Ira Dubois was coming back to tell his father’s grave he was gay. Well, gay enough. Bisexual. He would say it didn’t matter if his imagined future lover was a man or a woman or someone who those words could never contain. It was like he had spent twenty-five years—his whole life—nocturnal and now he’d seen the sun for the first time, and seen himself in it, and he hadn’t turned to stone or to dust.
He’d already come out to his mother and sister and they hugged him, loved him, the same as ever. It was crazy though, coming out to the dead. Ira didn’t believe in an afterlife, but the thing about losing your father young was you missed your chance to say a lot of things you didn’t know you meant to.
He would start with gratitude. Thank his father for everything he had given him. He wouldn’t bring up the imperfections. Gratitude then, and forgiveness. That was where he would begin. Work his way up to what he really meant to say.
The old roads, so familiar that he wasn’t sure he ever knew or needed their names, calmed him. The snow scattered on the ground could’ve been the same he left behind years before. Why was he nervous? The dead couldn’t hurt him. He didn’t think the dead would want to anyway. He hugged the curves, and they hugged him back. Vermont hadn’t changed in his absence. If anything, it was surprised to see him. The stranger with out of state plates looked familiar. The trees leaned over the roadside, expectant faces peering into a baby carriage.
Coming around the bend, he didn’t see the deer. The car went one way and the deer went the other. One wheel caught the road’s shoulder and the car careened into a tree trunk. The airbags deployed, but he was unharmed.
Ira didn’t realize he’d gotten out of the car until he saw the deer lying in the ditch. It was still breathing, inflating and deflating like a panic attack paper bag. Its pelt was brown as the cornstalk stubble stabbing up through the snow. It wouldn’t look at him.
Instinct told him not to get too close, though its horns were only studs. His first thoughts were of mercy, and the next to ask forgiveness. He apologized to the deer and went to his trunk looking for his father’s shotgun, but it wasn’t there—it had never been. This wasn’t his father’s truck. It had been many years since Ira rode around the backroads with him and the gun, looking for a turkey to shoot.
He leaned against the car and tried to slow his breathing. Police around here were used to executing not-yet-roadkill—so he flipped open his cellphone to call for help.
No signal.
Maybe because of the shock, or maybe because of the sudden guilt, or maybe because there was no one else around, Ira spoke to the dying animal.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “As soon as I get steady, I’ll start the car again and finish it. I promise.”
If anything, he should’ve done it quick, cut the suffering short, while his body still barely knew what it was doing. The deer of course, couldn’t understand, and maybe his human voice only added to the terror of its sudden paralysis.
“I’m sorry. This was all so stupid.” He got back in the car, punched the airbags down, and turned the key. The car wouldn’t start, no matter how many times he tried. He screamed in frustration, then felt ashamed, because the deer no doubt heard this too. Beneath the car’s crumpled nose a puddle of oil pooled.
He crossed the road again and hoped to find the deer finally dead. It didn’t raise its head, but he could see the white edge as it angled one black eye on him.
“I’m sorry. The car won’t start,” he said, like a doctor delivering bad news. “There’s nothing else I can do.”
His father had taught him how to kill and dress a deer, and he tried to conjure up whatever it was that let him pull the trigger then. Ira didn’t even have a swiss army knife in his glovebox, so what good could he do? He thought of wrapping a hand around its muzzle, clamping his fingers down on its nostrils, cutting off the air, but knew he could never do it. Not with its eyes open. Imagining the thrashing, he wanted to throw up.
“I’m sorry. I have somewhere really important to be,” he said, though that wasn’t really true; the dead would wait.
He started walking and put the deer out of his mind. It wasn’t much farther if memory served. This must’ve been his old school bus route. On the bus, he once watched two older boys cut their palms across a jagged piece of metal then lock their slick hands together, newly born blood brothers. This was special, they said, and it couldn’t be taken back, even if someone strung you up and drained all your blood into a bucket. Jamie cut his palm and found no one willing to share. Jamie was a faggot, the other boys said, and faggot blood gave you AIDS.
Jamie sat alone and clenched his fist to make the bleeding stop. Ira thought Jamie could’ve attacked the other boys, terrorized them with his oozing palm. But that would be admitting his blood was dangerous.
When Ira told his father, he grabbed his son’s wrists and checked his hands. Ira asked what faggot meant, and his father told him it was something he didn’t want to be, but he already knew that. He stayed away from all boys after that, afraid of bleeding, of finding out he was a faggot with faggot blood.
Years later, working out back with his father, Ira sliced his palm unspooling barbed wire. His mother cleaned the cut and said, “Straight across the fate line.”
