Henry Carlile

Now they to their slogged forthwendings tend, four hunters, guns askew like four unruly hairs, to start the rabbit or pheasant from hiding. But these cocks, wily, lie close and spy from covert or culvert the passing grim party and the rabbit keeps Viet-Cong-like to its digs. Here is no hunting horn and gargle of hounds among horse whinny and hoof stamp and ladies in smart hunting habits, though these four sport red in patterns motley or checkered and in hues fluorescent as road crewmen’s vests. Small wonder the game is not game, so uncouthly strikes the eye this drawling troupe of unshaven hope and choler and color. The roadside sparrows, come to dust, scatter before the headlong hum of him leather-crouched, helmet-missled over the speed-stretched oval wheels of his hundred-mile-per-hour crotch rocket all the way to Lone Tree past the six-foot Iowa corn, surprised cows and hogs and the high horse considering gravely over the fence this black burst of boots and gloves and goggles. So the goggle-eyed frog dives under a scum of ditch-vetched water fern and the blue-backed kestrel stoops from its crystal insulator perch and, gray as a piece of the paving, up springs the four-inch grasshopper splat! like a nicotine bullet in the teeth. Bearded buggy dads on their way to market, fine trotters high-stepping between shafts, broad-brim-hatted, blue-chambray-shirted, with black pants and black suspenders, sons like scrubbed minor replicas, dutiful daughters, eyes downcast among chatter of bonneted grannies and mothers, patriarchal grandfathers observing that rain must come as it always has, God’s will be done, and brief gossip also among the elders of shunning a deacon caught in unnatural circumstances with a pig—the Devil’s own vessel!—and of Sister Sara, who’s soon to require the midwife, as the moon too is full almost.

* In the shape of a submarine frost lengthens on a window. Outside, winter sparrows perch in rhinoceros-colored trees. Mare's tails chase whitely past brick chimneys. I have seen those lights before, small rectangular eyes of far buildings, one church steeple darkening the blue sky. * It looks like a stopped grey heart, if hearts sport such delicate scallops and trees wear hearts on their sleeves. Now the first wasp of spring emerges, its wings a transparency of fish scales, old isinglass or vein-fretted windows— wings of the first untranscendent angel sentenced to death by the god frost. How can some later spring reclaim this paper city or repair its walls damaged in the long drop from the one hundred and twentieth odd year of a tree? * The sky wears that color through which you expect a tornado's black drill. Only cicadas try the air, a scratching that cannon could not silence. Beyond the barn with three siloes and the wind pump stopped like a tin daisy, carp lip the surface of reflected sky, the promised violence. * I always imagined that place as an orchard on a mountaintop, its summer Delicious freckling to a sunset by Seurat. But the last time it was fall, the sere grass bent one way toward an open gate, as though a great wind had swept down stones of the garden walls. Two posts bent where the orchard had been, their purpose obscure. They stood, I think, where flowers had rivaled deepest in their colors and scents.

He is pushing a black Ford through an empty street - a car like his father's that beat the flat roads like wind in summer and brought him here. He never forgave his father. That was the year he left home. Then there was talk of weather and everyone was packing. Windmills were stopped all over Kansas. He is thinking of fathers, the ways they never forgive you, withholding love like lust. But they quit, they stop like pumps. There is no way to set them working again. He is thinking of mothers, how she could not know how he half followed girls down dark streets of his heart, how that loneliness is passed to sons, to the fathers of sons. He is pushing a black Ford. Its problem is such a heart you cannot give it enough care. Like a father it will quit. And there is no end to this.

Not to conform to any other color is the secret of being colorful. He shocks us when he flies like a red verb over the snow. He sifts through the blue evenings to his roost. He is turning purple. Soon he'll be black. In the bar's dark I think of him. There are no cardinals here. Only a woman in a red dress.

You never wrote the small green book like the poems of Edward Thomas. It was a book I dreamed. But watching the green report of your heart on the monitor it came to me as I stood like one of the doctors in my cap and gown, home, where you've lived like a bachelor at the far end of the house, there is a green diary: the book of the deer, the bear and the elk, with snapshots of Julian and Bob and Harry, old hunting friends dead as the game strung up on poles or drooped across fenders. I think you are the only one left. And still you fight to stay, breathing the scorched air of the burn ward, the sweet stink of your own charred flesh. Stepfather, don't go. Seventy-three years is not the end of the book, the letters you never wrote, because even before you blistered your hands the act of writing pained you. It took four shots to bring it down. Your father never praised you. Rising from dinner that night he beckoned toward the woodshed where the skinned deer hung draped in burlap. Then he whipped you with a belt. "Don't ever bring home meat shot up like that! One bullet is enough." I saw you kill a running buck at three hundred yards with one shot. It's a brutal art that fathers pass to sons. When the propane tank ignited you took the flaming cylinder in your arms like a lover and fought it out the door. Now you dream each night of the trailer burning. My mother screams and beats the fire out of her hair. She was not burned like you— twice, and three times, for your care. Now the deer are safe from us, I have one photograph to add to our book: a doe running through a field. My best shot. Somewhere in the grass behind her a fawn is hiding. You can't see it, but it's there waiting for its mother to draw us away. Later, she'll return and the two of them will be saved. Stepfather, Father, be like the fawn.