Deer Meat
BY ALANNA WEISSMAN
The girl found the spotted fawn curled in the grass at the edge of the clearing behind the cabin, nestled in a patch of sunlight at the base of the tallest tree, the one with the broken branch. The animal’s nose was wet like a dog’s, and though it couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds, its slender legs looked too weak to support its body and were folded neatly beneath it. It was autumn—the girl could tell by the crisp chilly air and the crunch of browning leaves under her feet—but even though the morning sun was warm, the fawn shook as she approached.
“Where’s your mother?” she asked, crouching over it and extending the back of her hand toward its nose, letting it catch her scent. She kept her bad arm close to her body. It was going to rain; she could feel it in her bones, the pulsating space where they had broken apart and haphazardly fused back together. The girl circled the clearing in search of the doe, poking her head behind the tree line and scouring the ground for tracks, but she found nothing, and eventually returned to the cabin, swatting at flies with her good arm, damp grass tickling the soles of her bare feet.
Her father was arranging the firewood, kneeling on the floor beside the pile of logs, boots shedding flecks of dried mud onto the ancient carpet. He wore a tan flannel shirt, and shotgun shells bulged in his back pocket. She sat down criss-cross applesauce on the floor at the far end of the couch, the spot she most often sat lately.
“There’s a baby deer out back,” she said. Her jeans were faded and stained, still fitted at the waist but by now far too short, riding up to expose her ankles. She picked at the fraying hem and shifted her weight from leg to leg, trying to find a comfortable position, the hardness of her bones against the hardness of the floor.
“Oh yeah?”
“It was all by itself.”
“Its momma will probably come back for it,” he said, chewing his lower lip. His beard had grown in thick and dark, sometimes reddish when the light hit it a certain way. At certain angles, he looked, the girl thought, like some sort of bear, all jowls and fur and yellowed teeth. “Sometimes they leave their young for a while.”
***
At first, there was only fighting. She didn’t remember the words, but she remembered the shouting—she’d hear it through her bedroom door, from under the covers she had pulled up over her head. Sometimes they weren’t shouts, but whispers that seemed impossibly loud. Sometimes they weren’t voices at all, but sounds; the slam of a door, the crash of a glass bottle, the clattering of a metal box. A hole in the drywall the size of her father’s fist that seemed to catch sound and echo it. When no one was looking she would stand on tiptoe and press her ear to it or fit both her fists inside, feeling the reverberations.
In the mornings, her mother would get her ready for school: tie perfect bows into her pigtails, zip up her jacket, hand her a packed lunch, and walk her out to the school bus. At night, the girl walked herself back from the bus to the house and her mother would let her in, opening the door to the scent of meatloaf, or roast chicken, or casserole. Once a week, on Wednesdays, her father was supposed to pick her up from school and drive her to gymnastics class, but more often than not he forgot, and the girl sat and waited in the linoleum lobby of the school, practicing pikes and tucks after all the other children were gone.
Sometimes she thought about how fragile her mother looked: long deerlike limbs, limp brown hair, translucent skin, eyes always sunken and dark. Still, the girl’s mother made sure to smile for her, every morning when she sent her off to school and every afternoon when she came home. Her father never smiled much, and when he did all the girl could focus on was his teeth, which were stained and yellow from the cigarettes. Occasionally he would put on a suit for one of his court dates; he always looked so unnatural with his hair slicked back and his shirt starched and tucked in, like a wild animal forced to perform.
For her seventh birthday—March 16th—her mother took her to the zoo; her father was supposed to come, but he didn’t. Moist gray clouds gathered overhead and the air was chilly, but not cold. Her mother wore white pants and a gauzy yellow scarf that let the air blow right through. They walked hand-in-hand through the exhibits. Her mother helped the girl learn the Latin words for different types of animals—cervine, ursine, porcine, vulpine, lupine—and read aloud to her the sad facts on the placards: Many animals identify their young by scent, and if a human touches the baby, the parents will reject it. If a mother grizzly bear is killed, her cubs will starve to death. Homo sapiens has hunted hundreds of species to extinction, and represents the greatest threat to many others. In the bathroom, while she waited for her mother to finish using the toilet, she rinsed her hands and bared her teeth in the mirror, examining her own reflection.
