By Jason Sanford Jun 30, 2007, 10:07 GMT
There are seven rules of trapping beavers, as told to one Jeremiah Eaton—me—by one Brother Silas Jedediah Stanton—my second cousin. Not rules written in any book. Not folk sayings passed through generations. These rules are purely Brother Jed’s, told to me alone. As he said once, “Rules only get you doing what you ought to be doing anyway.” I guess it’s true. And I have been doing plenty.
On this winter morning we wait in the prison parking lot for my father to come outside. Asphalt pebbles crunch under my boots as I walk along the rec yard’s chain-link fence, nodding absently at several prisoners meandering parallel paths to mine in the winter-dead grass on the other side. Ten years ago, my father killed my mother—shot her with a twelve-gauge shotgun that kicked her blood back onto his jeans and T-shirt. Today we’re picking him up for his 48-hour furlough.
“Wait in the wagon,” Brother Jed yells. He’s got the heater pumping out his half-open car window as he writes notes for his Sunday sermon.“Won’t be long,” I say.
It isn’t. A white door in the cement-block wall opens and throws my father out. He quick strides to us in his clean-pressed blue suit, his arms stretching past sleeves three inches too short. I open the front door of the station wagon for him, then get in the back.
“Thanks,” he says to me, nodding. I slam my door. Brother Jed waits in the driver’s seat.“Jed,” my father finally says, not making eye contact.“Elijah,” Brother Jed replies. He hesitates, then leans over and hugs his cousin. My father’s arms hang limp at his sides until Brother Jed releases him. Brother Jed winks at me—some big step, he thinks. A reconciliation. I clink the seat belt latch on and cinch the belt strap tight.“What’s the game plan?” my father asks.“Got the bus all set up,” Brother Jed says. “Jeremiah and I set a trap line yesterday. Get us there and it’ll be old times again.”“Don’t want me going home with you, huh?” my father asks. Brother Jed grins awkwardly. At the prison gate the guard smirks like he’s doing us a big favor by letting us out. As the wagon pulls on the road, my father sits quiet while Brother Jed hums from deep in his chest. “Warden said no guns,” my father says.“No guns,” Brother Jed repeats. “Didn’t say no traps, did he?”
They’re so different: Brother Jed talks gentle, strong, a late-afternoon cumulous building ten miles high. My father speaks with the shakes and shimmies of little winds, mixing words and sighing into one tumbling voice. Not finding anything to say, Brother Jed tunes the radio to AM 950—Alabama’s all gospel, all the time. They broadcast his sermon every Sunday. Today they’re playing a cappella music. I look out the window and watch the back-road dust billow by.
It’ll take two hours to reach Brother Jed’s land. We’re staying in an old bus, a city liner Brother Jed and my father drug up there from Birmingham before I was born. My father strung the bus to electric lines and Brother Jed built in counters, closets, a bed. It’s a rusting tin tub with tires dry rotted to the ground and plywood dust inside. A cheap man’s hunting lodge—waiting for us.
“It’ll be good to get back,” my father says. So unreal. He kills my mother, I grow ten years, and he’s back again, living without time passing. I wipe my nose and taste oil in my mouth. From oiling my gun and the traps last night. My mom said that smells run with memories. I breathe my father’s scent and wonder what he remembers.
* * *
First rule of trapping beavers: Look for areas of quiet water, preferably along hard wood bottomlands. If working in areas of rapids, concentrate the traps along the pools below the white water. I was given my first trap at age eight, a Christmas present from Brother Jed. Said he wanted to start me small. With raccoons.
“Be sure not to stick your finger in it,” he warned, “or your mom’ll be trapping me.”I grinned at my mother, who sat in a cloud of wrapping paper shreds under the Christmas tree. Her long black hair hung wet, her faded housecoat stained with that morning’s breakfast. She frowned at the trap, then aimed a cheap K-Mart camera at me. Click.
“No flash,” my father said.“Doesn’t need it,” my mother replied.The trap was a small #3 single-spring. Perfect for raccoons. Brother Jed trapped raccoons, beavers, minks all winter. I stared up at him—a big man of muscles and width. I imagined climbing him as TV people scaled snowy mountains in far-off Asian countries.
“Deal is that Jed’ll show you how to use it,” my father said, fingering the trap, “and I’ll show you how to clean the pelt.” My father was a taxidermist, but he rarely hunted and rarely trapped. Compared to Brother Jed’s bulk, he was a thin sapling that’d break if climbed.
After dinner, Brother Jed and I walked to an abandoned house down the dirt road. The floor boards were rotted, half gone, so we balanced on the nail lines above support beams. Brother Jed set the trap inside a fallen kitchen cabinet. He eased the trigger in the groove, laid a piece of newspaper over the trap, and placed two sardines on top.
