Strange as This Weather Has Been (22 page)

ALTHOUGH I have been a Christian all my life, I have never felt in church a feeling anyplace near where I get in the woods.This worried me for a very long time. Even when I prayed in a church, I couldn’t make much come, where woods, I had only to walk in them.To walk in woods was a prayer. But I knew it was wrong. Some kind of paganism or idolatry, I didn’t know what you’d call it, but I knew it must be sin. I used to feel so guilty about it I finally talked to the pastor one time. This was years back, me maybe in my late twenties. Pastor Dick, that one was, and I respected him. I respected all of them, I figured they had something I did not, why else would God have called them to be pastors? So I told Pastor Dick my concern, and he said, “Mogey, God gave man the earth and its natural resources for our own use. We are its caretakers, and we have dominion over it . . .” And he went on like that, saying stuff I’d heard since I was little.

But part of me knew, even back then, that’s not what it is. I knew we wasn’t separate from it like that. I started to say something, to explain to him—I think I wanted to get him around to where he’d say what I knew was okay—but he looked at me like Mary’d look at our
younger boy Kenny when he talked about his pretend friend. So I cut it off and shut up.

The first time I felt it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 1958. I’m sure on the year because I know I was ten, and that’d make my cousin Robby thirteen. We was standing right under the ridge on the backside of a mountain in Pocahontas County, a place they called the Ribs.

That buck come out after the last drive. I don’t mean he was driven to us. He was not, he come out on his own. Out to the side of Robby and me, and a little below us, and I felt him before I seen him. The way a big animal throws something off himself, something he carries around himself that you can feel without seeing. It’s like a higher hum than the still things, trees and ground and rock, although I only call it hum because I don’t got no other word for it. It’s not something caught by ear. As I got older, I’d catch it off small creatures, too, and after I got to be a man, I mean really a man, got past the early man and come to know myself and settled down, I could catch it, just quieter, even off trees and dirt and stone. But in the beginning, I only got it off big animals. That morning when I felt the buck and turned and saw, I thought at first he was a doe, his antlers blurred in the branches like they were. Then he moved ahead, stepping, and the antlers focused, come clear, and he was nodding a little, I remember. Like his rack was dragging his head a little with the weight.

I pushed my elbow into Robby. The buck held himself still, like he should not have, an animal that old knows better, and I stared at him, wondering at that stillness.The color their coats get in the fall, grayish, a kind of grizzled to them that comes on after the tender red-brown they wear in summer, as though they age by seasons instead of years. I watched him. Robby lifted his gun.

When he fired on him, that buck didn’t show in any way he moved that he’d been hit by a gun. The shot knocked him off the ledge more
like a punch than a bullet. And after he fell, he didn’t just crash and come to rest on the next outcrop like he was supposed to. No. He went to rolling. It was the third strange thing he done that day, after showing himself to boys with a gun and then standing still, practically posing for the shot. I’ve seen nothing like it since, big buck hooping down that mountain end over end, antlers over backside, whiteside, the antlers, then the white rump, coming up over and over again. Me and Robby leaned out, each of us hanging off a tree, and we watched him roll what had to have been well over five hundred feet, and that buck never hung up on a thing. Not a bush, not a ledge, not a rock. He just never hung up, like he should have. After a while, he disappeared out of our sight, although we could still hear the thumping and even the rattle of dirt and rock, and then, after a little bit, we lost the sound of him, too.

I’d never been to the very bottom of the Ribs.There was a fair-sized creek down in there, and running pretty full like it was, it took up most of what flat lay between the mountains, and there wasn’t much flat to begin with.We’d tried to come straight down as best we could so we’d end up about where the buck should have, but we didn’t see no sign of him. Not only no body, but no blood, and no tore-up leaves or brush, and no knocked-loose rocks. I looked at Robby, waiting for what we should do. Robby squinted and shook his head. He said, “You walk up the creek and I’ll walk down. Holler when you find him.”

