Tracker (2 page)

“It's gentle,” he'd tried to tell Emil. “Gentle and right, somehow. The feeling of the barn in the morning.”

But Emil hadn't agreed and John hadn't brought it up again because when somebody doesn't want to see a thing you can't make him see it.

His grandfather had fought the Japanese in World War II and had been wounded and later had been in the occupying force in Japan, and the hating part of war had gone and he had come to love them. That's how he put it, talking to John one morning during the morning lunch break.

“I came to love them and the beauty they see in things and the way they see the beauty. They look for small beauty, look for the beauty in even ugly things, and they compose songs and poetry to celebrate that beauty. Whole poems have been
written about a single petal on a flower. One tear on a child's cheek.”

And in a way that was what morning chores were for John—a whole series of small beauties. All the sounds and smells and feelings came as separate little bursts of beauty and he found himself making small poems in his mind while he did even the dirtiest work.

 

The cows greet
           gently.
On a cold morning.

 

The words went through his head while he was taking the manure fork and sweeping it down the gutter to clean the night's mess and he decided he would tell them to his grandfather when he came out.

The ritual of chores was always the same, at least in the fall and winter when the cows were kept in: clean the gutters, feed hay, feed silage—the warm rich smell of the hot corn from the silo always made his mouth water—and milk. There were seventeen milk cows and four about to come in to milk season and when the milking was done it was time to feed milk to the calves in
buckets and separate the rest of the milk and cream in the separator.

John could have done it with his eyes closed by the time he was twelve. At thirteen it was so automatic that he didn't have to use his mind at all and could think of other things.

He brought the milk stool from where it hung and settled in alongside Eunice, the first cow, and nestled his head in her flank and began pulling milk into the bucket with a hissy tingling foamy sound.

Don't watch the milk,
he thought. After you'd been milking for a while you learned to not watch the milk, because it came in a small stream and never seemed to fill the bucket if you watched it. But if you looked away for a time and then looked back, the level in the bucket would have come up, and he wondered while he milked how many other things were like that. Wondered if there were many parts of living that only changed when you looked away and looked back.

Like Grandpa.

It came in like a hot worm, the thought—like a needle in a blister. He didn't want to think of his grandfather. Not now, not yet. There would be time for that later, too much time for that later.

But it came. He couldn't stop it. The thought slid in the side and with it a small hope.

If I don't see what is happening to him,
the hope said,
then it isn't happening.

It's the opposite of filling the bucket with milk. If I watch him all the time I won't see the change that death is bringing and so it can't be.

Can't be.

Death couldn't come if you were watching for it.

John went to the next cow, Marge, a big Holstein who was an easy milker because she dropped the milk as soon as you started pulling.

The ritual again. The foamy hiss of the milk, the head cradled in the flank of the cow, the warmsweet smell of milk coming up and the thinking.

The thinking came again. There was school tomorrow, school all week and then deer season would start. He would think about that: getting through school all week and going deer hunting.

If he worked at that the other thing wouldn't come in. If he kept his mind going on school and going deer hunting …

School was a strange time for John. He was pretty much a loner, except for his best friend Emil, and he didn't get the entertainment part of school at all.

He approached school like a job—work to do. Something that had to get done, like chores. Usually he brought none of his home life to school and very little school came home.

But he did talk to Emil about his grandfather. The pressure had been too great—a building, blinding thing—and he had told Emil about it last week by their lockers.

All around was noise, kids moving, hall traffic with teachers watching.

“He's going to die,” John had said.

“What?” Emil slammed his locker. It wouldn't catch any other way.

“Grandpa's going to die,” John repeated, slightly louder. “Of cancer.”

Emil looked directly into his eyes. “That's not fair. He's too good. Too good for dying.”

“Just the same,” John said, starting to cry. “Just the same—the doctors said.”

“That doesn't make it fair.”

And Emil was right. It wasn't fair.

He thought suddenly of the deer he had killed.

Three of them. The first one a doe, then a buck and a doe, and he had killed them all.

Jolts of noise and violence—that's what he remembered—the slam of the shotgun as it recoiled
into his shoulder, the flat-crack of the bullet leaving the barrel, the second that hung forever in his mind as he saw the bullet hit the deer just in back of the shoulder, the hair and blood that flew with the bullet and the deer staggering sideways with the shock of being hit.

Sideways and down, he remembered, and the eyes looking, always looking for what had happened, looking in confusion and pain and finally clouding as death came; clouding and filming over with death.

The first deer.

And the thought crept in that maybe the deer had been good, just as his grandfather was good, and maybe it wasn't fair for the deer, either.

The second deer had been worse. The bullet had taken it too far back, in the lungs, and death had come slowly and John had to shoot again to kill it and it had seen him and that bothered him.

For a time.

Then that thing happened that happens to all people who hunt, or to everybody he'd talked to about deer hunting. They were sad about it, but the sad part only lasted a short time and wore off and was replaced by a hard feeling, almost an excitement. And after that it wasn't hard to kill deer
anymore, wasn't hard to give them death, and sometimes that bothered John, too. More than he admitted to other kids at school or even to his grandfather.

