Allegheny Front

MATES

THE DEER’S HAUNCH SHIVERED IN THE crosshairs. The hide was winter’s gray, and the air didn’t feel like November. Cold had come early this year, indifferent as the sharpest scythe.

The haunch moved: a doe. Crosshairs swung after.

Revealing the white underthroat that men seldom see, she balanced artfully on hind legs to pluck the wine-dark fruit hanging in the sumac. Her weight tugged off a fist of berries. Each bone-colored limb quivered in the air. Snow sifted down, snow that would be gone by noon.

Sull Mercer eased the.270 into the cleft of his shoulder and took a rest off one knee. His rifle was scoped with a 3x9 Leupold — an expensive piece of equipment — but Sull would have told you it was anything but a luxury. It found the tuck behind the doe’s shoulder, that corridor to heart and lung. When she passed into a notch between shagbarks, a chance would flicker. For three decades now, this rifle had been comfort in his hands — the bolt worn smooth of its checkering, the burled walnut dark with weather and age. A twig popped under his shifting heel. No more than the crack of a finch’s bone.

The doe stamped a foot. Moments ticked by. She performed an elaborate dance, dropping her head and bobbing it up, then back down again and on and on, ears switching, goading him to move. She was an old doe, barren now, and knew threat by its first name. If the flag of Sull’s face rustled in the greenbriers, she’d crash through the brush. He held.

His wife craved the liver. He pictured the doe bearing it to them in her body, a gift.

She took a step, with a slight slew-footed twist of the foreleg. Sull flinched. He knew this deer! Before his son Eric had gone to the penitentiary, Sull helped stalk her at the abandoned quarry, where she’d bedded with a lone fawn. This dance had saved her life then. Eric was young, impatient. He tossed four careening shots as she ran. A wild clean miss, each one. It was everything Sull told him not to do. All three sons had learned it over the years, a psalm: One cartridge, one kill. The rest is just slop. In a voice chilly as spring water, Sull had told him, “You work that bolt like an automatic, don’t you? Maybe they drafted the wrong one of you.”

Eric didn’t speak to him after that. It made Sull bite his lip to think it now. But Sull was calm, even as the doe’s stormy eyes slid over his body. He’d killed enough deer to hang every hook in a slaughterhouse, and few things excited him now that his children had gone on. The doe put forth a tentative hoof. The crosshairs leapt and a peal of thunder rattled the woods. Wrens vanished from the sumac into that pure balance: receding echoes, an expanding silence.

A fox had taken five of the Rockinghams Sull raised as a crib against lean winter months. They didn’t need the hens, really, with the grocery selling them on the cheap, but he nursed their absence like a blister. The thought of a deer hanging — the lactic acid breaking down, the meat’s surface curing to a glossy black rind — made him feel confident in his sustenance.

She didn’t travel a yard. The bullet had ripped a wet socket through the heart, and the doe collapsed as if her knees had turned to stove ash. Hind legs kicked convulsively, brooming leaves. Sull kept the scope on her as she seized, then thumbed on the safety when death was sure. Approaching, he checked his pocket for the familiar heft of the Schrade. She was hoary with age across the muzzle and shanks. Nicked, scalloped hooves. A fleeting regret: perhaps he should have killed something tender and young. Her muskiness drifted up to him. The body had a catatonic beauty, a still life. The exit wound, a slight red star, told a perfect shot. Shame no one else would see it. Marion would be happy for the liver, though, and maybe the twins would come down from Michigan to hunt Thanksgiving. After their discharges, Joel first and Jeffrey eight months later, they had found good union jobs in an auto plant and married Midwestern women about as quick as boys can find them. Sull and Marion couldn’t blame them. Anyone here with any ambition did the same. Ambition, they all said, chewing the word.

