I. THEN
Moonlight slashes open the boy’s face like a luminous wound. He puts on his brother’s goose down jacket, still too large for him, but the spring cold is crisp and bitter and there will be nothing to warm him outside the house. Through the screen door he can see one of his father’s favorite greyhounds lying half-asleep in the tall grass. Westerly comes a sharp wind that wakes the animal and sets it running up the gravel road leading to the entrance of the family manse past the glass-eyed buck’s head welded to the curlicued front gates. The people from town call it Stag’s Crossing after this vulgar display of taxidermy. One thousand acres of rich loam atop the Ogallala Aquifer but only one man there calls himself master of the house with the ornate staircase and milk-white facade. Carlyle Morrow paterfamilias and patriarch. Tall and angular in a peculiar way his face marked by the heat and silt of his childhood in South Carolina. His eyes sharp and green as cut emerald his hair going an early gray. His gait slightly bent to one side like a limping animal though he is strong as any of the summer farmhands he hires to thresh the wheat and husk corn. He drives his white Ford into town every weekend to play pool and drink and stand at the bar and look out the window like he is scrying his own future.
Married only once: his wife French-Oklahoman, a heathen wildness in her gaze dead now for several years having given birth to a monstrous child that in its dying killed her in turn. At the funeral the pastor spoke of the two boys she had left behind though now that she is buried they have forgotten her entirely. Motherless as though Carlyle had cut them from his own flesh. As God made man from a fistful of dust.
Nicholas and Joshua he calls them, the younger and the elder. Whistles to them like a pair of hunting dogs. The older boy Joshua blond like corn silk and the younger one Nick walnut-colored in hair and eye. Like two young bucks they have jousted for dominance in their youthful and garish splendor though Joshua as heir apparent has always been the fated victor. With no women in the house they turn against each other easily with the characteristic cruelty of young boys bereft of civilization. Leaping over the shallow creek and racing through the woods south of the house one pursuing the other until there is no distinction between the courser and the game.
At thirteen Nick is whelped of mother’s milk, his walnut hair grown darker with age to a raw hazelnut. He goes out of the house with his father’s hunting rifle like an angel sent by God to do his killing work. Had he any sense he would have killed his father with it long ago but he has not. Patricide is the least of his concerns. His father says some beast has been laying its tracks around the house and is in need of a good killing so he paces outside the house that night with the gun to reestablish man’s dominion over the animals like his father’s dominion over his children. Carlyle possessing like his own father did before him a violence keen and beautiful as the silver curve of a fishhook. Nick gentler and perhaps even fawn-like, strange somehow. Fashioned in the image of his mother—even more than that he is the last evidence of her presence at Stag’s Crossing, the singular inheritor of her most feminine and sibylline qualities that fill his father with unease.
Having come round the eastern side of the house and found nothing he joins his father in the driveway where Carlyle stands surveying his vast demesne. The Ford idling out front like a waiting hearse.
Didn’t see anything out back, Nick says.
Then look harder, Carlyle says. He points to tracks in the soft soil. Nick squints. Whatever animal has left these behind is swift of foot and light upon the earth. One of his father’s greyhounds comes up behind him, sniffing his hands. He recalls their restlessness, their alacrity. Drawn tight as a bowstring they might at one moment sleep soundlessly in the driveway as peaceful as children only to awaken and overtake a hare with a perfect, savage brutality.
Might be one of the dogs, Nick says.
You ought to know better than that, Carlyle says, lightly cuffing Nick’s ear. Nick sways on his feet; he is lucky it is not a harder blow. Look at the toes.
Fox, Nick says, at last. Probably here for our chickens.
His father nods.
Should I get Joshua? Nick asks.
No, Carlyle says. He draws his heel over the track, burying it in a furrow of upturned dirt. As though its very existence offends him. Joshua’s going to college in a few months. You need to learn to handle things without him.
I can handle things without him.
No, you can’t, Carlyle says. Get in the car. I’m teaching you.