“Tonight—snap,” he said, gesturing with his hands like I was slow. When I came back home, my mother ignored me until it was time for my bedtime story. She came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed, and shook her waist-length hair into cascades over me. I closed my eyes and breathed in shampoo and early-morning brushings.“Why do you want to catch a raccoon?” she asked.
I squirmed under the covers. I hated not knowing how to answer people. Like when my teacher at school asked me “Why?” after I gave her a correct answer. I knew the answer. What more did I have to give?
“Don’t know,” I said.“Well, you follow Brother Jed’s instructions about trapping and you’ll learn. If you want to, I mean.”“Why’s Brother Jed a preacher if he traps so good?”
My mother’s hair shifted over me, moving but still warm. “Sometimes you get into something and it’s just too hard to get out.” She placed our old National Geographic atlas next to me. Every night she tucked me into bed with a different story. She’d choose some country she’d never been to—which was everywhere—then read on the place in library books until she found a story that she could love and make her own. Then she’d share it with me. She told so many great ones. Like the story of a peasant boy in Thailand who tricked his way into the royal palace by doing backward flips. The King was so amused that he ordered the boy’s mother rescued from an evil landlord. Or the story of the last land tortoise on an isolated island in the Galapagos, who lived two hundred years after the rest of her kind where slaughtered by sailors. My mother said the tortoise would still be living today if she hadn’t died of loneliness.
“I have a great story from Brazil for tonight,” she said. She opened the atlas to South America. I looked out from under her hair and flipped the maps to the United States, to Alabama. “Here,” I said. “I want a story from here. Something about trapping.”My mother’s hair hung still. “What’s to tell about here?” she asked.“Please.”She sat silent for moments—thinking—then she closed the atlas. I knew she was disappointed in me. She reached over and turned off my lamp. “Okay, this is the story of Brother Jed and the panther.”
To hear the story right, picture dark bedrooms where anything imagined is seen, and where my mom’s voice turned raspy and tangled as she spoke:—Brother Jed, he’d been trapping raccoons in that old root cellar out on his land, down below the burned out homeplace. What’s a root cellar? Think of four cement walls under soil and clay, big oaks growing over the top, bigger roots wedging the door half open and dark. A perfect spot for storing food years ago. A perfect spot for raccoons now.
—One day, as Brother Jed was about to go into the root cellar to check on his trap, a deep voice rambled out: “You the man set this trap?”
—Brother Jed peered into the root cellar but couldn’t see anything beyond dark. Still, he feared no man—and preachers don’t believe in ghosts and stuff. “Maybe,” he said. “Why you wanna know?”
—“I’m a panther. I’ve been waiting all night for the man who set this trap to come back. See, it done snapped off my middle toe.” The panther held up his paw for inspection, but all Brother Jed saw were motions flickering in the dark.
—Now, Brother Jed wasn’t a stupid man. “How do I know you’re not a raccoon trying to scare me off by saying it’s a panther?” Jed asked.
—The voice paused, then spoke low, clear. “Guess you’ve got a choice, huh? Either you step in here and find out—and I’ll kill you—or I’ll chase you down—and kill you. Your choice.”
—So Brother Jed stood outside the root cellar’s door for a few minutes, pondering his options and listening to the heavy breathing and low growling coming from inside. Then he nodded his head, stroked his beard, and made his choice.—
My mother stood up, lifting her hair from about me.“What happened?” I asked.“Don’t know,” she said, kissing me goodnight. As she walked to the doorway, backlit by the kitchen lights, she growled at me. Like a panther with a cut-off toe who’s waiting in a root cellar.I didn’t sleep well that night.
Second rule of trapping beavers: Look for well-used runs. If there is an ample food supply—like smaller saplings—the beaver will make a habit of using the same run over and over. Some runs get used so much they groove down a foot or more into the creek bank. Brother Jed and I set a trap line on his land yesterday, to be ready for my father’s visit. By the time we arrive from the prison it is late afternoon, so my father changes clothes before we go and hike the slough roads and check the traps. None of them have been touched. We walk back to the bus as the sun’s getting smooth gray for the night. I fix sandwiches for us and we eat. Brother Jed points to the single light bulb hanging from the bus roof. The filament is hot under fly-specked glass. “I’ve never had to replace it,” he says, like this is up there with Genesis. “Click. Let there be light.” My father isn’t listening. He’s focusing on drinking his beer. “First beer in ten years,” he says.
“Who you got to blame for that,” Brother Jed says.I’m quiet. In my cup of hot chocolate, the little marshmallows swirl into whirlpools after each sip. We haven’t changed clothes since checking the traps—Brother Jed in his army coat, my father in his jump suit. I pull my coat tight while the wind shakes the windows. Brother Jed says we can light the kerosene heater but then we gotta open the windows. “The fumes,” he states.
