The walls of the living room were hung with samplers and tapestries, stitched with mystical patience by Luke’s grand-mother and her mother before her. Here too, as well as photographs of all the Henry Calders, were the antique wall clocks that Luke’s mother had once collected.
The cases of these clocks were oblong and made of maple. On their glass-paneled fronts, below the dial, each was decorated with its own hand-painted scene, mostly depicting animals or birds or flowers. There were four clocks now and once there had been five, until Luke’s brother managed to smash one showing off his roping skills to the girls and earning himself a thrashing from his father.
There was a time when their mother had kept all the clocks in time and good repair. Every Sunday she would wind and adjust them so they chimed the hour in unison. Visitors had often expressed wonder that anyone could bear to live amid such clang and clatter but Eleanor would laugh and say no one in the family ever heard it, which was mainly true, although Luke could remember once having a nightmare about them when he was little. It was when he was having one of his regular bouts of tonsillitis and in his fever he had dreamed that the ticking was really the snicker of cutlasses and that a band of bloodthirsty pirates was creeping up the stairs to get him.
All of these clocks were now silent. They had been that way for more than ten years. Whether it was a deliberate symbolic gesture or simple neglect, no one dared ask, but since Henry’s death, his mother had never again wound them. And because they were hers alone and maybe served some private purpose in her grief, no one else had touched them. Dustily, they registered the several times of their own demise.
There were other adornments on the walls, both here and elsewhere in the house, which, for Luke at least, carried greater significance. These were the mounted heads of animals killed by four generations of Calders, all of whom had been great hunters. His brother had shot his first elk at the age of ten, which was both illegal and a great source of pride to his father. The head was mounted above the door to the kitchen and one of Henry’s favorite tricks was to toss his hat onto the antlers from twenty feet across the room. It hung there still.
As a child Luke had always found these trophies disturbing. When he was four years old, his brother had confided to him that the animals weren’t in fact dead and that even though they couldn’t move, their brains and eyes still functioned.
For the best part of a year Luke believed his every move was being watched, his every deed assessed. The most important of the heads, his brother told him, was that of a huge moose their grandfather had shot and which had pride of place at the foot of the stairs.
‘If any of the others see you doing something bad they tell the old moose,’ Henry had whispered. Luke was aware that his sisters were looking on with great seriousness, but he kept his wide eyes locked on Henry. ‘And the moose keeps a count of all these bad things and when you’ve done too many, he’ll come and get you.’
‘How m-m-m-men—’
‘How many bad things do you have to do?’
Luke nodded.
‘You know, Lukey, I’m not sure. But I tell you, when I broke that old clock of Mom’s, he came to my room in the middle of the night and boy, did he give me a whupping.’
‘W-w-what w-with?’
‘Those great big antlers of his. Uses them like a paddle. And I tell you, they hurt a hell of a lot worse than Daddy’s belt. I couldn’t sit down for a whole week.’
Every night when he went upstairs to bed, Luke made a silent confession to the moose and told him he was sorry for everything he had done wrong that day, a list which by now, often as not, included stuttering in reply to his father’s meal-time demands and any consequent eruption. And even after his mother found him doing this one bedtime and assured him it wasn’t true and Henry got another thrashing from his father, it was a long time before Luke could again walk comfortably beneath the moose’s nose or sit in any room where there were heads on the wall and feel certain he wasn’t being watched.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of them. He’d never been afraid of any animal. Already he had found that it was easier to make friends with them than it was with human beings. The ranch dogs, cats and horses, even the calves, always seemed to come to him rather than to others. When his stutter started, he used to get around it by talking through Mo, an old glove-puppet that had once looked like a fox but became so worn and darned that it soon didn’t look like anything. Through Mo’s mouth, he could talk as fluently to people as he could through his own to animals. In the end it drove his father mad and Mo was banished to a locked closet.
Perhaps because of his brother’s joke about the trophies, perhaps because of those defiant genes that made him so unlikely a Calder, all that Luke had ever feared in animals was their judgment. Not simply of himself, but of all his species. He saw the wrongs they suffered at man’s hands and knew, by virtue of his own strictured tongue, how it felt to be unable to speak out against oppression.
A ranch was not the easiest of homes for one of such sensibility, though Luke had always done his best to conceal it. He helped with jobs that his conscience abhorred, such as holding calves down at branding time while their balls were chopped off and the smoke of their seared flesh filled his nostrils with nausea. He ate meat, although its taste and texture often made him want to gag.
To find favor with his father, he had even gone hunting and in so doing achieved the opposite.
Six years after his brother’s death, his father had asked him if he wanted to try for his first elk. Luke was thirteen and had been dreading the invitation while at the same time feeling hurt that it had taken so long to come.
The two of them rode out before dawn under a mottled November moon that lit the breath of the horses and made shadows of them on the sequined snow. An hour later they were up in the forest, standing silent with the horses on a high crag while they looked back to see the sun scale the world’s rim and turn the snow-swept plains to a sea of crimson.
