When I shifted back, I was closer than I’d ever been to sitting in his lap, and after I’d gotten used to the feeling of traveling steep uphill, I kind of liked the new sensation of his nearness. I tried to tell myself that it was no different from sitting next to him in church, but it was different.
“Mustard, don’t do it. The ground’s too uneven,” James hollered in my ear as we got closer to the top, and I yelled, “Ouch,” even though his voice didn’t bother me at all.
“It won’t hurt them,” Mustard said. “Hang on.”
“Ninah, tell him to stop,” James demanded, like I could make him listen.
But I didn’t want him to stop. It wasn’t that I wanted the horse to get hurt. I just didn’t want to shift directions. I was too busy trying to memorize the way James’ legs felt around my backside, hanging on, the way his arms felt buckled around my middle. I’d already forgotten about wanting to go to the pond.
From the top of the hill, Barley hollered out, and Pammy did, and John squealed as they held onto the galloping horse. We stopped and watched them soaring downwards, the horse’s brown tail flicking as his front feet pounded the ground, then his back feet.
Then the horse stumbled over a hole, and all I could see was a tumbling of bodies, somersaulting clothes, and Pammy’s red hair. But the horse neighed out, got up, and kept running. It was Pammy who grabbed his tail, and then we were watching her being pulled behind him, with Barley running hard to catch up and grab the reins. It looked like the horse’s back hoofs were kicking Pammy in the belly even though later she said they weren’t.
John was crying, so Mustard began walking our mare slowly down the slope. We could still hear Barley yelling “Whoa, boy, whoa” in the distance.
“Be careful,” I warned Mustard.
“But hurry up,” James said. “You got to get to him. I told you it was a bad idea.”
Then we were down from our horse and checking on John.
“You okay?” I asked him. But he just moaned and showed us his scraped hands.
“Stop being a crybaby,” Mustard yelled. “We gotta catch up with Barley and Pammy.”
“Leave him alone,” James screamed. “Go on ahead.”
So Mustard climbed back on the mare and went trotting off.
“Come on, John,” I said. John was a whiner, and I knew he probably wasn’t hurt at all—probably not nearly so hurt as Pammy anyway.
I didn’t offer John my hand, but James gave him his. He helped him up and led the three of us through the ravine. And even though my thinking about John was more along the lines of Mustard’s, I didn’t say so. Not after seeing the way James was treating him.
On the far side of the creek, we met up with the others. Mustard was still on horseback, but Pammy was rubbing the fallen horse’s head, and Barley was petting her neck. They were all laughing nervously.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” James scolded.
“It was kind of fun,” Pammy said, but she was muddy, and I could see that her legs were shaking.
“Nobody got hurt,” Barley laughed.
“John got hurt,” James said.
And on the way back to the barn, we shifted positions on the horse. James held the reins, even though Mustard protested. I still sat in the middle, wishing there was some way we could go downhill so I’d have a reason to lean against him again.
Late fall and winter, when the crops were in, the men of our community took jobs laying bricks, building houses, painting, or reupholstering furniture. Fire and Brimstone men had a good reputation as strong workers who did twice what other men did during the day. They never went to work drunk or took a whole hour for lunch or knocked off early, so even Methodists or people without faith would hire them for the winter months.
But Saturdays were for hunting. Before day, the men would rise, eat together, and head out to the woods, to the hundreds of uncut acres Fire and Brimstone owned. They’d take their dogs and guns and ride away in pickups, dropping off a man at every tree with a stand built into it, a crude treehouse where each man would sit and think about God while waiting for the dogs to run a deer down below.
Even the boys got to go. To me, deer-driving was one of the most mysterious habits of our community. I woke up early every Saturday too, looked out the window to see Mustard and James walking out with Olin, to see Barley leaving his house with his father, and John, who was younger and only had a BB gun, running to catch up. They’d laugh and puffs of smoke would appear in the cold air. They’d pat each other hard on the back and make their way into Grandpa Herman’s house, stomping their boots on the steps. He’d hold the door for them all, welcoming them so happily with his forbidden denture-smile.
I wanted to go with them worse than anything.
Saturdays were expectant days. We listened for the shotgun blast, wondering who had fired, wondering if they’d killed a deer or planted another shell into the land, wondering how long it would be before the truck pulled up, a deer in the back, limp as a mop.
For the women, Saturdays were cleaning days, days for washing our clothes and our bodies, our floors and our windows. All we had to do on Saturday was wash and wait for the men.
One Saturday in November when the floors were already done, Mamma sent me out to the woodpile to collect a few pieces of firewood. I was on my way back into the house when I heard the pickups come bumping down the road. Mustard was in the back of the first truck, his red hair hidden beneath a knit hat but his red ears poking out obscenely. “James killed one,” he hollered. “And they’re getting ready to bloody him.”
“James killed it,” I yelled inside to Mamma. “Come on.”
“Oh good,” she called back, excited. “I’m getting my coat.”
It was James’ first deer. And whenever a man killed a deer for the first time, the other hunters collected the blood and entrails and poured them over his head. It was a family tradition, a rite of passage, and a man’s special bath all rolled into one.