He wondered if she had known, what he was, why he was so bent on getting away. Not even he knew then.
He and his mom gardened together, and his father didn’t say anything because he must’ve known how much it meant to her, to share anything with her only son. Lucy, five years older than Ira, was gone to college most of his adolescence, and never took to the soil the way he and their mother did. Ira and his mom didn’t always talk, and often it was no more than asking for a trowel, the watering can, a pair of shears to trim a dying leaf.
While planting seeds at the start of spring, she showed him something her grandmother taught her. Using the sharp point of a pruning knife, she pricked her fingertip and drew a crimson pearl. She squeezed her finger and deposited a gem-drop atop each buried seed. Blood was some of the best fertilizer, she said. It made him nauseous and proved he could never be a doctor.
The cancer that took over his father’s lungs made Ira wish he was in med school. But wouldn’t it have been worse to study the thing killing his father and know he couldn’t make a difference? Doctors said it could be from all the pesticides he breathed in those many summers working with the windows open at the Post Office. Once the patriarch was in the ground, they sold the childhood house to a brand-new nuclear family, and mom moved to Massachusetts to be closer to Ira and Lucy. Six years ago, at Paul Dubois’ funeral, Ira imagined cutting himself open and draining into the earth. His father’s grave would’ve made a great flowerbed.
Up ahead, the road curved in a new direction and disappeared into the trees. Ira’s breath became ghosts in front of him. But the car was still in sight when he turned around to look. It wasn’t at all the road he thought it was. Surely, he had driven it before, but couldn’t find it in his memories of riding the bus, staring out the window to avoid looking at anyone else. Even here, not all roads led to home.
It was too chilly to go wandering, so he returned to the car. Sitting inside it, he waited. It won’t be long now, he thought. Someone would come by soon enough. The deer would be getting cold, and inexplicably he thought of picking it up and laying it in his backseat. Around here, most people would toss a dead deer in the bed of their pickup—dinner for the winter.
There was no shotgun in his trunk, but there was a tire iron, and reluctantly Ira retrieved it. The deer was waiting for him, breaths rising and falling, slower now. Standing before the animal, he had never thought himself incapable of mercy. He raised the iron over his head like a scythe and said he was sorry.
The tool sailed into the trees, landed somewhere with a dull echo. Ira sat down beside the deer. His father had told him to never approach a deer you weren’t sure was dead. It could get up any second and gore you good, stomp you into the ground. But this deer wasn’t going anywhere, even if it wasn’t dead yet. Maybe if he had never left, had learned all his father wanted him to—how to kill something he couldn’t share a language with—he would’ve stepped on the animal’s neck. The deer didn’t kick, it didn’t wriggle, it didn’t change. He wished he could do something.
Hadn’t he thought something similar at his father’s deathbed? That if he could stop his father’s heart they would both be happier. His father hated being indoors. Even in the dead of winter he would go out snow shoeing, chopping wood, ice fishing. Morphine drips and chemo were never the life and death he wanted. Ira always thought his father didn’t want to get better, because he would never get back to what he once was. Ira knew he was being selfish, resenting someone for not living longer. His father knew that once you started dying you never really stopped. He’d explained as much to Ira when the family cat’s kidneys failed, since he had only agreed to the pet to acquaint the kids with death while they were still young. But while his father went looking for bullets, the cat had crawled out of the cardboard box he put it in and spitefully lived for two more years.
The deer sighed, and Ira thought it had let go at last. He reached a hand out toward its snout, felt the warm air escape once, then again, and again. A wetness startled him, and he snatched his hand back. Slowly the deer’s tongue receded. Tentatively, he opened his palm to it again, and the deer licked away the sweat from his clammy skin.
After a while it stopped, maybe gave up, got tired, or just grew bored of the taste. Ira offered his other hand, and the deer didn’t react. Now, he thought, it was dead. But it shuddered on like a jalopy down a dirt road.
Ira’s hands were going numb; he’d forgotten to bring gloves, woefully unprepared for this homecoming. He tried breathing hot air on them, but it hardly helped. It seemed only natural to reach out and place his hands on the deer’s pelt. The hair was coarse—still warm, and Ira thought he could feel the blood rushing beneath his fingers, a river below the ice. For this his mother would scold him—you had to be careful when you bagged a deer because ticks would fall right off it and start looking for a new host the same second. His mother was still afraid of Lyme disease: the kind of thing that stuck with you quiet and undetected, only to flare up when you least expected. It rarely killed people, more often just made them vulnerable to other conditions that could. If a tick burrowed into him now, he might not notice until days later when he was showering, when the parasite had already digested his blood and the deer’s.