A few of the greyhounds have gathered round them now, crowding into the back of the truck. Nick climbs into the passenger’s seat and his father slowly pulls them out onto the main road, past the gates of Stag’s Crossing.
Only a short drive, Carlyle says. Just need to get to the other side of the woods. We’ll make a stealthy approach.
It’s late.
Not for foxes.
After negotiating the turn west of the house that points toward the woods, Carlyle says, You ever seen a foxhunt?
In a book I read. There was a picture.
Glossy, bright colors. A fox set upon by a group of sight hounds and torn to pieces. A gnawing anxiety growing within him as he turned the page to a picture of the hacked-off vulpine head, the tail, the paws. Kept by the hunting party as trophies. He took no pleasure in these images; he has always known that his particular viciousness is not the viciousness of his father, who meets all things with a violent contempt so total there is almost no need for the cruelty that inevitably follows it.
In a book, Carlyle scoffs. God willing, you’ll see the real thing tonight.
At the edge of the woods Carlyle parks the Ford and gets out.
Come on, he says. He has already grabbed another rifle from the back. Two hounds leaping from the truck bed to trail behind him, their ears flattened in submission. Like Nick they were bred to serve.
Nick adjusts the rifle strap and follows his father through the woods. Carlyle muttering to himself as they walk. His voice too low to discern what he is saying though Nick knows exactly what he means. Forced to witness the unending catalogue of his own failures, formed imprecisely as he has been in the furnace of his father’s ambition.
The dogs yelp and cavort in the shadow of the trees. The dappled branches menacing overhead as Nick trails behind his father, whose face is partially shrouded in darkness. Most of his father’s dogs are pure-blood greyhounds that hunt by sight alone, but from one crossbred litter he had begotten some bloodhound mixture, a monstrous and beguiling lurcher with a broad black snout. The dogs have no names, instead they are many-named: Rover, Fido, Rex, whatever capricious mood has caught Carlyle in the moment of calling out to them. Now the lurcher takes the lead, face pressed to the dirt, intent on flushing out its prey.
A peculiar trembling fills the air. Nick feels almost outside of himself, like he is observing this scene from afar. Knowing his father’s true designs he disdains them; he prefers the slow agony of fishing to the garish violence of hunting with the dogs. Watching as they course down any number of animals, returning, always, with the smug satisfaction that befits them. If Carlyle could have had dogs for sons he would have been a happy man; but when has a Morrow man ever been happy? No thousand acres, no grand inheritance can ever be enough to postpone their destinies. Nick will die as bitter as he came into the world. He knows this just as well at thirteen as he will in thirty years.
Peering into the darkness of the forest where hardly anything can be seen except what is pierced by the moonlight Nick catches a glimpse of the fox. A pair of pointed ears in the distance. He looks down the sights of his rifle, straight at it. His finger hovering over the trigger.
That’s my boy, Carlyle says.
One of the dogs startles, takes off running in pursuit. The fox darts away, a red smear in the landscape. A loud shriek resounds through the trees, a haunting cry like the scream of a woman, distorted somehow, a melody in the wrong key. Vanishing into a thicket like it was never there. Two of the hounds stop dead in the clearing, unable to pursue their quarry any farther. They return with their heads hanging, dismay in their eyes.
Carlyle grabs Nick by the collar of his hunting jacket. You missed the shot, he says. It was clean.
I had it, Nick mumbles. One of the dogs—
Did I ask for your excuses?
Nick shakes his head. His father releases his grip. Leaving no more of a mark on him than he usually does.
Looked too small to be a dog-fox, Nick says, finally. Must be a female. Could be a den nearby.
Carlyle steps forward into the clearing. There the dogs have begun pacing in an anxious circle. The lurcher perks his head up and barks once, twice. Lifting his paw and sticking his tail straight out it points directly at a half-fallen tree, hollow, already covered in moss and rotting away.
Carlyle gestures for Nick to come closer. At the base of the tree is an opening into which the lurcher peers with slavering intent. He brushes away the cover of dried leaves and sees two fox pups slumbering within.