The zoo animals had become used to people. Antelope crowned with long spiral horns grazed leisurely on strawlike grass. Pygmy marmosets pressed their tiny hands against the glass, mimicking the children on the other side. The grizzly bear had paws the size of baseball mitts and claws that were longer than the girl’s whole hand. It slept soundly in its enclosure, a huge hulking mass of sighing brown fur.
In the gift shop, the stuffed toys contrasted with the real thing. Tigers with smiles instead of fangs, monkeys with arms wide open to receive a hug. Her mother playfully put a safari hat on the girl’s head and bought her a teddy bear, brown and fluffy with a yellow satin bow around its neck that looked just like her own scarf.
“I used to have a bear just like this when I was your age,” her mother said, smiling lightly and giving the bear a squeeze. “I took him everywhere. He made me feel safe.” Wisps of her floral perfume lingered in the animal’s fur. “Happy birthday, honey.”
***
That night, the girl’s father gently shook her awake in the darkness. In hushed tones he dressed her—jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers—pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and bundled her out the door. The air felt thick and constricting. His hand sat heavy on her neck, pressing her head down so that with her hood up in the darkness she only saw the floor in front of her.
“Where are we going?” the girl asked.
“We’re going on an adventure.”
“Is mom coming?”
Her father said nothing in reply.
Ushering her to the used truck he had paid cash to buy from a buddy, he found a spot for her in the back seat, between cardboard boxes and gun cases and piles of his clothes. He drove to beat the speed limit, kept the headlights on low, flipped through radio stations and lingered longest on police reports. The sun rose and fell again and again. They ate beef jerky and flavorless fruit from the convenience store and slept in the truck in dark parking lots, the girl huddled under one of her father’s scratchy tattersall shirts, clutching her teddy bear close to her face, pretending she was still in her bed. In gas station bathrooms she would pee while her father shaved over the sink, gradually paring back his facial hair.
While he drove, she used her index finger to trace hearts and stars and smiley faces into the thick dust on the truck’s windows, picked bits of Slim Jim out of her teeth, counted the roadkill—squashed opossums, flattened raccoons, sometimes an open-eyed deer nearly as big as a car—they passed until the number grew higher than she knew how to count. Her father flicked cigarette ash out the front window, spit sunflower seed shells that the wind carried backward into the truck so that they landed on the girl and tangled in her hair. Once, she was startled awake when he swerved to avoid a buck in the middle of the road. It stood motionless in the face of the headlights and her father’s honking, hooves planted on the asphalt, the points of its antlers casting long tendrils of shadow across their faces. The girl’s father took a pull from his flask.
Eventually, there were only lush dark trees to one side of the road, pale grass fields across the way. The foliage grew denser and the roads less paved; in some places, the tree canopy was so thick they could barely see the blue of the sky. Finally they arrived at the little house in the clearing, a wooden cabin like the girl had seen in cartoons, with aged furnishings and the smell of smoke and pine needles hanging in the air. The father showed the girl to her room: a twin bed with a faded blue duvet, a dusty braided rug, a small fogged window set high in the wall.
In those first few months, he brought her bunches of colorful wildflowers he had gathered, once a jar of lightning bugs for her to keep on her windowsill for when she was scared of the dark, built a wooden birdhouse that he let her paint in bright yellows and greens and hung it on the front porch. But after a while he started leaving early in the mornings to check his traps, and often didn’t return until dinnertime. Sometimes he returned smelling of blood, sometimes of sweat, sometimes of liquor, sometimes of rain, sometimes of an unfamiliar musk. Sometimes all those things at once: the scent of wildness.
***
The girl spent so much time in silence, she sometimes thought she might forget how to speak. There was a television in the living room, but it only picked up static. Sometimes she would take a book down from a shelf and sit with it, smelling the musty pages, running her fingers along the words. She thought she remembered her alphabet, but most of the words were too big for her to read, vowels and consonants swimming in an illegible mass. The wildflowers had turned crinkly and brown, and the birdhouse remained vacant, its colors dulled from exposure to the elements. The lightning bugs laid dark and motionless at the bottom of the jar. At night the girl drove her nose into her teddy bear and inhaled as deeply as she could, but the scent of her mother’s perfume had long since faded, replaced by the choke of her father’s cigarettes. The bear’s fur was tamped down and worn into bald spots, and the yellow bow had long since come untied and disappeared.
They usually ate stew for dinner, thick brown gruel ladled from a huge bubbling pot of whatever her father had caught in his traps, sometimes some mushrooms or greens he had foraged. Sometimes she saw her father eating steaks of some sort, but she never got to have any; he kept the best cuts for himself.
