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Stories
by Rick Bass
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“Well, let’s do it right,” the elder said. “Come with us back down to
the house and we’ll get some warm water and towels, a saw and ax and a
come-along.
” He squinted at her, more curious than u
nkind. “What did you
intend to do, after shooting this animal?” he asked.
Jyl patted her hip. “I’ve got a pocketknife,” she said. Both brothers
looked at each other and then broke into incredulous laughter, with tears
coming to the eyes of the younger one.
“Might I see it?” the younger one asked when he could catch his
breath, but the querulous civility of his question set his brother off to laughing
again —they both broke into guffaws — and when Jyl showed them her little
folding pocketknife, it was too much for them and they nearly dissolved. The
younger brother had to lean against the truck and daub at his rheumy eyes
with a bandanna, and the morning was still so cold that some of the tears
were freezing in his eyelashes, which had the effect, in that morning sunlight,
of making him look delicate.
Both men wore gloves, and they each took the right one off to
shake hands with her and to introduce himself: Bruce, the younger, Ralph,
the elder.
“Well, congratulations,” Ralph said, grudgingly.
“He is a big damn
animal.
”
“Your first, I reckon,” said Bruce as he shook her hand — she was
surprised by the softness of it, almost a tenderness — Ralph’s had been
more like a hardened flipper, arthritic and knotted with muscle — and he
smiled.
“You won’t ever shoot one bigger than this,” he said.
They rode down to their cabin in the truck, Jyl sitting between
them — it seemed odd to her to just go off and leave the animal lying there in
the field — and on the way there, they inquired tactfully about her life:
whether she had a brother who hunted, or a father, or even a boyfriend.
They
asked if her mother was a hunter and it was her turn to laugh.
“My father used to hunt,” she said, and they softened a bit further.
They made a big breakfast for her — bacon cut from hogs they
had raised and slaughtered, and fried eggs from chickens they likewise kept,
and cathead biscuits, and a plate of delicate pork chops (both men were as
lean as matchsticks, and Jyl marveled at the amount of work the two old
boys must have performed daily, to pour through such fuel and yet have none
of it cling to them) — and after a couple of cups of black coffee, they
gathered up the equipment required for dissembling the elk and drove back
up on the hill. The frost was burning off the grass and the day was warming
so that they were able to work without their jackets. Jyl was struck by how
different the brothers seemed, once they settled into their work: not quite
aggressive, but forceful with their efficiency. And even though they were
working more slowly than usual, in order to explain to her the why and what
of their movements, things still seemed to unfold quickly.
In a way, it seemed to her that the elk was coming back to life
and expanding, even in its diminishment and unloosening, the two old men
leaning into it like longshoremen, with Jyl helping them, laboring to roll the
beast over on its back, and inverting the great head with the long daggered
antlers, which now, upended, sank into the freshly furrowed earth like some
mythic harrow fashioned by gods, and one that only certain and select
mortals were capable of using, or allowed to use.
And once they had the elk overturned, Ralph emasculated it with
his skinning knife, cutting off the ponderous genitals quickly and tossing
them farther into the field, with no self-consciousness; it was merely the work
that needed doing. And with that same large knife (the handle of which was
made of elk antler) he ran the blade up beneath the taut skin from crotch to
breastbone while Bruce kept the four legs splayed wide, to give Ralph room
to work.
Copyright © 2006 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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