Текст книги "Goat mountain"

Автор книги: David Vann

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

14

DID CAIN HESITATE? IN THE FIELD WITH HIS BROTHER, wearing the hides of Abel’s sheep scraped bare, and Cain a tiller of the ground, his crops found wanting by god. Rage as they walk through the furrows he’s planted, and he’s carrying a stone, and without any thought at all he steps behind Abel and smashes that stone against his brother’s skull. This part is easy.

But Abel is still alive. One blow isn’t enough. Abel’s mouth open in pain, eyes closed and blood in his hair from where the stone has crushed bone and torn flesh. He’s on his side in the loose dirt, hands and feet numbed but clutching at the earth anyway, attempting to crawl away in the oldest of instincts. And Cain standing there with the stone in his hand.

The rage in him is gone. Flimsiest of emotions, a cover and never itself, a betrayal. Cain feels tricked. But it’s too late now to go back. And so he has to kneel down over his brother and see his brother’s face as he brings the stone down again, and this time Cain is shielded by nothing, this time he knows who he is. And here is where he may hesitate. It may be a long time before he brings that stone down, and it’s in this moment we can know Cain. The momentum of his life, everything out of control, everything misunderstood and recognized too late, that’s how we are descended from Cain. All that was instinctual suddenly bearing consequence, our animal nature betrayed by consciousness.

The Bible has nothing to do with god. The Bible is an account of our waking up, an atavistically dreamed recovery of how we first learned shame in the garden and first considered ourselves different from animals, and Cain was the first to discover that part of us will never wake up. Part of us will act according to instinct, and that will never change. And one of our first instincts is to kill. The Ten Commandments is a list of our instincts that will never leave us.

I stepped away as the buck crawled toward me. Front legs pulling at the ground, trying to turn but only coming closer, dragging down that fire road. Heavy breath in close, eyes rolling, the smell of him, and then that scream again, eyes lidded and head up, high-pitched wail of every pain that had ever been, limitless and unendurable. Discovery that half of him no longer responded, half of him lost, maimed, and never to be made whole again. Unable to flee, crawling closer to the end.

Smell of hide and sweat and blood and fear. Blood caked with dust, red and then brown, hind legs tangled and dragging. The fire road narrow, thick brush leaning in, and no escape for either of us to either side.

The buck coming closer. Fueled by panic, hooves working, those antlers white-tipped and ready to gore. I needed to step backward faster, but I felt frozen. The brush closing in, this long alley narrowing.

His forehead raised up in a ridge, muscle and vein beneath his hide, jaw clacking. Paired hooves, twin wedges of bone striking at the ground and pulling. And he tried again to rise, long neck ducking and charging and that wide chest coming free of the ground, up on his forelegs and then falling again.

Great exhales, snorts into the dust, and he was mired in place. I could tell some part of him wanted to stop, just lie down and wait to die. Some part of him knew it was over. I had felt nothing in killing the poacher, but this was different. I could see what the buck felt, the catastrophe, all lost, no hope of recovery, the end of a life. I felt that end. We hunt the largest animals because they are the closest to being us.

But he pulled again with his forelegs and raised his head and crawled toward me, dragged himself closer, and I stumbled backward and fell, sprawled out on the ground before him, and I was crabbing backward pushing with my hands and heels at the dirt and he was close now, moving faster, crawling over my rifle, which disappeared beneath him, and his head yanking down as he advanced, swinging those horns.

This is the way I still see him, gray-brown hide in that late sun, each individual hair, all created in unison, a landscape of muscle and bone and blood beneath the surface, leaving ripples. The sound of his breath, hot heavy blasts, and the heat and smell bearing down on me, and I had forgotten his pain, forgotten he was maimed, forgotten what was happening here, pushing at the dirt trying to escape, and then he screamed again, a scream broken by intakes of breath, and he shook his head back and forth as if he could free himself from the pain, wring it from his body, and this was unbearable. I rolled to the side and got to my feet and ran down that fire road, ran hard and did not look back until I was a hundred yards away and safe and he was no longer near.

But of course I was still on this road, and so was he, and I no longer had my rifle. The shadows long, half the road gone, and the breeze increasing, last heat of the day. The two of us on this slope.

Nothing to do but walk toward him again, and what would happen when we met I didn’t know. Then Tom appeared higher on the road, and he was armed and I was not and no one else was there to witness, and I wondered whether that slug might come now, all things sped along in our lives, impatient.