I nodded and took off quick up the bank. I’ve always loved looking for stuff in the woods. That feel you get when you sudden-spy, as you’re moving, the deep green leaf of a ramp. The crinkle of a morel. Presents the woods give you just for paying attention, that’s how I saw it. And here I was, a little boy hunting a big buck, maybe a ten-pointer, wasn’t much you could look for more exciting than that. I slogged along through them rain-blacked trees, it was steep down there even at the very bottom, most of the time I had to kind of stagger along
with one leg higher than the other, and many a time I near slid in the creek. But I didn’t feel the cold or the wet, didn’t feel the mud soaking through the seat of my pants. It was sweet in that gorge, I’ll tell you. Rhododendron and fern, lichen and moss, big rocks, pretty even in such weather. I had my eyes sharped good. I’d been hunting game with my dad since I started school, hunting greens and stuff with Mom even before that. But, hard as I looked, I still couldn’t find no sign of the buck. Not even tracks or some mark of struggle in the brush. My excitement started running down on me some, and eventually I got to a point where I knew the buck could not have come off this far from where he was shot even if we had got way off course during our slide down. I figured he must have come off in Robby’s direction, even if Robby hadn’t hollered yet. I started heading back.

I run into Robby about where we’d parted ways. He had dropped down on a soaked rotty log, his hands between his legs for the warmth there. “Well,” he said to me. “He didn’t come off that way.”

“Didn’t come off my way neither,” I said back.

He cocked his head up at me. “Had to’ve,” he said.

I shook my head. “Ain’t no sign of him up through there. I looked real close.”

Robby blew his breath out, loud, to show how ticked off he was, then pushed up off the log. “Guess I’ll have to go look myself.” He picked up his gun and left.

I watched him go. Just stood there for a while, my nose running hot and heavy and fast, me wiping it over and over again with the cuff of my coat until that cuff was about glistening. Then I started shivering myself, and I couldn’t just stand there freezing to death in the rain. So I decided to double-check Robby’s direction, too.

Now this next little part I don’t remember as good. This time the hunt for the buck didn’t have the look-forward-to it had had before—I trusted Robby, I figured the buck wasn’t up his way. I really just
needed to move. I was starting to feel hungry under the cold, and also some worry over whether Dad would whip me when I got back for not telling him where I was going. I was feeling bad for the buck, too. I knew he had to be wounded, and it is a very bad thing for a hunter to clip a deer and never find him again. Him dying a slow death someplace, or being killed brutal by some other animal. To cripple a deer was a terrible thing. I was blundering along, thinking this, when I come up on it.

It was a spot where the shelf between the Ribs and the creek broadened a little. Turned out, although I couldn’t see that yet, that it made enough space for a little sunk-down place like a room, and it seemed even more like a room because there was rocks all around it. Somehow a rock fall had come and made like this room. And I come up on the rock border and the widened place, and, sudden, I knew that beyond it, the buck would be there. Somehow I knew that, I remember exactly how it felt in me. Then I climbed up the little rise and dropped down.

The buck was not there in body. But something else was.

I stepped into that little room, I stopped and looked around me. And something layered down over my self. At first it seemed to wrap me. But then it was somehow in the center of me, starting there, and then it washed on out through all of my parts. It was the feel of a warm bath with current in it, a mild electric, it prickled my skin, every inch of my skin it touched. And the thing was, once it had currented all the way through me and reached my very ends, it kept on going.

It melted my edges. It blended me, I don’t know how else to say it, right on out into the woods. It took me beyond myself and kept going, so I wasn’t no longer holed up in my body, hidden, I saw then how before I’d been hidden, how I’d believed myself smaller than I really was. It made me feel bigger in myself, and it made me feel more here even though you might have expected such a thing to make me
feel gone. And with it came total sureness. And with the total sureness came peace.

 

I had to leave out of here for a while. I got drafted, Robby did, too, they loved us hillbilly boys for how good we could shoot. All those fall days hunting deer and squirrel, it’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad. But it meant I left out of here and saw other mountains, and now I know people not from here probably don’t understand our feeling for these hills. Our love for land not spectacular. Our mountains are not like Western ones, those jagged awesome ones, your eyes always pulled to their tops. But that is the difference, I decided. In the West, the mountains are mostly horizon. We
live
in our mountains. It’s not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.