He wasn't sure it was right to feel that hard way about killing, about death, about shooting animals and giving them death.

He realized with a start that he was crying while he milked, the tears dropping off his cheeks into the foam of the milk at the side of the bucket, making round holes down through the foam.

He couldn't remember starting to cry, couldn't think when the great sadness came down on his shoulders, but it was there and he thought of his grandfather and the crying got worse and he buried his face in the cow's flank and ground his teeth together and made the crying stop. There would be nothing from crying, he felt—nothing to help at all from crying.

But still the sobs came, jerking his head as he milked, the tears dripping down in the foam.

THREE

During the next week things almost went back to normal, if a bit quiet, around the house. Now and then John would catch his grandmother crying, just little tears as she worked, and once he saw his grandfather staring out the window when there was nothing to see but darkness, his hands still upon the carving he was working on. But other
than that things were almost the same as always.

And in a way the week was the same as the ritual of the chores. There was getting up and working in the barn and then school, and for a change John liked school—it gave him something outside himself to think about, forced him to look away from his own life.

In the mornings at breakfast he forced himself to not stare at his grandfather and by Tuesday it was easier and he could talk without his voice catching.

They talked as if nothing were going to happen. As if things would go on and on.

“Those calves will have to come on hay in a couple of weeks, hay and a little silage, or they won't be ready for grass in the spring when we let them out,” his grandfather said Wednesday morning. “We don't want them to bloat when they hit the pastures.”

John nodded. “I'll see to it.”

“We'll have to check the traces on the stoneboat for hauling manure out to the back forty sometime this week. If we don't I think they might break with the load and we need to get manure on top of the snow this winter so it can soak in or we won't make good corn next spring …”

“I'll see to it after school.”

“There'll be a lot of work.”

“I'll handle it.”

And his grandfather had gone back to carving the small figures, the way it had always been. In the evenings they would sit in the kitchen and take heat from the kitchen wood stove and his grandfather would carve little horses and men from the old logging days and talk of all the work that had to be done and John would nod and smile and eat pie and drink cold milk from the well house and finally go to sleep, right at the table if he didn't catch himself.

The work went on. After school there was a small amount of homework and then the work of the farm. John fixed the stoneboat traces, put new boards in the workhorse stalls where the team had cribbed the old ones, drained the tractor for winter, sealed the granary to hold the harvest. The work went on. It fed on itself so that work made more work.

Once the stoneboat traces were fixed it was necessary to use the stoneboat to clean out the large manure pile behind the barn and that meant using the two horses and
that
meant still more work.

“They call them workhorses because it's a lot
of work to use them,” his grandfather said almost every time they harnessed the team. “But it's a good work, a full work. And they always start up in the winter, horses do—always. Not like tractors in the cold.”

John liked using the team, even with the extra work. The horses were huge and immensely strong and yet full of a kind of gentle courtesy, a slow thoughtfulness that made them better than a tractor.

When he harnessed them they stood to the collar and put their heads in and made it easy for him to reach up and around and to throw the harnesses over their backs. They were named Jim and Lars and they were both brown and had white blazes on their faces, but they had different minds. Jim would stand tight in the harness, leaning forward slightly against the load, while Lars stood easy and relaxed and jerked out when told to get up.

John hauled manure for three nights after chores, late into the night. The work kept him from thinking. When milking was done, his grandfather would help him harness and he would use the fork to load the stoneboat from the manure pile in back of the barn, then stand in
front of the load on the planking while the horses took the stoneboat out to the field.

They had been doing it so long that he could leave the reins tied to the rein bracket in front. They knew where to go and what had to be done when they got the load out there, and John stood leaning against the fork in the darkness while the steel runners crunched through the shallow snow.

It was cold, November cold when the body isn't used to it yet, and he wore his heavy chores jacket, so when he got to the field he had to take it off because it would be too warm when he started to fork the manure off. And it was while he was taking his coat off Wednesday night that he saw the deer.

The horses were standing in their own steam and he had jammed the fork down in the manure and pulled one arm out of his jacket sleeve and turned in the moonlight—and there she stood.

It was a doe, a small one—he could tell by her neck and lack of antlers. She wasn't thirty feet away to his right rear.

Deer often came out to check the manure, that wasn't unusual. There were seeds which passed through the cows and horses, and after snow the deer had to work a little harder for food, so the seeds were easy picking.

Many times in the past John had seen deer working through the clumps of manure. But this one was different.

She stood and stared at him for what seemed like hours, stood with little puffs of steam coming out of her nostrils in the moonlight, flaring to smell him, and didn't run.

Usually when deer separated the man from the horse smell they ran—man killed, man was the death smell.

But she stood, stood as if waiting for something, and John hung with one sleeve off and one on and stared at her, saw every part of her, saw her ears flick and her eyes move and then she was gone—gone so fast that she might not ever have been there.

But she left something in John, a picture of beauty that hung in his mind the way a picture will sometimes stay in your eyes when you close them, burned in.