“Been trapping much lately?” my father asks.“Not really,” Brother Jed says. “All the fun’s gone out of it.”“Noticed that your last trap was pretty bad. Saw the drag line poking up from the waterline and all.”
Brother Jed shrugs. “Things change. Now all the pelts just go to some fur factory and that doesn’t move me to do my best, I guess. Besides, I never could make a pelt look good like you.”
My father nods, accepting his old place within Brother Jed’s world. My chestsqueezes—just so easy, him coming back and Brother Jed and us easing into our old lives. It don’t feel right. I scrape my chair across the little nonskid ridges on the metal floor as spit burns down my throat. They can talk about everything that’s happened—everything but the everything that matters.
“You know we’re gonna change my last name?” I ask my father. He stares at me, waiting, so I go on. “Gonna change it from Eaton to Stanton.” Eaton is my father’s name, Stanton is Brother Jed’s. They’re cousins, but Brother Jed’s mom married a Stanton.
“Why?” my father asks Brother Jed.“Now Elijah,” Brother Jed says, friendly smile on his face. “This is something I’ve been thinking about for some time. He’s about to leave home, about to be a man, and he doesn’t need a name holding him back.” Brother Jed turns from my father’s hazel stare. Fleeting, chasing. My father stands, paces to the other end of the bus and back.
“That’s shit,” he says. “Do what you need to do, but don’t do things just to hurt me. What about you, Jed? You doing this to hurt me?”“Of course not.”“Well, that name was hers, too, and it’s the only thing you haven’t taken.” My father walks to the bed, drops his boots on the metal floor and pulls the covers over jump suit, socks, and all. Brother Jed looks close to cursing me, but he breathes deep a few times and releases what’s inside him. “Be getting up early,” he says. “You ready?”
There’s just the one bed, and it’s big, reaching from side to side in the bus. We lay next to each other, not sleeping well, feeling each roll and tumble the others make throughout the night.
Third rule of trapping beavers: Set the traps—usually a double-spring #4—in six to eight inches of water immediately below the selected runs. The beaver can’t see them and the water masks any human scent left behind. After my mom told me that panther story, I had nightmares all night—dreams of raspy voices missing one toe, dreams of panthers chasing and trapping me. In the morning, I took my 4-10 shotgun along when I checked my raccoon trap. I stepped up on the porch of that old house, walked carefully on the support beams. As I stepped through the doorway to the kitchen, I heard loud hisses and thumps jump out, then saw a raccoon lay black eyes on me before dropping inside the cubby of the fallen cabinet.
It was big, over twenty pounds. I walked over to the cabinet and shoved it with the shotgun barrel. The raccoon clawed the barrel, then tried to run but the dragline caught. The raccoon climbed back down and glared at me.
“I’m going to let you go,” I said, talking softly, easing forward. I shoved the barrel of the shotgun next to the raccoon, trying to push down the trap’s release. Instead the raccoon jumped again and I hit the trigger.
The blast flared, kicking me back. My right boot stepped off the support beam onto the rotten floorboards. The last thing I knew was a feeling that those mush-soft planks were sucking hard, and pulling me down.
I woke in bed—my mother pulling splinters from my legs and holding an icepack to my head.“You okay?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. Brother Jed and my father stood in the doorway, where they were whispering. “Ran back here like a devil,” Brother Jed said softly, “eyes rolled back in his head and all.” I didn’t remember that, but I also never knew Brother Jed to lie. When they saw me awake, Brother Jed and my father walked over.
My father talked.“You okay?”—I nodded.—“Why’d you shoot the raccoon?”—No answer.—“I had to throw it in the ravine, you know. Nothing left to it.”I leaned close to my mother. I felt embarrassed that I’d left the safety off my shotgun and killed something for nothing.
My father screwed his face like he’d swallowed gasoline. He sat next to me and sank the mattress so I rolled towards him. He held my arm gently.“Why’d you do it?”“Don’t know,” I said. The lie jumped in fast. “I don’t remember anything.”My father looked doubtful, but my mom pulled his hand off me.“He’s got a lump on his head. If you’re mad, hit Jed. He’s the one set a trap in that old house.”
My father locked eyes with me until I rolled over on the pillow. His boot steps then marched out, shaking the floors and walls and bed. Brother Jed followed him.
When I looked again my mother was smiling.“Don’t tell me what happened,” she said. “Don’t wanna ruin a good story, do we?”I smiled, and swallowed back all my words.
