Content Warning: Depictions of hunting and the death of wild animals

Light Pours From Their Wounds

The Asher farm had been in the family for generations, but when the old woman died it was put up for sale as four separate lots. The following spring a man from Columbus, Ohio, bought them all, more than eight hundred acres total. Everyone wondered what the new owner, Richard Marsh, planned to do with the rambling property. Most of it was steep woodlands with a sprinkling of small overgrown fields that had not seen a plow in at least two decades. It wasn’t good for much other than logging, or drilling for oil and gas. Surprisingly, Marsh wanted to live there. He’d recently sold his prosperous manufacturing company to a foreign investor and was realizing his dream of retiring early to a quiet, remote place where he could pursue his passion for landscape photography.

Wasting little time in establishing himself, he hired a local man named Bill Lamb, who ran a part-time excavating business, to haul off the junk cars and the derelict farming equipment. He also had him brush-hog the decades worth of tangle the previous owner, Wilhemina Asher, had permitted to thrive in her last years. Thick wild-grape vines and prickly field roses had advanced like an army, invading the lawn and nearly swallowing the simple two-story farmhouse, which had been greatly neglected. The gutters sagged, the chimney was crumbling, hornets had nested in the peak. Parts of the soffit were rotted and lengths of the facia were sprung. Most of the paint had flaked off the lap siding, leaving the structure with a drab, gray appearance that absorbed light on even the sunniest days. Wilhemina had had windows boarded over and room after room closed until, at the end of her life, she and a platoon of nearly feral cats existed solely in three first-floor rooms.

Why she had converted the house into a kind of bunker and lived there as a recluse until her death was a mystery. Some posited that age had addled her mind. The source of this conjecturing was a group of about half a dozen retired men who gathered regularly at the century-old general store in Deersville, a nearby hamlet situated off a narrow state route. In the late 1700s the road had been a pathway used by German missionaries to venture into the interior of the Ohio country to convert the native Delawares to Christianity, an effort that led to the tragic slaughter of nearly one hundred of the peaceful converts at Gnadenhutten in 1782. The general-store gossips were known as the Judges for their opinionated observations and supposed sagacity regarding local lore and history, though many derided them as cranks and busybodies. The Judges conducted “court” daily in a dingy back corner of the store, where seated at a small round table they sipped their coffee and tea, and meditatively stroked their white beards as they held forth. Shortly after his arrival, Marsh came in one morning to buy eggs and attempted to make conversation with them. It was an awkward exchange. Behind their veneer of amiability, he suspected they were critically assessing him, weighing his manner and dress as grist for future conversation in his absence. Here was the rich city man, the outsider, the picture-taker, with his foreign SUV, his high-blown style of talking and his appalling ignorance of the true way of things in this part of the world.

Marsh engaged a contractor to renovate the farmhouse and the work was completed by late July. Aside from fixes to the exterior, the deplorable state of the house’s interior also was addressed. The furnace was replaced, cat-soiled carpeting removed and the maple flooring beneath it sanded and refinished until it gleamed with a golden radiance. Layers of cheap paneling and stained wallpaper were peeled off. The horsehair plaster walls were repaired and painted an egg-shell white. New appliances were installed. Marsh took a minimalist approach to decorating, resulting in a sparely furnished residence whose rooms echoed hollowly when you walked through them. After engaging Bill Lamb to stay on as caretaker, Marsh began living there. He invited his wife, Portia, to accompany him, but she declined. A successful corporate attorney, she had a thriving practice in Columbus, about a hundred miles from the farm, and found the quietude and isolation of the country boring. They agreed that she would continue to reside in their spacious condo in a high-rise overlooking the city and would visit his country hermitage, as she called it, on those weekends when her schedule permitted. It was an acceptable arrangement. Although Marsh and his wife enjoyed a companionable marriage, each of them valued their independence.

As he settled in, he found that despite the improvements — particularly the new paint and the varnished floors — there remained a hint of a disagreeable odor. He attributed it to the cats kept by Wilhemina. Several of the wildish creatures haunted the place, prowling around outside at night and meowing plaintively. Another issue was the hornets. After some difficulty an exterminator had succeeded in removing the large nest in the eave. Yet the insects still routinely patrolled the property, making lazy swoops and circles around the house and occasionally thrusting their thumb-sized bodies against the windows as if they wanted in. At times, as he sat on the porch reading, one or two would dart menacingly at his head.

