Authors: David Vann
My father was studying me. The sun so bright I was squinting, having to blink, but his gaze was steady. The buzzing a thousand voices, high and insistent, making each moment a panic.
You've ruined the rest of your life, my father told me. Are you old enough to understand that? You may live another eighty years, and every one of those years is destroyed by this.
His eyes a light blue, clear as water, unable to see outward. Sinkholes.
You've ruined my life too, he said.
My father could no longer reach me. He was the one person in this world to hold me in place, but he was powerless. I smiled. It was not something I planned, and it was only a bit of a smile, but there it was.
My father was very fast. I turned and ran, but in a few steps his hand was on my shoulder and he threw me down. Hard earth packed and dry. The small velvet eyes of manzanita leaves. He punched me and did not hold back. For the first time in my life, I felt what he could really do. His fists slapping into me as I curled, covering my head. He was swinging with both arms.
The fist in my back frightening. His knuckles hitting spine, waves of nausea, and I could hear his breath, leaning close over me. If you saw this from far enough away, you might think he was picking me up to hold in his arms, Madonna and child. Saving me from the wolves. But there was no danger from outside, nothing he could protect me against. What we had to fear was inside me, and he was not able to reach that. His fists did nothing. And I think he knew.
My father stopped and lay back in the dirt beside me. I could hear him panting. My body a confusion of pain, my brain unable to sort out where to focus. The air itself hurt. I knew at least not to do anything, not to say anything.
The flies a sound that could not be endured for long, the curve of each flight a distortion of sound, the tone gone lower, and hundreds or thousands of these Dopplers combined made a maw of the air, a growling that came from inside our own ears, without source, and I think it was this that made my father rise from the ground and walk over to the body. I uncurled and saw my father lean down to take this man's hands and his rifle, and he began to drag him down that hillside.
W
E THINK OF CAIN AS THE ONE WHO KILLED HIS BROTHER,
but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.
My father struggled with that body. What to do with it. None of us came close. My father alone pulling dead weight through brush and scrub, over dry ground, walking backward downhill at an impossible angle, hung out over the warp of the earth, held by a counterweight. He paused only long enough to flip the man's rifle into the brush, then pulled the body again.
It's your crime now, my grandfather said. Throwing away his rifle, moving the body. You should have left it like I said.
My grandfather was fifty feet away from my father and not looking at him. Talking as if to the sky.
The flies held still to that cave, erupting at each bump and jolt and settling again. The man facedown, arms held high in worship, head hung low in meekness before his god. Legs trailing behind, slow crawl of a penitent.
You're going to be carrying that body farther than the truck, my grandfather said. You're going to carry that body the rest of your life. It will never leave you. You should have left it like I said.
My father having to lunge backward through thick brush, yanking the body. Snap of dry branches and twigs, and the penitent always close behind, following, head lolling, arms raised toward my father and that open blue sky.
All I could do was follow. I followed those tracks exactly. And behind me, Tom.
Only a fool picks up what's laid before him, my grandfather said. Only a fool.
My grandfather had grown up on a farm, told stories of peeling potatoes and adding a bit of extra protein when he scraped a finger. He ran traplines for meat and hides. Even as a kid I had a sense that he had picked up only what was laid before him.
Dragging that body down through manzanita, my father was struggling. I could see he wanted to quit. The flies a berserk horde. The sun directly overhead and his face formed in shadow, dark sockets for eyes, lines in his cheeks, his mouth another shadow. No longer cut out from the earth, no longer the same presence, diminished by this task, the edges of him connected now to air and brush and ground, made real.
I could grab his legs, I said.
Don't touch him, my father said.
Why?
But my father wouldn't answer. He only kept stepping backward down that slope until he hit pine and the body slid easily through needles and the growth was thin, and then he stepped faster, hurrying that body to its conclusion. A kind of sled made of the man, slurring down toward the road. When the slope dove more steeply, my father stepped to the side, swung with all his might, and the body tumbled the rest of the way, rag doll with the stuffing out.
At the road, my father looked toward the gate, but no one had come. Tom helped him now. They each grabbed a wrist and walked toward the truck, dragging the body between them. The man still facedown, the crater in his back still oriented to the sky. He could have been a drunk being dragged home by friends, but metaphor had become literal, the center blown out of him.
Pine-softened road, but at the bend it became rockier, and the man and his clothing were snagged and torn and covered in a white powdery dust. My father and Tom heaved him onto the mattress, swinging him like a hammock, Tom holding the feet. He landed without sound, and I climbed the tailgate to join.
We had to wait for my grandfather. Tom and my father in the cab of the truck, not speaking. The body stretched out behind me, lying across the bed faceup now.
