Gather round, my children, and I’ll tell you a tale, about back when you were babies in Minnesota, half a lifetime ago, among the lakes and ragged hills east of Fargo where you first saw the light of day. So far north the rivers ran to the Great Arctic Sea . . . surely you remember. We had that farm at Thistle Ridge and 200 acres on Otter Lake, the best hunting and fishing I’ve ever seen. Life was hard but it was sweet indeed.
Gather round this soft pine table, which I have with me to this day. It still bears the impatient marks of your cutlery upon it, your incessant hammering with forks and knives when waiting on supper like some lunchroom riot scene in a jailhouse movie. The marks from the Smith Corona portable where I wrote my first stories, cigarette burns from drunken friends.
The carpenter first refused the white pine planks, as they would show every mark and scar.
“Exactly,” I said.
So now we have it, a family history worn in wood. I run my hands over the pine and a story wells up within me and I want to tell you all about it.
Your pa came up from the slough and walked out into the hayfield. There was four inches of new snow, more coming. Flakes on Pa’s eyelashes, beard, scope. You know how I kept the scope clean, constantly daubing with a paper towel from my parka pocket. Twenty-eight degrees and a stiff northwest wind. Perfect. Easy tracking and the deer were all laid up in the cattail bottoms. I was a hell of a man in those days, tall and straight and tough as an oak board. I walked up many a deer in the snow, shooting them on the rise like quail.
Old Chevy half-ton out on the road, Leon coming home from the hunt. Two nice bucks in the pickup box, turned around so their antlers hung over the open tailgate. That’s the way we did it. Fill your tags, crack a jug of Canadian, then drive around to make our neighbors covet. I jumped the fence, flagged Leon down.
“Nice deer,” I said. “Where you get ’em?”
“Between a popple and a pine,” he said. “How’d you do?”
“Got one hanging, one tag left to fill.”
He wished me luck and rattled on down the road. But I must have used up my day’s ration of luck. I slogged sloughs till sundown, jumped innumerable does and fawns but never got another shot at horns. Home again, getting on towards late-thirty, I was in the tractor shed attending to my skinning chores when the phone rang, Leon on the line.
“Still got that tag open?”
I told him I did.
“Well, you’d better get over here, then.”
There was a fork-horn buck in the front yard, freshly gutted, filled with snow to cool him off. And in the kitchen, the drinking lamp was lit. It was a kerosene beauty with Home Sweet Home etched into the chimney and Leon fired it only on special occasions. He stepped out the back door, popped an icicle off the roof edge, busted it cube size. They rattled into the glass. His hands were red with dried blood and there was still fresh blood around his fingernails but I didn’t mind. He poured me two fingers and slid the drink my way.
“Damnedest thing I ever seen,” he said, shaking his head. “I came home, put the gun away and was shucking my boots when the dog popped off in the back yard, yapping like crazy.”
That would be Mata, the wonder dog. She and nine others come out of my Chessie bitch when the neighbor’s stock dog got to her. Mata was mud fence ugly, but she was a pheasant-hunting machine, despite the dubious pedigree. I couldn’t taste the deer blood in the whiskey, but it bore a faint hint of woodsmoke from the icicle cubes.
Leon started his story. “I come around the corner of the house and Mata had that buck backed up against the woodpile. He took one look at me, dropped his head and charged. He’d a had me but he was dragging Mata girl.”
Mata lay at Leon’s feet and raised her head when she heard her name. He stroked her muzzle and continued his tale.
“I beat it inside, grabbed the gun and chambered a round. And I said to myself, you stupid bastard, you’d better not be there when I open this door! But he was there and he was coming inside! I shot from the hip and killed him at five feet.”
I’d heard of such foolishness before – a buck getting so worked up he loses all fear of man. Buddies of mine wrestled down two bucks, their horns locked together. One died and the other damn near died, but came back once they pried him a-loose with tire irons. But there was scant gratitude. The surviving buck put them all back in their pickups, circling, looking through the windows and growling like a mean dog.
