Two Weeks After Christmas

The hank of jute rope Jed had hung from the barn rafter swung limp and cold and bristly, and never knew the weight of a buck that year. With Christmas two weeks gone, the prospects were bleak. Nothing of promise showed on the horizon. It was the hard time of year again, the one Jed had avoided considering while sitting on stumps through the dregs of deer season. He’d held out hope, which warmed him barely at all, though he let that slip too when the skies clamped shut and drooped, and the tracking snow never came.

With January established, and the bleak midwinter living up to its name, he slept later than normal. There was no reason to be in the woods by sunup, and no other job that seemed worthy of his early morning presence.

On Saturday, Jed leaned against the window with his coffee, and watched the overdue snowfall. He pressed his nose to the pane and leaned the weight of his forehead on the muntin. The glass under his nose bloomed with fog. He reached with a shirtsleeve and wiped it clear, and kept watching.

The snow was arriving too late and not kindly; it was the hard, windblown stuff that stung bare cheeks and sharpened the world instead of softening it, making outside chores a burden. Drifts gathered against the barn and nearly touched the cow shed windows, but the dooryard remained mostly bare. A crust of dead grass and matted leaves and ice showed in patches, disappeared beneath the swirling flakes and surfaced again.

Jed sighed and plopped into a chair beside the woodstove. It was not yet noon. He considered a slug of whiskey in the coffee.  Time, taking its time, wallowed Jed in the depth of the season.

His wife Polly showed no mercy.

“Jeezum, Jed, you’ve got that hangdog look so bad it’s almost sinful. Go do something . . . put some plastic over the upstairs windows, or split some kindling, or re-fill the woodshed at least.”

Her Yankee pragmatism irritated him, particularly when it held some truth.

“Or take Sleeper for a run. He’s moping around, looking bored just like you. Go over to Moore’s and run him through the fields.  The exercise’ll do you both some good, and I won’t have to catch my death of gloominess from either one of you.”

She returned to her bread dough, and smiled at it. “And that’s not just a suggestion . . .”

Jed didn’t answer.  He swirled the last swallow of coffee in his mug, tossed it into the stove and examined the grounds. He was disappointed that the black smear at the bottom of the mug bore no indication of how to improve his mood. He walked to the closet and got his plaid jacket, the check cord and some woolen mittens. He thumped up the stairs and padded down the hall to the room he and Polly shared. The door was just barely ajar.  He pushed it open, and slipped in.

The baby was sprawled on her belly on a sheepskin, nursing on nothing at all. She was the picture of contentment, working away on the memory of wonderful things. Her nose whistled soft and high with her breathing. Jed envied her. He bent over, kissed her hair and went to his closet. He took his wool pants from the top shelf, shook them loose and pulled them on, tucking the cuffs into his socks. He walked softly back to the door and looked at the little girl sleeping. Her little lips puckered and sucked, and he couldn’t help but smile.

Downstairs, Jed retrieved the old .22 from the workshop, released the hammer and shucked the slide, and slid the rifle into a tattered case. He pulled a box of long rifle rounds from the shelf above the workbench and stuffed them in his pocket, then walked out the workshop door to start the truck. He went back inside to refill his coffee with the gun slip over his shoulder. Polly was sliding loaf pans into the oven.

“I thought the deer season was over?” She nodded towards the rifle.

“Yeah, it is,” grumbled Jed. “But rabbits are open and there might be a few out at Moore’s, and if nothing else I’ll shoot up some stumps.”

Polly smiled. “I haven’t found a good recipe for stumps, not yet at least, but you shoot any that you see. I hate to say it, but if killing a few bunnies will improve your mood, then I’m all for it. Just don’t come back till there’s a smile on your face.”

She wiped her hands on her apron as she walked towards him, and then held his cheeks between her floury palms.

“I love you,” she said, and smacked his forehead with a wet kiss. “Now take your dog and get out of here.”

Jed whistled to the dog. He lifted his head barely from the floor and cocked his ears. Jed noticed for the first time a white dullness in the orange fur around his muzzle.