My father shot my mother and what do I tell people? Nothing. Used to drive my friends crazy, me not telling what happened.My friends made up games about it. I’d be my father. One of the other boys—usually Lamar, with his high girl’s voice—would be my mother. The boy chosen as my mother’s lover would stand awkward, trying not to show the least interest or delight in his role.
Then I’d walk in, raise my BB gun, and shoot Lamar/my mother. “Hit the bluejeans,” he’d yell—but that didn’t sting, so I’d pop him on the stomach. Then the sheriff would hunt me down—along with Lamar back from the dead and the boy lover. Sometimes they even shot me for fun.
I now know they did it out of curiosity, wanting to get me to talk about what happened. To them, I was cool—I’d seen a murder, seen the blood and guts and TV stuff. They wanted to hear about it, to know what signs to look for in their own parents’ potentially murderous behavior.
Still, I never told anyone anything. What could I say? That my mother and father never argued? That they never yelled? That they talked, calmly, breathing deeply, taking hour-long breaks before coming back together to talk some more? I couldn’t tell people that. It didn’t explain why everything happened.
I believed my parents were happy together, and when I found otherwise I was so stunned I didn’t try to help. If I had done something, even said one word, my mother would still be alive and so would I. That’s the story I can’t tell.
My father never had much use for stories. Most evenings, a half-hour before supper was ready, Mom’d tell me to go get him. I’d run out the back door and down to the barn, down to his work room where the smells of chemicals and tanning hides and preservatives wafted about. I didn’t say anything as I walked in, just squatted on a little chair by the door that my father had built specially for me.
My father always sat on a high wooden stool beside his workbench. He had knives and scrapers in a jar on the bench and stacks of naked plastic animal bodies—deer, ducks, a coyote—in the corners of the room. To his right, a fishbowl of glass eyes. To his left, an air conditioning that dripped onto a soggy pile of sawdust. My father dusted the stuff over the floor to soak up any blood.
I never talked when my father worked, never came close. I just watched him as he bent over some pelt, his hands and arms moving in and out from the fur. He’d stretch the pelts over the nude plastic molds and set the glass eyes in the sockets and suddenly, as if a wizard had whipped up a magical spell, a deer or fox was frozen in time and staring at me.
Once, Brother Jed brought my father a beaver pelt. The beaver hadn’t died underwater and, in the warm winter, the pelt began to stink so bad that the death clung to Brother Jed’s hands even after he washed them in gasoline.
“Shouldn’t have waited so long to check your trap line,” my father said.Brother Jed nodded. “Can you do something?” he asked.
My father scraped the fat off the pelt, soaked it for a week in chemicals he locked away from me in a metal cabinet. He then slowly eased the skin soft, coming back to the pelt every afternoon when his paying customers’ mounts were done. He finally stretched the beaver into a circle and pegged it to the wall. He let it dry for several weeks, rubbed it every so often with a salve. I sniffed it once—it smelled of good fur.
When the pelt was done, I watched my father sniff each inch of the beaver pelt, then slowly rub it up down his cheek. He sat hunched over the pelt for ten minutes or more, fingers bending and flexing the fur. He breathed deep of it one last time, then stood up.“Ready for supper?” he asked. We walked to the house.
The fourth rule of trapping beavers: Use a steel wire of about ten to twelve feet in length as a dragline. Attach the line to a heavy stake or tree lying in or close to the water, in the water being best because neither the trap or line will be visible and the water masks the human scent. Be sure to remember a tree or feature on shore so you can find the trap again.
Brother Jed taught me how to trap beavers the winter I was nine. He’d tell me his rules as we walked each trap line. “What do you do if…?” he’d ask, and if I answered wrong he simply spoke the number of the rule I was breaking. “That’s a #6,” he’d say, as if all insight could be found within.
On the morning of the second day of my father’s furlough, Brother Jed’s not quizzing me about the rules. “What are you going to say?” he asks me. My father is huddling over the kerosene heater, seeing if the coffeepot on top is still boiling. He’s still mad about last night and won’t look at us.
“Nothing,” I say.Brother Jed points to the stars. They’re slow fading to morning light. Time to go.“Jeremiah,” he tells me, “I’m going to set some raccoon traps. You and Elijah run the trap line along the sloughs.”
My father drinks a final sip of coffee, then slings the dregs down so they dance a small fog from the frozen ground. Brother Jed clicks off the bus light, lets the door bang empty in the still air as he begins to walk down the cotton field road. The long line of the irrigator pipes hang over the horizon and as he goes under them his flashlight gives the metal a brief glow.
My father and I walk to the woods. I’m carrying my old rifle in case we jump a deer. At the treeline we sit on stiff clods of iced earth, kicked up by a plow long gone. My butt goes wet cold then slowly warms as we wait for the dawn light.