Marsh spent most of his days at the farm outside. With his camera bag slung across his shoulder, he roamed the fields and woods of his holdings, photographing whatever stirred him. He was fascinated by the painterly quality of light that infused the abandoned landscape and the way fog curled and writhed atop it. He delighted in the property’s riot of vegetation, its shadowy ravines, broad wetlands and tangled coverts that remained gloomy even beneath the midday sun. Though he’d photographed in some of the world’s most exotic locales, he’d never been as inspired as he was here. A mysterious, doomed atmosphere cloaked the place. He would become engrossed in his explorations, forgetting about photography for a time and taking long naps lying along a meandering stream or with his back resting against the trunk of a girthy old tree in the middle of a meadow as cicadas buzzed hypnotically in the shimmering afternoon heat. Time seemed altered here. Individual moments assumed a crystalline sharpness, like a stag beetle preserved in amber; whereas, minutes, hours and days continually unraveled, losing their structure and dominion.

He was stunned at how strong his sense of ownership became. When Portia suggested he convert the property to a photographers’ retreat, he emphatically rejected the idea. The notion of strangers setting foot on it repelled him. He had Bill post no trespassing signs around the perimeter. In his slow, reticent way, the caretaker tried to tell him the locals wouldn’t like it, and his prediction proved correct. Many of the signs were subsequently torn down or blasted with shotguns, infuriating Marsh. He refused to surrender to this petty criminality and ordered them replaced. The Judges determined that Marsh was within his rights to post his property, even if his doing so wasn’t neighborly. His actions, they found, were remindful of old Octavius Asher, Wilhemina’s father, who had harbored a pack of vicious dogs that roamed freely and were a bane to hunters and foot-travelers for many years.

Marsh purchased topographical maps of the property and hung them on the dining room wall. When he wasn’t out wandering, he would study the charts with a six-inch diameter magnifying glass. The place was crisscrossed with logging roads, tractor trails and meandering deer paths. There were also abandoned fence lines with scraps of rusty barbed wire affixed to weathered locust posts, delineations of ownership by long-dead owners whose entitlements were forgotten or rendered irrelevant by succeeding possessors, as he supposed his own claim would one day be.

During one of his outings, he chanced upon a tiny pioneer cemetery situated on a knoll where it had been hidden for decades by a thicket of stunted buckthorns and spikey honey locusts. Thrilled at its presence, he directed Bill to restore the burying ground. The caretaker balked at the assignment, but Marsh insisted. With the aid of a nephew, Bill spent several days chain-sawing and chopping away brush and trees. It was difficult labor, and risky too. A den of copperheads required careful removal, as well as a hornets’ nest the size of a football. Bill and his nephew hauled the slash to a nearby field and set it alight. The resulting blaze produced thick, oily smoke that was visible for miles and attracted crows. The birds winged in from all directions, cawing raucously. Their racket continued most of the day and was so unusual that it became a topic of conversation. People came out of their houses to stare at the sky and listen; they telephoned neighbors. The crows’ appearance was chewed over by the Judges who couldn’t agree on an explanation.

Marsh found the reclaimed burying ground an ideal location to photograph. There were about a dozen graves. The tombstones, many tilted and garlanded with green and orange lichen, were the tablet style from the 1800s with carvings of winged skulls and clasping hands. Most of the graves were of those of Ashers, whose history in the region dated back to the first white settlement. Portia made charcoal rubbings of the markers and displayed them in their condo in the city. They were a hit at a dinner party she arranged and which Marsh reluctantly left the farm to attend. It was fortunate he did. During the affair he was called upon to perform a Heimlich on Portia’s law partner when a martini olive lodged in her throat as she examined one of the rubbings.

Shortly after the cemetery was reclaimed, Portia and Marsh experienced a change in their sex life. Being well into middle age, their intimacy had waned in recent years. But they suddenly found their passion rekindled whenever she week-ended with him. Their coupling became adventurous in ways it had never been before. One day they concluded a picnic at the cemetery with a session that ended with their lying side-by-side, naked and sweating on the blanket, laughing at themselves.

“It must be the country air,” said Portia. Flapping her hand toward a nearby gravestone, she wondered aloud whether they were being irreverent.

“I’d say they appreciate it, ” Marsh said.

She turned her face toward him, eyebrows arched. “Oh? And are they watching?

“Who knows? They could be.”

Portia giggled and modestly placed her hands over her breasts.

