Devil’s Lake

While driving on a mountainside, your father has pointed out the window, just north of your collarbone, and said, a buck, or some pheasants, and this was a rare moment, this sudden gesture of speech, this spotting and naming. He was pleased if you, too, could see and name, for it was proof that you had learned. You had been paying attention.

Attention, derived from attend, means to stretch—like a taxidermic skin stretched over your bones, a mimesis.

There is pleasure in being the first to observe subtle movement, whether among the brush, or within oneself. Sometimes this shifting means change; sometimes it is simply a settling in.

People do not like to be told how they are; people do not want to be watched. To observe him presses questions into your mind, demands that you turn in and observe yourself. How are you constructed? Can you locate all the pieces and all the seams? When his father died, he reparied the gutters and repainted his father’s house.

His work is never done.

His work is not to look in, but to look out: to look, to name, to name himself on the landscape, and to name you, who he built into his landscape. The mountainside existed long before you, long before him, when it was pushed upward by a collision of plates. A collision of bodies began the existence of you.

He blows a call through his fist at the waterfowl; he buglues after tule elk. He admires mimicry. He admires the way that animals can be recognized, when little else in the world can. For instance, there are new parts of you that he does not recognize, pieces that have been stitched on—these things that he would prefer not to see, so he acknowledges only the seams. He will choose what he sees. Some animals that he hunted have been skinned and rebuilt, so that he can put them on his walls. He admires the accurate reconstruction of the original.

There are always places a person cannot see. For instance, the thread that draws back to his father is black, vast, and silent.

There is a tangibility of silence. It fills the space in a room and hardens the space in your lungs. It makes swallowing deafening. He carries silence. He carries a tiny bellows under his boot and fills the air, anywhere that he might be visible, with a cloud of silence. Your coughing keeps you awake at night. Even your breathing is loud.

Every line, every fragment, threatens to reduce what is a life, a triptych of lives. This reduction is unjust. It is reduction of his father’s life into a pistol pointed at his own head. Reduction of years of silence that reel backward from that end, dizzy from their righteousness, the exhaustion of what’s visible. He remembers these things better than you do. Do not forget that.

But most memory he refuses to admit. To admit means both to let in and to let go. Mostly he refuses to construct from such ephemera as memory, preferring hide and bones from the mountain, preferring the mountain. He still lives below it, among skin that frays with age, among these formal rites of burial, among you, for whom he has labored, on whom he has worked so hard.

He is growing old, and this weather presses through his skin and into his bones. He can feel this, and a tiredness, and he comes to you. He doesn’t remove his coat. He has opened a small room, he tells you, for your sake alone. He worries your seams, pressing you to come undone.

It’s possible that only you can see this movement.

I bite my fingernails in long, ragged strips and never know where to put them. I don’t want to get up from my book and walk across the house to drop this one into the wastebasket. And I can’t just flick the nail onto the carpet—someone might step on it, and when they bend down to see the sharp thing that poked their soft foot flesh, they’ll find the brittle thorn and they’ll be disgusted and probably know it was me who left it there. If I leave it on the arm of this chair, there is a chance that I will remember to throw it away later, though there is also a chance that I will not, and someone will find it on the chair arm, or later, beneath the chair. Sometimes I put a fingernail into my pocket to throw away later, but these pants have no pockets. Because I want to keep reading this book, and I want to forget about the fingernail I have bitten off, I will throw the sharp sliver into a corner where few people walk; I think that the vacuum will probably get to it first. I hope that it makes it into that corner, that I throw it well enough and with good aim.

II

I once watched a woman in the cereal aisle of the grocery store clip her fingernails. She let them drop to the polished linoleum beneath the Fruity Pebbles.

III

There is no explaining certain things. When I was younger and traveling alone in a foreign country, I decided to collect fingernails of the people that I met. I was collecting them, I said, for an art project, and I offered people my plastic baggie. I intended on making that art project, a fingernail mosaic or else a miniature fingernail horse, and though I haven’t yet, perhaps some day I will. Every six months or so, I come across the baggie of yellowing nails from international fingers, and some are poking little holes in the plastic, trying to spill out.

It’s pouring and the stripper is hours late. Everyone is drinking too much in our living room, our kitchen, in the garage with the sound of rain pelting the garage door. I have never seen so many people at our house, crowding around the buck heads and Precious Moments, pressing their boots into the carpet, laughing. My sisters and I move around people’s legs, listening to bits of their conversation, occasionally following our brother who is the oldest at almost-thirteen and videotopes this occasion, our father’s fortieth birthday party. The napkins are spotted with confetti and everything says "Over the Hill." A blow-up doll has a cartoon red mouth and someone sticks his hand inside. Our mother looks at the clock and looks worried, unlike everyone else, and we don’t like to see her worry and also we’re bored, so we return to our Barbies, wondering if the stripper will make it through the mudslides.

A few weeks before the party, my sister and I had been playing on the living room floor, playing I don’t remember what because we were mostly listening to our mother speak into the telephone in a serious, hushed voice, her hand cupped around her mouth. We were nervous, and scared when we heard what she was talking about. "That’s not what she said," my sister whispered. "She said ripper. A ripper’s a lady who goes around ripping up paper. Like confetti." We both knew she was lying. Mom snapped her fingers at us and went in the other room, closed the door. Later she told us not to mention anything to our father.

Scared gave way to anticipation, and then we were secretly waiting to see the stripper.