But Tom only stood watching. No celebration for killing my first buck, no hoots or whoops. I hesitated, afraid of both Tom and the buck. The buck still crawling down toward me, his head dipping and rising. This fire road overgrown on both sides and beginning to grow in the middle, brush rising between the tracks. The buck snagging on this, held back, and I thought at first his legs were tangled but as I came closer I saw my rifle trapped beneath him, caught up in his dead legs and sticking out to the side to snag.

My rifle covered in blood and dirt, and the buck kept pulling but the snag turned him in a slow circle in the middle of the road. No longer headed downhill but crawling to the side, head butting into the brush and his back to me. Haunches flattened, unresponsive.

I walked close and didn’t know what to do. The buck was trapped now. His hind legs and the rifle tangled in brush in the middle of the road and his antlers caught in brush at the side. His front legs still pulling at the ground but only digging now, raising dust. Blowing with the effort, heaving and sucking at the air.

Tom only fifty feet away, the buck between us.

How do I get my rifle back? I asked.

Not my problem.

Well have you ever seen this before?

Nope. Everything with you is something new. You’re the devil’s own private piece of work.

Just shoot him for me.

Nope. I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to watch.

The buck had stopped digging. He was swaying in place, the front part of him moving forward as if he’d rise, then falling back, then moving forward again. Smell of fear, an actual smell, something rancid and maddening, something that could make you want to grab his neck in your teeth and just bite through.

The rifle buried beneath him and only the stock and bale visible on the other side, caught in a clump of brush.

I pushed at his rump with my boot, felt the hide slide over muscle. Dead flesh but he must have felt some movement, because he thrashed at the brush, freed his horns.

I knelt down and reached over him to grab for the bale of the rifle. Panic. He yanked his head and the horns came close and I fell back. Antlers with wide forks on top, dark brown and ridged. His eye rolling in fear and rage. He couldn’t reach, couldn’t fold himself far enough. His hooves slipping in the dirt, trying to lever his head back farther.

I could see the bullet hole in the side of his thigh, a small, loose hole in thick muscle and hide, and a bigger hole in his lower back where the bullet had exited, tearing through spine and then muscle above. White bone, blood, and darker meat.

Smell of a deer not like anything else, a stink from glands near the Achilles tendons, a scent for marking territory. Musky and overpowering.

I leaned in low and close and grabbed on to the rifle, but it wouldn’t budge. The buck heavy. He knocked me in the head with his horns, but only a sideswipe.

Hollow. That’s how his horns felt. No substance to them at all. Things imagined and sprung from air. Nothing to fear from an animal, made only of what I could tear through with my bare hands. So I came in low again and grabbed the bale of the rifle and tried to dislodge.

The buck heaving and striking at the earth and snorting, and all was held in place, immovable. So I pulled at his leg instead, but when I let go, it sprang back. Dead, unfeeling, unresponding, all nerves cut, but still held together by muscles like springs. I tried grabbing both legs and pulling, heavy, and the buck screamed again, tongue arched in pain, and it was too much.

I fell back in the dirt and just lay there. The sky a deep blue, rounded dome above us, a vacuum into which all was taken away, every sound and pain and thought. I was breathing hard, panicked. The two of us lying here on this ground.

You need to finish that animal. It was my father’s voice.

I looked up and saw him standing beside Tom.

I can’t get my rifle.

You need to finish that animal now.

The buck’s head swaying back and forth and a low moaning coming from him, a sound of fear, two men standing just uphill and me on the ground behind. A proximity impossible in his world, the same as if we found ourselves before our gods, all that we imagine materialized in an instant, all made real. And no way to run, legs frozen. Neck low and flat, hiding from the sky.

I crawled closer to his back, where half a foot of the rifle’s barrel stuck out, and I tried to grab that barrel, but it was pressed against the earth by all his weight and wasn’t moving.

So I tried to roll him. I grabbed his hooves on the uphill side and swung them in an arc high to twist downhill, but the weight of him was enormous and unlikely and his legs so stiff I couldn’t get them to point even straight up. I had them over my shoulder and was pushing hard, like some beast into the yoke for a plow, but he was pushing his front hooves downhill, twisting the opposite way, refusing to be turned. As if he were trying to run away from the men, facing down that fire road.

I dropped his legs and just stood there breathing hard and he faced again uphill, tried to pull himself toward my father and Tom. Nothing he did made any sense.