As the summer waned, Marsh continued to work diligently. He would rise at first light without the aid of an alarm, slurp a cup of black coffee and bolt out the door with his lunch in his pack as the sun crept above the surrounding hills. In the evenings he would sit at his computer and sort and edit his photographs.

Aside from Portia’s company, his only other companionship was provided by Bill. Although they had little in common, Marsh was intrigued by his taciturn caretaker. Several times he had attempted to photograph him from a distance as he brush-hogged a field or stood silhouetted against the sky, smoking a cigarette. He never was satisfied with the resulting images. It was as if the man could not be captured in two dimensions. Once or twice a week, they would sit on the porch at day’s end and sip Marsh’s single-malt scotch from crystal tumblers. While the two men drank, they played chess. Marsh fancied himself a capable player, yet Bill, who moved his pieces in a clumsy, distracted manner, like a child who’s only recently learned the game, routinely defeated him. Marsh tried to be a good sport about it, although it irked him, getting whipped by the hired help. One evening after Bill had captured his queen and the game was all but over, Marsh related something he’d seen a couple of nights before.

“It was nearly dark and I was taking the tractor path out of the woods, when I happened to look over my shoulder and saw a man following me. He was a ways off. Fog was gathering. I could barely make him out other than to see that he appeared to be wearing a top hat.”

“A top hat?” Bill repeated. “You mean like Abe Lincoln?”

“Well … yeah, I suppose. Anyway, I stopped, figuring I’d let him catch up with me. But he stopped, too, and we both stood there, about fifty yards apart, staring at one another. I shouted hello. Only, he didn’t respond. Something about it made the hair on my neck prick up.”

Bill regarded him in a closed manner, leaving Marsh uncertain as to what he was thinking.

“So then what happened?”

“Nothing happened. The fog settled in and I lost sight of him.”

“Humpf,” Bill grunted after about a minute of silence during which he toyed with Marsh’s captured queen, manipulating the piece with his thick, hard fingers as moths flitted around the yellow porch light.

“Humpf? That’s all you have to say?”

Bill waggled the hand grasping the chess piece. “Probably somebody out for a walk. People around here aren’t real respectful of signage, as you already know.”

“What about the top hat? I mean, who wears a top hat?”

“Are you sure about that part?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m positive. It was almost dark and he was far off. It seemed like it, though.”

“Seemed like it.”

Marsh felt a flare of embarrassment. It had been a mistake sharing the story. “You’re probably right. He knew he was trespassing and when he saw me he took off.”

Bill nodded encouragingly.

“Listen,” Marsh went on, “don’t repeat this to anyone.” Although he didn’t say as much, he didn’t want it getting back to the Judges.

There were no more sightings of the mysterious trespasser and after a few days, Marsh put him out of his mind and returned his attention fully to his photography. He was convinced he was doing his best work ever.

“It’s funny,” he told Portia during one of her visits. They were in the kitchen, drinking wine while he made carbonara. “I’m not even thinking about what I’m shooting. I’m simply bringing the camera up and there’s the picture. I’m working entirely by instinct.”

Taking a sip of her chilled chardonnay, Portia said, “You should publish a book of your photographs. Call it ‘Asher Farm’.”

Marsh loved the idea and went about his work with more enthusiasm than ever. One bright morning in early October he was walking along an overgrown logging road near the back of his property when he happened upon a woman in her late twenties. Dressed in a hunter’s camouflaged garb, she was kneeling as she field-dressed a deer. Light glistened off a pile of steaming viscera alongside the carcass, which she’d split from chest to groin. A bow and a quiver of arrows were propped against a nearby poplar. Either she hadn’t heard him approach or had heard and had chosen to ignore him. A suggestion of insolence in her posture made him suspect the latter.

Marsh stormed over. “What the hell are you doing!”

Not only was she trespassing, she’d killed a deer on his land. He considered hunting a cruel and backward activity, although around here it bore the ritual significance of a religious holiday. He assumed that his confronting her would put her on the defensive, only it didn’t. Bloody knife in hand, she slowly rose from the deer and regarded him evenly.

“Hello,” she said, gazing calmly at his clenched face.

Taken aback by her casual manner, he again demanded to know what she was doing. With the hand that clasped the knife, she gestured toward the carcass, as if it was obvious.

“But this place is posted. Didn’t you see the signs? I know you did.”

“I saw them,” she said as she deliberately wiped the blood-soaked knife on her pants, first one side of the blade, then the other.