My daddy had built a place to skin and clean a deer just off the side of our house. He’d hung a noose, of sorts, from the rafters in the beams of the garage, and that’s where they tied the deer up, upside down, so that they could rip it from top to bottom, and the head would hang low so they could saw it off more easily.
When we got there, James was beaming. Olin ruffled his dark hair, and Bethany put her arm around him. The women were coming from other houses, and the last of the pickups were pulling into the yard.
But when they pulled the deer out, it was a doe. I knew we had a law against killing female deer and couldn’t understand why everybody was so jubilant. Grandpa Herman kept saying, “That was a good shot, son,” and James kept grinning, saying things like “I just looked down and there she was, walking behind a blackberry bush.”
I shuffled back to Nanna while they hung the deer up.
“It’s a doe, ” I whispered to her.
“He won’t kill a doe again,” Nanna assured me. “It’s his first deer, ” she added, as if that explained it.
I tried to remember whether other men had been allowed to kill a doe their first time. I figured they must have. But I’d never paid attention. It hadn’t seemed to matter before that day.
“You got anything to catch the blood in, Liston?” Olin asked, and Daddy told me to fetch a five-gallon bucket.
We had one just outside the back door to catch rainwater, and I dumped the sludge out of the bottom and raced back.
By the time I returned, Everett and Olin had pulled the deer’s legs apart, and Daddy had his knife stuck high in the deer’s crotch. He was standing to the side, and as I placed the bucket beneath the deer, he pulled his sharp knife downward.
I should have moved, but I couldn’t stop watching him open her up that way. About the time he reached the rib cage, the stomach and blood splashed out and into the bucket, stewed like vomit. I wasn’t expecting it to come so forcefully, so soon, and I got caught in the spray.
I jumped back, but not in t
ime to spare my face, my dress, or my shoes.
Ben Harback started laughing, and everyone looked at me. I found myself standing there, speckled with her blood, and with my arms held out to my side as if I didn’t want my hands to touch myself.
“Child,” my mamma said, “don’t you have sense enough to know not to stand that close?” But then she was laughing too. Everyone was.
I backed out of the way, back to Nanna, who shook her head at me and slapped my bottom playfully. I looked down at my white socks all soiled.
“I’ll have to do another load anyway,” she said. “James’ clothes will be a lot worse than yours.”
Then we stood together and watched David pick up the bucket. James tried to run at first, half-playing but half-serious. Grandpa Herman caught him and told him to take it like a man, and then James walked into the circle and David dumped the hot blood over his head.
Everybody clapped for him, but nobody clapped as hard as Grandpa Herman. Drops fell from James’ earlobes, trickled along his nose. He spit and spit and wiped his eyes.
While they were cutting the deer up, I changed clothes and took the bloody ones over to Nanna’s. I took my underwear to her too, all those pairs I’d kept in the box. I stuffed them in the pockets of my dress, and she washed them with James’ clothes.
That night the men cooked venison outside on the gas stove. It was cut up into small chunks and fried tender. But I couldn’t eat it. Not that time. Even though it was James’ first deer, I couldn’t eat her.
That night Nanna returned my clothes to me, and all my underwear was clean and folded up neatly inside my dress. I could still see the stains on them though. They weren’t white like Pammy’s. They were dingy like the bottom of a sock.
James and Mustard and John and Barley had set out traps to catch raccoons and squirrels and anything else that happened to fall prey. Though the next day was Sunday, the boys were allowed to go check their traps after church and after we’d eaten.
“Can I go with them?” I asked Mamma.
“Them woods ain’t no place for a girl,” she said.
“Please, Mamma,” I begged. “I’ve finished all my homework.”
“Let her go, Maree. Ain’t no reason why she can’t run along with them,” Aunt Kate said.
“Ask your daddy,” Mamma told me.
They were getting ready to leave already, and I told them to wait for me. Barley moaned about it, but they waited.
Daddy was outside with the men, picking his teeth with a stick he’d whittled down and slapping his knee over a joke somebody had told.
“Can I go, Daddy?” I whispered in his ear. “I really want to, and Mamma said I could if you didn’t mind.”
“I don’t care,” he told me. “Don’t be gone long.”
So I hustled off with the boys before Pammy found out and wanted to come too.
“Girls can’t hunt,” John mocked.
“Well, you can’t hunt either,” I claimed. “Not with just a little BB gun.”
“I killed a bird with it,” he said. “Killed two birds. And I’m getting me a gun for my birthday. You wait and see.”
“Even when you get a gun, you won’t be able to shoot it,” Barley picked. “When you pull that trigger, it’ll kick back so hard your shoulder will be bruised for a week.”
“Well, your shoulder bruises too,” John whined.
We walked past the barn, and James stopped to stroke a mare’s long nose. We walked past the pigpen and past the chicken coop and all the way back to the place where the field ended and the woods began.
“Where’d we put that first trap?” Mustard asked. “Weren’t it right in there?” and pointed back down a path.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Barley agreed.
“Y’all go on in there and walk up the creek. I’ll take Ninah with me and we’ll check the traps from the other side and meet you in the middle,” James said. “I want to show her where I killed my deer.”