She’s only got two of em. Still young too, Carlyle says. They are bright orange-red and just about the size of Nick’s outstretched hand. No tod in sight—elsewhere, maybe, or already hunted down by the dogs in a delightful afternoon game.
Pick one up, Carlyle orders.
Nick hesitantly puts his hand out and picks one up by the scruff. It is practically helpless, making only a pitiful noise that falls just short of a shriek. Nothing like the piercing woman’s wail of its mother.
Go on then, Carlyle says, gesturing toward the dogs gathered round. The pup dangles in Nick’s hand. He is unable to move his body, unable to understand what his father desires of him.
After a few moments of standing in silence, Carlyle says, Give me that. Seizing the pup from Nick’s arms so violently that Nick is left with tufts of fur in his hands. Instead of throwing it to the dogs to be torn apart he takes it by the neck and wrings it with a sharp crack. The head sags, lifeless. Carlyle grabs it by the ears and pulls it off completely, detaching the head from the body in a grotesque motion. Ignoring the spray of blood that hits Nick in the face and arm he tosses both pieces to the dogs. They feed on what remains, without malice, knowing only the profane thrill of teeth against bone.
Nick peers inside the den. The last cub lies sleeping. With a trembling hand he picks it up and pulls it out from the hollow tree. The dogs are sent into a frenzy of eager barking—or perhaps he only imagines them barking in his nightmares, years later. He closes his eyes and throws the pup, still alive, into their midst. He cannot force himself to witness this wild omophagia, weeping uncontrollably as he does this, wiping his face, blood and fur crusting his hands.
Stop that, Carlyle says. Nick feels as though he is being harmed by an outside force, a physical injury piercing him though his father has not laid a hand on him. He doubles over, shuddering in pain, before finally the attack subsides and he straightens himself upright. His face swollen and tinged red.
Are you finished? Carlyle says.
I’m finished, Nick says.
They trudge back to the car in silence. Nick looking down at his feet, unable to meet his father’s gaze. Once they reach the Ford before he sullies his father’s car with his stained hands he wipes them hastily on his pants. He will have to wash them later, hunched over his sink reciting his pathetic jeremiads to no one in particular. The dirt smearing his hands, the stain that will never leave him. With the dogs and guns piled high in the truck bed they begin their languorous drive to Stag’s Crossing. A place to which Nick can only turn back, looking over his shoulder at a fragment of the past.
On the dirt road east of the house his father slows the Ford down slightly, looking through the passenger-side window at the sloped ditch, the stretch of meadow covered in bloomless vetch. In the distance is the shadow of Stag’s Crossing, the charnel house that looms. The last gasp of spring almost upon them. He watches his father unlock the car and pull the silver interior handle of the passenger-side door. The gust of wind that enters nearly throwing him from his seat. Two of the dogs have leapt from the truck bed and are now gamboling freely in the shallow ditch next to the dirt road.
You’ll walk the rest of the way, Carlyle says. He puts his hand on Nick’s shoulder and he is shoved violently forward, tumbling out of the car and onto the rocky soil. He lands on his shoulder and winces at the sharp crunch of pain. Lifting his head from where he has fallen he can see his father’s Ford rounding the corner just ahead. His father has never been one to look back. Carlyle Morrow has never turned back in his life, not toward his children nor toward the city of Sodom that might burn so brightly in the flat plains outside Omaha.
In twenty, thirty years his father will ask Nick to stop reliving the past, for Carlyle has no understanding of it, this childhood that could scourge and wound with violence. Nick’s face blooming with a fresh bruise as he crawls on his hands and knees in the grass. A few of the dogs crowding around him, licking at his face and hands with wild abandon.
Overhead the birds swarm in agony, screeching and muttering to themselves. If this is a warning Nick cannot interpret it. He thinks about the animals he has just killed, their sacrifices without meaning. The feeling he had of killing that his father had attempted to impart the pleasure of, only to fail miserably. The softness of the fur he had grasped, understanding why they would be skinned for their pelts and hung in his mother’s old closet with the rest of her furs.