“Yet here you are. This is my property,” he added, aware that he’d just said as much. Still, he felt compelled to underscore this simple, overarching fact.

“And you say this because you have a deed? A piece of paper locked in a safe deposit box?”

“That’s how it works,” he snapped.

“What about this deer? Does it belong to you too?”

Suddenly baffled, Marsh didn’t know what to say.

A smile ghosted her lips. “I’m not much of a believer in owning land,” she said with a sweep of her hand. “Besides, it was all stolen from the Indians.”

“Indians? That’s absurd!” He was finding it difficult to maintain his anger in the face of her coolness. Her appearance was striking. Just under six feet tall, she was broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and sported the rangy, athletic build of an open-water swimmer. Her wheat-colored hair was pulled tightly back from her face, streaked with swatches of camouflage paint. Her green eyes met his with a disconcerting frankness. It was easy to picture her sighting in on her prey; she rarely missed, he surmised.

She shoved away a few strands of hair. “You’re Richard Marsh.”

“You know my name?” This caught him off-guard. Suddenly he was convinced he’d overreacted. “I hope my reputation around here isn’t too bad.”

She shrugged. “Depends on who you talk to.”

He managed a grin. “I see.” He could only imagine what the Judges had been saying about him, then was irked at himself for caring.

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t put much stock in gossip.”

“Good to hear. You have me at a disadvantage, though. You are?”

“Dee Blevins. My mother is an Asher.”

“Oh?”

“I visited this property often as a child. Wilhemina was my great-aunt, which makes this my ancestral land. You could argue I have a right to be hunting here.”

“Nice try, but bullshit.”

They laughed.

He turned his attention to the slain deer. Vapor arose from the still-warm body. Not long ago it had been a living creature. Walking. Eating. Shitting. Pissing. Had it any presentiment of what was about to happen to it? Do any of us? He was struck by the corpse’s absolute stillness, its vacancy; in it, he glimpsed his own mortality. He had the urge to share his thoughts with Dee, but he was unable to formulate any words that would make sense or wouldn’t fail to come off as pretentious. Instead, he informed her that he rarely spotted any deer on his property.

“You’re not seeing them because they’re hunted,” she said. “It makes them wary.”

“I’d like to take pictures of them.”

“You’d probably have to approach it the same as a hunter would.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’d need to set up in a good spot and wait for them. Ground blinds would be best.”

“Would you show me?” he said.

The request appeared to catch her by surprise. She dipped her chin and touched the side of her face. Deer blood was smeared across the back of her hand. He thought that perhaps he shouldn’t have asked. Maybe it was an imposition, or he was trespassing in some esoteric field of knowledge imparted only to the initiated.

Just when he was certain Dee was about to beg off, she said, “Sure, I guess I could.”

Several mornings later she arrived at his place in her pickup, a gargantuan four-wheel-drive rig with Montana plates and a brush guard sturdy enough to stop a charging bull. The truck towed a trailer. In it was a mud-spattered ATV whose cargo box contained several two-by-fours and a roll of burlap, along with nails, wire and a few hand tools. Accompanying her were two wolfish dogs who regarded Marsh appraisingly with their yellow eyes and shied away when he tried to pet them. As the dogs dozed on the back porch, Marsh and Dee sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking. She began by explaining that concealing himself in a blind wouldn’t be enough. He couldn’t make any noise while he was waiting, and he would need to minimize his scent by showering with special soap and keeping the clothes he was going to wear in a plastic bag stuffed with dead leaves. Where they put the blinds was critical too, she noted. They went to the topo maps he had hung on the wall. Using her hands as she spoke, she talked about terrain and how deer move upon it. In placing the blinds, they would seek out the low sections of ridgelines, the points of land feeding from the high places into the low ones, and the natural funnels created by the narrow sections of woods stretching between open fields. She made dots on the maps with a blue marker to indicate several promising locations. Marsh found himself intrigued; he’d never imagined so much was involved.

Shortly before noon, they set out. The two dogs trotted beside the ATV as it rumbled slowly along with Marsh and Dee sitting side-by-side on the rig’s bench seat, bumping shoulders as they jounced over the uneven terrain. Using the logging roads and tractor trails they got close to the sites she had identified as suitable spots. They parked and carried the tools and materials farther into the woods. Working well into the afternoon, they used the burlap and lumber to construct the frameworks of the blinds and then added sticks and brush to camouflage them. They built three in all. Marsh was fascinated by the structures, appreciating their sculptural form and how they blended with their surroundings.

