Deer Heart

Five does follow the crease of the mountain toward the ravine. Like spring melt, they snake through windfalls and bare witch hazel stands. Hooves cut old snow. No laurel grows on this side of the mountain, and cold air fills the spaces between trees.

In the scope, Clyde sees a cardinal flit, bright as a teaberry. The first two yearlings pass by the crosshairs and over the bench. The third trots quickly, and snow sprays with her step. The twigs and branches look like brown burns against the white ground.

He has killed over a hundred deer since he first started hunting at ten, but still, his heart beats quick as grouse wings as the deer reach the clearing where an old logging road hugs the slope. His doctor calls it atrial fibrillation, but Clyde knows his heart is just forgetting its rhythm.

Clyde bleats at the fourth doe. She stops and turns toward his sound as he finds the soft behind her shoulder, breathes, and squeezes the trigger until the rifle fires. He learned to pull slowly so as not to jerk the shot and miss low. The shot should come as a surprise.

The doe buckles as the bullet punctures each lung and exits into the ground beyond. The three others sprint farther into the hollow as the fourth follows, leaving a blood trail Clyde can see without the scope. The fifth runs up the ridge. She pauses and looks at her herd, scattered across the hillside, unsure which way is safe, unsure where she’ll meet the others after dark.

Clyde’s big brother, Dempsey, doesn’t know where he is each time he wakes up. He asks his roommate, Henry, for his name if he’s feeling gentle or screams at him as if he were a stranger in the kitchen.

Henry is the same age as Dempsey, and in high school, they convinced their FFA teacher to let them do all their projects as a pair. After graduation, they moved into the house on Sandy Run Road. That was over sixty years ago. The families called them roommates. Two men who needed to split a mortgage and carpool into the valley for work: Dempsey at Wolf Furniture, and Henry at Kunzler Meats.

Dempsey went to Henry’s family for Thanksgiving, and Henry came to Dempsey’s for Christmas. Clyde and Dempsey’s mother said Henry and Dempsey were the closest of friends. Their father said Dempsey was smart with his money, staying single. Clyde was fine pretending like the rest of them. He thought that if it was never said, never sent into the air, then Dempsey and Henry were only two friends living together. It was expensive to buy land. If two bachelors wanted to own a couple acres, they had to live together on their paychecks.

Clyde married his girlfriend, Veronica, two years after Dempsey and Henry moved in together. He needed another person in his home. They never conceived, though they tried for years after doctors told them a baby was unlikely. Clyde feared it was because he didn’t love Veronica enough, and their bodies knew it. She died fifteen years ago. The table they had bought was small for the two of them. They had eaten their meals close to each other.

Clyde and Henry believe deer heart wrapped in pig caul fat is the only thing that can filter the silt of Dempsey’s mind. Clyde and Dempsey’s mother made the meal every opening day when they were young. The heart was the first part of the deer they ate.

In the woods, Clyde cups the heart in his hands while the rest of the gut pile steams and melts the snow down to tulip poplar and oak leaves. He rolls the slick muscle in cheese cloth, warm like fresh bread.

This is the first season Clyde has poached.

He shot a six-point on the opening day of rifle and a doe on the first Saturday, notching both his tags. The doe stiffening on the ground in front of him is the second deer he’s killed out of season.

Clyde isn’t worried about a fine, and there are more than two hunters who didn’t fill their tags, so he reasons the herd won’t suffer. But these last two deer have felt heavier than the others.

“All the meat is eaten. Someone always needs a deer,” he whispered as he gutted them.

After Clyde shot the six-point, he wanted to cook for his brother and tell him about the day on the mountain where they’d spent so many seasons together. A third of the way through the meal, Dempsey asked if the buck came out of the pole timber to the south, or off the ridge, like he was trailing a late-cycling doe. It’d been months since Dempsey had described any place. Not the grocery. Not the backyard. Not the living room.

Clyde and Henry waited for another question to ground the first.

When Dempsey asked if Clyde has been in Bracken or Plummer’s Hollow, Clyde and Henry hovered in the conversation like charred newspaper above a fire, tossed about by Dempsey’s hot breath.

The rope around the doe’s neck is noose tight as Clyde drags her up the final rise to the truck. The light is still good, and he can see blood spotting his white-pressed tracks. People tell him not to hunt alone. The doctor gave him pills to help regulate his palpitations but said he needed a partner if he wanted to keep hunting.

“No one wants to go where I do.”

“Well, make a friend,” the doctor said while she threw out her latex gloves.

“I’m too old for that, too.”