Sull was pleased and sad the hunt had ended so early, but it would give him time that evening to open the gilt-edged King James and glean its comfort. But the day itself comforted more. A windless cold, the kind that keens the senses and brings a gift of ice to the lungs. He’d have Marion write about the doe in her letter to Eric. After pulling the doe onto a rotten quilt of snow, Sull shucked gloves and jacket and rolled his sleeves. He gutted as if he were trying to ration motion itself. After years of fieldwork, he performed the ritual with surgical efficiency. The heart belched a ragged last beat. He fished out a rope, tied it round her neck, and quartered uphill. Innards left her body with a wet sigh and steamed. Arms gloved in blood, he plucked leaves off her eyes and mouth and smoothed the fur tenderly. Pooling blood began to congeal and maroon. He rubbed snow on his knife and hands. Foxes would find the gut-pile and stick their muzzles into the rich leavings, all the way up to their eyeballs. They would eat the pink snow itself. Then buzzards, considerately stripping earth of the dead.

Dragging the body, he thought of his hens. No tracks printed on the raked earth, no cabbage-sized hole marring the drywall. After three nights yawning with a snake-charmer.410 in his arms, Sull dug the rusty leg-hold traps out of the attic, a pair of size two double-coilsprings and a big Newhouse Three. The hinges ached. With a steel brush, he brought iron back to life and nursed the springs with beeswax in the worst, twangiest spots. He baited them with meat scraps, which shriveled untouched till they resembled dried mushrooms. This fox was awful.

A grouse flushed from an upturned washing machine. Snow gave way to leaves and a dump where greenbrier stitched the work of generations: bald tires and log-chains rusted into solid piles, gallon jugs and stripped sedans. He skidded the deer onto a logging road that died into the slope behind his house. Pausing to catch his breath, he saw the silhouette of a great dark hawk that lit on the electric pole near the drive. It shook its vast wings of parasites and tucked them back. Sull’s face grew hot. Dead hens. No tracks. He’d been a fool.

He dropped the rope and leaned into his shot. When he pulled the trigger, the hawk stiffened and fell. Sull ran with an old man’s jauntiness and found it buckling in the gravel. Scaly, cadmium talons gripped for empty air like palsied hands. Guard feathers obscured the chest, but his bullet had torn a red void out its back. A wing flapped. Turning the bird over with his boot, he saw it was a mature bald eagle. He grinned. It died then.

With a dull hammer, Sull nailed the eagle to the side of the barn, a derelict creamery, to ward off other predators. The parchment skull gave easily under the sixteen-penny nail, its honed point shining, and the sharp wedge of beak caved to the hammer-blow. He stood back to admire his handiwork. The screen door cracked in its keeper. The pitcher in Marion’s hand was lacy with suds. “You scared me,” she said, with a pinched look. “I dropped a dish.”

“Sorry. I seen this on the light-pole. I shot him. Weren’t no fox. An eagle!” Breathing hard, he wiped his smiling face on a shoulder. Sweat had turned his gray hair the dark, wet sheen of merchant pig-iron.

“You allowed doing that?” she asked.

“Yeah I am,” he said curtly. He spoke through a fixed smile, as he tended to do when flustered. He’d expected her to beam. “Shot us a doe. She’ll eat good. Hose in the garage?”

“Is where it always is. You remember the liver?”

“Shit.”

She flinched at the word. He’d left the tender organ buried in the gut-pile like a precious coin. Marion’s favorite part, if a tad rich for his palate. She had reminded him of it three times. He picked shyly at his hammer-welted fingers. Blood had troughed blackly in the folds of knuckles.

“Want me to fetch it?” Though he knew crows would be playing rowdy by now.

She shaded her face, her pretty gray eyes. “No, no. It’s alright.”

“I want to,” he said, coloring. He was angry at himself, and angry at her. “I’ll run up.”

“Too late anyhow.”

“You want me to shoot another?”

“No. Well, maybe later this year. I’d hate to have one killed just for the liver.”

“We’ll get us one when the twins come. Here, come take a look at this old boy.”

The eagle was huge. Marion put a tentative finger to the claws. A train of blood eased down the whitewashed boards, the fierce yellow gleam draining from its iris. Sull and Marion heard a shrill cry breaking in two parts, then three. The eagle’s mate was banking to the clouds above Fenwick Mountain. As she climbed updrafts on stiff wingbeats, the circle she made grew and grew, expanding like a pupil to the shifting of light.

Eric couldn’t come home. “They’re only allowed a furlough if a close relative dies,” the warden had told them. “That’s state policy. Mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter, God forbid. Guard escorts them the morning of the funeral and brings them back that afternoon. I can tell you’re good church kind of people and I hate telling it to you, but it’s true.”