One of the blinds they established in a small clearing surrounding a boulder the size of a car. Dee said the stone was called Council Rock because it was believed to have been a meeting place for the Delawares who’d once occupied this territory. It had been a local landmark for generations. Incised into its surface were initials and dates stretching back to 1806. Dee related that when she was in high school there was a group of pale girls who habitually dressed in black and fancied themselves witches. The rock was where they gathered.

Laboring together under the autumn sun, they chatted and discovered a shared reverence for the landscape. Dee was trained as a biologist and had recently left her job with the forest service in Montana, returning to the area to care for her ailing mother. She planned to go back as soon as she could. She’d become enamored with the open country of the west; being back in the east made her feel claustrophobic.

As the day progressed it grew unseasonably warm and they stripped off their outer layers. Dee’s proximity and the way her sweat-glossed skin shone and smelled of fresh straw, aroused Marsh. He tried not to let on; after all, he wouldn’t have dreamed of acting on it. Nevertheless, she seemed to sense his desire and responded to it with the mild condescension younger women often exhibit when older men display an amorous interest in them.

Over the phone that evening he told Portia about her. She must have detected something in his voice. “Your woodland vixen puts me in mind of the mythological Diana, goddess of the hunt and of wild animals.”

“She’s not a vixen,” he said, hearing himself sound defensive.

“There’s a story in Ovid of a young hunter becoming enchanted with Diana. She transformed him into a deer, and he was torn to pieces by his own hounds.”

“Very funny.”

“Just saying.”

Following Dee’s instructions, Marsh waited a week to give the deer a chance to become accustomed to the blinds’ presence. When he finally began to use them, he did as she advised, visiting only at dusk, a peak time for deer movement, and using a different one on each outing. He enjoyed settling into the hiding spots, sitting there quietly, feeling his anticipation build as the air chilled and the light drained from the sky. It was as if he were no longer merely visiting the woods but had become a part of them. He became attuned to the twilight sounds of the forest:  the hooting of owls, the pattering of raccoons and possums, the gobbling of turkeys as they roosted for the night. Once, a fox trotted by and he took its picture. Yet for the first two weeks he failed to sight even a single deer. When he informed Dee, she quizzed him on whether he was being cautious about his scent and staying absolutely quiet. He insisted that he was. Then be patient, she advised, they’ll come. She was right. At last, he began seeing them, typically in the moments before dark when they seemed to materialize from the gloaming itself. There was an otherworldly quality to their appearing, and it was thrilling to photograph them, knowing they were unaware of his presence. He felt like a voyeuristic ghost.

At first Marsh was pleased with the grainy images that resulted from his low-light photography. But after his initial successes, he became dissatisfied. The pictures were too ordinary. He desired something dramatic and original. To accomplish this, he began using a flash to photograph the deer after it was fully dark. The outcome was striking. The sudden, blinding light starkly illuminated his subjects as they exploded in alarmed bursts of leaping, twisting flight, a poetry of motion and form. These weren’t the passive postures of deer going about their normal lives, unaware of a human’s presence. He was creating their responses by triggering their instinct for self-preservation and, in doing so, recording instances of absolute wildness. When he proudly showed the results to Dee she regarded them for a long time in silence.

“Don’t you like them?” he asked, trying to mask his disappointment at her muted reaction.

“I’m not sure,” she replied as she continued to study the photos with her chin cradled between her thumb and forefinger.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re taking something.”

“That’s an odd comment, coming from a hunter.”

“What I do is part of an interrelationship between predator and prey that’s been occurring for ages. Deer understand it at some level, I believe. What you’re doing is different.”

Marsh suppressed his annoyance. He suspected that she wished she hadn’t taught him about the deer.

Later, over the phone, he shared with Portia what Dee had said.

“I think I know what she’s getting at,” his wife responded. “It reminds me of those lost tribes you hear about. The ones they find in the jungle who don’t want their pictures taken. Something about stealing their souls.”

“You sound like her.”

Portia sighed. “Oh, I don’t know if I’m saying that, exactly. Listen, I love the photos. They have a memorable, provocative quality. Some people might find them controversial, but they won’t forget them. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “And I’m going to keep taking them.”