I tried for a long time to pull the two together, what I knew from church and what I knew from mountains. Of course, it would only be right if I could keep the church part ruling the woods part. So when I’d first walk into the woods, I’d say to myself, “Look here what God’s give us.” But just about as fast as I could have that thought, this second one would come from deeper: “This is God.” And then, from under that thought, from deeper yet, another thought would come, saying, “I go here. This is where I go.” And last of all, the most certain thought, but also the most dangerous: “This is me. This, all this, is me.”

 

I used to dream a good bit about that buck. It was mostly the same two dreams I had, but I’d have them fairly often. I’d dream we’d come up on the sunken place, me and Robby together, and the buck would be there, but the feeling would not. The buck has a broke back, but he’s still alive, trying hard to get up, him hoofing in the sloppy wet leaves for a grip. His big rack is dragging at him, pulling on his head, and there comes in me a tear in my chest, like cloth tearing, such pity do I feel. The rocks lie in a circle, making the room where the buck struggles,
and Robby is afraid to shoot him for fear a bullet might ricochet off a rock and hit one of us. But I crouch down behind a big beech, I press my cheek to it, those trees that look like they’re wearing human skin, and Robby takes aim from behind another one. I hear the explosion and then the echo off the mountain across the creek. But when I peek around to see the body, there ain’t nothing there.

Or I’d dream it different. I’d dream the buck was dead. Me and Robby come up on him not fresh dead, but a day or two dead, his body twisted unnatural and his coat matted with rain. His coat matted in a way it would never get live. He’s shrunk up, how much littler he looks dead, and collapsed around his ribs like somebody has gutted him already. I look at the rack. The rack looks huge. It looks aliver than him. And something has already ate on his eyes, even though you would have thought the cold rain would have kept them back in their holes. There comes again in my chest the pity-feel of cloth tearing. And then, after the pity feeling, once more he is just not there.

 

Nights, I lay in bed in this house I built, Mary sleeping beside me. Since the little strokes, I don’t sleep so good. I usually go to bed early, have to, and fall asleep right off, but after a few hours I wake up with a headache, or with worry, or both, and can’t get back to sleep. So I lay here feeling around me this house I built with my own hands, falling apart. Blasting’s cracked my Sheetrock, cracked the walls in my bathroom, cracked the cinderblocks under my house. Just a few weeks ago, it split my concrete porch in two. In this valley now we are completely surrounded by the mining. Soon it’ll be directly over top the house. And it’s across Route 9, too, across the river, those mountains being taken not only by Lyon, but by Arch, then you go south—more Lyon, some Peabody—and you go north, it’s there, too.You work all your life to have you a home. And you want your home to be quiet and peaceable. I built this house, I know how well-made it is, and it’s
the only thing I got to leave my boys. And here they can take it from me without even walking on my land.

I lay awake, sometimes pressing my fingers to the hurting places in my skull, and I say to myself,
What are they doing up over your head? What are they doing above you?
Funny, seems to me, how they keep it hid not inside someplace, and not under someplace, like things are usually hid. Funny how they hide it up over your head. There’s some kind of meaning in that there, in how they hide it. But given how my mind fails me anymore, I cannot puzzle together what that meaning is.

 

After that kettle bottom dropped on me, my deer dreams turned different. My brain worked different in a lot of ways, them dreams was one of the worst. I dreamed deer not quite deer, deer like something got in their blood and turned them in funny ways, and I’d have a terrible time leaving behind me the feel of the dreams after I’d wake. I dreamed I come up on the mouth of a cave, it surprised me, and there flushed out of it a whole herd of these deer-elk creatures with antlers longer than they was. Rising off their heads in pairs, then fusing to make a single knife blade running longer than their backs, and after they got out of the cave, the whole mountain collapsed behind them. Then it got to where I was dreaming deer coming after me with bared teeth like mad dogs. I’d be in a nice yard someplace, and there’d be all kinds of deer gone wrong, and some of them lying in the grass you couldn’t tell was they dead or alive. And the mean deer leaping over the lying-down ones, coming at me, swinging them wolf-teethed heads. It was like I done something to them. It was like both me and them known what it was.