In the first riot, the warden turned off power and water for ten days. When light shined again, the prisoners were made to carry dead men to the corner of the yard. It was three hundred fifty-two and a half feet long, eighty-two and a half feet wide, and Sull’s son knew every inch. Eric’s crew buried four unclaimed men with crosshairs chasing them like horseflies, rifles leaning from gothic battlements.

Yet Sull had things to give thanks for. Carter and Reed McCulloch would soon come for buck season, taking the same stands they did every year. The hollow where he shot the doe was only half a mile from his house. A low ridge off Fenwick Mountain, footed there like a foal to its mare. Coastal Timber owned the thousand-acre tract, letting oaks grow upward to the saw, but Sull knew the land better than any company surveyor. He’d learned the place from his father and Uncle Aubrey, memorizing trees as one does a prayer book. Despite the yellow POSTED signs, no one meddled with him there, at least not for now, though he did come across others, like the young grouse-hunter working his brace of bird dogs like a currycomb through the rough pelt of mountainside. What could he say? Was it his place to run people off? He feared others. On a whim, they could take the place away from him, make it theirs. There would be no room for him, or those like him.

Marion reminded him of the McCullochs’ visit at supper, after they had speculated on the habits of eagles. Sull Mercer and snaggletoothed Carter McCulloch sprung from the same tintype great-grandmother, a mad seamstress from Anthem who wore a celluloid visor against the sun and a human molar set in a ring — she said it belonged to the jawbone of Thomas Jefferson. Beyond blood, Carter was Sull’s best and oldest friend. In their youth, they had been the most talented poachers of their generation, jacklighting bucks, exploding trout streams with bottles of carbolic acid and netting the astonished catch as they bobbed to the surface, air bladders ruptured. One Veterans Day they creeled 123 native brook trout from Whitehorse Run. The legal limit was six. Fried them popping with ramps and potatoes and ate them from the skillet like smelt, bone and eye and all, till the boys passed out gorged and greasy round the fire-ring. Half the fish they left for raccoons to have a holiday. Sull always laughed to his wife how goofy it was Carter grew up to be a game warden. What’s writ for you in the Book of Life, you never know.

“Yes, the McCullochs are good people,” Sull told her, “but they’re not sons, they’re not blood in that sort of way.” Marion said it was too bad their own boys couldn’t find good jobs around here like Reed did, or Carter did before him.

Sull and Marion argued after that. But he did remember to make a promised phone call.

Reed McCulloch, Carter’s boy, coasted into the drive the next morning in his dime-bright Chevy. He was a young lawyer, and all the country people did business through him. When Eric got in trouble, Reed had found the Mercers a fine criminal lawyer, though it did them no good. No one could have talked judge and jury out of a Moundsville sentence for their son.

Sull was welding a broken bed-frame for the boy. He wondered how the hell you could break a thing like that, but when Reed’s fiancée climbed out of the truck, he had a pretty good notion. “Hey there, who’s this good-looking woman you brung me?”

Reed grinned. “Miranda, this is Uncle Sull. He’s the last of the mountaineers.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” she said, tipping her face to Sull in a way that made him embarrassed for the green crescents of his fingernails, the licks of uncombed hair curling out from under his oil-stained cap. She came from Marshall County, where the penitentiary was, and her voice was like a Yankee’s, crisp and clipped.

Sull decided not to offer his hand. He gave her a little wave. “Pleased to meet you, miss.” Sull turned to Reed. “How much you paying her?”

She cuffed Sull’s arm and laughed. Fretful hens were milling by their feet.

Reed said, “I’m paying with a new house, by all accounts. We closed on some acreage near the gorge yesterday. Just a speck by the National Forest.”

“Oh yeah? How many acres?”

Reed looked away, to the broken quartzite peak of Fenwick Mountain. The other eagle, maybe? Instinctively, Sull followed his gaze. The mountain still held snow, which had melted off in the valley. Reed tucked his tongue into a cheek. “Three hundred and forty,” he said.

“That’s more than a speck, that’s awful goodly land. Know how little I got here?”

“I’ve hunted every inch of it.” Reed was referring to the Coastal Timber property.