“Do you like venison?” her father once asked her as he flipped a steak in the pan, but she didn’t know what that was, and he didn’t tell her.
He didn’t use the truck much, but made sure to keep the gas tank full, to start the engine every few days when it got cold. Occasionally, he would take a drive and come back with a treat for each of them—liquor for himself and potato chips or Swedish Fish or a Snickers bar for the girl, all so sweet and salty and unnatural-tasting that they made her teeth ache, but she always ate them anyway. He talked about getting chickens so they could have eggs, or bees so they could have honey, but it never happened.
The first time he took her into the woods to hunt with him, her shoes didn’t fit anymore, and with bare feet she noticed the different textures of the ground: the soil soft and cool, twigs sharp and stiff. They gathered a few dead rabbits from the bloodied jaws of her father’s traps, and then began to follow a set of tracks. The girl watched her father peer through bushes and around trees and tried to make her breaths as silent as possible, even as her heart pounded so hard in her chest she was sure any living creature that might be nearby must be able to hear it. A shot rang out and he called her to the kill—a massive wild hog. She approached cautiously, reaching out one hand toward the hog and softly patting its mottled gray-brown bristles. Rough and soft at the same time, like her father’s grizzled beard, or the spot on the couch where he most often sat, or her worn teddy bear. The hog was at least four times her size, and even dead, it looked as though it would jump up and attack at any time—yellow tusks bared, ears pricked up, skin still warm. Its eyes were open but dark and emotionless.
Her father crushed the cherry of his cigarette against the trunk of a tree, leaving a small smoldering spot in the bark. He heaved the carcass onto its side, plunged his knife into its chest and sawed downward through its belly, carefully at first but more roughly as the corpse resisted and he began to grow impatient. Tiny beads of blood flew into the air, into his beard, onto the girl’s skin, where they sat heavy and hot as burning embers. When the knife pulled away a litter of piglets spilled out slick and pink onto the ground.
“Damn,” her father said, wiping his knife on his thigh, a red handprint soaked into the grain of the wooden handle. “Those are too young to eat—a few more weeks and we could have had suckling pig.”
***
Outside, she had been learning. The purple berries were okay to eat, but the red ones made her hallucinate. Certain leaves helped ease itching when crushed and rubbed on mosquito bites, but leaves of three, leave them be. The prettiest, most colorful leaves she kept to press in the heavy books she wasn’t able to read. She played tic-tac-toe with herself, using twigs to draw X’s and O’s in the soft parts of the ground. She could extract a deer tick from her skin without severing the head from the body, and imitate the chirps and whistles of the birds she heard most often. Once, she sat in the grass and held herself so still that a yellow songbird landed on her arm and perched for a moment, its feathers glistening gold in the sunlight, its body light as balsa wood. She no longer startled at gunshots in the distance. Nothing could dislodge the dirt from under her nails.
It was early summer—she knew from the thickness of the air and the green of the trees, dark plump veins running through each bright, velvet leaf—and the girl’s father was out. She was sitting on the front porch when the warm breeze carried to her nose the familiar sweet-bitter scent of musk and flowers.
With her nose in the air the girl followed the smell off the porch, through the grass and to the base of the tallest tree at the edge of the clearing. Pulled by some sort of invisible reverse gravity, she felt the need to climb, to catch the view from the top, to see if the scent got stronger. She touched her hands to the rough bark and they came away sticky with golden sap, which she clapped on her palms like gymnasts’ chalk. She hoisted herself up on the lowest set of branches, hugged the trunk as her callused feet felt for a toehold. The split ends of her hair tickled her waist when she moved. She pulled herself up onto the second set of branches, but still could only see leaves all around, and the scent was muted by the tang of the bark. Upward she continued, the rough bark scraping the skin off her palms, and she was panting by the time she reached the top of the tree. She had never been so high up before, and she could swear the sky was bluer, the sun warmer, the air clearer and cleaner-tasting. She slid on her belly along the highest branch, trying to remember how she balanced on the beam in gymnastics class, thinking how if she reached the end she could perch like a bird and see above the tree line. The branch looked strong and thick, and she knew she wasn’t heavy.
