Conner said, “I feel like Patton up here. Or Robert E. You can see it all.”
I tuned the scope to 10x. I’d never watched from this angle. We were late for the hunt — Conner put his truck in the ditch on that icy Laneville Road, we had to winch it out — so we drove up Cabin Rock to watch the spectacle unfold. We’d meet up later with the others. The CB crackled in the cab.
The sow forded a run with three great waltz-steps. Hounds swam the chilly water and hit the bank shaking their hides, bodies steaming. I shivered reflexively. Conner laughed at this.
“Rose, you need you a little firewater,” he said, draining his beer. (My name is Roosevelt Daugherty.) “Can’t hack the cold without it. Makes you feel like a true-blue mountaineer.” He struck a heroic pose, the Great Hunter. “We make them northeast libs shiver the night before a presidential election,” he said, in a creaky old-timer voice. “Make them shake like a dog shitting razorblades.”
I laughed, despite my feelings. He learned that silly voice off my dad. The CB gave out snarls of English, quizzical Chinese, a squall of pink noise. That morning in a strip-mall parking lot, I saw the Chinese merchants from Pittsburgh who huddled around a Chevy Blazer. They sipped tea from Styrofoam cups, listening to a scanner. The bear’s gallbladder is said to be an aphrodisiac. They pound the organ into a greasy, yellow concoction and sell it for thousands. Wise fellows, banking on the black market and backward countrymen. Their children graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and Carnegie Mellon. More power to them.
I said, “I can’t see it anymore.”
“Me neither. They’ll pop back up.”
The smell of beer in the cold made me nauseous. I ate a burning handful of snow. This was in my vague year between college and law school. (I had not yet been accepted and was nervous, though everyone else was sure I would turn out okay. Why so sure? I wondered.) Conner was five years younger, but our roles seemed reversed. When I was home on break, he made an effort to take me fishing and hunting. Family was sacred to him. Like all sentimental people, he would mine that vein till there was nothing left: nothing but bare, scraped rock.
“If you get a shot,” he said, “lay down a field of fire. They can take a lot of lead.”
I said I would.
“Don’t forget,” my mother would tell me, “that you are a Methodist.”
She repeated this like a koan, to help me through that listless, frustrating year. I worked with my dad and lived with her, an arrangement I definitely preferred. Dad was a small-town lawyer, semisuccessful, and chair of the county Democratic Party, garrulous and hard-drinking and loved by all, a keen mimic, quick with a story. (My mother, chief operating officer at the hospital, is successful without caveat.) I organized for the party in that election year. When I had a free moment, Dad sent me round to the local faithful to gauge their mysterious wants and concerns. I met these sweet old men and women who offered me coffee and pie. In turn, I asked my question. The sweet old woman would say, “I really think the state legislature needs to bring back the death penalty.”
That, or reining in the gays, or instituting Castle Doctrine, or plugging the donut hole in Medicare Part D. I loved hearing about that donut.
He sent me to the hard cases, it’s true. He acted as if I had forgotten West Virginia. I had gone to Vanderbilt for a year, didn’t care for it, and transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, which I did care for. But I knew our district. I’d grown up hearing it from blowsy pols, union reps, the coal miners, the Democratic Women’s luncheon, just as I was forever being handed that same plate of potato salad. They beat it into you at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Dad convinced me to enter law school at the state university, his alma mater, because it would prepare me for life here, for joining his practice. “The Ivy League’s a waste,” he said. “You can’t meet nobody to help you down here, and you’ll never come home.” But this year was to be my true education: “It’s getting hard to hold District Two,” he said. “Here’s your dance card. Get ready to twist.” He lived to set me up for state legislature and then, some distant day, Congress. My grandfather, “The Coal Miner’s Friend,” represented the Second District for twenty-three years. In his cups, Dad would say, “I could’ve done it, but these voters won’t elect a divorced man. I did what I could for the party, and I think I did it well.” No one could argue with that. He died before I could add another disappointment to his disappointed life. After that, the thin tether between my stepbrother and I fell away.
It’s so tawdry and plain it hardly merits telling — unless it’s your own true life. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and Dad married his secretary as soon as the ink was dry. Yet Mom and Dad took pains to keep a cordial relationship. Even when his drinking and Conner’s evils took Dad to his lowest level, Mom would defend him.
The secretary, a brassy country girl from up Birch River, came with a son of her own, Conner. “Instant family, just add water,” his law partner fumed. Conner’s biological father was a redneck called Shade Tree — as in shade-tree mechanic — and I never knew his real name, Ronzel James Mavety, for ages. Then it clicked. Ronzel, the police-blotter celebrity. Every small place has a family like the Mavetys, known not so much for the ferocity of their crimes but for the regularity of them. They pitch their trash over the hill, jacklight deer, coach their healthy children on how to bilk SSI payments from the government and fool the flintiest social worker. Someone is always pregnant. “Constituents, too,” Dad would say. “The lumpenproletariat.” So we were as surprised as anyone when Dad rented on Church Street, in full view of everyone we knew, and moved in the secretary and her son. I had trouble imagining what life was like in that alien house. But no one could hold it against Dad forever. Not even my sister, the last holdout. He was the silver-tongued devil, then, and handsome, too.
Conner was silent in class to the point of being thought retarded, but loud and nasty in the hall. I tried to feel for him. I trod the gouged path of my mom’s family, ardent Methodists to the marrow: “Your opponent is not your enemy.” Mom was sent to England for a conference on the National Health Service — this about the time the Clintons botched their healthcare thing — a trip sponsored by the incorporeal think-tank people that essay our politics. When she returned, she taped a picture to our refrigerator, to face me down whenever I craved something cold to fill my belly. It was a snapshot of what she mistook for John Wesley’s gravestone, a chiseled memorial in a country churchyard:
LORD LET ME NOT LIVE TO BE USELESS
“Do you hear that Plott?”
“It’s deep. Throaty.”
“That’s right,” Conner said. “I could get you one, if you wanted.”
I took the scope from my eye. “That would be awesome,” I said, and it would be. I loved the dogs — Conner felt obvious glee in how closely I listened to them sing. We liked Shovel best, a redbone named for his triangular head. He tracked by scent, huge ears flapping in the wind, driving air and stench to his nose like a set of bellows. So did the German Plotts. The others were strictly sight-hunters with jaws like vises; once such see a bear they don’t let up until they die or are wrenched off. Their bravery gives you the luxury of distance, of safety. Unless you chase a bear into the rocks. You want a bear to tree, not cave. That’s when accidents happen.
The sow doubled back. She couldn’t outrun them. She dropped her shoulder and struck a bluetick. It rolled twice and gathered itself up. The pair of hunters in the lead picked over the boulders, trying to make firing range, orange jackets as bright as fires against the rock.