“You trying to get Jed and I to fight?” my father asks.“Don’t know. Just hard, knowing the truth.”My father accepts that. “Still,” he says, “better to be with family than bouncing from foster home to orphanage to what not.”That’s also what he told me before the trial.“Sorry about last night,” I say. “I’m not really going to change my name.”
My father accepts the apology and we sit quiet for a while. I look around the woods—my eyes are seeing the dark, even as the night gives to dawn. I stare at my father, at his shortening, hardening face, which draws tight around his eyes in the faint light. It’s a reality of unknown and fantasy that I’ll never know.
“I knew about Brother Jed and Mom,” I say. “I mean, before you found out.”“Not too surprised,” he says. “Still, there’s nothing you could have done.”“I kept thinking you and Mom would work things out, that if I didn’t say anything she’d forget Brother Jed and you two’d be fine. Guess I should have said something.”
My father reflects on this. I go on. “If you’d known before hand, would you have still done it?” I ask.“I think about that a lot. I mean, the prosecutors said it wasn’t premeditated, but there I was, thinking that I shouldn’t be doing this the whole time I was doing it. You may not have known it, but your mom and me had problems.”
I stiffen, frown. Brother Jed had said the same thing once, when I first went to live with him. I’d been crying and hitting the walls in my room one day when Brother Jed walked in and said, “That’s good. Get it all out.” I screamed and said I hated him. “Your mom and dad had problems,” he stated, as if this explained it all.
My father and I sit in silence for a minute, two. “Please leave me alone,” I eventually say. My father respects being alone, so he stands and walks back across the field to the bus. The frost snaps under his boots until he’s twenty feet away, then you’d never know he was there.
I walk into the woods. Daylight comes, lunch comes, and I keep walking. The sun dodges between the bare tree limbs and the few, yet-to-fall dead leaves. I walk until I’m near the sloughs, or somewhere near that root cellar in Brother Jed’s panther story. Somewhere. My rifle floats somewhere within my gloved hands.
The fifth rule of trapping beavers: Always weight the trap in order to drown the beaver. Tying a half piece of concrete block or a rock of equal weight to the trap will work. Place eighteen inches of wire between the weight and the trap. Place the weight on the slope of the bank. The trapped beaver will pull the dragline out to deeper water, and the weight should drown it.
“Mom,” I said, air thick and strangling my chest. “I know about you and Brother Jed.”In the dark of my bedroom, I couldn’t see her face. But her hair stopped dancing over me, froze into an immobile waterfall of smells and touch.“What do you know?” my mother asked. She’d been about to tell me a story from Kenya, and hadn’t expected this.
I couldn’t open my mouth—saying what I’d just said had taken all the voice I possessed. I’d seen Brother Jed coming by and leaving on a day when my father was off at a taxidermy show. I was supposed to have been out at Lamar’s house, but I hadn’t gone.
“It’s okay,” she said, stroking my nose.I started crying. I didn’t want Brother Jed as a father. I wanted my own father.I had started to suspect things that time my mother took me to the church on a Monday. “I just need to talk to Brother Jed,” she’d said. “You play outside.”
For a while I tried to catch the giant grasshoppers—each as long as my hand—that jumped on the kudzu vines by the brick church. I couldn’t box them in and they all leapt away. I went to inspect the vines below Brother Jed’s office for any grasshoppers I hadn’t spooked. His window was open, the air conditioning flowing deep river cool down onto me. I heard my mother’s angry voice.
“I hate him, sometimes,” she said. “Like when he’s working on those pelts and won’t have anything to do with me. Then later, he’ll come in the house, shrug, say, ‘You know how it is when you’re doing something you love,’ and I want to kill him.”“Why?” Brother Jed asked.“Because I don’t know.”
I sat under the window, listening, because it’s fun to know stuff you’re not supposed to hear. My mother talked about all the places she’d wanted to see, all the things she’d dreamed of doing. She told about our old atlas and how she’d marked it up with places she’d read about.
“It’s hard knowing that little ink circle called ‘Bangkok’ or ‘Tokyo’ is a place where people are living and here I am not involved in any of that,” she said.“What’ll make it better? Leaving?”“I don’t know.”
Brother Jed walked around his desk and hugged my mother as she began to cry. Slowly the crying stopped, but the hugging didn’t, so I walked away and chased more grasshoppers and didn’t think to know anything more till I caught my mother and Brother Jed together and told my mother when she came to tell me that story from Kenya.
“There, it ain’t that bad,” she said, holding me. “It’s got nothing to do with you. Sometimes things just don’t work out between two people.”“Why don’t they?” I’d seen the love my parents had—they didn’t fight, yell, argue, which is what people on TV always did before they broke up. “Don’t you love Dad?”My mom stood up, and walked to the door. She couldn’t say anything so she left my room. Without telling me her story.
