A three-year-old girl kidnapped with her mother standing not three feet away from her. How long could Joanie’s eyes have been off Rosalyn? Two minutes? Three? You can’t blink anymore. Not these days. Not if you want your children to remain safe. Shit, Baylor thought, Mama could drop me off in front of K-Dixie-BS-TV station by myself, let me walk into the place, appear on TV, then walk down Jefferson Street to a pay phone. She knew I’d be okay. Didn’t have to think twice. That was over thirty years ago, he told himself. Get with it. Our children are growing up in a different world. You want to protect them, then get with the program.
Baylor had been around guns since he could remember. How could he not? To grow up a boy in Thornton, Louisiana, meant hunting. It meant being exposed to shotguns and hunting rifles when you were five years old. Boys had BB guns and pellet guns, then finally at seven or eight, they were shooting a real shotgun.
Big Shep gave each of his sons a Winchester as his first gun. When each boy’s twelfth birthday arrived, he proudly presented him with a Browning A-5 automatic double-barrel shotgun with his initials on the gun. The presentation took place under the huge live oak tree at Pecan Grove, and was as close to ritual as Big Shep got. He took time to introduce each boy to the gun, and how to handle it. “Guns are real personal,” he’d say. “You treat them good, they’ll treat you good.” Big Shep himself had an L.C. Smith and a 70 Winchester. Not to mention the guns he had inherited from his own father. Baylor knew all about them because they were mentioned in his father’s will, for which he was the executor. He’d told his father: “I’m no hunter. Leave all the guns to Shep. Don’t do me any favors.” Good guns, rare guns, were a staple item in the wills he drew up as an attorney in Thornton. In his family, only the boys hunted, but he knew some families where girls were given guns and taught to hunt—forced to hunt, in some cases. Especially if the father had wanted a son and ended up with only daughters. That was not the case in his family or in the Ya-Ya circle.
When folks talked about Opening Day in Thornton, it wasn’t baseball, football, or some new shop at Southgate Shopping Center. Opening Day was the first day of deer season, dove season, duck season. Those in the know didn’t need to be told which Opening Day it was. High school girlfriends had to learn to live with it. Married women used to tell young women how Opening Day was as sacred for the men as going to Sunday Mass was for the women.
Weeks before Opening Day, Big Shep would take Baylor and Little Shep to scout The Deer Land, showing them how to look for deer spore, deer tracks, flattened grasses in a thicket where deer may have slept, and tree rubbings where the bucks had rubbed their antlers and scraped bark from the tree. Sometimes they’d leave corn or a salt lick from the feed store out on The Deer Land to attract deer. But only before Opening Day. After the season was open, that was “baiting the field.” There was a Code, and baiting was against it. It was illegal, but more importantly, there was no honor in it. “Only low-life trailer trash does that kind of thing,” Big Shep told his sons. “Gives hunters a bad name.” Same for “shining”—riding through the woods at night with a bright light in the back of the pickup, guns at the ready. On the back roads, hunters could spot deer this way and shoot while the deer’s eyes were blinded by the light. Bad form. “Only redneck SOBs pull that kind of shit,” Big Shep instructed them. Big Shep never hunted with baiters or shiners. He was devoted to The Code and didn’t have any truck with those who broke it. He’d turn those kind of hunters in to the game warden quick as lightning.
Baylor remembered how his daddy taught him that on Opening Day, the deer are most naive and innocent. You have a better chance of killing them. That first day, they aren’t as careful. They had been living their deer lives, free of bullets for months. Catch ’em while they’re most innocent. Bag your big one on Opening Day. The more points on the antlers, the better the kill.
On every Opening Day, the Ya-Yas delighted in throwing parties for themselves. They had nothing to do with guns, but didn’t think twice about their boys handling them. Opening Day was just another reason for them to celebrate with no men in sight. They ate, drank, smoked, played Bourrée, and dared their husbands to expect them to clean anything they’d shot. When the men arrived home, dirty and full of tales, the Ya-Yas listened politely for a few moments before suggesting that they bathe immediately.