During the ensuing weeks Marsh made dozens of flash images of panicked deer. He edited the best ones and emailed the files to his printing service, paying extra for expediting the order and for overnighting back to him the 11-inch-by-14-inch results printed on heavy photographic paper. He matted the photographs and displayed them in simple frames that he hung on the farmhouse’s parlor walls. Drink in hand, he’d stand before the prints in the evening and imagine them in a gallery. He was confident he would achieve even better outcomes if he kept at it.

That’s not what happened, though. The deer’s behavior suddenly changed. They stopped bolting when he triggered the flash and simply stood there, rigidly staring toward the light, which transformed their eyes into glowing orbs. Had they become accustomed to the flash? Were they no longer frightened by it? It occurred to him that perhaps he should stop for a while, but only in passing. He was obsessed with collecting even more compelling images. Yet his subjects’ frustrating docility continued. He considered contacting Dee to ask her thoughts on the matter, but decided against it. Since he’d shown her his photos, a coolness had emerged between them. They talked little now and, when they did, their conversations were stiff and forced.

One moonless night as he waited in the blind at Council Rock, Marsh heard a sound he’d never heard before and hoped never to hear again:  a savage bellowing that echoed through the pitch-black woods at intervals of less than a minute. It reminded him of the tiger he had once heard in a Cambodian jungle during one of his photo safaris. It was the hair-raising sort of caterwauling early humans might have listened to as they huddled in fear about the fire. For Marsh, the effect was equally terrifying. Fortunately, the cries ceased after a few minutes. Had they continued much longer, he might have fled headlong into the darkness, not halting until he reached the house. Afterward, the woods were preternaturally still, as if every creature in them had been as petrified as he. Eventually, the normal night-time rustlings of the woods recommenced. Near midnight, three does moved in and he triggered the flash. The same dull photos resulted.

The following morning he rose early; he hadn’t slept well. Trying in his sunny kitchen to fully recall the previous night’s eerie roaring was difficult. He began to doubt what he’d heard and wished he’d had the presence of mind to record the cries with his phone. If he heard them again, he would.

Stubbornly, he continued to visit his blinds. Arming himself with even more flash equipment, he reasoned a brighter detonation would shake the deer from their passivity. He used this new method on half a dozen outings, only it made no difference. If anything, their tameness became even more pronounced. One night, two of them tentatively approached his blind after the flashes went off, putting him in mind of deer in an animal park begging visitors for food. That evening, sitting in front of the fire with a scotch, he finally made up his mind to abandon the deer photos and be happy with what he had already captured. He could begin again in the spring. By then the deer likely would be back to their former selves.

The next morning, with the morning sun having cleared the hills and the ground crusted with a heavy autumnal frost, he went out with the aim of resuming his landscape photography. He entered the woods along one of the twisting tractor paths leading into a narrow valley. From there, he traced the bank of a shallow stream that took him near the Council Rock blind. He had intended to walk by, but something made him pause. The air bore a biting tang he could taste, as if he were holding pebbles in his mouth. There was a musky animal odor as well. Puzzled, he left the pathway and passed through a thin grove of trees, his footsteps crunching the frosty leaves as he proceeded uncertainly, heeding some inner voice. He entered the opening dominated by the boulder. Next to it stood his blind, appearing neglected, like the abandoned hovel of a primitive woods-dweller. The ascending sun glinted off the top of Council Rock, producing brilliant shards of light that made him squint. He shifted his gaze toward the ground, still in shadow. There he saw about half a dozen deer whose heads and limbs had been violently separated from the trunks of their bodies. Frost clung to their fur and stood on their eyeballs. Everywhere, dark, congealed blood lay pooled. He stood there for several minutes. The sight filled him the way a hard rain fills a buried cistern. Returning in a stupor to the house, he sat in the kitchen, listening to the clock tick and the refrigerator cycle on and off. Uncertain what to do, he phoned Dee.

When she arrived, he guided her to the place and she stared at the scene with a look of revulsion and incomprehension. Moving among the carnage, she paused here and there to kneel and place her palm on the ravaged parts, touching the cold flesh almost reverentially, the way you might bestow a blessing.

“Was it a pack of dogs? Coyotes maybe?” suggested Marsh.

Not looking at him, Dee slowly shook her head.

“What about a person? One of these hillbillies around here, pissed off because I posted the land.”

She seemed not to hear the question. Rising mechanically to her feet, she continued to study the deer. He began to say something else when she suddenly swiveled her face toward his. Her eyes, boring into his own, were wet and her face was contorted with anger. He took a step back.