Stories. Rules.I’d seen things coming, like a train braking a half mile down the tracks and the engineer knowing it still can’t stop before hitting that car in the crossing.It was a Friday. My father and I left our muddy boots on the front steps and walked into the house. My father double tapped absently on the windowpane as he held the door for me. “Always empty your gun before coming in,” he said solemnly, and I handed him the two shells from my shotgun as we walked through the kitchen.
I balanced the twelve gauge shotgun on my shoulder. Brother Jed had given me the new gun; my father’d been teaching me how to use it. My right hand was in his and I felt the shotgun shells mixing with his calluses. Then we heard quick jumping up sounds—creakings and a crash—coming from the den.
My mother sat on the sofa, unbuttoned shirt hanging loose over her skin, legs, and all. Behind her, Brother Jed was pulling up his pants. I wanted to tell him to slow down, to button one hole at a time. Then my father let go of my hand. The shotgun shells clicked, the shotgun lifted from my shoulder.
My mother smiled at me—her hair long and black, gliding past her stomach. So many stories left to tell. She nodded. So much to tell. So much to tell.Behind her, Brother Jed ran out the side door. Beside me, the click of shotgun shells entering the chamber.The shotgun blast.Stories, rules—they’re just words.
The sixth rule of trapping beavers: Run the trap line early every morning. Some beavers will always manage not to drown. They will either pull loose or tangle in the line above water or gnaw their own foot off.
I walk the road between the sloughs—a hard-packed cut between the hill and icy water—listening to the long-giving-way groans of ice cracking. Each step is quiet on last year’s frozen, decayed leaves.
The ice is bright, white. The first three traps had been empty, but this one’s gone, the dragline straight out from the tree. A beaver sits on the ice nearby with the trap shut on his right rear leg. The weighted wire that was supposed to drown the beaver drops off the edge of the ice, with the cement block at the line’s end pulling down hard.
I sight him in my scope. He is beautiful; at least forty pounds, fur sleek and glistening, his teeth moving in and out, gnashing at me. He fills my scope. I lower the rifle and watch. The ice is bloody where the beaver’s been gnawing at his trapped leg. He slaps his tail hard on the ice, warning other long-gone beavers. He tugs once on the dragline, gnaws his leg again, and slides closer to the water.
I raise my rifle and sight him in again and pull the trigger. The blast burns my eye with afterimages. As I blink away splotches and glows, I walk to the bank. There’s an ice hole around the run and the water splashes below where the beaver stood. He must have dived under after I shot him.
The beaver’s blood is burst across the ice, a red sprinkled line three feet out. As I watch, the dragline jerks a final time before going still. I cock the rifle, hold the barrel a few inches from the dragline, and pull the trigger again. The line parts with a jerking flare and the beaver end of the line sinks. In the hole little waves bounce off the rimming ice before returning to the center again. I cock the empty shell out and the brass rolls on ice.
While driving over to the judge’s office, Brother Jed told me how things would work. I’d been living with him ever since the deputies had arrested my father.“Okay, here’s how it is,” he said. “They’re going to find your father guilty. They’re going to send him to prison.”I nodded. I understood.“Now,” Brother Jed continued, his hands gripping the steering wheel like an imaginary pulpit. “The prosecutor wants to ask you some questions today.
They know about your mom, okay? So just do like your father said do.”I nodded again. When we arrived, I followed Brother Jed up the courthouse steps and stood back as he shook hands with the district attorney. When the district attorney led me into his office, I said I didn’t know the man my mom’d been with. No sir, didn’t get a good look at him either. As we left, the district attorney pulled a sucker from his drawer, gave it to me, and patted my head.
“It’s good you’re taking him in,” the district attorney said to Brother Jed.“He’s family. What else could I do?”That night, Brother Jed pulled out my mother’s old atlas. “I’ve been to a few of the places in here,” he said. “Vietnam, Japan, Thailand …you wanna hear a real story about those places?”I shook my head no.
My mother never told me any rules for finding the perfect story. I once asked her how she did it, found the good stories to tell me night after night. “You know a good story when you hear it,” she said. “You get the voice in your head and that’s it, you’ve caught a good one.”
Once, my father sat in on one of her stories. It was set in Russia, I think, about a princess who escaped from the communists and found the man of her dreams in America. Halfway through the story my father stopped her.
“That’s not how the story goes,” he said. “I heard this on TV last week. They killed the princess and threw her and her family in a well.”“I can tell it how I want to.”My father nodded at that and my mother finished her story.
