IN SEASON
I need bullets, he said,
only one left in the chamber,
and headed toward the house
when by chance I spotted it
in the back field, near the woods
that drop down to Rush Run, the
creek like a vein through our farm,
and shouted to him, though a shadow
hid whether it was buck
or doe–he’d only got a permit for buck.
But Cody said later he saw the
huge rack flecked with light
shining as though by moon
rise, or sun, like something not
quite of this earth, just as
he took after it, running
into the russet of late autumn
when dusk rises early off the land
toward the sky, and bright
red hats dot the woods for five days like apples hanging after frost,
sometimes up in trees, and waiting
the hours of forever
for the creatures to leg their way
into the sights,
noiseless but for the small rustle of
leaves, their enormous eyes knowing
and uncertain at once before
the simultaneous explosion and kick
like a hoof deep in a shoulder,
then the stutter of the second shot–
or someone else’s
firing from another side: it happens,
that close. I even prayed. Please God,
let the boy get that deer, he’s only got one
bullet. I heard the rifle
and so did Mother, upstairs
in her room, and when I told her, she said if Cody got it, have him
bring it around so I can see it
up close. I asked her twice,
was she sure, Mother
having just moved in,
but she said she was.
Then Cody came back
to get the truck, all full
of himself and glory; I’ve never seen
that boy so burning happy, sweating,
flushed, breathing like a trumpeter
gone to heaven and crying how beautiful
the old buck was, how beautiful,
and I told him to bring it around
for Mother to see: the size of the hole in the neck,
the crimson on brown and the heart
convulsing on the way it does, maybe forty minutes
even if it’s taken out. Well Mother,
she fell apart
she cried and cried on me like a stone
dissolving in water and I held her,
laughing until I cried myself,
feeling her thick, ancient body on spindly legs giving
out beneath her,
the thready blue pulse in her throat
buried into mine as though all the water
were blood and running together in
Rush Run where the deer drink.
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As I’ve drafted about fifty pages of a novel featuring a widow and her chickens, I’ve hunted for this: how to write the pain of an elderly woman who has suffered terrible losses while making the reader root for her crazy schemes. Or not so crazy. Louisa’s voice needs to most often be humorous even as she deals with advancing age. I’ll use metaphor as a technique to let the reader see into her fears and isolation indirectly but most deeply.
The poem I’ve posted is a rough draft for a scene between a much younger Louisa and her aged mother. She’s flashing back to soon after she brought her mother, unaccustomed to country life, to live with her (and her family) out on the farm where she now lives alone. I’ve brought her to this memory of her grandson, Cody, and the revulsion for hunting that ultimately came from killing the buck. Old and vulnerable herself now, as she relives the moment with her mother, she understands what her mother felt. The death of the old buck is one metaphor, and Louisa’s remembering her mother sobbing in her arms becomes another. I don’t think Louisa will need to ruminate about herself for the reader to feel with and understand her emotionally. Can you imagine this being effective?
You might wonder why it’s cast as a poem right now. Sometimes I find it helps my fiction to do this first, especially with a topic that I’m treating metaphorically. It’s a way to clarify essential language and the speaker’s attitude. Now I’ll go back and write it in full scene, aiming for a mix that captures voice, place, way of life, adds laughter to the beginning and holds the pain and pathos of the end. In my next post, I’ll put this this up in prose. (Or at least the beginning of it!)