She smiled. “You don’t hunt turkey, though. And rifle season’s done. You’ll be fine for seven months.”

“Turkey’s too stringy for me,” Clyde said, accidently tearing a length of the paper sheet as he stood up from the table.

His arms are still as big as most men’s legs, and his back wide as a river stone. He drags all his deer and thinks the people who hunt where they can drive a truck might as well sit in the cab and listen to the radio.

Clyde lifts weights at the rec center near the high school in the afternoons. A young guy once asked him if he used to be a bodybuilder. When Clyde said he worked for the railroad, the kid laughed and said he must’ve curled the engines right off the tracks.

Clyde takes the two front legs of the doe in his left hand and the two back legs in his right. Bending low, then lifting, Clyde drops the deer on the tailgate and pushes her into the bed.

The blood and hair left by the other deer congeal in the bed liner’s grooves, tinting the black plastic the color of clay.

When the Parkinson shakes started to show, Clyde and Dempsey’s mother burnt her arms on the stove walls at least twice a week. They weren’t bad burns, but after she’d set the roast on the stove top, she’d run cold water and stand at the sink for minutes so the skin wouldn’t slough off.

Dempsey would make a cold pack out of ice wrapped in a water-soaked washcloth for her to press onto the burns. Clyde was never fast enough, but he wasn’t jealous. He’d sit at the table and listen to the two of them talk under the light until their father came home and they all ate. He loved the cooing of their voices in the kitchen.

The snow sounds like crushed Styrofoam under the tires as Clyde pulls into the driveway. He waves at Henry who opens the garage door.

“Get another?”

As Clyde backs into the garage, Henry peers into the bed at the blue-milk eye of the doe.

“Yeah. Did the Martins take the last one?” Clyde steps out and leans against the bed, steadying his breathing until his heart slows.

“They picked it up on Tuesday.”

“You eat dinner yet?”

“A bit. Dempsey didn’t eat anything. I tried, but he said he wouldn’t eat food from someone he didn’t know.”

Clyde nods as he climbs into the bed to hoist the deer’s back legs with the gambrel hanging from the center beam. When the body is as high as the ceiling will allow, Clyde steps from the bed then pulls the truck forward until the doe swings off the tailgate.

While Clyde parks, Henry watches the pendulum of fur, meat, and bone slow to a slight twist. Henry’s white hair is thick, and Clyde notices that his eyes shine greener against his pale skin. Clyde knocks snow off his boots then makes a motion toward the door, bloody bag in his hand.

Last season, Dempsey began forgetting his rifle on the ground and walking the trail back to the truck before the day ended. Clyde joked that it was getting too cold for Dempsey, but Dempsey only half-smiled like he would to a stranger. When Clyde asked where Dempsey’s gun was, Dempsey said he didn’t have a gun. There was a rifle there. A Winchester .30-30, but not his.

“Well, whose would it have been?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t going to take something that wasn’t mine.”

“You gotta go get it now.”

“I’m having trouble remembering what it looks like.”

It was the first rifle season that Dempsey didn’t finish. The first one Clyde and Dempsey didn’t drag a deer out together. By the following March, most of Dempsey’s memory had been washed away like a dirt bank after snowmelt.

Now, Dempsey sits at the kitchen table trying to hide his sense of bewilderment as Clyde and Henry walk in.

Clyde hangs his coat on a hook and blows on his hands. “What’d you get up to today, Dem?”

“A lot of different things. Who are you?”

“I’m Clyde, your brother. And this is Henry, your best friend.”

“I don’t know that.”

“No, I guess you don’t.” Clyde pushes the purple vein on the back of his hand from one side of the middle bone to the other. “You wanna eat?”

“Not hungry.”

“Well, I’m gonna cook. If it smells good, you can have some.”

Dempsey nods as he sits forward.

Clyde and Henry have talked about the deer heart, speculating how it renders memories from Dempsey’s brain. Henry says it is one of the small miracles that the pastor promised would happen if Henry prayed. Clyde thinks it’s the smell and taste. He believes that if someone eats something long enough, they become that thing. Clyde knows deer are strong. Maybe they’re strong enough to outrun the sickness swallowing all his brother’s stories.

Clyde takes the cast-iron skillet and lights the gas burner with a match. While rough chopping the onion and peppers, butter bubbles and foam separates from the clear oil. The doctor says butter and fat aren’t good for Clyde’s heart. The oil spits when the vegetables hit the pan.

“What’re you cooking?” Dempsey asks.

“I’m just browning the veg. Then I’ll cook the deer heart.”