I poured myself another round, fired my corncob pipe. The smoke haloed the lamp chimney and whiskey swirled around the cubes in our glasses. The wind moaned around the eaves, the snow hissed off the windowpanes and the fire rumbled softly in the stove. All was right in the world.
“You want him?” Leon asked.
“Why, hell yes!”
“Well tag him up,” he said, “and throw him in your truck. I got a generous plenty of him already.”
I did.
It was a small town, 20 miles from the freeway, 15 from Wal-Mart. They tore up the train tracks and the bus did not stop there anymore. Of 26 listings in the O section of the phonebook, 25 of them were Norwegian Olsons. The first was Olsen, a Dane.
Wasn’t much to do wintertimes except make babies or practice. You children are old enough where I can talk about this now. Besides, that’s how we got you, a small tribe of bright and hungry little faces each time we bellied up to the table. That deer was much appreciated.
Ahem. While the aforementioned horizontal relations were the favored wintertime indoor sport, outdoors it was not hockey as you might suspect, but gossip. There was always a blizzard of it going round. You never heard such. An estranged and aggrieved woman could walk into the bar at the VFW and say something scandalous and speculative about her ex and four days later, when some variation upon it got repeated back to her fourth hand, she would say, “See I knew it was true!”
It was a God’s wonder nobody got cut up or shot, as there was some provocative jacking of jaws in those parts, increasing exponentially with each new inch of snow cover.
Though the antics of a fork-horn buck paled in comparison to rumors of widespread drunkenness, arrests, bar-fights, bankruptcies, casual embezzlements and sundry fornications, still the fork-horn stories rattled around town like a rock in a milk pail. And I got them one at a time as the dreary season wore on. The phone man who got treed when the fork-horn took exception to the beeping of his wire locator; the homeowner forced to abandon his lawn work; the barmaid jogging along the road who was mounted when she bent over to tie her shoe. She claimed hoofprints on her shoulder blades, but refused to further elaborate.
Obviously hand-raised by somebody in the neighborhood, the fork-horn suffered an identity crisis. He treated people just the way he would have normally treated other deer. It is illegal most places to adopt orphaned deer and this is precisely why. Once grown they can be damned dangerous. But resting peacefully in our freezer, he could cause no more trouble. Right?
Spring is a glorious time in Minnesota, a land coming back from the cold dead, a palpable spirit riding the cries of northbound geese, falling with the gentle pattering rains and caressing the first tenuous greening of the aspen trees. Easter Sunday, we showed up for sunrise service at Zion Lutheran, then went home to a serious meal. Homegrown potatoes, carrots and onions you children helped fetch up from the root cellar and the last of the venison, a ham off the troublesome buck all baked together in my grandma’s Dutch oven. Heavy on garlic and cracked peppercorns, it promised a delight to eye, nose and tongue.
I carved the roast, spooned up the vegetables, passed the plates around. I gave your momma the cut she liked best, the rump of the rump, crisp with just the right marbling of fat. You kids said the blessing and we all dug in. Three minutes later Momma grabbed her jaw, howled and spat two objects onto her plate. One was an air rifle pellet. The other was most of a molar.
“Take me to a dentist,” she moaned.
“Honey, it’s Easter. Where we gonna find a dentist on Easter?”
She had her head in her hands now. “I think I’m going to faint,” she said.
“Emergency room? Good Lord!”
“Something,” she said, “and quick.”
I turned to your worried little faces. “Eat up kids, we got to go!”
“Momma gonna be all right?”
“Momma be fine. But Poppa be the one hurting.”
“Don’t bite on a bullet, Pa!” you all wailed in unison.
That fork-horn brought one final trouble, a pellet embedded in his ass when he wore out his welcome somewhere. You kids were too young to know there was no insurance and how much emergency dental surgery might cost, so I did not tell you. You are all grown and gone now, scattered across half a continent. But I always wanted to tell you this story. And I just did.
Your old Pa is still shooting deer. He is still drinking good whiskey and still smoking his pipe. He still sits at the same table, marked by your youth, and he still loves you just as he did when he hauled venison home to it.