail of blood, but it always seemed we were too far behind. At times the cries seemed to be surrounding us, as if, as it was dying, the deer decided to play a cruel joke on us in its last moments. After a while the trail of blood disappeared into the interwoven branches that we could not make it through. We listened to the hoarse wailing until it stopped, or fell out of earshot. When my father turned back towards me I could see he had been crying.
Simplicity is the peak of civilization.
-Jessie Sampter
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