Henry sets his hand close to Dempsey’s but doesn’t reach to take it. Clyde has never seen them do more than hug. One Christmas, he thinks they almost danced together. Danced close. But they just kept walking after a quick turn.

The last two visits, when Clyde was at the door tying his boots to leave, Henry stood by, his lips tight as if the sentence in his mouth was a vole scratching behind his teeth. But each time he’d only smiled and said goodnight. Clyde tied quickly when he saw Henry’s mouth tightening.

“I haven’t had deer heart before,” says Dempsey.

“Oh, yes you have. You love it,” says Clyde.

“I’ll try a bite.”

“Good! That’ll make me happy.”

Clyde cuts the heart in half, following the groove on the back side of the muscle. When the heart lays flat, like the world’s reddest butterfly, he slices it lengthwise, then across so the meat is cubed in inch-wide pieces. Henry walks to the refrigerator, takes the caul fat out of the plastic to give to Clyde, then sits down next to Dempsey. Clyde unfolds the caul fat like a sheet. The white streaks weave as rivers would on a map. He cuts two lengths wide enough to roll the meat and vegetables in. With the onion and pepper holding color, Clyde dumps them onto a plate to mix with the chopped heart. He seasons the red, white, and green pile with salt, pepper, and garlic powder before scooping handfuls into the center of the caul fat and folding each into the size of a sandwich roll. The tight package shrinks when it hits the hot pan, and the caul fat crisps as it cooks the heart inside, leaving a shell to break once it’s finished.

Dempsey keeps sniffing and asking when the food will be done. Clyde tells him to wait.

Clyde has thought about the quickest way to die. He doesn’t want to go like Dempsey. He knows Dempsey doesn’t want to go like Dempsey. Their parents have been dead for twenty years. No cousins, nieces, or nephews. Clyde has never known a mountain without Dempsey. He doesn’t want to be alone without kin.

The charred fat cracks like an egg, and the onion, peppers, and heart spill out onto their plates. So much steam rises off the meat that the men wipe the wet from their faces. Henry stares at Dempsey while Dempsey eats, watching for a motion in his face that will signal the turn his mind might make to recognizing home and people. Clyde is hungry and uses the crispy fat like a chip to shovel the heart and vegetables into his mouth. The deep cold of the day recedes as his stomach fills.

“How do you like it, Dempsey?” Henry asks.

“I like it fine, Henry. Clyde, I’m glad you got one today. I was hankering for some heart. Been awhile.”

“Me too. They came down off the ridge, and I knew where they were heading.”

“They follow the same routes like we follow highways.” Dempsey laughs and pats Henry on the knee. Henry’s eyes swell like tomatoes after rain. “What’d you get up to this morning, Henry?”

“I read a lot and went for a walk down the road to where the ice broke a hemlock.”

  “How far down is that?” Dempsey chews a cube of heart.

“Two miles. The wood looks orange.”

  “All the colors are brighter when the snow’s on.”

Clyde can’t think of any questions to ask Dempsey, though his entire day was spent to reach this moment.

“I’m trying to remember what I did today.” Dempsey bites an onion with his front teeth. “I’m tired, so I must’ve done something.”

“You had a big day.” Henry makes eye contact with Dempsey and tries to hold him there.

“Not as big as Clyde, though. You probably put this deer in the pickup all by yourself, didn’t you?” Dempsey looks at his brother, but Henry won’t shift his gaze.

“Yeah, I did. No one there to help.”

“I remember when you were in your twenties, and the Yoders needed help with a billy goat.”

“That was a mean sumbitch.”

  “Dad tried. I tried. No one was going to get him out of that corner and onto the trailer. But then you hopped the fence, pinned his head down, scooped him up from behind, and flipped him in!”

 “Just needed to be quick.”

“That billy was near a hundred and fifty pounds, and you flipped him! Were you there, Henry?”

“No, I wasn’t.” Henry grins at Dempsey.

Dempsey leans in and sets his hand on Henry’s shoulder. “You were gone so long today I thought you might’ve fallen, and I would need to go out there after you.”

“I just walked farther than I told you. No need to worry about me.”

The slack of Dempsey’s cheeks has vanished. His eyes are focused and clear. He asks about people in church, what was the biggest buck killed on the mountain, and how the basketball team is faring in conference play. All the heart is finished, and the blackened bits of caul fat float like rafts in the blood, thinned by grease that pools on their plates.

Dempsey burps. “Can we get some coffee, Henry? I need to settle my stomach.”

“We can wait a little longer, can’t we? I have some potatoes I can fry up.” The want in Henry’s voice hangs on his teeth as he smiles.