“You don’t get it, do you?” she said.

“Don’t get what?”

“This is your fault. You made this happen.”

——————–

Later, Bill used his front-loader to transport the carcasses to a spot behind the barn where a pig-sty had once been. A cigarette dangling from his lip, his face as inexpressive as ever, the caretaker gouged a pit in the dark friable soil with a back-hoe. Into it, he shoved the stiffened remains and covered them. Marsh forced himself to watch as vultures wheeled overhead.

After the slaughter he was unable to return to the woods. He drank too much and ate too little. He reached out to Dee. He wanted to tell her he understood, but his understanding was a slippery thing. He’d think he had it, but then he didn’t. A veil would descend. No matter; she refused to answer his calls or respond to his texts. Bill told him she’d returned to Montana.

Portia was shocked about what happened. Apologetically, she explained that she would join him, but she was busy with preparations for an important trial. Getting away, even on the weekends, was difficult for her. She tried to persuade him to return to Columbus. He emphatically refused, finding the idea of leaving physically jolting.

He stopped going outside and began shuffling through the house in his stocking feet, unshaven and wrapped in a thick cardigan. November arrived and, with it, fierce storms and cold, bleak days. He took photographs through the windows, recording the changes in light and shadow, mood and tone. He took down the framed prints of the deer and placed them in the house’s dirt-floored cellar, leaning them against a wall of damp hand-laid stone. Afterward, he could sense the creatures’ presence beneath the floor. He imagined them huddled in the darkness below, reanimated, no longer in ragged pieces but whole.

Bill was his sole visitor. They would sit in the kitchen and play chess. When Marsh asked him his explanation for the slaughter, he rubbed his broad face and spooled out a long story about how, when he was a boy, a dozen of his grandfather’s cattle had been killed at once in a single lightning strike.

Sleep became difficult. One night he was awakened by someone downstairs, stepping deliberately with footfalls that produced a gritty noise on the hardwood flooring, as if the intruder wore muddy boots. When Marsh heaved himself out of bed to investigate, the sound abruptly ceased. He went downstairs but no one was there. He switched on the light and lowered himself to the floor. Holding his face inches from its surface, he inspected for grit and found none. From then on he began sleeping on a cot in the parlor and obsessively mopping the floors, swearing that he could feel grit beneath his socks. He took to keeping an axe propped against the wall next to him, though, in time, its proximity became more unnerving than the possibility of the intruder’s return, so he put it in the closet.

When Portia’s trial finally concluded, she called and proposed they take a trip to Bonaire, one of their favorite Caribbean destinations. They could stay a month. Snorkel, read, laze about. He could make a fresh start with his photography. His refusal alarmed her. He had too much to do, he insisted. When she asked him what, he became angry. Only when she threatened an embarrassing intervention, did he woodenly agree to go.

Marsh left and never returned.

Perched in their gloomy, out-of-the-way corner of the general store, the Judges proposed theories about what happened, although they never quite fit and would leave them them squinting owlishly into the distance, scratching their wooly necks like tribal elders or peering into their Styrofoam coffee cups as if an answer might be divined on their liquid surfaces.

One day that winter Bill came into the store and shook snowflakes from his shoulders. In his frayed and patched chore coat, he carried the queen from the chess set he and Marsh had used. He often found himself reaching into his pocket and tracing its contours, recalling their games and how the moves and patterns were present even before the first pawn was advanced. To him, the pieces possessed a flesh-and-blood materiality as they navigated the charmed landscape of the board while he hovered god-like above, his presence felt but not seen. Removing a liter of Mountain Dew from the cooler he tucked it under his arm and selected a Moon Pie from the display case near the ancient cash register. The wood flooring groaned under his weight.

From their dark corner, one of the Judges deferentially asked his view on what had occurred at Asher farm. Bill stared at them and said nothing. The Lambs, like the Ashers, were among the old families of the region, and the long history of those generations, much of it ruinous, stood behind his gaze. The silence between them expanded, becoming so spacious it could hold anything. Though he had foreseen the inquiry, Bill had no intention of answering it. Their knowing would not save them.

THE END

 

About the Author

Mick Leigh is a writer from the Midwest who has worked as a print journalist, copywriter and technical writer. His fiction often deals with nature, particularly its dark, mythical side. His work has been published in The Broadkill Review, The Rockvale Review and New Reader Magazine.