Formica with the tip of his low-tar True. He was a large, loose-jowled man given to bouts of sulking and general gruffness, a beer drinker who lightened each night around ten and spun off story after story about his days as a World War II bomber and Alaskan bush pilot. He had been my eighth-grade science teacher, and I feared he might resent that girl I had once been—smoking, cursing, setting my desk on fire with the Bunsen burner while singing Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”—but in his memory my rebellion was less the sinister workings of a bad spirit than the simple boundary-testing of a teenager. I loved him for that.
Like his father, John was a man’s man—a high school football star, now a running back for the university. His thighs were thicker than my waist. He had an undercut jaw and a barrel chest. Tall and lumbering, he possessed an uncommon strength, which I felt held back each time he embraced me. I loved that he was a hunter, that he knew the ravines and streams of the surrounding mountains, their secret roads and hidden meadows. I loved that he took me there, back to where I believed I could not go alone. The first time we made love was in a farmer’s field, sheltered by hackberry and wild plums. I remember the warm earth beneath me, the way the magpies dipped and sculled around us, yellow pine riming the sun.
My life with John was defined by our time spent together in the outdoors. For Christmas he gave me the Ithaca 20-gaugesemiautomatic I’d seen in the window of Lolo Sporting Goods. For his birthday I bought him a Weatherby .22-250. Bolt-action, lever-action, single-shot, pump, Leupold Gold Ring 3×9 power: here was the language of my father, the numbers and names I’d heard all my life. It was all familiar to me—the rifles in the pickup’s rear window, the smell of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning fluid, the dank odor of downed deer, their guts pulled out in a pile, glistening and steaming, the rasp of a saw through pelvic bone as an elk was quartered and sacked to be carried. When I brought the shotgun to my cheek, the movement came to me fluid and easy—all those seasons of watching and yearning, dreaming that someday I, too, might walk the mountain and come home rich with provision.
Sometimes, after a hunt, I would stop by my parents’ house, mottled with blood and feathers, still shouldering my gun, smug with success. I took a perverse pleasure in my mother’s dismay. She could not understand such masculine endeavor. But it wasn’t my mother I hoped to impress; it was the man who sat in his easy chair, facing the television, hardly looking my way.
My father seemed only to tolerate my presence, the few bits of speech he offered brittle and empty, hulls, husks, and chaff. From the kitchen, where I sat while my mother fried chicken in Crisco, I would ramble loudly about the shot I’d taken to bring the pheasant down, the deer I intended to hunt come October.
It was my father’s land I brought back to him, I believed, his ways I embodied. The wool and flannel and denim I wore, the firearms I carried, the trails I followed.
Look at me
, I wanted to say.
Can’t you see I am your daughter? Remember
what it was like before, when we existed together in our solitude, when all that mattered was a good shot, meat on the table, fire in the stove, a bed to share our warmth. Remember how happy you were then. Remember what you abandoned
.
But there was no going back, no compromise. My father had done what he believed God had asked of him, leaving behind the only land and work he ever loved, while I had failed in every way. It was impossible for me to be that daughter my father had raised and taught and shaped into being: a chaste and temperate young woman, virginal in her marriage bed, humble before her father, her husband, her god.
I believed it was John who might be my proxy, my way back into my father’s good grace. Over a period of several months, I brought John
Like his father, John was a man’s man—a high school football star, now a running back for the university. His thighs were thicker than my waist. He had an undercut jaw and a barrel chest. Tall and lumbering, he possessed an uncommon strength, which I felt held back each time he embraced me. I loved that he was a hunter, that he knew the ravines and streams of the surrounding mountains, their secret roads and hidden meadows. I loved that he took me there, back to where I believed I could not go alone. The first time we made love was in a farmer’s field, sheltered by hackberry and wild plums. I remember the warm earth beneath me, the way the magpies dipped and sculled around us, yellow pine riming the sun.
My life with John was defined by our time spent together in the outdoors. For Christmas he gave me the Ithaca 20-gaugesemiautomatic I’d seen in the window of Lolo Sporting Goods. For his birthday I bought him a Weatherby .22-250. Bolt-action, lever-action, single-shot, pump, Leupold Gold Ring 3×9 power: here was the language of my father, the numbers and names I’d heard all my life. It was all familiar to me—the rifles in the pickup’s rear window, the smell of Hoppe’s gun-cleaning fluid, the dank odor of downed deer, their guts pulled out in a pile, glistening and steaming, the rasp of a saw through pelvic bone as an elk was quartered and sacked to be carried. When I brought the shotgun to my cheek, the movement came to me fluid and easy—all those seasons of watching and yearning, dreaming that someday I, too, might walk the mountain and come home rich with provision.
Sometimes, after a hunt, I would stop by my parents’ house, mottled with blood and feathers, still shouldering my gun, smug with success. I took a perverse pleasure in my mother’s dismay. She could not understand such masculine endeavor. But it wasn’t my mother I hoped to impress; it was the man who sat in his easy chair, facing the television, hardly looking my way.
My father seemed only to tolerate my presence, the few bits of speech he offered brittle and empty, hulls, husks, and chaff. From the kitchen, where I sat while my mother fried chicken in Crisco, I would ramble loudly about the shot I’d taken to bring the pheasant down, the deer I intended to hunt come October.
It was my father’s land I brought back to him, I believed, his ways I embodied. The wool and flannel and denim I wore, the firearms I carried, the trails I followed.
Look at me
, I wanted to say.
Can’t you see I am your daughter? Remember
what it was like before, when we existed together in our solitude, when all that mattered was a good shot, meat on the table, fire in the stove, a bed to share our warmth. Remember how happy you were then. Remember what you abandoned
.
But there was no going back, no compromise. My father had done what he believed God had asked of him, leaving behind the only land and work he ever loved, while I had failed in every way. It was impossible for me to be that daughter my father had raised and taught and shaped into being: a chaste and temperate young woman, virginal in her marriage bed, humble before her father, her husband, her god.
I believed it was John who might be my proxy, my way back into my father’s good grace. Over a period of several months, I brought John
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