Woods in Winter

Birds were gathering in the trees and starting to chirp, a sign that it was almost time to call it quits. He’d had no luck again waiting for a deer to show. Sunset had come, and then that moment just before dusk when deer were most active — the golden hour he’d always called it, though it lasted only minutes — and still nothing. Now dusk was here, and the meadow, covered with snow and dried deadheads of goldenrod, remained quiet and still.

He looked at his watch. Ten minutes more won’t hurt, he thought. The light, though past its prime, was still good.

Two sides of the plywood deer blind looked out over the sprawling meadow. A third side offered a view of spruce trees planted in rows by a previous owner, providing a handy shooting lane. He’d twice taken deer that way after each stepped out of the thick brush to browse. The fourth side backed up to a briar patch tumbling down a steep pitch into hardwoods. His habit was to look out through one eye-level gap in the panel siding and then another, watching for movement as his thoughts ran their usual course until his mind finally went blank.

Besides the occasions when he walked through the meadow and went in the door to tell Jill about his good luck, these were the moments he savored most. Jill worked from home now, answering calls for a crisis hotline, which was a blessing. No more driving winding roads in the dark to the women’s shelter in town, where she’d worked the night shift until last month. The trade-off was that unoccupied headspace for him after a long day at the power plant was rarer these days.

He’d made plans to raise the deer blind several more feet for better visibility, before thinking better of it. A perch of five feet was plenty. Woods surrounded the meadow and populated much of the rest of his 70 acres. From nearly every vantage point inside the blind, he could see pastures and cornfields, and still more forest blanketed the rolling hills in the distance. Not once had he taken for granted his luck in having purchased the old farmhouse and surrounding acreage amidst such an immense landscape, and at such a low cost. Soon after Jill had come back home, a buddy who delivered coal for the plant had hooked him up with a company executive who was unloading mined-out parcels for cheap. He’d paid cash thanks to an unmarried aunt who had played the stock market and named him sole beneficiary in her will.

Given the state of his marriage back then, laying claim to poisoned land had seemed fitting. The headwater creeks were toast from acid run-off. Despite hard searching, he hadn’t found a crawfish or salamander in a single one. Shale excavated from deep underground was piled all around the property, forming an archipelago of old wounds — he’d never bothered counting them all. He surmised the meadow itself was the result of a surface mine back when the company had scraped the hilltop flat. Pines and oak trees had reseeded on their own, creeping right up to the edges of the slag piles and dropping their leaves and needles on them year after year. By the time he was an old man, perhaps they would reclaim the slag piles too.

A single mature oak was a deer’s lunch counter in a good acorn season. The herd had grown in size in just the four years since he’d bought the place, and in each one he had bagged a doe. Sometimes it took a week before he got off a clean shot. He preferred hunting with his grandfather’s black-powder rifle out of a belief that using a scope was cheating — twice as hard, though twice as satisfying once he met with success. He hoped to include a venison dish for Christmas dinner. His son Aaron, when young, had detested the taste of wild game but was slowly coming around. Aaron would return from his first semester away at college in a few days, so he still had time to bag a doe.

Movement across the meadow caught his eye. A flock of birds burst from the crown of a tree, circling as one through the sky. The dark birds, starlings probably, abruptly turned and wheeled in the opposite direction, a cloud of wings and feathers, which broke in two and merged again before settling among the twiggy thatching of the hardwood canopy at the lower end of the meadow. A second later they took flight once more and like a puff of smoke were gone.

Shifting his gaze to his right, he spotted his neighbor’s truck ambling down the road. Ernest lived alone in a double-wide where he hobbled around on one leg, diabetes having taken the other. Before the venom coming out of his mouth about the government and his ex-wife became too much, he and Jill had made a habit of checking on him. They still kept his woodpile well-stocked, regarding the smoke rising from his stovepipe as proof that he was still alive.