Baylor had hated hunting from the very beginning. He went because it was expected of him. He didn’t mind hiking and being at the camp. And when he sat around a campfire with Big Shep and Little Shep, there was a brotherhood he could feel. Men talked easier around a fire. He liked the stories. But mainly he liked sitting next to his father, watching him stoke the fire, sip his drink, throw his arm around his son, and tell about the time Manny Calvit had actually rolled around in cow manure in his fatigues so he could “get up in there amongst ’em.” The belief was that this would get rid of the human scent and bring the deer closer.
Big Shep would end the story by saying: “I told him, ‘Manny, I hope to hell it does bring the deer closer to you, because it sure as hell is gonna’ keep anything human ten miles away from you!’”
Everyone would crack up when Big Shep told that story. The other men loved Shep’s stories. He was a good storyteller. The other men looked up to his father. Baylor preferred the funny stories. Some of the other stories made him sick to his stomach. Stories passed down from grandfather to father to son. One was the Baptism in Blood story, where the hunter gets baptized with a bucket of deer blood from his first kill as a rite of passage. Little Shep thought that was cool. For Baylor it was yet another reason to never kill a deer.
For a Louisiana boy, not to hunt was to be an outcast like Necie’s son, Frank. Frank would have nothing to do with hunting, and he was labeled “sissy” from the time he was six years old. Frank’s real name was Francis, after Saint Francis, and the other boys called him “Francissy.” Baylor had watched the “sissy” label color Frank’s whole existence. He heard Vivi and Necie talking in the den in the afternoons, Necie upset because of the way George made fun of his own son for being afraid of guns. George had even tried to get Necie to let Joanie hunt, but Necie had refused. Vivi had told Baylor about this one afternoon as though it might be important to him someday. She had said, “Hunting is not everything, Dahlin, even though your father may think it is.”
In secret Baylor had admired Frank for doing what he himself was too scared to do: go to movies on the weekend, lie around and read, dress up in costume, and make up plays with the girls.
I have never even killed a deer, Baylor thought. A deer would be the closest I could imagine to killing a human being. I’ve killed ducks. Didn’t like it, but I did it. I’ve killed doves. That I really hated. Such small, delicate birds. I vomited the first time I ate dove gumbo made from doves I’d shot with my father and brother.
Deer hunting. You wake up early, like three-thirty, four in the morning. To get to the Deer Land. As a very young boy, before he could spell, he thought his daddy and brother meant the “Dear Land,” like when Buggy or Willetta called him “Dear.” He thought it meant “sweet land.” It wasn’t until he was a little older that he began to understand that it was the land where you went to kill deer.
Pecan Grove wasn’t deer land. Not the right groupings of trees. Good for dove, some quail, but not deer. The Deer Land was owned by his grandfather’s friend, Mr. Andrew Maddox, and it was never referred to by any other name but the Deer Land. His grandfather had hunted there with Mr. Maddox. His daddy had grown up hunting there with his own father. There was a group of men and their sons and their son’s sons who knew where it was. Outside of that group, nobody knew. You didn’t want other hunters to know where your deer-hunting spot was. It was private. Privacy was part of The Code. There was a small hunting camp on the Deer Land, just a shack in the shape of an L, lined with enough bunks to sleep eight. Rough cooking setup, an outside john. Sometimes on the weekend you might spend the night because you had to be ready and in the tree stand by dawn,
that magic time when the Louisiana sun shyly began spreading its pinks at first light.
That’s what he loved about deer hunting. The light. That’s what he would tell Sidda, but no one else. And being with his daddy, that’s what he loved. That’s when he could smell his father, see his father for hours at a time, receive his father’s attention, all at the camp.
At the camp, with its primitive fireplace, Playboy magazines, and stacks of Field and Stream, Baylor would look at grown ladies buck-naked. He would read the ads in the back of Field and Stream for the mail-order scents of the hunt. You could order doe scent, fox urine, all kinds of scents that were advertised to cover up human scent in the woods. You had to cover up your scent. Deer, his daddy told him, had a stronger sense of smell than even dogs, and he knew that dogs had a sense of smell that was hundreds of times stronger than a human’s.
He liked hunting because that was when his father talked to him. Big Shep might be drinking, playing poker with the other men, but Big Shep always checked on Baylor, made sure his gun was ready, made sure he brought something with him to eat early in the morning: biscuits stuffed with venison sausage made from last year’s kill; a small thermos of coffee milk. And, of course, some toilet paper. Big Shep would lean over him in the bunk and touch him on the shoulder. “Son, you gonna sleep all day? We got deer just waiting for us out there. Come on, get up, time to put on your fatigues.”