The bus is dark and the kerosene heater sits outside with us, its picture-framed flames lighting the lawn chair that my father sits in. The air around the heater is a warm ball slowly stirring away into the night. I make a sandwich and sit with him.“What did you shoot at?” my father asks.“Beaver.”He nods critically. “Always know two shots won’t get anything. Why’d you miss?”“Didn’t.”My father looks at me and shrugs. We sit and wait until Brother Jed walks up.“Did you cut my drag line?” he asks.“No. Shot it.”He glares.“Shot the beaver too, but it dove down the ice hole.”“Beaver will go for water every time,” my father says. “Their last thought is for that water. It’s underwater, hugging the bottom before it even knows it’s dead. But maybe you knew that, eh?”“Shut up, Elijah,” Brother Jed says.
I look up. The night clouds are dark, backlit by the moon. They sail by. Boring, but it’s easier to let people know you’re ignoring them if you look up. We sit there, with no one talking. Ten minutes, twenty. Finally, my father stands and walks behind the bus. I hear old metal screeching, squawking. He comes back with two poles. One of them curved is on the end.
“Let’s go see if we can hook your beaver,” he tells Brother Jed. I drive the wagon while Brother Jed and my father work the poles in the back seat. My father ties a special knot to hold the two poles together and they inspect it closely. Brother Jed says it should be tighter; my father says it’s fine. The wagon bounces hard in a rut and the pole smacks them both.
“Careful,” I laugh out.The wagon bumps tight between the trees on the slough road but we make it. I park it so the headlights shine into the ice, lighting the blood trail like warm coals. The water in the ice hole is blue-cold frothy slush.“You wanna do it?” my father asks me.“I’ll watch,” I say.My father stands on the bank, swirling the pole in the water to break the ice hole larger. He probes with it, pushing in and out for the beaver. He stops once, feels, keeps going. The water looks about nine feet deep. The pole moves three feet out, then four. It stops and he pushes hard, then pulls. The pole doesn’t move.
“Give me a hand.”Brother Jed and I grab the pole. We’re pulling, tugging, when the pole jerks. We pull harder, setting our boots against the bank. Suddenly the rope knot slips and I hit the ground and Brother Jed lands on me. We sit up to see the lower half of the pole bobbing in the water.
“You sure that was it?” Brother Jed asks.“Yeah,” my father says. He looks at me as if he wants to know what I will do now.“It doesn’t matter to me,” I say.“If it didn’t matter you shouldn’t have killed it,” he says. Brother Jed nods.
Freeze. Stop. My stomach churns around a wad of cold pitch. No more. All these years, neither one of them explaining, neither one saying. I understood everything when my father went before the judge for sentencing. It had been an easy trial: just my father, my dead mother, and my father holding a just-fired shotgun when the deputies arrived. A simple case.
My father didn’t say a word during the trial and never mentioned Brother Jed’s name. I followed his lead.
Before passing sentence, the judge asked my father if he had any final words, but my father shook his head. “Twenty years,” the judge said and people shouted, nodded.
“We’re here for you,” an old man sitting next to Brother Jed and I said. I didn’t know him, but he gave me a familiar squeeze on the shoulder with his wrinkled hand. Other spectators smiled at me, agreeing, also wanting to be there for me. “I should have said something,” I said to the old man. He kept smiling, but let go of my shoulder. Brother Jed, who hadn’t stirred throughout the trial, who hadn’t shown emotion since my mother’s death, shivered.
It was a twanging shake that shivered the wooden bench and shivered into my body.I understood then. Everyone said they were there for me, everyone wanted to hear my story, but if I ever spoke the truth they’d just take me away. I’d have no family. No one. I’d be sent into unknown homes, to people who’d want to hear my story just so they could shake their righteous heads and say “Wicked, just wicked”while they smirked. They believed it would never happen in their families.
Brother Jed rushed me to the courthouse bathroom and everything came up in the toilet. He tried holding me but I pushed him away. I washed my mouth out in the sink, swallowed too much water, and threw up again. If it doesn’t matter, you shouldn’t have killed it. They had problems. If you want a family, you have to keep quiet. If I’d said something, this wouldn’t have happened. All the things I’ve ever heard or thought makes me wanna shoot their voices out of my brain. I look back. Brother Jed and my father are behind the wagon, tying the metal rods together again. They’re still discussing which knot to use.
The headlights wrap my hands in a pale glow. I strip—take my coat off, my shirt off. It won’t make a difference, but I want it all off. My body smokes steam and the lights wrap around me. I’m a shimmering ghost as I step off the bank.
As I enter the water, I ask, What do I want? I’m not going to kill myself—this I know—but my body still fights as the ice water shocks me, as it shatter-glasses my eyes and needle-knits my skin. I twitch, grab, move to a cold more real than me, more truth than not. Still, I say I’m not going to kill myself.