His father always knew where they were most likely to find elk. It was the place where Henry had shot his first buck, a hidden canyon where a herd would often shelter and feed when the snow lay thick. Luke had come here on his own many times to watch. But never, until this day, to kill.
They left the horses and went the final mile on foot, taking care to stay on the safe side of what little wind there was. The snow was fresh and fluffy and not deep enough to bother them, though now and then one of them would sink to the hips in a hidden drift. They barely spoke and when they did it was in whispers. Otherwise, but for their breathing and the creak and crunch of their boots in the snow, the forest was still. Luke’s heart was thumping and he prayed, crazily, that his father couldn’t hear it and that the elk could and would take flight and save themselves.
His father carried the rifle. Usually he hunted with a 30-06 Springfield or the .300 Magnum he had bought the previous fall. But today he had brought only the .270 Winchester, the same weapon that Henry had used to fell his first elk six years earlier. It had less recoil than the others and in practice a few days earlier Luke had hit the target time after time. His father had been thrilled.
‘You shoot darn near as straight as your brother,’ he said.
It took them more than an hour to reach the lip of the canyon. They crawled into the sheltered hollow of an old pine and peered through the gap between its lowest branches and its girdled drift of snow. His father handed him the binoculars.
The elk hadn’t heard his heartbeat. Across the canyon, there was a herd of maybe twenty cows. A little way off, a solitary bull with five-point antlers was nibbling bark in a stand of quakin’ asp. He was less than two hundred yards away. Luke handed the binoculars back to his father and wondered if he dared say that he didn’t want to go through with it. But he knew that even if he were to try, the words would never come out; their effect would be too catastrophic.
‘Not a six-point like Henry’s, but he’ll do,’ his father whispered.
‘M-m-may
be we should w-w-wait till we find a s-s-six-point. ’
‘Are you crazy? That’s a fine animal. Here.’
He carefully passed the rifle. Luke knew that a single touch on the tangle of branches above them would dislodge a pile of snow and maybe spook the elk. He toyed with the idea of doing it.
‘Take your time, son. Take it real slow now.’
His father helped him ease the barrel out through the gap. The hollow of the tree smelled strongly of resin and Luke wondered why it should make him feel sick when it never had before. He pressed the butt of the rifle into his shoulder.
‘Get yourself comfortable now. Find a good place for your elbows. How does that feel? Okay?’
Luke nodded and put his eye to the scope. The eyepiece felt clammy against his skin. For a moment all he could see was a racing blur of snow-covered trees and the striated gray rock of the canyon wall above.
‘I c-c-can’t find him.’
‘See that patch of blowdown? The cows are directly below it. Can you see them?’
‘No.’>
‘Take your time, it’s okay. He’s at two o’clock from where the cows are.’
Now he saw them. They were stripping moss from the bark of the fallen trees. He could plainly see their eyes when they lifted their heads and stood chewing. The crosshairs of the scope moved from one animal to another, panning their pale bellies inside which by now calves were starting to form.
‘Got him?’
‘Yes.’
The bull was tugging a piece of bark from a sapling and when it came free the tree quivered, sprinkling his head and antlers with snow. The intimacy of the scope was shocking. Luke could make out individual hairs on the dark neck. He could see the grinding of the jaws as the elk chewed, see the paler patches around the liquid black eyes that impassively surveyed the cows, see droplets of melted snow on his nose.
‘He looks k-k-kind of young to have his own herd. M-m-maybe there’s a b-b-bigger bull around somewhere.’
‘Hell, Luke, if you won’t take him, I will.’
Half of Luke’s brain screamed at him to hand his father the gun right then. But the other half assessed this moment for what it was: a final chance to be something in his father’s eyes. He must take this creature’s life for his own to have any value.
He was breathing fast and only in the very top of his chest as if his lungs were three-quarters closed. His heart was pumping so hard he thought it might burst and he half hoped it would. He could feel his blood pulsing in the flesh pressed against the eyepiece of the scope. The crosshairs moved on the elk’s head and body like a yo-yo.
‘Easy now, son, easy. Take a deep breath.’
He felt his father’s eyes on him, judging him. Comparing him, no doubt, with how Henry had been that day.
‘Do you want me to take him?’
‘No,’ Luke snapped. ‘I c-c-can do it.’
‘You’ve still got the safety on, Luke.’
With twitching fingers, Luke felt for the catch and clicked it off. The elk had lowered his head to the tree again and was about to strip more bark when something made him hesitate. He raised his head and lifted his nose to the air. Then, suddenly with every sense alert, he turned and seemed to look directly into the lens of the scope.
‘Has he seen us?’
His father was looking through the binoculars and didn’t answer for a moment.
‘He’s sure gotten a whiff of something. If you’re going to do it, Luke, do it now.’
Luke swallowed.
His father went on, his whisper urgent now, ‘The rifle’s sighted in at two hundred and that’s about where he’s at. There’s no wind, so it’s line of sight, just the way you see it.’
‘I know.’
‘Take him just behind the shoulder.’
‘I know!’