When the stripper comes it is nearly midnight, or it must be, and have we ever been up this late? No one tells us to go to bed, or else we don’t listen and they forget. The stripper wears a tan trench coat like the one our mother wears when she goes out to dinner, wears make up. She sets her black boom box on the piano bench and unfolds a chair in the middle of the living room. Everyone gathers and someone turns off most of the lights and the stripper tells my father to sit in the chair and she handcuffs him, hands at his back.

We’re watching from the couch, from behind all the bodies.

It isn’t halfway through "Everybody Dance Now" and her few clothes are lacy black—it’s the first time I’ve seen a garter belt on a real person—and our father breaks the handcuffs, which are cheap plastic, and puts his hands on the hips of the stripper. In the shadows, his friends are hollering and whistling, and my mother’s face is very red and she is laughing so much there are tears, and the stripper says that’s not allowed, says that no one has ever done that before, broken the cuffs, and she doesn’t stop him.

We’re embarassed, but we also know that you should be proud when you’re the first to accomplish something. Our father is smiling, smiling.

In autumn, the men went hunting for ducks and came home with dozens and all different kinds, heaped in a bucket. I went once, but when the lab bounded across the flooded field with a half-dead duck body in his mouth and dropped it just outside the blind, and in order to kill it my father bit into the duck skull, I knew I’d rather just think about ducks. Eat them when that’s what we were having for dinner.

When the men came home from hunting, they poured duck bodies onto the garage floor, then pulled out the feathers by the fistful, cut off the heads and wings and feet, burned off the pinfeathers with a little blowtorch, and saved the entrails for fishing bait. Sometimes we ate duck that same night, peppered skin and burgundy meat all the way through, and we tried to ignore the lingering smell of scorched pinfeathers that wafted in from the garage. My father always reminded us to watch out for shot. My father always broke his teeth on shot.

Dirt.

We grew up eating from gardens. We ate eggplant and tomatoes and the family grew and we stung our fingers on crookneck squash when we pulled the squash out of buckets. We grew up eating from the trees in our yard. It was an insipid suburban house, but outside was a miniature orchard. Peaches and tangerines and walnuts, avocados, persimmons. In fall, we made pomegranate jelly. In summe,r we canned peaches. In spring, a man would spray the trees for bugs. The garden we took care of ourselves. There was DDT in the garage.

My grandfather had a big garden in his backyard and another behind his paint shop, and both fed his family and friends and many neighbors. Sometimes he used paint thinner as a pesticide. Later when my grandfather was an old man some neighbors told the right (wrong) people about the paint thinner, and the EPA came out and said the soil was poisoned and it would cost two hundred thousand dollars to clean. They hauled off truck loads of soil. I don’t know where they put it.

Deer.

The men go on long hunting trips. They apply for tags and if they get drawn they pack their trucks and drive from Northern California to the mountains. In Wyoming, they hunt elk. An elk lasted us, four kids and two parents, one year: a year of elk meatballs and elk meatloaf and elk steaks. Elk jerky. Elk gravy.

My brother was diving into the mountains to hunt deer once, and a deer collided with his truck. A few days later, he hunted and killed a deer to take home. The deer, smaller than an elk, would probably last his family of two kids and two adults one year. The deer that got hit was left on the side of the road, and though I don’t know for sure, I imagine it lasted the vultures and wolves and other forest beasts much, much less than a year.

Eggs.

These days, they say, you shouldn’t buy grocery store eggs since so many eggs have gotten contaminated with salmonella from the unsafe chicken houses. Half a billion eggs to the dumps, I read in the paper. This morning I went to the farmer’s market and Sue was out of eggs, so I bought eggs from a different egg seller. All the eggs in his cartons looked the same—same size, same shade of brown—and they were covered with a cool sweat of condensation—not poop, like Sue’s eggs—and when I cracked them open at home their yolks were all yellow. They weren’t the orange of a chicken that has been eating grubs out of cow patties and rotten watermelon rinds.

Tomatoes.

I can my garden tomatoes in the summer but never without trepidation. Everywhere warns of botulism and other almost-invisible predators. I squeeze extra lemon juice into the jars. I add more salt. I line my cupboards with canned tomatoes. I brought a can to my friend in California, but it was a long drive from Alabama and hot in the summer, and the car got hot and the jar got hotter. I handed her the jar with an oven mitt. She said, You know how you tell if there’s botulism in your jar? She said, If you set the jar on your counter and don’t move it for days and if you come to your jar and look inside and see something moving, you might have botulism in your tomatoes. You shouldn’t eat them if there’s something alive in your jar.

Cucumbers.

Toward the end of the season, caterpillars move into the cucumbers. They tunnel to the moist center and leave sticky globs at the entryway. At first I thought it would be best to pick the cucumbers and cut around the worms, or cut off the places where the worms had obviously tunneled. But of course, you can’t see through a cucumber and sometimes the tunnels go all the way through and sometimes a caterpillar looks a lot like a cucumber. Then I was compelled to hurl the especially holey cucumbers into the bushes below the garden and rid them from my sight forever.

Later, a seasoned farmer taught me a trick: drop the cucumbers in a bucket of water, and the worms will all back out of their tunnels and swing out of the cucumbers. They dangle from the entryways and after a bubble or two unfasten themselves and float to the surface. Some sink. They all drown. Some cucumbers float and the holes face sky-ward, so you have to roll the cucumbers to flood all the holes and tunnels and make sure all the worms move out of the cucumbers so you can slice up the cucumbers and put them in your salad.