Face of a ghost, white-dusted and bloodless, blue-lipped even in this heat. Eyes gone opaque from dust. Sideburns and hair different than on a living man, become distinct, unrelated to flesh. Mouth open. He could have been sleeping except for those open eyes, the open-eyed sleep of the dead.
I was losing my indifference. I sat back against the cab, but he was only a few feet from me, and he was nothing like an animal. Even in death, his expression was one of wanting more. A disbelief at being ended.
In the center of his chest was one small disruption, a rough dark entry point and a caving from gravity, all the backing gone.
His arms flung above his head, hands open. Shirt and vest dark and jeans dark and legs unstrung. A presence that would stay among us.
My grandfather appeared on the road. Heavy steps, never looking down. A thing that could topple at any moment, but he never looked where he stepped, only gazed blankly ahead, always unconnected to the ground. And this made any end possible.
No glance as he passed me. No glance at the body. Opened the cab door and heaved himself inside, the bed tilting beneath us and springs adjusting.
Then my father started the engine and we rolled forward as if this were any other trip, same as any other year. Up through a draw and then around a bend and the world opened up again. A long thin ridge fell off behind us to the left, steep slope of pines growing at a sharp angle to the land. A place too steep to hunt. Gray rock and slides of scree among the green, and the bottom of that place gone from view.
The road ahead traversing the mountain. I was on my knees and looking upslope to the right, not wanting to look at the dead man. Wind in my face, my hands low, the top of the cab too hot to touch. I had no rifle, but I looked for bucks anyway, something automatic in me.
That world at a tilt. A sense of elevation, almost the same as flying. And the mountain growing, each part of it enlarging as we approached. Beyond another ridge, an open bowl with only scattered ponderosa pines. Just above us to the right, a reservoir, dammed, lined by trees. I could see its lower bank, heaped up by a bulldozer decades before, covered now in ferns and seeps in that otherwise dry place.
My family had killed a lot of bucks here. An open valley with small rises and only spotty cover for hundreds of yards in every direction, the most gentle part of this mountain. Usually we'd stop and look all around with scopes and binoculars. But this time we drove on.
Side roads heading down to our left, lower on the mountain, to switchbacks and several enormous glades and the burn and bear wallow and another reservoir. We owned this entire realm. It was ours. From this point, we could hike in any direction and not have to cross onto another's land.
I'd like to remember what that felt like, to own and to belong. I've lost the sense of it. I have no land now, and I can no longer visit our history.
We drove through that familiar landscape and believed it would always be ours. It was so certain it was never even a thought.
O
UR CAMP IN A LARGE STAND OF PONDEROSA PINES, COOL
and shaded. Always a breeze and the sound of that breeze in the treetops. A spring that ran cold and pure. Ferns and moss and mushroom. Miner's lettuce we could pluck and eat fresh, bounty of the land. As close as we'd know to Eden, as close as we'd come to being able to return.
My grandfather had built small waterwheels here, and several had survived the winter. Turning still in the stream, miniature engines of imagined villages, all built for me, and before that, for my father. Each made from only three small slats and two nails, but animated beyond that. The water shallow and clear across a wide delta of small islands, an entire land, a region twelve feet across, not yet carved into deeper channels or bends, a world too new to have left a mark.
Downstream, at an impossibly larger scale, a pole lashed high between two trees, hooks hanging down by chains, one of them a scale for weighing bucks.
From my earliest memories, all features of this camp had been in place and nothing changed. The spring fed into a black plastic hose that gushed without ceasing into a white basin, the stream three inches thick. Beside this, high wooden countertops, freestanding, for the Coleman stove and griddle and boxes of provisions, Tom's place, the camp cook from before I could remember. All of it open to the pines above and the sky.
Just down from this kitchen, close along the land of the waterwheel islands, a picnic table between two trees and a steep corrugated roof above. The primary structure of the camp, without walls, this open table, the place we gathered, where lanterns were hung and stories told.
And that was it. Off in the trees, generations before me had left old rusty box springs, turned as brown as the pine needles, and farther off, a few pieces of plywood tacked between two trees for an outhouse.
The camp an outpost in an enormity. The slope of pines extending above, gradual at first and then rising much higher along the mountain. We could see only the bases of dozens of trunks as they rose, a contour of land still to be discovered. And below us, the stream curled around and left a fringe of fern and pine and then a wide meadow. Dry yellow grass baking in the sun and filling this forest with light.
All was ideal: the cool shade and breeze, the light, the sound of the stream and pines, the smell of sap and grass and fern, the history and feeling of arrival, of belonging. To me, this was the best part of every trip, the moment we found ourselves here again, the moment all the time between collapsed.
I hopped down from that mattress. I was ready to set up camp.