“C’mon, buddy,” he said. The dog stood creakily, but perked up at once when he saw the gun case on Jed’s arm.

“Let’s go make something of this godawful day.”

Jed turned and swatted Polly, who was returning to her bread.  He stung her on the fanny and she scooched away. Jed and the dog slipped out the door, closing it softly and letting the latch fall home. Upstairs, the baby rolled and sighed and nursed on nothing, deeper into the winter day.

Jed drove down into Maple Valley, scanning the woods for deer. He couldn’t help it. Polly always teased him for driving so slowly, for looking everywhere but at the road ahead. He turned onto North Main and into the pines, where the road dipped and the big beaver pond swelled right up beside it. Acres of flooded deadwood showed stark grey and skeletal, piercing the frozen pond. Blown snow scuttled over the ice.

Jed pulled over. He’d hunted ducks here in October, shot a limit of woodies on the north side three mornings running. But that was when there was color in the world, and a great wide autumn was just opening up. Now the woodies were long gone, having taken all the splendor with them and then some. Jed pulled back onto the road and up the rise, south towards town, turning left on the dirt road into Moore’s.

The Moore Farm was a woodsman’s heaven, a place that brightened Jed’s mood. It was a dairy farm of sorts, a few hundred brambly acres and a handful of cows. The milk always tasted like the smell of dandelions, or so Jed thought anyway. Old John Moore kept the place running on two bowed legs and a back so done-in that he couldn’t raise a pitchfork above his head. It was love that maintained the place more than anything, and maintained the beasts upon it, both wild and domestic.

Old John Moore fed the legions of bantam roosters, the old Percheron mare, the oxen and the ram and the billy goats. He fed the deer incidentally on his acres of pasture under the July moon, and the partridge and woodcock on the private stock of his thorny hedgerows. And in winter, he fed a never-ending supply of cottontail rabbits on whatever leavings from the barn spilled out and over, and into the stone walls and fringes. He left just enough barberry and rose to protect them, whether on purpose, as Jed surmised, or because he couldn’t be bothered to pull the thorny stuff out. It always grew back anyway, and John Moore had farmed the place long enough to not have any more losing battles left in him. Jed found him in the back barn, mucking.

“Hey, Johnny Moore,” he cried, his inflection carrying down, like the greeting was the end of a story.

John Moore looked up and tried not to smile. “Uhn-huh,” was his answer.

Sleeper spun wildly around John’s legs and bared his teeth in a grin, then buried a nose in John’s crotch.

“Goddamn dog better learn some manners . . . ” He put down the pitchfork and tousled the dog’s ears. “What you been up to on this nasty day, Jed.”

“Ohhhh, well . . . ” said Jed, following the old routine, “just looking to see if you got any bantam roosters for sale.” Fifty of the cocksure little blighters paraded around the bars of the stanchions.

“Uhn-huh,” said John Moore again, leaning on the fork. “What sort of a peashooter you got in that case?” John raised a gnarled finger and gestured towards Jed’s rifle

“Just my grandpa’s old .22. Thought I might do you the favor of thinning out your rabbit population. That is, if there are any rabbits around this old place.”

Jed and John both knew that the rabbits were a foregone conclusion. But John was a New England hill farmer, afraid of the prospect of plenty. His glass remained half empty, and he answered Jed fittingly.

“No white rabbits in years, since the coyotes got ’em. But some Coneys around, I’d say, here and there anyway. You might find a few in the east pasture. Just don’t shoot my horse, and close the gates after you. Come up by the kitchen when you’re through. You’ll have a taste of this year’s cider before you leave.”

These were the terms of the lease. Jed nodded. He unsheathed the rifle, a battered old Winchester, and filled the magazine with tiny cartridges. They always looked so small, so inconsequential, compared to a shotgun shell at least. Jed closed the magazine and whistled the dog away from a heaped cake of chicken shit.

“Well, we’ll see what happens.”

John Moore returned to his mucking.