He listened to the sound of Ernest’s truck door slamming shut and the slap of a screen door a minute later. The songbirds were quiet now. Though it wasn’t yet dark, he noticed Jupiter, and maybe it was Rigel, poking through the steel blue shell of sky.

Respectful of other people’s property rights, he had long steered clear of Ernest’s acreage, though he might have trespassed anytime without fear of getting caught. He had traced and retraced every square foot of his own land, often alongside Aaron before he left home. There was always the chance of finding something they’d overlooked. Each season helped in that regard, winter most of all, when the forest shed its garments and gave up its secrets. They’d discovered an old cistern that way when Aaron spotted the corner of a cement foundation jutting through the moldering leaves. He’d never imagined a house once standing in that location. When they returned the following spring, Aaron found an apple tree hanging on beneath younger trees trying to shade it out.

He still marveled at just how well Aaron had coped during Jill’s absence. Antagonisms between them had disappeared virtually overnight. The ordeal had somehow brought them closer, and it remained that way even after they were all living under the same roof again. Mom needs a break, he was prepared to say if asked about why she’d left, though Aaron never had.

The day Jill had come back, not a word was spoken between them about why she left, where she’d been, or what had led to her return. A single letter had arrived during that dark year, with no mention of her plans, only a request to mail a box of her belongings to an address in New Orleans. The reason, he suspected, was that the musician she’d met at a concert in Pittsburgh had moved on. Or perhaps the greener grass had needed testing and was found to be not so green after all. Maybe she just missed home.

But she was back, and in the four years that had passed since then, he never once pried or demanded an explanation. He bought the house and land out in the county in part to spare her the scorn of neighbors who’d sided with him.

We want you to know we’re on your side, the lady across the street had told him more than once. He’d wondered for a long time afterward about sides and his neighbors’ intentions behind choosing his. There was only one side so far as he was concerned, and there always had been. The terrible year spent worrying about Jill and awaiting further word from her was over, which was all that mattered.

The light was fading fast and the temperature dropping, a not altogether unpleasant sensation. He pulled the strings tighter on his hoodie and exhaled into the opening of each glove to warm his hands. Once he went indoors, Jill would embrace him, slipping her arms under his layers of cotton to share her body heat. A foot taller, he would rest his chin on her head while inhaling the scent of her hair and the nutmeg and cinnamon filling the kitchen. A family recipe going back generations on his side would be baking in the oven, her devoted attention to every detail in its creation another sign of the bond she had recommitted herself to keeping, another small step in the mending of his heart.

Countless times that first year after her return, she had found ways to make up for her absence and show him she was sorry. Sorry, perhaps not for doing what she felt she had to, but for the deep hurt she knew it had caused him. She fixed his favorite meals night after night, and once they’d moved into the old farmhouse, she painted the rooms in record time. Many evenings she lay in bed beside Aaron, spooning him like she’d done when he was little to make up for lost time, before rising to finish her chores and fill out another job application. In spring, despite never having gardened, she planted flowers out front, all of which perished in a late frost. Before planting again, she prepared a raised bed for vegetables, which was where he found her nodding off one evening with the garden hose running in her hand.

That’s plenty, that’s enough now, he said, placing a hand on her arm when she joined him in bed. At least pace yourself, he added, making them both laugh.

She had come home between Christmas and New Year’s, almost exactly a year after she’d left, and the following autumn she began a sewing project that at first mystified him. He could not recall ever seeing her sew except in a home economics class they both took in junior high. But she learned the techniques quickly by watching videos, and fashioned together a patchwork quilt made from articles of clothing discarded when they’d packed for the move. He recognized part of a plaid shirt he’d relegated to the rag pile and a cutting of the negligee she’d worn on their wedding night that no longer fit her. That Christmas, the finished quilt appeared on their bed, and it had taken up residence there every winter since. Tonight they would crawl beneath the covers once more and perhaps reenact skin to skin the peace pact made between them.