Shoot him, my father said.

I can’t, I said. I can’t get my rifle.

I’m talking to Tom. Shoot him, Tom.

Nope.

Fucking shoot him right now.

Nope. This is your own clusterfuck. I’m no part of this.

My father grabbed at Tom’s rifle then, his hand catching the barrel, but Tom held on. The two of them up close, almost like dancing, all four hands on the rifle that stood like a needle pointing straight into the heavens. Slow turns of the dance in yanks, a needle controlled by some random magnet below but always remaining upright. A needle that would shift over the surface of the earth searching for something, for some element we knew was missing, something not yet discovered but its presence felt.

My father with his eyes closed, a diviner of this footwork, mouth open in what was more disbelief than determination, hanging on, but Tom had his eyes open and he kicked my father in the knee.

The needle tilting as my father caved to the side, no longer pointing, all divination lost, and Tom kicked the same knee again and my father let go of the rifle and went down, landed on his side in the dust and Tom backing away.

Get off me, bitch, Tom said.

You don’t know, my father said. You don’t know anything.

I know all I need to know.

You don’t know what this is like.

Yeah, I feel real sorry for you. You’ve been such a good person and done all the right things, how could any of this have happened?

Well I have done the right things. I’ve been a good father.

And we have the proof right here.

My father on the ground not far from the buck, and he rose up to kick the buck’s horns. A swinging kick from the side, and the buck’s head jolted and he lowered his antlers and tried to face my father but my father kicked again from the side.

The buck braced on his forelegs, a wide stance in the dust, and raised up his chest, swung those horns on his thick neck. But my father was quick, swung his boot from the other side now and clocked the buck again.

What the fuck are you doing? Tom asked.

If you won’t give me your rifle, this is all that’s left.

That’s just stupid. You can’t kick a buck to death.

Watch me.

My father crouched like a wrestler and stood close to the buck with his hands ready and grabbed those antlers as they swung, grabbed both big forks and kicked down through the center, kicked his heel into the buck’s nose.

A great roar from the buck, as if he were some other kind of beast, mythic and brutal, half giant, and he yanked his horns upward and my father was thrown back again into the dust.

Footfalls of other giants coming to help, as if the buck had called his kind, a crashing through brush, a summoning, snapping of branches, and my grandfather emerged, holding his rifle high. A beast himself.

Why is that buck still alive? he asked.

It’s not, my father said. It’s about to die. Stay out of this. And he rose to his feet again and held his knife this time.

That buck belongs to your son. He has to kill it.

Suddenly there are rules?

There have always been rules.

God you’re full of shit. I don’t know how I didn’t know this about you before.

He’s going to kill that buck.

And how’s he going to do that? His rifle is trapped under the buck.

How did that happen?

How the fuck should I know? My father turned back to the buck and crouched with his knife and grabbed at the horns with his other hand.

The deafening boom of my grandfather’s.308, shot into the ground. Ears gone blank and smell of sulfur, evocation of hell at our feet, and the buck writhing and screaming high-pitched in horror.

My father shrank to the side against the brush, just instinct, and I was up against brush too, and Tom also. All of us wanting cover.

He has to kill it, my grandfather said. It’s his to kill. That can’t be changed.

15

OBLIGATION. WHAT’S REQUIRED OF US BY GOD. THE ORDER of things. We sow what we can, but god found Cain’s offerings inadequate. And nothing more that Cain could do. What if it’s not possible to please god? No offering sufficient, but an offering required nonetheless.

That buck was what my family required, and yet it wasn’t sufficient. No celebration. But my grandfather made sure it would be my kill.

I circled the buck from lower ground. Head turning, hooves digging, trying to face me. Tiring, bleeding out, coming closer to some dull recognition.

On hand and knee I crawled across that dirt, shoulders ducked close to the ground, and when I was so close my face was almost touching the hide of his back, his head and antlers yanking, trying to see me, I leaped from all fours and wrapped my arms around his neck.

Thrashing, risen up from the earth, that neck still alive. Every beast made for man, put here for him, but of course that’s a lie. The buck fought for his own dominion, roared and shook his horns and yanked his neck and tried to throw me off. What I knew was that he wanted to live. Something I could never have felt for the dead man, the pull of a trigger too easy, a trigger something that makes us forget what killing means. But in my hands I could feel the pulse of the buck’s neck, the panic in him, the terrifying loss, the impossibility that anything could ever be just, the tragedy of our own death, incomprehensible, and the will in us to disbelieve. In killing, I was taking everything. And what I destroyed could never be remade. I knew that and reached for my knife.