Through the yellow grass he crawls. Unable to stand up until he can no longer hear the relentless hum of the engine, can no longer smell the exhaust in the cloying air. Finally at the edge of the road he gets to his feet and pulls his jacket tight around his shoulders. Beginning the long walk back to Stag’s Crossing. The ground beneath him still treacherous in places, slippery and choked with mud. Only a few wretched dogs to keep him company.
As he passes through the veil of branches that heralds his return from the world of beasts into proper civilization he sees himself at last, clearly, reflected in the dew on the leaves. Joshua’s unlikeness, the impending cataclysm of his house. In all manner of ways he is marked by death; he stinks of it; like the third brother that tore open his mother on the way out.
Ii.NOW
At forty-three Nick has emptied himself of all nostalgia. His childhood a strange illness from which he will never recover. Out of necessity he has learned to feign the appearance of an ordinary man with an ordinary boyhood. Always ready with an amusing anecdote, a bland characterization of his father as strict. He might even believe himself, forger and plagiarist that he is, that the strike of his father’s hand slapping his broad and shining face was not unlike love. Perhaps not quite the same but close enough—just as he is close enough to the man he would like to be. His coldness, his fits of depression only apparent in the bleakest of winters. The trees hemorrhaging their leaves as promptly as he discards the trappings of civilization. With a voracious and bestial appetite he has consumed all his lovers, publicly savaging his acquaintances with eloquent condescension. Turning upon them knife in hand. Blood of his father blood of his brother cascading through him ceaseless as summer rain.
He has long vowed to be unlike Carlyle—named by his mother after the patron saint of children and thieves. Yet as time passes inexorably he grows more and more into his father’s cruel likeness seen through a cracked windowpane. None of the same handsomeness that afflicts his brother. His eyes have grayed and his hair has darkened to a still-vibrant mahogany but the jagged lines on his cheekbones are entirely his father’s. Second son of a second son.
Still his mind is cutting as ever. Having applied his vicious and mangling intelligence to literary criticism he is unfailingly erudite. After two decades set loose upon the world he has learned to affect the banal hostility of an East Coast intellectual. Sawing off all trace of a Midwestern accent from his anodyne English he is exacting in his deception; he refuses the moniker of America’s heartland and jeers at any hint of the provincial. No sense about him that he could unload and clean a hunting rifle in the dark without shooting his finger off nor that he has hunted geese knee-deep in brackish water a shorthaired pointer crashing into the lake after him. No sense at all that he has known the thrill of an apex predator vanquishing all manner of animal before him. Greyhounds with no table manners bloodying the foyer of his grand house with gore.
That was the Nick of his childhood. Now he is a different man, an impostor. Were he to return to Nebraska he would be a stranger at Stag’s Crossing. Prodigal son returning. Would he kneel before his father’s magnificence and eat oats from his hand like a wayward steer? Would he see his brother in all his glory like a young Christ in the house of his father?
Unrecognized he would come as a guest in his own home. His brother would embrace him and all would be well in that place where time has no dominion and memory is a mere recursion of the past. Where the edges of Stag’s Crossing might have been the edges of the known world and its centerpiece a two-story magnificence built by hand. His father intended them to be born and die there, as with all princes and their castles.
If only Joshua had not done the unforgivable. Married an unacceptable woman from an unacceptable family. If only Carlyle had not chased him from the house like an uninvited guest. Crowing: How dare you. I can’t believe it. You brought that bitch into this house. Have her as your mistress, do what you want. It’s all the same to me. But your wife! Your wife!
Nick watched from his bedroom window. His father’s rage shaking the floorboards of the house. Waking the spring cardinals and setting the sparrows to flight. Joshua turned back to his car where his wife waited for him and Nick saw her—saw the curve of her neck and the delicate parting of her hair.
Copyright © 2024 by Kailee Pedersen