Out in the pastures the wind had shifted. The sky spit now with less anger and pirouettes of blown flakes danced across the field.  They spun over the open space as the winds collided, settled and met again. Sleeper coursed off along the stone wall, paid tribute to the bigger clumps of barberry. Jed gave him his head. He didn’t expect much. He knew better than to let a bird dog out in the rabbit fields, but the both of them needed this. He kept a bell on the dog, and swore to himself that if a rabbit presented, he’d not take a shot if Sleeper was anywhere near. Under the same breath he hoped that the quartering dog would squirt a bunny in his direction.

Jed opened the spring-gate that closed the east wall barway, stepped through and hooked it back home. The easternmost pasture was a maze of thornbush and scraggle, and he thought at first he should just sit and wait – let the bunnies show. There were piles of scat all about, rounded pellets not unlike those of the deer, but different somehow: less stately. Jed has seen the scat everywhere on the walk out.

He turned to the stone wall and looked for a likely place to sit.  Sleeper vaulted up and over the wall, landed, went over again to the far side and disappeared from sight. Then Jed caught movement just there in front of him, under the tent-like arch of a spreading rosebush. He kicked the dead branches nearest him, and the bunny dashed out. Its trim back legs worked like pistons, ears laid back, and the precise bob of its white tail bounced along behind.

It was a mad dash, a frantic zigzag side-to-side and then an abrupt stop under a canopy of thorns. But the pretense of safety was pretense only. The rabbit became a brown wedge, legs tucked under and ears up, alert, a frozen moment with an ice black eye.

Sleeper’s bell tinkled far off. Jed raised the little rifle, held on the rabbit’s shoulder and squeezed off a shot. He jerked it, anticipating the recoil of an autumn’s worth of 12-gauge bullying. The splat of the shot echoed. The bunny sprawled on its side, laid out long beneath the thorns, twitched once, went still.

The dog was coming around, enticed by the sound of a shot. Jed ran over and plucked the soft body from the stiffened ground and put it in his game pocket. The dog knew the ruse. He sniffed at the alive smell, the wild smell, the rich blood smell, but Jed shoved him away. He returned to his rounds, and Jed patted the warm bundle against his back, and wondered what else might lie beneath the thorns.

The afternoon got dark too soon. Jed harvested a few more rabbits, held them, and fended off the dog some more. They were perfect, and they did what rabbits do, dead rabbits anyway. They made Jed stop for a moment, feeling a tiny bit sad, a tiny bit guilty. But the feeling of an afternoon made purposeful offset these melancholic sentiments, an afternoon full of provender honestly earned. Warm against his back, Jed appreciated the weight of a few meals, maybe a pair of fur booties for the baby. He walked back to the barn in the fading day, directly into the wind.

Jed opened up the bunnies in the shelter of the barn, flung the innards to the banty roosters who fought amongst themselves for every scrap. He skinned the rigid bodies, quartered them and rinsed the bits clean in the spigot by the milk-room door. He wrapped the meat in a handkerchief, then tied it shut. He’d throw the heads into the roadside ditch on his drive home.

With a glass of John Moore’s cider in his belly, Jed headed home under a sky absent of stars, a sky spitting wind and bits of snow. The dog slept on the seat beside him, his head on Jed’s shifting hand. Jed turned into his dooryard and cut the engine.

Against the dark, the kitchen was full of warm light. He saw Polly at the stove with the baby on her hip, swaying side to side and stirring a steaming something with a wooden spoon. She was talking. Jed could see that she was telling the little girl wonderful things, spinning out the promise of a lifetime to come. The little girl, months or years from words, was tangling Polly’s hair, clinging to it.

Jed opened the truck door. The dog hopped out and ran to pay his tributes once more, and Jed gathered up the gun and the cloth-wrapped meat. He closed the truck door and looked at his girls again. Polly glanced up from the stove, pointed towards him, and looking down at the baby, spoke to her.

Polly lifted the baby’s tiny hand and waved it, and Jed saw her mouthing “Pa-pa.” He lifted the latch and followed the dog in, bringing home the smile that Polly had ordered, and a little something for the stewpot just in case.

First published Sporting Classics Magazine