Sull winked at Miranda. “Don’t be too impressed. That’s a bad habit of his, exaggeration. Not so many inches in this place as he’d lead you to believe. He ever tell you a thing like that?”

She blushed. “Don’t mind me,” Sull told her. “Old men just talks like that.”

Reed laughed. “I’d like for you to see the place. Maybe Dad can bring you out.”

“We’ll do it. I haven’t seen him out and about lately.”

“We’re stopping by Mom’s on the way home. I’ll tell him to come see you.”

“Suppose you want that bed-frame.”

“Here, I’ll help you.”

While they carried the frame from the shop, Marion stepped out to meet Miranda. When the women weren’t looking, Reed slipped his father’s friend a folded twenty-dollar bill. Sull tucked it into his watchpocket. Reed asked, “Are the twins hunting with us this year?”

“’Deed I don’t know. Say it depends on their vacation. Joel had him a baby this spring.”

“I hope they come. It’s been a couple years.”

“GM works them pretty hard up there.”

Marion was giving Miranda an apron full of late apples that shined as if they’d been lacquered. Side-by-side, the pair struck Sull about as unalike as women can be, though he knew it wasn’t fair to think that way. One night he and Marion heard Eric talking on the phone in the living room when he came home drunk. “If that redneck slut looks at me like that one more time, I’ll put her eyes out. I swear to God, I’ll do it with my own hands.” Eric was talking about his girlfriend. They’d never heard him so much as cuss. In the twilight of their room, Sull felt Marion’s body stiffen then shiver beside him, but she said nothing.

As he walked with Reed McCulloch, who would Marion compare him to?

Marion touched the girl’s arm, telling tales. Miranda laughed in an easy way. She seemed graceful and confident, not like the sort of women his sons brought around.

Sull asked, “She a nice girl, Reed?”

“Oh yeah. She’s from a good family.”

“We’re happy for you. Real happy. You be careful, though. You don’t want one rides you too hard, you know what I mean?”

Miranda was complimenting Marion on the way she painted the doors and shutters teal in the summer. Then she laughed at the goats, the color of charcoal and chalk, that had wandered over to gaze at her with their fancy hell-colored eyes. “Things are a nuisance,” Marion said. “Don’t get near or they’ll devil you, they’ll chew the hem of your dress.”

The men heaved the bed-frame into the Chevy. Sull’s corner nicked the paint. He saw Reed grimace, but the boy quickly swept it from his face. In the open barn, the doe hung by the neck, dribbling blood into a pan and twisting on the rope. They walked to the kennel so Reed could say hello to his old friends, Sull’s black and tans: Fife and Drum, Ring and Train, and Sharky, the crip. They stood bawling on hind legs, nails hooking on the hexagonal wire-mesh. They licked Reed’s fingers through the wire. Like all hunting packs, they seemed one feint, one animal.

“What in the hell is that?”

“It kept killing chickens. Got five before I took it out of commission.”

“That’s a bald eagle!”

“No shit?” said Sull, a wicked smirk ratcheting his face tighter and tighter. “Thought about getting me a bird book.”

“Eagles are federally protected now. You could get in big trouble.”

“How big?”

“A few thousand dollars. Maybe jail time.”

Sull chased the thought from the air with his fingers. “Ain’t seen no warrant.”

“Somebody could call you in on it.”

“Like who?” Sull’s one neighbor in sight was a VFW man with a watery heart and a shuddering walk. He never left the house in cold months.

“I’m just warning you, deer-slayer.”

“Thanks for the warning. Now you tell your old Dad I told him what he could do with himself, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Ha! I’ll tell it to Mom, too.”

“You tell Letha we love her.”

After they left, Marion said maybe he should pitch that eagle over the hill. Sull said no, not at all, it would warn the other away from the yard.

An hour later, the eagle’s mate appeared as a distant mote in the sky. She haunted the farm, carving the air with her hooked beak, her metronome wings beating time. Greater in span than the one he’d killed, she perched confidently in the walnut or watched him from the barn’s apex, like a weathervane. When Sull stepped into sight, she’d fly from his gun.

