“What are they doing?”
“Coyote hunting.”
It was pure serendipity that Joanna was even there, in the house, her marriage having finally collapsed at roughly the same time that Homer’s cancer came back. The disease thrived as the marriage had not. Her leaving had been anticlimactic, and Richard had said as much on their final night together. He compared their relationship to a baseball player batting.180 over the course of his final season, with everybody, including the player, knowing it was over.
Joanna hated sports metaphors, and that this was the best he could come up with after fourteen years made her resent him even more than she already did.
They’d spent some time in counseling, even changing therapists twice, as if the therapist might somehow be the problem. The last one was a sunny blond woman named Nathalie. She had a degree from McGill, and legs like a Vogue model. She brought things to a close when she called Joanna at work to tell her that Richard had sent her a text asking if she wanted to get a drink. It was the first time Joanna had ever heard of a marriage counselor advising a client to run for the hills.
Which is precisely what Joanna did, although the hills turned out to be the fields of her youth, less than an hour south of Montreal, in Howick. She took a leave of absence from her job at Dawson College. Her father’s illness provided a convenient excuse, although most of her colleagues were aware of her domestic situation. Who knows — maybe a few of them received a text from Richard too. Maybe a few even responded.
She came home to her old bedroom, to the familiar smell of the house and the barn and the land. She cooked for her father, drove him to Montreal for his treatments, and in between, she frantically cleaned a house that hadn’t seen much more than the occasional pass of a corn broom since her mother died seven years earlier. In what even she recognized as a cathartic state, she suggested painting, papering, and installing new flooring. Homer would have none of it. He wanted things to be as they’d always been — his walls and his floors and his health.
Joanna should have known better. She had tried a similar tactic when Richard began his wayward drift, spending less and less time at home, showing houses to prospective clients in the evening instead of the day, attending real estate conferences he’d eschewed in the past. Meanwhile, Joanna renovated and redecorated the house, knocking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room, making an en suite bath and walk-in closet in the bedroom for the kids they’d never have. The renovations had been expensive, even for Westmount, but money was never the problem.
By early December, Homer felt well enough to wander around outside for a couple hours every day, looking for jobs to do. One sunny morning, Joanna found him on an extension ladder, cleaning leaves from the eave above the front porch. She’d made him climb down, to his disgust. Since then, he’d reluctantly confined himself to whatever chores he could find at ground level.
One gray afternoon, Homer was changing the oil in his pickup truck when Ben Dubois rolled into the driveway. Joanna was in the kitchen making soup from the carcass of a chicken she and Homer had eaten over the weekend. When she heard the rumble of the exhaust, she saw Dubois sliding his girth out from behind the wheel. Ralph Acton emerged from the passenger side, shoulders slumped, head hanging down like a cartoon character. Homer straightened and wiped his hands on a rag he drew from his coveralls. Joanna could tell by his step that he was not happy with the interruption.
The three men were standing by the tailgate when Joanna came out of the house wearing Homer’s old wool jacket, which he’d once worn when doing his evening chores. Ralph Acton nodded as she approached, but looked away quickly so he wouldn’t know if Joanna nodded back.
Inside Dubois’s truck bed were three dead coyotes, two of them small and brown, the third large and yellow. Their hides were thickly matted where they had bled out, their eyes glassy, tongues swollen. Dubois glanced at Joanna as if she were a child interrupting the grown-ups, and then didn’t look at her again.
“The big one near got away,” he said. “We ran him around the beehive bush and he went through a culvert on Mill Road. Billy Logan just pulled up to the intersection there, got out with his .222, and put a slug through his hindquarters.” Dubois pointed to the shattered hip of the dead coyote. “Spun him around like a whirligig. Son of a bitch kept going, though, just his front legs working. Made the mistake of crossing my path, so I hit him in the ribs with my rifle. He was done like dinner. Lookit the size of him, Homer.”
Homer nodded. It seemed to Joanna that he was trying to muster some enthusiasm for the matter at hand, but couldn’t quite do it. Changing the oil in his pickup was the job at hand. The cancer had made him more focused, she’d noticed, whether he was cutting the grass or clearing the vegetable garden — whatever the task of the day was, he did it relentlessly, distractions be damned.
“What do you do with them?” Joanna asked.
Dubois, looking at Homer, smiled, making a point of not acknowledging the question or the woman who’d asked it.
Ralph watched Dubois, needing direction, then reluctantly took it upon himself to reply: “We dump ’em at the landfill.”
Joanna kept her eyes on Dubois. If he wouldn’t look at her, she wouldn’t stop looking at him. “You’re not serious,” she said.
“Girls,” Ralph chided, “always against us boys and our hunting.”
“Right,” Joanna said. “Except I was shooting and skinning out rabbits and ducks when you were still shitting your pants, Ralph. We ate what we shot.”
“I ain’t going to eat no coyote,” Ralph said.
“A little bit of the city come home to roost, I see, Homer,” Dubois said.
“You don’t sell the hides or anything?” Joanna persisted.
“Ain’t worth nothing.” Ralph again.
Now Joanna turned to him. “Then why shoot them?”
Ralph grinned. “Just what we do. Right, Dubois?”
Dubois stepped to the tailgate, lifted the front quarters of the large coyote, and stared straight into the dead glassy eyes. “That’s right. It’s what we do. And we do what we want.” He dropped the carcass carelessly, the animal’s head banging onto the metal of the tailgate, and turned to Homer. “We’ll let you get back to your truck, Homer. Got a feeling you’ll be getting an earful over supper tonight.”
Joanna waited until the vehicle was out of the driveway before turning to her father. “They ask your permission to hunt here?”
“Yeah,” Homer answered, slowly adding new oil to his engine.
“You approve of it?”
“I guess I don’t disapprove of it.”
Joanna stared hard at her dying father.
It wasn’t until breakfast the next morning that the subject came up again. It seemed Homer had been thinking it over.
“A coyote will kill young calves and lambs,” he said, having finished his single piece of toast, both hands on the coffee cup before him. “Helps out the farmers, keeping their numbers down.”
“Except these days you can drive fifty kilometers in any direction and not see a single cow,” Joanna countered. “And when was the last time anybody in this county raised sheep?”
When Homer took a sip of coffee, his watch slid halfway up his wrist. His forearms had once been like fence posts. “They’re just a nuisance.”
“So are telemarketers,” Joanna said. “We don’t shoot them and toss them in a landfill.”
Homer smiled. “It’s an idea though.”
Joanna stood and cleared the table. “I’m not opposed to hunting. But these guys aren’t doing it for meat. It’s nothing more than blood sport. Sitting in their goddamn trucks along the road with the heaters going. Ralph Acton smelled like a distillery yesterday. Dubois too.”