Clyde wonders how long they can drag out the meal to keep Dempsey with them. How many hearts would they need?

“I’m stuffed. Come on now. Clyde probably wants some coffee, too.”

Clyde looks at Henry whose eyes again swell with tears. “I think coffee would be fine.”

Henry’s hands peel off the table. Clyde guesses that’s how he rolls out of bed in the mornings. It’s the same way Clyde does. Most of him wanting to lay still a little while longer.

With the coffee, Dempsey asks about a dead cousin that neither he nor Clyde met. A name they only heard about in warnings against drinking and driving. Clyde tells the story of Dempsey walking up to a deer thinking it was dead, only to find the buck stunned and the right antler shattered. The deer jumped up as Dempsey leaned over, and the rising head broke his nose.

Dempsey asks, “Who?” at the end.

Henry manages to walk Dempsey down the hall and into the bedroom without struggle. Clyde wipes out the cast-iron skillet then sets it in the oven with some grease to season. Henry comes back into the kitchen and sits at the table, pointer finger through the handle of his coffee mug.

“Leave the rest of the dishes, Clyde.”

“I don’t mind, Henry.”

“Gives me something to do. Really.”

Clyde dries his hands and steps towards his boots, the breadth of the day finally catching the soles of his feet.

“It’s not fun, Clyde.”

“No, it’s not, Henry. It’s the worst way to go.” Clyde sees the strain in Henry’s face but can’t open the door fast enough.

“It’s not fun living like me and Dempsey have to, had to. Even now. Even when he can’t remember his own life.”

Clyde’s back sweats, and he doesn’t turn all the way to face Henry.

“Over sixty years,” Henry says. “What the hell? Living together over sixty years.”

“Everyone knows you two are the best friends on the mountain.”

“Friends,” Henry says. “Dempsey is the one thing this mountain won’t let me have.”

Clyde swallows. “Henry, it’s late.”

“I love Dempsey. I’m going through what every other person who loses their wife or husband does, but you think people are coming up in church and hugging me?” Henry’s voice is level, and he doesn’t move his hand from the cup. “No one ever looked at us the way they look at other couples. We did all the work without help.”

“You know we don’t believe in that, Henry. Don’t talk like that when my brother can’t defend himself.”

“Defend himself? He loves me. And now even he doesn’t know it except for an hour whenever that heart’s in his mouth.”

That next Thursday, Dempsey hit Henry when Henry was coming back to bed from the bathroom. Dempsey says he thought Henry was breaking and entering. It wasn’t hard, but Henry’s temple and around his ear is tight and purple.

“Purple like a grape,” Henry said in the message he left on Clyde’s phone.

Dempsey moves into assisted living on Monday.

The snow has been good, and Clyde knows deer are still moving off the ridge. He could get one more heart for his brother. One more good meal before the workers give Dempsey potatoes that come in a box, dehydrated and brittle as packing peanuts.

Clyde would cook the heart for Henry, too.

The button buck is angled so Clyde must shoot him in the neck. The deer drops.

Clyde hasn’t slept well for a week. He’s dreamed every night about swimming in the reservoir with Dempsey. Dempsey is sixteen, but Clyde is old. Dempsey doesn’t see his brother as old though and tells him to swim faster. Two ducks land on the water, and as they paddle, they become otters flailing in fishing line. Dempsey and Clyde swim to the otters. Dempsey always reaches them first. Clyde always wakes up before he reaches his brother.

Clyde sits on the ridge, calming his heart after the shot. There’s no tracking and plenty of light left. He watches as the birds return after the rifle’s clap. Nuthatches and chickadees slowly fill the woods with movement. The buck stiffens in the time Clyde takes to walk down the slope. Clyde thumbs the buck’s buttons, nubs of antler not yet big enough to break through the hide. A black streak of fur runs down the chest.

Balancing the deer on its back is difficult, and Clyde’s breath quickens as he positions himself downslope. He braces the haunches with his legs and sets his hand on the buck’s belly. His chest tightens. Pain grows in his collarbone, slides out to his shoulder and pools in the crook of his arm. The ground begins to spin, and Clyde loses his footing in the slick snow. The deer slips over him. He gasps for air and his mouth fills with snow. Damp leaves roughen his tongue.

Clyde remembers making snow angels. He believes he can feel the vibrations of his brother close to him, moving his legs. Clyde’s legs are too heavy to join Dempsey’s motion. He’s so tired he can barely hear the blood pumping in his ears or his brother’s arms pulling against the cold ground.