A Negative of Snow

Ice on the puddles, in the cups of fallen leaves. I’d walk with Dad and a handful of other men, the setters working the fields, the underbrush. It was my job to carry the birds. I’d have them all plucked by the time we got back to the car. On the walk out I’d look for puddles I’d missed and break them. Though many moonless nights have fallen on the grave like a negative of snow, Dad’s wheelchair sometimes flashes in my mind, and I hear the bleating down the hall, a voice berating its god, his worthless anodynes, and the doctors who were at that very moment increasing his morphine, having failed to note the word alcoholic on his chart, meaning that his damaged liver routed the opiates straight to his brain, his beautiful fragile brain, which I had not yet finished loving. My father, who still had manners, who was a hardwood, a tough tree. That was his first death.