When he was too young to be left in a tree stand alone, Baylor pretended to miss the deer he saw. Not that he had to pretend much. The first time he tried shooting, the recoil had gotten him so bad that his shoulder was black and blue and he could hardly move it for two weeks. Vivi had complained to Big Shep about this, but finally deferred to him when he said it was all part of the game.
They’d walk silent as Indians to their different tree stands, and when Baylor was old enough to be left in a tree stand by himself, he’d climb up and will the downwind deer to smell him so they wouldn’t come near. Sometimes he’d even urinate down into the brush to give the deer his scent, keep it away. The first time he saw a deer, he’d been staring at a thicket for the longest time before he realized the deer was there. The subtlest flick of the deer’s tail tipped him off, and he froze. He concentrated until he could see the deer right in the eyes. He’d will the deer to know that it was safe with him. Stay close to me, buddy, I won’t kill you. This rifle is in my hand, but I don’t like it any more than you.
For the longest time, he watched this deer, a young buck. Beautiful smooth hide. He could see the animal’s eyelashes. He could see his head. He could tell how smart the animal was. He didn’t know how long it lasted, but he never forgot it. He prayed that the deer would elude the other hunters. He imagined a deer guardian angel and prayed the angel would help keep the animal safe. He sent thoughts to that deer: Look out, just stay here, and nothing will happen. Finally he heard shots fired some ways away, and the deer close to him bolted away into the trees.
If you got a deer, you’d fire a certain number of shots and shout to let the others know. Sometimes, the deer kept going after being shot and had to be tracked.
Sometimes Baylor shot at nothing. Didn’t do to be up in a tree stand for hours and never fire a shot. But mostly he never told anyone back at the camp that he’d seen a deer. They would’ve asked too many questions about why he didn’t shoot. It was easiest to say, “Didn’t see nothing.”
A revolver. Yeah, I’ll walk in there and buy myself a goddamn revolver. No getting out of it. I’ll be like Daddy every Sunday night and clean my gun.
Every single Sunday evening after supper for as long as Baylor could remember, Big Shep had laid out his guns on the kitchen table and cleaned them. Baylor could still see it: the old cotton bedspread laid out underneath the rifles and shotguns. The scent of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun cleaner, distinctive and pungent. Little Shep would join him. Just pieces of metal, but they touched them like they were sensuous things. He could remember his father’s voice instructing Little Shep: “Just a little Hoppe’s, on a little size patch. Now run it up and down the barrel until it’s clean. Then a couple of dry patches to get the cleaner out, and a drop of gun oil on a patch and run it through the barrel.” Baylor tried it once and got a headache. From then on out, he claimed he had homework. Baylor did his best to avoid watching his big brother and father, who seemed to be relaxed, comforted by cleaning their guns, the two of them forming this tight little unit. It was like they were caressing the damn guns. It made him sick. And jealous. Shit, Baylor thought, maybe it was a weird type of therapy. The smell of Hoppe’s could still give him a headache.
Heart. You want to aim for the heart. That’s the best way, a shot through the heart and lungs, just behind the deer’s shoulder. Or you could aim for the neck. Yeah, that would break the spine. Problem is that the deer could run off to die. It was considered good form to wait ten or fifteen minutes so you weren’t running after a dying deer but instead following him and finding him after he’s dead.
Baylor remembered the first time he’d seen a deer actually shot. He was twelve. Sharing a tree stand with his father and brother. Little Shep shot a six-point buck straight through the heart.
“Hot dog!” his brother hollered, and fired off a number of shots to let the other hunters know he had bagged one. Then Baylor watched as his father helped his brother drag the once magnificent deer to the nearest road and put it into the bed of Big Shep’s old hunting pickup. Little Shep sat in the back with his dead deer. Baylor sat in the cab with his father.
“One of these days, you’ll get you one,” Big Shep said. They hauled the dead deer back to the camp. Baylor could see the bright red blood on the tan and white hide, could see the wide-open stare of the animal. One moment the buck had been looking for berries. How long a time lapsed between the moment he smelled his killer and the moment the bullet ripped through his heart? He could feel his father’s pride as his brother hung the deer from the tree. It was cold, late November.