But my father and grandfather and Tom remained in the cab. There was no sound of talking. They were only sitting there. And when they emerged, finally, they didn't look at me. They gathered at the back of the pickup and looked at the dead man, who lay still with his face to the sky and arms flung above and mouth and eyes open. As if he would take in all the world, all at once.
I'm not touching him, Tom said. I'm no part of this.
I wasn't asking you, my father said.
You had one chance to not be a part of this, my grandfather said. You could have walked back down that road. Not gone through the gate. That was your one chance. Now it's the same as if you pulled the trigger. It's the same for all of us.
That's bullshit, Tom said. I haven't done anything.
What you've done or not done doesn't matter now. Where you are is what matters.
My father grabbed the dead man's hands. Fuck this, he said. And he pulled the dead man from that mattress overboard to whump hard onto the earth and kept pulling and dragging him toward the hooks.
You can't do that, Tom said, but my father kept dragging.
He's not a piece of meat, Tom said.
He is now, my father said, and he dragged across pine needles and the dead man with his open mouth seemed amused and a little drunk, his chin on his chest, and then his head lolled back as if he were laughing. On his way to some new place of hilarity and chains and hooks.
My father dropped him at the base of those trunks, at the edge of the stream. The place all our bucks had hung. He reached up for a dark hook that had several extra feet of chain trailing. Help me lift him, he said.
I'm not doing that, Tom said. He held his rifle in both hands before his chest, barrel aimed upward. At the ready, as if he planned to take aim at any moment. He was one step from panic. I could see he was breathing fast.
It doesn't matter whether you help now or not, my grandfather said. You've already grabbed that man's wrist and helped drag him to the truck.
You shut up, Tom said. I'm sorry. I know I've never said that to you before, sir. But please just don't say anything more.
It doesn't matter what I say or don't say.
Time to do this, my father said.
Tom's glasses made him weaker. The fact that his own eyes couldn't see, the fact that he was always relying on help. And the stock of his rifle was held together with packing tape, a thick brown wad of it, where the stock met barrel. An old .243 Winchester Savage, a light rifle for deer, small caliber, faster but with far less impact than my own .30-.30. It was a gun to be despised, a gun to be ashamed of.
I'll help, I said.
You stay away, my father said. I'll do this myself. He walked over to the trunk where several ropes were lashed. He loosened the one tied to this chain and hook and let them lower to the ground. Then he knelt at the dead man's feet. Work boots, not hiking boots, and jeans. My father lay the hook between these boots and then wrapped the chain around the man's ankles, pulled each wrap tight and then skewered the chain on the hook, anchoring it in place. His face intent, studying his task, a jeweler setting a stone.
Okay, he said, and then he went back to the trunk and heaved on that rope. The sound of chain links sliding over the crossbeam above. The dead man's feet rising up, legs coming off the ground. He kept his legs straight, cooperating, not wanting to make a fuss.
My father wrapped the rope around the trunk and held it with one hand, used the other to sweat the line. And so the legs of the dead man rose in jerks that caved but each time found him a little higher, until his waist was off the ground and the pale skin of his stomach exposed as his shirt fell away.
Dried caked blood on his skin but the whiteness apparent anyway. An illumination beneath. We were at the edge of that forest, the dry yellow grass of the meadow just beyond us radiating, a brightness that severed that part of the world, and the dead man belonged to that place already. He was not where we found him but could trick the eye. And he was turning now, a slow spin as his shoulders came free.
My father heaved at the line as the weight increased. Hard jerks, and the dead man turned until his back showed to us, the shirt and vest fallen away, and that cavern a dark eye iridescent and moving. His head was free then jammed back into the ground then free again and lifting, and his arms lifting, and he kept turning and we saw again the white luminous belly covered in a dried dark film.
My father heaving backward on that rope, pulling at an enormous bow, facing away from the dead man as if they had separate labors. The dead man's arms swirling against the ground dreamily, mouth open in rapture. And then he was gone to us again and again we saw that cavernous eye in glints blue and green.
Not one of us could speak. I had never seen anything more beautiful. The bright meadow beyond, and the fall off the edge of the world from there, the source of this breeze as the mountain dove and we could see only blank air and other mountain ranges lost in the distance. The dead man in his slow spin before us somehow able to pull that distance toward him and able to tilt even the ground beneath us, collapsing all.
My father had seen nothing. He glanced back only to check that the man's head was high enough above ground, and then he wrapped the rope around the tree several times, careful not to let it slip, and tied off. Get one of the sacks, he said.
It wasn't clear who he was speaking to, but Tom and my grandfather didn't move, so I went to the truck, reached behind the seat and saw my rifle. I put my hand on the stock but then grabbed one of the burlap sacks beneath and pulled it free.