The slough bottom is stiff sludge, with dead twigs and branches that poke numbly into the calluses of my feet. I kick about for the beaver; on the second kick my toes hit stiff meat. I grab the beaver’s rubbery tail but my cramping fingers refuse to hold onto it. Quickly, I knot my fingers around the loops of the metal trap.
I should tell my legs to push off the bottom. Instead, I wait, for five seconds, ten, then I can’t follow the time. My throat cries out on its own, whines away with my soft air. That’s why people don’t usually choose suicide through drowning—it takes too long. The body suddenly wants air more than the mind wants dying and you live. Shoot yourself—no time for the body to object. Waste slowly away in life, never trying to live—the body’s too content to object. It’s just drowning that’s hard to force.
I wanna move away from myself, like a pelt cut away from the body, like a character cut from a story: That’s Jeremiah lifting the beaver. That’s Jeremiah crying. That’s Jeremiah going on with life, wishing he’d said something when he could. That’s Jeremiah saying I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry.Suddenly, the water divides and my father’s long arms grab me. For a moment we go down as my throat runs out of air. Don’t breathe water, my body says. I don’t. My father’s legs push us up and the surface splashes and I breathe.
“Give me your hand,” Brother Jed yells. I reach out. He tugs hard and I’m flying to the bank, my fingers still wrapped around the steel trap.“I’ve got the beaver,” I say. I crumple to the bank as Brother Jed pulls the beaver up onto the frozen ground. Brother Jed then pulls my father out and pushes us to the wagon.“Get out of those clothes,” he barks, turning the car heater on high. Brother Jed strips off his coat, shirt, tosses them to us. “Dry off with my stuff,” he orders.
The heat is needles and cramps all over again. My father strips clothes and joins me in nakedness. We sit blue tinted in the car’s dash lights, shivering and wiping with Brother Jed’s shirt. “Pretty funny sight, huh?” he asks. I laugh. He doesn’t ask why I jumped in. The wagon then rocks once when Brother Jed tosses the beaver in the back.
Back at the bus, my father and I warm by the heater while Brother Jed skins the beaver. I sip vegetable soup from a can while my father drinks coffee. When Brother Jed comes in he hangs the pelt inside the bus so the raccoons and coyotes can’t get to it. As I’m falling asleep, my body still twitching to get warm under the blankets, I hear my father talking. I roll over and watch out the side of one squint-opened eye.
“It’ll be a good pelt,” my father says. He’s holding the beaver, feeling the skin cut from fat cut from body now hanging from the metal bus ceiling. He rubs the pelt between thumb and finger, brings the blood to his nose and sniffs. His face twitches like it wants to spit a tear, but doesn’t.
The seventh rule of trapping beavers: Skin the beaver as soon as possible after death. Otherwise the pelt will begin smelling as the air gets to it and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.
On the morning my father has to become a prisoner again, we stop the wagon an hour early at the prison gate. The guard looks at his schedule and shrugs. “Fine with me if you want back in early,” he says. We drive through and stop at the entrance. My father shakes hands with Brother Jed.“If I get parole next year,” my father says, “I might just have to tell people. I mean, since Jeremiah will be grown up and all. Be quite a story.”Brother Jed nods.“But maybe I won’t, eh?” my father says.
He leans over the seat to me. “Put that pelt up on a wall. Peg it good and round.” My father gives me a smile, then he walks through the prison door and is home.
As we drive down the highway I think of the final rule that Brother Jed taught me: always skin the pelt early, before it has time to set up and smell. I feel this new pelt. The fat is still frozen, the blood like congealed jello, but there is no stink. Brother Jed skinned it in time. But I also know that he once left a beaver too long in the air and it stank and my father still saved that pelt. What good is a rule if you can break it and still have everything turn out all right?
Brother Jed is mouthing the words he’ll be preaching later this morning, and I wanna ask him about this and my mother and everything. But Brother Jed stays deep into his sermon and I leave him alone. Next year I’ll leave home and be gone—the way others are gone while their stories continue on. I know now that rules are just stories told so often they’ve become rules. And that stories are just people who’ve gone on beyond the rules. And that someday we’ll all be gone while the stories, rules, still live—until eventually no one knows what they must have meant in the first place.But gone still has to go on in some way, eh?
******
"Cold Pelts" first appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal. It is part one of three in a series of stories.
Jason Sanford has fiction in issue five of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, while one of his critical essays was just published in the New York Review of Science Fiction. His short fiction has also been published in The Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, Diagram, Beloit Fiction Journal, and other journals and magazines. He is the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and edits the literary journal storySouth.
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Don J.Jul 8th, 2007 - 18:33:44
Amazing story.
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Don J.Jul 8th, 2007 - 18:33:44
Amazing story.
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