The scent of cigarette smoke jolted him out of his thoughts. He’d assumed he was alone, but the smell hanging in the air now told him otherwise. Where it was coming from, he couldn’t tell. The only explanation, which seemed unlikely given the expanse of available hunting grounds this far out in the country, could be an intruder brazen enough to hunt on his land without asking permission.

With the light almost gone, he focused hard on the meadow for any movement among the tallest deadheads of goldenrod still discernible against the backdrop of snow-covered ground. A moment later, he watched a figure step out of the trees and head across the meadow at a leisurely pace. A rifle was slung over the man’s shoulder, and the bright orange tip of a cigarette dangled from his mouth.

A terrible urge twisted inside him as he trained the muzzle of the flintlock on the man and located him between the crosshairs. He had fired once on a coyote in a moment of sheer spite, missed, and was glad of it, knowing another would only take its place. Coyotes were like that. Beat them back and more would just keep filling the void.

The old hurt surged once again as he considered what to do. The stranger was more than halfway to the road and would soon disappear behind a rise where the trees began again. A warning shot would send a strong message. But like the No Trespassing signs he’d purchased but never bothered to post around his property, it seemed in poor taste. Like something his trigger-happy cousin Dewey would do.

He waited. He was used to waiting, the longest year of his life having given him plenty of practice, and as he did, his breaths slowed.

He lowered the gun, knowing he wasn’t going to pull the trigger — just like he knew he would never get the chance to confront his wife’s lover, a fantasy he’d entertained from time to time despite the impossibility of it ever happening. The once-forsaken land he owned was damaged goods, but it still held deer and plenty of them. More in fact than he would need for food. If the stranger ever returned and poached one, well then, what of it? He only wished the man would first come to the house, look him in the eye, and ask permission. That was the way it was done. If he had the gumption tomorrow morning, he would track the man’s footprints through the snow to learn where he’d gone and where he’d parked. Perhaps he would post the No Trespassing signs after all.

Sparkling holiday lights had come on among a cluster of houses on a distant hill. It was full dark now and long past shooting hours. Still he waited. Indoors, the shortness of days was obscured this time of year, with window shades drawn tight and the warm glow of lamplight filling every room. Out here he welcomed the sedative darkness provided, and he did not want to part ways with it just yet.

At one time, he had believed life was like a garden planted according to one’s wishes, establishing order out of chaos, as much as that was possible. But he had come to see how much it instead resembled the woods. Seeds fell and took hold wherever there was ample sunlight. Weeds were left unpulled and grew into impenetrable thickets in some places. A different kind of order prevailed — one he had let go thinking he could wrestle under his control.

The clarity of wintertime afforded a view of his life’s starker contours, and though he would have never chosen some of them, he felt surer than he did even a year ago that he would not trade them if given the chance.

It was unlike him to linger for so long past dark. The sharp report of his rifle, on those occasions when he fired it, would send news to Jill inside the house of the reason for his delay. Time was necessary to dress the deer before hauling it to the shed to hang overnight for butchering in the morning. In the absence of a gunshot, he knew she would begin to worry.

He unlatched the hook on the weather-beaten door and climbed down with care, his hips having grown stiff from standing for so long in the cold. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards back toward the house, coming round a grove of evergreens, when he finally saw them. Scattered around a corner of the meadow, hidden from view of the deer blind, there they were — a dozen or more whitetails grazing among the bent blades of grass poking through the snow, silent as ghosts. A cloud of warm breath backlit by the gibbous moon rising above the horizon exited the nostrils of the one nearest him. The deer looked up as if on cue upon his approach. They studied him for a moment without moving before lowering their heads to the ground once more. Such strange, brazen creatures, he thought.

It was a curious sight, watching the deer stand as still as statues as he moved among them, his footfalls soundless in the soft powder. They knew the deal. Tomorrow or the next day, he would be back. Nighttime, though, was theirs. He took another step, and another, careful not to startle them, though that seemed unlikely, grateful for their courtesy as each one stepped aside, parting like water as he passed through.