“Gut him quick,” Big Shep said. “With this cold and a quick gut, we’ll have some damn fine meat.”
Baylor watched as his father supervised Little Shep butchering the deer. His brother tore out the deer’s entrails, oblivious to anything but the task at hand. Oblivious to anything but pleasing his father. Baylor stood silently and watched. Until a violent wave of nausea overtook him, and he vomited all over his hunting boots. Little Shep and his father never let him forget it.
His brother said, “You turnin’ Francissy on us, bro’?”
Years later, after the twins were born, Baylor had quit pretending and given up hunting for gardening. He had turned his backyard into a gardener’s paradise, a bird sanctuary, a place where butterflies convened. He told anyone who asked that he had joined the Church of Gardening. In fact, Baylor did indeed believe that gardening was a salvation. The year before, when most boys were given their first pellet guns, he had given his son Jeff a camera. He gave him binoculars and a book on birding. Still, in order to do “bidness” and keep up professional social ties, Baylor occasionally went on hunts. But he never carried a gun. He didn’t care what they thought of him.
Baylor was awakened from his reverie by a feather landing on the windshield of his car. He did not hear it land, but something in its coloring caught his eye. He opened the car door and picked the feather up. He held it up to the November light and turned it one way and then the other, trying to decide what kind of bird it was from. He was usually able to identify feathers. But this one was foreign to him. It was a grayish feather with faint spots and a pale yellow shaft. It was soft and gently curved. A feather from the body, not the wing. He was struck with its subtle beauty. Suddenly a gust of wind picked up the feather from the palm of his hand and took it away. Baylor wanted to run after it. Find it, identify it, or at least keep it with him, a talisman. But the feather was gone.
For the first time Baylor noticed that there were Christmas lights in the display window of Security Sporting Goods. Red, white, and blue
lights twinkled among boxes of bullets, small American flags, plastic basketball hoops for toddlers, and various toy guns and rifles. A full-size Santa dressed in hunting fatigues stood with his hand pointing out toward only God knew what. Baylor was struck with the obscenity of it all. He turned away and looked up as though he might still be able to spot the feather. But all he could see were changing cumulus clouds and a kind of soft, overcast light. He stood there in the parking lot, waiting for something he couldn’t quite articulate.
Finally he got back in his car. He pulled the car out of the parking lot into traffic. He didn’t think; he just drove.
At Our Lady of Divine Compassion Catholic Church, the Saint Joseph Altar is on the side near the stained glass window of the Archangel Michael. One fierce angel. Now Baylor sat in the front row nearest the Saint Joseph Altar and alternated between looking at the fierce angel of the Lord and the image of Saint Joseph, “the earthly father of Jesus.” He simply sat and studied the different images. The man the statue depicted wore light brown robes, and he held a sleeping baby in his arms. Baylor thought of the thousands of times he had held his babies in his arms. He thought about their births. How each birth had seemed like the Holy Spirit coming. The birth of his children were the miracles in his life. He stared at the statue. At Jeff ’s age, he had thought of Joseph as such a wimp. Man married a woman already pregnant, hung around, then nobody heard about him doing much except leading a donkey to a stable and taking the kid to the temple. He’d always been a little embarrassed for Saint Joseph. Now he sat in the pew, with the old familiar scent of years of incense and candles and wooden pews and cracking leather on the prayer kneelers, and he began to see Saint Joseph differently. He thought he saw a fierceness in the statue’s eyes. He noticed a muscularity about the arms. Hell, the man was a carpenter, probably strong as an ox. But mainly what he noticed this time was a tenderness, a tenderness that he had once mistaken for weakness. Now he noticed how Joseph held the baby to his heart, how he seemed to press him to his heart, how his head bent down as though he were just about to kiss the baby’s fine head. The closer he stared at the statue, the more he saw that here was an image of a father who knew how to protect his baby, holding him close to his heart, but also out there for all the world to see. For the first time, Baylor let himself weep. Not “tear up,” like his father said, but weep. Weep at the tenderness he felt in his own heart. Weep at the realization that to the extent any of us could ever protect our children, we could do it only with this kind of heart-fierceness, this kind of loving gaze, this seemingly sissified masculine gentleness.