Around one o’clock, she took a Rockingham hen with the sound of a handclap. Sull tossed open the door, fumbling a shell into the breech, but only managed to throw a worthless blast when she was well out of shotgun range. His finger caught on the trigger guard. The cut burned as blood ran from his knuckles and into the creases of skin. Hens cowered under the porch, reassuring one another with soft, gurgling clucks.

The door cracked when he punched it.

He spent the next hours shut up in the shop. In the slack of the year, he invented chores: tend the chainsaw, fool with equipment, make it better. Keep animals alive, read the almanac, plan another year. Whet knives for melons and shoats, pump antifreeze, harvest bills and army pension from the junk mail. He tucked his jeans into rubber shitkickers to go check the spring.

Stepping into sunlight, he read the sky for the eagle’s mate but saw nothing. He fed brass cartridges into the.270 and took up a crowbar. The wind gleaned tears from his eyes.

He reached the fading field-road where a meager little run sluiced the pasture, just enough water to wet the tongues of cattle. A pair of Angus lowed as he approached. Sull hollered, “How you doing, girls? Your old Dad’s here to love you.” The water was shallow this time of year, so half a century ago his Uncle Aubrey had hauled a yellowing clawfoot bathtub there in an oxcart. An iron pipe hammered into a hillside spring kept it full, but in cold months, Sull had to chip ice twice a day. It splintered under the crack of metal, and his Angus shouldered forward to taste the wealth that bloomed from the blow. He gave them kindly smacks on their haunches as they dipped. This run used to be a pure trout stream, but a thousand sucking hooves had chopped it to a muddy ditch. Sull imagined wild brook trout, cold and firm in the fast, healthy current, buried in the water like ingots of precious metal. They hold fast to the bank, laurel-green with bellies of coal-fire. Wilder colors than you’d dare imagine on your own. Stock had destroyed the run — to be truthful, the Mercers had — and silky mud rose off the bottom in slow veils where the Angus dropped their hooves. Do rivers have ghosts? Do trout swim the air?

Coming home, Sull saw her perched on the light-pole. The crowbar fell with a muted clatter. The eagle lifted her hooded eyes. The bullet missed, and she floated unharmed, at a leisurely clip, up Fenwick Mountain. Sull muttered a blasphemy under his breath, then asked God to forgive him.

Marion had taken their coughing Buick to Corinth for groceries and to visit their daughter, June, a bank teller who never gave them a speck of trouble. Sull never felt right when Marion was gone. The mildest bite of food would make his stomach ache and brim. When he was in the army, her letters promised the happiest life when he returned, and he let himself believe. They were married by a justice of the peace and moved here that same afternoon. The first week, he knew something was wrong. Before long, Marion was moving back to her mother’s home for two or three months at a time. Sull’s father had said, “Some women just does that. When you fill her belly, she’ll quit,” and though his father managed to be wrong about nearly all else in life, he was right on this. Thank God they had children. Maybe she’d like to go to her mother’s even now, but her mother was twenty years gone.

As Sull kicked off his boots, the phone began to clatter in its cradle. Through twenty minutes of pleasantries, he knew from the edge in Carter McCulloch’s voice what the man wanted to say. His game warden voice. Reed must have told him. They didn’t keep a thing from one another. Finally, Sull asked, “You calling about that stupid bird, right?”

“It’s illegal. Real illegal.”

“Remember when you jump-shot that hoot owl? I about shit. I’ll never forget the look on your face. Said you thought it was a grouse. Biggest grouse I ever seen.”

“That was thirty years ago, bud.”

“So?”

“Throw it in the woods,” Carter said. “Don’t keep a claw. Don’t keep a feather. You can’t have any part of it. Serious this time.”

“What if I tell people it’s roadkilled?”

“Throw it out, Sull. Do it for me, alright?”

“Alright, Mother Hubbard. When you coming out?”

“Not soon, I hate to say. Getting ready for rifle, got a couple new guys on staff.”

“Best see you before Thanksgiving.”

“You will,” Carter said. “I got to sight-in that 7mm Reed got me.”

“Yes, sure. Don’t be a stranger.”

“I won’t.”

The next morning, Sull heard a six-cylinder whining up the road. He stepped out to find Carter ambling up the walk in his olive uniform. The state truck gleamed behind him. “Look here, it’s old tin-star in the flesh. I thought the outlaws and vandals was the end of you.”