When the breeze blew the right way, the canopy of red and yellow leaves parted and she could see slivers of life. A pair of beavers on the riverbank tamping down mounds of earth with their tails, a red-breasted robin with a wriggling worm in its beak. A family of crows crossed the sky overhead. Snatches of birdsong wafted over from the other trees. The girl finally realized where she knew the scents in the air from. She didn’t know what they were called or what plants they came from, but they were the notes of her mother’s perfume.
She was almost to the end of the branch when she thought she saw below her the enormous silhouette of a bear. Her muscles involuntarily stiffened, but then she remembered one of the placards her mother read to her at the zoo: Though incredibly powerful, most bears are gentle and will only attack to defend their cubs. They’re more afraid of you than you are of them. She leaned over to the side, trying to get a better look, and the branch gave way with a sharp crack.
In the moments before everything went black, the air thickened. When the girl moved her limbs she felt like she was swimming through molasses. Birds swirled overhead, the sunlight glinting rainbow off their feathers. The last one she saw had plumage yellow as a sunflower.
When she awoke, she was on the couch in the cabin, her arm in pieces, her father standing over her. She caught a whiff of whiskey on his breath.
“You’re lucky—this is a clean break,” he said and pinned her torso with his knees, his body heavy and thick as a tree trunk. In the moment before he shoved a rag into her mouth and wrenched the bones back into place, the girl cried out for her mother.
Her father fashioned a split from a piece of firewood, affixed it to her arm with twine and the damp rag that had been in her mouth, tearing it into strips with his sharpest side teeth. The sounds of twisting muscle and splintering bone echoed in the girl’s ears. They sat in silence for what felt like forever. She watched a beetle crawl out of a tiny hole in the makeshift splint, its iridescent carapace glittering like a jewel.
“What happened to mom?” she finally asked. She had slid off the end of the couch and now lay curled on the floor, cradling her throbbing arm, the tears on her cheeks finally starting to dry, the smokiness of the rag lingering in her mouth.
Her father looked out the window, where the sun was dropping behind the tree line, the sky starting to gray. The birds outside were silent. Somewhere in the distance, a thunderclap.
“Things between your momma and I, they weren’t so good. You knew that, dear,” he said, pausing to fish a cigarette from his pocket and place it loosely between his lips. He flicked his lighter open and shut, open and shut.
***
As dusk began to settle and the last orange fingers of sunlight reached out over the horizon, she went outside behind the cabin. Lightning bugs were beginning to flicker near the trees, while fuzzy white moths lazily circled the porch light that her father only sometimes turned on. The fawn was still there, still quivering. The rain had started, a fine mist that the bones in her arm promised would grow heavier, and the animal glistened slick and brown in the moisture. She tried to count the white spots on its back, but they were mottled and faded now, the grain of the fur pushed at all angles. Even wet, the fawn had no scent, she noticed as she knelt beside it. With the back of the hand on her good arm, the girl wiped her face, then reached down and smoothed the animal’s fur all back in one direction. The white spots reappeared, darker and more yellowed now, on its back. It wasn’t as soft as the girl expected it to be. The fawn looked up at her with dewy black eyes.
When she went back inside her father was plopping large slabs of meat into pans on the stove. She watched him dig the tip of his hunting knife into the reddest part of the meat and dislodge a misshapen bullet, which clattered to the floor. Light glinted off the points of the serrated blade, the teeth sharp like a wolf’s. They sat in silence until the meat began to sizzle, its pink exterior turning gray, steam thickening the air and filling their lungs with the scent of hunger and blood. The girl’s mouth instinctively filled with saliva, and she ran her tongue over the sharp teeth on the sides of her mouth.
“The baby deer is still outside,” she said. “It’s shivering. Can we bring it inside? Get it out of the rain?”
Her father harrumphed, a sound from deep in the back of his throat. “If it’s meant to live, it will live.”
“But it’s just a baby.”
Above the fuzz of his beard, the girl saw her father’s nostrils flare.
The rain was falling more heavily now, maybe even turning to hail; she could hear the fat drops beating mercilessly against the metal roof. They sat at the table and she sawed at the meat with her too-dull knife, clutching the handle weakly in her bad arm, chewing thickly at bits of gristle. It had been a long time since she last had meat. But this wasn’t like the steaks she remembered her mother buying at the grocery store or her father ordering at restaurants—it was leaner, gamier, more sinewy.
“What is this?” she asked.
Her father’s eyes flashed feral, his bearlike face turned grizzly. She could have sworn she saw, for a split second, the ghost of a smile.