The elk was still looking at him. The blood was roaring in Luke’s ears. It was as if the world had become a tunnel with only two living creatures in it, he at one end and the elk at the other, staring back at him, into his mind and deeper still, as if scouring the darkest corners of his heart. And finding there perhaps a glimpse of death, the animal jerked in alarm and began to move away.
And at that precise moment, Luke pulled the trigger.
The elk jolted and stumbled. Below, the herd of cows erupted and headed as one for the cover of the trees.
‘You got him!’
The bull was on his knees but then he stood again and moved off in a broken, uncertain run through the aspens. Luke’s father was pushing himself headfirst out of the tree hole.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. Come on!’
Luke followed, pushing himself out through the snow into the glare of the sun. His father was already standing up.
‘Here, I’ll take the rifle. Let’s get over there. He’s not going far.’
And his father set off down the slope, wading strongly through the snow with the rifle held high and Luke followed in his tracks, half blinded by the sun and falling so often that soon he was covered in snow and all the time saying, whether out loud or to himself, he didn’t know and didn’t care, Oh God, please don’t let me have done this and if I have, please let him live, please let him get away. Oh please.
When they got to the stand of aspen they found blood in the snow and they followed its spattered trail up into the ribbon of pine that fringed the foot of the canyon wall.
They heard the elk before they saw him. It was a sound Luke had never heard before and would never forget, a kind of low, throaty scream, like the broken door of a derelict house creaking in the wind. From the tracks, it seemed that the elk had stumbled and disappeared over a ledge of rock. Luke’s father carefully edged his way along it through a snow-drifted tangle of scrub and peered down.
‘Here’s your baby, Luke. You got him in the neck.’
Luke felt his chest contract. The elk’s screaming was relentless now and its echo in the canyon so terrible that he had to fight not to block his ears.
‘Come on, Luke. You’ve got to finish the job. Careful as you go, it’s steep here.’
Luke walked along the ledge not caring if he fell, dreading with every step what he was going to see. He came alongside his father and peered down. The ground fell away steeply in a tumble of sliprock. About halfway down there was a dead tree which had snagged the elk’s fall and he lay wedged there, watching them, while his hind legs thrashed useless in the air below. There was a dark hole in his neck. His shoulder and chest ran slick with blood.
His father racked another bullet into the chamber and handed him the rifle.
‘There you go, son. You know what to do.’
Luke took it and, as he did so, felt his mouth quiver and the tears flood in his eyes and he tried so hard to stop it but he couldn’t and his whole body started to shake with sobs.
‘I c-can’t.’
His father put an arm around his shoulders.
‘It’s okay, son. I know how you feel.’
Luke shook his head. It was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. How could anyone know how he felt? Least of all his father who must have seen this kind of thing a dozen times.
‘You’ve got to do it, though. He won’t be yours unless you do.’
‘I don’t w-w-want him!’
‘Come on, Luke. He’s in pain—’
‘You think I d-d-don’t know that?’
‘Then finish the job.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Of course you can.’
‘Y-y-y-you do it.’ He handed back the rifle.
‘A hunter finishes what he’s started.’
‘I’m not a g-g-goddamn hunter!’
His father looked down at him for a long moment. It was the first time Luke had ever cussed in front of him. Then, in what looked more like sadness than anger, his father shook his head and took the rifle.
‘No, Luke. I don’t think you are.’
His father shot the elk through the neck again and they wa
tched it jerk and kick its legs in the air as if its soul was flying to some far-off place. Then, with its eyes never leaving them, it stiffened and gave a long, gurgling sigh and at last was still.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
They got a rope on the carcass and pulled it out of the tree from below. And there his father made him help skin it out and field-dress it. This was the deal, he explained, as he slit the belly and reached up inside to sever the windpipe and haul out the elk’s steaming heart and liver and lungs. If you hunted, this was what you had to do. It was a sacred moment, he said. And they sawed off the head and then cut the body into pieces so that they could pack it out. And Luke wept in silence all the while, wept at the feel and smell of the elk’s warm blood on his hands and wept for himself and his shame.
They hung what they couldn’t carry from a high branch so coyotes or any late-denning bears couldn’t get it. And when they left the place, with the antlered head swaying crazily above the meat strapped to his father’s shoulders and more meat strapped to his own, Luke looked back and saw the gut piles and the snow soaked wide with blood and it occurred to him that if there were indeed such a place as hell, this was how it must look and where surely now he belonged.
The elk’s head was never hung on the wall with the others. Perhaps his mother forbade it, after hearing what had happened; Luke never knew. But even now, five years later, he still sometimes conjured it in his dreams, leering at him from some unexpected place. And he would wake whimpering and soaked with sweat, among the twisted sheets of his bed.
10
Hope, that Wednesday morning, looked like the set of an out-of-control movie. The whole of Main Street was jammed with cows, cars and children about to bludgeon each other with musical instruments. Overhead, two young men, precariously perched on ladders, were trying to hang strings of colored flags from one side of the street to the other. The town was getting ready for the annual fair and rodeo.