His mother was a big believer in donating blood. Ira had given too, fine as long as he didn’t have to watch. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to give blood anymore—faggot blood—though he doubted that would’ve mattered to anyone dying, or to the deer.
“I wish we knew each other better,” Ira said, then clarified for the deer’s sake, “Me and my dad.”
It would be dead soon, and someone would come by, give Ira a lift, and a tow truck would come for the car. His savior might even take the deer in the back of their pickup, or it would be left for the bears, the crows, the worms, and whatever else was hungry. The car would get fixed. Ira would go to the graveyard and say his piece and would never have another reason to come back here, unless it went well and maybe he would return to visit his father’s grave again, clean it up, plant flowers, or whatever else one did for the dead.
He checked his watch and realized he had no idea how long he had been sitting there. He had no recollection of what time they met, and the day’s twilight felt unmoved, the sun waiting to set until the deer had died, until Ira found his way. Maybe the car’s clock had stopped when he hit the tree, and he considered checking, but didn’t want to abandon the deer even for a moment. By now the car would be cold, its engine finished popping long ago.
He imagined cutting the deer open and crawling inside to keep warm, but he had nothing sharp, and it seemed wrong to think about while the deer was still alive, its warmth the only comfort left to it. Rubbing its pelt he tried to impart some friction heat—tried to do his part.
“Hard to get to know a ghost, I guess,” Ira said.
If no one came he might freeze to death and get the chance to tell his father in person. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. It was like he’d only just met himself, and it would be a shame not to live a while longer.
The deer huffed and blinked at him. It moved a bit, shifted with a twinge of its spine. The muscles tensed under Ira’s touch. Death throes, he thought, but the animal continued to breathe. Imagining a miracle, he pictured it getting to its feet, legs shaking like an unsteady newborn. Of course, it did nothing of the kind. The blood was probably pooling in its chest with no way out. If only he could slice its stomach open and let it die, flowers would grow so tall from this ditch they would stretch right over the road.
The deer opened its mouth and made a terrible sound like a child crying. Though Ira had heard it before in the dark of a morning hunt, his body turned to goosebumps—his father had a deer call to imitate the sound. It wasn’t a young deer, but dying must have reverted it to natal instincts. It was a call for help, Ira was sure, and it could carry for a mile. What would he do if its mother doe appeared? Or worse a father buck with a crown of antlers sharp as nails? Around here, deer knew better than to trust humans. They might stay away, wary of his presence, or they might try and drive him off. Either way he would’ve said sorry for stealing their son. It was an accident. Or would the deer’s own offspring arrive just in time to watch their parent expire? The deer brayed once more and rested. Ira waited several tense minutes, but nothing came from the woods, and no cars came down the road. They remained alone.
It occurred to Ira that maybe the deer’s mother doe and father buck were long dead. Roadkill, or trussed up and hanging in someone’s garage waiting to be cleaned and gutted. Maybe he’d seen through a window the buck’s head mounted on the wall of somebody’s home. It was a good-sized deer—it could be much older than he thought. Deer shed their horns every year, so the nubs on this one didn’t mean a thing. You could be an orphan at any age.
He thought of taking it to the graveyard, burying it beside his father, but it seemed selfish to take away its meat and bones from all that might eat it. They would make better use of it than he ever could; he’d never liked venison all that much anyway, had to chew it so long it felt like the flesh was fighting back, refusing to go down.
And it lived on. Every hunter in his hometown had a story of a deer that should’ve died, one that ran for miles with a bullet hole in its breast leaving a red river in its wake, another with an arrow piercing its throat that disappeared into the brush without a drop of blood and appeared next season, the arrow still intact. He was pretty sure deer didn’t think about dying. Humans could be the same way—it wasn’t real until it was happening to you.
It was getting dark now—the sun hadn’t set but the clouds were moving in and even without their leaves the trees blocked out so much light. A car could come speeding around the curve at any moment, and hit Ira, then a tree, and the driver would get out and wonder what they had done wrong, would stretch Ira’s body out beside the animal, sit with them and see who finished breathing first. Maybe the driver would have the heart to stop both of theirs. It felt like the only way Ira was ever going to get to that graveyard was if he was buried in it.
He lifted the deer’s head into his lap and its horns dug into his hands. Babies imitate what they see others doing, and thinking of this Ira tried to hold his breath, because maybe that would help it let go. Someone just needed to show the way. It would’ve been better to get up and run and run and run, only looking back to see if the deer was following. He couldn’t hold his breath very long, so instead he told stories about his parents, how he grew up around here too, waiting for it, for time, for someone else to pass.