My left shoulder slammed against the ground over and over, and I was being shaken loose, gripping with that arm, and I would have let go if not for my grandfather watching. I had lost the desire to kill. I would have reversed time and not fired my rifle, let the buck leap into the brush and escape. I felt remorse, though I had no word for that at the time or even any possibility of understanding the concept. We were put here to kill. That was immutable. It was family law and the law of the world. And I reached for my knife because my grandfather was there to enforce. But who I was had changed. From that moment on, every kill would be bitter to me. Every kill would be something forced, something I did not want. And that’s what would make me human. To kill out of obligation, to kill even when I did not want to.

I pulled my knife across the buck’s throat, and it did not cut easily. I had to saw back and forth as the buck screamed like any human and flailed and thrashed and did not want to die. And even when no sound would come out, when blood was everywhere and the buck’s throat cut and filled, I knew he was still trying to scream, and I’m glad I could not see his mouth or eyes and could see only the stiff hairs of his hide as he struggled and fell and shook against the ground.

Bathed in blood. The buck still jerking. And I just kept sawing, kept cutting deeper and deeper until I could feel the blade against bone, against spine, and then I let go of the knife and just held on until the buck moved no more.

No animal should be treated like that, Tom said.

Every animal is treated like that, my grandfather said. He still had his rifle to his shoulder, ready, barrel pointed at the ground just uphill from me and the buck, as if he might shoot again at any moment.

We’ve never treated a buck like that, my father said. Never in our lives. Never in all the times we’ve hunted here.

We’ve done the same thing every time.

No we haven’t.

You think somehow you can be safe. You think you can be untouched. You think it’s possible to be moral.

More philosophy.

My grandfather smiled then. Smiled at my father. Different than I had ever seen him do before. And then he turned, still smiling, and pointed his rifle at me. Time to gut that buck, he said.

I thought he was going to pull the trigger. I froze, just instinct, and my father and Tom froze also, and waited. Whatever happened, they were not going to interfere, apparently.

But nothing happened. My grandfather only waited, his rifle pointed at me, and I unlocked from the buck, pulled my arm free from under his neck. I hadn’t realized one of my legs was around him, heel digging into his stomach as if into a stirrup. I freed myself and knelt in the dirt.

The buck’s eye still open, and he did not look dead. Only stunned, held in suspension somehow, but his face still the face of something alive, still taking in the world.

I scooted around to the front of him, my back now to the men. I could feel my grandfather’s rifle on me still. I turned my knife blade up and snagged the tip in the center of the buck’s belly, white hide, and I was careful to snag only the surface. Any deeper and I’d cut into the pale green stomach sack and release bile.

I was facing directly into the sunset, downslope on this fire road, and the sun was lying fat on the horizon and burning hot in my face and the breeze had died. I don’t know where it could have gone. I tugged lightly at the knife and the skin broke and the white hairs bloodless. The knife low and parallel to the cut, my fist lower against that belly, keeping everything at the surface, and as the hide parted a few inches the guts swelled into the gap, fragile membranes, slick and pooling in the light but I was partially blinded by that sun and worried I wouldn’t see the tip catching a membrane, so I slipped my left hand in below the knife, fingers caressing the entrails and riding just beneath muscle, the blade skimming through above.

Ritual. What it does is make the horrifying normal. I was settling in to this gutting already, finding it easy, no longer feeling anything at all for the buck, for the life I had taken. The killing of a few minutes ago already far in the past, shielded. And the men calmed also. No more speaking, only standing in place and watching what they had watched a hundred times before and had themselves performed from the first day they were men.

A ripping sound through muscle and hide, tearing of all that had been woven together, the blade sharp and able to slide along that surface. An opening of all that had been concealed, the inner workings in each of us, a man not so different from a buck. Opening until the sternum, rib cage, brisket, end of the cut.

I wiped my knife on his hide and resheathed it, and then I opened that belly, both hands pulling the muscle away, dark cavern of heat and steam and walls of blood and bone, and it should have spilled out toward me, but the buck’s belly was facing uphill and this would not work.

I grabbed his hind legs and stood with one foot on the stock of my rifle, to keep it pinned. I swung those legs straight into the sky and then heaved against them and this time the buck could not twist against me. This time I rolled him, hams first and gut and chest, then stepping forward to grab his forelegs and rotating those, too, and pulling at his antlers to flop his head.