“How you doing, Sull?”

“Been awhile.”

“Too long.”

“Yes, too long.”

Carter stepped onto the porch and grinned with that funny, pinched leer of his, as if the left corner of his mouth had been darned up with a stitch. Sull cleaned a finger of tobacco off his palate and slung it into the yard. They shook hands with grips of iron, as men can who have come of age together. Sull said, “That Georgia corn-cracker they want to elect has your name.”

“Yeah. I seen that.”

“You cousins?”

The smile drifted from Carter’s face. “I let you off the hook and now you throw it in my face.” Carter took off his broad-brimmed felt hat, which was greening with moisture. With his bald spot showing, he’d aged ten years in a breath. He used the hat to point at the barn, where the bedraggled eagle was still shedding wing feathers. “Throw it in front of God and everybody.”

Sull scratched the back of his hand, near a russet birthmark. “Nobody comes out here.”

“I ask you to do a simple thing and you lie to me. Lie right into the damn phone,” Carter said, slapping his thigh in cadence each time he said lie.

“I told you not to worry about it.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll say it again. Don’t worry about it. I know what I done.”

“Well, I’m kindly worried, seeing how it’s kindly my ass you put on the line. You want me to write you up? You really want to go to Anthem? That’s a federal judge. That local boy shit don’t cut it up there. He don’t care who you’re related to. He’s never even pissed on grass.”

Eric had wanted to be a game warden, but he had mild epilepsy, weak eyesight, and couldn’t even pass the pistol test. Sull hated to think about it. His own son. Because of the epilepsy, Eric couldn’t get his CDL, though a hack-and-mend doctor had offered to fix the papers for two hundred dollars. Sull slammed the office door, hard enough to crack the frosted glass.

“I’m not allowed to protect what I got? Just let anything walk in here and take it?”

Carter made a show of sighing. “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them. I took an oath.”

“Horseshit.”

“I take it serious. You don’t believe it, but I do.”

“You took it real serious when I slid you some of that deer across the table last year. I believe you said it was pretty good.”

Carter blushed. “I didn’t know where it come from. We was drinking.”

“You knew I shot it out of season. Believe you pardoned me in front of the whole table.”

“You know what the trouble is? I let the piddly shit slide, cause I’m from here, I know how it is. Been doing it twenty-six year now. But you know what? That just bites you on the ass. You’re good to people and they go bragging on what they get over on you. But I know the tricks. They don’t get shit over on me. Swear to God, you all think you own the place.”

Sull opened his arms. “We do own the place. Look around you. This is ours,” he said, tapping his sternum with two worn fingers the color of boot leather. “When that judge has come and gone we’ll be here holding the bag. We’re on our own out here, bud.”

“Aw, quit poor-mouthing.”

“They get the timber and the coal and the votes and they wash their hands of us. Law, law, law. Nobody holds them to the law.”

“That’s not how it is,” Carter said, working himself up to his full six feet. He put his hat back on. “That’s not how it is at all.”

Sull didn’t hear him. “Where’s the justice in that? Did you put your hand on the Bible and swear to bother your own people?”

“Look—”

“No, you look. All your eyes behold is God’s and He give it to us so we can scratch our way through. I’m doing it. Damn it, you know I’m right.”

Carter shook his head. “The law is the law. Today. You got to take it down today.”

Boots cocked on the rail, Sull waited an hour. Finally, he traded his shotgun for a spade and hefted the burlap sack. It was bound with baling twine.

Cresting the hill, he happened upon the family cemetery among the trees, where oaks gave way to sullen pines. They had quit the place a generation back because of the encroaching woods and a newfound desire among the more religious ones to rest in churchyards, which would guarantee, they said, the Mercers would be parsed from the heathens in the final reckoning. The Indian tribes knew better than to tend this marginal soil, but these white people had been here a long time, the first to drag up new ground from the Alleghenies. The Mercers stopped here, finally, because it was the first place no one made them leave. Their history was tangible as stone. They could put it in their mouths and break their teeth bloody on it. Sull could kneel and mumble his broken teeth onto the ground.