“Why do you want to show her?” John ridiculed.
“Because she ain’t seen it yet and you have,” James said.
“All right,” Mustard conceded, and the three younger boys disappeared behind branches and brush.
James led me in another direction. “It’s kind of growed up in here,” he said, holding back limbs so they wouldn’t slap me.
We walked for a long time, with him leading the way and me following, stepping over briars and over moss. As I crunched across lichen and then headed down near the creek through mud, I felt something churning in my chest like too much sorrow. I didn’t want to follow James to a place I hadn’t seen. I wanted to be the one showing him something. I didn’t want to be the girl.
We found a place to cross the creek where a tree grew in the middle and we could step onto a root and then over to the other side. James offered me his hand, but I didn’t take it.
“Not far now,” he said after a while, and I watched his flannel shirt stretched tight across his back. I watched his dark hair curling up around his collar. He’d need a hair-cut soon. I followed his dark pants into the woods, deeper and deeper.
“You tired?” he asked me, looking back.
“No,” I insisted.
“Well, why ain’t you talking to me?” he asked. “You mad?”
I shrugged.
“Why are you mad?”
He stopped, and I stopped too, not wanting to get one bit closer.
“Cause you killed a doe, ” I said, “and she could have had ten baby boys for you to kill later, but now she can’t because she’s dead.”
“They told me to,” James argued. “They said, ‘Shoot anything that comes your way.’ It was the first one,” he explained. “That rule don’t apply to your first one.”
“Well, it should, I fussed. “You shouldn’t never kill a doe.”
I was holding onto a skinny tree, shaking it in my hand. When I looked up at James again, I was surprised to see him so silenced. He didn’t look like a big boy at all then. He looked little in his eyes.
“Want me to take you back?” he offered.
“No,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I want to see it,” I told him. “I want to see the place where you killed her.”
He took my hand and led me through the woods into a clearing. On the other side, there was a tree with a stand in it.
“You were up there?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
So I walked over to the place where the little slats of board were nailed to the tree trunk and began climbing up.
When I was sitting on the narrow plank, with James right beside me, I said, “Show me where she was.”
He pointed to a cluster of bushes over to the right. “She was right there,” he said. “With her head down. And you see them branches over there, not in that first bush but the one behind it?”
I nodded.
“Well, I thought they were a rack,” he explained. “I thought she was a buck. Otherwise I wouldn’t have shot at her no matter what anybody said.”
“Oh,” I sighed, and looked into my lap, feeling like I might cry and hating myself for it. I told myself I should be relieved or even happy that James hadn’t meant to kill a doe. But I was crying anyway. I didn’t want James to see.
“Ninah?” he whispered. “Ninah?”
And when I looked at his face, all I saw were his lips, chapped and damp, his mouth open just a little and his chipped tooth right in front from the day we were playing in the pack house and he tripped on the stairs. I stared at his mouth until I had to close my eyes from the nearness of it, from the feeling of those chapped lips on the skin above my eyes.
I was sitting in the porch swing beside Nanna, bundled up in a blanket. Nanna didn’t have a blanket of her own, but the end of my blanket stretched across her legs, so she wasn’t too cold.
Pammy and Bethany sat outside with us for a while, watching the moon hover low in the clouds, the sky still streaked with hints of day. Bethany brushed out
Pammy’s hair, then braided it back neatly in spite of Pammy’s protests. But then Pammy got whiny and wanted to go inside, so Bethany kissed Nanna goodnight, and they left.
“You need to get home and do your lessons,” Nanna said.
“Don’t have anything except a math quiz that I already studied for.”
“When did you study?” she asked me.
“On the bus.”
“That don’t count,” she said. “All that noise. You need to study it again.”
“I’ll go in a minute,” I promised.
Nanna rubbed at my sock, pressed her bony thumb into my arch and moved it around and around beneath the blanket.
“Tell me the story of when you met Grandpa Herman,” I begged her. What I really wanted to hear about was the first time they kissed, but I knew that story was off limits.
“Why do you want to hear that? I’ve told you a hundred times. Nobody else nags at me for stories.”
“I like your stories,” I said. “Tell me.”
Nanna patted my foot, put it down, and picked up the other one, pressing into my heel. “I was just about your size,” she began. “And stupider than a sunflower in the shade. And Herman came acourtin dressed in brand-new denim britches and a starched white shirt. Walked right up to Uncle Ernie’s door carrying a handful of ragged azalea flowers he’d cut off his mamma’s bush with his pocketknife.”
“Was he grinning at you and winking?”
I smiled at her and she smiled back and said, “You’ve done heard this story, and I ain’t telling it again tonight when you’ve got lessons to get. But don’t think I don’t know what’s in your head, girl. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Ma’am?” I asked her innocently.
“You’re James’ aunt, whether you like it or not. And he’s your nephew, whether you like it or not. I can see you two looking at each other. And you better be careful, is all I got to say, because you’re gonna get hurt if you ain’t careful.”
“I ain’t really his aunt,” I said.
“Not by blood, maybe. But by position. So you can forget that right now, do you hear me?”