My father was tying the man's arms up to his sides. He tried wrapping, but that was slipping down, so he let the arms fall and tied one wrist, brought the rope up through the man's crotch and led to the other wrist, cinched it tight, the man with one hand at his crotch now and the other at his butt, as if covering himself from view, a modest dead man caught without any clothing, except his jeans were still there.
The dead man's behavior could not be accounted for, but my father slipped that burlap sack up over him and he was lost from view and no longer to be considered. Except that somehow hanging there in a sack like the carcass of a buck he became even larger in my imagination and I could see his open mouth and eyes and his look of pure wonder at the world. His skin had become whiter, and he was taller.
The sack was not long enough to cover his boots. My father kept heaving upward on that sack but it was at its limit. He'd have to tie around the man's ankles or shins, around his jeans where the chains bit in, and these yellow-brown work boots would remain for all to see.
You can't leave his boots showing, my grandfather said.
I'm aware of that, my father said.
Anyone could see it's a man, not a buck.
I get that, Dad, my father said. It's not a brilliant fucking insight you're sharing with me.
We're going to prison for a long time, Tom said. All of us. Except maybe the one responsible, since he's a boy.
How about shut the fuck up, my father said.
Yeah, because I really owe you. You're doing so much for me here. Thanks for being a great friend.
My father knelt down and pulled up on the man's head. Then he looked at me and said, Come here.
So I knelt before the dead man and pulled his head against his chest. The burlap rough, like the weave of tree bark, and the man's face hidden but I knew his mouth would close as his chin hit his chest. It won't matter if you cover the boots now, I told my father. Because he'll only get taller in the night, and then his boots will stick out again.
My father looked down at me, and I could see for the first time that he was not a handsome man. His chin too fatty on an otherwise narrowing jaw, and his nose too bony. His eyes might even have been too close.
My father returned to his work, tying that sack around the chain above the man's boots. Done, he said. And thanks for the help, everyone.
We all stood back and looked at the man hanging there upside down. Even in burlap, it looked like a man. You could tell he had shoulders and his head pinned against his chest. You could tell those were boots at the top. A man learned to sleep upside down, wrapped in rough burlap wings larger but essentially the same as the wings of any other bat. Underneath, a body white as chalk. Waiting for nightfall.
Good enough, my father said. Time to set up camp.
So we pulled at that mattress that was darkened now on top and we carried it to one of the ancient rusted box springs and flipped it over, leaving the clean side to face the sky. This bed was for my grandfather, who had a bad back along with all his other ailments. The rest of us would sleep on the ground.
My father helped Tom carry the wooden crates of canned goods and plates and utensils to the tables beside the sink. They weren't speaking or looking at each other. Tom's face in those glasses could have been a boy's face, someone my age. Dark hair, not receding like my father's.
I hung the lanterns at the table. I carried my bedroll to a place between the trees where I always slept, level ground and pine needles.
Tom fixed lunch, as he always did. Just bread and lunch meat and cheese set out on the table, ketchup and mustard. We all sat on the benches, my father and grandfather on the uphill side, Tom and I being pulled slightly backward by gravity on the downhill side. The table had never been level.
Each of us with our hunting knives, long wide blades. My grandfather cutting his sandwich into strips like jerky. No place mats, just the stained old planks of the table and our knives etching into the wood as we cut. The blades thick on top, channeled, curving at their ends into narrow points. Each of our sandwiches cut differently, my father diagonal, Tom in simple half, mine in a cross, four pieces. And when we finished cutting, we stabbed our knives into the table so that they all stood on end, four pillars among the lunch fixings. Every time we came here was the same, except this time we didn't talk. No one had anything to say. Cicadas turning the air into clicks and a pulse. Flies, the large horseflies that could take a nasty bite out of wrist or ankle. We moved only to chew or to swat away the flies, and we all looked down at the table.
The pines above us moving in the breeze and then silent again. The water at the basin. The growing heat in the meadow, radiating into the trees and shade.
Well, my father said, and he rose and walked away to his bedroll farther back in the trees.
My grandfather opened a pack of Saltines and crushed a handful into a tall plastic cup. He poured milk over them and ate with a spoon.
Tom got up without a word and wandered off to his bedroll, and I listened to my grandfather chew. Sopping and smacking sounds. Middle of the day and nothing but the insects inclined to move.
Well, I said, and I walked to my bedroll, an old green army sleeping bag that was too hot to get inside. I lay on top and looked at the pines against a bright blue. All vision moving toward the center, the pines rushing toward the blue but also remaining in place, as if they could constantly shed shadows of themselves, streaming off into the sky but never becoming any less substantial. All the world a kind of vapor drawn from what would not change.
The ground I was on could have slipped anywhere along that mountain, and could have caved in to any depth or seemed to cave. There were four points of us, and a fifth hanging, and all the rest only background.