I knelt, my back to the sun, the buck and men before me, and as I opened that cavern again all was made iridescent in the last light. The stomach sack the largest orb, green-gray with hints of pearl, the liver a deep red in loaves shaped and set here somehow and impossible. The intestine a yellowish and lumpy tubing. The diaphragm shimmering, thinnest of walls. All sliding toward me, spilling out against my knees. The breath of it.

I used my knife to cut the diaphragm in a large arc, thin sheen falling away to reveal lung and heart and rib, cut the esophagus, and felt in the intestines for the colon, stiff tube, raised this into the light and cut through then ran my hands along it to discharge the dark pellets until all was flat and smooth and empty.

I cut through the large vein and artery that fed the liver, resheathed my knife and reached in close and scooped everything toward me with both arms, gentle shifting of dough, my fingers easing apart membranes, but what was remarkable was how little was attached. These guts living separate from the rest of the body, in their own world. My face against his hide, his scent and sweat mixing with these other vapors, and my arms pulled from this other void unrelated to him.

My hands sliding along the walls, searching, and finally all was smooth and I scooted my knees back and pulled everything onto the dirt.

Save the liver, my grandfather said. Don’t let that liver touch ground.

I made sure those dark red loaves floated on top of the mass that had become a creature entire, its own being. Something dredged up from the ocean, slick and shielded by no more than membranes, brought somehow to this dry slope of burr and thorn. Intestines like tentacles.

I would leave it here, and it would dry and pucker at the surface and deflate and be torn apart and eaten by coyotes and ants and everything else, but I knew that first I would have to eat part of the liver. I would have the first bite. I looked up and could see all three men waiting. Turned gold-red by the sunset, their faces no longer white, the landscape bled into them. My grandfather with his rifle held low now in one hand, no longer at his shoulder. Face creased and unreadable, gone, soulless, only waiting.

I cut away a hunk with my knife, a hunk the size of my fist. It had to be enough to fill a hand. How did I know that rule, and was it even a rule? Or was it a discovery repeated in each of us, inevitable?

I knelt before that buck, before the men, and lifted raw liver to my mouth. Still hot as I bit down through, and no resistance, only hot mush that tasted of blood. I could feel myself retching but held it back and chewed and swallowed and bit again and thought of the dead man, thought of eating his liver and could feel the bile rising, my chest and throat convulsing, but I held it in and swallowed again and could taste the inside of every man and beast, could taste that we are made of the same things forgotten and ancient beyond reckoning from when the first creatures crawled from the soup. Taste of seawater and afterbirth in my mouth, reminder of where we came from. And why hadn’t I done this when I killed the poacher? It was the same. Everything was the same, and I should have tasted his liver and then his heart.

I mashed what was left of the liver into my mouth and made myself finish it. Poison catcher. A taste I wasn’t sure would ever leave.

The sun gone down, in shadow now but still reddish, the men waiting. I had the heart still to eat.

Torn diaphragm sagging in remnants, lungs frothy looking, orange tinge to the red. As if our breath were foam, a reminder again of the sea, of our origins. And the heart hanging in place rigid and marbled in white, a thousand miniature designs reaching upward across its surface, every thread of muscle and blood and fat.

I grabbed this heart in one hand, tough and rubbery, same size and shape as a human heart, no different. My other hand holding the knife, reaching upward inside to find the large arteries and veins and cut through, vines in a forest enclosed. Severing all, and more blood, endless blood, running out now hot over my fingers. I pulled the heart free, held it in the open air and turned it over to drain onto the dirt, blood heavy and thick and pooling in the dust.

Domination. To hold a heart in the air still warm and take a bite from it. Proof that all was created for us, for our use. An assertion repeated and echoing through time.

I sank my teeth into the wall of that heart and it was so slick and rubbery I had to push it hard against my face. My teeth not made for this, not sharp enough, so I shook my head as I bit, tore at the muscle. My knife dropped and the heart held in both hands, and I was made a beast again, eyes closed and jaw working and the taste of blood and flesh in my mouth.

Now you’re a man, my grandfather said.

Now you’re a man, my father said.

I let that heart drop and roll away and I chewed until I could swallow, and I felt my life had begun. Eleven years old and now a man, blood all down the front of me. The sun fallen and the shadows darkening and the night a great embrace, a connecting of all things.