This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [72]
A large buck hung from a tree by its hind legs, the rack of horns dragging on the earth with the swaying of the rope. Its fur was dark burgundy, and burnished with blood along the center of the white belly, cut open to reveal a complication of innards. I couldn’t look away. The deer was both majestic and robbed of its majesty as it hung there, eyes turned to black stones in the encroaching dusk.
“Looks like Keith got his deer,” Papa said.
Keith emerged from the house, bearlike, an uneasiness beneath the contours of his strong jaw. There might have been a human hanging from the tree, the way he looked at Papa. Continuing to hunt and eat meat, despite the Nearings’ disapproval, lent Keith the unapologetic guilt of an addict who didn’t know how to quit.
“Frost coming,” Papa said. “I need to get that extra roll of plastic I stored with you.”
I stayed in the jeep, having no desire to enter the shed, which might contain the carcasses of butchered pigs or chickens.
“At least they know where the meat comes from,” Papa would later concede. “Much better to eat animals you feed well yourself than buy the crap they raise under poor conditions in the commercial feedlots.” If it hadn’t been for the lack of refrigeration and the Nearing taboo against “carcass eating,” perhaps Papa would have added more meat to our diet, but in the competition for the Nearings’ favor between Papa and Keith, like competitive siblings, vegetarianism was the one thing Papa had on his side.
As it was, Papa couldn’t hold too high a candle over Keith, because he killed animals, too, the ones that got into the garden. When the dried blood sprinkled around the crops and the radio left on at night didn’t scare the coons away from the sweet corn, you could hear Papa out taking shots with his old .22. He hated to do it, but had few options in the competition with wildlife for our food supply.
Papa and Keith came out of the shed on either end of a roll of plastic and loaded it in the jeep. We hightailed it back to protect our food source from frost, leaving the silhouette of the buck swaying from the tree, its blood seeping into the ground in a darker circle beneath it.
In the quiet of winter, we found some of our old happiness. The pace of the farm slowed to the rhythms of hibernation as Mama sewed and mended and Papa rested and dreamed over seed catalogs and snow fell endlessly outside the windows. Oh, the beauty of those snowstorms! The flurries muted the landscape and united the details of the farm under one soft blanket, silhouetting the bare ash branches and accumulating on the boughs of fir and spruce trees, hanging them to the ground. Squirrels, chipmunks, jays, and chickadees retreated to the inner parts of the forest to wait out the storm, and we followed their example in the house, the dark lifted up by white outside the windows, our faces glowing from the charge of negative ions in the air.
“Snowstorms remind me of living in the mountains as a ski bum,” Mama said.
“Yes,” Papa agreed, an old light in his eyes to match Mama’s. Determined to heal his thyroid on his own, he’d been taking B vitamins, kelp tablets, and concoctions fortified with seaweed to provide the much-needed iodine he seemed to be lacking.
Heidi and I snuggled on the padded benches with our blankets and warm milk and honey, kerosene lanterns humming, and listened to The Spider’s Web, a radio program on WBGH that featured English-accented readings of children’s books.
“It’s a web like a spider’s web, made of silk and light and shadow,” the theme song began, as Heidi and I leaned close to the Zenith. “Spun by the moon in my room at night. It’s a web made to catch a dream, hold it tight till I awaken, as if to tell me the dream is all right.” We shivered with excitement at the familiar words.
A story called Otto of the Silver Hand particularly captured us. It was a complex tale