There is an intensity to skinning, a sense of immediacy. Once you start, you must continue. Many people work fast to get it over with, but I like to take it slow. I hadn’t felt this way in a long time and hadn’t known I’d missed it.
I eased the skin over the back of the skull. Its right side was caved in pretty bad. The pelt was inside out, connected to the body at the beak, as if the owl was kissing the shadow of its mate. I passed it to Tarvis. He held the slippery skull in one hand and gently tugged the skin free of the carcass.
“Get a shovel,” I said.
Tarvis circled the house for a spade and dug a hole beneath a cottonwood. I examined the bird. Both legs, the skull, each wing, its neck and ribs — all were broken. Its head hung from several shattered vertebrae. I’d never seen a creature so clean on the outside and so tore up on the inside. It had died pretty hard.
I built a twig platform and placed the remains in the grave. Tarvis began to spade the dirt in. He tamped it down, mumbling to himself. I reversed the pelt so the feathers were facing out. The body cavity flattened to an empty skin, a pouch with wings that would never fly.
Hand-shaking is not customary among men in eastern Kentucky. We stood apart from one another and nodded, arms dangling, boots scuffing the dirt, as if our limbs were useless without work.
“Got any whiskey?” I said.
“Way I drank gave it a bad name. Quit when I left Kentucky.”
“That’s when I took it up. What makes you want that owl so bad?”
“It’s pure built to hunt. Got three ear holes and it flies silent. It can open and close each pupil separate from the other one. They ain’t a better hunter.”
“Well,” I said. “Reckon you know your owls.”
I drove to the bar for a few shots and thought about eating, but didn’t want to ruin a ten-dollar drunk with a five-dollar meal. I didn’t meet a woman and didn’t care. When the bar closed, a bunch of us bought six-packs and went to my house. I laid drunk through most of the week, thinking about Tarvis in the blurred space between hangover and the day’s first drink. Though I’d shown him how to skin, I had the feeling he was guiding me into something I’d tried to leave behind.
A few weeks later I met a teacher who was considering a move to Kentucky because it was a place that could use her help. We spent a few nights together. I felt like a test for her, a way of gauging Kentucky’s need. I guess I flunked because she moved to South Dakota for a job on the Sioux Reservation.
On Memorial Day I took a six-pack of dog hair to Tarvis’s house, parked behind his truck, and opened a beer. At first I wanted to gag, but there’s no better buzz than a drink on an empty stomach. I drank half and held it down. The heat spread through my body, activating last night’s bourbon. I finished the beer and opened another.
Tarvis came out of the house, blinking against the sun. We went to the riverbank and sat in metal chairs. A great blue heron flew north, its neck curled like a snake ready to strike. The air was quiet. We could have been by the Blue Lick River back home. It felt right to sit with someone of the hills, even if we didn’t have a lot to say.
I asked to see the owl and Tarvis reluctantly led me to the door. His eyes were shiny as new dimes. “Ain’t nobody been inside in eight years.”
The cabin was one room with a sink, range, toilet, and mattress. A woodstove stained from tobacco spit stood in the middle. The only furniture was a tattered couch. Shelves lined every wall, filled with things he’d found in the woods.
A dozen owl pellets lay beside a jumble of antlers. A variety of bird wings were pinned to the wall. One shelf held sun-bleached bones and another contained thirty or forty jaw bones. Skulls were jammed in — raccoon, fox, deer, a dozen groundhog. Hundreds of feathers poked into wall cracks and knotholes. There were so many feathers that I had the sense of being within the owl pelt turned inside out.
Tarvis pulled a board from the highest shelf. The owl lay on its back, wings stretched full to either side. The claws hung from strips of downy hide. Tarvis had smoothed the feathers into their proper pattern.
“You did a good job,” I said.
“Had some help.”
“Ever find Indian stuff?”
“All this came from hunting arrowheads,” he said. “But I never found one. Maybe I don’t know how to look.”
“Maybe this is what finds you.”
He handed me a stick from one of the shelves. It was eighteen inches long, sanded smooth and feathered at one end. He reached under the couch for a handmade bow.
“That’s osage orangewood,” he said. “Same as the Indians used. I made them both. Soon’s I find me a point I’ll be setting pretty.”
“You going to hunt with it?”
“No.” He looked away. “I don’t even kill mosquitoes. What I do is let the spiders go crazy in here. They keep the bugs down and snakes stop the mice. Hawks eat the snakes. Fox kills the duck. An owl hunts everything, but nothing hunts the owl. It’s like man.”
He put the owl on a shelf and opened the door. We went outside. The staccato of a woodpecker came across the river, each peck distinct as a bell.
“How come you don’t hunt?” I said.
He looked at me, then away, and back to me. His eyes were smoky.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Hear that woodpecker? Take and cut its beak off and it’ll pound its face against a tree until it dies. Not hunting does me the same way. But I still can’t do it.”
The river shimmered in the wind, sunlight catching each tiny cresting wave. A breeze carried the scent of clover and mud. I slipped away to my car.
Work hit a slow spell. I was in a dorm I’d painted twice before and could do it blindfolded. The rooms repeated themselves, each one a mirror image of the last. I went in and out of the same room over and over. Sometimes I didn’t know where I was, and leaving didn’t help because the hallway was filled with identical doors.
The next time I visited Tarvis, I drank the neck and shoulders out of a fifth while he talked. He was from a family of twelve. His last name was Eldridge. He grew up on Eldridge Ridge, overlooking Eldridge Creek in Eldridge County. His people numbered so many that they got identified by hair color and their mother’s maiden name. Nobody called him Tarvis. He was Ida Cumbow’s fourth boy, a black-headed Eldridge. That’s what finally made him leave. No one knew who he was.
Tarvis and I sat till the air was greyed by dusk. Night covered us over. We were like a pair of seashells a long way from the beach. If you held one of us to your ear, you’d hear Kentucky in the distance, but listening to both would put you flat in the woods.
An owl called from the river.
“There’s your owl,” I said.
“No, that’s a great horned. A barred owl getting this far west ain’t right.”
“Maybe that’s why it died.”
Tarvis looked at me for a spell, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. He never spoke and I left for the Pig. The ease of Tarvis’s company just drove in the fact that I didn’t belong out here. Maybe that’s why I drank so much that night. I woke up the next day filled with dread, craving water, and with no memory of what had happened at the bar. I used to think not remembering meant I’d had a great time. Now I know it for a bad sign, but a drink can cut that fear like a scythe.
I went back to see Tarvis at the height of summer. The river moved so slowly it seemed to be still, a flat pane of reflected light. Mosquitoes began to circle my head. Tarvis opened his door, squinting against the sun. He’d lost weight. His hands were crusted with dirt and he reminded me of the old men at home, weary from slant-farming hillsides that never yielded enough.