The gravestones listed toward the horizon and whispered archaic demise: hydrophobia and crib death, scarlatina and Spanish flu. A lone obelisk rose, a bony finger marking the path to heaven. The stones were badly in need of mending, cleft by ice and water and eaten through with the soft persistent teeth of lichen. Some names were beyond weathered, illegible now, never again to bear witness or be muttered aloud. Sull felt guilty for this, yet could think of no solution for the matter of time. Those from the last century lacked any alphabet but the nicks and wormtrails of old letters. Many children, three to an adult. Sull paused to run his fingers over vanishing names of great-aunts and uncles who had returned to the earth. Grievous times. Three gone in 1918, two in 1920, the year between one of respite. Sull remembered a skipping rhyme his mother used to hum around the house: I had a little bird, her name was Enza, I opened up the window, and in-flew-Enza!

He pushed aside thick vines that unfurled from above and drooped late bunches of wild grape the size of single-ought buck. His father wanted to be buried here, but Sull let his half-sisters make the final decision; he reasoned that women brought men into the world and should have the final say in their going. Sull’s father should rest in the Anthem Cemetery, they said, beside their mother, India, his second wife. In this way, Sull let himself defy his father’s wish. It had galled him for a decade now. He promised to return on Memorial Day. Marion would bring flowers. Carter, too. Maybe Reed and Miranda, show them where their people came from.

Sull walked a few paces downhill from the cemetery, figuring this as good a spot as any. His spade rasped in the cold ground. Two feet down, splinters of ice sparkled in the dirt. He turned a good-sized furrow and planted the sack with the eagle in it. Ten pounds of flesh? Twelve? A greasy sweat broke on his brow, and he swabbed it with a bandanna. His father trapped foxes and shot raptors back when you could make a dollar that way, trading pelts and filling bounties for the state. Whole families took part in the commerce, with stiff piles of foxes, hawks, eagles — eagles! — owls, coyotes, raccoons, bears, and bobcats on the fly-swarmed roadside. Government men and fur traders came every other week with a fat wad of bills that bought many a man groceries, even through the Depression, and left in gore-slaked buckboard wagons, the planks leathery with dry blood. Scrawny children clapped and danced and bought oranges at the store. A thick red fox pelt brought the best money, hide stretched like a six-pointed star across the barn siding, a nail in each black-socked foot, the tail, the limp nose, for everyone up and down the road to see. That and the meager ground and the CCC kept them alive.

The hole could use another foot or dogs might get at it. He set the eagle aside and bit into the earth once again. There he turned up a narrow mineral, the color of sun-warmed cream.

He held it to his eye. No rock, no arrowhead. It was a finger-bone, and there another. Sull turned the bone in his hand. The tiny gravestone had rolled downhill, but here was a child’s grave he had opened, the grave of an aunt or uncle or cousin. A shiver climbed him. He stuffed the eagle into the hole with his boot and covered it, packing the mound with harsh slaps of the spade. His throat dry as cinders. He tried not to cry, and failed.

At home that night, he read the Old Testament’s black verses and the red of the New. What does God think of a man who defiles his family’s ground? Would Sull be punished? When he thought of God, he imagined a workingman with callused hands, an eye for detail, and a firm, unyielding love that demanded much. Sull wondered if God thought of him at all.

Marion was watching a television special on a distant country strewn with trash and palms. Brown children tumbled about the legs of US soldiers. Wading endless words, Sull asked her to turn off the television, and she did. Quietly, she rose and stoked a fire in the potbelly stove with kindling and newsprint. Oily paper flared, yellow tongues and antlers of flame, erasing deaths and marriages and auto sales. Watching it burn, Sull knew his punishment had already come. It stunned him. Was God wise and conniving that way, as tricky as any politician? Shaken, Sull closed the Bible and set it aside.

Marion said, “I dreamt about Eric last night.”

“Did you?”

“It was a good dream.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad you did.”

Marion set two places at the table, keeping her back turned to hide the crimped, mournful smile on her face, and Sull remembered the intricate route to the penitentiary, way up in the northern panhandle: Highway 33, Pigeon Run Road, Fallen Timber Road, Route 250, Route 7, Route 2. A three-hour trip, one way. The warden had Eric setting pillars in the penitentiary’s coal mine. Before the trial, the lawyer had said that if Eric pleaded guilty, the judge might send him to the prison farm at Huttonsville, where he could live among the less violent and learn a skill. It was only forty minutes away, no more than a Sunday drive. As they sat on the hard benches of the Cheat County courthouse, Sull bowed his head and listened to Marion chanting her prayer: Oh God, I ask nothing else of You. Please keep him safe. The bailiff touched her shoulder.

After dinner, they sat on the porch. The sun hunkered behind Fenwick Mountain. Marion asked if he’d like a cup of coffee. “Sull. I asked you a question.”

“What now?”

“You want you some coffee?”

“I like that,” he said, watching smoke spiral from the neighbor’s chimney. A wasted Chevy, with FARM USE ONLY sprayed on both doors to avoid the fifteen-dollar tag fee, stood dormant in the drive. Mice nested on the engine block. Everything fallow.

Marion set a steaming mug at his side and squeezed his shoulder. Sull thanked her. She kept standing there, so he looked up into her face, at her weak chin, at the pretty ridge of cheekbone, at the white beginnings of a cataract in her left eye.

“You was a good dad to them,” she said. “Real good. No one could have done better. It weren’t right of me to blame you.”

Marion had never said such a thing, but over the last few years, Sull felt the silent accusation radiate like heat from her skin. His sons hadn’t considered their birthright — this hard land — worth having. They scattered into the world. The failure must be his.

He saw the muscles of her cheek begin to shiver. If Marion started at it, he would, too. She knew this and drifted inside. He set his jaw. He couldn’t again, not today. Lightheaded, he looked around for something solid to touch.

For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chainsaw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep by his wife.

By the first week of December, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He’d held his fire for a month now, and all the hens were gone. When the eagle’s mate flew to an ivory treetop on the hogback ridge, near the graveyard, Sull didn’t take down his.270. He lifted the chainsaw, a good Stihl, and went tramping through ankle-deep snow.

Sull flushed the eagle from her nest, which was large as a raft and took up the entire crown. The size and scope amazed him, deep with dead white branches. Why hadn’t he come here before? He slapped the red oak to test it. His breath, a silver hush.

With a yank of the ripcord, the chainsaw snarled to life, and Sull bit into the bole, giving it a felling notch worthy of timber country. He goosed the saw to a steady, ravenous whine. When the oak finally gave — so fast and so slow, like hot drizzling molasses — it went crashing, loud and brazen, as if it had craved the earth for years and years. He hit the kill switch. Despite the great ripping clots of grapevine and growth, the eagle’s nest had held firm in its rigging, but Sull knew it was worthless here on the ground. He stood on the stump till the light grain oxidized, like the bite out of an apple. It had been a great oak, the father of thousands. Sull couldn’t wrap his arms around it, for he’d tried once. He knelt and with the tip of his Schrade counted the seasons of the tree, marking years of mast and dry, fire and flood. He watched the sky and saw nothing but clouds traveling with black bellyfuls of snow. Sull had expected to feel guilty, for he hated cutting a red oak, his favorite kind for its bounty of acorns, but a smile came and cracked his face. They’d had a nice Thanksgiving with their daughter’s family, Christmas was on its way, and he had deer-meat wrapped in butcher paper. He shot a decent six-point on the third day of buck season, and Reed an even nicer one. He had good health. Marion, too. Perhaps they could take a train to Flint, visit the twins.

Shrieking above.

He glanced up at the sky’s gray vault and saw the eagle’s mate pulling herself upward, flying over the backbone of Fenwick Mountain. Sull watched till she was small as a chickenhawk, small as a period, then small as nothing at all.

Smiling, he began to descend the hillside at a good clip, picking his way through briars on a hoof-beaten trail. One of the deer had been a huge buck that survived rifle season against all odds. The marks of its splayed hooves and dewclaws were tamped into the earth so deeply they dwarfed the tracks of does, fawns, lesser bucks. Maybe Sull would find the shed antlers come February. He settled on his haunches and put bare fingers to one of the icy prints, tracing its dimensions. The cold soothed his ungloved hand. Then he heard a familiar cry.

The smile seeped from his face. Once again, the mate banked against the ridgeline, gliding back in his direction, gliding effortlessly, like she could do it forever.